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English Settlers in Early Wisconsin: the British Temperance Emigration Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

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Extract

Historians, as they search the mounting wave of assisted emigration from Britain to North America during the 1830s and 40s, naturally expect the quantity of surviving record to vary with the source of assistance. The wealth of their material, that is to say, is likely to differ according as the emigrants' sponsor was (e.g.) the government, a Poor Law Union, a co-operative society, a trade association, a private philanthropist or a calculating landlord. As a rule, a small number of men and women banding together to leave these shores, and being neither a true group migration nor an experimental community, would leave behind few traces outside the folios of family correspondence. To this the British Temperance Emigration Society was no exception. We cannot be sure what its members really had in common; whether temperance, or Primitive Methodism, or small shopkeeping, or artisanship in distress. Its very existence is discernible this side of the Atlantic only by a few short items in a handful of mid-century provincial journals.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1964

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References

1. Some of these are cited by Shepperson, Wilbur S.: British Emigration to North America (Oxford, 1957) p. 127.Google Scholar
2. Used for a small History of the Township and Village of Mazomanie by W. Kittle (Madison, Wis., 1900).Google Scholar
3. John Gorst papers, Wis. State Hist. Library, at Madison.Google Scholar
4. For the Potters’ enterprise see chiefly Owen, Harold: The Staffordshire Potter (London, 1901) pp. 63101, and G. Foreman in Wisconsin Magazine of History XXI, No. 4 (Madison, 1938). The Potters’ Examiner of 18 May 1844 (vol. XXV. No. 1, pp. 196–8) reproduced extracts from the rules and regulations of the earlier Society, and commended them as a model.Google Scholar
5. Eastern Counties Herald (Hull), 23 August 1849.Google Scholar
6. Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol.XXV (1918): An English Settler in Pioneer Wisconsin (ed. Quaife) pp. 94 's Emigrants Journal of 18 January 1849 (vol. I, No. 16) advised: “Let the next batch of emigrants be stout, fearless fellows, specially charged to apply Lynch-law io the recusants in the shape of a smart cow-hiding”.Google Scholar