Frenchmen into Peasants

Earlier this week, I read Leslie Choquette's Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (1997). I don't know as much as I'd like to know about Canadian history, but, luckily, the professor who is examining me in early American history takes a very broad view of that field, so I was able to include this on my generals list.

Choquette’s in-depth demographic history of the colonists of New France challenges many of the origin stories cherished by their descendants. While French-Canadians often think of their ancestors as rustic peasants who emigrated from the French provinces, Choquette finds that migrants to French Canada were generally cosmopolitan and middle-class (many were artisans). Her title is a reversal of Eugen Weber’s seminal work, Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), which charts the consolidation of French nationalism in the late 19th century.

Frenchmen into Peasants is heavily influenced by social science methodology. Choquette’s argument is based on statistical analysis of 16,000 French migrants whose birthplaces, occupations, and migration patterns can be recovered because of a “mania for encyclopedic description” that characterized French imperial projects from the beginning of the 17th century (10). She does not present literary evidence (not even letters, diaries, etc.) or other forms of documentation to support her conclusions, which is too bad. As it is, this book reads like raw data. Choquette’s conclusions are plausible given her data, but without corroborating evidence in other forms, it is difficult to accept them wholeheartedly. She convinces the reader that French-Canadians were not peasants when they set sail from France, but her actual discussion of the peasant-ization process is feeble.

This book had no maps, which was a problem because so much of it was about regional origins and settlement patterns. Tsk, tsk, Harvard University Press.

Next Steps

Why didn’t more English women migrate to the American colonies during the seventeenth century? Perhaps the difficulty in finding a satisfactory answer to this question is that the question itself is too narrow. In order to answer this question competently, future studies must subsume several broader questions, including “Where did English women travel and for what reasons?” and “What did mobility mean in seventeenth-century England?” Several of the authors discussed earlier in this essay have suggested potential jumping-off places for these new forays.

Before we can understand why women traveled to America, we must discover why they traveled at all. Conditions in the colonies are important and must be part of any discussion of migration, but female transatlantic migration must also be situated within a larger context of English women’s mobility. By examining patterns of local transience, intra-national movement, and migration to other destinations, including Ireland, Scotland, and continental Europe, scholars can determine which aspects of transatlantic migration were extensions of other types of travel and which were anomalous. Alison Games’ research will be particularly useful for piecing together this larger context, not only because her data includes migrants who went to continental Europe as well as to America, but also because she follows individual migrants over a period of years as they undertake many separate migrations of various durations. Likewise, Susan Hardman Moore’s study of New Englanders who returned to England suggests that transatlantic migration was part of a pattern of many migrations during an individual’s lifetime, not a single removal from a point of origin to a set destination.

In addition to developing a better sense of English women’s mobility, historians must investigate the meaning of mobility within early modern English gender discourses. Kathleen Brown’s exploration of gender and social order provides a model for accounting both for events and for the meaning of those events. Englishwomen who traveled to America were not merely mobile laborers; they were variously understood as harbingers of stable community life, insolent wenches who threatened social hierarchy, and embodiments of “civilization” and whiteness who helped to define the limits of freedom and slavery.

Currently, the historiography of migration does not adequately address English ideas about the appropriateness of travel that might explain why certain women could imagine making particular journeys but not others. Under what circumstances could a wealthy woman travel to a neighbor’s house? To London? To Holland? To Jamaica? Did poor women have more freedom to make those journeys or less? What assumptions would other English subjects make about a woman who made any of these migrations? Before we can make sense of the gender disparity among transatlantic migrants, we must better understand how Englishwomen imagined travel and themselves as travelers.

There can be no doubt that transatlantic migration from England was “overwhelmingly a man’s business” (Games, 47). Yet, it is not enough to leave the reasons for this disparity unexplored and unexplained. White women’s restricted mobility is such an ingrained feature of our imagined historical landscape that historians have left the historical processes underlying sex-specific migration unhistoricized, thereby naturalizing men as movers and women as homebodies. That English men crossed the ocean and English women, in general, did not is a matter of historical record. The beliefs, experiences, and policies that created this imbalance remain obscure.

