Peopling of British North America

The Peopling of British North America…An
Introduction
Bernard Bailyn
The Curti Lectures – The University of Wisconsin
New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, MCMLXXXVI

Worlds in Motion
I do not know when it began – sometime in the early Middle
Ages. It moved forward with varying speeds for several
hundred years; was thrown back for a century or more after
the first third of the 14th century; took a sudden lurch forward
in the 16th century; slowed in the mid-17th century; then sped
precipitately ahead in the later 17th century to form in the
18th and 19th centuries a mighty flow that transformed at first
half the globe, ultimately the whole of it, more fundamentally
than any development other than the Industrial Revolution.
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The Westward Transatlantic Movement
• From 1500 to the present, it has involved the displacement
and resettlement of over fifty million people.
• From the jagged, wind-swept Butt of Lewis on the far
northern tip of the Outer Hebrides to the Lunda kingdom
deep in equatorial Africa, from Prussia south to the Danube,
and from the Elbe to the Mississippi, tens of thousands of
people were moving over great distances, to resettle in the
alien environment of the North American seaboard
communities and then to help open millions of acres in the
wilderness to the west.

Four Propositions
• Proposition One
– It was an extension outward, and an expansion in scale of
domestic mobility already existing. Ultimately it became a
new and dynamic force in European population history.
• Proposition Two
– The settlement and development patterns for the whole of
British North America reveal not uniformity, but highly
differentiated processes, which form the contexts of the
immigrants’ arrival.

Four Propositions
• Proposition Three
– The major stimuli to population recruitment were, first,
continuing need for labor, and, second, land speculation.
These drew on different socio-economic groups and
involved different modes of integration into the society.
• Proposition Four
– American culture in this early period becomes most fully
comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western
periphery, a marchland,* of the metropolitan European
culture system.
* A forward- and outward- looking, future anticipating, progress area. BB

Mobility
• The English population in Great Britain was mobile in the pre-
industrial era in three interwoven patterns.
1. Short-distance movements resulting from population
growth within families, into farming and servitude.
2. Longer-distance moves that funneled people from the
countryside into the towns.
3. And the great flow of people into the vast and constantly
growing catch basin of London.

London
• This “dominant node in the national migration system” was
the great flow of people into the vast and constantly growing
catch basin of London, with a population of:
• 60,000 in the early 16th century
• 200,000 in 1600
• 350,000 in 1650
• 575,000 in 1700 (11% of England and Wales)
• Disease devastated the slums, and London was a graveyard in
the 18th century, but ever more people came in – 1,000,000
between 1550 and 1750.
(The Boston population in 1740
was around 16,000)

Spillover Migration
• In its earliest phase, the peopling of North America was a
spillover of these established patterns of mobility in England.
• Religion shaped the ethos of the Puritan migration of the
early 17th century, but people were already accustomed to
moving geographically.
• 21,200 people emigrated to Puritan New England during
1630-1642, but 3 times that number left for other colonies in
America and the West Indies, and 6 times that number of
Englishmen and Scots (120,000) migrated to Ireland.

(1st Area) New England
• 1700 – A Puritan world whose inner spirit, once powerfully
creative and fearless, had survived into a third generation in a
faded and defensive form (from a single period of English
emigration, 1630 – 1640).
• The fierce religious intensity, the sense of daring and risky
enterprise in the service of a demanding God – all of that had
passed.
• The first generation’s accomplishments had been something
their children had been born into, and to their children (the
3rd generation), adults in 1700, what had once been
rebellious and challenging was now a problematic
anachronism. Cultural horizons had narrowed to practical
demands.

Boston
• On 8 April 1630, four ships left the Isle of Wight. Winthrop
sailed on the Arbella. The ships were part of a larger fleet of
11 ships that would carry about 700 migrants to the colony.
• At the fleet's arrival at Salem (the original destination) in
June, Winthrop and his deputy, Thomas Dudley, found in
Salem a scene of death and desolation, and embarked on
surveying other options in the area.
• Dudley stubbornly insisted on a site inland along one of the
two rivers emptying into the bay – the Charles – and
Winthrop favored one on the other – the Mystic. They
compromised on a temporary spot between the two, at what
became Charlestown.

Boston (continued)
• There, on the sloping shore, the hundreds of disoriented,
exhausted voyagers threw together temporary shelters –
tents, huts, and wigwams – and dragged their supplies,
livestock, and equipment to safety above the water line.
• It was a desperate, crowded, helter-skelter huddle, lacking
sanitation, sufficient food, and medical supplies. Dysentery
swept through the encampment and the settlers were forced
to disperse.
• Thomas Dudley led a group up the Charles River to
“Newtown” (Cambridge). Sir Richard Saltonstall led another
group further up the Charles River to what would become
Watertown.

