Colonial American Research and a Review of “The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction” by Bernard Bailyn

 

If you have colonial American ancestors, you may or may not have been successful in your quest to find the original immigrants. This can be difficult for a number of reasons. Because people from Britain were emigrating to the British colonies, not many records were kept. Also, the early years in the Americas saw colonists struggling to survive in this new land. Record keeping would not have been high on the list of priorities in many cases. Even if records were kept, they may not have survived the subsequent years.

If we can’t find a record of our colonial immigrants, we can at least learn from historians who have studied the immigration patterns. We can develop a hypothesis based on what we do know about our ancestors and their group. Many scholarly works have been written, and The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction* by Bernard Bailyn provides a fascinating look at what was happening in Britain and, to some extent, Germany and France during the colonial era of the 17th and 18th centuries. We are reading this book as our summer selection for the Family Locket Book Club on Goodreads. If you have colonial American ancestors, I invite you to read the 131 pages of  Peopling as a way to form a hypothesis about your ancestors.

*This is an affiliate link to Amazon.

Author Bailyn reveals in the introduction of The Peopling of British North America that it was originally a paper that he used to organize his thoughts as he studied colonial immigration. The paper is divided into three essays with the following engaging and enigmatic titles.

• Worlds in Motion
• The Rings of Saturn
• A Doomsday Book for the Periphery

 

Bailyn summarizes his theory on the “peopling of British North America at the beginning of the book.¹

This transforming phenomenon was the movement of people outward from their original centers of habitation. . . that involved an untraceable multitude of local, small-scale exoduses and colonizations, the continuous creation of new frontiers and ever-widening circumferences, the complex intermingling of peoples in the expanding border ares, and in the end the massive transfer to the Western Hemisphere of people from Africa, from the European mainland, and above all from the Anglo Celtic offhsore islands of Europe, culminating in what Bismark calls the ‘the decisive fact in the modern world,’ the peopling of the North American continent.

Bailyn uses extensive endnotes to support his writing. His sources include numerous books and journal articles by historians, as well as genealogical sources such as The William and Mary Quarterly. When a specific topic catches the reader’s fancy, these sources could be searched.

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction encapsulates Bailyn’s comprehensive work found in his larger work, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. Bailyn won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in History for Voyagers to the West.  In 2013, he published The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America – The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Born in 1922, he died in 2020 and was lauded as an American historian specializing in early America.

What value does Peopling have for the genealogist? I was fascinated to read the four propositions that Bailyn develops in the book as a starting point for the discussion.

Proposition 1

Bailyn maintains that immigration to the colonies was part of the natural movement in the homelands as people moved outward from their village of origin.  He describes differences in the patterns of mobility in the 1600s and 1700s and explains that “again and again major issues, apparently unresolvable paradoxes in the peopling process, can be resolved by reference to the domestic scene in the land of origin. ” ² Bailyn provides examples from the Scottish Highlands, Southern England, London, and Germany.

With surnames such as McChristian, Frazier, and Keaton, I know that these ancestral lines likely originate in Ireland and/or Scotland. I can trace my ancestors as far as possible in the U.S., then turn to reviewing what might have been happening in the home country at that time to form a hypothesis about their immigration. That could lead to finding records in the home country, if available.

 

Proposition 2

The second proposition Bailyn makes is that there is no continuity in how new immigrants settled in the colonies. He examines the differences between population centers such as New England, New York, and Boston. He states, “The greatest source of variety lay in the ethnic and cultural composition of the incoming groups. . . . There was no single “American” pattern of family and community organization. There were many patterns, reflecting the variety of human sources from which the population had been recruited and the swiftly changing, fluid situations in which the people lived.”³

My Shults ancestral line in North America began with Johan Valentine Shults’s arrival in 1731. He followed a common pattern for German immigrants, arriving in Philadelphia and then moving west to join other people of German origin. I wrote about my research in Researching a German Colonial Immigrant Ancestor: Valentine Shults (1715-1745)

