Abstract
It is clear that convict transportation after 1718 involved a massive effort by the authorities in both England and the colonies. The London government maintained expensive subsidies for shipping felons, and local counties and regions entered into similar, often long-term, arrangements. Equally important were the common interest in criminals which this trade generated, and the exchange of news and cultural representations associated with it. The overall impact on both societies, however, is difficult to gauge. As Bailyn writes, ‘how deeply the experience of transportation entered into the consciousness of eighteenthcentury Britons and into the fabric of British society and culture can only be surmised, but the evidence of a profound impact abounds’. As we have seen, the visible evidence of ‘coffles of manacled prisoners marching through the early-morning streets of London to the Thames or across the English countryside to pens in harbour prisons to await shipment’, reports of the transatlantic voyages and accounts of the conditions of work in the ‘plantations’, indeed the imagery of virtual slavery in the colonies, were all deeply embedded in popular consciousness.1
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Notes
B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling ofAmerica on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 293–4 a coffle is a line of people; on p. 295 he talks rather exaggeratedly of the transportation of‘hardened criminals’.
See comments of Father Joseph Mosley, in ‘Letters of Father Joseph Mosley, 1757–86’, Woodstock Letters 35 (1906) p. 54: ships’ captains allegedly flogged Catholics into taking the oath and denying their faith.
R. Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1722), p. 249; American Weekly Mercury, 14 Feb. 1721.
Farley Grubb, ‘The Market Evaluation of Criminality: Evidence from the Auction of British Convict Labor in America, 1767–75’, The American Economic Review 91 (1) (2001), 295–304, p. 303.
See Henry T. Tuckerman, America and her Commentators (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970; first published New York, 1864), Chapter 7,‘English Abuse of America’.
J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 188–9 and 253.
PRO SP 36/50, f.308 (Somerset), Thomas Pope, arrested for burglary 1740, reprieved for transportation for life; Henry Fielding, ‘An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers’ in The Works of Henry Fielding Esquire, 10 vols (London: Smith Elder, 1882), vol. 7, p. 265.
J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 473; Timothy Pitkin, APolitical and Civil History of the United States of America from the Year 1763 etc., 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Hezekiah Howe, Durrie and Peck, 1828), vol. 1, p. 133.
Kent County Court (Bonds and Indentures) 1715–20, f.50v-52v, the Transportation Act; A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: the Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–75 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) pp. 138–9.
Waverly K. Winfree, comp., The Laws of Virginia Being a Supplement to Hening’s The Statutes at Large, 1700–50 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1971), pp. 212–22; Ekirch, Bound for America, p. 139; Gwenda Morgan, The Hegemony o f the Law: Richmond County, Virginia, 1692–1776 (New York and London: Garland, 1989), p. 144.
Morgan. Hegemony or the Law, p. 145; Richard Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), vol. 2, p. 526.
Alan Atkinson, ‘The Freeborn Englishman Transported: Convict Rights as a Measure of Eighteenth-century Empire’, Past and Present 144 (1994), 88–115, pp. 100 and 106. Atkinson’s ambitious article aims among other things ‘to contribute to the thesis which would argue that for the period of Britain’s “imperial meridian” the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it may be misleading to think of the British empire merely as an appendage of the British state. In some ways Britain itself can be seen as merely the central dominion, the first among equals, so that parts of its home government can be properly understood only within the imperial context’ (p. 91).
Richmond County Order Book 9, 18 May 1730, p. 519; J. P. Kennedy and H. R. Mcllwaine, eds, Journal of the House of Burgesses, 1727–40, pp. 71, 87 and 123; on the destruction of Lee’s house, Gooch to the Board of Trade, 26 March 1729, PRO CO 5/1321/110–11; Ekirch, Bound forAmerica, p. 167; Morgan, Hegemony of the Law, pp. 153–4; Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 2, pp. 525–7; Fairfax Harrison, ‘When the Convicts Came’, Virginia Magazine o f History and Biography 30 (1922), pp. 250–60.
Peter C. Hoffer and William B. Scott, eds., Criminal Proceedings in Colonial Virginia: Record of Fines, Examinations of Criminals, Trials o f Slaves, etc., from March 1710 to (17541 [Richmond County Virginia], American Legal Records, vol. 10 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. xlivlii; Philip J. Schwartz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), pp. 16–25; Morgan, Hegemony o f the Law, pp. 99–137.
