I. THE NEW WORLD AS REFUGE AND BRIDEWELL: CHILDREN IN THE COLONIZING PROCESS
After 1500 the nations of Europe sought wealth and strength through exploration and empire. As an infant rejuvenates the spirits of its parents, ancient Europe expected a renewal of life through the birth and nurture of colonial dependencies. Naturally, the planning and execution of imperial projects were duties for the mature, but children figured in the calculations as instruments and beneficiaries of colonization. In England especially, children were expected to play an important part in the creation of empire.
Motives and expectations differed from one promoter of colonization to another. Richard Haklyut of London, an enthusiast for empire, thought children's labor would be beneficial for all concerned. Even boys and girls of "twelve or fourteene yeeres of age, or under," he wrote, "may bee kept from idlenesse, in making of a thousand kindes of trifling things, which wil be good merchandize for that country."1 His new world would be a workshop of busy children, with employment, profits, and social harmony the inevitable results. New England Puritans, on the other hand, often spoke of migration to the New World as a movement for the benefit of their children's souls. "It was for your sakes especially, that your Fathers ventured their lives upon the rude waves of the vast Ocean," Increase Mather told his congregation. "Was it not with respect unto Posterity that our Fathers came into this Wilderness, that they might train up a Generation for Christ?"2
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.