Immigrants on the Move

Sources

Mobility. No matter where a visitor to colonial America looked, he or she could find people on the move. For many individuals and families, in fact, the long move that brought them across the Atlantic to America was only the longest in a series of moves that began in the British Isles or on the European continent. The Pilgrims who settled Plymouth colony had first left England to seek refuge from religious persecution in Holland before embarking for the New World. Families who sailed from England to Massachusetts Bay could often remember when they, their parents, or their grandparents had first moved from country villages to larger English towns such as Ipswich and Great Yarmouth in search of jobs in manufacturing. Thousands of single young people traveled from the seventeenth-century English countryside to London in search of opportunity. Many of them took passage to Virginia and Maryland as indentured servants, hoping to learn tobacco planting and establish their own plantations after completing their terms of service. The mobility that brought settlers to America was not confined to England. In the 1680s German Anabaptists took advantage of William Penn’s offer of cheap farmland in his newly founded colony of Pennsylvania, settling around Germantown. Waves of Mennonite and Amish immigrants soon followed. Around 1710 German refugees from the regions near the Rhine River arrived in London, and English officials relocated hundreds of them to settlements of the upper Hudson and Mohawk Rivers in New York to make pine tar for the Royal Navy. A steady flow of German Palatines poured into Pennsylvania in the following decades to compose more than a third of the colony’s population by 1766. Scotch-Irish tenant farmers, whose parents or grandparents had left Scotland to settle in northern Ireland, also began a new migration to America as Ulster rents increased and Anglican officials persecuted them for their Presbyterian beliefs. Throughout the eighteenth century these Scotch-Irish settlers streamed onto cheap western lands in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas at a rate of four thousand per year.

AVERAGE TRAVEL TIMES BY SAIL IN 1730

Boston to London: 7.5 weeks
New York to London: 9.2 weeks
Philadelphia to London: 9.8 weeks

Source: Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Regional Differences. Once people arrived in British America their movements varied from region to region. New England settlers moved slowly and methodically across the countryside, establishing stable towns in which families remained for several generations. Chesapeake planters established their plantations along navigable rivers where ships could easily dock to take on each year’s tobacco crop. Poor men who had worked off their indentures often pressed further west to set up hardscrabble farms. In New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania patterns were even more mixed. Earlier groups of settlers tended to establish stable communities, but as the eighteenth century wore on, the population became increasingly mobile, each year pressing further west toward the backcountry

and further south along the Appalachian Mountain range. By the 1760s it was not uncommon for backcountry settlements to spring up rapidly, flourish for a few years, and then dwindle as their inhabitants moved on. Eastern leaders in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas worried about how such a shiftless population could be governed or kept loyal to the colonies and the Crown. An increasing incidence of backcountry rebellion in the last decade before the Revolution seemed to confirm their fears. Colonial officials never satisfactorily resolved the problem.

Sources

Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: The Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);

Edward Countryman, Americans: A Collision of Histories (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996);

A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).