The Beginnings
King James VI & I expected his three kingdoms—Scotland and Ireland being the other two—to develop their own American colonies. By 1640, however, the surviving overseas plantations were all English, and neither Scots nor Irish were especially welcome. Nevertheless, many a Scot still made his way to Virginia, though not always under circumstances that commended the journey.
Countrymen called some of these émigrés "sorners," a Scots word that implies an importunate panhandler trying to get through life without working. Others were drifters, abducted servants, unwary youths, criminals, and such, men and women not so much adventurers seeking their dreams as being carried "furth"—that is to say, "out"—of Scotland, sometimes by deception, sometimes by order, sometimes for Scotland's good.
The Cromwellian era brought the first large-scale compulsory Scots migration to America, starting with the thousands of soldiers Cromwell captured when he destroyed Scottish armies at the battles of Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester. Rank and file often were transported—expelled into servitude—mainly to the English sugar islands in the West Indies. There they were profitably sold into bondage for a period of years.
By the end of the 1650s Scotland was part of a unitary state and the magistrates of Edinburgh exploited the freedom of trade this implied to export those they regarded as undesirable. The alternative was to put such persons in jail and maintain them. Clearly there were not enough vagabonds in 1666, for the council can next be found allowing Gibson to beat a drum for volunteer emigrants for Virginia through Edinburgh and its adjacent communities. Gibson offered clothing and food to those willing to undertake "such a profitable voyage." He had to present volunteers to the magistrates.
The flow of Scots transportees to Virginia then became more visible. Persecution of Covenanting groups unwilling to accept the claim of the restored English monarchy to supremacy in the kirk as well as in the state, and the defeat of the Covenanting rebellions, Politically awkward prisoners, like dissenting Presbyterian ministers who married people illegally, were dispatched to Virginia by the next available ship, as might be rebels refusing the loyalty oath.
Humble people could only afford a passage to Virginia by becoming indentured, but being already in custody and sentenced radically simplified your options. In 1700, for example, a senior criminal judge, gave a boy of about fifteen, James Hall, who was under sentence of death in Glasgow tolbooth for "thieving and pickery," the alternative of transportation to Virginia. Hall accepted.
A famine from 1696 to 1700 killed up to 15% of the population. James Chapman, sentenced to death in 1699 for stealing food for his family, appealed for banishment to America. He was whipped and put at Perth on the next appropriate ship. There were few volunteer indentured emigrants, however, and some refused to stay transported. Deportees Thomas Anderson and John Weir, were rearrested in Scotland in 1700.
People knew how indentured servants were treated. An English bondswoman in Maryland reported in 1756 that she was half-naked, poorly fed, "toiling almost Day and Night—with only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough, and then tied up and whipp'd to that Degree that you'd not serve an Animal."
White indentured field hands became scarce after 1700, and as slaves replaced them, racist attitudes strengthened. Southern colonies legislated against flogging white people naked, which meant they had been so flogged. Man or woman, you needed a strong stomach to volunteer as an unskilled indentured labourer in Virginia.
Virginia, with its perpetual labour shortage, offered high prices for indentured servants. Edinburgh ships, some of them wolves in sheep's clothing with names like The Ewe and Lamb, topped up their passenger list for Virginia with mugged and kidnapped people.
Until about 1740, Syndicates and their skippers were bound to pay a heavy fine for any prisoner who escaped before being landed in Virginia. Most Scots prisoners went to Virginia. Immigrant Scots women helped early eighteenth-century Virginia acquire a self-replacing population. Before 1700, the sex ratio and lifestyle ruled that out. And if Virginia suited these Scots, they did well by Virginia. Despite the homesickness, hardship, and misery, some Scots found that their land of exile had turned into a new home. In 1730, looking back over the first three generations of Scots migration to Virginia, Roderick Gordon, a ship's surgeon and from 1729 resident of King and Queen County, Virginia, wrote:
“Pity it is that thousands of my country people should be starving at home, when they may live here in peace and plenty, as a great many who have been transported for a punishment have found pleasure, profit, and ease and would rather undergo any hardship than be forced back on their own country.”
Source: Bruce P Lenman: Lusty Beggars, Dissolute Women, Sorners, Gypsies, and Vagabonds for Virginia