Early America was a dumping ground for criminals - Now that explains everything!

So it seems that America received a higher-than-normal percentage of the criminal gene pool in its early years.

And what say those criminal genes? They say - "We don't die, we multiply!"

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To be honest, I don't have much history on this.. so appreciate if anyone more familiar can contribute some of the history..

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I was walking down my block and saw this flag -


The Gadsden flag


Seeing it before, but never really understanding it's meaning, I looked it up.

It turns out.. "The flag is named after American general and statesman Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805), who designed it in 1775 during the American Revolution. It was also used by the Continental Marines as an early motto flag, along with the Moultrie Flag. In modern times, the Gadsden flag is sometimes associated with the Tea Party movement." - The Gadsden Flag

The symbolism of the snake originated from Benjamin Franklin. "In 1751, he made the first reference to the rattlesnake in a satirical commentary published in his Pennsylvania Gazette. It had been the policy of Britain to send convicted criminals to America, so Franklin suggested that they thank the British by sending rattlesnakes to England."

"In 1754, during the French and Indian War, Franklin published his famous woodcut of a snake cut into eight sections. It represented the colonies, with New England joined together as the head and South Carolina as the tail, following their order along the coast. Under the snake was the message "Join, or Die". This was the first political cartoon published in an American newspaper."

"As the American colonies came to identify more with their own communities and the concept of liberty, rather than as vassals of the British empire, icons that were unique to the Americas became increasingly popular. The rattlesnake, like the bald eagle and American Indian, came to symbolize American ideals and society."

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Anyway, that is enough about the flag..

So there you go - Early America was a dumping ground for Britain's convicted criminals.

Wonder if this had any effect on American business and culture?

Some more info:

"The British, French, and other colonial empires heavily used North America.. as penal colonies to varying degrees, sometimes under the guise of indentured servitude" - en.wikipedia.org...

"The British used colonial North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. Merchants would transport the convicts and auctioned them off to (for example) plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century." - en.wikipedia.org...

"Indentured servitude was a labour system whereby young people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a certain number of years. It was widely employed in the 18th century in the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. It was especially used as a way for poor youth in Britain and the German states to get passage to the American colonies. They would work for a fixed number of years, then be free to work on their own. The employer purchased the indenture from the sea captain who brought the youths over; he did so because he needed labour." - en.wikipedia.org...

"For more than a century, England used its North American colonies as a dumping ground for its unwanted criminals. Societies without prisons generally rely on physical punishment and exile as punishment for all levels of crime. England had used branding, beating, mutilation, and the death penalty for centuries. On paper, British law relied heavily on the latter penalty for all sorts of crimes, from petty theft to the most heinous acts of violence. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, England had some 225 capital offenses on the books. However, as many historians have pointed out, juries hesitated to convict if they believed that a minor crime against property would result in the death penalty. The legal system relieved that stress through the ingenious mechanism of the king’s pardon commuting the death penalty into transportation to the colonies. Few people objected to shipping common criminals off to North America, with more than fifty thousand having been transported to the American colonies by 1775. Transportation not only relieved the English of thousands of criminals, but it also allowed them to treat their American cousins with contempt, as when Samuel Johnson declared the Americans “a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”; "In 1759 Benjamin Franklin publicly complained that the policy was “an insult and contempt, the cruelest perhaps that ever one people offered another” -

Book Review of "A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain's Convicts after the American Revolution."

Im not sure I believe this theory.

If it were true Americans should be as Awesome as us Aussies who are pretty much all descendants of crims yet you find that Aussies are exponentially Awesomer.

Theory debunked right there.

Glad I could help

It seems convicts were also dropped in remote stations of Africa where they ran amok as Brit 'soldiers' - "criminals do not always make good soldiers--especially in the absence of any military training--and making them soldiers provided numerous opportunities for crime that could be committed under the guise of military necessity. “Murray was still the master criminal,” Christopher writes, “but now he wore a British Army uniform. It would all end badly” - same book review from above


In context:
"The reader shares the researcher’s sense of wonder as she explores yet another outrageous aspect of Britain’s transportation policy. I am once more reminded of colonial Jamestown, of which Edmund S. Morgan so memorably said, they “made nearly every possible mistake and some that seem almost impossible.”

