Four British Folkways in American History:
The Origin and Persistence of Regional Cultures in the United States
Colonies then are the Seeds of Nations, begun and nourished by the care of wise and populous Countries; as conceiving them best for the increase of Humane Stock.
—William Penn, 1681
INDEPENDENCE DID NOT MARK THE END of the four British folkways in America, or of the regional cultures which they inspired. The history of the United States is, in many ways the story of their continuing interaction. Most broad areas of consensus in American life have grown from values that these cultures shared in common. Many major conflicts in American history have developed primarily from their differences. Every presidential election shows their persistent power in American politics. Every decennial census finds that cultural differences between American regions are greater in some ways than those between European nations.
The persistence of regional culture in the United States explains many things about American history. In particular, it helps to answer the question which led to this inquiry, about the determinants of a voluntary society. By way of a summary and conclusion, it might be useful to examine in a general way the origins and development of the four British folkways, and their relationship with the main lines of American history from the great migrations of the seventeeth century, to our own time.
Genesis: The British Reconnaissance of North America
In the beginning, there was a neglected half-century of Anglo-American history which preceded the four great migrations. From 1580 to 1630, more than thirty English settlements were planted in what is now the eastern United States. Many survived, and a few remain culturally distinctive even today.1
On Smith and Tangier islands in the Chesapeake Bay, for example, immigrants from the far southwest of Britain founded a culture which still preserves the dialect of seventeenth century Cornwall and Devon (zink for sink, noyce for nice). At Plymouth in southeastern New England, another variety of English culture was introduced by the Mayflower Pilgrims who were very different from the Massachusetts Puritans; even today this small sub-region still calls itself the “Old Colony,” and speaks a strain of English which is subtly distinctive from other Yankee accents. On New England’s north shore from Marblehead to Maine yet another culture was planted by fishermen from Jersey, Guernsey and English channel ports; their folkways still survive in small towns and offshore islands from Kittery to the Cranberry Islands.2
In Massachusetts Bay, an eccentric Devon family called Maverick settled the present town of Chelsea and an island in Boston harbor that still bears their name. They had trouble with the Puritans and moved away, keeping one jump ahead of the larger cultures that threatened to engulf them. By the nineteenth century, the Mavericks had found their way onto the western plains. Their name was given to range cattle that bore no man’s brand, and became a synonym for independent eccentricity in American speech.3
Many such “mavericks” settled America before 1630. The Balch and Conant families, to name but two, both arrived in Massachusetts before the Winthrop fleet and are still known in New England for going their own way. Altogether these earliest English settlers added color and variety to the cultural mosaic of early America. But their primary role was to prepare the way for larger groups that followed. They were the reconnaissance parties of British America.4
Exodus: The Four Great Migrations, 1629-1750
After 1629 the major folk movements began to occur, in the series of waves that are the subject of this book. As we have seen, the first wave (1629-40) was an exodus of English Puritans who came mainly from the eastern counties and planted in Massachusetts a very special culture with unique patterns of speech and architecture, distinctive ideas about marriage and the family, nucleated settlements, congregational churches, town meetings, and a tradition of ordered liberty.
The second wave brought to Virginia a different set of English folkways, mainly from a broad belt of territory that extended from Kent and Devon north to Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. This culture was characterized by scattered settlements, extreme hierarchies of rank, strong oligarchies, Anglican churches, a highly developed sense of honor and an idea of hegemonic liberty.
The third wave (ca. 1675-1715) was the Friends’ migration, which carried yet another culture from the England’s North Midlands to the Delaware Valley. It was founded on a Christian idea of spiritual equality, a work ethic of unusual intensity, a suspicion of social hierarchy, and an austerity which Max Weber called “worldly asceticism.” It also preserved many elements of North Midland speech, architecture, dress and food ways. Most important, it deliberately created a pluralistic system of reciprocal liberty in the Delaware Valley.
The fourth great migration (1717-75) came to the backcountry from the borderlands of North Britain—an area which included the Scottish lowlands, the north of Ireland and England’s six northern counties. These emigrants were of different ethnic stocks, but shared a common border culture which was unique in its speech, architecture, family ways and child-rearing customs. Its material culture was marked by extreme inequalities of condition, and its public life was dominated by a distinctive ideal of natural liberty.
Each of these four folk cultures in early America had a distinctive character which was closer to its popular reputation than to many academic “reinterpretations” in the twentieth century. The people in Puritan Massachusetts were in fact highly puritanical. They were not traditional peasants, modern capitalists, village communists, modern individualists, Renaissance humanists, Victorian moralists, neo-Freudian narcissists or prototypical professors of English literature. They were a people of their time and place who had an exceptionally strong sense of themselves, and a soaring spiritual purpose which has been lost beneath many layers of revisionist scholarship.
The first gentlemen of Virginia were truly cavaliers. They were not the pasteboard protagonists of Victorian fiction, or the celluloid heroes of Gone with the Wind. But neither were they self-made bourgeois capitalists, modern agro-businessmen, upwardly mobile yeomen or “plain folk.” Most were younger sons of proud armigerous families with strong Royalist politics, a devout Anglican faith, decided rural prejudices, entrenched manorial ideals, exalted notions of their own honor and at least the rudiments of an Aristotelian education. The majority of Virginia’s white population were indentured servants, landless tenants and poor whites—a degraded rural proletariat who had no hope of rising to the top of their society. Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century. The mythical, figures of Virginia cavaliers and poor whites were solidly founded in historical fact.
