America: Land of Human Smuggling

21st century Americans complain about "coyotes" smuggling people into the United States. Americans are absolutely indignant that some of those smuggled people might be criminals. It's not clear why. Human smuggling is an old American tradition. Indeed, the word "kidnapping" was invented precisely to describe the practice. Indeed, Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped was based upon a true story of exactly this British practice.

The earliest known use of the verb kidnap is from A brief historical relation of State affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, by Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), annalist and book collector; he wrote that, on 23rd May 1682, there was:

"a tryall at the kings bench barr upon an indictment against Mr. John Wilmore, for spiriting or kidnapping away a young boy under the age of 13 years, called Richard Siviter, and sending him to Jamaica : the jury was a very good one, returned out of the county of Kent : the witnesses against him were some to prove that there was in generall such a trade as kidnapping or spiriting away children, and that he did beleive [sic] there had been above 500 sent away in two years at Christmas last."

Up to 75 percent of all the individuals who came off the transatlantic ships in the 17th century were indentured servants, but the European servants did not always come willingly:

Boys and girls of the poorer classes were hustled on board ships and virtually sold into slavery for a term of years. Kidnaping or ‘spiriting’ became a fine art under Charles II. Slums and alleys were raked for material to stock the plantations… About 1670 no fewer than ten thousand persons were ‘spirited’ away from England in one year. One kidnaper testified in 1671 that he had sent five hundred persons a year to the colonies for twelve years and another testified that he had sent 840 in one year.

Without Indentures: Index to White Slave Children in Colonial Court Records [Maryland and Virginia] by Richard Hayes Phillips, lists more than 5,000 children who were kidnapped from England, Ireland, Scotland and New England and sold into slavery in Maryland and Virginia from 1660 to 1720. These kidnappings were the result of the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor, also known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, which stipulated that children who were orphaned or whose parents were unable to support them could be taken in by parish officials and apprenticed to local tradespeople.  This law was amended in 1609, 1662 and again in 1697 and 1722, giving officials progressively more power to deal with children who were beggars or vagrants. These children were not indentured and the courts assigned their time of servitude. 

Government kidnapping of children was not an unusual event. By 1600, Queen Elizabeth had granted entertainers the right to kidnap children in order to use them as performers in the theater. Once the children were taken, the parents had little recourse. But the shenanigans did not stop with kidnapping children for transport to the colonies. In 1718, Britain passed the Transportation Act, which allowed convicts to be sold as indentured servants in the colonies. Britain shipped  approximately 60,000 convicts, dubbed "the King's passengers." Roughly ninety percent stayed in Maryland and Virginia. Between 1718 and 1775, up to one quarter of the British immigrants to America were convicts sold into servitude by the British government. According to the vicar of Wendover, transportation served the purpose of ‘draining the Nation of its offensive Rubbish’. Benjamin Franklin compared the practice to the emptying of a chamber pot on a colonial dinner table. But, the practice was  so popular in England that Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in order to support the government practice.

On both the Atlantic passage and during their servitude, European convicts were treated worse than slaves as they brought less cash, were less physically fit, and had criminal records. They were typically bought by poorer farmers who could not afford slaves. 

The French populated its Louisiana territories in much the same way the English populated their colonies. Charles Law shipped convicts and kidnapped children to the Gulf coast en masse. Being Catholic, the French actually took the time to perform mass marriages of the kidnapped children, to assure family formation and increased population once the newlywed kidnap victims arrived in their new location. Unfortunately for their plan, more than half the women and nearly a quarter of the men typically died during transport. 

So, prior to the Revolution, roughly 30 percent of American immigrants were convicts who were sentenced to be transported to the colonies and sold as indentured servants. Thousands more were kidnapped children either assigned by the courts to servitude for the crime of being an orphan, or spirited away by professional kidnappers who made their living off human trafficking. When someone tells you they can trace their lineage back to the earliest American settlers, the chances are quite good their ancestor was a convict or a kidnap victim.

Welcome to American history.