Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/330

 amazingly copious. In the years 1771 and 1772, the number of emigrants to America from the North of Ireland alone amounted to 17,350, almost all of whom emigrated at their own charge; a great majority consisting of persons employed in the linen manufacture, or farmers, and possessed of some property which they converted into money and carried with them. Within the first fortnight of August, 1773, there arrived at Philadelphia three thousand five hundred emigrants from Ireland; and from the same document which has recorded this circumstance it appears that vessels were arriving every month, freighted with emigrants from Holland, Germany, and especially from Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. About seven hundred Irish settlers repaired to the Carolinas in the autumn of 1773; and, in the course of the same season, no fewer than ten vessels sailed from Britain with Scottish Highlanders emigrating to the American States. As most of the emigrants, and particularly those from Ireland and Scotland, were persons discontented with their condition or treatment in Europe, their accession to the colonial population, it might reasonably be supposed, had no tendency to diminish or counteract the hostile sentiments towards Britain which were daily gathering force in America. And yet these persons, especially the Scotch, were in general extremely averse to an entire and abrupt rejection of British authority. Their patriotic attachment, enhanced as usual by distance from its object, always resisted and sometimes prevailed over their more rational and prudent convictions; and more than once, in the final struggle, were the interests of British prerogative espoused and supported by men who had been originally driven by hardship and ill usage from Britain to America. Among other emigrants doubtless cherishing little reverence for their native country, whom Britain continued to discharge upon her colonies, were numbers of convicted felons, who were conveyed in general to the States in which tobacco was cultivated, and labored during the allotted period of their exile with the negro slaves. Of these persons, the most abandoned characters generally found their way back to England; but many contracted improved habits, and remained in America. All enlightened and patriotic Americans resented as an indignity, and all the wealthy slave-owners detested as a political mischief, this practice of the parent state,—of which the last instance seems to have occurred in the course of the present year. In England, many persons were so unjust and unreasonable as to make the conduct of their government in this respect a matter of insult and reproach to the Americans,—as if the production of crime were not a circumstance more truly disgraceful to a people than their casual and involuntary association with criminals.

A convention was held this year in Georgia, by Sir James Wright, the governor of the colony, with a numerous deputation of the chiefs of the Creek and Cherokee tribes, who willingly ceded to the British king several millions of acres of valuable land, in the