[42: 643–74] The experience and reflection spoken of in the last chapter has led me to enquire as far as the means here at my command would allow me to go, what has been the general average condition in respect to those qualities which mark advancement in the scale of civilization of the emigrants from whose loins this nation has sprung. In the light of what I have seen here and in Texas it appears to me that it has been much lower than is generally realized.

The whole number of emigrants may be considered under two heads; those who have been driven out of their fatherlands and those who have chosen to go from them.

Withdrawing from the class of voluntary emigrants those who soon returned or for other reasons failed to leave families in the permanent settlements, nothing is more certain than that the voluntary emigrants were generally from the poorer classes of English Society, that they were mostly very ignorant and credulous and were often moved by romantic and fallacious expectations. In this respect we must remember that while we are still subject to crazy schemes and wild excitements, on the whole the civilized world is constantly growing less exciteable, less prone to yield to tides of the imagination and that nothing has occurred in our time which will enable us to fully realize how crazy men were made a few hundred years ago by dreaming of what might be found in “the New World.” A large fleet of vessels was once fitted out to bring the soil of Labrador to London because it was rumored to be full of gold and whole shiploads of dirt were actually brought to London from various points in New England and the Southern colonies under the conviction that a proper apparatus was only needed to get out of it untold wealth to the speculators. Among thousands of ridiculous phantasies which passed current for years as sober facts even among men of substance and learning, one was the story that the river Roanoke had its rise on the banks of [670] the Pacific Ocean; that it flowed through a country abounding in gold and inhabited by a nation of gold refiners who possessed a stately capital city surrounded by a glistening wall inlaid with pearls. So firmly grounded was this notion that Sir Ralph Lane sent out a company expressly to go up the Roanoke, and find the city, and although it was with the greatest difficulty any headway could be made against its current, the adventurers persevered until, after having eaten their dogs, they were forced by starvation to return. Even Governor Smith once pushed his way as far as possible up the Chickahominy Creek, imagining that it was a channel of approach to a mythical land of gold in the South Seas. Sir Thomas Dale, even after he had passed through great hardships, was so far from being cured of the American fever that he deliberately and formally reported to a council in London in regard [to] the James River country, “Take four of the best Kingdoms in Christendom and put them all together, they may no way compare with this country, either for commodities or goodness of soil.” And Lord Deleware and Sir Thomas Gates “earnestly confirmed” all that Dale wrote. The nasty, brutal and treacherous savages were described as “gentle, loving and faithful” men, “void of all guile, such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”

Such being the accounts published and credited by the wealthy and more educated, sober, cautious and respectable adventurers, the delusions of the smaller fry were of course much more preposterous. Nothing indeed was too absurd to be asserted and credited, and the mines of Peru and Mexico, associated with the fruits of the West Indies and the fisheries of New Foundland, were all placed together in New England, Virginia, Carolina or Georgia by the enterprising emigrant agents of those days, as it successively suited their purpose, according to the destination of the ship next to sail.

It must be considered that in the seventeenth century, when more than in any other period the character of the population of the Atlantic Colonies was established, the ordinary home condition of the larger part of the English people, was much more wretched and their ignorance, excitability and vice much greater than at present and that they were correspondingly more easily induced to take the risks of any enterprise that promised a great change.

Macaulay says that “the greater part of the people lived on rye, barley and oats.” Laboring men could earn only from sixpence to ten-pence a day without food, and great numbers were forced to depend on * [671]begging, gambling, thieving or robbing, for the means of supporting life. A large part of all the North of England, including Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, “was down to the eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism.” And of Northumberland he says that within the memory of some whom this generation has seen the sportsman who wandered there found “a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of California,” and though these terms barbarous and savage would be much too strong to apply to the great majority of the industrious classes who formed the bulk of the rest of the nation, it would be equally an error to regard them as advanced above the simplest elementary steps of civilization.

