Prelude to Migration of Caldwell Ancestors to America

Reformation Before the mid-16th century, the Roman Catholic Church was the official church of Scotland. Many Scots resented the Catholic Church’s power, and France’s strong influence on the Church. (A. S. Mather, "Scotland," World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 17, World Book, Inc., Chicago, 1991, p. 218.) Not many felt religious zeal. The Church offered little to attract them. There is an anecdote of a visitor to a tiny village who, finding no chapel, asked if there were no Christians living there. "Na," came the reply, "we’s a’ Elliots and Amstrangs."

The nobility coveted the land held by the Church. Up to the time of the Reformation, the Church in Scotland had acquired vast landholdings from nobles in exchange for promises that prayers would be issued in perpetuity. It was estimated that the annual rental income of the Church from these lands was 300,000 pounds, compared to 17,000 pounds of annual rental income earned by the Scottish nobles.

As the Church sought to enlarge its income, it lost respect. Everything was for sale by the Church: from cardinal’s hat to pilgrim’s relic, every office, nomination, appointment, preferment, dispensation, judgment, adjudication, pardon, indulgence, and absolution. Excommunication and anathema were used by the Church to wring payment of debts to the Church.

Local diocese resented the selection of clergy by the Pope. Often strangers to the diocese were chosen for a fee and proved unable to read Latin scripture or perform the ritual of the Eucharist.

The emerging class of merchants and craft workers felt frustrated by the restrictions on competition. The Church’s doctrine of a just price and fair competition prohibited innovation in tools or methods, overproducing, underselling below a fixed price, working overtime, or praising goods to the detriment of others.

The prohibition against moneylending led to disgruntled merchants paying fines to the Church.

Although there had been scattered attempts previously by John Wycliff (1329-1384) and others, the Reformation was effectively introduced to Scotland by the Anti-papal policies of King Henry VIII, who became an Anglican. Henry VIII’s English troops invaded Scotland in 1544 and 1545, with instructions to kill, burn and spoil.

Henry wrote to his officer: "Burne Edinborough towne -- when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it...sack Holyrood house...sack Lythe and burne and subvert it and all the rest, putting man, woman, and child to fyre and sword without exception." (King Henry VIII’s instructions, quoted in Nigel Tranter, The Story of Scotland, Glasgow, Neil Wilson Publishing Co., 2000.)

Blamed for burning eleven heretics, including friends of King Henry VIII, Scottish Cardinal David Beaton (1494-1548) became a target of King Henry VIII. The most prominent of the persons that Cardinal Beaton had burned at the stake was Lutheran reformer George Wishart. In 1538, while a schoolmaster he was charged with heresy. He fled to study with followers of John Calvin in Switzerland and Germany. He served a portion of time in exile as a tutor at the University of Cambridge. He returned to Scotland in 1543, as part of a mission sent by the English King Henry VIII to arrange the marriage of his son to the young Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87) He began teaching the doctrines of the reformation, thereby antagonizing the Scottish Catholic prelate Cardinal David Beaton. In January 1546, Beaton had Wishart arrested. Convicted of heresy, Wishart was burned at the stake at Saint Andrews in March 1546. Beaton reportedly watched gleefully from a cushioned chair. Wishart's friends were said to have avenged his death when Cardinal Beaton was assassinated three months later. John Knox was part of the group who retaliated by murdering Cardinal Beaton, and this earned him two years as a galley slave. Wishart profoundly influenced the career of Knox, his intimate friend and disciple.

Having failed in attempts to poison the Cardinal, Henry offered a reward for the Cardinal’s assassination. A small group of men led by a pastor entered the Cardinal’s bedroom, slew him with daggers, took a brief respite to kneel and pray, mutilated his body, and then hung him naked by his ankles from his bedroom window. Cardinal Beaton was the last Archbishop of St. Andrews, appointed to the position in 1539.

