"Because I have heard how strangely cruel and severe the service of this country is represented in some parts of England, I can't forebear affirming, that the work of the servants and slaves is no other that what every common freeman does; neither is any servant required to do more in a day than his overseer; and I can assure you, with great truth, that generally their slaves are not worked so hard, nor so many hours in a day, as the husbandman and day labourer in England. An overseer is a man, that having served his time, has acquired the skill and character of an experienced planter, and is therefore entrusted with direction of the servants and slaves ... all masters are under the correction and censure of the County Courts to provide for their servants food and wholesome diet, clothing and lodging."
"If a master should be so cruel, as to use his servant ill, that is fallen sick or lame in his service, and thereby rendered unfit for labor, he must be removed by the churchwardens out of the way of such cruelty, and boarded in some good planters home till the time of his freedom, the charge of which must be laid before the next county court, which has power to levy the same, from time to time, upon the goods and chattels of the master, after which, the charge of such boarding is to come upon the parish in general.... No master of a servant can make a new bargain for service or other matter with his servant, without the privity and consent of the County Court, to prevent the masters over-reaching, or scaring such servant into an unreasonable compliance."
Moreover, when the servant had redeemed himself by working out his time, he received from his former master, as assistance to start out for himself "ten bushels of corn (which is sufficient for almost a year) two new suits of clothes, both linen and woolen, and a gun, twenty dollars value"; all of which were given to him as his due. He had the right to take up fifty acres of unpatented land and thereupon took his place, according to his merit and industry, in the free life of the Colony.
The system was necessary from the first; for if the servants had not been bound they promptly would have secured tracts of land to work for themselves, leaving those who had paid for their passage in the lurch. That it was advantageous to both master and servant is indicated by its growth. Its end in Virginia was caused by a cheaper labor supply having become available rather than from any lack of those seeking transportation. It has been estimated that, between the years 1635 and 1680, from 1,000 to 1,600 came annually to Virginia under its conditions and that from first to last not less than eighty thousand persons so arrived. But with the importation of negroes, beginning on a larger scale about 1680, the custom declined until by the middle of the eighteenth century, it seems to have practically ended in Virginia.