Early American Crime was recently featured in the Westborough News. The article covers the completion of my year-long series on British convict transportation to colonial America and includes a short Q&A with me about the project. Read the full article here [no longer available online].
Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.
Almost as soon as British convict transportation to America ended, Americans began to downplay the numbers and significance of convicts sent to the colonies. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson led the way by claiming,
The Malefactors sent to America were not sufficient in number to merit enumeration as one class out of three which peopled America. It was at a late period of their history that the practice began. I have no book by me which enables me to point out the date of its commencement. But I do not think the whole number sent would amount to 2000 & being principally men eaten up with disease, they married seldom & propagated little. I do not suppose that themselves & their descendants are at present 4000, which is little more than one thousandth part of the whole inhabitants.
Jefferson should have known better. The British were sending nearly 1,000 convicts to America each year around the time he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and about half of them ended up in his own home state of Virginia.
Nineteenth-century historians participated in this cover-up as well. Most of them ignored the institution of convict transportation to America, and those who did recognize it usually claimed that most of the people who were transported were political prisoners. Not until 1896, when an article on convict transportation by J. D. Butler appeared in the American Historical Review, did this thinking begin to change. Butler pointed out that the majority of convicts shipped to America during the colonial period were decidedly not political prisoners and that their numbers were much higher than previously reported. After the appearance of Butler’s essay, historians in the twentieth century finally began to research convict transportation to America in a serious and systematic way.
Today, historians of convict transportation to America have settled on much higher numbers than those cited in the nineteenth century. Of the 585,800 immigrants to the thirteen colonies during the years 1700-1775, about 52,200 were convicts and prisoners (9 percent of the total). During these same years, slaves by far constituted the largest group of immigrants (278,400; 47%), followed by people arriving with their freedom (151,600; 26%) and indentured servants (96,600; 18%). Note that almost three quarters of all the people arriving in the American colonies during this time period did so without their freedom.
These numbers account for immigrants arriving in America from all countries during these years. When the numbers arriving in America from Great Britain are examined in isolation, the percentage of immigrants who were convicts is of course much higher. From 1718 to 1775, when the Transportation Act was in full force, convicts accounted for one-quarter of all immigrants arriving in the American colonies from the British Isles. Either way, the numbers are much higher than the “one thousandth part of the whole inhabitants†cited by Jefferson.
This series on convict transportation to the American colonies began with the story of James Bell, who in 1723 was caught stealing a book and was sentenced to transportation for a 7 year term. Other than the description of his criminal act at his trial in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and the appearance of his name on a convict shipping list, we do not know much more about his story. More well-known and hardened criminals were certainly transported to America, but Bell’s story is more typical of the thousands of petty thieves who received a sentence of transportation for their crime.
Even though Bell’s story of petty theft is short and lacks detail, the event turned out to be a momentous one for him. In being sentenced to transportation, he joined the ranks of thousands of others who could tell a similar story. Transportation to the American colonies constituted a major transformation in the lives of the people who received this punishment–a transformation so profound that they probably never could have conceived of what was in store for them before it actually happened to them. For what could very well have been an impulsive act, Bell was sent on an epic journey across the ocean and into the unknown.
The history of convict transportation has modern resonances that are hard to ignore. In recent years, drug crimes in the United States have soared and strict sentencing laws meant to contain such activity have led to a dramatic increased in the prison population. Today, more than 1 out of every 100 adults is now locked away behind bars in the United States. Convicts who have committed a wide range of offenses are housed in overcrowded and dangerous conditions, often with nothing to do all day. Prison gangs are rampant, and violent clashes between rival gangs and guards are common. Many prisoners have become institutionalized and see prison as their only and most comfortable way of life. This description of the state of the criminal justice system in the U.S. today is not far from what characterized England’s in the eighteenth century.