Under the head of involuntary emigrants come the Plymouth Pilgrims, the Roman Catholic settlers of Maryland, the earlier Quakers, and a few Huguenots and others. I have no means of estimating the number of all those who actually came to America because of the persecution to which they were subject at home, but I think their importance numerically, when compared with those who were driven out for reasons which justified their being dealt with as pests of society, is commonly very greatly exaggerated. The exportation of criminals to America began before the first Pilgrims embarked, the first hundred having been drafted from the Bridewell prison by order of the King in 1619 and shipments having been subsequently made at frequent intervals down to the period of the revolution. The number sent to Maryland alone in a single year is mentioned at three hundred and fifty. But if we had full statistics of all those regularly transferred from the prisons to the ships by formal order of the authorities, it would give us little idea of the whole number of those driven out on account of their offences against society. It was only a small portion of these who passed through the jails. For every crime that is formally punished there are even now hundreds probably of which the law takes no formal account, and this was formerly much more the case. In all old communities there is a large class of people who, because they have been brought up to no regular means of serving the community, or, if they have, have abandoned it, are justly considered as disreputable and suspicious, although they do not follow what in the eye of the law are distinctly criminal occupations, like the regular thieves. Such are many of the London “Swell-mob,” “horse’ chaunters,” fair and race-course swindlers, blacklegs, persons who aid in the disposal of stolen and smuggled goods and poachers’ game, thimble riggers and other gamblers, prize-fighters, quacks and other imposters, pawn-brokers and disreputable insurers, prostitutes and procuresses. These people, so long as they are deterred from crime, are so mainly from a consideration of the risks of engaging in it. Only when opportunities are presented to them which they think quite safe, or where the prospect of an extraordinary reward for a crime overweighs their caution, do they become legal criminals. Probably most crimes are committed by this class, its members being so [672]much more numerous than the “professional criminals.” In a great many cases such cautious and irregular criminals, immediately upon the commission of a crime, turn emigrants and many of them, though few in proportion to all, thus escape the police. Mr. Dickens in “Great Expectations” shows how such persons, in very many cases, manage even if arrested to avoid the penalty of the law by perjury and other means.

When they do so, however, they return to their old occupations, if at all, at disadvantage. Thenceforth they really stand in the criminal class before society and in the convictions of the officers of the law. They are watched therefore and guarded against; others have taken their places in their various disreputable occupations, which it thus becomes more difficult for them to resume, and for these reasons if for no others they are often forced to look to fields where they can “begin life” again free from these inconveniences. Of such fields, those presented in America have been the most cheaply and quickly reached. The same influences have always acted in still stronger degree to favor emigration to America, with such of these occasional and accidental lawbreakers as are convicted, when they escape or are discharged from jail, prison, convict ship or colony.

A convict writing for the Cornhill Magazine says of professional thieves:

Just consider the position of one of these men on leaving prison, what modes of life present themselves to him? Too-regular employment, which, hateful in itself, promises the most galling annoyances, coupled with returns quite inadequate to his wants; and his old loved familiar employment of skilled theft, which presents to him a picture of easy circumstances, unrestrained self-indulgence, and pleasant approving companionship, And will this man, the very curse of whose life is, that he has never restrained himself in the least thing from his childhood—the whole of whose life is the weakest self-indulgence—choose what is difficult and hateful, and unremunerative, when he can obtain what is in his idea the most enjoyable life, by a few successful strokes in a game in which defeat is so rare with him as to be hardly worth a thought? It cannot be expected. . . . What he looks at is, not the penalty of the law, but the activity of the police, He leaves off garrotting, not because of the Act of 1863, but because so much public attention has been called to it; just as he studiously avoids committing murder, not because the penalty is death, but because the police will be more active in pursuit; because, in short, he knows that twenty burglars escape for one murderer. He may, as he grows older, if he has sufficient self-restraint to amass capital enough to set up in business, retire from the more active line of the profession, because he well knows that either for his own crime or that of others he is sure to suffer in the long run; but in the meantime he pays no regard to increased penalties for one offence or [673]another. He simply calculates the chances of success, and acts on his calculation without looking beyond. Mere accumulation of penalties is therefore idle; and with the skilled town thief, with London at his feet, you must trust for success to moral influences alone.