Boston (continued again)
• William Pynchon led another group a short distance south to
Roxbury.
• John Winthrop, though he conceded enough to Dudley to
build a house in Newtown (Cambridge), led his personal
following to the small, narrow peninsula jutting into the bay
that became known as Boston (named after the Boston,
Lincolnshire, England town where John Cotton had inspired a
generation of Puritans).
• By the end of 1630, there were seven settlements scattered
on the shores and inlets of Boston Bay.

(2nd Area) Hudson River to the Delaware
• 1700 – In the settlements scattered from the Hudson River
south to the Delaware – ethnic diversity of extremes.
• New York’s population of 18,000 was comprised of the
original Netherlanders; and then from New England, England,
France, the German principalities, Brazil, indirectly from
Africa, and from Virginia and Maryland.
• In the Hudson valley there were Dutch, French, Walloons,
Palatines, and English.
• It was a scene of continuous contention, lacking social
cohesion, a uniform land system, and chaotic in public affairs.
• Yet a more coherent world was beginning to emerge.

(3rd Area) Chesapeake Colonies
• 1700 – An immigrant population from 1607 that was 8 times
as large as the Puritan migration. Half of the children born in
these disease ridden Chesapeake colonies died before age 20,
and the rest, the most seasoned and acclimatized people of
the region, had only about another 20 years to live.
• 1700 – In the tobacco country of Virginia and Maryland, the
number of native-born whites finally equaled that of white
immigrants. At the same time, there was a dramatic shift to
slave labor. In 1680, less than 8% of the Chesapeake people
were black slaves. By 1690 it was 15%, by 1710 it was 25%.
• Crude, thinly populated, tending to oligarchy (slave owners),
but it was active, more or less stable, and beginning a culture.

(4th Area) The Carolinas
• 1700 – Two centers of British habitation south of Virginia. The
older, North Carolina, included a ragtag collection of farmers,
trappers, petty merchants, Indian traders, and rather
desperate fortune hunters. This cluster of farms and villages
was regarded as the pine-forest wilderness of the southern
Virginia frontier.
• 1700 – The southern Carolinians were centered in the port of
Charles Town. Its 7,000 people, half black slaves, Indians or
white indentured servants, the other half mostly from
Barbados, engaged in Indian trade that sent 54,000 deerskins
annually to England.

The Whole Area
• This whole world was a borderland, a part of the expanding
periphery of Britain’s core culture; and its inner quality
derived from that fact. Like the Welsh borderland 200 years
earlier, like the Scottish middle marches a century earlier, like
Ireland and the Caribbean islands in the colonists’ own time,
and like Australia later, the mainland North American colonies
formed a typically disordered border country in which, as in
the Scottish marchland in the 15th century, “violence [was]…a
way of life.”

Seven Year’s War
• Took place between 1754 and 1763. It affected Europe, North
America (French and Indian War), Central America, the West
African coast, India, and the Philippines.
• The war was between Great Britain and France
and Spain, resulting from overlapping interests in their
colonial and trade empires, and between Prussia and the Holy
Roman Emperors and archdukes in Austria, from
territorial and power conflicts in the Holy Roman Empire.
• Results of the Treaty of Paris in 1763:
– Great Britain annexes Canada, Bengal and Florida.
– France transfers Louisiana to Spain.

Land
• As of February 3, 1774, The British Privy Council declared that
lands in British North America were to be distributed by sale,
not by grant, and sold in officially surveyed plots, at public
auctions and at published prices, with fees for passing the
papers specified by the crown.
• It didn’t work for very long.
• The Treaty of Paris in 1763 gave Britain the east side of the
Mississippi, and France ceded almost all of its territory in
mainland North America (except for fishing rights off
Newfoundland and two small islands to dry the fish).

Land
• The peace treaty of 1763 thus threw open a vast territory to
settlement: two wilderness regions at geographical
extremities, Nova Scotia and the Floridas, and between them
an enormous inland arc stretching from back-country Maine
to upcountry New York and Vermont, to the Appalachian
plateau in southwestern Pennsylvania, through the Great
Valley of the Appalachians, to northwestern North Carolina
and eastern Tennessee, to upcountry South Carolina, and
across the Savannah River to the great new land cessions of
northeastern Georgia.
• This is tens of millions of acres.

Before the Revolution
• The migration to America in the fifteen years between the
Seven Years War and the American Revolution was
remarkable by the standards of the time.
• Between the end of war in the mainland colonies and the
disruption of the empire in 1775, over 55,000 Protestant Irish
emigrated to America, over 40,000 Scots, and over 30,000
Englishmen.
• Also 12,000 immigrants from the German states and
Switzerland, and 84,500 enslaved Africans.
• This total of about 221,500 arrivals was 10% of the entire
population of mainland America in 1775.

Bibliography
• Bernard Bailyn. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British
North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600 – 1675 (New
York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
• Bernard Bailyn with Barbara DeWolfe. Voyagers to the West:
A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the
Revolution (New York, NY: Random House, Vintage Books,
1986).
• Bernard Bailyn. The Peopling of British North America: An
Introduction (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
• Google and Wikipedia references are typed into the Notes
section of each applicable Power Point Cell.

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