Emory G. Evans, ‘A Question of Complexion: Documents Concerning the Negro and the Franchise in Eighteenth-Century Virginia’, Virginia Magazine o fHistory and Biography 71 (1963), 411–15, pp. 414–15; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 127–8; note the earlier ruling in 1717 by the attorney general, that a free Christian Negro should have the same rights as any freeman, Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1716–17, p. 282.
The best discussion of this right is Farley Grubb, ‘The Statutory Regulation of Colonial Servitude: an Incomplete-Contract Approach’, Explorations inEconomic History 37 (2000), 42–75, where he notes that the phrase ‘except convicts’ in the 1753 Act has often been ignored, p. 70; Hening, Statutes, 6, p. 359; Maryland State Archives, Ridgely Account Book 1781–2, end paper; R. Kent Lancaster, ‘Almost Chattel: the Lives of Indentured Servants at Hampton-Northampton, Baltimore County’, Maryland Historical Magazine 94 (3), (1999), 341–62, pp. 361–2, n. 5; Atkinson, ‘Free-Born Englishman Transported’, pp. 101–2.
H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Legislative Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 3 vols (Richmond, VA, 1918–19), vol. 2, pp. 1034–5.
See T. H. Breen, ‘A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660–1710’, Journal of Social History 7 (1) (1973), 3–25, p. 13, on late-seventeenth-century fear of rebellion by servants.
Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: the Debate over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749–53’, in Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn and R. B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 87.
William Byrd II to Philip Ludwell (31 Jan. 1717/18), and to Mr Smyth (6 Sept. 1740), in Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684–1776 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 310 and 557; Georgia and North Carolina were rumoured to be full of escaped convicts.
John Beattie, ‘London Crime and the making of the “Bloody Code”, 1689–1718’ in Lee Davison et al. (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 49–76, pp. 63 and 68 particularly; D. A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal 28 (1989), 111–28; Paula Humfrey, ‘Female Servants and Women’s Criminality in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, in Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May and Simon Devereaux, (eds), Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New: Essays in Honour of J.M. Beattie (Toronto: Centre for Criminology, 1998), 58–84.
Mark J. Stegmaier, ‘Maryland’s Fear of Insurrection at the Time of Braddock’s Defeat’, Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (1976), 467–83.
Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave’, p. 79; Ruth Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London in the age of the McDaniel Gang c.1745–54’, in D. Hay and F. Snyder (eds), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 301–41; ‘The Discoveries of John Poulter’, published probably in 1753, reprinted in Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices, 137–77.
David A. Copeland, Colonial Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 97 and 106, statistics pp. 288–99 and Table 7 on p. 294 particularly; Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: the Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 239ff.
See Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave’, and Peter King, ‘Newspaper Reporting, Prosecution Practice and Perceptions of Urban Crime: the Colchester Crime Wave of 1765’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), 423–54, for an English case study. For a modern context, P. Schlesinger and H. Tumber, Reporting Crime: the Media Politics of Criminal Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Maryland Gazette, 12 June 1751 (new law passed by assembly); 17 July 1751 (editorial and Mr Cole’s robbery); 14 Aug. 1751; 6 Nov. 1751.
Virginia Gazette, 27 June 1751; note Faller, Turned to Account, p. 320; A Genuine and Authentick Account of the Life and Transactions of William Parsons Esq. … etc. (London 1751): there were several editions in that year alone (see University of London Library, special collections — 3rd edn, 1751).
See the classic study of youth cultures and the media, Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: Paladin, 1973).
The Independent Reflector … by William Livingston and Others, ed. Milton M. Klein (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 165–6 and pp. 168–9, dated 15 March 1753; Clark, The Public Prints, p. 240, for the case of ‘Suss the Jew’ from the London press.
According to Kevin Hayes, Franklin’s essay was reprinted in the New York Evening-Post, 15 April 1751, the Maryland Gazette 17 April; and both the Boston Gazette and the Boston Evening Post on 23 April; it appeared in part in the Virginia Gazette on 2 May and in full on 24 May; Hayes also links the timing of Franklin’s essay to the case of Jeremiah Swift; Kevin J. Hayes,‘The Board of Trade’s “Cruel Sarcasm”: a Neglected Franklin Source’, Early American Literature 28 (1993), 171–6, pp. 174–5, n 2.