The culture of the Delaware Valley was dominated by British Quakers and German Pietists whose Christian beliefs had a special moral character. Here again, their culture has been distorted
Four English Folk Migrations: Modal Characteristics
by historical revisionists who have variously “reinterpreted” them as utopian cranks, manipulative materialists, secular pluralists and the “first modern Americans.” The modernity of the Delaware Valley has been much exaggerated, and the primitive Christian roots of William Penn’s “holy experiment” have too often been forgotten.
The backsettlers also possessed a strong and vibrant culture which also has been much misunderstood. They were not ancient Celts, or wild Scotch-Irish savages, or innocent children of nature. Neither were they rootless pluralists, incipient entrepreneurs, agents of the Edinburgh enlightenment or heralds of the New South. The majority, no matter whether northern Irish, lowland Scots or North Country English, shared a culture of high integrity which had been tempered in fire of the British borderlands. The more we learn by empirical research about these four cultures of British America, the more distinctive they appear from one another, and the closer to historical “myths” which they inspired.
British Origins: The Regional Factor
The origins of these cultures were highly complex, involving differences of British region, religion, rank, and generation, as well as of the American environment, and the process of migration. Let us briefly examine each of these determinants, beginning with British regions—not because this factor was more important than any other, but because it has been less clearly understood.
The idea of a region creates few practical problems for American historians, who tend normally to think in regional terms without reflecting very much about them. In English historiography, however, region remains an alien concept. The history of England is highly developed on national and local levels, but a third level is missing in between. So little has been written about the history of English regions that in a formal sense there is no regional historiography at all—that is, no established set of regional problematiques.5
Regional history has long flourished in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and even in smaller countries such as Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands. England is unique in the exceptional riches of its national and local historiography and the poverty of its regional research.6
This has been so not because England is more uniform than other nations, but because its internal differences are more complex. To travel across the English countryside is to be continuously surprised by the complexity of its cultural terrain. One meets many different ideas of spatial discrimination which have the collective effect of blurring regional perceptions. The leading regional ideas might be summarized in a few sentences:
Zones are topographical units popularized by Cyril Fox, who divided England into a “highland zone” (the north and west) and a “lowland zone” (the south and east), each supporting different cultures.7
Pays in English usage are soil regions and agricultural regimes. Leading examples are David Underdown’s elegant essay on “the chalk and the cheese,” and Joan Thirsk’s meticulous studies of wood pasture and open pasture, “fielden, forest, fell and fen.”8
Principates refer to ancient sovereignties, which tend to be strong sources of regional identity throughout Europe. They are weaker in England where national unity came early, but the ancient kingdoms of East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria still survive as regional conceptions.
Counties are more than administrative units; many of England’s collective memories are organized by counties. Its archives are lodged in county offices, its military traditions are kept by county regiments, its gentry were defined by county visitations, and its scholarship is written in county histories. County consciousness was even stronger in the past; one historian asserts that “when an Englishman of the early seventeenth century said, ‘my country’ he meant ‘my county.’”9 Most regional taxonomies in English scholarship today are county-clusters.10
Provinces refer collectively to all of England except London, in a great disjunction between the metropolis and the rest of the nation. This idea is very strong in English scholarship today, but it is not very old—perhaps not older than the eighteenth century.11 Nevertheless, many historians apply it to earlier periods.12
Hinterlands include both individual towns and the areas around them. This spatial unit is especially popular among English geographers, and has been highly developed in general studies of migration and trade.13
Other quasi-regional ideas include river systems which are ecological units of increasing conceptual prominence in England today; one thinks of the Thames Valley, the Severn Valley, Merseyside, Humberside and Tyneside. Also much in use is the idea of ecological districts, defined by their terrain, climate, flora and fauna—such as the Lake District, the Peak District, the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, the Yorkshire Dales, the Norfolk Broads, the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and various Moorlands and Downlands.
What, after all, is a region? For many scholars it is a physical entity formed by terrain, soil, climate, resources and systems of production. But these material models of English regions do not fit the facts of this inquiry. They do not coincide with patterns of emigration. Another approach to the problem works better. A region may also be thought of as a cultural phenomenon, created by a common customs and experiences. It might be defined primarily in historical terms, as a place in time whose people share a common heritage that sets them apart from others of their nation. A major conclusion of this work is that regions, so understood, have been more important in the history of Britain than they are in its historiography. But they have not always been the same regions, nor have they always been important in the same way. Regional boundaries have changed with historical conditions.14
This inquiry was not about English regions in general, but historical regions that existed at a particular point in time, during the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. They appear most clearly not in evidence collected after the industrial revolution, but in maps of cultural processes and political events through the preceding seven hundred years—in the jurisdiction of the Dane Law and the ancient boundaries of British kingdoms before King Edred; in the English earldoms of 1066 and the areas of support and opposition to King John in 1215; in the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381 and Jack Cade’s Revolt in 1450; in the distribution of Marian martyrs in the sixteenth century and the incidence of Elizabethean Puritanism; in the areas that rallied to Parliament and to the Crown in the seventeenth century; and not least in patterns of emigration to the American colonies.