Think what the attractions of a country supposed to be wonderfully rich, yet in which law & social order are scarcely begun to be established, are to such a man. But if so to him, how much greater to a man who has long been thoroughly criminal in character but who has for years avoided provoking the action of the law, when at last having placed himself in danger he finds he has slipped through the hands of those he considers his natural enemies. Says the writer last quoted: “There is only one sort of life from which they have ever found any enjoyment. . . and to that life they will assuredly return.” Nearly all of that which is essential to this enjoyment is offered them in the excitement of pioneer adventure in countries where law & social order are not yet established at least not rigidly effective, and for every convicted criminal who resorts to these, there are hundreds who do so to avoid conviction, or to follow their inclinations free from the caution which the fear of conviction before the law inspires.

Mr. Sala, in Captain Dangerous{?), says of the 18th century. “In those days all our plantations were full of the scum and riff-raff of our English towns. ’Twas as though you had let Fleet Ditch, dead dogs and all, loose.”

De Foe in Moll Flanders says of the 17th century that “the greatest part of the inhabitants” of Virginia were of two sorts, “either first, such as are brought over by Masters of Ships to be sold as servants, or, second, such as are transported after having been found guilty of crimes punishable with death.” “ ’Tis that cursed place [Newgate] that half peoples this colony.”

Smith says in his autobiography, that in the first three ship loads of emigrants to Virginia there were not two dozen men who had ever done an honest day’s work in their lives, and in a letter to the treasurer of his Company in London he tells him that he would rather have thirty working men than “a thousand of such as we have.” Again he says: “They desired but to pack over so many as they could, saying necessity would make them get victuals for themselves, as for good laborers they were more useful in England.”

The first charter of the Colony of Georgia was granted expressly for the purpose of providing a place of refuge for the poor and unfortunate, but more especially for discharged prisoners, and Hewitt says:

The first embarkations of poor people from England, being collected from towns and cities, were found equally idle and useless members of society abroad as they had been at home.

[674]

That the earlier emigration to the Carolinas was of the same character is well known.

The same qualities so distinctly predominate in the less vicious of the criminal class and the more forlorn of the voluntarily emigrating class, that it is evident that a large body of emigrants can be placed with neither class with any exactness. Take many petty defaulters, poor debtors, smugglers, poachers &c. for example. It is probably on account of the respite it has offered to the penalties of insolvency that for more than two centuries America has obtained the largest part of all the intelligent consideration it has had in Europe, but most debtors emigrating have given no more intelligent consideration to what the consequences were to be than Mr. Micawber gave to his prospects of being able to meet the obligations of his promissory notes at the moment of signing them.

It is an everyday occurrence in England, and in many other parts of Europe, that men guilty of crime, or hopelessly bankrupt, are saved from their legally appointed punishment, on condition of their emigration. Not only merciful individuals who have personally suffered, stay the hands of justice in this way, but magistrates themselves frequently do so; benevolent associations make a constant practice of it, and there are, I believe, even at this very day, societies in existence for the especial purpose.

That the ostensibly voluntary emigration from England has been recently influenced in this way, in any very important degree I will not undertake to say, but that both the ostensibly voluntary as well as the forced emigration of the earlier colonial period was largely made up from a class which failed to live in complete harmony with the laws through weakness and impersistency of purpose, I think that no one can doubt [675]who is acquainted with the ferocious character of the criminal jurisprudence of that period and who will take the trouble to imagine what must have been the influence upon most persons who were guilty of slight trespasses, of the terrible punishments which they knew that they were liable to be brought to suffer, so long as they remained in England.