The abbeys were destroyed and many Scots were driven away. French mercenaries took many prisoners and sold them to the Spanish and Portuguese for them to torture.

Calvinist Church of Scotland The troops were withdrawn in 1550. The next twenty years saw the establishment of the Calvinist Church of Scotland (the Presbyterians) through the efforts of John Knox (1505-1572), a Glasgow University graduate, returned exile, and former galley slave. Initially ordained as a Catholic priest, Knox met George Wishart and became a Protestant. Knox is considered the father of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, whereby the Roman Catholic Church was replaced by a disestablished, democratic, Presbyterian Church of Scotland, founded on Calvinist principles. Knox was ordained as minister of St. Giles Kirk in Edinburgh (1559). A brilliant orator and forceful personality, Knox delivered vehement sermons against Popery and aroused the anger of mobs against the Catholic "idolatrous shrines and buildings." Knox detested stain glass windows and steeples, and to this day many Presbyterian churches have neither. He imported cart-loads of Bibles printed in English, which helped spread Protestantism, because the Catholic scriptures were in Latin.

Knox put before the Scottish nobility and lairds a program for reform: the "godly reformed Kirk," or National Church of Scotland, that was to be organized around congregations, each of which was to be ruled by elders, or presbyters. He gained the support of the nobles who stood to benefit from the overthrow of the Catholic Church and transfer of their vast landholdings -- half of the best land in Scotland. The establishment of the Presbyterian Church is described in the Westminster Confession of Faith authored by Knox and by the Act of Settlement of 1560.

Queen Elizabeth withdrew her protection of Knox because of his attitudes against queens, revealed in his notorious writing, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in which he declared women to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures, and that any rule by them was contrary to God and repugnant to nature. Nonetheless, the new Church emerged victorious.

Mary Queen of Scots Acceding to the Scottish throne in 1561, Mary Queen of Scots, a nineteen year old, alluring, and vivacious woman, a Catholic monarch in a Protestant land, began her reign by berating the forty-seven year Knox for his writing against women assuming the throne. Knox warned her that if she behaved well he would not disallow her rule, but she must not interfere with religion. Knox told Mary that it was God and the Kirk [assembly of church elders] that her subjects must obey, not her. Mary asked Knox, "Was it not the Kirk of Rome that nine-tenths of Christendom obeyed?" Although Mary ‘s reign was hopeless from the start, she gained respect for her forceful challenge of Knox.

One of Mary’s first proclamations stated that none should interfere in the state of Protestant religion prevailing, upon penalty of death, but none should neither interfere in the religious observations of herself and others. Knox rejected this policy of tolerance. Mary defied a proclamation of Parliament prohibiting the saying of Mass in Scotland, upon penalty of death. A Protestant Regent Arran declared that to participate in or defend the Mass was more abominable in the sight of God than was murder. Mary abdicated in 1567, remained imprisoned for eighteen years, and was beheaded in 1587 for treason against England’s Queen Elizabeth.

During Mary’s brief reign, Knox advocated the view that civil government is based on a covenant between the magistrate (or the representative or king) and the populace. His view was that when the magistrate defects from the covenant, it is the duty of the people to overthrow him.

Knox’s social views towards the poor were conservative and unforgiving. He and his followers taught that we come into this world not as innocents but as ignorant and must be forced to conform to the will of God. Witnessing the propensity toward lawlessness of the poor, he persuaded Parliament to enact a statute in 1579, that decreed that all sturdy beggars -- the unemployed who were physically able -- should be arrested and flogged. There were not enough jails to house them all, and many were driven into crime or pressed into military service abroad. Attendance at the Presbyterian Church became mandatory. Actual or suspected adultery was savagely punished. Religious conformity was not a matter of mere belief, but political loyalty; religious dissent constituted subversion.

Knox encouraged the Scots to educate their children so that they could read the Bible. Their relatively high literacy compared to other ethnic groups gave the Scots an advantage as propagandists, educators, and politicians.