Involuntary Migration

In contrast to both “push” and “pull” arguments, several recent authors have drawn attention to involuntary migration, which accounted for the vast majority of all transatlantic migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* Although most involuntary migrants were enslaved Africans bound for the sugar islands, the exploration of coerced relocation contributes to the literature on Englishwomen’s migration through its discussion of the labor history of the American colonies. Since forced migration involved large-scale planning, studies of this phenomenon can illuminate elites’ understanding of the relative importance of male and female laborers to their colonial projects.

The author who most directly addresses the fundamental question of gender disparity in migration is David Eltis. In The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000), Eltis attempts to explain why Europeans were willing to import enslaved African women but did not encourage European women to emigrate. He argues that white men were willing to accept African women as field workers who could contribute to the staple crop economy of the colonies, but that European women’s labor was neither profitable nor in demand in the colonies. English women were not coerced or coaxed into migrating because they were “never a significant part of the labor force of the export sectors of the Atlantic economies” (Eltis, 99). The idea that elite planners devising an ideal workforce preferred English men to English women is supported by the work of Robert C. Johnson, who found that when the Virginia Company sent vagrant children to their colony as servants, they chose to send three times as many boys as girls.**

Even if we accept Eltis’ supposition that “the work of women was closer to the core of the African economy than was its English counterpart,” his belief that women’s labor was not in demand in the colonies does not fit the evidence supplied by other authors (Eltis, 92). In addition to Carr and Walsh’s argument that white women were scarce, sought after, and highly valued in seventeenth-century Maryland, Kathleen Brown’s work on seventeenth-century Virginia demonstrates just how valuable white, female workers were to the planter economy.

In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996), Brown contradicts many of Eltis’ key assumptions about the value of white women’s work by pointing out that tobacco production reached its peak only after women, “whose processing and commercial skills made possible both subsistence agriculture and internal markets,” reached demographic parity with men (Brown, 84). Where Eltis argues that “European settlers in the New World did not reshape European norms in family and sexual conduct,” Brown finds that colonial courts and legislatures spent a great deal of time passing and defending laws that struggled to impose ideal European gender relations on a populace that challenged them constantly (Eltis, 103). Where Eltis assumes that “demand for [English] women stemmed from their reproductive role,” and that “there was no economic demand to sustain the female component of transatlantic migration,” Brown argues that white women’s field labor was crucial to their husbands’ economic success because, unlike black women and all men, they were not taxed as potential field workers. This allowed white planters to profit from the field labor of their untithable wives and children while the law defined women as household laborers and ignored evidence that white women actually performed agricultural work (Eltis, 96; Brown, 121).

Brown is not explicitly concerned with transatlantic migration, but her compelling arguments about white women’s economic value in the colonies and English discourses of gender and social order provide essential background for further work on female migration.

Although Eltis makes several untenable assumptions about white women’s place in colonial economies, his focus on labor markets is essential to unraveling the causes of gender disparity among transatlantic migrants. In the face of insatiable demand in the American colonies and a surplus of unmarried women in England, arguments that attribute gender disparity principally to the laws of supply and demand fall flat. Since the economic explanations of labor demand that seem to explain male migration to the Americas cannot fully account for the lack of European female migration, future investigations must grapple with the influence of culture.

Though they take different routes to arrive at similar destinations, both Eltis and Brown agree: “culture-bound assumptions” have economic and political consequences, and no argument that ignores ideology can fully explain gender or race relations in early America.

*David Eltis finds that African slaves made up 61.3% of all migrants during the period 1640-1700 and 75.7% between 1700 and 1760. In addition, he estimates that 80% of all women and 90% of all children who crossed the Atlantic before 1800 were enslaved Africans. In addition to the coerced migration of Africans, many European prisoners were transported against their will. It is difficult to assess the number of European indentured servants who should be added to this tally, since some contracted their indentured willingly, while others may have been coerced. In any event, most transatlantic migrants did not travel of their own volition. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11, 97; Carr and Walsh, 542.
**Since the Virginia Company had a vast supply of vagrant children and paupers of all ages and both sexes at their disposal, their decision to send “seventy-five boys and twenty-four ‘wenches’” in 1619 seems to be calculated to meet the colony’s perceived labor needs. Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618-1622,” in Early Stuart Studies, ed. Howard S. Reinmuth, Jr., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 140.