All of this evidence shows strong and consistent regional patterns that do not conform to the boundaries of topographical zones, soil types, field systems, farming regimes, hinterlands, river systems or ecological districts. The regions of seventeenth-century England were defined primarily by broad ethnic, cultural and historical processes.15
Four historical regions in seventeenth-century Britain were specially important to this inquiry. The first of them lay in the east of England, and included the three peninsulae of East Anglia itself, eastern Lincolnshire and the northeastern fringe of Kent. The boundary of this territory ran through the old counties of Rutland, Huntingdon and Hertford. In the seventeenth century, this area was commonly called the “East” or “eastern England.” With the addition of Kent it corresponded roughly to the area of the “Eastern Association” which supported Parliament in the
English Civil War. This region produced approximately 60 percent of emigrants to Massachusetts.16
A second historical region, which sent many sons to Virginia, was a broad belt of territory through the south of England, extending from Kent to Devon, and north as far as Warwick. It encompassed the ancient kingdom of Wessex and its Mercian protectorates—the realm of Alfred and Aethelred. This area had the least articulated sense of regional identity because it believed itself to be the heartland of the country—in Henry James’s phrase, “midmost England, unmitigated England.” Nevertheless, it had a cultural existence which was defined by its history, in ways that made it distinct from East Anglia, the North Country and the Celtic cultures of Wales and Cornwall to the west. Roughly 60 percent of Virginia gentlemen and servants came from this region.17
A third historical region lay in the North Midlands of England. It included a broad belt of territory from Cheshire and Derbyshire north through Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire to southern Cumbria. This area was called “the North Country” in the seventeenth century. Thus a Quaker named John Crock wrote, “I was born in the North Country.” Another wrote that “he heard of a people in the North of England, who preferred the light. …” And a third described Quakerism as “glad tidings brought out of the north.” This area was the source of approximately 60 percent of the Quaker population which settled in the Delaware Valley.18
The fourth historical region was an area which included the English counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, and the North Riding of Yorkshire, together with the southern counties of Scotland. As early as the fifteenth century this region was called the “border,” or “borders,” and its inhabitants called themselves “borderers.”19 These people of Scotland and northern England, together with their transplanted cousins in Ulster, were very mixed in their ethnicity, but they shared a common culture which was shaped by the history of their region. More than 60 percent of settlers in the American backcountry were immigrants or the children of immigrants from northern Ireland, the lowlands of Scotland, and the six northern counties of England.
The origin of regional differences between East Anglia, southwestern England, the North Country and the borderlands is a problem that carries far beyond the subject of this book. A search for their beginning leads back a thousand years before American history to ethnic movements as early as the seventh century—and even that date is not early enough to mark the beginning of differences between these cultural regions in the east and south and north of England, which had important consequences for American history.
British Origins: The Religious Factor
Of all the determinants which shaped the cultural character of British America, the most powerful was religion. During the seventeenth century, the English-speaking people were deeply divided by the great questions of the Protestant Reformation. These divisions in turn created a broad spectrum of English denominations in the New World.
The “right wing” of the British Reformation was the party of Anglican Episcopacy which favored an inclusive national church, a hierarchy of priests, compulsory church taxes and a union of church and crown. Its worship centered on liturgy and ritual, its theology became increasingly Arminian in the seventeenth century, and its creed was defined by the Book of Common Prayer. This denomination was specially strong in the south and west of England. It was destined to dominate Virginia for more than a century.
Next to the Episcopalians on Britain’s spectrum of religious belief were Presbyterians. They also favored a broad national church, but one which was ruled by strong synods of ministers and elders rather than by bishops and priests. The theology of Presbyterianism was Calvinist; its worship centered on preaching and conversion. The Presbyterians were numerous in North Britain, where they made much use of evangelical field meetings and prayer meetings. They became very strong in the American backcountry.
Near the center were Congregationalists, who defined their position as the “middle way.” Their church government was a mixed confederacy of independent congregations and weak synods. Their theology took a middle ground between Arminianism (which tended toward rationalism and free will) and Antinomianism (the dominion of the spirit). Their formal beliefs were defined by the Synod of Dort (1618-19) in the five points of Calvinism (total depravity, limited atonement, unconditional election, irresistible grace and the final perseverance of the saints)—a Christian creed of extreme austerity. This group was strong in the eastern counties of England. It founded the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
To the left of the Congregationalists were the Separatists, who believed in the autonomy of each congregation, and wished to separate themselves from the corruption of an unreformed national church. Their theology was broadly Calvinist, and their classical text was Robert Browne’s Reformation without Tarrying for Any (1583). This denomination included the Mayflower Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony.
Farther left were various sects of Anabaptists, many of whom subscribed to the five points of Calvinism, but added a “sixth principle” that baptism should be restricted to regenerate Christians. Their theology stressed the working of the Holy Spirit more than the teaching of divine law. Their church was a fellowship in which worship was a sharing of the spirit of Grace. Most Baptists also believed in the separation of church and state, primarily to preserve the church from spiritual pollution. They founded the colony of Rhode Island.
Beyond the Baptists were the Quakers, who believed that Jesus died not merely for a chosen few but for everyone, and that a Holy Spirit called the Inner Light dwelled within all people. Their beliefs rose from the teachings of George Fox and received their classic statement in Robert Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Religion. Quakers rejected the legitimacy of established churches, ordained clergy and formal liturgy. Their meetings for worship centered upon the movement of the spirit. This denomination first appeared in the North Midlands of England. It founded the colonies of West Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Because religion touched so many parts of life in the era of the reformation, these denominational divisions created deep cultural differences which have survived in American regions long after their original purposes have been lost.
