It is not only in novels and plays, however, that we encounter such statements. Malachy Postlethwayt, author of several valuable and scholarly treatises on commerce, tells us: “Even your transported felons, sent to Virginia instead of Tyburn, thousands of them, if we are not misinformed, have, by turning their hands to industry and improvement, and (which is best of all) to honesty, become rich, substantial planters and merchants, settled large families, and been famous in the country; nay, we have seen many of them made magistrates, officers of militia, captains of good ships, and masters of good estates.”[127] Either from the study of Postlethwayt, or perhaps simply from reading “Moll Flanders,” we may suppose that Dr. Johnson got the notion to which he gave vent in 1769 when quite out of patience because the ministry seemed ready to make some concessions to the Americans. “Why, they are a race of convicts,” cried the irate doctor, “and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging!”[128] Thus we witness the progress of generalization: first it is some Virginians that are jail-birds, or offspring of jail-birds, then it is all Virginians, finally it is all Americans. A few years ago, in the time of our Civil War, one used to find this grotesque notion still surviving in occasional polite statements of European newspapers, informing their readers that the citizens of the United States are the “offspring of the vagabonds and felons of Europe.”[129]
The real question.
The statement of the worthy Postlethwayt seems based partly on observation, partly on information, and has unquestionably been the source of inferences much more sweeping than facts will sustain. In order to arrive at clear views of the subject, we must distinguish between two questions:—
1. What sort of people, on the whole, were the indented white servants in Virginia?
2. How far did they ever succeed, as freedmen, in attaining to high social position in the colony?
Redemptioners.
In answering the first question, a mere reference to “felons” and “convicts” will carry us but little way. A considerable proportion of the indented white servants were poor but honest persons who sold themselves into slavery for a brief term to defray the cost of the voyage from England. The ship-owner received from the planter the passage-money in the shape of tobacco, and in exchange he handed over the passenger to be the planter’s servant until the debt was wiped out. Indented servants of this class were known as “redemptioners,” and many of them were eminently industrious and of excellent character. Such redemptioners came in large numbers to Virginia, Maryland, and the middle colonies, and much more rarely to New England, where the demand for any kind of servile labour was but small.
Punishments for crime.
Again, among the transported convicts were many who had been sentenced to death for what would now be considered trivial offences; the poor woman who stole a joint of meat to relieve her starving children was not necessarily a hardened criminal, yet if the price of the joint were more than a shilling she incurred the death penalty. For counterfeiting a lottery ticket, or for personating the holder of a stock and receiving the dividends due upon it, the punishment was the same as for wilful murder.[130] The favourite remedy prescribed in law was the gallows, as in medicine the lancet. Yet many judges and officers of state were conscious of the excessive severity of the system, and welcomed the device of sending the less hardened offenders out of the kingdom instead of putting them to death. There is reason for believing that murderers, burglars, and highwaymen continued to be summarily sent to Tyburn, while for offences of a lighter sort and in cases with extenuating circumstances the death penalty was often commuted to transportation. As a rule it was not the worst sort of offenders who were sent to the colonies.
Number and distribution of convicts.