Editing Redemptioner (section)

==Accounts==
The only two surviving first-person accounts by redemptioners were published in September 2006 in the book ''Souls for Sale: Two German Redemptioners Come to Revolutionary America''. By coincidence, they both arrived in Philadelphia on the ship ''Sally'', in the fall of 1772. John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Buettner were recruited in [[Baltic states|Baltic]] cities, and shipped as virtual prisoners to Rotterdam, originally to be delivered to ships of the [[Dutch East India Company]] that were departing for [[Indonesia]]. Their handlers missed that opportunity, so they settled for handing them over to a ship bound for Pennsylvania.

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 German immigrant to [[Missouri]], [[Gottfried Duden]], whose published letters (1829) did much to encourage German-speaking emigration to the U.S. in the 1800s, wrote about the redemptioners. “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. The wife is separated from the husband, the children from their parents, perhaps never to see each other again.” But by the time that Duden published his letters, the redemptioner system was all but dead.