British Protestantism in the Seventeenth Century: The Spectrum of Practice and Belief
British Origins: The Factor of Social Rank
Another determinant of cultural differences in British America was the social rank of the colonists. This factor worked in two ways. First, the founders of America’s various regional cultures came from different strata of British society. Second, major changes occurred in England’s ranking system during the era of colonization. Emigrants in the early seventeenth century had one way of thinking about social status; those who arrived in the mid-eighteenth century had another. This process of change added another dimension to regional differences in America.
To understand this problem we must study the ranking systems of earlier periods in their own terms. Between 1577 and 1600, this subject was discussed by three English writers: Thomas Smith (1583), William Harrison (1587), and Thomas Wilson (1600).20 None of these authors thought in terms of modern social classes, or even used the word “class.” Sir Thomas Wilson wrote of “estates”; Harrison, of “conditions” and “degrees”; Smith, of “orders.” These categories were defined not by material possessions or by the means of production, but by access to power. In Smith’s phrase they were “orders of authority … annexed to the blood and progeny.”21
The three authors agreed in their description of the upper orders. At the top of every list came the King himself, who was quaintly called the “first gentleman” or “chief gentleman” of England. Then came the princes and the “nobilitas major,” an order so small in England that Harrison could list every member on a single page: he counted one marquis, twenty earls, two viscounts and forty-one barons, plus twenty-four bishops who were the “lords spiritual” of England. Smith’s list in 1600 was even smaller—sixty-one noblemen altogether. This was England’s high aristocracy; it contributed much to the capitalization of British America but little to its population.22
Next came the nobilitas minor, who were identified as knights, esquires, and gentlemen. Wilson reckoned that there were about 500 knights and 16,000 esquires whom he defined as “gentlemen whose ancestors are or were knights, or else they are the heirs and eldest of their houses and of some competent quantity of revenue.” This order or estate also included a residue of undifferentiated gentlemen who were defined in different ways. Smith identified them as “those whom their blood and race doth make noble and known,” or “whose ancestor hath been notable in riches or for his virtues, or (in fewer words) old riches.”23 Wilson, on the other hand, defined them in an interesting way as “younger brothers,” and added:
their state is of all stations for gentlemen the most miserable, for … my elder brother forsooth must be my master. … This I must confess doth us good someways, for it makes us industrious to apply ourselves to letters or to arms, whereby many times we become my master elder-brothers’ masters, at least their betters in honour and reputation, while he lives at home like a mome [a fool].24
This group, particularly the younger sons, played an important role in the creation of a Virginia elite.
Beneath the rank of gentlemen were clergy, lawyers and learned professions. There was general agreement that professional men were “made good cheape in England,” and had become too numerous for the good of the realm. Below the professions, all writers recognized an estate of “citizens” who had been admitted to the liberties of England’s towns and boroughs—“a commonwealth among themselves,” Wilson wrote.25
Next came the yeomanry. Wilson divided this rank into “great yeomanry” (10,000 strong), whom he thought much “decayed,” but often with estates larger than “some covetous mongrel gentleman.” Below them came “yeomen of meaner ability which are called freeholders,” whom he reckoned to have been 80,000 strong, after having studied the sheriff’s’ books in which they were listed.26 Smith noted that the rank of yeoman, though mainly defined by possession of a freehold, also implied a certain age. “Commonly, he wrote, “we do not call any a yeoman till he be married, and have children, and as it were have some authority among his neighbours …”27 Harrison wrote that “this sort of people have a certain pre-eminence … live wealthily, keep good houses and travail [work] to get riches.” This rank, with lawyers, clergy and citizens, was important in the formation of New England’s elite.28
Below the rank of yeoman, all of these lists became very thin as they reached the “lower orders” who included the great majority of England’s population. Wilson’s taxonomy ended in a single broad category which embraced “copyholders who hold some land and tenements of some other lord,” and “cottagers,” who “live chiefly upon country labour, working by the day for meat and drink and some small wages.” He noted that “the number of this latter sort is uncertain because there is no books or records kept of them.” Smith also had a catch-all category at the bottom for “day laborers, poor husbandmen, merchants or retailers which have no free land, copyholders, all artificers.” To a modern mind this lower order seems a very mixed group, but all shared a quality in common. Smith called them “men which do not rule.” Harrison explained, “These have no voice or authority in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but only to be ruled.”29
This was England’s system of social rank at the beginning of the seventeenth century—a complex set of orders, degrees, estates or conditions which were more rigid than modern classes. It was a way of thinking that persisted through the period of the English Civil War. The poll tax of 1660, for example, recognized the same taxonomy.
