What crap. Indentured servants in NO way did the most of the "heavy lifting" anywhere. They had contracts and once fulfilled were freed. Prior to the cotton kingdom slavery was much more benign and even required great skill in the tobacco industry not the huge gangs of labor required after 1793.
Life for an indentured servant was a picnic compared to the field hands in Alabama in the 1840s.
Life for an indentured servant was a picnic compared to that of a free Irish miner in 1890 or a free Slovenian open-hearth mill worker in 1910.
There are bad jobs, and there are worse jobs. Bondmen get worse jobs, but sometimes free men take them, too.
What's your point? Spit it out.
Beg to differ. Indentured servants did the heavy lifting in many places because they were there BEFORE slaves were imported. Also, many of the first blacks to arrive came as indentured servants, not "slaves." They worked off their contracts and were let go. I'm talking about pre-1700, when a lot of the heavy lifting was done--swamp clearing, stump pulling, tree felling, etc.
My own Welsh ancestor sailed from Bristol, England in 1620 to a Nevis plantation as an indentured servant. Then moved to Maryland in 1626 after he'd paid off his passage. Slaves arrived on Nevis ten years later. There were few if any blacks in Maryland in 1626. The heavy lifting, clearing, pulling, felling was done by Welsh and England colonists. But no one wants to give us any credit whatsoever for it.
My ancestor was a brave teenage lad, orphaned, alone, undoubtedly illiterate, impoverished to the point that he didn't even have a last name, but took the name of the nearby castle in Wales. When he got to Maryland in 1626, the population of the entire state would fit into a 2004 baseball stadium, virtually all were white, few were landowners. most died before age 35 from malaria and other dreadful things. But somehow, plantations began and flourished, the economy grew even without those hard-working slaves.
I don't begrudge blacks credit for their heavy lifting and I don't promote the institution of slavery. It was dreadful. But they weren't the backbone of America. A little perspective please.