Michael Francklin, lieutenant governor and sometime temporary governor of Nova Scotia between 1766 and1776, oil portrait by J.S. Copley, circa 1762.
Seeking settlers for the land he had previously hoped to populate with New Englanders, Francklin left for England in 1769 to personally direct a recruitment campaign in Yorkshire. He concentrated his efforts in the farming areas of the North and East Ridings, where the great upheaval being experienced by the creation of large consolidated holdings from former scattered strips in the common fields made farmers and agricultural workers particularly receptive to his offer. Through his family and business contacts he had inside knowledge of tenant grievances on the Duke of Rutland’s estate. Here, it was simply a matter of directing resentful tenants toward Nova Scotia. Francklin placed his agents in Rillington, Skelton, Thirsk, Hovingham, Sowerby, Whitby, and Burniston — all towns in the North and East Riding of Yorkshire. The agents located potential settlers and arranged for their sea crossings from the nearby ports of Hull, Scarborough, Stockton-on-Tees (Durham), and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (see Map 3).16 By 1775, when the American Revolution halted the exodus, eight vessels had carried around nine hundred emigrants from the north of England to Nova Scotia.17
Map 3. Yorkshire: The Main Region of Emigration, 1772–75.
Francklin’s campaigning efforts attracted “a fine quality of substantial, knowledgeable men to whom the land was remarkable for not needing manure and the terms unbelievably tempting.”18 The Reverend John Eagleson, an Anglican missionary sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in London, observed in 1773 how “the country is fast settling, many English farmers annually coming over and settling among us; whose favourable accounts of the country to their friends seem to induce still more to emigrate hither.” His hope that “in a short time, this district will be settled with a sober, industrious and religious set of people”19 was borne out, although not without controversy and setbacks, and few would support his religion.
As the exodus grew, emigrants had to withstand criticism from Britain’s ruling classes, who feared that emigration would seriously deplete the country’s workforce and armed services. A correspondent writing in the York Chronicle in 1773 thought “it a matter of astonishment to every rational being in this Island, that the Government should permit such numerous emigration from the mother country.”20 And in his view, Michael Francklin’s involvement made a bad situation even worse:
It may be said that Government has just granted a large portion of land, in a neighbouring forest, for the purpose of population and agriculture. But how have they granted it? Not in the judicious manner in which settlers receive it in the American provinces…. The very land should have been parcelled out in small lots. Instead of this, one great man has the whole, and he naturally will make the most of it.21
The government’s anti-emigration stance required it to lament the loss of people, and yet it needed loyal British emigrants for its North American colonies. It would have to face up to this quandary eventually, but in 1773 the government’s principal aim was to contain the exodus that appeared to be spiralling out of control. Although parliamentary action to curb emigration was resisted, the government instructed customs officials at every port to record the numbers emigrating, thus providing passenger lists for the period from 1773 to 1775, showing who left on each ship and their reasons for leaving.22 Overall, the results reveal that farmers and craftsmen and tradesmen were particularly wellrepresented among the Yorkshire emigrants, while there were relatively few labourers and unskilled workers.
The disruption and higher rents caused by the creation of enclosed farms in Yorkshire was given as the principal motive for emigrating. As Mathew Walker, who sailed from Scarborough in 1774, explained, “all the small farms [had been] taken into large ones in his parish” and he “could not get bread.”23 Michael Pinkney, who travelled at the same time, said that he had been “turned off his farm, it being taken into a larger one.”24 In fact, Yorkshire had the largest acreage enclosed of any county in England, most of which took place from the late 1760s to the 1770s in the North and East Ridings. Men like Walker and Pinkney were in the front line. They faced higher rents, and eviction if they could not afford to pay them.
Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the American colonies and owner of estates in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had first-hand knowledge of enclosures. The distress being caused by rent rises on his estates was made very clear to him by William Lister, one of his tenants: If his Lordship “could see the tears running from his eyes I’m sure it would melt your heart.” 25 Claiming that Edward Elmsall, Lord Dartmouth’s farm manager, was singling out tenants whom he disliked to raise their rents and evict them if they could not pay, he thought the situation to be very unjust and that his Lordship should know that his neighbour Robert Dixon had “now gone to America.” But Lister knew his place: “Nay my dear, dear Landlord … I had rather go to my bare and bended knees [than cause any provocation].”26
However, contrary to William Lister’s account, Elmsall was well aware of the discontent on Lord Dartmouth’s estate and advised against further rent rises and brutal evictions. He deplored the extent to which “old tenants” were being removed by Thomas Gasgoine’s agent in Shropshire, stating that “the tenants have made much noise in this country,” and conveying his hope that similar action in West Yorkshire would “be disagreeable to your Lordship.”27 But although the pain was as great, few people emigrated from the West Riding since, in this more industrialized region, people had more employment alternatives and wages were generally regarded as good.28 Around the time that Lord Dartmouth was raising rents on his Yorkshire estates, he was also speculating on land in Nova Scotia and east Florida. Conveniently, his cousin Francis Legge happened to be governor of Nova Scotia and could offer sound advice:
Many of the nobility are soliciting for grants of land within this province [Nova Scotia] … and considering your numerous family, it may be of some advantage hereafter to some of your younger sons if they could obtain grants … if your Lordship could procure for four or five of your sons twenty thousand acres each, I shall take care to have them located in such places as they must of course in time become valuable, in the doing of which I shall be assisted by the Surveyor General.29
William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth (1731–1801). Portrait by Pompeo Batoni, circa 1753–56.
Courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH. Purchased through gifts from Jane and W. David Dance, Class of 1940; Jonathan Cohen, Class of 1960, Tuck 1961; Frederick B. Whittemore, Class of 1953, Tuck 1954; Barbara Dau Southwell, Class of 1978; and David Southwell, Tuck 1988; Parnassus Foundation/Jane and Raphael Bernstein; and an anonymous donor.
Benefiting financially from one’s political position carried little or no stigma at the time. People in high office, with large ambitions, felt they were entitled to grab the choicest land and did so. And yet, seemingly unmindful that colonizers would have to be found for his and his sons’ newly acquired lands, Lord Dartmouth railed against the rising level of emigration from Yorkshire:
The increase of the inhabitants in the province of Nova Scotia by emigration from this Kingdom may be of local advantage to this colony but is a circumstance of very alarming consequence and consideration in respect to the interests and security of Great Britain … it is an evil
