We have already discussed the push-pull factor, forces operating in both directions, east and west. The English and other colonists who came to America voluntarily came for different reasons, but virtually all could be boiled down to one essential point: They wanted to improve their lives. Behind that self-evident fact was the additional idea that they had different backgrounds and different primary motivations. Some were seeking economic advantage—most of all, a chance to become landowners. The decision to emigrate was also often spurred by conditions in England and elsewhere in Europe—during times of strife or economic hardship, the impetus for emigration was stronger than in good, stable times. Some emigrants were moderately prosperous, and saw the New World as an opportunity for investment that would allow them to move up a few notches on the economic scale. In general, however, the very well-to-do did not emigrate because they had everything to lose and could gain only at great risk.
The very poor did not come at first because they had nothing to offer—no skills, no money for passage, and so on. To obtain a contract as an indentured servant, one had to have something to offer—a skill such as blacksmithing or farm experience or the price of passage—so the poorest of the poor, who were generally chronically unemployed and had no skills to speak of, tended not to be among those who came voluntarily. Later many poor people came against their will—some were prisoners who were offered a chance to go to America in lieu of a prison sentence, and others came as indentured servants, some sold into that temporary form of servitude by parents or families. Both convicts and indentured servants had a chance to succeed because labor was dear in America and they were valued far more than they might have been at home.
In 1618 the Virginia Company instituted the "headright" system, which guaranteed that any person who immigrated into Virginia or paid for another person to settle in Virginia would receive fifty acres of land for each immigrant. The person entitled would get a certificate entitling him to a tract of 50 acres. People already settled in Virginia would get two headright grant, or 100 acres. The purpose of the headright system was to encourage immigration, a measure of how valuable labor was where land was cheap. (The United States government later used a similar policy to stimulate settlement of the West.)
Things began slowly. By 1620 maybe 2,500 colonists existed in all the English colonies in North America. A great migration of Puritans and others occurred from 1630 to 1642. Because of the need for labor to "develop" America, as mentioned above, vigorous recruiting methods were used—inmates of jails and poorhouses were loaded into the ships. The fundamental economic fact about America was the opposite of what existed in Europe: America was land rich and labor starved—much of Europe almost an exact mirror image.
Some settlers came to America for religious freedom, to be able to practice their faith as they wished. But as we shall see, however, the desire for religious freedom did not necessarily mean the desire to have everybody share that freedom. In Puritan Massachusetts, for example, members of other faiths were not welcome. And in Anglican Virginia, it was virtually impossible up to the time of the Revolution for a minister other than Anglican to obtain a license to preach. Maryland became a refuge for Catholics, and the religious diversity of Pennsylvania was an exception.
World History