However, it is worth noting Christopher’s larger point, that the British government acted to solve a domestic problem by sending convicts overseas without any planning, lacking even a “specific destination”. After 1782 the government was no longer putting convicts in the army as the American Revolution drew to a close, though it continued to send them to Africa. No step of this operation seems to have been thought through, as the convicts were dropped off without food or supplies at remote imperial outposts. The result, as many contemporaries predicted, was a catastrophe for those involved, making Africa synonymous with death. The Lord Mayor of Plymouth, John Nicol, challenged the Home Office over its use of “so severe a Sentence as that of Transportation [to] the Coast of Africa,” which was tantamount to a death sentence. Nor did England benefit from the practice; the Royal African Company persistently complained that these convicts did more harm than good, disrupting British control of the region and inflicting serious harm to their interests. It appears that no one in the ministry ever addressed directly the most obvious problem: criminals do not always make good soldiers--especially in the absence of any military training--and making them soldiers provided numerous opportunities for crime that could be committed under the guise of military necessity. “Murray was still the master criminal,” Christopher writes, “but now he wore a British Army uniform. It would all end badly” "

a reply to: IkNOwSTuff

What theory?

This is just history.

We might have washed our hands with criminals and orphans years ago sending them far away,but that gene pool must be tiny compared to normal immigration

Today's crims are selfish and reckless all about the money culture glorified in media with films and fast food music( easy to produce) .Evil people become role models to morality free youth who do anything to get money rather than work :-/

a reply to: nOraKat

I think Franklin is an Aquarian like myself and we do have an off the wall sense of humour even seeing the ridiculous as funny, or sad.

I suspect he didn't need to send rattlers to England as we have no end of them sitting in our parliament and running our institutions. - substitute the physical snake for the psychopathic.

I didn't know we sent criminals I thought they were suppolsed to go to Australia. Mind you we kept a huge number also.

originally posted by: nOraKat
Early America was a dumping ground for Britain's convicted criminals.

So was Australia.

Seems we're in good company.

Also and more importantly, most US Americans are descendent from practically every nationality, religious, ethnic and racial background on Earth not just British.

originally posted by: nOraKat
a reply to: IkNOwSTuff

What theory?

This is just history.

We all know that history is written by the victors and its fairly obvious that the Criminals who now control America have won.
They have revised history so that it seems like they were always there when, as I demonstrated with my comparison of Yanks and Aussies that was clearly not the case. America was most likely founded by descent blokes and sheilas who have since regressed into the degenerates we now call Americans and us Aussies who were founded by scum have now evolved into what is basically just super mega Awesomeness.

Dont mean to burst your bubble but my logic is infallible and your history books are lies

It annoys me when Americans bag Australia for having a convict past when the lands of the USA had their own convict history. Although i must admit it is pretty funny when some don't know their own history.

Overall, i find the arguments redundant, considering convicts made up a minority of the immigrant populations of Australia and the USA. The majority of Australians and Americans can trace their history back to free settlers.

Posting in a stealth bashing Britain thread,

Like its our fault the US, has there own problems, yes we dumped our criminals both in Aus and the US, however you are not born a criminal its the choices you make.



Like the US and Brit relationship isn't strained enough.

Our Empire Fell The clocks ticking for you USA

B

originally posted by: IkNOwSTuff
Im not sure I believe this theory.

If it were true Americans should be as Awesome as us Aussies who are pretty much all descendants of crims yet you find that Aussies are exponentially Awesomer.

Theory debunked right there.

Glad I could help

I think the last time I checked around 27% of Australians were immigrants that had nothing to do with the criminals.

a reply to: IkNOwSTuff

We all know that history is written by the victors and its fairly obvious that the Criminals who now control America have won.

