Immigration

Colonial America

As the American colonies became settlement societies, the British government and the joint stock companies that ran most of the early colonies appealed to men's desire for economic opportunity and to religious dissenters' desire for greater freedom of religious expression. Immigration, then, and the ideals of manhood that shaped it, were grounded in notions of economic opportunity and greater liberty.

The dynamics and demographics of immigration shaped the transfer of English ideals of patriarchal manhood to colonial America. In New England, the immigration of whole families allowed for a relatively stable transmission of social structures and relations, including patriarchal forms of family and political governance. In the Chesapeake region, however, a mostly male immigration and a low life expectancy due to disease produced clear departures from strict patriarchal household governance and economic power. In this setting, family structures were destabilized and women were allowed greater opportunities to own property. But as natural population growth gradually supplanted immigration, life expectancy increased, and the gender ratio became more balanced, patriarchal social patterns became more firmly entrenched.

The development of the American colonies into settlement societies encouraged more immigration, with significant consequences for notions of manliness. Coming from Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as Great Britain, colonial-era immigrants organized their ideas about manliness less around loyalty to British colonial forces and notions specific to British culture than around more abstract notions of political liberty, equality, religious freedom, and independent property ownership. The French aristocrat J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, for example, felt that coming to colonial America had made him into a new type of man, one who defined his manliness and self-worth around landownership and productive endeavor rather than aristocratic status. Such notions of manliness played a significant part in the development of proindependence sentiment during the 1770s.

Early National and Antebellum America

Immigration was disrupted by the American Revolution, and by European wars during the decades that followed, but it began to surge after the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. It was further stimulated and facilitated by new developments in transportation and communication, such as canals, railroads, steamships, and the telegraph, as well as by such social and political crises in Europe as the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the Irish potato famine of the late 1840s. Between the 1830s and 1850s, German and Irish immigrants—by far the most numerous groups—relocated to the United States for differing reasons and developed different ideals of manhood.

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