By the late seventeenth century, however, new ideas of social rank were stirring in England. A case in point was a famous analysis of English society by Gregory King. At first sight, his list of “ranks, degrees, orders and qualifications” seemed similar to those of Harrison, Smith and Wilson nearly 100 years earlier. But on closer examination, important differences appeared. King’s social orders were less distinct than those a century earlier. Between the nobilitas major and nobilitas minor, the rank of baronet had been introduced as a fund-raising device by cash-poor Stuart kings. The professions had grown more numerous and
Three Taxonomies of Social Rank in England, 1577-1600
more complex, and two new ranks were added for “persons in office.” Merchants had advanced from the bottom to near the top—above even the clergy. The lower ranks had become elaborately subdivided by occupation.30
In the early eighteenth century, this new way of thinking about stratification began to develop rapidly. Rank was defined increasingly not by origins, but by possessions. One finds this new ranking system in the writings of Daniel Defoe, who used the word “class” in its modern sense as early as the year 1705.31 In 1709, Defoe described English society as follows:
1. The great, who live profusely.
2. The rich, who live very plentifully.
3. The middle sort, who live well.
4. The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want.
5. The country people, farmers, &c, who fare indifferently.
6. The poor, that fare hard.
7. The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.32
Here was a modern class model in which people were assigned a place according to their material possessions. Thereafter, this idea developed steadily through the eighteenth century. Raymond Williams writes that the “development of class in its modern social sense, with relatively fixed names for particular classes (lower class, middle class, upper class, working class) belongs essentially to the period between 1770 and 1840.”33
This transformation had important consequences for American history. The four waves of British emigrants came not only from different ranks, but also from different periods in the history of ranking systems. The older system of orders came to Massachusetts where it survived in a truncated form, and also to Virginia where it was extended by the development of servitude and slavery. But the founders of the Quaker colonies and especially the back settlements came from a later era in which orders and estates were yielding to social classes. This fact made a difference in the development of regional cultures throughout British America.
British Origins: The Factor of Generations
The four migrations came not only from different regions, ranks and religions, but also from different generations. The key concept here is that of an historical generation—not a demographic cohort but a cultural group whose identity is formed by great events. In the turbulence of the twentieth century, for example, everyone recognizes the “generation of the Great Depression,” the “generation of World War II,” and the “generation of the ’60s.” Seventeenth-century England had similar historical generations, which were defined by the same events that set the major folk migrations in motion.
Each of these migrations created a culture which preserved something of the moment when it was born. The Puritans settled Massachusetts within a period of eleven years from 1629 to 1640—an epoch in English history which is remembered by Whig historians as the “eleven years’ tyranny.” This was the time when Charles I tried to rule without a Parliament and Archbishop William Laud attempted to purge the Anglican Church of Puritans. The great constitutional and religious issues of this epoch were carried to the Puritan colonies and became central to the culture of New England—persisting as intellectual obsessions long after they had been forgotten in the mother country.
A large part of Virginia’s migration of cavaliers and indentured servants occurred between 1649 and 1660, an unstable era of English history called the interregnum. In this period of disorder the dominant elite was an oligarchy of English Puritans, and their victims included a group of defeated Royalists, some of whom carried to Virginia a culture which was defined not merely by their rank and party but also by their generation—in its fascination with constitutional questions, its obsession with honor, and its contempt for the arts of peace. The culture of America’s tidewater south was to retain these characteristics long after England had moved beyond them.
The Friends’ migration to the Delaware Valley happened mainly in the years from 1675 to 1689. This was part of an historical epoch which began with the Restoration, and continued through the reigns of Charles II (1660-85) and his Catholic brother James II (1685-88). In this period of English history, the great questions were about how people of different beliefs could live in peace together. That question was central to the cultural history of the Delaware colonies, and remained so for many years.
Another period of English history followed the Glorious Revolution
A Short Chronology of Anglo-American History, 1558-1760
of 1688, when a pattern of political stability formed “as suddenly as water becomes ice,” in historian J. H. Plumb’s words.34 The government of England passed firmly into the hands of an oligarchy of country gentlemen. This solution created new problems which concerned the relationship between England’s governing elite and others—in particular, the people of Ireland, Scotland, America, the London mob and the rural poor. Violent conflicts set in motion yet another wave of emigration which brought to America the great question of whether the rights of English gentlemen belonged to other people. These issues took root in the American interior, where they survive even to our own time. All four folk cultures of Anglo-America preserved the dominant themes in English history during the years when they began.
American Development: The Environment
British culture was not the only determinant of regional differences. The American environment also played an important role—not by “breaking down” or “dissolving” European culture (as the frontier thesis suggested) but by more complex material pressures which modified European cultures in some respects and reinforced them in others.
In New England, the Puritans selected a rigorous environment which was well suited to their purposes. The climate (colder and more changeable than today) proved exceptionally healthy to Europeans, but high mortality among African immigrants reinforced a Puritan ambivalence toward the growth of slavery. The configuration of New England’s coastline and the distribution of soil resources in small pockets of alluvial fertility encouraged town settlement. The Indians of Massachusetts Bay had been nearly destroyed by disease before the Puritans arrived; conflicts remained at a comparatively low level for nearly fifty years except during the Pequot War.
The Virginians encountered a very different environment. The Chesapeake Bay, with its 6,500 miles of tidal shoreline, its hundreds of rivers and creeks, and its abundance of good soil, encouraged scattered settlement and plantation agriculture. The climate (about the same as today) produced bountiful staple crops. But the Chesapeake estuary was unhealthy, and European death rates were twice as high as in New England. Africans had lower mortality rates than in the northern colonies, and slavery developed rapidly from the late seventeenth century. The large Indian population of the Powhatan Confederacy strongly resisted English settlement, with much bloody fighting.