Knox instilled in the Scots the belief that they did not need either the Priest or the King to think for them. This was the beginning of the Scots radical tradition.

King James the VI of Scotland Mary was followed by her son, King James the VI of Scotland and James I of England (as he was known to England). (Nigel Tranter, The Story of Scotland, Neil Wilson Publishing, Glasgow, 2000, p. 145.) Suspected by some of being a covert Catholic, James I publicly supported the Church of England.

As James’ father was murdered when he was one year old and James was taken when an infant from his mother, he was reared by tutors. Taught to hate his mother’s murderous and adulterous affairs and separated from his mother for twenty years, James refused to meet with Mary as she requested in 1585. Shakespeare is said to have captured the relationship between mother and son with these words:

"...nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her..."

The advice of Hamlet’s ghost-father on the subject of his mother Gertrude, said to be based on the relationship between Mary Queen of Scots and James VI.

During King James’ reign, the first successful colonies were planted on the American mainland. He was the first monarch to unite Scotland, England and Ireland as the Kingdom of Great Britain. He espoused the divine right of kings, and the monarch’s duty to reign according to God’s Law and the public good. He commissioned the Authorized King James Version of the Bible, "the only great work of art ever created by a committee." (This quotation is attributed to actor Charlton Heston.) He pacified the border people between Scotland and England, many of whom had turned to cattle rustling, kidnapping, protectionism, and fraud. Whole families were forced to relocate to Northern Ireland. Because of their experience on the Scotland-England border, they were to make excellent frontiersmen, Indian fighters, and scouts when they eventually immigrated to America.

A number of times Catholics ("Papists" as James called them) unsuccessfully tried to assassinate King James. One of these attempts involved a plot by Guy Fawkes and others to blow up Parliament with gunpowder stored in the basement. When Fawkes was arrested, a search of his person revealed that he was carrying a watch, slow matches, and touchwood. Fawkes later declared that had he been in the cellar when the King’s investigator entered it, he would have blown him up, house, himself, and all. The suspected conspirators were all tortured with manacles and the rack and executed. King James stated in a letter with regard to one of the conspirators: "The gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad mia tenditur [and so by degrees proceeding to the worst], and so God speed your goode work."

Charles I In 1625 King James VI died at age 59 and his son Charles I was crowned King. Charles I publicly espoused a near Catholic version of high Anglicism, known as Arminianism, which antagonized Catholics, Calvinists, Puritans and most Episcopalians. In 1637 Charles I sought to deprive the Scots of their Presbyterianism and required changes in their churches to resemble more closely the Anglican Church of England. Whether parishioners kneeled or stood in church took on political significance. The Scots arose and overthrew the episcopacy that Charles I had tried to implement.

In 1638, representatives from the clergy, the nobles, the gentry, and the Scottish boroughs gathered to sign a National Covenant, which reasserted the struggle against "popery," and pledged the signatories to defend Presbyterian religion against all comers. This covenant described the authority of the King as "a comfortable instrument of God’s mercy granted to this country for the maintenance of his Kirk." The Scottish General Assembly excommunicated all Bishops and banned the Common Book of Prayer as "heathenish, Popish, Jewish, and Armenian [near Catholic Anglicans]." Charles informed the Assembly that all of their acts were void.

By 1640, an estimated 100,000 Scots had resettled into Northern Ireland, the majority of whom became tenant farmers. These included large numbers of Caldwells from Ayr and Renfrewshire. Many had left Scotland because of the ravages of war and persecution, and because they could not afford the escalating rents in Scotland. In 1641, 5000 Scots residing in Ireland were slaughtered by Gaelic-speaking Catholic Irishmen, the beginning of the Nine Year War, also called the Popish Rebellion, between Catholics and Scots who had migrated to Northern Ireland. News soon came into London of staggering numbers being slaughtered: 50,000 -- 100,000 -- 150,000. The cry of the rebels was, "Spare neither man, woman, or child. The English are meat for dogs; let not a drop of English blood be left within the Kingdom." The sufferings of the Protestants were fearful, and especially of the ministers. Storehouses and provisions were destroyed. Famine ensued and pestilence followed in its track. (Rev. James Geddes Craighead, D.D., The Craighead Family: A Genealogical Memoir, 1658-1876, Philadelphia, Sherman & Co., 1876, p. 13.) When Parliament assembled and presented the king with various demands, he sought to have the leaders arrested. He arrived with an armed guard to arrest the Puritan leaders on the floor, but the Parliamentarians escaped.

