Before the era of separation, the American planters had begun to resent the influx of felons. Free labor grew plentiful, and the colonial reputation was compromised: nor were these the sole reasons for opposition; the management of negro slaves became a capital branch of domestic industry; the _prestige_ of color was endangered by the subjection of white men to the discipline of slavery.
The practice of transportation did not terminate until the era of independence. The Canadas remained loyal; but the ministers of the day did not deem it prudent to reward their submission with the stigma of transportation.
Franklin, when the colonists were about to cast off the imperial rule of Great Britain, complained of this system: he compared it to pouring "cargoes of rattlesnakes on the shores of England." He, however, maintained that this description of exiles formed but a small proportion of the American people; that of one million, eighty thousand only had been brought over the ocean, and of these one-eighth only were convicts. In reference to the number transported to America, the accounts of the British and American writers considerably differ. None were sent to the New England colonies. Jefferson, during his diplomatic residence in France, furnished a statement for the _Encyclopédie Méthodique_, in which he asserted that the convict element of the American population was too small to deserve enumeration. He estimated the total number at 2,000, and their descendants at 4,000, in 1785, or something more than one-thousandth part of the entire people. This calculation has been, perhaps justly, charged with partiality; but it is useless to meet error by conjecture.[50] This obvious topic of sarcasm was early adopted. Party writers poisoned the shafts of political warfare, by references to the convict element of the trans-atlantic population: "their Adam and Eve emigrated from Newgate,"[51]--"their national propensities to fraud, they inherited from their convict ancestors,"--"they are the offspring of convicts, and they have retained the disposition of their felon progenitors." Such were the sayings of critics, lords, and statesmen: it was thus they described a people, who among their forefathers can enumerate heroes and saints; who, flying from the scourge of bigotry and despotism, laid the foundation of an empire. Can we expect more complacency?