Many early colonists paid for the Atlantic crossing with seven years of unpaid labour
Long before Ellis Island, huge numbers of young men and women sailed to colonial America as indentured servants. An employer paid the ship's captain for their passage; in return they worked for food, lodging, clothing and training but no wages, usually for seven years or until about age 21, then went free to marry and farm.
The first and longest era of immigration ran from the Jamestown settlement of 1607 to the Revolution in 1775. It drew mostly northern Europeans, above all British, German and Dutch. Once tobacco proved profitable, plantations spread along the Chesapeake Bay. In 1620 about 100 Pilgrims, who had first fled to Holland to escape persecution by the Church of England, founded Plymouth, and tens of thousands of Puritans, largely from East Anglia, followed to the Boston area between about 1629 and 1640.
Each region developed its own character. New Englanders were the most urban and educated colonists and founded Harvard in 1635 to train ministers; cold winters that killed disease-carrying insects gave them the lowest death rate and highest birth rate of any colonies. The Dutch settled along the Hudson from about 1626 and held New Netherland for 40 years until the English took it in 1664. Pennsylvania, founded around 1680, drew Quakers and German Protestant sects with religious freedom and cheap land, and by 1780 about 27 percent of New Yorkers descended from Dutch settlers.
The frontier had its own wave. From about 1717 to 1775, between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish, Presbyterian farmers fleeing hardship and persecution, poured into inland Pennsylvania and the southern backcountry, and their culture came to dominate Appalachia.
The South was harsher. Malaria, yellow fever and conflict with Native Americans killed many newcomers, while epidemics of measles and smallpox had already emptied much of the land of its original inhabitants by 1630. From the early 18th century, enslaved Africans made up a large and forced share of arrivals: between 1700 and 1740 they were most of the net migration to the southern colonies.
Source: History of immigration to the United States