Charles I had earned the ill will of the English Puritans by claiming the divine right of kings allowed him to raise taxes without Parliamentary authority and have their ears cut off and their noses slit for defying his efforts to force episcopacy on their churches. The Puritans, or "Roundheads" as they were called, led by Oliver Cromwell, turned against Charles and civil war broke out in England in 1642, which continued until 1649. The Scots were at the margin of this war. The Scottish Covenanters supported Cromwell and the Puritans.

It was the first war fought on behalf of a representative government. By defeating Charles I, Cromwell ended the medieval doctrine of the "divine right of kings," a doctrine that was opposed to republican democracy. The English Puritans advanced the new doctrine, the "sovereignty of the people." The Puritans often cited Peter’s proclamation to fellow believers: "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a party of God’s own possession..." (1 Peter 2:9).

In 1643, the Covenanters entered into a "Solemn League and Covenant" with the English Parliamentarians which would have given a uniform Presbyterian religion in both England and Scotland. The "kirk" in Scotland adopted the Covenants but England’s Parliament rejected them.

Charles fled to Scotland but was captured by the Covenanters and turned over to the Puritans in exchange for £ 400,000.

"Charles I invited an Irish Catholic army to his aid, an action for which he was tried for high treason, murder, and as a tyrant, and executed shortly after the war in 1649. When Charles I was beheaded at age 48, the understanding was that he had broken covenant with the people. The view of Cromwell and the Puritans was that when the magistrate breaks covenant, then he may legitimately be deposed. The Puritan understanding of the covenantal nature of government was the foundation for American colonial government. This was true of Massachusetts and Connecticut and to a lesser extent in the Southern colonies. When the Mayflower Compact was written, the Pilgrims had a covenantal idea of the nature of civil government. This was a foundation for later colonies established throughout the 1600s. These covenants were influenced by what Knox had done in Scotland and what the Puritans had done in England."( Progress of Nation, Vol. IV, pp. 145-145.)

Charles II The Scots proclaimed Charles II (1630-1685) King of Scotland contingent upon him accepting Presbyterianism and the covenants, which he signed June 1649. As seemingly was the reputation of all of the Stewart Kings, many people suspected if not feared that Charles II was covertly a Catholic. Charles II dissolved the union between Scotland and England and ruled the countries separately.

This was unacceptable to Puritan Oliver Cromwell, who was responsible for the beheading of Charles I, and thereafter assumed the title of Lord Protector. His "New Model Army," comprised of soldier-farmers and herdsmen, would recite the Westminster Confession and march into battle singing the Psalms of David. His counter-insurgent campaign was short and brutal. The army invaded Scotland and engaged in a bloody battle at Dunbar in 1650. Charles II fled to France and was to return nine years later. Cromwell killed many Presbyterians and he exiled survivors to Plantations in America and Ireland. He also invaded Ireland and crushed the Irish Catholic Rebellion that had lasted ten years. He showed no mercy, killing whole towns of Catholics and Protestants alike, to let them know that England would not take disobedience from either side. From then until 1690 the Covenanters were suppressed.

A Treaty of Union of 1642 united Scotland and England to form a Commonwealth and abolished the monarchy.

Persecution of Presbyterians In 1653 Cromwell ordered venerated leaders of the Presbyterian church driven from their places of meeting by English soldiers and led like criminals through the streets of Edinburgh.

