We often have a little joke with our Australian pals that their country was founded by a bunch of criminals, Britain sending over 165,000 of our worst to the land down under between 1788 and 1868 but it wasn't only Australia who were the recipient of our murders, America took shiploads also.
Over 55,000 British prisoners were shipped off to colonial America between 1718 and 1775, before we started sending them to Australia when the yanks got up-tight about Britain ruling over them.
Where Australians have reluctantly accepted their original less than law abiding population, most American have no idea that their country’s founding included a massive prison population which would eventually become known as the United States.
Thomas Jefferson tried to downplay the history of penal transportation to America, writing in 1786,
that even if British criminals had been sent, they 'were not sufficient in number' and were 'principally men eaten up with disease, they married seldom and propagated little'.
Some colonies tried to pass laws that would prohibit the practice with Virginia and Pennsylvania so fed up with the practice of Britain dumping tens of thousands of it's undesirables on it that they both passed laws prohibiting it which the British Government ignored and continued to send over anyway.
Americans have a rather romantic ideas about how their country was founded, the Pilgrim Fathers and all that but along with the religious folk who left England due to it not being holy enough for them, its origins also has a good dash of the deplorables we didn't want here so if you live in Virginia or Pennsylvania, you may want to go check your family tree circa mid 18th Century.
Explains Wall Street though i guess.
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