I. THE
NEW WORLD AS REFUGE AND BRIDEWELL: CHILDREN IN THE COLONIZING PROCESS
After 1500 the nations of
Motives and expectations differed from one
promoter of colonization to another. Richard Haklyut of
Englishmen's visions of America as a setting for
childhood were about as varied as Englishmen themselves. Since the Reformation
they had been divided. In the upper reaches of society, factions in
church and state revolved around the crown in a ceaseless rivalry for influence
and office. At the bottom of the social hierarchy, great numbers moved about
the countryside or were absorbed into London, looking for work or hoping to
avoid it, seeking pleasure, fleeing unhappiness, or simply trying to survive.
English national life was a spectacle of contrasts: wealth and poverty, power
and dependence, faith and heresy contended and coexisted. In these
circumstances even a wilderness might bear a hopeful aspect.
And what of childhood in this boisterous world?
Certainly its beginnings were hazardous for both mother and infant regardless
of their station in society. When John Chamberlain, a London gentleman, wrote
in 1601 to a friend: "My niece Stukeley was lately brought abed of a son,
but the joy lasted not longe, for they both vanished soone thereafter," he
told a tale common in the households of the time.3 Epidemics, malnutrition, the
ordinary diseases of childhood and those contracted from mothers, especially
tuberculosis, carried off hundreds in the earliest stage of life. Perhaps as
many as two-thirds of all children died before they reached the age of
four.4 Despite this rate of mortality,
English families tended to be large. The admonition to "be ye fruitful,
multiply, and replenish the earth," like some other biblical teachings,
was held in serious regard. Families were further enlarged by extending over
several generations and by including unrelated members as well. The young, the
mature, and the elderly, other relations, apprentices, workmen, and servants,
were often to be found within a single household. Consequently, families of a
dozen or more were common in the villages and the countryside, and eight to a
household was near the average in towns and cities.5
Many people, however, lived
outside of families. Losses at sea and work accidents made widows of wives and
orphans of children. A large floating lower-class population, including
numerous children and young people, only irregularly participated in family
life.
Social conditions were a propelling force,
persuading people to leave the kingdom and venture into the New World. Shifts
in occupational and social structure, uneasiness over the course of politics
under the Stuarts, and, perhaps more than anything else, the failure of the
Church of England to satisfy religious longings, created a sense of
rootlessness and drift that led men whose ancestors had lived in England for
countless generations to consider migration. Although the situation was not
entirely novel, the presence of an alternative to acquiescence was. The New
World as a lure, a refuge from care and anxiety, figured in the calculations of
emigrants.
The early middle-Atlantic colonies, for a
variety of reasons, were settled mainly by individuals instead of families. Organized
groups came to Virginia and Maryland, but rarely entire families. Individual
indentured servants, artisans, or farmers usually made up the passenger lists.
The municipal authorities of England, who had responsibility under the Poor Law
for the care of orphans and abandoned children, were a source of supply. The
usual way to care for these unfortunates was to bind them out in families at
home, but often there were more than could be accommodated, especially in
London and some of the larger towns. Colonial officers sought dependent
children for the settlements. A portion of the business of collecting young
people for shipment was in the hands of "spirits," commission agents
of merchants, and shipowners, who signed up young men, women, and even children.
The spirit, with his persuasive powers strengthened by promises of food, drink,
and a small bounty for the enlistee, beguiled his prospect with the wonders of
America. Spirits were sometimes charged with kidnapping, particularly of
children. Most whom they attracted, however, went of their own accord. Those
enlisted by agents were usually unable to pay for their passage and had little
or nothing in the way of supplies. Their needs were met through indentures, a
contract with which all Englishmen were familiar. The emigrant agreed with the
ship's captain, a merchant, or perhaps even another emigrant, to work a
stipulated term, usually four years, to repay the sum or service advanced.
Indentures were freely sold or assigned to others. Probably the majority of
seventeenth-century colonists reached the Chesapeake region in this way.
The Puritans characteristically came to America
in families. Passenger lists of vessels bound for New England chiefly consisted
of entire families or of a portion leading the way for others temporarily left
behind. Frequently families banded together, as, for example, when a dissenting
minister departed from England with his flock. The interests of posterity, even
the presence of a child, sometimes determined a family's decision to migrate.
Thomas Shepard, a minister in both old and New England, decided to leave
because the anticipated birth and christening of his child would force him to
reveal his Puritan sympathies to the authorities and thus jeopardize the
security of his family.6
As a variation on the theme, John Dane, a young man
estranged from his parents after his father "toke a stick and basted me .
. . [when] I went to a dansing scoll to larne to dans," left for New
England.7 Eventually he was joined by his parents and reconciled to them. The
New England environment helped both to bring and to keep families together.
Although no complete figures for the total
emigration from England in the first half of the seventeenth century exist, it
has recently been estimated that about 80,000, or 2 per cent, of all Englishmen
left Britain between 1620 and 1642, with 58,000 of them crossing the Atlantic
to North America.8 Since most English immigrants expected their colonies to be
permanent residences and settled communities, children were rightfully accorded
full and essential participation in this movement.
2. Increase Mather, A Call from Heaven (Boston,
1685), p. 42.
3. Norman E. McClure, ed., The Letters of
John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), I, 133.
4. Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled
Englishmen (New York, 1968), pp. 25-27.
7. Quoted in Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled
Englishmen, pp. 461-462.