"Asylum for Mankind": America 1607-1800. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2000 by James A. Henretta

"Asylum for Mankind": America 1607-1800. By Marilyn C. Baseler (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. xi plus 353pp.).

Most studies of American immigration focus on the period between 1830 and 1920, using that era of massive voluntary migration as the norm by which to measure previous and future developments. In Asylum for Mankind, Marilyn Baseler adopts a different perspective, providing a broad and enlightening sociopolitical analysis of the first two centuries of European settlement in British North America, a period when migration had a very different size and character. Nonetheless, Baseler argues, this era had the same conflicts (over cultural diversity and nativism, for example) as later periods, and established lasting policies toward immigrants and aliens.

Baseler's story begins with the decision by early seventeenth-century English monarchs to allow private adventurers to establish colonies first in Ireland and then in America. Because this emigration threatened to drain the nation of investment capital and skilled workers, it was quickly criticized as contrary to mercantilist principles. Consequently, English political leaders devised a new immigration policy consistent with the mercantilist thinking that informed the Acts of Trade and Navigation enacted between 1660 and 1696. Henceforth the government would discourage the migration of productive English men and women to its American settlements, populating them instead with enslaved Africans, English criminals and vagrants, and European Protestants fleeing religious persecution and economic hardship. As Baseler points out, this decision to fill British America with "People Not Our Own" set the future United States on the path to becoming an "asylum for mankind."

England's new policy was intended to quell domestic unrest: xenophobic opposition to the influx of French and German Protestants, artisans' fears of skilled foreign workers, and struggles between the King and Parliament over control of naturalization. But its effect generated intense passions in America and prompted the colonial assemblies to limit the importation of convicts and slaves. When the British government vetoed this legislation excluding involuntary migrants, the assemblies turned their energies to encouraging settlement by higher-status social groups, using incentives of free land, low taxes, and laws that permitted aliens to own and bequeath property. The consequent eighteenth-century migration of tens of thousands of land-hungry European farm families and persecuted Protestants cemented the idea of British America as both a religious asylum and "the best poor man's country."

The American Revolution fixed these principles in the consciousness of the new nation, as Patriots influenced by "Real Whig" ideology celebrated the United States as the new torchbearer of political liberty and economic opportunity. American governments added substance to this outlook by providing free land and easy naturalization to British and Hessian deserters and welcoming republican-minded military volunteers from Europe. According to Baseler, the immediate post-war years witnessed substantial migration, not only of enslaved African workers but also of British, Irish, and German farmers and artisans. To bolster this argument, which is based primarily on contemporary accounts rather than statistical data, she points out that British officials tried mightily to deter emigration, warning prospective migrants of the imminent collapse of the American republics, banning the departure of skilled mechanics, and defining British subjectship as perpetual, a status that could be dissolved only by treason.

As Baseler explains in detail in her final three chapters, many Americans were also opposed to the wholesale movement of peoples across the Atlantic. During the 1780s state governments obstructed the return of Loyalists and British merchants, limited the Atlantic slave trade, protested strongly against the clandestine flow of British convicts (under the guise of "indentured servants"), and banned aliens from becoming lawyers or officers in business corporations. Furthermore, revenue-conscious American governments ended the policy of assisting ambitious European immigrants with free grants of land, selling it instead to land speculators and settlers with ready cash.

The 1790s brought the first national legislation on naturalization. Worried about the influx of undesirable migrants and of potentially "dependent" industrial workers, in 1790 future Republicans enacted congressional legislation that required two years of residency prior to citizenship and, respecting states' rights, allowed naturalization by state governments as well as national officials. Much more restrictive Federalist measures followed in 1795 and 1798, fueled primarily by the ideological passions and political conflicts unleashed by the French Revolution. These laws made naturalization the sole prerogative of the national government, increased residency requirements for citizenship first to five and then to fourteen years, and imposed restrictions on aliens from both "friendly" and "enemy" nations. Following Jefferson's triumph, the Republican Congress in 1802 restored the five-year waiting period for citizenship, thus resuscitating America's reputation as an asylum. But, suggesting a wariness about al iens that has continued into the present, Congress left unchanged the "Alien Enemies" act of 1798, providing a statutory basis for the forced removal of British aliens from port cities to inland areas during the War of 1812.