Cromwell died in 1658. One of his generals marched on London, dissolved Parliament and put the son of Charles I, Charles II, on the throne. When Charles II returned from exile in 1660, he endorsed the restoration of episcopacy and the use of the Episcopalian Common Book of Prayer. By order of King Charles II, the corpse of Cromwell was disinterred from its burial site at Westminster Abbey, hanged, and beheaded in 1661. Charles II considered Presbyterianism "not a religion for gentlemen." Persons who had supported Cromwell knew they were marked for summary arrest, exile, and execution. Many fled to America.

On May 17, 1661, Parliament passed a resolution that the Presbyterian Covenant should be publicly burned. On May 30, 1661, a Bill declared the Solemn League and Covenant illegal. In 1662 an Act of Proclamation banned all ministers who did not have an Episcopalian Bishop’s license. All ministers chosen since 1749 were required to resign and reapply for their posts from bishops and "lairds." One third of the Scot ministers refused and held service in defiance of the law. The term "Covenanter" arose, those Scots who used guerilla tactics fighting the English landlords. Aryshire was particularly hard hit by looting. They murdered Archbishop Sharp. Troops were sent to enforce the law. This period was known as the "killing times." Over three hundred ministers were ejected from their manses. There were further bloody battles and over 100 prisoners taken and executed after various degrees of torture.

In the Act of Uniformity, Parliament began a program of prosecution of Puritans (and later in 1673 was to pass the Test Act, which barred all but Anglicans from public office). The core of the policy of revenge against Protestants was codified in the so-called Clarendon Code, four acts of Parliament passed between 1661 and 1665.

In 1679 a Covenanter army of over 5000 soldiers was decisively defeated at Bothwell brig by Monmouth with 400 left dead and over 1500 taken prisoner. The names of all Covenanter martyrs are recorded on the National Covenant Memorial in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Two ministers were hung and the others executed. Two women were made martyrs when they were tied to posts in the tidelands and left to drown in high tide. Some two hundred were sentenced to transportation to the West Indies but their ship sunk and they drowned. Between 1660 and 1690 about 30,000 Presbyterians migrated to Ulster (Northern Ireland). Most of these entered Ulster through Londonderry.

The strongest and most extreme forms of covenanting and resistance were found in Ayrshire, Dumfries, and Galloway where dissenting ministers had large congregations. Their resistance took the form of guerilla tactics. They were subjected to heavy-handed military and judicial reprisals, especially after 1681. The estates of the defeated covenanters were forfeited. Among such forfeitures was the Mure of Caldwell Estate.

James II In 1684, Charles II died after being converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. His successor, James II, alarmed his Protestant subjects when, after becoming King, he went to mass, a thing that he had not done before, and thereby revealed that he was an active Catholic. Before his first and only Parliament in 1685, James II assured that he would make it his endeavor to preserve the Church of England and. However, he then proceeded to place the army in the hands of Catholics in what many Protestants viewed as a flagrant violation of the Test Act of 1673. He filled all the civil offices and the new corporations of towns with Catholics; pensions were granted to Catholic prelates, the tithes given to the clergy of that church, and dispensations were bestowed upon those who would renounce Protestantism. Public worship by Protestants was almost wholly suspended. After packing the judiciary, he obtained legal sanction in the test case of Godden v. Hales to use his power to dispense with Parliament Acts that he did not like.

In June 1685, James repressed an uprising by James Scott, an illegitimate son of Charles II, to place a Protestant on the throne. It was the largest massacre to have occurred in England in centuries.

In 1687, after failing to obtain parliamentary repeal of the Test Acts, James promulgated a Declaration of Indulgence granting freedom of worship to all Catholics and persons dissenting from the Anglican Church. This Declaration was widely perceived as circumventing the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 as well as various Elizabethan statutes against dissenters (nonconformists) and Catholic recusants. This declaration was widely viewed as a violation of the nation’s constitution. His Protestant subjects feared that his Declaration of Indulgence was merely a step towards establishing Catholicism as the state religion. When his wife gave birth to a male heir, his subjects foresaw the unacceptable risk of a Catholic dynasty.

