Criminals Immigrated as Indentured Servants
No matter where one wants to start, from the early days of the Thirteen Colonies to the day this blog was posted, immigration policy has been a U.S. political issue. The pace or number or origin of immigrants has changed over time, but the reasons – desire for religion and personal freedom, the opportunity to own land, escape from oppressive poverty, and to ensure one’s children have a chance for a better life than their parents – haven’t.
From the earliest days of our country, U.S. immigration policy has been shaped by internal events – the need for more people to move and settle the West – and those outside the U.S., such as the Napoleonic Wars, famine in Ireland, and poverty in what is now known as Eastern Europe.
In 1700, British and colonial documents estimate that the total population of the 13 Colonies, including slaves, according to a University of California-Davies study was 250,888. By 1710, we were up 32.2% to 331,771, and in 1720, the number jumped 40.5% to 466,185. Quickly, studying the chart leads one to the conclusion that the population of the 13 Colonies jumped by about 30%+ every 10 years well into the early 1800s.
That’s a lot of babies!!! The truth is U.S. population growth was not organic. Popular culture would like you to believe that people from all over the world came to the 13 Colonies to seek fame and fortune.
But did they? The truth is a lot different. Experts who have studied immigration to the 13 colonies estimate that between one-half and two-thirds of the immigrants who arrived before the American Revolution came as indentured servants.
And then there were the convicts. The story starts with the British Parliament in 1716 realizing that it had a crime problem that was two-fold. One, crime was rising. Two, the government didn’t have enough prisons to house convicted criminals, nor did the parsimonious Parliament want to build more that they would have to support.
Enter the Transportation Act of 1717, a.k.a. The Piracy Act of 1717, and a.k.a. The Felons Act of 1717. What it did was shift the burden of paying for the housing of criminals to the private sector.
Convicted criminals would be transported to a British Colony for seven years for minor crimes and 14 years for major crimes. Before they boarded a ship, a British businessman either in England or the 13 Colonies took a contract on the prisoner and paid for the prisoner’s and, if applicable, his family’s passage. Once in North America, the prisoner became an indentured servant to the businessman for the period of his or her sentence.
Long before Botany Bay in Australia became famous as a home for convicts, the British were sending convicts to North America. Estimates vary from 30,000 to 50,000 men, women, and children who came here to complete their sentence as indentured servants.
Start doing the math, but if they were in their 20s when they arrived in 1720s or 1730s, their sons and grandsons probably fought in the American Revolution. And their progeny, if you want to really start digging into ancestries, were our Founding Fathers.
1738 Indentured Servant Contract of Henry Mayer to Abraham Hestant of Bucks County, PA