The Delaware Valley offered yet a third set of environmental conditions. This area proved more salubrious than the Chesapeake, but less so than Massachusetts. Its climate was mild and its soil endowment was the richest of the eastern colonies, producing crop yields above all other coastal regions for three centuries. An abundance of mineral resources and a fall line only a few miles from the sea supported rapid industrial development. The Delaware Indians were not warlike in the early years of settlement. Altogether this environment was perfectly suited to the purposes of the Quakers, as they well knew when they chose to settle there.
Regional Cultures of Anglo-America: Environmental Conditions
For many years it supported their “holy experiment” in prosperity and peace.
The southern backcountry was a densely forested highland region of enormous proportions. Markets were distant and travel difficult, but the abundance of land and water encouraged the rapid growth of family farming and herding. The climate was comparatively mild and healthy. The Indians were numerous and very hostile to European settlement. The backcountry became a cockpit of international rivalry, and was ravaged by major wars in every generation from 1689 to 1815. The climate, resources and dangers of this American environment were well matched to the culture of the British borderlands.
American Development: The Indians
In every region, English colonists met an indigenous population of American Indians. The collision of these groups was a cultural process of high complexity, which can only be discussed here in a summary way. In brief, the Indian populations of North America were not a cultural monolith. Even within the eastern woodlands, the Indians of New England, the Delaware Valley, the Chesapeake Bay and the Appalachian highlands were at least as diverse in their folk customs as were the British themselves—in many ways, much more so. Moreover, the demography of these various Indian populations also tended to be very different from one to another. Further, Indian cultures were changing through time. Each had its own history, which scholars are only beginning to reconstruct.
The founders of the British colonies were aware of this diversity, and deliberately selected the sites of their own settlements in part because of the special character of the Indians in the vicinity. This was very much the case among New England Puritans and Delaware Quakers. All four major British groups also invented their own distinctive policies toward the Indians. They tended to treat the Indians in profoundly different ways, and were treated differently in their turn.
The results were distinct regional processes of interaction, involving at least four causal variables: Indian culture, Indian demography, white culture and white demography. A result was that relations between Indians and Europeans reinforced regional differences in a complex web of cause and consequence. The larger outlines of this process have never been described comprehensively, though various monographic findings are beginning to come in. The author has been collecting his thoughts and materials on this subject for many years and hopes to find an opportunity to set them forward in more detail than is possible here.
American Development: Imperial Politics
The growth of regional folk cultures in British America was also fostered by a unique political environment which was very different from other European colonies. New France and New Spain were more closely controlled by imperial authorities than were England’s American provinces, which had more freedom to manage their own affairs.
This condition did not develop by design. English statesmen looked upon the empires of France and Spain with admiration, and even with envy. The authorities in London often tried to impose similar controls upon their own colonies. But for many years these efforts failed and regional cultures of British America were left to go their own way. The first important English attempt to control the American colonies was made by Charles I, who created a Commission for Foreign Plantations in 1634. Its head was Archbishop William Laud, the great Anglican enemy of Puritanism, whose assignment was to curb New England’s independence. For that purpose, a “great ship” was ordered in England, while the people of Massachusetts made ready to defend themselves. But before the great ship sailed, Parliament rose against Charles I and one of its first acts was to execute Archbishop Laud. New England continued to govern itself for many years.
During the Civil War, King and Parliament both claimed the right to regulate the colonies, but neither was able to do so. A Parliamentary Commission for Plantations was appointed in 1643, but before it began to act effectively, Parliament itself was overthrown by Oliver Cromwell. The colonies continued to go their own way.
After 1653 the Protectorate also tried to organize the colonies into a coherent imperial system. To that end, Oliver Cromwell and his Protector’s Council created two new bodies—a Committee for Foreign Plantations (1655), and a Committee for America (1656). An expedition was sent against the Royalist regime in Virginia, but after Cromwell’s early death in 1658, these bodies also disbanded. The colonies continued to control their own affairs.
The restoration of Charles II in 1660 was followed by a more sustained effort to create an imperial system—this time through the Privy Council’s Committee for Trade and Plantations, called the Lords of Trade (1660). Various other councils and committees also functioned in a fitful way from 1660 to 1685, but none gained effective control over the colonies. The fragility of England’s restored monarchy, the poverty of the new regime, and the caution of the King himself all prevented strong measures, except in Virginia after Bacon’s Rebellion. The colonies retained much of their independence.1
After the year 1685, England’s King James II tried to impose a consolidated government called the Dominion of New England upon all the colonies from Maine to Delaware. He appointed a viceregal figure named Sir Edmund Andros to govern it. The result was an American Revolution of 1688 which began before the accession of William and Mary, and ended with Sir Edmund Andros a prisoner in Boston. The colonies narrowly survived yet another imperial challenge.2
After the Glorious Revolution, the new Protestant regime of William and Mary also tried to bring the colonies to heel, and at last succeeded in doing so. It created a new body called the Board of Trade, and a complex machinery of imperial government. But the delicate relationship between King and Parliament prevented either from asserting itself as forcefully as did imperial authorities in France and Spain. After 1714, Britain was ruled by German kings who cared little about America, and English ministers who knew less. One of them believed that Massachusetts was an island. There was in London a profound ignorance of American conditions.
Throughout the empire, colonial assemblies continued to claim parliamentary status, even though officials in London regarded them as comparable to municipal councils. This constitutional question was not resolved before 1775. While it continued, England’s American provinces remained more nearly autonomous than other European colonies, and regional cultures developed with less interference from above.