A late English writer has said:—“If the French courts tortured criminals with fiendish violence and ingenuity for real crimes, the English courts put men to death for trifles with as much indifference as if they were drowning blind puppies in a stableyard.” Yet those who suffered death were a comparatively small number and men were committed to prison with even greater recklessness, while life in prison was often worse than death. Persons convicted of the smallest possible peculations or defalcations, or who, under whatever unexpected misfortune found themselves not able all at once to pay the smallest debts, were crowded into filthy dungeons in which the most frightful pestilences raged without check along with the most abandoned criminals. From these horrors not only were bankrupts saved in large numbers, by the influence of humane men who happened to know them, & who obtained their discharge upon condition that their immediate emigration to America should be provided for, but shoals of common criminals were also allowed to go on the same condition, without undergoing the forms of trial. Both classes rank in the records as voluntary emigrants. Every humane person who found another wronging him, was apt to say: “I want not to see you hanged or sent to jail to die of the plague; get you gone beyond seas, and I will forgive you.” And there were offices all over the Kingdom at which anyone, under these circumstances, could at once obtain board and lodging and early passage to America, on his simple obligation to work out the debt after reaching America, as a servant or “redemptioner,” for all the American colonies were bidding against each other for them and pressing inducements, honest and dishonest, to effect their purpose. A large number of men known as “spirits” were constantly employed in this duty who used unscrupulously all the arts of modern “emigrant runners” to excite the imagination and play upon the vagrant and gambling disposition of those whose attention they could engage. Their profit was the same whether they enlisted a good man or what Smith calls “a roarer” and their chief stations were naturally the gaming houses and tap-rooms.

The consequences of the methods used to stimulate emigration in the seventeenth century were certainly least deplorable in New England, but the wiser heads even there regarded them with grave apprehension. Governor Winslow, for instance, enumerated the chief sources of danger to be; “The vain expectation of present profit,” the ambition of [676]rulers, and “the lawlessness of those that send over supplies of men, not caring how they be qualified.”

Much that we call crime, and of that which, in self protection, civilized society deems it necessary to punish as crime, is, as we all acknowledge, simply the outworking and necessary result of a feeble will to live by what we call honest means. To steal or starve is often the alternative placed before a man and woman, not because of any positive viciousness, but because of ignorance, want of skill, or want of that degree of power in and balance of the intellectual faculties which makes the acquisition of skill and wisdom unusually difficult to them. Thus it is that in the criminal classes, and especially in those who are associated and treated by society with reluctance as a part of the criminal classes because of the conviction that they are less criminal than unfortunate, the qualities which I have asserted to be more commonly found with the voluntary emigrating classes than with the stable classes, are found in a particularly strongly marked degree. Whoever has had experience with them will at once recognize this fact. The same habits which distinguish the weaker criminal class, and which lead to their emigration, forced or voluntary, are the same habits which distinguish the milder savage tribes, and which prevent the possibility of their being allowed to live in the neighborhood of communities possessing a moderate degree of civilization.

An intelligent surgeon after having during a long voyage on a convict ship bound to Australia, made a professional study of the mental and moral condition of the prisoners, has stated his conclusions as follows:

The mental condition of a considerable number was certainly defective in a varying degree, from some slight aberration to nearly absolute imbecility. The ignorance and depravity of others, who had been reared to crime, were so great as almost to abrogate the power of conscience, or so to pervert its indications as to destroy all rule of life. A few had been driven, by excited passions, through a series of follies—too mild a term—until accident rather than inherent vice precipitated them into some criminal action. By far the largest proportion, however, had first acquired habits of intemperance, which, unsettling the reason in a similar degree to the physical structure, left no sound protecting power. If we add to the above a small number who were forced into crime by want of the necessaries of life, or by temptation in a moment of forgetfulness, we shall probably have a classification in which every convict could be arranged, in some degree, as the inmates of a lunatic asylum, according to their mental defects. There is this important difference, however, that while a majority of the patients in the one case are incurable, in the other they are nearly all susceptible of being restored to a correct frame of mind, by restraint and education.

