Title: Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Year of Publication: 1986
Thesis:
Following migration patterns from England, Bernard Bailyn argues that distinctive but simultaneous journeys took place between 1773-1776. A "metropolitan" migration from the South of England comprised mostly of young (less than half indentured) artisans and craftsmen vigorously recruited by middlemen sending them to the middle colonies while farming families left the North of England in response to economic instability. These farmers arrived largely on the frontier, where Bailyn expands on the dissonance between "civilization" and "savagery" and violence.
Time: 1760-1776
Geography: British Atlantic
Organization:
Part I - Background: The Magnet of the West (explains British anxieties about the exodus of people)
Part II - Dimensions (Quantitative Analysis)
Part III - Mobilizing a Labor Force (Demand for labor and recruitment of southern migrants)
Part IV - Peopling the Peripheral Lands: The Extremities (Northeast, Gulf, and Delta)
Part V - Peopling the Peripheral Lands: The Great Inland Arc (NC, Georgia, NY)
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
His work breaks up a monolithic notion of English immigrants, noting class and regional differences in both England and the colonies.
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
- African and Native peoples get short shrift.
- American Exceptionalism
Questions:
Quotes:
*"the sudden intensification of this fundamental process [migration and settlement] after 1760 affected the entire fabric of American life."
"While Americans of the Revolutionary generation struggled for freedom and equality in public life, they remained remarkably insensitive to the human consequences of deprivation. In such a world--where the blatant humiliation of inferiors by social superiors was a matter of common experienced and where degrading physical punishment for civil and criminal offenses was routine--the utter debasement of chattel slavery needed little justification, and lesser forms of servitude were regarded as normal." <---this suggests that some evolution in societal attitudes would make slavery and other forms of abject servitude recede.
"They lived in the outback, on the far marshlands, where constraints were loosened and where one had to struggle to maintain the forms of civilized existence." <---this (and really the few sentences preceding it) further clarify Bailyn's perspective on advanced and "primitive" society
"And it was a world at constant risk, its gentility preyed upon not only by natives culturally disoriented and dispossessed of their land, but by marauding "crackers" and other "banditti"--creoles gone savage--no better, it was said, than bloodthirsty aborigines." <-- this did not age well.
* Will return to add page #’s. All from introduction.
Notes:
He won his 2nd Pulitzer prize for this book.
Published during the last few years of the Reagan Era, this work seems to typify what we now call the master narrative.
Out of interest, I checked the Slave Trade Database to see what the importation of enslaved Africans looked like during this period, and a huge influx are headed for major cities in England (London, Liverpool).