American History Hit - When Britain Sent Its Convicts to America

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Britain shipped convicts to America from the days of Jamestown right up until 1775. More than 50,000 were sent. To explore this too seldom told tale, we are joined by Dr Anna McKay from the University of Liverpool, a historian of prisoners in the British Empire.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 1720. The Old Bailey, the central criminal court of the city of London, stands directly adjacent to the city jail, the infamous Newgate Prison.

It's noisy in here, crowded. Here in the courts, the public is welcome to watch the proceedings, as justice is meted out daily, served up like theatrical performance. On this bitter winter day, Margaret Wilson, a resident of the parish of St. Giles in the fields, stands shivering as she has found guilty of stealing two silk handkerchiefs, a muslin apron, a shirt, and a pair of flaxen sheets. Her crime is pretty unremarkable stuff. Petty theft. One of countless such offenses in a city swelled with desperate lives. And her sentence? Equally ordinary. Indeed, unexceptional. A punishment meted out to tens of

thousands before and after her. Transportation. Margaret Wilson will be banished. transported far across the Atlantic Ocean to serve out her sentence in penal labor in distant colonies. Colonies we now know as the United States of America. Hello listeners, welcome back to American History Hit. I'm speaking with you today from the streets and alleys of East London, working out of the History Hit offices here in England. Very exciting. We've been flown over to meet with a whole hassle of history hit podcasters and producers

discussing our service to the platform as the only colonist among us, I'm now immersed in breakfasts of bangers and mash, quaffing bitters at the pub, and dining on meat pies and the like. There is still an ocean of history and culture dividing us, but the special relationship remains intact, and American history hit is testament. All thanks to you, our listeners. Today's episode harkens back to a forgotten piece of American colonial history, the foundational days long before the revolution, when an economic system of penal servitude existed between Mother England and the colonies, which was eventually formalized into law, something called the Transportation Act of 1718. This was fundamental to the early development of the American economy,

a brutal system of forced labor that was implemented to grow it. We're talking about tens of thousands of convicted felons dispatched to the colonies as free labor. With me to discuss it all is Dr. Anna Mackay of the University of Liverpool, an historian of prison systems of the British Empire. Greetings, Anna, nice to see you. Hey, thank you for having me. We are actually in a room together. This is very unusual for American history hit.

I'm usually on Zoom from my own booth. Anna, we're talking about a lesser-known history on several fronts. So let's first address this broadly. When I speak of a system of forced labor in the American colonies, what was this a reaction to? How did this come to pass? Well, there's always been transportation. So from like 16, 15, as early as that,

we have James I first authorizes convicts being sent to the American colony. He says take them for foreign discoveries. There's already been convicts in America from the very early years. And it continues on in kind of patches. So throughout the 17th century, we do get convicts being sent. Anyone convicted in the courts gets sent to America. And it kind of spikes during the Commonwealth. It's normally prisoners of war.

Rebels and captured soldiers, people like that get sent over. But then from 1718, it becomes a formalized process and more and more people get sent to the American colonies. I think it's important for this audience to understand the word transportation, it's such a friendly word nowadays. We're talking about transporting prisoners. So Transportation Act of 1718, which we'll talk about more formally in a moment, is really about moving prisoners from England where there really wasn't a developed system of prisons. Is that correct? Exactly. Yeah.

It's basically a form of forced migration. Prison systems during, say, the 17th and the 18th century, they're really not built to house so many prisoners. They were more like workhouses, right? Yeah, exactly. They're run down. They're full of disease. There's big open cell structures so people can just wander around and they're dangerous places and they get overcrowded. The famous one was Brideswell.

Yeah, exactly. So we have Newgate Prison as well. That's in London next to the old Bailey Central Criminal Courts. You get convicted and sent straight over to Newgate and it's scary. You know, people are frightened of going to Newgate prison. Yeah. And this was a system, just to be clear, that goes all the way back. The Romans used force.

labor, of course. And we're not necessarily talking about slavery in this case. The line blurs. We're really discussing what do we do with all these prisoners in a growing population here in England? And suddenly the colonies give James I, and to his administration, a place to put them. Exactly. Yeah. And lots of states across the world are doing this as well. It's kind of part of like imperial expansion, right? So you have the French do it. They send convicts to Louisiana. And then we've got Portuguese, the Spanish. Everyone in their empire is doing this. It's like, what do we do with our prisoners? We banish them. We send them overseas. And they can basically almost settle the land. They're put to work and they basically help the colony progress. It's a practical solution. It also requires a brutal system, though.

