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CW Journal
: Spring 2005 : Lusty Beggars, Dissolute Women, Sorners, Gypsies, and Vagabonds for Virginia
In a drear Scottish prison, convicts await transport to the colonies and a hard, brutal existence as indentured servants. The prisons held "idle vagabonds and beggars," poverty being itself sufficient grounds for imprisonment and transport. Interpreters Christina Westenberger, Zack Westenberger, Rod Faulkner, Stephen Moore, Rachel Moore, and Bill Rose. Photo by Dave Doody
Click image to enlarge |
by Bruce P. Lenman
Colonial Virginia was
always intended to be a piece of England translated to the Chesapeake Bay. King
James I expected his three kingdoms—Scotland and Ireland being the other two—to
develop their own American colonies. By 1640, however, the surviving overseas
plantations were all English, and neither Scots nor Irish were especially
welcome. Nevertheless, many a Scot still made his way to Virginia, though not always
under circumstances that commended the journey.
Scotland's
dealings with the Old Dominion began in 1628. They generally were thought to
have gone moribund until about 1668, after Charles II had assumed the three
thrones. Indeed, the idea has been that Scots reached Virginia with regularity
only after the Act of Union of 1707 created the United Kingdom of Great
Britain. That overlooks a migration of Scots that began in the 1650s.
Countrymen
called some of these émigrés "sorners," a Scots word that implies an
importunate panhandler trying to get through life without working. Others were
drifters, abducted servants, unwary youths, criminals, and such, men and women
not so much adventurers seeking their dreams as being carried "furth"—that is
to say, "out"—of Scotland, sometimes by deception, sometimes by order,
sometimes for Scotland's good.
The Cromwellian era
brought the first large-scale compulsory Scots migration to America, starting
with the thousands of soldiers Cromwell captured when he destroyed Scottish
armies at the battles of Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester. Rank and file often
were transported—expelled into servitude—mainly to the English sugar islands in
the West Indies. There they were profitably sold into bondage for a period of
years. We know little about them beyond their names and that some ended up in
Virginia.
By the
end of the 1650s Scotland was part of a unitary state—the Commonwealth of
England, Ireland, and Scotland—and the magistrates of Edinburgh exploited the
freedom of trade this implied to export those they regarded as undesirable. In
February 1659 they acceded to a request from Edinburgh merchants going to
Barbados for a cargo of shiftless people and vagabonds, not to mention
condemned prisoners from the jails. The burgh council was happy to hand over
"such idle and debosht persons."
Before
condemning the councilors, know that the alternative was to put such persons in
jail and maintain them. That cost the town money for the mason and ironwork
necessary for the safe custody of "strong, idle vagabonds and beggars."
Moreover, even in the tolbooth of Edinburgh, its "best" jail, conditions were
appalling. In a history of Edinburgh published in 1779, Hugo Arnot, lawyer,
patriot, and fine flower of the Scottish Enlightenment, recorded the filth and
putrid stench of the tolbooth where he found an unsegregated population of men,
women, and children confined under dreadful conditions. Conditions would have
been no better in 1659.
Always exploited, often brutalized, indentured servants were slaves without shackles. Liz Wiley, here, finds a moment of rest. Photo by Dave Doody
Click image to enlarge |
When the
union of the Commonwealth dissolved, and the monarchy was restored in 1660,
Virginia was again legally what it had always been culturally—English.
England's Acts of Navigation restricted the activities of foreigners in the
colonial trade, and Scots were foreigners by the terms of the acts.
Nevertheless, they were subjects of the same monarch as the English, and the
Acts of Navigation did not seal off English overseas plantations from all
foreign trade. You could always take the product of your own country to
Virginia in one of your own country's ships, and in labor-hungry Virginia, a
servant—someone to work in the tobacco fields, tend the livestock, chop the
firewood—was a commodity.
By April
1666 the city fathers of Edinburgh were back trying to export beggars,
vagabonds, and others "not fitt to stay in the kingdome," and this time to
Virginia. The unfit were to be shipped off by Captain James Gibson of the Phoenix of Leith, Edinburgh's port and
vassal community.
Because
in Scotland it was illegal not to have a master and belong to a community, you
could just round up vagabonds who had sneaked into Edinburgh and ship them
across the Atlantic. That kept them from creeping in again through one of the
city ports or streets.
Clearly
there were not enough vagabonds in 1666, for the council can next be found
allowing Gibson to beat a drum for volunteer emigrants for Virginia through
Edinburgh and its adjacent communities like the burgh of the Canongate and the
Barony of Broughton. Gibson offered clothing and food to those willing to
undertake "such a profitable voyage."