William II The Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 led to placement of the Protestant William II on the throne of England in 1689. Those who would not swear allegiance to the monarch were called nonjurors or Jacobites, Jacobus being the Latin word for James, the name of their leader, James Edward Stewart (James II). The first Jacobite Rebellion occurred in 1689, after the Scottish Convention accepted William III as king.

On July 1, 1690, the King of England, William III (William of Orange) defeated James II at the Battle of Boyne in Ireland. After this battle, tolerance of Presbyterianism was again reassured. Catholics were driven from power and anti-Catholic legislation was enacted. For centuries thereafter, July 1 has been celebrated by Protestant North Irelanders for rescuing Great Britain from "slavery and Popery."

An Act of Parliament in 1690 again ratified The Confession of Faith agreed upon originally by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster and approved, Anno. 1647. This document sets forth the essential beliefs of Presbyterianism. Williams was obliged to affirm the Bill of Rights. The Revolution put an end to the exercise of the divine right of kings to dispense with parliamentary Acts and a state ruled by an absolute monarchy. Within a year, England and Catholic France were at war. Native Americans joined French in their raids on English colonial settlements.

A war with France brought heavy taxes to a new height not to be exceeded for another century.

Presbyterianism became the established Church in Scotland in 1691.

In 1691 William offered amnesty for Highlanders who had fought for James II provided that they sign an oath of allegiance by January 1, 1692. The penalty for failure to do so was execution. The chief of the McDonald clan was unable to sign the oath until January 6. To make an example, William’s Scottish Secretary Dalrymple gave orders that resulted in the massacre of 30 McDonalds on February 13, 1692 at Glencoe.

Queen Anne Favorable treatment towards Presbyterians ended in 1702, when King William II died and was replaced by his sister in law, Anne.

In 1707, the Scottish and English Parliaments passed the Act of Union. The act joined Scotland with England and Wales to form one kingdom, the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Scots dissolved their Parliament and sent their representatives to England. One of the immediate effects of the Act of Union was to allow Scottish merchants to penetrate English colonial commerce. By sending agents to reside in the colonies and initiating a system of stores at collection points, Glasgow merchants soon dominated the importation of tobacco from the Atlantic colonies. (D.W. Meing, The Shaping of America, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986, Vol. 1, p. 157.) Many of the first people leaving from Glasgow to tobacco-growing regions abutting Chesapeake Bay were young single males, salaried sojourners rather than family settlers. (D.W. Meing, The Shaping of America, supra, p. 158.) Upon their return to Glasgow, they would have shared with Clyde River Valley inhabitants their observations about the advantages of migrating to America.

During Queen Anne’s reign, Parliament passed a series of Acts that were unfavorable to the Scots, severely restricted the practice of their Presbyterian religion, and forced many of them out of their jobs. Presbyterians could hold no position above postman. They could not be married in their own church without being labeled fornicators. Presbyterians held services where and when they could, often in the woods with guards posted. In 1712 the Patronage Act reintroduced patronage as a means of appointing ministers and thus depriving the Presbyterian congregation of the cherished right to choose its own minister.

Queen Anne died in 1714, her health exhausted by seventeen pregnancies in a futile attempt to obtain a male heir. Her reign is noteworthy for being the last monarch to veto an Act of Parliament.

George I George I of the House of Hanover acceded to the throne, but many Highlanders remained loyal to the Stewarts. "George spoke little English and knew nothing of Scotland. A less acceptable monarch would be hard to imagine." (Nigel Tranter, The History of Scotland, supra, p. 208.) A Jacobite rising in 1715, led by highlander Rob Roy MacGregor, sought to crown the Old Pretender, James Edward Stewart, which resulted in bloody carnage in Scotland. The Crown was markedly lenient with leaders of the rebellion. Only two were executed. In 1717 an Act of Grace and Free Pardon was offered to all except the MacGregors. Nonetheless, many Scots regarded the trial in England rather than Scotland of the leaders of the rebellion as a violation of the Treaty of Union of 1708.