Proposition 3

Bailyn’s third proposition deals with what happened after the initial colonization phase and explains the two main reasons for continuing emigration came from first, the need for labor and second, land speculation. He explains that the majority of the emigration in the 1600s was an effort to move people from England to the colonies to provide labor. Of the estimated 155,000, the majority were indentured servants coming mainly from London and its surrounding areas.  They provided basic labor skills. By contrast, the immigrants of the 1700s began to be more skilled in their chosen profession. Bailyn writes,

“In page after page of the many extant letterbooks of the eighteenth-century merchants involved in labor recruitment, the need for skills, and not merely brute labor –  is spelled out – specified down to the last detail.  . . . The greatest need was for workers who could build things. . . who could repair things, and who could otherwise assist in maintaining the physical world of the maturing mainland colonies.”⁴

If we discover that our ancestor was a carpenter, joiner, bricklayer, pewter, etc., we can hypothesize that perhaps he was recruited to come to the colonies because of his needed skill. For example, William Copen was born about 1723 and died about 1805 in Prince William County, Virginia. ⁵ He was a stonemason, a carpenter, and a calligrapher. Among the various records we have of William’s work, in 1773, George Washington paid William to put the Washington name on his pew in the Pohick Church in Fairfax County, Virginia. William’s name appears as “Copan” in George Washington’s colonial papers. ⁶ William fits the profile of a young man recruited from England to start a new life in North America.

Is it possible that William was the son or grandson of an earlier emigrant? Yes, but understanding the immigration pattern of this time provides an alternative hypothesis.

In discussing land speculation as part of the settling of America, Bailyn reminds us of the 1763 peace treaty following the French and Indian War that opened new land in Nova Scotia and the Floridas. He gives the example of British landowners who sought to replicate the tenant farming of England in America and purchased huge handholds only to find that the wildness and abundance of land in America made this impractical.

Land speculators on a smaller scale recruited immigrants to first rent and then purchase land after years of laboring to clear the land. The speculator would either have his land cleared by the tenants or would sell the land to them after their years of labor. This exchange of labor for land aided both the speculator and the new landowner. Bailyn proposes that land speculation attracted families, often with means in their home country. By selling off their property, they could afford passage to America and buy or rent their new land. He states,

“Many of these free families were destined to be frontiersmen in each successive generation. Consumers from the start, they were producers too, and prolific contributors to the rapidly increasing population.”⁷

Proposition 4

In the last section of the book, Bailyn tackles the complicated issue of chattel slavery in North America, and  he states:

American culture in this early period becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland of the metropolitan European culture system.⁸ It was the juxtaposition of the two – the intermingling of savagery and developing civilization-that is the central characteristic of the world that was emerging in British America. ⁹

Bailyn discusses the role of the brutality of the Indian wars and chattel slavery as Europeans sought to make a new world wherever they had landed. The wilderness was always near, as were the dangers. Europeans were no strangers to the idea of slavery, but it had always been on the margins – isolated work gangs – not in their midst, as it was in North America.

Bailyn ends his final essay in The Peopling of British North America with this statement:

This mingling of primitivism and civilization, however transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture and we must struggle to comprehend it.  What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivate land? We can only grope to understand.¹⁰

Although we would like to discover the original immigrant for each of our family lines, if they immigrated during the colonial years, we may never know the ship, the year, or the circumstance that prompted them to leave their home country. However, by studying books like The Peopling of British North America, we can gain understanding and perhaps create a hypothesis for each ancestor based on what we do know about them.

Best of luck in all your genealogical research!

 

1. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York City: Vintage Books, reprint edition 1988), 4.
2. Ibid., 29.
3. Ibid., 59-60.
4. Ibid., 62.
5. Diana Elder, AG, Copen 2018 Research Report, 2018, files of the author, Highland, Utah.
6. To George Washington from Going Lanphier, 16 October 1773,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-09-02-0273. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 9, 8 January 1772 – 18 March 1774, ed. W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, pp. 348–350.]
7. Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America, 86.
8. Ibid., 112.
9. Ibid., 114.
10. Ibid., 131.