The United States is in dire need of finding new solutions to its prison problem. The cost of housing convicts is draining government coffers, and some states have even tried to contract out the management of its criminal offenders to private prisons. In the eighteenth century, England took the radical step of partnering with private firms to create a new form of criminal punishment that was surprisingly efficient in its administration. The result was convict transportation to America. Can the history of convict transportation to colonial America help the United States to rethink the way it handles its criminal offenders today? The answer to this question hinges on evaluating the success of Britain’s new system of punishment in the eighteenth century.
When convict transportation to America had reached its height after mid-century, the British government was ambivalent about the success of this enterprise and sought alternatives, although none of them proved satisfactory enough to displace it. The stories and experiences of the various groups involved in convict transportation offer different shades of light on the success of convict transportation. All of them must be taken into account when evaluating how effective the punishment ultimately was in diminishing the crime rate, rehabilitating the offenders, and establishing new lives for the convicts.
There were many winners in the practice of transportation. Convict merchants, who specialized in moving this form of human cargo across the Atlantic, made a fortune. Plantation owners were also beneficiaries of this form of punishment by taking advantage of the cheap labor that convicts provided. There were risks, to be sure. Convicts with ill temperaments could disrupt plantation life, and many convicts jeopardized plantation owners’ investment in them by escaping and running away. Even so, planters quickly bought up convicts almost as soon as they arrived in port, because they were such a bargain. The British government probably benefited the most. Not only was it able to empty its jails of convicts at minimal cost, but it could pass their convicted felons off on someone else and forget about them as soon as they set foot on American shores.
The convicts, for the most part, were the losers. Some of the transported convicts ended up thriving in their new setting. Many, however, died during their trip overseas before they even arrived in America. Others were mistreated by their new masters once they did arrive. Most of them, uprooted from their family and friends in England and shipped off to a strange land, either ran away or served out their terms before disappearing into obscurity.
Convict transportation played a significant role in the workings of colonial America. In the same way that Australia has learned to acknowledge and embrace its criminal legacy, America needs to come to terms with its similar criminal past. The history of convict transportation to colonial America asks Americans to re-examine their roots and compels them to recognize the contribution of British convicts such as James Bell in establishing and populating what would eventually become the United States.
Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.
Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).
Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).
Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.
What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.
The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.
Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.
Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.
The American Revolution brought an abrupt end to the British practice of transporting convicts to America. Back in England, the supposedly temporary solution of housing convicts on prison hulks in the River Thames to relieve prison overcrowding only had a short-term effect, because it wasn’t long before the hulks were completely filled with prisoners as well. Once the British lost the war in America, they also lost any hope of once again using the American colonies as a means of emptying its jails and prisons. The temporary prison hulks, and their dreadful living conditions, began to look like they were going to become permanent.
The British criminal justice system had clearly become addicted to convict transportation. The government had come to rely on the low-cost expedient of transporting its unwanted convicts to America. In fact, near the tail-end of the practice, convict transportation didn’t cost the government a dime, since the sale of convicts in America was so profitable that merchants were lining up to transport them for free. Years went by as Parliament resisted expensive solutions, such as building newer and bigger penitentiaries, and tested failed alternatives, including settling convicts in West Africa and increasing the use of the death penalty.
In the summer of 1783, the British government decided to push the issue of convict transportation with America, since no treaty or law specifically banned the practice. It hired George Moore, a London merchant, to transport 143 prisoners to America by offering him ₤500 and whatever profits he could receive from selling the convicts. To help him out, Moore established contact with a prominent merchant in Maryland, George Salmon, who believed that the two could make a fortune selling convicts once again in America.
Salmon was confident that with no law prohibiting the import of convicts to America and with his significant political connections, he could overcome any potential legal obstacles to the scheme. Even so, George Moore and George Salmon decided to disguise their human cargo as indentured servants and list the ship that was to transport them–which was fittingly called the George–as headed to Nova Scotia. That way, once the ship landed in Maryland, it could claim that it did so in distress, even if the true identity of its cargo were discovered. They even renamed the ship to the Swift to help further obscure its true purpose.
The new name of the ship, it turns out, was not nearly as fitting as its original one. Soon after the Swift departed, the convicts rebelled, took over the ship, and ran it aground on the Sussex coast. About one quarter of the convicts managed to escape, although some of them were caught and consequently executed. After spending a month in Portsmouth, the Swift started out once again for Maryland, this time with only 104 convicts.
