Victoria Hernandez

Professor Lubisich
History 7A / #73086
14 November 2015
Document Interpretation: Letter to get Father
It seems to me that Elizabeth was sent to be an indentured servant because she was
disobedient to her father, but I feel that it might be something else because of the way she
addressed her father. She wrote to him apologetically and constantly referred to herself as an
undutiful daughter and begged him to send her clothes. My first thought was that maybe she left
to be an indentured servant because she did not want to be around her father any more because
she states "My being forever banished from your sight, will I hope pardon the Boldness I now
take with troubling you...," but looking at it a different way she could also be apologizing for her
long silence (i.e. her absence of letters to him.) If she didn't leave because she wanted to be away
from her father, then most likely she left because of her family's poverty and hoped to lessen the
financial burden of another child to take care of. Since most European immigrants became
indentured servants for that reason, then I will conclude that it is most likely her family's poverty
that Elizabeth became an indentured servant.
Elizabeth complained very much the brutal and horrendous way that she was treated at
the mansion. She claims that the black servants were treated better than her and that she was
barely given a blanket to warm herself. She barely had enough clothes to keep her warm at night,
she was whipped more than an animal would be, and the food she was given was just enough to
keep her alive. Indentured servants were mostly treated like slaves, but they had certain terms

that separated them from enslavement such as: serving only for a certain period of time and
being promised land they can live on after their service has ended. Since they were treated very
harshly (in some cases because some servants were considered part of the family) and promised
so little in return, many servants rebelled and demanded justice for their service, which is
probably why plantation owners decided to have more enslaved Africans than indentured
servants after the seventeenth century.