ABSTRACT

William Winterbottom wrote this letter in 1895 from New York to his cousin, some 55 years after his emigration from Saddleworth (near Huddersfield in Lancashire), in about 1840. A carpenter by trade, Winterbottom was a radical, which he became after his grandfather was tarred and feathered for his political activities. This is a good reminder of how British political oppression could perhaps make emigrants out of some victims and inspire them to appreciate America’s greater political liberty. A half-century after his emigration, Winterbottom’s bitterness with England is still palpable: ‘we was planted and reared on what we know to be a verry small Island furnished with Lords Barons Kings and we thare dependants & Subjects we had no say in the mater only work and Obay just Animals’. And whereas Cobden and Bright were admired by many British immigrants for their ‘radical’ support for the working man, Winterbottom was not impressed: ‘as for Bright & Cobden did thay ever do one thing to better the sons of Soil no never it all the Love of gain & Self reduced man to the level of a Machiene’. While these problems supposedly festered in Britain, in America ‘the Honest willing and industrious are never forsaken and thare seed are not Beggers’. If only that had been true. Yet, in many British immigrants’ experience in America, it was.