The English diaspora in North America

Migration, ethnicity and association, 1730s–1950s

Tanja Bueltmann, Donald MacRaild

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781526103710
• eBook ISBN: 9781526103734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Ethnic associations were once vibrant features of societies, such as the United States and Canada, which attracted large numbers of immigrants. While the transplanted cultural lives of the Irish, Scots and continental Europeans have received much attention, the English are far less widely explored. It is assumed the English were not an ethnic community, that they lacked the alienating experiences associated with immigration and thus possessed few elements of diasporas. This deeply researched new book questions this assumption. It shows that English associations once were widespread, taking hold in colonial America, spreading to Canada and then encompassing all of the empire. Celebrating saints days, expressing pride in the monarch and national heroes, providing charity to the national poor, and forging mutual aid societies mutual, were all features of English life overseas. In fact, the English simply resembled other immigrant groups too much to be dismissed as the unproblematic, invisible immigrants.

1

The origins and development of the English diaspora in North America

The roots of the English diaspora lie in the sixteenth-century quest for an empire, which began processes of territorial settlement, first in the home islands, and then beyond the oceans. Mass plantations in 1580s Munster, for instance, signalled a new and more sustained phase of pacifying Ireland by English population settlement.¹ In 1609 this approach was further intensified via systematic, planned, popular migrations as the English joined the Scots of the pre-existing Hamilton-Montgomery settlement by undertaking the Plantation of Ulster.² Until that point, the northernmost province of Ireland was, as one London official said, ‘heretofore as unknown to the English … as the most inland parts of Virginia is yet unknown to the English colony there’.³ Subjugating the ‘Celtic fringe’ was but one small step along the path of English imperial ambitions. Thereafter, as the Tudors and Stuarts began establishing colonies in the West Indies and North America, English expansions abroad were to become the foundations of the first British Empire.

Although the early plantations initiated a process of Anglicizing colonial possessions that was to become a key thread in English imperial history,⁴ it would be too simplistic to see Scotland and Ireland as the first firm steps to re-peopling and exploiting the Americas. What we can say is that this was an age of English power and that the neighbouring countries within the British and Irish Isles were caught up in their larger neighbour’s growing ambitions. Ireland, coastal North America and the islands of the Caribbean were each brought under the expansionist purview of the English, and were subjected to sustained but unevenly successful integration. As the English sought to rediscover an Arthurian sea-borne empire, their neighbours in the North Atlantic world suffered military aggression, colonial settlement and the prospect of sharing some of the benefits of imperial growth.⁵ Monarchical unity and then political union with Scotland, and a long, bitter struggle to pacify the Irish element of the ‘Celtic fringe’: each of these developments comprised part of a larger process in which England expanded within the home archipelago and then across the Atlantic. It was as a consequence of this expansion that a new (or rather recycled) identity, Britishness, emerged to encompass the English, Welsh and Scots and some of the Irish. In turn, ‘Englishness’ receded as a much less useful term.

Continuing migration was critical to these political and imperial projects since territorial possession was made real only through the establishment of viable colonies. Many migrations in the early period were initially planned and driven by the state, but paid for by venture capital; some were gifted to individuals, companies and collectives who undoubtedly forced market interest with cheap and free land, systematic oceanic transportation, promises of military protection and infrastructure and propaganda flows. Yet, initially at least, English elites were slow to recognize the possibilities of exploitative colonization; or else they were disinclined to harbour such ideas, let alone act upon them. Whereas the Spanish and Portuguese, whose naval and technical prowess the English matched in the sixteenth century, had immediately applied themselves to task of adding settlement to commercial exploitation, the English were different. They focused, for almost all of that century, on exploring the world. Only Ireland was systematically settled at the time and even then only in parts of Munster.⁶ Moreover, in the early 1600s, Ireland represented the summit of many English ambitions. In 1610 Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland and founder of modern Belfast, expressed contentment with the Ulster experiment, preferring not to stretch his interests to the Americas. ‘I’d rather labour with my hands in the plantation of Ulster’, Chichester opined, ‘than dance or play in … Virginia.’⁷ Chichester may have sounded dismissive: in fact, he was expressing fear of competition. Besides, as Gaskill shows, Sir Walter Raleigh and his half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, followed periods soldiering in Ireland with voyaging to plant the flag in Newfoundland and Virginia. In this way, these men connected Irish experiences of conquest to the other settings for colonization and expansion.⁸

Willing emigrants were crucial to English imperial designs, and here the circumstances of the age helped elites who harboured expansionist visions.⁹ Indeed, attitudes to emigration changed as the turbulent seventeenth century progressed. A mind-set emerged that came to view the establishment of ‘Englands out of England’¹⁰ as both desirable and viable. Hence, England began to make a decisive contribution to a process that Bernard Bailyn described as ‘the centrifugal Völkerwanderung’,¹¹ with around half a million departing in the seventeenth century. Four-fifths of them went to the Americas, with the mainland colonies and the Caribbean being the principal destinations. But, as Hackett Fischer has argued, ‘this exodus was not a movement of attraction. This great early migration was a flight from conditions which had grown intolerable at home.’¹² Monarchical tyranny saw England sliding into civil war; parallel economic hardship and disease contributed to disaffection with the old country.¹³