Exactly. And it's very cheap. And it's very cheap, which is going to figure in fundamentally to the development of the United States. From 1,500 to 1650, a little fact here, the population of England grew from 3 million to 5 million. Along with that, one, One fourth to half of the population existed in poverty. And poverty equals crime in any culture. In some cases. Exactly. It's like this is one of the things we think about.

When we think about poverty and crime, we say they go hand in hand. Lots of people didn't commit crime. For those that did, they're facing a really harsh reality. If you're committed to, say, a capital offense like murder or petty offenses, things like shoplifting, stealing a loaf of bread, that kind of thing. You can all still face a sentence of transportation. Yeah, exactly. And this becomes one of the many elements of the relationship between the colonies and England that grows in importance and significance in the American system, where there begins towards the revolution time to be quite a resentment about this. Exactly. Yeah. It does get a bit fraught. So basically there's a sense of in America, the colonists are trying to gain their own kind of sense of self. And then what keeps happening is that the British government keeps saying, no, every kind of taxation or import.

or anything like that. They're getting quashed by Whitehall. So American colonists are getting really frustrated and they're also hating the fact that they're becoming this place where we basically, the British Empire, are dumping their criminal population onto their shorts. This is something. It's embarrassing to say this,

but I had no clue that this even existed until this episode came along, which is extraordinary. It's a really forgotten part of American history, I think. It's been swept under the rug. When we think about criminal transportation, We tend to think of the story of Australia. But before that, it was actually the story of early colonial America. Interesting. It was tried out here before it became Australia.

Wow. Who are the people being shipped out? What was a typical criminal? A typical criminal. 80% of them were young men. So they're unskilled. So they're the kind of people that you talk about. They're being gangs, pickpockets and thieves, that kind of thing.

Young men without skilled trades are being sent over also women, some children between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. anyone who basically the government doesn't want to house in prisons. And these are on these ships, these prison ships that are being used for this? Yeah, merchant ships. So one of the weird things about the whole transportation process was that the British government pays like a merchant, so a contractor. They pay someone who has a ship to send the convicts overseas. So you get £5 per head if you're a merchant.

There's this one called Duncan Campbell. He's a Scottish merchant. He's had experience in the slave trade. He knows how to basically ship people across the ocean. And someone like Duncan Campbell, he collects the convicts from the jails in England, so along the kind of London and the home counties area. So he'll collect the convicts up, get £5 ahead from the government, and then send them overseas.

And when the convicts arrive in America, the merchants can pocket any profit that they make from selling these convicts. And they're being forced to labour when they get there. So when the ship arrives in port, they generally rang a bell or sounded a gun to like basically imply to everyone, right? The ship's in port. Come on down and look at the convicts, see who you want to buy. You know, convicts would be sold for about 10 to 15 pounds ahead. And that's the money that the merchants are pocketing. But yeah, people just came and picked who they wanted.

Well, anyone who was interested in buying a convict, remember they're quite cheap. So if you needed someone to work on, say, your farm, you'd go down to the port when the convict ship arrived. and you'd choose someone who might be able to work for you. So what used to happen was that people would go down to the ships and they'd look at the convict's teeth. They'd see if they'd been healthy. They'd look at their limbs to see whether they're strong. They want strong workers.

So then they would buy you and take you to their plantation. From my reading, it was between 1717 and 1775, 37,000 were brought over. It's even more than that. Really? Yeah, it's 48,000 convicts. They estimate. It's a big number. And how does that compare?

to how many African enslaved people were coming at the time? When we compare, say, convicts, convict transportation to slavery, there's 48,000 convicts coming over it within, say, this 57-year period, right? But if you look at, say, Virginia alone, you've got 200,000 enslaved people. Wow. It's a massive number. So there are far more enslaved people in, say, Virginia colony than there are convicts. Yeah.

We're going to talk about the shift. It really does evolve between these two systems. but it's important for people to understand that there are these separate institutions going on that are developing, one to do with penal servitude, and also then comes the enslavement, where they blur and overlap as things go on. Exactly. There's all these different systems of forced migration all occurring at the same time. Yeah. We're skipping over an important fact that I don't want to miss, the fact that this gets institutionalized into law. But prior to 1718, the Transportation Act of 1718, this had been going on for almost 100 years, before, right? From the days of Jamestown. And then, of course, it's happening up in Massachusetts

as well. I imagine the Dutch were probably doing their own version of this for some time there. I don't know. But all of this is an ordinary part of life, an extraordinary part of life, but one of the factors in building a labor force. Exactly. Yeah. People are basically complicit in this kind of coercion. Someone in the Virginian colonies later commented like a governor. He said, as long as they keep sending them and as long as we keep buying them, we are bringing the evil to us. That's by the time that tensions are getting a bit high. They're saying, as long as we're complicit in this practice, it's never going to stop. Yeah.

