Redemptioner
Encyclopedia
Redemptioners were European immigrants, generally in the 18th or early 19th century, who gained passage to America
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...

 (most often Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

) by selling themselves into indentured servitude
Indentured servant
Indentured servitude refers to the historical practice of contracting to work for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities during the term of indenture. Usually the father made the arrangements and signed...

 to pay back the shipping company which had advanced the cost of the transatlantic voyage. British indentured servants generally did not arrive as redemptioners after the early colonial period due to certain protections afforded them by law. Redemptioners were at a disadvantage because they negotiated their indentures upon arrival after a long and difficult voyage with no prospect to return to their homelands.

History

Up until the American Revolutionary War
American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War , the American War of Independence, or simply the Revolutionary War, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America, and ended in a global war between several European great powers.The war was the result of the...

, some convicts from the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 were transported to the American Colonies
Thirteen Colonies
The Thirteen Colonies were English and later British colonies established on the Atlantic coast of North America between 1607 and 1733. They declared their independence in the American Revolution and formed the United States of America...

 and served out their time as indentured servants before receiving an official pardon
Pardon
Clemency means the forgiveness of a crime or the cancellation of the penalty associated with it. It is a general concept that encompasses several related procedures: pardoning, commutation, remission and reprieves...

. Labor was in demand in North America and so free persons were also recruited. Those who could not afford to pay their own way, came under indenture
Indenture
An indenture is a legal contract reflecting a debt or purchase obligation, specifically referring to two types of practices: in historical usage, an indentured servant status, and in modern usage, an instrument used for commercial debt or real estate transaction.-Historical usage:An indenture is a...

s which obligated them to work for no wages until their land and sea transportation and other expenses had been covered. Because of abuse of the system, which included lying to recruits and even shanghaiing
Shanghaiing
Shanghaiing refers to the practice of conscripting men as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence. Those engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps. Until 1915, unfree labor was widely used aboard American merchant ships...

 them, the British Parliament enacted laws protecting British subjects from the worst abuses. The law required that the specific terms and conditions of servitude be approved by a magistrate in Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

, and that any indentures not bearing a magistrate's seal was unenforceable in the colonies. This resulted in British indentured servants becoming less attractive to potential colonial masters. A similar law was passed in Ireland in an act of Parliament whereby in return for passage to America, the servant gave the purchaser of his indenture all rights to his labour for an agreed period of time, usually four years. Once a candidate for indentured servitude was identified, the emigration agent or visiting ship captain negotiated a binding contract detailing the terms and benefits, and the contract presented before a local magistrate.

Non-British immigrants had no such protections. If they used the redemptioner system, they were forced to negotiate their indentures with their future master at the worst possible time, before they were allowed to leave a stinking, vermin-infested ship at the end of a long voyage.

A few early 18th century Europeans, typically German-speaking immigrants to America, later sent for family members in the old world by agreeing with the shipping companies to "redeem" their loved ones off the arriving vessel by paying the passage —more or less a form of COD
Cash on delivery
Collect on delivery is a financial transaction where the payment of products and/or services received is done at the time of actual delivery rather than paid-for in advance...

 for human cargo. Ships' owners soon saw this as a lucrative opportunity. They recruited Europeans to emigrate
Emigration
Emigration is the act of leaving one's country or region to settle in another. It is the same as immigration but from the perspective of the country of origin. Human movement before the establishment of political boundaries or within one state is termed migration. There are many reasons why people...

 without payment up front and allowed anyone in the new world to redeem the travelers. The fare was set by the shipping company and the prospective master bargained directly with the immigrant to determine how many years he or she would work to pay off the "loan
Loan
A loan is a type of debt. Like all debt instruments, a loan entails the redistribution of financial assets over time, between the lender and the borrower....

" of the fare.

More than half of 18th and early 19th century German-speaking immigrants came as redemptioners.

