Settler Revolution

The hidden movement of the 19th Century

On 26th of January, 1788 all eleven ships of the First Fleet would at last lay anchor in Port Jackson, Australia. After a momentous journey of over 250 days and 15,000 miles, the crews and passengers of the ship would disembark and go about building their new lives as convicts in Britain’s new penal colony.

That colony of less than 2000 people, in a little over a century, would become nearly 4 million spread across a continent. A prisoner’s colony had transformed itself into a leading member of the British Empire. Australia’s population boom wasn’t the result of prisoner fecundity or mass deportation of British criminals, but by massive and explosive immigration from the Home Country.

How is it that a literal prison became a premier destination for the tired, poor and teeming masses of Great Britain? Standard historiography will point towards specific moments in Australian history, like the Ballarat and Bendigo gold rushes, as the primary catalysts driving colonization. But if the transformation from prison to paradise was an accident of history, then why did a similar story play out across the fellow Dominion of Canada? Looking beyond the Empire, the settlement of the Western United States follows the similar narrative arc, from inhospitable wilds to a yeoman’s paradise.

It was not gold that drove the settlement of Ontario and Ohio, but dreams.

Settled peoples are by definition adverse to migration. Before the 19th Century, only intense social and economic pressures induced Britons to leave their home isles for foreign lands an ocean away. Once settled, they tended to remain relatively well put, despite shocking increases in population pressure. The most famous and extreme example comes from New England of the then Thirteen Colonies. After 1640, and the arrival of some 20,000 people, little emigration from Britain to New England followed. These 20,000 people would multiply into over 700,000 by 1780. Yet despite a 35x increase, the people of New England failed to replicate a journey similar to what their forefathers accomplished.

Generally speaking across the whole of the Thirteen Colonies, population density was largest along the Eastern Seaboard and rapidly diminished into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Beyond those great hills, few cared to venture. Those that did were often considered semi-savage outlaws. Individuals who were unable to survive in civilized society and needed (or sometimes forced) to venture beyond it’s bounds. Images of Western savagery certainly weren’t helped by the fact they were largely under the control of the “savage” Indians.

Similar stories play out in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Australia, as discussed in the opening was literally a penal colony and the refuge of convicted criminals. Canada was a frozen North, the rump of North America outshine by the bounty of the United States. New Zealand’s native Maori had rumors of cannibalism. Emigration in Britain was seen as a method of casting off poor malcontents.

This changed at the start of the 19th Century. Part of the change stemmed from official government support. One of the key objects of the United States since independence was organizing the Western claims of the various colonies and establishing a system of sale and settlement. In Canada, the British government took Loyalist refugees from the Colonies en masse and settled with grants of land. In Australia, large land grants were issued to first to retiring officers and later wealthy British speculators.

Government support did not initiate mass migration, but it did help establish a new founding population composed of more than adventurers, vagabonds and criminals. While the previous inhabitants may have been content or even enjoyed living on the margins of civilization, the new comers were not. The change in attitude can be detected in a shift in language. During the 18th century, the primary word used to describe those leaving their homeland for a colony was “emigrant,” a word whose focus was on the act of leaving. In the first half the 19th, new words began to come in vogue: colonist, immigrant and, most popular of all, settler.

Each word attempted to paper over different stigmas associated with emigration and the act of leaving one’s homeland. Colonist denoted a sense of order and gentility and was most popular in upper crust Great Britain. Immigrant, an American invention, focused on the act of entering the new country rather than the old. But it was settler which came to be the most prolific and popular term. One which reaches into the present day.

Settlers did not leave or enter a “new country.” Rather they brought the country with them, building it up brick by brick. The change in language underscores intentions. The new foundling populations in America’s West and Britain’s (eventual) Dominions did not seek to leave civilization, but to expand and replicate it.

And to do that, they needed people. Lots of them. Settler’s with means and connections, such as Canada’s largely United Loyalist ‘Family Compact,’ would often pull strings and connections to promote migration. Whether it was helping build the initial housing of a new town or township, lobbying banks and governments for public improvement funds or helping pay travel fares, they would do whatever they could to entice more people.

But by far, their most effective method was the publishing of booster literature. Books, pamphlets, newspaper ads, newspaper articles, testimonials, all manner of written word was published promoting the settler spirit. Problems were either downplayed or recast into positives: Bears were timid, Canadian winters built character. Positives were amplified: farms became Edenic Gardens yielding vegetables the size of cows.

And it was here that in the realm of boosting that the average settler could play a part too. Writing back to friends and family back home, yeoman settlers often took a similar tone to officially published works, helping reinforce in the minds of their impressionable readers that what awaited in the great unknown was a land of plenty.

Imagine how an Englishman would feel reading how is felon cousin, shipped off to Australia for theft, wrote back declaring his life better as convict in Australia than as a freeman in England?

Boosting was not magic. It did not work overnight. But it was prolific. And over the course of a century it worked to change emigration, the last resort of the bottom dregs of society, into settlement, the golden ticket to prosperity of a respectable family: A Settler Revolution.