TOTALS INDENTURED SERVANTS NEGRO SLAVES

The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was 500,000–550,000; of these, 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Of the 450,000 or so European arrivals who came voluntarily, Tomlins estimates that 48% were indentured.

After 1775, indentureds continued to be shipped here. Given the high death rate, many servants did not live to the end of their terms.^[2] In the 18th and early 19th century, numerous Europeans, mostly from outside the British Isles, traveled to the colonies as redemptioners, a particularly harsh form of indenture.^[22]

The majority of indentured servants ended up in the American South, where cash crops necessitated labour-intensive farming. As the Northern colonies moved toward industrialisation, they received far less indentured immigration.^[39] For example, 96% of English emigrants to Virginia and Maryland from 1773 to 1776 were indentured servants. During the same time period, 2% of English emigrants to New England were indentured.^[40]

Thus, although the Wikipedia article does not quantify the total indentures, it clearly exceeded the negro slave importation, and conditions for both groups were often very similar.

About 600,000 slaves were transported to America, or 5% of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa.

Author and historian Richard Hofstadter has written:

The most unenviable situation was that of servants on Southern plantations, living alongside but never with Negro slaves, both groups doing much the same work, often under the supervision of a relentless overseer… Even as late as 1770, William Eddis, the English surveyor of customs at Annapolis, thought that the Maryland Negroes were better off than "the Europeans, over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity." The Negroes, Eddis thought, were a lifelong property so were treated with a certain care, but the whites were "strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labour."^[36]