The notion of involving the Celtic peoples in these early ventures overseas was not on the minds of most proponents of imperial development and colonial settlement. With superior wherewithal and political control, the English, not the British, were the principal actors in the early colonization process.¹⁴ Their traces remain strong. In a recent ancestry survey carried out in the United States, 27,658,000 people (of a total of 307,007,000 surveyed) identified their ancestry group as English ‒ a figure putting the group in third place behind the Germans (50,708,00) and the Irish (36,915,000).¹⁵ In Canada, a total of 6,570,015 people listed their ethnic origins as English, making it the largest ancestry group from the British and Irish Isles.¹⁶ At the outset, we can say with certainty that the English were pervasive, both in reality and in collective memory. Set within this wider context, this chapter provides historical background to the aspects of English settlement in the Americas that we examine in this book,¹⁷ focusing on migratory streams from the eighteenth century onwards. While we recognize the importance of earlier imperial endeavours, this time-frame is the most suitable for our work given that ethnic associations first developed in the eighteenth century, partly in unison with early urbanization patterns in North America, to which we also turn attention.

Colonial migration and early urbanization

Eighteenth-century migrations were different from the earliest transatlantic movements of the English,¹⁸ not least because some contemporary commentators stressed the undesirability of poor and ill-conditioned English emigrants, singling out Scots or Ulster farmers as more independent and industrious migrants. Negative comments about the class composition of the English were common. ‘Rogues, vagabonds, whores, cheats, and rabble of all descriptions raked from the gutter and kicked out of the country’, A.E. Smith called the majority of indentured servants in the tobacco colonies.¹⁹ Like some these English, Irish Catholics were also frequently scorned ‒ a tendency dating to the earliest phases of transatlantic migration.

While the English were pervasively established across the Atlantic by 1700, migratory streams diversified greatly in the eighteenth century. For periods Irish Protestants and especially Germans dominated transatlantic emigrations to the American colonies, and we see the arrival of significant numbers of Swedes, Finns and Scots in what became an increasingly intense migration process. Principal among the eighteenth-century flows were as many as 150,000 people of primarily Scottish and English roots who left Ulster for colonial frontiers of New England, south-east Pennsylvania and the Upper South.²⁰ Having departed their original homelands for promises of land and opportunity within the context of a massive, planned plantation in Ulster, they reacted to violence, civil war, ethnic unrest, rising rents, agricultural modernization and religious restrictions to take their chances in the American colonies.

It is critical to understand that within the different migrant groups were sub-layers: northern Englishmen as opposed to southerners and Irish Catholics (initially a minority) as well as Ulster Protestants. No national group was a single indistinguishable body; from the offset the settlers were of different regional origins and religions, and therefore of varying cultures. And this brought with it additional complexities.²¹ Where these people came from was one thing, but their overall effect was another. Along with high fertility rates, sustained and growing mass migration ensured that between 1700 and 1780 the colonies witnessed an eleven-fold population increase (Table 1.1).

While the eighteenth century saw the English generally eclipsed by other groups of immigrants, they still migrated in large and increasingly diverse numbers. Between 1718 and 1775, for example, the epoch most associated with Ulster-Scots, convicts totalling 50,000 in number became an important element of English and wider British migrations.²² As well, towards the end of this period, migration was promoted by economic difficulties brought on by a series of poor harvests, which saw prices rise and hardship spread among the poor.²³ Richard Price speculated that England would be ‘well-nigh depopulated within fifty years’,²⁴ and questions were asked, both in parliament and beyond, about actions that might remedy the losses of particularly skilled people.²⁵

Overall, in the eighteenth century, migration to the colonial Americas, particularly the Middle Colonies and New England, eclipsed the movement to Canada. In 1775, at the dawn of the American Revolution, the thirteen colonies contained about 2.5 million people, thus registering a ten-fold increase since 1700. In the same period, the Canadas and Newfoundland together were populated by perhaps 250,000 persons ‒ a tenth of those found in the colonies to the south.²⁶ Critically, however, during the late eighteenth century, revolution provided a major spur to growth in the Canadas. In 1790, émigrés fleeing the revolution in America ‒ the United Empire Loyalists ‒ accounted for as many as 50,000 of the Canadian population. Their arrival boosted the population by as much as one-fifth. They settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and parts of Quebec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: ethnic associationalism and an English diaspora
• 1 The origins and development of the English diaspora in North America
• 2 Elite associations: from local to transnational
• 3 Independent and sectarian: working-class English associational culture
• 4 Ethnic activities and leisure cultures
• 5 Charity and mutual aid: the pillars of English associations
• 6 English, Scots and Germans compared: British and continental perspectives
• 7 The making of a global diaspora
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 North American cities and towns with St George’s societies and other English associations
• Appendix 2 Lodges of the Order of the Sons of St George, 1885
• Appendix 3 Lodges of the Sons of England, 1896
• Bibliography
• Index