Motives for Migration

As the flight from North Britain approached its climax, Dr. Samuel Johnson and his faithful friend James Boswell were touring the west coast of Scotland. At Armadale they were invited to a country dance which captured the spirit of this great folk movement. Boswell remembered:

We had again a good dinner, and in the evening a great dance … we performed a dance which I suppose the emigration from Skye has occasioned. They call it “America.” A brisk reel is played. The first couple begin, and each sets to one—then each to another—then as they set to the next couple, the second and third couples are setting; and so it goes on till all are set a-going, setting and wheeling round each other, while each is making the tour of all in the dance. It shows how emigration catches till all are set afloat.⁵

Boswell asked a lady to explain the dance, and recorded her reply:

Mrs. Mackinnon told me that last year when the ship sailed from Portree [a small village on the Isle of Skye] for America, the people on shore were almost distracted when they saw their relations go off; they lay down on the ground and tumbled, and tore the grass with their teeth. This year there was not a tear shed. The people on shore seemed to think that they would soon follow.⁶

Through the long period from 1718 to 1775, the annual number of immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and the north of England averaged more than 5,000 a year. At least 150,000 came from northern Ireland, sailing mostly from the ports of Belfast Lough, Londonderry, Newry, Larne and Portrush.⁷ Another

75,000 departed from seaports in the west of Scotland, from the Clydebank to Solway Firth.⁸ At least 50,000 (probably more) left from coastal towns of northern England from Maryport to Merseyside. These are conservative estimates. The true magnitude may have been much larger.⁹

In one respect, this folk wandering from North Britain was similar to other migrations that preceded it. It was mainly a movement of families. A study of British records (1773-76) finds that 61 percent of emigrants from northern England traveled in family groups. From the border counties of Scotland, 73 percent also did so.¹⁰ From northern Ireland, 91 percent of 405 Ulster emigrants who came to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during the year 1740, arrived in families. Only 37 traveled as individuals.¹¹

Many of these emigrants were women and girls. The sex ratio of those who left Scotland in the 1770s was 149 males for every 100 females—an unusually even-handed distribution in an emigrant population. The mix of genders was less equal than in New England’s great migration, but more so than in the movement to the Chesapeake colonies.¹²

The age distribution of men and women was also remarkably broad in this moving population. A large proportion were adolescents and young adults. But 25 percent were children under fifteen, and nearly 40 percent were over twenty-five. All age-cohorts were represented in large numbers except the elderly. Here again, the pattern was intermediate between the migration to New England and the Chesapeake.¹³

In other respects, however, this fourth great migration differed very much from all of its predecessors. The motives of these emigrants were fundamentally unlike those of New England Puritans, Delaware Quakers and even Virginia cavaliers. Among the North Britons, there was no talk of holy experiments, or cities on a hill. These new emigrants came mainly in search of material betterment. In the early eighteenth century, many surveys of their motives found the same pattern of concern about high rents, low wages, heavy taxes and short leases. In northern Ireland, conditions were so very hard that famine and starvation were often mentioned as a leading cause of migration.¹⁴

The same material motives also appeared fifty years later, when this movement was nearing its end. In the year 1774, four shiploads of emigrants to Nova Scotia were individually asked why they had come to America. Their answers were more positive than before, but still strongly materialist. Once again, they spoke about the rapacity of English landlords, the shortage of food, and their dreams for a better life in the New World.¹⁵

An important stimulus to emigration was correspondence from family and friends who had already made the journey. In 1729, two clergymen wrote that members of their congregations received “many letters from their friends and acquaintances …

[in the] plantations, inviting them to transport themselves thither, and promising them liberty and ease as the reward of their honest industry, with a prospect of transmitting their acquisitions and privileges safe to their posterity, without the imposition of growing rents and other burdens.”¹⁶

The process of migration itself also became more materialist in the eighteenth century. Much of it was organized for profit by shipping agents who scoured the countryside in search of likely prospects. The Atlantic crossing also tended to pass into the hands of greedy entrepreneurs, with horrific human consequences. Ships were laden beyond their capacity. In 1767, an epidemic broke out on board a crowded emigrant vessel sailing from Belfast to South Carolina; the unscrupulous owners had packed 450 people into its hold and more than 100 died at sea. Another ship bound from Belfast to Philadelphia ran out of food in mid-passage. Forty-six passengers starved to death; the survivors were driven to cannibalism and some even consumed the flesh of their own families. The transatlantic journey became more dangerous in the eighteenth century than it had been in the seventeenth. Mortality in ships sailing from North Britain approached that in the slave trade.¹⁷

When these people arrived in the New World, they faced intense prejudice from other ethnic groups. “I was looked upon as a barbarian,” wrote Lieutenant James MacMichael.¹⁸ But so desperate were conditions at home that few chose to return to the world that they had left. One Scots-Irish immigrant wrote from Pennsylvania in 1767, “I do not know one that has come here that desires to be in Ireland again.”¹⁹