There is a big difference, though, and that's important. We'll discuss where one has this sort of limited sentence involved versus permanence of the enslavement. But in a moment on that, I want to clearly understand that these were really brutal ships coming over. Typically, many deaths along the way, the worst kind of diseases were happening on these ships. Exactly, yeah. One of the reasons why American colonists dislike the fact that convicts keep being. sent to their shores is because they see the ships as being diseased. People, they're bringing smallpox and things like they can wipe out whole colonies if you're not careful. They have tuberculosis,

they have typhus, cholera, all these different kinds of diseases can really spread like wildfire in these cramped conditions. I was surprised to be reminded that Daniel DeFoe wrote a book on this, Mole Flanders, right? Exactly. So Mole Flanders is like one of the best examples actually that we have in literature of a convict who landed in Virginia. And so Moll is convicted and she's sent over. And Series of events essentially mean that she ends up rich. And one of the great things her mum says when she arrives is that a lot of convicts are integrating in society. So Moll's mum says that many a Newgate bird has become a great man in America. But Mold Flanders, that's published in 1722, right?

So that's just after the Transportation Act. So it's a good bit of publicity for it, actually, because Defoe doesn't paint Virginia and Maryland in a bad light. He actually says, you can become rich here. But it's a historical novel. So Moll is actually more representative of that James Town kind of group of convicts in the 17th century. So tell me where demand was highest. Where were these prisoners landing for the most part? The prisoners are landing in the Chesapeake region.

So they're in Virginia, Maryland, places like that. The Chesapeake Bay extends there. That's a big fertile area. Exactly. So 90% of convicts go there. And that's actually because the merchants who are transporting them have a lot of contact. there. So there's a lot of tobacco. And these people on their return journeys, the merchants, they're collecting tobacco. So they take convicts over, bring tobacco back. So they have all these

networks there. Tobacco is a very labor-intensive crop to raise. That's primarily what's happening. They're getting out in the fields and being employed that way. Exactly. So the majority of these convicts, the male convicts, they're unskilled. They're working on plantations. They're in agriculture. So the majority of them do work in the fields, but other ones, they become apprentices. to tradesmen, they become shoemakers, carpenters, butchers. For the female convicts, they become seamstresses, they work as house servants and things like that. How would you know one of these people is out there? Like, you go to your local printer and, oh, that guy back there is like one of those convicts. One of the reasons why America is so frightened of convicts. You can't tell them

apart. They just look like normal people. No one has branded fingers or they suggest branding people on the ears so that they can be easily identified. But no, you can't tell them apart. then live these pretty normal lives in those kinds of services, I guess. Yeah, and when convicts run away from home, they change their clothes. They put sort of boot blacking on their faces so that people can't recognize them. And they just run away. Interesting. Yet another strange theme to the colonial lifestyle. I'm just trying to picture this. So you've got this guy working in the shop, but he's not under chain. He's not bound in any way. He's pretty much working as a normal person would. And then goes home and sleep somewhere, right? Yeah. There's nowhere to go. That's one of the things. So they don't really need to police them in the same way. You're a servant. You work here for seven years. You work here for 14 years.

Or free. Yeah. And you might sleep on the floor of your employer's house or, you know, in a kind of, you know, lean to or something like that if you're working in the fields. And yeah, it's a pretty normal life of servitude. You have no rights. Yeah. It's important to realize that this has always been a system. Even to today.

That penal colonies, penal systems exist to some degree here and in a state. here in America to provide free labor, or at least very cheap labor. Yeah. States have always turned to banishment or deportation to deal with sort of problem groups, as they might call them. What about escaping? That must have been a big problem as well, just as it was with enslaved people. Yeah, convicts definitely tried to escape. One of the ways that we can find out about them is by looking at colonial newspapers at the time. So things like Pennsylvania Gazette, all these colonial newspapers printed reports of convicts escaping.

So that's where you can find physical descriptions of convicts. You can find people saying they have a bad manner about them. They have a strong accent. They have a scar. They have one eye. And it's ways of identifying these runaways. So many similarities. I imagine beatings and whippings were common as well. Yes, exactly. So people do often mention scars on their backs from being whipped. Is it like slavery? And like we know the system of slavery that we've seen in the movies and all the rest of it? In a way, yes. One of the things you got to remember, is with enslaved people, that's for life. Whereas a convict, you have a seven-year or a 14-year sentence. So at the end of it, you know that you might be able to go home. Yes. Whereas obviously, enslaved people, they can't do that. What was preferred about an enslaved person over it?

