Redemptioners were European immigrants, generally in the 18th or early 19th century, who gained passage to the American Colonies (most often Pennsylvania) by selling themselves into indentured servitude, to pay back the shipping company which had advanced the cost of their transatlantic voyage.
British indentured servants generally did not arrive as redemptioners, after the early colonial period, due to certain protections afforded them by law.
[1] A similar law was passed in Ireland, in an act of Parliament, whereby, in return for passage to America, the servant gave the purchaser of his indenture all rights to his labour for an agreed period of time, usually four years.
If they used the redemptioner system, they were forced to negotiate their indentures with their future master at the worst possible time, before they were allowed to leave a stinking, vermin-infested ship, at the end of a long voyage.
A few early 18th-century German-speaking colonists later sent for family members, back in the old world, by agreeing with the shipping companies to "redeem" their loved ones off the arriving vessel by paying the passage —more or less a form of COD for human cargo.
The vast majority of these poor, go-now-pay-later travelers were not redeemed by family members, in America, and so the term is misleading in that most of them paid for their emigration with their own toil, tears, and sometimes their life, as a redemptioner.
On the other hand, a Virginia law of the same year stipulated that "any servant giving notice to their masters (having just cause of complaint against them) for harsh and bad usage, or else for want of diet or convenient necessaries... [shall] have remedy for his grievances."
If the ship needed to sail back to Europe, before all of the passengers’ indentures had been sold, an agent in the American port kept them confined, until a buyer presented himself.
Over time, Germans, who had finished their indentures, formed German-American societies, and one important activity for them was to lobby for humane regulations and policing of the shipping companies.
“The poor Europeans who think they have purchased the land of their desires by the hardships endured during the journey across the sea are enslaved for five, seven, or more years for a sum that any vigorous day laborer earns within six months.