Welsh Journals

contacts that had developed with England, nineteenth-century Wales was still recognizably different, possessing a language and a culture of her own. It will hardly do, therefore, to group Welsh immigrants with the English in the manner, not alone of American immigration officers, but more notoriously of the Encyclo- paedia Britannica which for decades gave offence to Welshmen with its lofty directive: 'For Wales see England '.3 Though Welsh emigration was predominantly a nineteenth-century pheno- menon, the beginnings of the exodus date back to the 1680s, when groups of religious dissenters began to settle in Pennsylvania. The first sizable movement consisted of Quakers whose leaders had purchased from William Penn a 40,000 acre tract the so-called Welsh Barony on the west bank of the Schuylkill River. Coming from widely scattered parts of Wales and made up for the most part of lesser gentry and yeomen farmers, these people were to play a prominent part in the early history of Pennsylvania. They were closely followed by other sectarians Arminian Baptists from Radnorshire who settled on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and Calvinistic Baptists from West Wales who established themselves on the Delaware River in what was to become the state of Delaware. But by 1700 or so these movements had lost most of their impetus, and for almost a century Welsh emigration came virtually to a standstill. The cessation of emigration ended what little chance remained of realizing the hopes of the early settlers of establishing in Pennsylvania an autonomous Welsh community capable of preserving its language and customs. These hopes had already been undermined by Penn's refusal to grant the Welsh those rights which they believed he had promised them in the original agreement self-government and the right to the exclusive possession of the Welsh Tract. But in any case the Welsh character of the settlement had been in jeopardy from the outset for only a small minority of the settlers appear to have been monoglot Welshmen. Most of the Quakers belonged to a class which was equally at home in English and Welsh, while the Radnorshire Baptists came from a border region where the Welsh language was already losing ground. In other words the bi-cultural character of Wales, which was to become increasingly pronounced in the nineteenth century, was a factor in the adjustment of Welsh immigrants even in the colonial period. In such circumstances the Pennsylvania Welsh were unable to maintain their separate identity for more than a few decades, and by the time emigration from Wales began again at the end of the eighteenth century, the Welsh Tract had lost every trace of the Welsh character it had once possessed.5 The economic changes which everywhere in Europe were to provide the spur to mass migration began to make themselves felt in Wales at the end of the 3 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868-1922 (Cardiff, 1963), p. 8. On this subject see Charles H. Browning, The Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1912); Thomas A. Glenn, Welsh Founders of Pennsylvania (1913); T. Mardy Rees, The Quakers in Wales and their Emigration to North America (Carmarthen, 1925), and A. H. Dodd, The Character of Early Welsh Immigration to the United States, 2nd ed. (Cardiff, 1957). 5Dodd, op. cit., pp. 34-6.