Were they more expensive? What was the difference between these two systems? Enslaved people were definitely more expensive. So, in fact, you see a lot of the convicts who are being bought, they're being bought by the sort of middling class of planters, the people who are up and coming, who can't actually afford enslaved people. Convicts were less costly.

So an enslaved person might have cost anything between 34 pounds to 44 pounds, whereas a male convict is 10 pounds. You know, they're like a third, a quarter of the price. And, okay, you can only detain them for between 7 and 14 years. I think people say that nine years is about the average that a convict would labour in one of these plantations. But yeah, the big difference is you can't leave. Convicts aren't treated well by these planter classes.

They're still being whipped, forced to work. They can't create a sort of network or friends. They're being isolated from each other. So it's still a very lonely and difficult life to be living. But again, compared to enslavement, you have, it's on such a big scale. I think it's very clear, obviously, when that sentence is up, average nine years, that person is gone. So your investment goes with them versus as ugly as it sounds. That's the point with this enslavement is that you're getting a person for permanently

plus their children. It's horrible, but it continues and remains and grows over time. We've discussed it as side by side, these two systems of penal servitude and transportation of prisoners versus enslavement. What's the interplay between these two? How do they overlap? I mean, there's a lot of unease. One of the weird things about this system is, like we said, they're overlapping. They're happening at exactly the same time. But people are concerned that the racial bias is going to be upset. People don't like the idea that white convict servants are basically being treated as enslaved people. There's a sense that enslaved Africans would see white people being whipped, flogged, treated as degraded members of a sort of social underclass. So when people try, like when the British government tries to send convicts elsewhere in this kind of periods of experimentation across the 19th century,

a lot of Caribbean colonies actually reject them. They say, no, we don't want any white convicts. being sent here because they think it will upset the kind of ruling system. There's a group of subjugated white working class people that are being treated as enslaved people. They really object to that. Why was the law necessary to have this Transportation Act of 1718? We always think about why laws are necessary at all, but basically the Transportation Act, we said that there's always been transportation. It's basically because there's population increases. One of the things that people always talk about is actually the birth of the newspaper. So newspapers in the kind of early 18th century

begin to print more and more stories about crime. And it creates this perception amongst its readers that crime is a real problem. And the people who are reading the newspapers are the lawmakers, they're the literate classes, right? And so they're reading all these things about all these criminal classes and that kind of thing. And it's stirring up this fear amongst people. So it contributes to this sense of we have to do something about it. And so you have urban migration, you have industrial revolution kicking off and things like that. More and more people are moving to the big cities. It means that there's more population, more crime. And convicts are being sentenced to transportation all across the British Isles. So, you know, you could be in

Wales, you could be in Scotland, in Bristol, in London, anywhere. But two thirds of the population who go through the Old Bailey. So there's central criminal court in London. Two thirds of them during this period get transported. Wow. So there's a huge amount of convicts from London. How obvious was the American attitude, the colonist's attitude about these prisoners? Is it in the papers? Do you read about this? There's definitely a lot of antagonism. The colonists don't want convicts being sent there. So, you know, Dr. Johnson, who wrote the dictionary, he called America a race of convicts. So, you know, it's really giving them a bad name.

And people used to think that the convicts would bring disease. One of the biggest problems is that they thought that they would bring more crime. There is this huge idea that the more criminals get sent over, the more people will commit. crimes. It's not actually true. We find very little evidence in the archives to say that these convict servants, even when their runaways, are actually committing that many crimes. It must have been of a nightmare when that was made into law because everybody who, all Americans who'd been here for a long time knew that this was an ordinary system of life. They had gone on for decades. And then suddenly it's made into law. And then it continues on.

We're talking about a century's worth of prisoners coming from Britain. You basically don't have any say in what happens. This is one of the big problems of the like colonial America. Whitehall makes the decisions back at home in London and you can't do anything about it. And yet it was a useful system as well. A lot of Americans were making money off of this. Exactly. So they are complicit in it. As long as you buy the convicts, you're encouraging them to send more. So in 1718, this law has passed and therefore this system will continue for decades following. But then comes right up against the American Revolution. And this is the dead end for this whole system, right? 1775, it's over. How does England react to the loss of this system? Probably with a bit

of outrage, I'd say. For all this time, American colonists don't like the fact that transported criminals are being sent to their shorts. So Benjamin Franklin, even as midway through, says 1750s, he writes this treatise called rattlesnakes for felons. He argues that instead of sending convicts, what America should do is send back rattlesnakes because they're just as, you know, vipers, everyone in the American colonies sees these convict servants as wretches, vermin's and serpents. There's a lot of anger about it. Back in England, they don't know what to do. So suddenly they can't send their ships. The ports are blocked. You know, you have a shipload of convicts. What do you do with them? And so the British kind of penal system is just sent into this flux where they're trying to find