To fill empty holds, poor Europeans were recruited onto ships in Rotterdam
Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...

 by “Neulaender” (singular = Neulander) or “new worlders” who had worked out their time as indentured servants in the colonies. Neulaender received a commission for each person they brought to the ship so they were not always a trustworthy source of information about how the program would work for the emigrant. The Neulaender were dressed in fancy clothes to impress the peasants as they wandered about Germanic countries to begin recruiting.

The vast majority of these poor go-now-pay-later travelers were not redeemed by family members, so the term is misleading in that most paid for their emigration with their own toil, tears, and often blood. In America they were considered property under the law to be bought and sold until their indentures matured and they could be legally punished in the same manner as African slaves. The big differences between redemptioners and African slaves, were redemptioners came of their own accord even if misinformed and that they had an “out of indentures” date to look forward to. An example of how the indentured servant was viewed is the 1662 Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

 law that forced both slave and indentured servant females who bore children by their masters to serve after their indentures for an additional two years for the local churchwarden
Churchwarden
A churchwarden is a lay official in a parish church or congregation of the Anglican Communion, usually working as a part-time volunteer. Holders of these positions are ex officio members of the parish board, usually called a vestry, parish council, parochial church council, or in the case of a...

s. No penalty was specified for their masters.

Abuse of redemptioners on board ship is well documented. If a person died after half way across the Atlantic, the surviving family members had to pay the deceased’s fare as well as their own. Their baggage was often pilfered by the crew. Many travelers started their journey with sufficient funds to pay their way but were ripped off and overcharged so they arrived with a debt to settle and they also had to be redeemed. If the ship needed to sail before some of the passengers’ indentures had been sold, an agent in the American port kept them confined until a buyer presented himself.

The redemptioners who became indentured servants ended up working as farm laborers, household help, in workshops, and even as store clerks. They were typically prevented from marrying until after their term of service. Often, the terms of separation after the contract stipulated that the servant receive a suit of clothing and sometimes a shovel and/or an axe. Also, some contracts required the master to teach the servant to read and write from the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

. Conditions were sometimes harsh as evidenced by the lists and paid announcements for the return of escaped servants in contemporary newspapers.

The Rotterdam
Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...

 ships always stopped first in the U.K. (often at Cowes
Cowes
Cowes is an English seaport town and civil parish on the Isle of Wight. Cowes is located on the west bank of the estuary of the River Medina facing the smaller town of East Cowes on the east Bank...

) to clear British customs, before proceeding to the Colonies. A list of indenture registrations in Philadelphia from 1772 to 1773 survives and reveals that most worked five to seven years to pay their masters off.

Accounts

The only two surviving first-person accounts by redemptioners were published in September 2006 in the book Souls for Sale: Two German Redemptioners Come to Revolutionary America. By coincidence, they both arrived in Philadelphia on the ship Sally in the fall of 1772. John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Buettner were recruited in Baltic
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

 cities and shipped as virtual prisoners to Rotterdam, originally to be delivered to ships of the Dutch East India Company
Dutch East India Company
The Dutch East India Company was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia...

 departing for Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

. Their handlers missed that opportunity so they settled for handing them over to a ship bound for Pennsylvania.

Over time, Germans out of indentures formed German-American societies and one important activity for them was to lobby for humane regulations and policing of the shipping companies.

The German immigrant to Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...

, Gottfried Duden
Gottfried Duden
Gottfried Duden was a German emigration writer of the early 19th century. His famous book Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerika's gave romantic and glowing descriptions of the Missouri River valley between St. Louis and Hermann, Missouri...

, whose published letters (1829) did much to encourage German-speaking emigration to the U.S. in the 1800s wrote about the redemptioners. “The poor Europeans who think they have purchased the land of their desires by the hardships endured during the journey across the sea are enslaved for five, seven, or more years for a sum that any vigorous day laborer earns within six months. The wife is separated from the husband, the children from their parents, perhaps never to see each other again.”

By the time Duden published his letters, the redemptioner system was all but dead. As many as 50% to 70% of Germans coming to America in the 1700s came as redemptioners.

External links

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