England Dumped its Convicts off in America

For more than a century, England used its North American colonies as a dumping ground for its unwanted criminals.

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”. He suggested that it would only be fair for the colonies to ship rattlesnakes to Britain in exchange. The American Revolution created a crisis for the British legal system, which had a serious backlog of criminals sentenced to transportation with nowhere to send them. It is well known that eventually the British government decided to use Australia as a home for its undesirables.

Michigan State University
[link to www2.h-net.msu.edu]

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