American Development: Immigration and Race
British America also differed from other empires in another way. It was settled mainly by voluntary migration. Most British men and women made their own way to the New World. Many raised the price of their own passage, and freely chose to settle in a colony which was congenial to their culture. This pattern changed in the eighteenth century when large numbers of involuntary immigrants appeared: transported felons, soldiers under orders, and more than 250,000 African slaves. But even when this traffic was at its peak, most people came to America as volunteers.3
This voluntary migration was unique to the British colonies. In New France, a large part of the population was descended from conscripts, soldiers, sailors, basket women, “king’s girls,” civil servants, priests and nuns, and others who had been ordered to America, sometimes much against their will.4 Once arrived, these immigrants tended to be more closely controlled, except on the fringes of the colony. In Quebec, a secret organization of females called the Congregation of the Holy Family kept watch by a system of domestic espionage which had no counterpart in the English colonies.5 In New Spain, colonists were screened for religious and social orthodoxy, and kept under continuing surveillance by imperial authorities. The Spanish Inquisition became more active in Mexico than it had been in Iberia. Its worst excesses of cruelty and persecution were committed in the New World.6
British America’s voluntary migration encouraged religious diversity rather than uniformity. It also allowed like-minded colonists of various sects to settle together and to transplant their own folkways to the New World.
Immigration also promoted regional development in another way. For many years, the American colonies effectively became their own gatekeepers. They were able to control the process of immigration themselves, and did so in very different ways.
The Puritan colonies stubbornly enforced a policy of strict exclusion despite imperial opposition. The homogeneity of New England’s population was not an historical accident; it arose from the religious purposes and social values of a regional culture.
The founders of Pennsylvania had very different ideas about immigration. William Penn and the Quaker elite of the colony made a special effort to attract European Protestants whose values were compatible with their own. English Quakers, German Pietists and Swiss Anabaptists all believed deeply in the doctrine of the inner light, religious freedom, the ethic of work and the evil of violence. The immigration policy of the Quakers expanded the community of Christian values beyond the boundaries of their own sect, and deliberately encouraged a diversity of national stocks in the Delaware Valley.
The rulers of Virginia adopted still a third immigration policy. Puritans and Quakers were not welcome; many were banished or driven out. But the Virginians actively recruited a servile underclass to support their manorial ideal, first by bringing in large numbers of English servants, and then by importing African slaves. Their object was not merely to solve a problem of labor scarcity (which might have been done in many other ways) but to do so in a manner consistent with their hierarchical values.
The backsettlers were not able to control immigration to the southern highlands in any formal way. But local neighborhoods had other methods of deciding who would go or stay. The old folk custom of “hating out” was used when necessary. The prevailing cultural climate also had a similar effect; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, Quakers and Congregationalists left the southern backcountry, moving north to a more congenial cultural environment.
Local control of immigration thus tended to reinforce cultural differences between regions. Even as most parts of British America became more diverse during the eighteenth century, they did so in very different ways, according to purposes and values of their founders.
One effect of immigration was to change the racial composition of the four major regions of British America. African slaves were imported to every colony, but in very different proportions. In many parts of New England blacks were never more than 1 percent of the population before 1760; in some southern coastal counties, blacks were more than a majority by that date.
To understand the relationship between race and regional culture in British America, one must study carefully the timing and sequence of historical change. An important and neglected fact about race slavery in British America is that it developed very slowly. Africans did not begin to arrive in large numbers until the late seventeenth century. The presence of blacks did not begin to have a major cultural impact on British America until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Then, the impact was profound. The problem of race relations moved rapidly to the center of cultural history in the plantation colonies. African folkways also began to transform the language and culture of Europeans, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery created new folkways of its own.
These great and complex processes will be studied in the second volume of this work, “American Plantations.” In this first volume, the major conclusion is that race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies; that culture created slavery.
The Expansion of Four Regional Cultures
By the year 1770 the four folk cultures had taken firm root in British America. All expanded rapidly. Emigrants from Massachusetts founded colonies with similar cultures in Connecticut, New Hampshire, southern Maine, eastern Vermont, Long Island, East Jersey, upstate New York and northern Ohio. The culture of tidewater Virginia expanded into southern Maryland, southern Delaware, coastal North Carolina and west beyond the mountains to parts of Kentucky. The folkways of the Delaware Valley spread through West Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, parts of northeastern Maryland and central Ohio. After 1740 the borderers of North Britain rapidly occupied the Appalachian highlands from Pennsylvania to the Georgia, and moved west to the Mississippi.
The people of these four cultures shared many traits in common. Nearly all spoke the English language, lived by British laws, and cherished their ancestral liberties. Most dwelled in nuclear households, and had broadly similar patterns of marital fertility.
