Our Foreigners | Page 3

dissenters founded New
England. They built towns and almost immediately developed a
profitable trade and manufacture. With a goodly sprinkling of
university men among them, they soon had a college of their own.
Indeed, Harvard graduated its first class as early as 1642.
Supplementing these pioneers, came mechanics and artisans eager to
better their condition. Of the serving class, only a few came willingly.
These were the "free-willers" or "redemptioners," who sold their
services usually for a term of five years to pay for their passage money.
But the great mass of unskilled labor necessary to clear the forests and
do the other hard work so plentiful in a pioneer land came to America
under duress. Kidnaping or "spiriting" achieved the perfection of a fine
art under the second Charles. Boys and girls of the poorer classes, those
wretched waifs who thronged the streets of London and other towns,
were hustled on board ships and virtually sold into slavery for a term of
years. It is said that in 1670 alone ten thousand persons were thus
kidnaped; and one kidnaper testified in 1671 that he had sent five
hundred persons a year to the colonies for twelve years and another that
he had sent 840 in one year.
Transportation of the idle poor was another common source for
providing servants. In 1663 an act was passed by Parliament
empowering Justices of the Peace to send rogues, vagrants, and "sturdy
beggars" to the colonies. These men belonged to the class of the
unfortunate rather than the vicious and were the product of a passing
state of society, though criminals also were deported. Virginia and
other colonies vigorously protested against this practice, but their
protests were ignored by the Crown. When, however, it is recalled that
in those years the list of capital offenses was appalling in length, that
the larceny of a few shillings was punishable by death, that many of the
victims were deported because of religious differences and political
offenses, then the stigma of crime is erased. And one does not wonder

that some of these transported persons rose to places of distinction and
honor in the colonies and that many of them became respected citizens.
Maryland, indeed, recruited her schoolmasters from among their ranks.
Indentured service was an institution of that time, as was slavery. The
lot of the indentured servant was not ordinarily a hard one. Here and
there masters were cruel and inhuman. But in a new country where
hands were so few and work so abundant, it was wisdom to be tolerant
and humane. Servants who had worked out their time usually became
tenants or freeholders, often moving to other colonies and later to the
interior beyond the "fall line," where they became pioneers in their
turn.
The most important and influential influx of non-English stock into the
colonies was the copious stream of Scotch-Irish. Frontier life was not a
new experience to these hardy and remarkable people. Ulster, when
they migrated thither from Scotland in the early part of the seventeenth
century, was a wild moorland, and the Irish were more than unfriendly
neighbors. Yet these transplanted Scotch changed the fens and mires
into fields and gardens; in three generations they had built flourishing
towns and were doing a thriving manufacture in linens and woolens.
Then England, in her mercantilist blindness, began to pass legislation
that aimed to cut off these fabrics from English competition. Soon
thousands of Ulster artisans were out of work. Nor was their religion
immune from English attack, for these Ulstermen were Presbyterians.
These civil, religious, and economic persecutions thereupon drove to
America an ethnic strain that has had an influence upon the character of
the nation far out of proportion to its relative numbers. In the long list
of leaders in American politics and enterprise and in every branch of
learning, Scotch-Irish names are common.
There had been some trade between Ulster and the colonies, and a few
Ulstermen had settled on the eastern shore of Maryland and in Virginia
before the close of the seventeenth century. Between 1714 and 1720,
fifty-four ships arrived in Boston with immigrants from Ireland. They
were carefully scrutinized by the Puritan exclusionists. Cotton Mather
wrote in his diary on August 7, 1718: "But what shall be done for the

great number of people that are transporting themselves thither from ye
North of Ireland?" And John Winthrop, speaking of twenty ministers
and their congregations that were expected the same year, said, "I wish
their coming so over do not prove fatall in the End." They were not
welcome, and had, evidently, no intention of burdening the towns.
Most of them promptly moved on beyond the New England
settlements.
The great mass of Scotch-Irish, however, came to Pennsylvania, and in
such large numbers that James Logan, the