And so as slavery lessened cannibalism, transportation to America made less work for the English hangman. One can imagine the rage of sadistic Chief Justice Jeffries, who used to send offenders to the gallows in droves, at this arrangement.
Later, the Committee of Trade of New York petitioned the authorities to send to New York all prisoners to be transported from Newgate Prison.9 It is doubtful, says Alexander Brown, if any other class of white labor could have been secured to open up Tide-water Virginia at that time than such as were sent.” And these were unsatisfactory.10 “It is a fact,” said the American Historical Review, “that the transportation of convicts was a regular and systematic pursuit through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”11 An estimated 20,000 of these felons came to Maryland alone between 1737 and 1767, among them 115 on the York from Newgate Prison, March 22, 1739. Their names are given.12
Of course, all sent were not actual criminals. Some were debtors, others political dissidents, prisoners of war, labor agitators and the like. Some might have stolen only a loaf of bread or whitened farthings to make them look like sixpences. But a good many were murderers, robbers, forgers, counterfeiters, house-burners, highwaymen and the like. Most of these convicts came from Newgate Prison. A reading of Rayner and Crooks’ five - volume “Newgate Calendar” will give the type of usual criminal there at the time.
It cannot be denied either that deportation to America was England’s favorite way of getting rid of her loose women. The first ones sent were undoubtedly this kind. Narcissus Luttrell, writing in his diary, Thursday, November 17, 1692, tells of eighty such women being sent to Virginia. He mentions a ship “going for Virginia in which the magistrates had ordered 50 lewd women out of the houses of correction and 30 others who walked the streets after 10 at night.”13 Chambers mentioned another shipment of Scotch prostitutes in 1695.14
England didn’t care whether such women were given to whites or Negroes. In 1787, when 351 ex-slaves were being sent from England to Sierra Leone, West Africa, the authorities picked up all the loose women they could find on the streets of Portsmouth, some sixty of them, herded them aboard, and had them married to the blacks. An Englishwoman, Mrs. A. M. Falconbridge, who saw these women in Sierra Leone four years later, tells of them.15
Leading Englishmen and Americans protested vigorously. “It is a shameful and unblessed thing,” said Bacon, “to take the scum of people and wicked and condemned men to be the people with whom ye plant.” 16
The American Mercury, February 14, 1720, says of the arrival of “above 180” of these “malefactors” from the prisons of Newgate and Marshalsea, “These ways of transporting villains amongst such a flourishing people is to lessen our improvements and industries by filling the vacancies of honest men with tricking, thieving, and designing rogues who will hardly be brought to get their livelihood by such laborious and settled means.” The Mercury, October 29, 1720, lamented that the plantations “cannot be ordered to be better populated than by such absolute villains and loose women, as these proved to be by their wretched lives and criminal actions, and if they settled anywhere in these parts can only by natural consequence leave bad seeds amongst us.”
The Virginia Gazette, May 24, 1751, says “When we see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious Robberies, the most cruel Murders and other infinite villainies perpetrated by the Convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy and what terrible Reflections must it occasion. … These are some of thy Favours, Britain. Thou are called the Mother Country; but what good Mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt them with infectious vices and to murder the rest.”
In 1753, Benjamin Franklin complained that English and German jails were being emptied in America. He wrote the London Chronicle in 1769, “Their emptying their jails in our settlements is an insult and a contempt, the cruelest that ever one people offered to another.” He threatened to send King George a cargo of rattlesnakes in return.
Chief Justice Stokes of the Colony of Georgia wrote, “The Southern colonies are overrun with a swarm of men from the eastern parts of Virginia and North Carolina, distinguished by the name of Crackers. Many of these people are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times and inherited so much profligacy from their ancestors that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth.”17
So many desperadoes and others were sent that the American colonies came to be regarded as Australia was to be after 1787 or Devil’s Island in our time. The celebrated Dr. Samuel Johnson said in 1769, “They (the Americans) are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”18
Johnson was undoubtedly prejudiced against America. He hated slavery. In his “Taxation No Slavery,” he asked, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But James D. Butler, who went into the subject thoroughly, says Johnson wasn’t altogether wrong. “His research,” says Butler, “has filled him with surprise that our colonial convict element was so large. He is inclined to confess that English views on this matter have been more correct than those prevalent in America. He cannot wonder that Johnson, who was employed in editing the Gentleman’s Magazine, had hundreds of times chronicled the reprieve of gallows-birds that they might be made American colonists, should hold in low esteem the regions they pervaded and peopled. It seems more natural that he should speak as he did and declare that he could love everybody but an American.”19
In its May issue, 1747, this magazine reported that 887 convicts had been shipped to America to date that year.
Views as that of Dr. Johnson, naturally deterred the more respectable type of colonists. But many of the latter began to arrive, these mostly indentured servants, semi-slaves, who sold themselves for a number of years. The Germans and Pennsylvania Dutch, made especially good immigrants.
Another forced type of immigrant were the kidnapped, chiefly children, husbands and wives who were in the way, and heirs to fortunes and titles. One of the latter, James Annesley, tells how he was held as a slave in his “Memoirs of An Unfortunate Nobleman Returned from A Thirteen Years’ Slavery in America, 1743.” These latter were slaves for life.
France also sent her unwanted to the New World. Fleurian, an official, complained of the quantity of criminals being sent to Louisiana and on May 9, 1720, the French Council of State ordered that no more “vagabonds, criminals and cheats” be sent there. Instead they were to go “to the other colonies.” (Louisiana Hist. Quar. Vol. 1-3, p. 124. 1917-18).
It is clear from the foregoing that the earliest immigrants to the United States, English predominating, made up chiefly of a few aristocrats, “gentlemen,” debtors, kidnapped, political prisoners, prostitutes and the outright vicious, added up to a source of manual labor that left much to be desired.
PILGRIMS AS DRUNKS AND SODOMITES
Even the early pilgrims of New England though very pious, or were forced to appear so, weren’t all the hardworking, very desirable characters we’ve been led to believe. Governor Bradford, writing in 1642 of the severity of punishments in his colony, said, “And yet all this could not suppress the breaking out of sundry notorious sin, especially drunkenness and uncleanliness, not only incontinence between persons unmarried, for which many both men and women have been punished sharply but some married persons, but that which is even worse, sodomy. …”20 Nevertheless Mayflower ancestry is still considered the highest in the United States.
The Saturday Evening Post, November 29, 1958, in an article, “Let’s Have Less Nonsense About the Pilgrims,” quotes Professor Morison of Harvard on the great amount of “bunk” written about them.
The very presence of Indians, badly armed, who could be forced to do the rough work, had a tendency to make even some of the most industrious colonists shiftless. The presence later of the Negroes made great numbers positively indolent. What Colonel William Byrd of Virginia said of this in 1736 will be given later.
England