Running away and returning home: the fate of English convicts in the American colonies

Abstract

Transportation of criminals to America was one of the distinctive features of English penal policy in the eighteenth century. While other countries experimented with the practice, only Britain undertook large-scale convict transportation after 1700, a policy which Pieter Spierenburg regards as a departure from the European norm 2. Eighteenth century Continental critics certainly regarded it as a curiosity: «Banishment seems to be an assault on international rights», Denis Diderot wrote in reaction to equivalent measures in the Russian law code. «To send a malefactor to do wrong not at home but somewhere else is to introduce him into the house of your neighbour» 3. Many Americans would have agreed with him. «We want people, 'tis true», wrote William Smith of New York, «but not villains, ready, at any time, encouraged by impunity, and habituated, upon the slightest occasion, to cut a man's throat, for a small part of his property» 4. Exactly how many people were transported from Britain and Ireland remains a matter of some speculation. Estimates range up to 50,000, suggesting that between the 1718 Transportation Act and the American Revolution three out of every seven migrants from England were convicts 5. This legislation, allowing transportation both for those reprieved from the death sentence and for those who had committed very minor offences such as petty and grand larceny, is often regarded as having led to transportation dominating all other secondary (non-capital) punishments after 1718. John Beattie, for example, concludes that a growing use of imprisonment in the early eighteenth century was halted as the Transportation Act was implemented, though this was not the case in parts of northern England which adopted the prison at the same time as transportation 6. Whatever its impact on other punishments, however, there is no doubt that the numbers of convicts transported rose throughout the period, and reached a peak in most areas of England in the twenty-five years before the American Revolution 7. Running away and returning home: the fate of English convicts in the American...

The Unintended Consequences of Penal Reform: A Case Study of Penal Transportation in Eighteenth-Century London

“…(2008: 286)This profile of transported offenders remained constant even after the 1718 Act. In their study of 4,500 offenders transported from northern England between 1718 and 1776, Rushton and Morgan (: 63) found that their subjects had been “convicted for mostly petty offences. Indeed, only about a third of those transported from assize courts had been condemned to death and reprieved on condition of transportation.” These findings suggest that many who were transported would have received some punishment less severe than capital punishment.…”