TORN BETWEEN TWO LANDS
Armenians in America
1890 to World War I
Robert Mirak
Leaving the Old Country.
It was a
source of pride to late nineteenth-century immigrants
that Armenians had arrived in the New World long before
the 1800’s. The story was told in the first
English language history of the Armenians in the United
States, written in 1919 by a young lawyer, M. Vartan
Malcom. According to Malcom’s research, the
British State Colonial Papers, the Court Book of the
Virginia Company of London, and Peter Force’s
Historical Tracts confirmed that Armenians were among the
first families in Virginia.[1] The first such colonist
was one “Martin the Armenian,” “Martin
Armenean,” or “Martin an Armeanean,”
– also referred to as “John Martin the
Persian.” Very little is known of his origins
or why he came to the Virginia wilderness, but he arrived
very early in Virginia history – 1618 or 1619 –
probably as colonial governor George Yeardley’s
servant. In Virginiahe became an English subject
– and that, boasted Malcom, entitled him to the
distinction of being the “first naturalized person
on the American continent.”[2]
Martin
spent four years in Virginia. When he returned to England
with a parcel of tobacco he had grown in the colony,
customs officials levied double the usual duties because
of his foreign birth. Martin thereupon petitioned
the London Company for relief and promptly received it.
References to Martin continue in the records of the
Virginia Company in London until 1624.[3] Nothing is heard of him after
that.
Armenians
next arrived in Virginia in 1653 to grow silk. The Virginia
colonists had tried for a decade to promote sericulture
to vary their exports, but their experiments with
silkworms and mulberry trees were dismal failures. Edward
Diggs – a prominent Virginia planter who had heard
through his father, then the English Ambassador to
Russia, that Armenians were expert silkworm cultivators
– engaged two Armenians, perhaps from Amyrna, who
were reputed in their native land to have experience in
silk production, to come to Virginia. John Ferrer,
an “earnest supporter” of the fledgling colony,
eulogized the sponsor of the Armenians in his monumental
epic “To the most Noble deserving Esquire Diggs:
upon the Arrival of his two Armenians out of Turkey into Virginia”:
His two Armenians from Turky sent
Are now most busy on his
brave attempt
And had he stock sufficient
for next yeare
Ten thousand pound of Silk
would then appeare
And to the skies his worthy
deeds upreare.
Two years
later the Virginia General Assembly resolved in favor of
one of Diggs’s men: “That George the
Armenian for his encouragement in the trade of silk and
to stay in the country to follow the same have four
thousand pounds of tobacco allowed him by the
Assembly.”[4]
The
arrival of Martin the Armenian and Diggs’s two
silkgrowers is historically unimportant; their
significance lies in their mythological role for a later
generation of immigrant Armenians. That Armenians
had come to America at the time of the Virginia Cavaliers
or the Mayflower permitted the late
nineteenth-century newcomers to feel a part of American
history; like Yankee bluebloods, they too possessed deep
roots in America. And accordingly, M. Vartan Malcom
devoted many pages to their early history.
Armenian
writers were not alone in exaggerating the importance of
their early settlers; every new immigrant group in the United
Stateseulogized it earliest colonists, expostulated on
their “contributions” to the discovery of America,
the winning of the Revolution, and so forth. Establishing
a history in America was a necessary step in adjusting to
an alien environment. But the Armenians of the
colonial period were not the true pioneers; they did not
start an exodus of Armenians to America; they were
strays, removed from the main currents of the migration.
Phase One: The Pioneers
to 1890
The actual chronicle of the
origins of the Armenian migration belongs instead to the
nineteenth century. The first phase of the movement
is composed of three separate but interconnected stages.
Initially, a group of Armenian students and clergymen
came to the United States in the period from
Constantinople, Smyrna, and the interior ventured to New
York City and Chicagoto expand their commercial
operations. Finally, in the period after the
1870’s began a rural exodus of the poorer laboring
and artisan class, which heralded the mass migration of
the 1890’s.
[1] Paragraph derived from ibid. 55-56. The
173 line poem is in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other
Papers, vol. 3, no. 53, 31-35. See also
Minasian, “The First Armenians in America,”
Ararat (Spring 1968).
Hadjin Turkey Home
Copyright H.M.
Keshishian 2006.
Last revised: December 16, 2010.
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