Immigration in American History

Kristen L. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367416362
• eBook ISBN: 9781000370799
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Immigration in American History is a concise examination of the experiences of immigrants from the founding of the British colonies through the present day.

The most recent scholarship on immigration is integrated into an accessible narrative that embraces the multicultural nature of U.S. immigration history, keeping issues of race and power at the center of the book. Organized chronologically, this book highlights how the migration experience evolved over time and examines the interactions that occurred between different groups of migrants and the native-born. From the first interactions between the Native Americans and English colonizers at Jamestown, to the present-day debates over unauthorized immigration, the book helps students chart the evolution of American attitudes towards immigration and immigration policies and better contextualize present-day debates over immigration. The voices of immigrants are brought to the forefront in a poignant selection of primary source documents, and a glossary and "who's who" provide students with additional context for the people and concepts featured in the text.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of American immigration history and immigration policy history.

Part 1

Analysis and assessment

1Migration to the British colonies

When the English first arrived in Tsenacommacah and named it Virginia, they were encountering a land that had been settled for millennia and where civilizations had risen and fallen, cultures had evolved and vanished, wars had been fought and peace had been made—in short, where all the activities of human life and “history” had taken place. Too often in American history we talk about the Americas as though they were sparsely populated before the Europeans arrived, and as though the Native Americans had static, unchanging societies that left the landscape largely unaltered—that is, almost as though they did not experience “history” in the same sense as Europeans did. We know this is not true, but more work is necessary to rectify the long omission of Native peoples from United States history.

This chapter, which examines the foundation of the British colonies and migration to them, will not refer to this process as “settlement” for that reason, since it creates the perception that this land was essentially empty and unused when Europeans arrived, when in reality, it had been “settled” thousands of years earlier. Far from encountering an empty land, the Americas were populated by millions of people when Columbus discovered them in 1492. Many scholars estimate that there were between six and seven million people living north of the Rio Grande in 1492, and some think as many as ten to twelve million. The numbers are difficult to estimate, partly because contact with Europeans was a demographic disaster for Native Americans. Conquest, war, and enslavement killed many, and the introduction of European diseases killed many more. Scholars estimate that many regions lost between fifty and ninety percent of their populations to disease epidemics. In that sense, the land the Europeans came to “settle” was not “empty” but rather had been at least partially “emptied” by the impact of colonization. Only on the eve of independence would the population of Europeans and Africans in the future United States east of the Mississippi surpass two million—thus bringing the population of the region back to the level it had been before the Europeans arrived.

The English arrive in Tsenacommacah—the Chesapeake

In the early 1600s, Tsenacommacah was an alliance of roughly thirty tribes under one paramount chief—a man named Wahunsonacock, better known to history as Powhatan—in what is now the tidewater area of Virginia. Wahunsonacock had created a powerful alliance during his lifetime. He became chief in the late 1500s, when he inherited the rule of six tribes on the James and York rivers, and by 1608, he had assembled an alliance of thirty tribes through warfare and diplomacy. The people of Tsenecommacah were farmers, with the women of the tribes growing corn, beans, and squash, among other crops. As was common in the Americas, they had no domesticated animals, so the hunting and fishing that the men performed was a crucial source of protein for their diets.

Wahunsonacock’s empire was somewhat unusual in that time and place—most Native American confederacies in northeastern North America in the seventeenth century were smaller and looser than this. Any number of things might have inspired Wahunsonacock to take on the challenge of assembling this alliance, but the changes his people experienced during the 1500s because of contact with Europeans likely played a major role. European traders and explorers had been to the area, and the diseases they left behind killed many, making it harder for villages and tribes to maintain a viable population. Uniting for defense was thus useful, both against their native enemies in the interior, and against the Europeans, who occasionally kidnapped people when they stopped to trade.

This was the nation the British encountered when their ships arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 and established the colony of Jamestown. Historians estimate that there were about 14,000 subjects and 3,200 warriors living in Wahusonacock’s territory when the English arrived. The paramount chief himself was in his sixties by this point, and as an experienced politician and leader, knew he had to manage these English carefully. He pursued a dual strategy towards them—on the one hand, he sought to keep the English weak enough that they would not seek to acquire too much land or spread out enough to trade with nations other than his own. On the other hand, he could not let them become so weak that they would abandon the colony entirely. By monopolizing access to English goods, Wahunsonacock could increase his own people’s power at the expense of his enemies—an important consideration in a world of population decline.

Lack of food combined with a poor location made the survival of the English colony uncertain. Given the large number of colonists who expected to find gold or other mineral wealth, farming was not prioritized, with the result that the colony depended on assistance from the Native Americans, voluntary or forced, for its survival. Furthermore, the colony was located on an island in the James River at the point where the tidal flow from the ocean met the freshwater from the James. This meant the water was often quite stagnant, especially during dry weather, and pollutants were not flushed away quickly. Saltwater also seeped into the water table, making wells on the island slightly brackish. Starvation, salt poisoning, and diseases like typhoid and dysentery killed many.

During the winter of 1609–1610, known as the “starving time,” more than half the 220 colonists in Jamestown perished, mostly due to starvation. George Percy, who had the misfortune to be Jamestown’s leader at the time, described how men first ate their horses and dogs and then their “boots, shoes, or any other leather some could come by.” He described them foraging in the woods for “serpents and snakes” and much more disturbingly, turning to cannibalism. Starving colonists did “those things which seem incredible, as dig up dead corpse out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows.” One man named Collines “murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopping the mother into pieces…salted her for his food.” The survivors burned him at the stake.

