white Englishmen and Irishmen were less welcome than obviously distinct,
and so segregatable, black slaves. The first blacks in Jamestown came off a
Dutch ship in 1619, but it would be decades before many others arrived.
In 1624–1625, only twelve black men and eleven black women are men-
tioned as living in English-controlled Virginia.
Many white servants had been convicts. Although Virginia had passed
a law in 1670, and Maryland in 1676, forbidding convicts from entering, an
Act of Parliament in 1717 opened both colonies to convicts; and, as Abbot
Emerson Smith wrote, “no one on either side of the Atlantic seems to have
doubted that a colonial law flatly prohibiting their importation could not
stand against the new parliamentary statute.” The colonial legislatures tried
a subtle way to avoid a confrontation with Parliament. Realizing that they
could not prevail in a head-to-head dispute, they enacted laws that made
the importation of convicts unprofitable. Fines were to be levied for various
acts of negligence, and impossibly high bonds were to be provided against
escape or subsequent misbehavior. In 1723 the contractors appealed
directly to the Board of Trade, a committee of the Privy Council that had
taken over from the Lords of Trade in 1696 to administer the colonies. The
contractors claimed, rightly, that the intent of the acts was to overrule
Parliament and render the transportation of felons impracticable. The
board agreed, and with unusual speed the Privy Council disallowed the
acts. There were subsequent attempts, but these were finally abandoned
just a generation before the Revolution broke out. In one instance, the king
personally instructed Governor Culpeper of Virginia “to allow the entry of
[the merchant Ralph] Williamson’s prisoners, any law, order, or custom of
Virginia to the contrary not withstanding. Thus protected against any colo-
nial disposition to exclude the Scots by virtue of the act against convicts,
Williamson loaded sixty-eight captives.” Private contractors are recorded as
having taken 17,740 felons from prisons in the area around London and
probably landed at least 20,000 in Virginia and Maryland in the thirty
years before the Revolution.
Other than prisoners and those who wished to emigrate, individuals
were kidnapped, drugged, plied with drink, or overwhelmed as they ate or
drank in taverns or walked London’s dark streets and alleys. Once in the
hands of “spirits” or “crimps,” a person had little chance to escape, as he
The Growth of the Colonies 161