The “temporary” nature of indentured servitude was largely meaningless when fully half of them died of disease, abuse, hunger and exhaustion before their terms of indenture were up. When Cromwell sent 30,000 Irish to the Caribbean as slaves, almost none of them lived more than a few years, so brutal were the conditions under which they lived. Convicts were known to beg to be hanged rather than sent to the American colonies.
The “voluntary” aspect was likewise a joke. Many were simply kidnapped by men known as “crimps” or “spirits,” and their contracts were blatant forgeries. Others were simply lied to; they had no idea what horrible lives awaited them in the New World. Many were children deceived into signing contracts with offers of candy. Children in poor neighborhoods were literally snatched off the streets by the dozens in raiding parties by the crimps and spirits, a practice known as “kid nabbing” from which the modern word “kidnapping” is derived. Prisoners and beggars who had been “contracted” for indentured servitude by the state were often imprisoned in the ships that would take them to America because they were too likely to run away before the ship sailed. Fully a quarter of the Britons who came to North America before the Revolution were convicts. (And bear in mind that the convicts were often guilty of nothing worse than such things as stealing bread to ease their hunger.) Once in the colonies, they were auctioned off; families were broken up with little possibility of ever seeing each other again. White slaves (and they were frequently referred to as slaves; there was no clear distinction between “servant” and “slave” in the language of the time) were chained together in coffles and marched through the countryside by peddlers who sold them off one by one to farmers.
You can find examples of indentured servants who were treated tolerably well by the standards of the times, just as you can find examples of slaves in the antebellum South who were treated decently by their masters. But most of them were brutally exploited and had little choice in the matter.
And the suffering of indentured servants in America is only a fraction of the suffering endured by the poor and working classes of the Western world. Consider this:
About the middle of the seventeeth century, the owner of a British chemical factory was in need of workers. To meet this need, he went to different orphanages and poor houses and bought a thousand or so children. (Yes, you read that right–poor whites could be bought and sold in Britain.) Only a few years after putting them to work in his factory, ** almost all of them had died from the brutal working conditions.**
Understand something. If you had gone to this factory owner and asked him, “You mean you knowingly sent children to work under conditions so horrible that almost all of them were certain to die in a few years?” he would simply have given you a funny look and said, “Sure. What’s your point?” The masters did not care if the lives they destroyed were black or white; all that mattered was the money to be made. You can say whatever you please, I see little important difference between a twelve-year-old black child being worked to death in a sugar cane field and a twelve-year-old white child being worked to death in a mine or a factory. Your ancestors were chattel slaves. Mine were wage slaves. As both suffered horribly, the distinction was often moot.
To deny the suffering of poor and working class whites over the last five centuries is not merely callous, it is monstrous. You chose your screen name well.