The
Edinburgh city council has been thought to have shown lack of enthusiasm for
the project because it insisted that before Gibson carried people aboard, he
present them to the magistrates of Leith. But all the councilors were trying to
do was shield their own. Like most early-modern local rulers, they were
ruthless toward outsiders like vagabonds, but anxious to protect permanent
residents. Gibson was interested in profit, and such was the demand for
bondsmen and bondswomen in Virginia that there was a danger he might kidnap
some of the young people of Edinburgh to sell as indentured servants.
Inspection by magistrates made sure that those dancing to Gibson's drums, or
those James Hamilton was authorized December 19, 1666, to beat through
Edinburgh "for such as will go to Virginia," were genuine volunteers.
Nobody
worried about vagabonds. Edinburgh magistrates, to whom one Captain Tennant's
request for a cargo of "vagabonds to Virginia" was referred in November 1666,
were probably only concerned that Edinburgh cut the most advantageous deal.
With
1666, the flow of Scots transportees to Virginia became more visible. A sharp
persecution of Covenanting groups unwilling to accept the claim of the restored
English monarchy to supremacy in the kirk—the church—as well as in the state,
and the defeat of the first Covenanting rebellion at Rullion Green in the
Pentlands outside Edinburgh left the regime with political prisoners on its
hands.
Faulkner as a "Scots slave." If they survived the miseries of indenture, some servants found better lives afterward in the colonies. Photo by Dave Doody
Click image to enlarge |
They
could be sent to the royal colony of Tangier. Members of the garrison thought
they might as well be in prison as sweating in a fortified city under perpetual
siege from the Moroccans. A soldier who complained about never being paid was
shot. Margaret Summerton, convicted of sedition and trying to raise rebellion
in Tangier in 1663, was flogged in front of the assembled garrison before being
thrown into the cells. She probably emerged to join other offenders who, after
their whipping, were set to work without pay and in shackles on the defenses.
They were officially enslaved.
We tend
to think of slaves as black, but Caucasians were enslaved in Tangier. Indeed,
they were enslaved in Scotland. Male and female Scots coal miners and salt
workers were slaves until 1799. The status was hereditary.
People
facing forced labor on Tangier, like John Denholm, who appealed to the Privy
Council from Edinburgh tolbooth in 1669, were likely to discover they had never
been truly Covenanters after all and free to take any oath the king could
devise.
Anything
was better than the hellhole of Tangier. By comparison, Virginia looked good.
The Scots Privy Council,
the nobles who ran the kingdom in the name of Charles II, had by the 1670s
worked out a drill. Politically awkward prisoners, like dissenting Presbyterian
ministers who married people illegally, were dispatched to Virginia by the next
available ship, as might be rebels refusing the loyalty oath. Their lordships,
however, normally responded to requests from syndicates with a ship.
Skippers
for the New World needed a profitable outward cargo. Until about 1740, Scotland
had little in the way of manufactures to ship. Concurrently, good harvests in
England were drying up the supply of indentured servants for the Chesapeake.
When the Charles of Leith was about to leave for Virginia, in 1669, its syndicate
was granted a saleable outward cargo of any loose beggars and gypsies any
Scottish magistrates could round up, plus the sweepings of the Edinburgh,
Canongate, and Leith tolbooths. Theoretically, the consent of the sweepings was
required.
Syndicates
and their skippers were bound to pay a heavy fine for any prisoner who escaped
before being landed in Virginia. By August 1677 John Leckie and his partners,
who had a ship ready for Virginia, could say that it was "usual for the
Councill to grant libertie for apprehending vagabound and lowse persones and
transporting them hither that the kingdom may be freed of their burthen."
Another
round of Covenanting rebellion began in 1679, culminating in the defeat of the
Covenanters by the Duke of Monmouth at Bothwell Brig, so more political
prisoners came on-stream. Then the ousting in 1688 of James II presented the
new regime of William and Mary with widespread political turmoil.
A famine
from 1696 to 1700 killed up to 15 percent of the population. Economic desperation,
especially as famine bit deep, explained a lot of the theft and housebreaking
that so worried the Scottish government.
In this eighteenth-century print, Scottish field hands scrabble for firewood and scrape with a hoe in front of a stone cottage. Photo by Bruce P. Lenman
Click image to enlarge |
James
Chapman, sentenced to death in 1699 for stealing food for his family, appealed
for banishment to America. He was whipped and put at Perth on the next
appropriate ship. There were few volunteer indentured emigrants, however, and
some refused to stay transported. Deportees Thomas Anderson and John Weir, were
rearrested in Scotland in 1700.