Scottish Exodus to Promised Land In 1717 an exodus of low land Scots and Scots-Irish from Northern Ireland to America begin in earnest. Plagued by four years of drought, high rents, (Many leases in Northern Ireland first expired in 1717. The landlords sought to double and triple the rent, and farming became unprofitable. The Scots-Irish usually rejected these rent demands and sought to immigrate to America. Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 29. Originally published 1944, University of North Carolina Press) consolidation and non-renewals of tenancies, typical marginal subsidence holdings of 30 acres or less, English import/export restrictions, rebellion, and religious intolerance, five thousand left that year. Most of the early migrants were simply tenant farmers with grievances, seeking escape from hard times, not cattle thieves or religious fanatics. Migrations occurred in clusters: 1717-1718, 1725-1729, 1740-1741, 1754-1755 and 1771-1775. (Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-Americans, Basic Books, 1999, p. 180.) Presbyterian Ministers bellowed from their pulpits against the landlords and Episcopal clergy, calling them rackers of rents and screwers of tithes, with other reflections of this nature which they know were pleasing to their people; at the same time telling them that God had appointed a country for them to dwell in (naming America) and desires them to depart thence, where they will be freed from the bondage of Egypt and transported to the land of Canaan. Ship masters, factors and agents roamed the country, tempting and ensnaring people to migrate to America. The "richer sort" were being assured that "their posterity will be for ever happy," "the poorer sort" were being "deluded" by accounts "of the great wages given there to laboring men."

In 1717, responding to a crime wave, Parliament passed the Transportation Act, which authorized the banishment of convicts, including persons convicted of vagrancy, to America for sale as indentured servants in terms of seven to fourteen years. Between 1735 and 1743, the only period for which authoritative figures are available, over half of the convicts who were shipped from Ireland were vagrants. Some 50,000 convicts were shipped to America between the passage of this Act up to the Revolutionary War. Some colonies sought to circumscribe the law by imposing local fines on the importation of convicts. Others, such as Virginia, demanded securities for good behavior which were so prohibitive as to constitute, in the words of Richard West, Lord Chancellor of Ireland (1725-6), "a virtual prohibition of convicts" from the British Isles after 1720.

Virginia’s hard-nosed approach was not followed in Maryland which alone among the colonies, accepted the Transportation Act. Recognizing that Pennsylvania could not supersede the Transportation Act and ban the entry of British and Irish convicts, the Pennyslvania colony’s "Convict Act" of 1722 sought to undermine the trade by local regulation, imposing import duties, and assessing fines on captains, agents and others who broke the letter of the law. In 1729, the Pennsylvania Privy Council passed the Servant Act, requiring that detailed passenger lists had to be entered at the Philadelphia custom house and bonds posted for the good behavior of the immigrants. The object of this Act was chiefly to exclude criminal convicts. Merchants, ship captains and their agents evaded the colony’s restrictive laws by disembarking passengers at the Delaware ports of Newcastle and Wilmington. The Privy Council formally revoked the laws in 1742 as being incompatible with the Navigation acts.

A minister of Ulster, writing to a friend in Scotland, in 1718, lamented the desolation occasioned in that region "by the removal of several of our brethren to the American plantations. Not less than six ministers have demitted their congregations, and great numbers of the people go with them." Ten years later Archbishop Boulter wrote to the English Secretary of State respecting the extensive immigration to America: "The humor has spread like a contagious distemper; and the worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the north." (Rev. James Geddes Craighead, D.D., The Craighead Family: A Genealogical Memoir, 1658-1876, supra, p. 23.)