Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607-1776

by Peter Wilson Coldham

In a story largely untold until now, Peter Coldham's groundbreaking study demonstrates once and for all that the recruitment of labour for the American colonies was achieved in large measure through the emptying of English prisons, workhouses, brothels, and houses of correction, as felons, rogues and social outcasts were transported fated to toil in the tobacco-growing colonies of Virginia and Maryland.
Supported by a massive array of documentary evidence and first-hand reports, the author lays the focus on the emergence and use of transportation as a means of dealing with an unwanted population, dwelling at length on the processes involved, the men charged with the administration of the system of transportation or engaged in transportation as a business, then proceeding with a fascinating look at the transportees themselves, their lives and hapless careers, and their reception in the colonies.
Few transportees contrived to return to their native country when their sentences expired, and it must be assumed that most such involuntary emigrants were assimilated into colonial society. Their untold story may lack the romance of the cavaliers of Virginia and Maryland - the heroic ring of a dispossessed aristocracy - but it has the stark accent of truth. This is a story to challenge common perceptions and attitudes about the peopling of the American colonies.

Genres: History

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Peter Wilson Coldham, FASG (1926 – 2012 in London), was a British genealogist. He was noted as "distinguished scholar of colonial American immigration."

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Peter Wilson Coldham reveals an aspect of our American history and the settlement of our nation that has not been emphasized and which frankly comes, if not as a shock, as a confirmation that some history is deliberately "forgotten." Economic and social conditions of all the parties on both sides of the Atlantic are addressed in an unforgettably tragic tale of human beings involved in "transportation."

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim book but packed with solid analysis, reference, and great anecdotes outlining the fundamental inhumanity, cupidity, and official savagery of the period, domestic as well as imperial. The roots of the convict lease and chain gang systems as practiced in the postbellum South are found here, their goals being identical: to reduce nominal freemen to a state of grateful submission through legal terror. This terrorizing of the "lower orders" through "the rigorous interpretation and application of law" was freely admitted by its proponents, as quoted by Mr. Coldham on p. 11: "Hopeless slavery was the proper condition for labourers," according to Andrew Fletcher, MP Saltoun; "such people existed only to work and that politicians should be able to limit their existence by work." Thus "the freedom of the few was bought by the servitude of the many," a state of affairs openly advocated by many so-called libertarians today.

The law was specifically framed to snare the poor offender against property, raising the list of capital crimes to ridiculous lengths: a cottager who cut down trees in an orchard deserved the death penalty; a slumlord committing arson to collect insurance money, endangering the lives of dozens of tenants, committed a misdemeanor. So unconscionable were the contradictory lengths of such class-biased law that more "humane" justices would offer plea bargains of transportation for "reduced offenses" like stealing a handkerchief. Thus the "justice" as well as "the majesty" of the law was upheld, contracting ship captains ensured plentiful marketable cargo, and colonial American planters assured ready labor for expanding fields of "endeavour."

But, while many of the transported may have been "rough and ready rogues" who would have seen the law's hard end under any system, Coldham stresses (p. 14) that "the majority of those transported to the colonies may, however, be justly regarded as having fallen victim to oppressive circumstances and harsh environment rather than as professional villains." This is exactly parallel to the postbellum freedman bound by vagrancy and debt laws into servitude in coal mines and turpentine camps. The law was designed to subvert "the rights of Englishmen" as much as possible for the poor, for in this age a white skin counted for naught.

The British penal system missed not a beat, however, when the practice was forcefully stopped by the US Congress in the 1780s, flowing directly into the Australian transport system. Whenever we hear clucking noises coming from the usual suspects over Russian gulags and Siberian exiles, one must recall why so many white, colonial British-Americans cannot properly trace their forbears any more than the chained Africans who followed them.

(Worth a look also is Ben Franklin's appended 1751 satire, "On the Subject of Transportation," where he advocates deporting rattlesnakes back to England as an equal opportunity of social reform and usefulness as provided by transportation.)

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite a small book but is quite full of information. It packs quite a punch. Coldham deals with cold hard facts (as opposed to some historians who kind of romanticize Britain).

[Desiree Smelcer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good information on Indentured Servants. Worth a read for basic information.

[Toby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thw archtypal Dickens companion.