[677]

Whoever will examine a large collection of the photographic likenesses of criminals, as may be easily done at any Metropolitan Police centre, cannot but be struck with the evident intellectual debility expressed in their features. There is no quality so generally found among the criminal class as that sort of feebleness of will which prevents the acquirement or the practice of a regular civilized method of securing a livelihood by good offices to the community.

Hence I say that the fountain head of the American stream of civilization, to recur to the figure of Guizot, was not in the civilization of Europe, but in the uncivilization of Europe, that the stream drew off chiefly those elements of the European populations which were most inharmonious and unmanageable in its civilization—just as the streams setting to Texas in 18— and to California in 1850 drained off similar elements from our own Atlantic society, only in a greater degree.

Not that this stream of European barbarism was unmixed—that I do not say—but I do say that the more civilized elements of European society mingled in it very little, much less than seems to be generally assumed. How many of the middle and upper classes came to and became permanent settlers and fathers of America I know not, but take what estimate we may of it, we must still consider that it does not follow that men are civilized because they are of the middle and upper classes of English society even nowadays. The temptation to emigration operated also most strongly and readily upon the less civilized of these, and what these are we may form some idea by recurring to Macaulay: he says of the smaller gentry:

The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to a mittimus. If he went to school and to college he generally returned before he was twenty. . . . His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. . . . His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day.

This was the heir, the younger sons were less favored. The more fortunate of the latter, (of course the larger part of the “class”) were provided for with places in the church, and the army and navy. The parsons are described by Macaulay as generally miserably sycophantic servants of the squires.

What standing in civilization was needed in the army Mr. Sala shows in his account of the officers of a garrison in the West Indies. [678]

Captain This had been kicked out of a Charing Cross coffee-house for pocketing a punch-ladle while the drawer was not looking; Lieutenant That, who had been caned on the Mall for cheating at cards; and Ensign Tother who had been my lord’s valet, and married his madam [cast off mistress] for enough cash to buy a pair of colours withal. Military gentlemen of this feather used to serve in the West Indies in those days, and swagger about Kingston, as proud as peacocks.

Only when the doors to such society as this were closed upon them would even the younger sons of the country gentry be likely to begin to think of becoming colonists.

Men who have had the necessary qualities of character and ability to secure for themselves a moderately good education in old England or who had the good fortune to be educated by the will and at the expense of others seldom felt the temptation to emigrate. Those who did were mostly scapegraces, spendthrifts, gamblers and broken-down roues, incapable of governing themselves, wholly unfit to govern others.

Mr. Lever in Barrington represents two fortune hunters conversing in a London coffee-house. One proposes to go abroad,—he don’t much care whither—“to Persia, or perhaps to the Yankees.” “I always keep America for the finish,” says the other. “It is to the rest of the world, what the copper hell is to Crockford’s—the last refuge when one walks in broken boots and with low company.” And such has been the view of America taken by most young men of the higher class.

In the earlier condition of all the colonies & settlements, the choice of men fitted to undertake the simplest governmental duties was limited, but although the important offices consequently devolved for a period to some extent upon men not of the common quality; that it was notoriously to a very limited extent, even at the outset we must suppose from such statements as that of De Foe, who says that in Virginia: “Many a Newgate Bird becomes a Great Man, and we have several Justices of the Peace, Officers of the Train Bands and Magistrates of the Towns they live in that have been burned in the hand.””

Gradually individuals of the lower class were educated in sufficient numbers to perform all the duties of legislation and government, and the lower class of Englishmen and their children became more & more seperate and independent in this as in other respects of the higher class. In all the history of America to this day there have been few leaders of the people in Government, War, Art, Science, Literature, Benevolence or any other way, who have sprung from the educated, wealthy or gentle classes, or even the respectable common people of Europe. It appears to me that this fact has too much escaped consideration, that the United States has not only been mostly peopled by the offspring of a selection of [679]the weaker, the poorer, the more vagrant, the least valuable and the least civilized of the English people, but that this class has supplied its own leaders and led itself to be whatever it is. For whatever it is, small thanks will ever be due to the good offices of the gentlemen of England.