Conditions began to improve by the late 1610s, when the colonists at Jamestown finally came upon a crop they could produce that would make a profit back in England—tobacco. Despite the fact that King James had dismissed smoking as “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs,” his subjects were gradually becoming addicted to the tobacco they obtained through trade with the Spanish empire. The amount of tobacco being imported to London increased rapidly during the early 1600s. In 1615 and 1616, merchants in London imported 2,300 pounds of tobacco from Virginia, and 57,000 from the Spanish. By 1617, Virginia exported 20,000 pounds, and by 1629, 1,500,000 pounds. The tobacco boom was underway.

Soon nearly everyone was planting tobacco, to the extent that when the new governor of the colony, Samuel Argill, arrived in 1617, he was astonished to find “the marketplace, and streets and all other spare places planted with tobacco” and most of the colonists “dispersed all about planting tobacco.” This troubled the Virginia Company, which tried to convince its colonists to diversify, referring to tobacco as a “deceivable weed” and warning that the profits being obtained from its growth “might soon vanish into smoake.” The same was true in the other Chesapeake colony, Maryland, which was founded in 1632 by a royal charter that had been granted to George Calvert, Lord Baltimore. It was never his intention that the colony become devoted to tobacco—as he put it, “I came not hither for toe plant…this stinking weede of America”—but tobacco had become the major crop of the colony within a decade.

Colonists’ demands for land to produce tobacco increased dramatically, to the detriment of relations with the Powhatan Confederacy. Given the rapidity with which tobacco depleted the nutrients in the soil, and the rapid growth of the population after the tobacco boom started, the demand for new land was nearly insatiable. This ultimately led to bloodshed in 1622, when Opechancanough (Wahunsonacock’s brother who had succeeded him) led the confederation in a major uprising against the English. Of the roughly 1,240 colonists in Virginia, 347 were killed. Warfare between the English and the people of Tsenacommacah continued off and on over the next twenty-odd years, finally ending in 1646 when Opechancanough was captured and killed.

The need for labor in the Chesapeake and the desire of poor people to move there resulted in the creation of an extensive system of indentured servitude, wherein a migrant would sign a contract agreeing to work for a period of years, generally five to seven, to pay off the cost of their voyage. Roughly 100,000 Britons, most of them English, migrated to the Chesapeake region during the seventeenth century, and approximately three-quarters of them went as indentured servants. Early on during the tobacco boom, when tobacco prices were still extremely high and good land was widely available, selling oneself into servitude was a gamble that could pay off handsomely, allowing the landless poor of England the opportunity to obtain land in America and ultimately buy their own indentured servants to work it. It definitely was a gamble, however. Although death rates improved over the “starving time” of the earliest years, life expectancy in the Chesapeake remained shorter than the English average for the remainder of the seventeenth century. Roughly one-quarter of indentured servants would not survive their term of service.

Many during the seventeenth century were willing to take this risk, however, given the economic distress of the times. England had experienced a long period of combined population growth and inflation in the late 1500s, with real wages dropping steadily through the 1620s. The economic distress was worsened by a decline in manorial obligations as landowners began managing their estates more like private property, ending customary practices like allowing tenants to gather firewood or graze animals on the common green. Furthermore, some tenants were being evicted entirely, as landowners switched land from farmland to sheep pasture to produce England’s major export, wool. In the eyes of some elite Britons, one potential benefit of the American colonies was to remove some of this growing population of transient poor from Britain. As one contemporary put it, “what can be more beneficial to a commonweal, than to have a nation and a kingdom to transfer unto the superfluous multitude of fruitless and idle people (here at home daily increasing) to travel, conquer, and manure another land, which by the due intercourses to be devised may and will yield infinite commodities?”

This system of migration resulted in a society that looked very different from that of England. Not only were certain classes not represented, like the aristocracy and many types of artisans, but men were vastly overrepresented, outnumbering women six to one during the early years. As a result, family formation was difficult and people tended to marry late, men because of the difficulty of finding a woman to marry, and women because they often were not free to marry until they had fulfilled the terms of their indenture. Given the high death rates, marriages often did not last long, and were generally followed by one or two more. As a result, families were more complex than in England, with assorted step-parents raising children from multiple marriages. Most children had lost at least one parent by the time they reached adulthood, and more than one-third of the children born in Virginia lost both.

Indentured servitude in the Chesapeake was a more brutal system than it had been in England. [Document 1] Servants would receive “freedom dues” after serving their term, generally including a suit of clothes, some food and tools, and a claim on fifty acres of land. But during their time of service, indentured servants had little control over their lives. Their owners could impose any discipline they wanted on them, including physical beatings, and could sell them at will, at least for the time remaining on their contract. Food and housing were often rudimentary. Additional time could be added by the courts, for “crimes” including being unruly, trying to escape, or having a child. For female servants, this presented a double form of punishment, since they were vulnerable to sexual abuse from masters and if they had a child as a result, would be sentenced to spend more time with their abuser.

As late as 1660, the vast majority of unfree people coming to Virginia were indentured servants. There were a few African slaves as well—about nine hundred out of a total non-Native American population of twenty-five thousand. Forced migrants from Africa first arrived in Virginia in 1619, when a Dutch trader sold twenty individuals in exchange for supplies. Given that the English colonists in Virginia had no direct experience with slavery to guide them, the experiences of these first Africans in America varied widely. For much of the seventeenth century, at least some Africans were able to obtain their freedom and live in near equality with the English population. By 1668, for example, roughly one-third of the fifty-nine Africans living in Northampton County, Virginia, were living as free men and women, and a few of them also owned property. One of the best known examples was the man known as “Antonio, a Negro” when he was sold into slavery at Jamestown in 1621. Although he worked as a slave for many years, he ultimately was able to gain his freedom and obtain land. He and his wife assimilated to English culture, baptizing thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Who’s who
• Glossary
• Part 1 Analysis and assessment
• Part 2 Documents
• Further reading
• References
• Index