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Asylum for Mankind" America, 1607-1800. By Marilyn C. Baseler. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xiv, 353 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-3481-5.)
The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom. By John T. Noonan Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xiii, 436 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-52020997-4.)
In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine called upon Americans to "receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind." His words provide the title for Marilyn C. Baseler's careful study of the origins of immigration policy in the United States.
By 1800 the new nation had opened its doors to nearly all Europeans. American asylum was limited and flawed, "built at the expense of dispossessed natives and enslaved Africans." However, most European immigrants were offered virtually all of the rights guaranteed to native-born whites-including religious freedom. John T. Noonan Jr.'s book takes its title from James Madison, who wrote that freedom of religion promised "a lustre to our country."
The British, Baseler finds, were the first to see America as a place of asylum. While other nations tried to keep their populations at home, the British thought their colonies could siphon off troublesome people, including Catholics, Quakers, convicts, and the idle poor. After 1660 the British tried to attract settlers from other European nations. Toward that end, a greater degree of religious and political freedom was offered in the British colonies than anywhere in the Old World. But the British motives were pragmatic.
The new American nation came to support asylum on principle. As Bernard Bailyn (Baseler's mentor)...