If an | indentured servant was transported at the expense of another and then served | his contracted time, would he be considered manumitted?? If not, what term | would that have been? According to John Fiske's Historical Writings, Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, I find this: "A considerable proportion of the indented (Note: He does not call them Indentured)white servants were poor but honest persons who sold themselves into slavery for a brief term to defray the cost of the voyage from England. The ship-owner received from the planter the passage money in the shape of tobacco, and in exchange he handed over the passenger to be the planter's servant until the debt was wiped out. Indented servants of this class were known as "redemptioners" and many of them were eminently industrious and of excellent character. Such redemptioners came in large numbers to Virginia, Maryland, and the middle colonies, and much more rarely to New England, where the demand for any kind of servile labour was but small." Perhaps the word for these folks who have worked off their debt is redemptioners. Margaret |

Margaret, as usual, is correct; indentured servants who had completed their term of service were known as "redemptioners." Paul