The problem with your theory is that most of the criminals running this country are descendants of later waves of immigration. The criminals sent here during the colonial period mainly ended up as dirt farmers. It was the entrepreneurs, mostly from sects called "Dissenters" at the time, who built the American economy and set it on its pragmatic ways. Many Americans cherish a myth of the early colonists being religious, like the pilgrims. They were not. They were ambitious.

originally posted by: IkNOwSTuff
Im not sure I believe this theory.

If it were true Americans should be as Awesome as us Aussies who are pretty much all descendants of crims yet you find that Aussies are exponentially Awesomer.

Theory debunked right there.

Glad I could help

It's true. Penal Colony

The British used colonial North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. Merchants would transport the convicts and auctioned them off to (for example) plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century. The State of Georgia for example was first founded by James Edward Oglethorpe by using penal prisoners taken largely from debtors' prison, creating a "Debtor's Colony". However, as this largely failed, though the idea that the state began as a penal has stayed both in popular history, and local lore.[1] The British also would often ship Irish and Scots to the Americas whenever rebellions took place in Ireland or Scotland, and they would be treated similar to the convicts, except that this also included women and children.

So yes we did get criminals but is more like the ones that went to jail for not paying their debts. Not so much the violent and disagreeable type. We got all the people who were at odds with the banks. It's no wonder we rebelled against the British banking system.

ETA: Also Australia was just a continuation of what the British were doing in America. Convicts in Australia

Transportation had been applied as a punishment for both major and petty crimes since the seventeenth century. Around 60,000 convicts were transported to the British colonies in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the American Revolutionary War brought an end to that means of disposal, the British Government looked elsewhere. After James Cook's famous voyage to the South Pacific in which he visited and claimed the east coast of Australia in the name of the British Empire, he described Botany Bay, the bay on which present-day Sydney sits, as an ideal place to establish a settlement. In 1788 the First Fleet arrived and the first British colony in Australia was established.

So your country is largely made up of the same people our country is made up of. Though it is a fallacy to suggest that because our ancestors were criminals, that somehow effects the mindset of their kin.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

I think he was stating that in jest.

e got all the people who were at odds with the banks.

We got the type of people who stole a loaf of bread due to starvation, lol.

a reply to: daaskapital

Possibly, but I still wanted to verify the OP.

originally posted by: Whereismypassword
..but that gene pool must be tiny compared to normal immigration ..

According to Wikipedia - "..convicts were sent to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century."

In other countries like Africa, the Brit criminals supposedly ran amok. Not sure the effects here in the states.

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To be fair, there are criminals everywhere. Bandits go around plundering small villages around the world; though early US colonies may have had a disproportionate amount. I suspect they weren't all people who just stole a loaf of bread..

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Btw - this is not a Brit bashing thread. I just thought that it was interesting history.

a reply to: nOraKat

It's not a surprising account by any means though. The British considered themselves to be "civilized" and that means jailing and putting the undesirables out of sight and out of mind. Well luckily back in the day that meant some distant land with no hope of ever returning to your home country. If it wasn't for the fact that every piece of land is currently claimed by some country in this world, we'd probably be doing the same thing with our criminals now.

Have you ever read the sci-fi book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? It's a FANTASTIC book that discusses things like this, authoritarian rule, and rebelling against the homeland.

So there you go - Early America was a dumping ground for Britain's convicted criminals.

So was Australia. No mention of them? Canada was also (somewhat) a convict colony as well. France unloaded criminals here early on in our history, in the region that is now called Quebec. No mention of us either? This seems a little biased towards America bashing doesn't it?

What you're saying (or at least what I think you're saying) is illogical and highly unlikely. The founders of America had "criminal genes" and those in power still have those genes now, and are responsible for the mess the world is in? Behavior is more to do with the environment a person is raised in.

Yes, greedy WASPs are pretty much to blame for a good sized portion of the world's problems, but not because of 'genes' passed down from the first settlers.