Few came as indentured servants, in fact that was the major reason for the rise of slavery, you had to free a person that was indentured, but you kept a slave for life and then their children.
I will say from the start I'm not sure what point you're trying to refute. My point is that the U.S. is made up of the ornery misfits of the world who wanted a better life. You seem to be saying "no they just wanted a better life but they weren't ornery!" while not really offering any evidence to substantiate that claim. In fact, I think the two points are rather complementary to my conception of our culture as violent and malcontented.
Factually, though,
roughly one-third to one-half of colonial settlers came over as indentured servants according to the Library of Congress. Another one-fourth or so came in the Atlantic slave trade. Most of the country pre-1776 thus came to what would become the U.S. as labor in colonies that were mostly founded as profit-seeking ventures (some exceptions to that in New England looking for religious freedom, but this was the case for most of the original eastern colonies from New York down through the southern colonies).
The romanticized "looking for a better life" types you want to emphasize came only after the founding in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Yes, they were looking for land on the western and southern frontiers... which only became available when the U.S. successfully prosecuted a series of genocidal wars against the pre-Colombian inhabitants. The British refused to do so; the U.S. had no such qualms about such campaigns.
No, we were not worse that Australia, slavery didn't work there because the land would not support growing cash crops like it did in the US. the Carribean Islands is where slavery was used mostly. It was so profitable there, that it was cheaper in some cases to feed them little, let them die and purchase new ones.
I think you nicely refute your own point here. You describe the system of plantation agriculture as so brutal "it was cheaper in some cases to feed them little [and] let them die and purchase new ones." How in the world could the Australian penal colony be
worse than a system that treated kidnapped and enslaved people (not criminals given harsh treatment in Australia but at least a chance to pay their debt to society, earn their freedom, and to start over on the other side of the planet) as commodities to be disposed of in that way?
Granted, Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations were still
much harsher than the cotton and tobacco plantations in what would become the Southeast of the U.S., but think carefully before you assert that some other system was more brutalizing than the Atlantic slave trade and plantation agriculture.
The first slaves came to Jamestown within a year of the settlement, but most of the people that came here did so for a better life, few were running away from the law, they were running away from poverty, and the ability to ever get out of it back in Europe. When most of this immigration occurred, the church and wealthy owned 80 to 90% of the land, the few that owned land, tend to be rocky poor soil, the US had abundant amounts of land, that was free to dirt cheap, and is some of the best land on the planet.
Take a step back and imagine two peasant farmers in war-torn Germany after the Napoleonic Wars. Both are considering moving to America for the available land and better life you describe.
One decides to go for it. One decides to tough it out and accept their lot. Think of the different personalities and levels of risk tolerance those two decisions imply for the two of them.
The one who decides to go is frankly risking everything. They're moving to another CONTINENT in an age before the telegraph. They aren't going to know anybody in their new homeland and, even if they do, they are going to be hard to track down without the Internet or even the white pages. Even crossing the Atlantic in that age was extremely dangerous. Conditions in steerage were unhealthy and dangerous;
up to 10% to 20% of immigrants died crossing the ocean. While the
R.M.S. Titanic is the most famous and glamorous instance,
dozens of such liners found only the bottom of the ocean in the 19th Century. Many of them
simply disappeared.
Once they arrive, things are far from guaranteed. You don't speak the language. You don't know anything about local customs. Life then had much higher levels of property crime and physical violence than it does now, and I can only imagine people coming off the boat who know nobody, don't speak English, and the cops don't care about would have been obvious targets for that. Most people in that era were very much NOT tolerant of immigrants coming from other lands and did not tolerate other religions, ethnicities, and languages very well. The idea that being xenophobic and unwelcoming to people trying to make a better life for themselves is a bad thing is a modern one with which most native-born Americans in 19th Century did not agree.
Despite all this, many of them did it. Many of them died or failed but many of them also prospered. Can you see what kind of personality type and tolerance to risk this selects for when you scale this up to the tens of millions? And the inverse sort of person that it left behind in Europe in comparison?
"They were looking for a better life" doesn't mean they weren't ornery and ungovernable. In fact, to be open to those kind of risks, you have to have an ornery "**** it" element to your personality. You have to tolerate risk and violent to a high degree and be a willing participant in both things when needed.
And that's us. Americans. *screaming bald eagles fly by*
My point is they wanted a better life, religious freedom like the Quakers and Pilgrims but many just wanted the opportunity to own land. They were not leaving because of the law, they wanted opportunity that the US provided.
The Quakers and Pilgrims/Puritans were religious nut jobs. I say that with nothing but love and respect for them, but compared to the Anglican beliefs they were fleeing... they were nut jobs.
They were very much the spiritual version of the two example peasants from Germany I described in my previous instance where more of the emphasis was on economic opportunity.
I never said most or even a large minority of Americans came to this country as criminals. Many were --
upwards of 60,000 in colonial America -- but that was just one of many sources for ornery malcontents that made up the social and genetic ancestors of the people who still live in these United States.
I think your conception of rebelling is limited if you think the only thing one can rebel against is the law. People can rebel against all sorts of less formal systems of social and behavioral control --
-- religious mores (e.g., like you said, the Puritans and the Quakers)
-- ossified economic systems that offer no upward mobility or opportunity for the ambitious (such as the remnants of the feudal system in central and eastern Europe, China, and Japan)
-- those fleeing political persecution (e.g., Jews and the Irish tired of British colonialism)
-- debt, criminality, and poor reputation (e.g., those indentured servants in colonial America)
-- then add in the African slaves who didn't really get a choice
The point is to come over to America meant you had to be rebelling against
something to get on that boat. Wanting a better life for you and your family and taking insane risks to make it happen is rebelling against safety and comfort and the mediocre stagnation of the existing system in your homeland. You have to be able to say "I am going to risk everything" and be enough of an individualist to say you're going to be on the ones to succeed and you're going to do what it takes to do it. And **** anybody who tries to stop you from doing it.
So, America collected all the ornery rebels of the world and took them out of just about everywhere else. And that's a distinguishing national characteristic that will forever define us.
