their own freedom, but for the overthrow of the
colonial government.[2-27] In 1678, after the suppression of the
Scottish Covenanters by the Highland Host, a new batch of prisoners were
sent to the plantations.[2-28] Seven years later many of Monmouth's
followers taken at Sedgemour, who were fortunate enough to escape the
fury of Jeffreys and Kirk, were forced to work in the plantations.

But the bulk of the servants were neither criminals nor political
prisoners, but poor persons seeking to better their condition in the
land of promise across the Atlantic. They constituted the vanguard of
that vast stream of immigrants which for three centuries Europe has
poured upon our shores. The indentured servant differed in no essential
from the poor Ulsterite or German who followed him in the Eighteenth
century, or the Irishman, the Italian or the Slav in the Nineteenth.
Like them he found too severe the struggle for existence at home, like
them he sought to reach a land where labor, the only commodity he had to
sell, would bring the highest return. The fact that his passage was paid
for him and that he was bound by contract to work it out after reaching
America, in no wise differentiates him from the newcomers of later days.
In 1671 Sir William Berkeley reported to the Board of Trade that the
colony contained "6,000 Christian servants for a short tyme," who had
come with the "hope of bettering their condition in a Growing
Country."[2-29]

Virginia is fortunate in having preserved a record of this, the first
great migration to the English colonies, which in some respects is
remarkably complete. In fact, the names of fully three-fourths of all
the persons who came to the colony, whether as freemen or servants
during the first century of its existence, are on record at the Land
Office at Richmond, and at all times available to the student of
history. In the early days of the settlement a law was passed designed
to stimulate immigration, by which the Government pledged itself to
grant fifty acres of land to any person who would pay the passage from
Europe to Virginia of a new settler. Thus if one brought over ten
indentured servants he would be entitled to 500 acres of land, if he
brought 100, he could demand 5,000 acres. But the headright, as it was
called, was not restricted to servants; if one came over as a freeman,
paying his own passage, he was entitled to the fifty acres. Should he
bring also his family, he could demand an