Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

Bernard Bailyn built Voyagers to the West around a single remarkable source, the register of emigrants that the Lords of the Treasury required British customs officers to keep from 1773 to 1776, recording nearly everyone who left Britain for the American colonies in the last years before war closed that door. Bailyn asks who those people actually were and why they left, in the final stretch of peace before the Revolution cut off more than a century of British emigration to America.

Working from the names, trades, ages, and destinations the registers recorded, Bailyn reconstructs two distinct streams within that final wave. Indentured servants, recruited largely out of southern England, tended toward the mid Atlantic colonies where labor demand was highest, while family groups from Scotland and the north of England moved instead in search of land, pushing toward the colonial backcountry. Bailyn shows agents and shipowners organizing much of this movement as an increasingly commercial enterprise in its own right, with servants signing contracts binding their labor for a fixed term of years in exchange for passage across the Atlantic, rather than emigration remaining the purely individual, family by family decision earlier historians had generally assumed it to be. Bailyn treats this closing wave of migration as the last chapter of the colonial peopling of America, a process the Revolution would then interrupt for a generation.

Reading Voyagers to the West means following painstaking demographic reconstruction, individual named emigrants traced through customs records rather than a narrative built around famous events or leaders. It suits a reader drawn to migration history and the human texture of who actually crossed the Atlantic in these years, over the political leadership that made the Revolution itself.