"Pull" Arguments

In contrast to the “push” arguments, “pull” arguments emphasize the American colonies’ attractiveness for those seeking political, social, and economic advancement. In this telling, transatlantic English migrants are neither the beleaguered victims of government harassment nor huddled masses yearning to escape lives of crushing poverty. Instead, “pull” arguments portray colonists as entrepreneurs, adventurers, and shrewd assessors of risk and reward. For these authors, the unanswered question is not, “Why didn’t religious/economic/demographic upheaval push women, as well as men, to America?” but rather, “If America provided such attractive opportunities, why didn’t more women migrate?”

In their landmark article, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland” (1977), Lois Carr and Lorena Walsh argue that the scarcity of marriageable white women in Maryland during the first generation of settlement gave women enormous economic and social power. Though nearly all female migrants arrived in Maryland as indentured servants, they soon found that successful planters were eager for marriage partners, even if they had to buy out their wives’ indentures (Carr and Walsh, 542). Impoverished women who were “seeking opportunities they had not found at home” took advantage of the marriage market to improve their status, often marrying planters with large and growing estates and practicing a form of “serial polyandry” because so many outlived their husbands (Carr and Walsh, 544, 558). Carr and Walsh cite enticing advertisements as evidence that poor women in England knew of favorable conditions in Maryland and sought indentures with the expectation that they would eventually benefit socially and financially (Carr and Walsh, 547).

The women in David Ransome’s “Wives for Virginia, 1621” (1991) are similarly well-informed and aspiring. Unlike their Maryland counterparts, the 57 women who departed for Jamestown in 1621 came from middle-class or gentry families, but they shared a desire to find successful husbands in the colonies (Ransome, 12). Ransome notes that Virginians were eager to marry, even though they had to pay up to 150 pounds of tobacco for the privilege, and many complained that there were not enough potential wives to be had at any price (Ransome, 6). The men of Virginia agreed with their Maryland neighbors: women made their colonies happier and more productive, and they would take all the white women England could send.

The colonies described by Ransome, Carr, and Walsh seem like ideal destinations for both poor and well-born women, particularly given the dire state of the English economy. Why, then, did women make up fewer than 15% of migrants to the Chesapeake?* Both articles imply that the best way for a 17th-century Englishwoman to advance both materially and socially was through an advantageous marriage, but the evidence suggests that Maryland and Virginia’s insatiable demand for marriageable women was never enough to entice very many.**

The “pull” arguments advanced by Ransome, Carr, and Walsh are limited by their focus on women’s positive experiences in America instead of on their pre-migration decision-making process. While it may be true that women were able to exercise greater power within their families because their productive and reproductive labor was so highly valued in the colonies, women in England remained skeptical, perhaps because they suspected that they would be put to work in the tobacco fields (Kathleen Brown, good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 82). “Pull” motivations are an important piece of the migration puzzle, but they remain unsatisfying for explaining why women were unwilling to migrate when they had both the opportunity (about 20% of adult women never married during the 17th century) and the means (in the form of passage-paid indentures).

David Cressy’s appraisal of migrants’ motives in Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987), provides a useful model for extending “pull” arguments into more rewarding discussions. Rather than ascribing migration to the charms of the New World, he investigates the convoluted decision-making process of prospective migrants in England and argues that their manifold motivations and incentives were much more muddled than either pure “push” or “pull” arguments admit. Cressy rejects religious persecution as a “self-serving” narrative advanced by both colonists and historians searching for a useable past, neither of whom could admit that most migrants emigrated for economic gain or to escape personal troubles (debt, crime, bad marriages), and that some “crossed over in a casual or impulsive manner” (Cressy, 85, 98-106).*** By recognizing that uneasy conditions at home could prompt English subjects to contemplate alternatives, Cressy lays the groundwork for exploring why they were pulled to particular colonies.

Despite their flaws, the “pull” arguments do introduce an important idea: the American colonies provided economic and social opportunities for women as well as for men. Furthermore, all of the mainland colonies, even those that specialized in tobacco production needed and actively recruited white, female migrants. Beyond their value as companions and reproductive laborers, women were active, productive, and coveted workers whose industry contributed to the material wealth of the colonies.

