HKB
or else, if they could by begging or otherwise, arrive to the stock of 2s. 6d. to waft them over to Holland, become servants to the Dutch, who refuse none.
"But the principal growth and increase of the aforesaid plantations of Virginia and Barbadoes, happened in, or immediately after, our late civil wars, when the worsted party, by the fate of war, being deprived of their estates, and having, some of them, never been bred to labour, and others of them made unfit for it by the lazy habit of a soldier's life, their wanting means to maintain them all abroad, with his majesty, many of them betook themselves to the aforesaid plantations; and great numbers of Scotch soldiers of his majesty's army, after Worcester fight, were by the then prevailing powers voluntarily sent thither.
"Another great swarm or accession of the new inhabitants to the aforesaid plantations, as also to New England, Jamaica, and all other his majesty's plantations in the West Indies, ensued upon his majesty's restoration, when the former prevailing party being by a divine hand of providence brought under, the army disbanded, many officers displaced, and all the new purchasers of public titles dispossessed of their pretended lands, estates, &c. many became impoverished, and destitute of employment; and therefore such as could find no way of living at home, and some who feared the re-establishment of the ecclesiastical laws, under which they could not live, were forced to transport themselves, or sell themselves for a few years, to be transported by others, to the foreign English plantations. The constant supply, that the said plantations have since had, hath been such vagrant, loose people, as I have before mentioned, picked up especially about the streets of London and Westminster, and malefactors condemned for crimes, for which by law they deserved to die; and some of those people called quakers, banished for meeting on pretence of religious worship.
"Now, if from the premises it be duly considered, what kind of persons those have been, by whom our plantations have at all times been replenished, I suppose it will appear, that such they have been, and under such circumstances, that if his majesty had had no foreign plantations to which they might have resorted, England, however, must have lost them."
Any man, who will consider with attention these passages from Sir Josiah Child, may conjecture what Mr. Otis's observations upon them were. As I cannot pretend to remember them verbatim, and with precision, I can only say, that they struck me very forcibly. They were short, rapid; he had not time to be long: but Tacitus himself could not express more in fewer words. My only fear is, that I cannot do him justice.
In the first place, there is a great deal of true history in this passage, which manifestly proves, that the emigrants to America, in general, were not only as good as the people in general, whom they left in England, but much better, more courageous, more enterprizing, more temperate, more discreet, and more industrious, frugal, and conscientious: I mean the royalists as well as the republicans.
In the second place, there is a great deal of uncandid, ungenerous misrepresentations, and scurrilous exaggeration, in this passage of the great knight, which prove him to have been a fit tool of Charles 2d. and a suitable companion, associate and friend of the great knight, Sir George Downing, the second scholar in Harvard College catalogue.
But I will leave you, Mr. Tudor, to make your own observations and reflections upon these pages of Sir Josiah Child.
Mr. Otis read them with great reluctance; but he felt it his duty to read them, in order to show the spirit of the author, and the spirit of Sir George Downing's navigation act.
But, my friend, I am weary. I have not done with Mr. Otis or Sir Josiah Child. I must postpone, to another letter from your friend,
JOHN ADAMS.
TO THE HON. WM. TUDOR.