The Swift finally arrived in Baltimore on Christmas Eve, and as planned the captain informed the authorities that the ship had run out of provisions and was forced to cut short its voyage to Nova Scotia. What they hadn’t planned is that news of the hoax had reached Maryland before their arrival. Members of the state assembly in Annapolis were outraged when they first learned of the plan, but when they officially received word on Christmas day that the ship had indeed landed, they were already on recess for the holiday and could not take up any legislation to block the ship’s entry.
The sale of the convicts went ahead as planned, although demand was low. Only 30 of the convicts on board were sold by mid-January, and several of the convicts who were purchased had already run away from their masters. Moore and Salmon managed to sell most of the convicts by the spring, but they incurred serious losses after having to provide food, clothing, and medicine for the convicts who languished on board the ship until they were sold. Furthermore, the convicts sold for low prices and the planters whose convicts ran away refused to honor their debts to the two sellers.
Despite these troubles, Moore attempted another voyage with 179 convicts in April 1784. Once again, the convicts rebelled. The ship finally made it across the Atlantic after a long trip, but unlike the first time, no American port would allow it to enter. The convicts were finally unloaded in British Honduras, which was none too happy to receive them.
Hugh Williamson, a Congressional representative from North Carolina, said of the attempts to transport convicts to America, “Perhaps a greater insult to any Nation could hardly have been offered.†To erase any legal ambiguity about shipping convicts to American soil, Congress passed a law in 1788 that specifically prohibited the import of convicts from Europe. The era of convict transportation to America had officially come to an end.
After the botched attempts to reestablish the practice of transporting convicts to America, Great Britain was now on its own in finding an alternative. Back in 1779, Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist who had accompanied Captain James Cook on an expedition through the South Pacific, had recommended New South Wales as a suitable destination for convicts. However, the estimated cost of ₤30 per head to ship convicts there, six times what it had cost the government to transport convicts to America, quickly put the proposal to rest. Now in a desperate spot, the British government was forced to reconsider its decision. In August 1786, it approved sending convicts half-way around the world to New South Wales.
The first fleet of 11 ships carrying 548 male and 188 female convicts set sail from England to Australia on May 3, 1787. These convicts faced very different experiences from their American cousins when they landed and were put to work in a penal colony in Botany Bay. Convicts sent to America were never placed in a penal colony and instead were generally sold off to private plantation owners. Convicts sent to Australia, on the other hand, were under much tighter control. They fell under the direct supervision of the government and were subject to convict discipline, including the use of chain gangs, convict barracks, slop clothing, and forced labor. They could not buy their freedom, as convicts shipped to America could. Convict servants in America were essentially treated like indentured servants, so they could basically blend in with the general population. In Australia, convicts and indentured servants were distinct.
Many believed that transportation to Australia would mean the end of the prison hulks in the Thames, but it wasn’t to be. The hulks remained for another 70 years, and convicts sentenced to transportation to Australia were first housed in the hulks to await their passage. If the hulks were too crowded, then the prisoners were sent to Newgate or other surrounding prisons.
Over 165,000 convicts were sent to Australia, more than triple the number sent to colonial America, before the practice was officially abolished in 1850. The first four years of transporting convicts to New South Wales cost the British government a staggering ₤574,592. If Parliament had known the cost to establish a penal colony in Australia would be so high, it probably would never have approved the plan.
. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1994.
. New York: Vintage, 1986.
. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2006.
Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.
Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).
Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).
Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.
What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.
The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.
Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.
Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.
The American Revolution ended the British practice of transporting convicts to the American colonies and threw Great Britain’s criminal justice system into chaos. With no place to send its convicted felons, and without a back-up plan in place, England suddenly saw its prisons and jails quickly filling beyond their capacity. The British Parliament needed to act quickly before the crisis of prison overcrowding turned into a complete catastrophe.