*Alison Games finds that 13.6% of those bound for Virginia in 1635 were female. Games, 47. Carr and Walsh deliver one short paragraph to this question, suggesting that ties to families and communities in England, as well as their lower desirability as field workers accounted for limited female migration. Carr and Walsh, 546.
**Approximately one fifth of English women born between 1575 and 1700 never married. Those who did typically did not wed until the age of 26. see Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
***Cressy does not discount the importance of migrants’ religious motives, but he does argue that their accounts of persecution were “a caricature of conditions in Caroline England.” Instead, he casts religious motivations for transatlantic migration as aspirational and secondary to economic concerns.

"Push" Arguments

Proponents of “push” arguments have focused on two types of hardship: religious persecution and economic opportunity. Since at least 1886, when George Bancroft portrayed the “Pilgrim Fathers” as “peaceful farmers” who were “harassed by imprisonments, search warrants, trivial prosecutions, and the various malice of intolerance,” historians have considered religious intolerance in England, particularly under the policies of Archbishop Laud, to be a major factor in transatlantic migration. Although the religious persecution argument has come under attack from more recent historians, including David Cressy, it is still a major element of many “push” arguments.

In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), David Hackett Fischer places religious persecution at the forefront of the many factors driving the “Great Migration” of Puritans to New England during the 1630s. Fischer argues adamantly that religion was “not merely [their] leading purpose[;] it was their only purpose” (Fischer, 18). Although he acknowledges economic opportunity in New England and the possibility of evangelizing among the Native Americans, Fischer sets out a strong “push” argument. “This exodus was not a movement of attraction,” he declares, “the great migration was a great flight from conditions which had grown intolerable at home” (Fischer, 16). Since the East Anglians who settled in New England intended to establish godly communities rather than plantations, gender ratios were more balanced and “normal family life was not the exception but the rule” (Fischer, 27).

Susan Hardman Moore echoes Fischer’s arguments in Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (2007), emphasizing Laudian policies as a driving force behind the Puritan exodus and characterizing movement to New England as “the most family-centered migration in America’s history” (Moore, 21). Moore draws a clear sociological distinction between those who migrated to New England and those who traveled to other Atlantic colonies, noting that the former were more prosperous, better skilled, and were spread across a wide age spectrum. The New England settlers’ most important trait was their tendency to travel in family groups along with “other local families, bound together by kinship and acquaintance over many years” (Moore, 21). By stressing the importance of family migration, Moore gives the impression that gender ratios among New England-bound migrants were balanced, and she does not offer any evidence to dispel that assumption.

What neither Fischer nor Moore can explain is why there was any gender disparity at all in migration to New England. While a population that is nearly 40% female is much more balanced than those found in most other English colonies, the imbalance is still pronounced.* If they are correct in arguing that religious persecution was the primary force driving whole families to New England, equal numbers of men and women should have been affected. Fischer notes that, if church membership is any indication, “it would be statistically more correct to say that many Puritans led their husbands to America,” but does not venture any explanations for the gap between women’s religious loyalties and their failure to cross the ocean (Fischer, 27). Ultimately, Fischer and Moore’s explanations of migration to New England are unsatisfying because they ignore the realities of gender disparity in favor of the logic of their family-centered arguments.

The other type of “push” argument foregrounds economic hardship and population pressure in England. Even historians who argue that migrants were attracted to America by the promise of opportunity concede that 17th-century England was undergoing rapid population growth, massive dislocation of agricultural workers, and a tightening job market. While modern historians seldom advance a strong “push” argument without acknowledging that migration was a “multilayered, multitextured phenomenon,” many explain migration primarily as a direct result of poverty at home (Horn, 48).

In Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (1994), James Horn defines economic upheaval in 17th-century England as the result of three interconnected trends: demographic growth, the development of national markets, and the creation of new types of economic ventures, including cottage industries and joint stock companies. In this telling, overseas migration was merely an extension of England’s internal migration patterns as populations responded to new social and economic realities. While some wealthy individuals hoped to increase their fortunes by moving to America, most English inhabitants of the Chesapeake arrived as servants, for whom “poverty appears again and again as a determinant” (Horn, 62).

