English Settlers in Early Wisconsin: the British Temperance Emigration Society

Abstract

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.