Humble
people could only afford a passage to Virginia by becoming indentured, and even
Scots did not really want to go, but being already in custody and sentenced
radically simplified your options. In 1700, for example, the Lord Justice Clek,
a senior criminal judge, gave a boy of about fifteen, James Hall, who was under
sentence of death in Glasgow tolbooth for "thieving and pickery," the
alternative of transportation to Virginia. Hall accepted.
People knew how
indentured servants were treated. An English bondswoman in Maryland reported in
1756 that she was half-naked, poorly fed, "toiling almost Day and Night—with
only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough, and then tied up and
whipp'd to that Degree that you'd not serve an Animal."
White
indentured field hands became scarce after 1700, and as slaves replaced them,
racist attitudes strengthened. Southern colonies legislated against flogging
white people naked, which meant they had been so flogged. Man or woman, you
needed a strong stomach to volunteer as an unskilled indentured laborer in
Virginia.
William
Baillie, "ane Egyptian," did not volunteer.
"Egyptian"
was the Scots term for Gypsy. Contemporaries knew that there were nomadic clans
in Scotland, but few real Romany-speaking Gypsies. It was a capital offense to
be a nomad. A great Scots ballad, "MacPherson's Rant," immortalizes the
execution of an Egyptian, John MacPherson, in Bamff, who defiantly played his
fiddle under the gallows in 1700.
In 1699
Baillie was lucky to be banished to the American plantations by the Privy
Council with an allowance for his upkeep to any skipper who would take him
under bond for safe delivery, certificated by a port officer. Transportation
was a profitable business, as Francis Scott knew in 1689, when he wrote to
Alexander Campbell, an Edinburgh merchant, saying that if Campbell could secure
two or three hundred transportees, there would be no problem securing shipping
space for them to Virginia.
Virginia,
with its perpetual labor shortage, offered high prices for indentured servants.
Glasgow was into the
Chesapeake tobacco trade well before 1707. After 1689, in a war situation, it
was uncanny how privateer attacks or bad weather tended to drive tobacco ships
legally bound to unload at an English port into the Clyde instead.
Free Scots profited from tobacco; others sweated in the fields. From left, interpreters Terry Thon, Wayne Randolph, and David Nielsen. Photo by Dave Doody
Click image to enlarge |
Direct
trade in tobacco between Virginia and Scotland was legal under Scots law, if
not English, and the Scots effectively blocked English naval vessels arresting
ships "loaded with tobacco from Virginia."
Through
Clyde outports like Greenock and New Port Glasgow, Glasgow merchants sent
prisoners as outward cargo. In August 1681, one of them, Walter Gibson, told
the authorities he had a ship lying at Port Glasgow ready to take "all sorners,
lusty beggars or gypsies" to Virginia.
Edinburgh
ships, some of them wolves in sheep's clothing with names like The Ewe and
Lamb,
topped up their passenger list for Virginia with mugged and kidnapped people.
Glasgow,
with a shorter run to the Chesapeake, offered better rates. The pattern soon
established is shown in the offer made by James Montgomerie Jr., merchant in
Glasgow, to the Edinburgh town council in 1694, to collect "dissolute women"
from their House of Correction and move them to Glasgow under military guard at
the modest rate of six pence per day before feeding, clothing, and transporting
them at thirty shillings a head, subject to the usual £50 penalty for any
escapee.
Most
Scots prisoners went to Virginia. Immigrant Scots women helped early
eighteenth-century Virginia acquire a self-replacing population. Before 1700,
the sex ratio and lifestyle ruled that out. And if Virginia suited these Scots,
they did well by Virginia. Despite the homesickness, hardship, and misery, some
Scots found that their land of exile had turned into a new home. In 1730,
looking back over the first three generations of Scots migration to Virginia,
Roderick Gordon, a ship's
surgeon and from 1729 resident of King and Queen County, Virginia, wrote:
Pity it
is that thousands of my country people should be starving att home, when they
may live here in peace and plenty, as a great many who have been transported
for a punishment have found pleasure, profit, and ease and would rather undergo
any hardship than be forced back on their own country.
Historian Bruce Lenman, recently retired
from the faculty of the University of St. Andrews in Fyfe, Scotland,
contributed a story on Scots tobacco factors to the autumn 2003 journal.
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Historic Triangle