Alison Games makes a similar argument in Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), contending that, “migration within England was a part of the life cycle for most young men and women” during the period of demographic growth and economic strain (1580-1640) (Games, 16). Although she mentions women’s mobility briefly, most of her subsequent discussion focuses on migrants who “tended to be young and male, menacing in their poverty and freedom from masters” (Games, 17). The great strength of Games’ work is in her meticulous collection of data, which allows her to give precise statistics for migrants by age, sex, and destination. Using records from overseas voyages originating in London in 1635, Games can compare groups of migrants who traveled to Virginia with those who traveled to Barbados, New England, and continental Europe. In all cases, male migrants far outnumbered their female counterparts (Barbados, 94:6; New England, 60.9:39.1; continental Europe, 73:27) (Games, 24, 47). Although Games discusses gender imbalance as a defining characteristic of transatlantic migration, she does not explain why men and women seem to have responded differently to the potent forces of population increase and unemployment.

Both Horn and Games offer persuasive arguments about the economic and demographic roots of migration, but they do not go far enough in historicizing the developments that led to the gender disparities that both acknowledge. If English subjects were indeed starving in their villages and migrated both within England and beyond to find sustenance, historians must provide compelling evidence to explain why men left while women stayed when both would have suffered. In the absence of investigation, these authors imply that it is natural for men to move and for women to remain homebound. Their work, particularly Games’ data, will be essential to further inquiry into English migration, but it is not sufficient for explaining the scarcity of women among transatlantic migrants.

Horn and Games do not reconcile their “push” arguments with the data suggesting that men and women were unequally prodded, but they do suggest a potentially fruitful area in which their work could be extended. Both agree that London served as a crucial “staging post” for those wishing to travel to any overseas destination. According to Horn, “younger sons of gentry, yeomen, and provincial tradesmen flocked to London” to take advantage of new jobs created by transatlantic commerce, and many ended up accompanying their goods to America (Horn, 61). Although neither Horn nor Games explores this point, a possible explanation for gender disparity in migrating populations is the importance of initial travel to London, which may have attracted more “masterless men” than masterless women.

*Fischer cites the gender ratio as “approximately 150 males for every 100 females,” a 3:2 ratio that agrees with Games’ data (60.9% male, 39.1% female). Fischer, 27; Games, 47.

English Women and Transatlantic Migration, 1607-1675

I haven't written about books in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading.

I recently finished an historiographical essay on the problem of gender disparity among English transatlantic migrants in the seventeenth century. These essays aren't my favorite things to write, but this one turned out pretty well. I'll post it here in several parts.

Introduction:
In 1635, over 82% of all English migrants who traveled from London to the American colonies were male (see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 47). While it is axiomatic that most English colonies experienced stark gender disparities during the seventeenth century, the causes of this imbalance are less clear. Many historians have taken on the task of explaining the massive exodus from England between 1610 and 1675, but few have attempted to understand how the various factors that inspired people to emigrate may have held differential sway over men and women.

It is not enough to accept men’s mobility and women’s inertia as predestined or to offer off-hand speculation instead of investigation and evidence. Left unhistoricized, the cultural norms that defined early modern English men as potential movers and women as weak, dependent, and homebound, take on the cast of natural distinctions. If historians hope to unravel the complex web of motivations that induced some English subjects to cross the ocean while most remained at home, they must not be satisfied by knowing that transatlantic migration was “overwhelmingly a man’s business,” but must explain why it was.

Explanations for English-American migration generally rely on “push” arguments that locate the impetus for migration in deteriorating prospects at home (starvation, religious persecution, crippling unemployment, disease, etc.) or “pull” arguments that emphasize the colonies’ drawing power for migrants seeking economic, religious, or political opportunity. More recently, a third strand of argumentation has stressed involuntary migration as a major factor in European as well as African transatlantic crossings. In this essay, I will examine examples of all three types of arguments, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities for explaining European female migration.

Part I: "Push" Arguments
Part II: "Pull" Arguments
Part III: Involuntary Migration
Part IV: Next Steps

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction

Pete found an online seal generator, so from now on, I will be able to bestow a snappy image, as well as my gratitude, on any academic text that makes its point in fewer than 250 pages.

Today's recipient: Bernard Bailyn's The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986). This slim volume provides a basic overview of the questions driving historians' investigations into European migration to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bailyn is mostly concerned with migration from Britain, but also includes discussion of Germans who ended up in British North America.

Bailyn builds his argument on four propositions:

• First, transatlantic migration was an outgrowth of a culture of internal migration that characterized early modern Britain.
• Second, migration was not a single, unified process, but a combination of distinct, independent migrations.
• Third, after the earliest phases of migration, subsequent emigrants crossed the ocean in order to fill the demand for (increasingly skilled) labor and to speculate in land.
• Fourth, American culture is best understood as a backward-looking outpost of European culture, not as a forward-looking frontier.