Virginia Gazette, 13 and 27 Feb. 1752; Pennsylvania had tried to ban convicts entering in 1749. See ‘A Bill to give power to change the punishment of felony in certain cases, and of certain other offences, to confinement and hard labour, in His Majesty’s dockyards’, in S. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975), vol. 9. p. 358.
Report from the Select Committee on Criminal Laws etc. (House of Commons, ordered for printing, 8 July 1819): Appendix 4, pp. 146–51, execution rates were 52.8 per cent in the 1720s, and 53.4 per cent between 1749 and 1755, but only 37.5 per cent from 1730–48.
T. H. Breen, ‘Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising’, Journal o f American History 84 (1997), 13–39, p. 19.
Breen, ‘Ideology and Nationalism’, p. 19; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico/Random House, 1992); Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Breen, ‘Ideology and Nationalism’, p. 31; on the radical whig tradition, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967) and Gordon S. Wood, ‘Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 23 (1966), 3–32.
Stephen Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, c 1739–83’, William and Mary Quarterly 59 (2002), 65–100, pp. 77–8, 81–2 and 94–5; see also his ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles’, English Historical Review 116 (468) (2001), 863–93.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 206.
Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 49.
George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, eds, Boswell’s Life o f Johnson, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 312; Butler suggests the comment was made in 1769, see James Davie Butler, ‘British Convicts shipped to American Colonies’, American Historical Review 2 (1896), 12–33, p. 12; Boswell’s Life was first published in 1791.
Cited in E. H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 192.
Petition of Franklin to the House of Commons [12–15 April 1766], Leonard W. Labaree and William B. Willcox (eds), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–2001), 13, p. 24.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 Nov. 1774, citing the London Chronicle, 30 Aug. and 1 Sept. 1774, again calling the phrase a ‘barbarous ill-placed sarcasm’; Samuel Johnson: Political Writings, vol. 10 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald. J. Greene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 414, in the pamphlet ‘Taxation no Tyranny’; George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell’s Life o f Johnson, vol. 2, p. 314, n. 3.
L. H. Butterfield et al. (eds), Diary and Autobiography ofJohn Adams, vol. 2, Diary 1771–81, 23 Feb. 1777 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 261.
Worcester, from Boston newspapers, Virginia Gazette (Dixon), 28 Oct. 1775 and (Pinkney), 26 Oct. 1775; Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 May 1778; for the abuse of prisoners in New York, see Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York: the City at the Heart of the American Revolution (New York: Walker and Co., 2002), pp. 274–5, and p. 285 for Cresswell’s account of the half-buried bodies of American prisoners; Holton, Forced Founders, p. 219.
Journal ofNicholas Cresswell, 1774–77, with a foreword by Samuel Thornley (New York: Lincoln Macveagh, Dial Press, 1924), p. 186.
6–8 May 1787, quoted in Bob Reece, The Origins o f Irish Convict Transportation to New South Wales (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 116; Michael Rozbicki, The Complete Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 92–6; Malachy Postlethwayt, Dictionary of Commerce, 3rd edn (London, 1766) cited in Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998), p. 49.
Jefferson’s ‘Observations on Demeunier’s Manuscript [1786], ‘Observations on the article Etatsunis prepared for the Encyclopedie’, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), vol. 10, pp. 30 and 59–60. On Jefferson and population, see Daniel Scott Smith, ‘Population and Political Ethics: Thomas Jefferson’s Demography of Generations’, William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999), 591–612.
Edmund Randolph, History of Virginia, edited with an Introduction by Arthur H. Shaffer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), pp. 37–8; William Stith, The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia etc. (Williamsburg, VA, 1747).
Fairfax Harrison, ‘When the Convicts Came’pp. 250–60; Charles Edgar Gilliam, ‘Jail Bird Immigrants to Virginia’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 52 (1944), 180–2; Polly Cary Mason, ‘More about “Jayle Birds” in Colonial Virginia’, and Matthew Page Andrews, ‘Additional Data on the Importation of Convicts’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 53 (1945), pp. 37–41 and 41–2; Timothy Pitkin, A Political and Civil History of the United States of America from the year 1763 etc. 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Hezekiah Howe, Durrie and Peck, 1828); George Bancroft, History of the United States of America (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888); Butler,‘British Convicts shipped to American Colonies’, 12–33.
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© 2004 Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton
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Morgan, G., Rushton, P. (2004). Panics and Recriminations: Convergence and Divergence and the Criminal Atlantic. In: Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000872_6
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