American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony 1839-1850

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In 1840, eighty-two Americans were transported from Canada to a life of penal servitude half a world away in Van Diemen's Land, present-day Tasmania. Captured in a series of cross-border raids at Short Hills, St. Clair, Windsor, and Prescott following the 1837 rebellion against the colonial government in Upper Canada, these convicts were exiled in lieu of a death sentence.Gleaned from eleven first-person accounts, Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart examine the largest body of interlocking convict narratives in existence. American Citizens, British Slaves is presented as one narrative into which the editors have woven their own extensive commentary. This work provides a vivid, intimate account of the lives of these American political prisoners within the penal system, their attempts to escape, and the ultimate prize of freedom as described by the survivors. The book also sets the Patriot narratives within the broader context of political unrest in the borderlands of America, as well as within the British Empire as a whole, during the 1830s. The narratives reveal the political and legal issues exposed in the use of transportation as a viable judicial tool.