With these points, Bailyn situates himself directly at the center of the prevailing historiography of 20 years ago. For the historians of the 1970s and 1980s, migration could be explained mostly in economic terms as a story of unemployed Englishmen, labor demand, and the free movement of free and temporarily unfree people to a land of opportunity.

Today, the scholarship is tending toward an emphasis on the coercive elements of migration. David Eltis, among others, has redirected the historiographical narrative to place involuntary migration at the center and to treat voluntary migration as the exceptional story in transatlantic migration history.

Wives for Virginia, 1621

As background for my essay on migration, I am reading "Wives for Virginia, 1621" (WMQ, Jan. 1991) by David Ransome.

It's a fairly straightforward little article which argues that the 57 women shipped to Virginia by the Virginia Company in 1621 as wives for the colonists were of a higher social standing than popularly supposed. Ransome bases this argument on some amazing documents that preserve the women's names, birthplaces, family conditions, and, in one case, letters of recommendation.

The documents are fun, but what makes this article post-worthy is its contribution to my list of favorite 17th-century names: Temperance Flowerdew. Now, Mistress Flowerdew can't quite challenge for the top spot, which still belongs to Humiliation Scratcher (see DHFischer, Albion's Seed), but she certainly earns honorable mention.

Do you have a favorite 17th-century/Puritan name? Leave it in the comments.

Coming Over

I'm working on a prospectus for an essay on female migration from Europe to the Americas in the 17th century. The central question is why there was such a disparity between the volume of male and female migration at the time. The fact of the gender imbalance is well established, but there is still considerable disagreement over the motivations that led to migration.

There are two principal types of arguments about the reasons that people moved to America: the "push" and the "pull" arguments. "Push" arguments say that migrants left there homes in order to escape intolerable conditions such as religious persecution, unemployment, famine, etc. "Pull" arguments contend that Europeans were lured to America by the promise of opportunity, social advancement, etc.

One of the books I'm examining is Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century by David Cressy (1987). Cressy rejects the "push" argument that other historians such as Carl Bridenbaugh, Samuel Eliot Morrison, and Virginia DeJohn Anderson have embraced; that is, Puritans emigrated because they faced religious persecution in England. Instead, he emphasizes the individuality of each migrant's decision and the multiplicity of religious, economic, and personal motivations that inspired his or her to move to New England.

Although Cressy is pretty good about acknowledging the difficulty of ever pinning down exactly why any person decided to migrate, he does advance a modified pull argument. Personal tragedy or economic hardship might have given someone a nudge, but Cressy explains migration as an opportunity for advancement.

The one thing I'm not convinced by is Cressy's dismissal of involuntary migration. He discusses reluctant servants briefly, but says that Irish convicts, Scottish captives, and other coerced emigrants are an anomaly. This may be true of New England residents, where forced migration may have accounted for as little as 10% of the population, but in general, forced migration was the rule rather than the exception in the 17th century. While historians readily acknowledge that this was the case for Africans, the consensus that most British migrants were forced as well is more recent.

Next up: Lorena Walsh and Lois Carr's "The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland."

Mrs. Gallop, Dorset, England, 1632

The stories of those who left England during the Great Migration are familiar to historians, but those who stayed behind also exercised agency. In a letter to John White on July 4, 1632, John Winthrop recounted the story of a Dorset woman who refused to come to America despite relentless pressure from her husband and other powerful men:

I have much difficultye to keepe John Galloppe heere by reason his wife will not come. I mervayle at the womans weaknesse, that she will live miserably with her children there, when she might live comfortably heere with her husband. I praye perswade and further her comminge by all meanes: if she will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not, let it be bestowed to bring over his children, for he so desires it: it would be above 40 li losse to him to come for her.

While withholding her husband’s wages from a woman and threatening to take away her children seems to merit a stronger verb than “perswade,” it is clear that Mrs. Gallop was asserting her own wishes in the face of enormous obstacles. Perhaps she did not wish to part from family members, perhaps she feared the crossing or the prospect of starving, freezing, or being killed by Native Americans. Whatever her reasons, Mrs. Gallop shows that ordinary people exercised their own will when it came to emigration.