different solutions. And so they think about all the other British colonies. They end up sending convicts for a very short period of time to West Africa on the Gold Coast. They try and set up a colony there, but there's disease, there's murder, there's mutiny, they can't send them there. And so then they finally decide a good few years later, 1786, they make the decision to send convicts to Botany Bay in Australia. And that becomes the story of Australia. It's so fascinating. I'm one of the many who think that whole system began with Australia, because they famously claim, you know, we were a nation of convicts. But indeed, that began with the American colonies.

So when American prisoners can no longer be sent to the colonies after 1775, a whole whole whole new system begins in Britain. What do you do with them until they start sending them to Australia? A new industry exists along the Thames, right? Exactly. So they have these things called prison ships, prison hulks. And some of the merchants who were actually involved in that trade to the American colonies, they see a business opportunity. They say, hey, what are you going to do with all these prisoners? Where should we put them? Why don't I house them on my prison hulks? And so they convert these ships that used to transport the prisoners to America into floating prisons. And the prisoners work in the dockyards during the day and then they come back and sleep on these ships at night.

This is only supposed to be a really temporary short-term measure just for a couple of years, couple of months, until they think that the American ports will reopen, but they never do. And actually this prison hulk system runs alongside the transportation system to Australia for 80 years. Wow. Forced labor, hard to say no to when you're making money off of it. Were there studies ever done about how many people stayed in the colonies and became normal citizens? It's really difficult to find them. Basically, unless someone does anything wrong, you can't find them in the records. You can't find them in prisons.

You can't find them in the newspapers, things like that. I was doing some research in Baltimore recently and looking at ships, lists, a list of arrivals of convicts, because I'm really fascinated in finding their names, finding out who these people were. Instead of just thinking about numbers, actually, what were they like? How was their experience? So I found some ships lists of arrivals. Ports, also in Annapolis, there's a lot of stuff there. You can find lots more county records and things like that.

But one of the things I'm really fascinated in is newspapers. So any kind of colonial newspaper, finding those convict runaways, finding the escapes, finding physical descriptions of people, finding out what they were like, their characters and things like that. Can you actually track any lifetimes as you follow them along or not? It's really hard to. Like I said, unless someone commits another crime, it's hard to find them. How to convict never run away from the plantation where they were working. We wouldn't even know their names. Interesting.

But that is where DeFoe gets this idea. What an adventure this person is on, unwillingly at first, but suddenly they're off and running. Yeah, exactly. So there's a great story of one guy who was a butcher in the colonies. And he said he couldn't not think about going back home. He was so desperate to go back to England that he ran away, ran through like the marshes of Virginia, killed squirrels along his way, and then caught a boat back to England. But he was apprehended.

So again, we can find his name because he was caught back in England. Of the many thousands of these prisoner lives, tell me about one of these guys. Okay, so I want to tell you about William Wheeler, right? So he gets sent over to the American colonies in December 1775, but then he comes back to England. So he's in the courts again. So he can find his like personal testimony in court records. And he says that he was being made when the war broke out in America, he was being made to be a soldier and fight against England.

And he refused. He says in the courts, I refuse to fight against my king and country. And people ask him, why? Why, when they've treated you like a slave? Are you not angry at Britain? And he says, no, it's my homeland. And he actually runs away from this regiment.

He says they put him in a jacket that had death or liberty written on the arm. And he said, I don't want to be this. He runs away. He gets a boat back to England. And they catch him. And they say, you've returned from transportation early. You've got to go back. And he's no way, I'm not doing that.

And so what happens to him is because, 1775, very important year, they can't send him back because the ports have closed. So he gets sent on board a prison ship. And so we can keep finding him in the records because he's being then held on a prison hall. As we are facing this 250th anniversary, it is so fascinating to me how many new and interesting angles on this relationship are exposed. And people like me, or deep into their lifetimes, are still finding out all of this amazing stuff about how this relationship was much more subtle and much more complex.

than we even think of. All of what we're talking about, we chalk up to, oh, the tea party, and no, we didn't like those standbacks and all that sort of thing. But there was all this other stuff that had been going on for literally decades, if not centuries. Exactly. I always think of 1775 is like this year of beginnings, but it's also the year of endings. Things stopped happening then as well. Dr. Anna Mackay is from the University of Liverpool, historian of the prison systems of the British Empire. So it's nice to meet you in person here at the history head offices. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit.

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