In 1775, William Eden, the Home Office secretary, was charged with finding a solution to the crisis of prison overpopulation, now that England could no longer send its convicted felons to America. Eden estimated that England would need to find new accommodations for 1,000 convicts each year, and since the country’s prisons and jails were already overcrowded, there literally wasn’t any place to put them.
Both Eden and the British Parliament predicted that the American market for British convicts would open up again at the conclusion of the war with America. With this belief in mind, Eden proposed creating a system of prison hulks by docking in English waters ships that had been originally used to transport convicts to America. These ships would then serve as temporary places of confinement for England’s prisoners until they could be transferred once again to America.
Eden immediately put his idea into practice. Starting in 1775, convicts were housed in the Censor and Justitia prison hulks at Woolwich and were put to work dredging the Thames and building docks and an arsenal. Had Eden not come up with the idea of housing convicts on these ships, prison conditions on land probably would have deteriorated to an even greater degree than what would eventually occur on board the newly appointed prison hulks.
Soon after placing the convicts in the newly created hulks, Eden presented two bills before Parliament: one to authorize for two years what was already taking place–namely the housing of convicts on board the ships and the use of their labor on public works projects–and one that called for the erection of a penitentiary.
Even though convicts were already residing in prison hulks on the Thames, passage of a bill authorizing the practice was far from certain. George Johnstone, a former governor of West Florida, argued against the hulk bill, contending that convicts should be sent to the West Indies or Canada instead. Johnstone’s argument was countered by those who pointed out that colonies that have remained loyal to the British government should not be punished by having convicts forcibly dumped on them. And unlike Maryland and Virginia, his critics continued, these areas have little need for cheap convict labor, especially in the West Indies where there was already an abundance of slave labor. A market for convict servants simply did not exist in these colonies.
In the end, resistance to the hulk bill was not enough to prevent its approval by Parliament in May 1776, although some doubt about the success of this scheme lingered. During the same session, Parliament passed a provision empowering every county in England to create a house of correction. Convicts under sentence of death could then be granted mercy and be sentenced to hard labor at these institutions for a term not exceeding ten years, during which time they should “be fed and sustained with bread, and any coarse or inferior food and water or small beer.â€
The second bill that Eden proposed to Parliament, the penitentiary bill, was not passed until three years after approval of the hulk bill. This later bill not only authorized building a new penitentiary, but it extended the use of prison hulks for another five years. It also set terms of confinement on board the hulks: offenders liable to 7 years transportation could be sentenced to not less than one year or more than five, and offenders sentenced to transportation for 14 years could have their terms commuted to 7 years on board the prison hulks.
After passing the first hulk bill, Parliament decided that the prison hulks at Woolwich needed someone to manage them. In the summer of 1776 it awarded the position of Superintendent of the Thames Area to Duncan Campbell, who years earlier had failed to secure the position of Contractor for Transports to the Government. Despite his failure back then to secure this position, Campbell nonetheless maintained influential friends in the House of Commons, and they handed him this new position as compensation for the loss of his convict transportation business due to the war in America. Campbell was now responsible for the welfare of 510 male convicts housed in the prison hulks along the Thames.
Prisoners on board the hulks were boarded in the lower decks of the ship, while officers were housed in the stern. The above-deck forecastle of the ship was reserved for the sick, so that breezes could carry away the smells and the infected air emanating from them. During the day, prisoners were removed from the ship and put to work. At night, prisoners slept side-by-side on wooden platforms measuring six feet long and four feet wide. The two prisoners shared a single straw pad and one blanket, both of which often carried vermin.
Just as on convict ships, gaol fever (typhus) and other diseases rapidly ran through the prisoners housed on the hulks. Of the 632 convicts who were confined on board the hulks between August 1776 to April 1778, 176 died. During the first twenty years of the hulks’ existence, around 8,000 prisoners were housed on them and almost 2,000 of them died. This 25 percent death rate on board the prison hulks almost doubles the 12-14 percent death rate of the convict ships.
Despite the original intention of prison hulks serving as a temporary expedient to prison overcrowding in England, they remained an integral part of the British criminal justice system for the next 80 years.
. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1994.
. Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1992.
Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.
Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).
Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).
Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.
What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.
The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.
Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.
Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.
Beginning in 1770, English courts handed out fewer transportation sentences to its convicted felons. The growing unease in the American colonies over British rule and its use as a destination for convicts probably had something to do with this trend. Rather than send convicted criminals across the ocean to America, local authorities instead started reviving the use of benefit of clergy, imposing terms of imprisonment on offenders, and instituting hard labor at home. Even so, convict transportation remained an important element of the British criminal justice system.
John Stewart assumed the position of Contractor for Transports to the Government in 1763, but his short tenure came to an end with his death in 1772. Stewart’s business partner, Duncan Campbell, naturally applied for the vacant the post.
Duncan Campbell was descended from the Glasgow family of Scotland. With his marriage in 1753 to the daughter of a wealthy Jamaica planter, he was prominent in the West Indies trade, owning both plantations and ships. One of his ships, the Bethia was later renamed the Bounty, of Captain Bligh fame. He also served as chairman of the London merchants trading to Virginia.
Campbell assumed that he would automatically step in to the position of Contractor for Transports and continue to receive ₤5 from the government for every convict he transported to America, just as all the others who held this position had in the past.
Duncan was mistaken. Apparently, the profits that could be had by selling convicts in America were so great that a line of merchants were already lined up at the Treasury offering to transport convicts at their own expense. The Treasury no longer needed to pay any merchant to take convicts off the government’s hands, so Stewart turned out to be the last person to hold the post of Contractor for Transports.
Even though Campbell did not secure the government subsidy, he made a fortune exporting convicts and remained an influential player in the business of convict transportation.
Samuel Johnson famously quipped in 1769 that the American colonists “are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.†Needless to say, such a sentiment would not have sat well with the American colonists. After all, the British government was responsible for populating America with its unwanted convicted felons against the wishes of many colonists.
While convict transportation was not a direct cause of the American Revolution, it helped to validate in the minds of American colonists their status as second-class citizens under British rule. If Great Britain could forcibly dump its criminals and other undesirables on America, what did that say about how it viewed its relationship with the colonies?
Convict transportation came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1775, when the American colonies began to refuse entry to ships from England after hostilities had broken out between the two lands. On September 16, 1775, The Virginia Gazette carried a short report from London dated July 4 that a convict ship was refused entry to America and was forced to return back to England. No detail was given as to exactly why it was refused entry.
The British government at first thought that the rebellion would not last long. In May 1776, the Solicitor-General asserted before the British Parliament that “when tranquility was restored to America, the usual mode of transportation might be again adopted.†His prediction never came to pass.
The last known ship to empty its cargo of convicts on American shores successfully was the Jenny, which arrived in the James River from Newcastle in April 1776. At this point, however, well over a year had passed since any other convict ship had landed in America before it.
On December 11, 1776, after America had claimed its independence from England in July, a group of convicts who boarded the Tayloe for transportation to America were subsequently pardoned on condition that they join the British army. Rather than work for the colonists in America, now the convicts would be used to fight against them.
After the American Revolution, Americans were forced to reconsider how they do business. Much of the American economy had relied on cheap labor provided by the forced immigration of British convicts and African slaves. The idea of equality that informed the American Revolution now conflicted with the economic structures of the past.
When immigration resumed after the war, free immigrants now dominated the numbers of those coming to America. Nearly two-thirds of all immigrants who came to America were free, compared to only about a quarter before this time. Slaves and indentured servants continued to make up the difference until importing African slaves was banned in 1808.
Even though the American Revolution put an end to the British practice of transporting convicts to America, runaway ads for convicts continued to run in American newspapers well after 1776. Despite the divorce between the American colonies and Great Britain, convicts were still bound to serve out their terms in America.
. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.. Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1992.
Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.
Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).
Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).
Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.
What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.
The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.
Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.
Read my Amazon.com bestselling book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America! Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.
Read my new Amazon.com bestselling book, Early American Criminals. Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.
