Pilgrims Portrait: Some Thanksgiving Surprises

  

For Thanksgiving, I’m sharing a summary of research by T.H. Breen and Stephen Foster (1973) on early Massachusetts immigration (cited below).

I’ll let them talk. I’ve simply added brief headings that reflect my summation.

Immigrants Came as Families, Not Individuals: Turning to the lists themselves, even a casual examination calls into question the classic picture of migration to the New World: a predominantly male movement of young, single unattached persons, that is, individuals free both of strong ties to their homes and of constitutional infirmities that would preclude a difficult journey. On the contrary, most of the 1637 emigrants were grouped into relatively small nuclear families consisting of two parents, a few children, and sometimes one or more servants. Men and women were about equal in number, and only a handful of the families included grandparents or in-laws.

Immigrants Were Older: Migration is often assumed to be an affair of the young, but the Yarmouth examiners left enough material about age to establish that this was not a particularly youthful group of colonists. Although among the servants, as might be expected, almost all of the men were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, with heads of households the case was quite different. Almost half of the twenty-five men whose ages were recorded were in their thirties, another eight were forty or older, while only five were in their twenties. Nor were the women appreciably younger: a large minority of the wives, in fact, were older than their husbands.

Most Immigrants Were from Cities: Most of the East Anglians and Kentish men were urban and most were artisans. Excluding servants, forty-two of forty-nine men gave their occupation, and only eleven were farmers as against eight weavers, four cordwainers, four carpenters, two each of joiners, tailors, coopers, and mariners, as well as a brewer, a shoemaker, a grocer, a locksmith, a minister, a butcher, and a calendar maker.

Immigrants Were Not Destitute: Rich or poor, none of the migrants was hopelessly ruined at the time of his decision to leave England for America. Here again, their ages are worth  remembering. Most of the male heads of households were five or more years past their apprenticeship, all were old enough to be launched on a career, most were too young to have been driven to desperation by the incapacities of age or misfortune.

Immigrants Had Skills and Crafts: The 1637 group was made up mainly of families headed by urban tradesmen somewhere in mid-career who apparently chose to exchange their settled English vocations for life in a pioneer agricultural community of uncertain prospects.

Immigrants Were Harassed by Some Clergy: On top of depressions and epidemics came harassment by overzealous church officials. Bishop Matthew Wren held the diocese of Norwich (which comprised the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk) from the fall of 1635 to the spring of 1638. During this brief period he enforced ceremonialism and deprived nonconformist clergy with so much enthusiasm that at the calling of the Long Parliament he was impeached and spent eighteen years as a prisoner in the Tower.

A Primary Industry Failed Due to Lack of New Immigrants: The failure of clothworking is a mystery. Massachusetts possessed a considerable resource in the persons of so many trained weavers. Its population obviously required cloth. Yet despite repeated encouragement from the General Court, every attempt to establish a textile industry in the Bay Colony ended shortly after it began. The inhabitants of Rowley, many of whom were experienced English weavers, took the lead in the first great drive to create an indigenous textile industry in 1643. Three years later, however, they were still paying premium prices to Boston merchants for imported fabrics.

One wonders why so much determination produced so little. Part of the trouble may have been a labor shortage. Like all seventeenth-century trades, clothworking was extremely specialized and fragmented, while the “new draperies” in particular were also an unusually “labor intensive” industry. Although Massachusetts had a large body of immigrant weavers, it quite possibly lacked the necessary number of combers, throwers, carders, calendars, and the like to complement their skills.

SOURCE: T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 189-222, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.