delanceyplace.com 11/14/11 - most early americans were not free

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In today's excerpt - most early Americans, if you exclude the important category of Native Americans, were African slaves, convicts from Britain who were forcibly shipped to America, and indentured servants:

"More than 50,000 convicted felons were ... uprooted from their families and friends in Great Britain between 1718 and 1775 and forced to travel overseas to begin new lives as indentured servants in the American colonies. The number of convicts who made this trip was not insignificant. During these years, one out of every four British immigrants who landed in America was a convict. To put the 50,000 number in even more perspective, when Britain regularly started sending convicts to the American colonies in 1718, the white population of Maryland was around 50,000. And in 1765—10 years before convict transportation to America came to an end—the entire population of Boston was only 15,520. All told, British convicts constituted one of the largest groups of people ever to be forced to immigrate to America, second only to African slaves....

"Almost as soon as convict transportation to America came to an end, Americans began to downplay the number and significance of criminals sent to the colonies. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson led the way by claiming:

The Malefactors sent to America were not sufficient in number to merit enumeration as one class out of three which peopled America. It was at a late period of their history that the practice began. I have no book by me which enables me to point out the date of its commencement. But I do not think the whole number sent would amount to 2000 & being principally men eaten up with disease, they married seldom & propagated little. I do not suppose that themselves & their descendants are at present 4000, which is little more than one thousandth part of the whole inhabitants.

"If Jefferson truly believed what he wrote, he should have known better. In the period leading up to when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the British were sending nearly 1,000 convicts to America every year, and about half of them ended up in his home colony of Virginia. ... Only in the latter part of the 20th century did historians finally begin to research convict transportation to America in a serious and systematic way. Today, historians generally agree on the 50,000 number. ...

"Convict transportation adds new dimensions to popular notions of immigration to early America that go beyond Pilgrims and brave men crossing the Atlantic in search of religious freedom and unlimited opportunity in a new, untamed land. Most of the people transported to America were ... petty criminals who came out of the ranks of the destitute poor. In fact, most people who came to America during this time arrived under similar circumstances as Bell's, whether they were a convict or not. Between 1700 and 1775, a total of 585,800 immigrants arrived in the 13 colonies from all over the world. About 52,200 of these immigrants were convicts and prisoners (9%). Slaves by far constituted the largest group (278,400; 47%), followed by people arriving with their freedom (151,600; 26%) and indentured servants (96,600; 18%). Note that almost three-quarters of all the people arriving in the American colonies during this time period did so without their freedom."