Four Regional Cultures in Anglo-America; A Summary of Cultural Characteristics, ca. 1700–50
Definitions of Quantitative Indicators:
A |
Age bias, computed as a ratio of the reported age to expected age |
AWM |
Voting participation as a proportion of adult white males |
B |
Bastardy rate, illegitimate births per 1000 total births |
C |
Crime index, ratio violent crimes against persons to crimes against property |
E |
Mean years enrolled |
F |
Completed family size, mean number of children born to all families |
G |
Gini ratio, ranging from .00 (perfect equality) to .99 (perfect inequality, the uppermost percentile owns all) |
L |
Land grants, mean size in acres |
Ma |
Mean age at first marriage |
Nb |
Naming patterns, proportion of biblical names |
Np |
Proportion of first-born children named for parents |
O |
Crimes against order, as a proportion of all crimes |
PPR |
Prenuptial pregnancy rate, proportion of first births within 8 months of marriage |
rPr |
Refined persistence rate, percent of living adults persisting through ten years |
S |
Signature/mark literacy rates, percent signing by mark. |
Tm |
Season of marriage, the timing of major peaks in the annual marriage cycle |
Their prevailing religion was Christian and Protestant. Their lands were privately owned according to peculiar British ideas of property which were adopted throughout much of the United States. But in other ways these four British cultures were very different from one another. The more we learn empirically about them, the less similar they appear to be. The skeptical reader is invited to review the evidence of this inquiry, which is summarized in the preceding table.
Other Colonial Cultures
The four major cultures did not embrace all of British America. Other cultural areas also existed. Some were of considerable size, though smaller than the major regions. The largest of these other cultures was New Netherland, which occupied much of the Hudson Valley. In 1700 Dutch burghers and boers were two-thirds of the population in Dutchess and Ulster counties, three-quarters in Orange County, five-sixths in Kings County and nine-tenths in Albany. They also colonized part of East Jersey, where as late as 1790 they were 75 percent of the population in Bergen County, and 80 percent in Somerset County.7
This was a very conservative culture. Its old-fashioned Dutch dialect survived even into the mid-nineteenth century. Its architecture remained distinctive for broad barns, hay barracks, step-gabled town houses, and low, narrow farmhouses with half doors. Settlement patterns retained a special character, with homes built in distinctive irregular clusters around a reformed church. Rates of internal migration were exceptionally low, and Dutch households had a different demographic profile from those of English neighbors, with fewer children and more slaves. In 1738, most Dutch families in King’s County were slave-owners.8
This culture developed its own special ways of dealing with other ethnic groups. It combined formal toleration, social distance and inequality in high degree. The result was an ethnic pluralism that became more atomistic than in the Delaware Valley and more hierarchical than in New England. The peculiar texture of life in New York City today still preserves qualities which existed in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam—and Old Amsterdam as well.9
The culture of New Netherland did not expand far beyond its original boundaries. Its population remained small. In 1664, only 7,000 Dutch settlers (and 3,000 non-Dutch) were living in New Netherland. By 1790 only about 98,000 people of Dutch descent were living in the United States—less than one-tenth the population of New England, and a small fraction of the other major regional populations.10
Another distinctive colonial culture developed on the coast of South Carolina. Some of its founding families came from the West Indies; others were French Huguenots, and more than a few were emigrants from tidewater Virginia. Three-quarters of the low-country population in 1790 were slaves who came mostly from the Congo basin and the coast of Angola. These groups rapidly developed their own unique customs and institutions, which were closer to the Caribbean colonies than to the Chesapeake. Speech ways were heavily influenced by the “Gullah” (Angola) dialect of the black majority. Building ways were a unique amalgam of Caribbean, French, African and English elements. Patterns of settlement were marked by the highest level of urbanization in colonial America: nearly 25 percent of low-country whites lived in Charleston. The wealth of its white families was the greatest in the colonies (£450 in 1740), and highly concentrated in a few hands. The annual rhythm of life was regulated by a pattern of transhumance that did not exist in other mainland colonies.11 This area became a distinct cultural region, but it never developed into a major cultural hearth. As late as 1790 less than 29,000 whites lived in the South Carolina low country, compared with more than 300,000 whites in eastern Virginia and 450,000 in the southern back settlements (of whom 112,000 were in the South Carolina upcountry alone).12
Yet another colonial culture developed in North Carolina’s Cape Fear Valley, where Highland Scots began to arrive circa 1732. Many followed after the ’45 Rebellion, and by 1776 their numbers were nearly as large as the white population in the South Carolina low country.13 Other ethnic groups also settled in the Cape Fear Valley, but so dominant were highlanders that Gaelic came to be spoken in this region even by people who were not Scots. There is a story of a newly arrived Highland lady who heard two men speaking in Gaelic:
Assuming by their speech that they must inevitably be fellow Highlanders, she came nearer, only to discover that their skin was black. Then she knew that her worst foreboding about the climate of the South was not unfounded and cried in horror, “A Dhia nan fras, am fas sinn vile mar sin?” (O God of mercy, are we all going to turn black like that?)14
Even in the twentieth century, the Cape Fear people sent to Scotland for ministers who were required to wear the kilt, play the pipes, and preach in Gaelic.15
The political history of this culture was very different from its border neighbors. During the American Revolution the borderers were mostly Whig; Scottish highlanders were mainly Tory. In the new republic, the backsettlers tended to vote Democratic-Republican, and the highlanders of the Cape Fear Valley voted Federalist. Historian Duane Meyer writes that these people were “remarkably consistent in choosing the losing side.” They never became part of the solid south; in 1900 they cast their ballots for McKinley rather than Bryan. Here was another culture that preserved its separate identity into the twentieth century.16
Rhythms of Regional Development
Every regional culture had its own history, which unfolded in its own way. But all of them passed through a similar sequence of stages which created a powerful rhythm in colonial history. The first stage was the transit of culture from Britain to America, in which individual actors played decisive roles. In Massachusetts, for example, Puritan leaders such as John Winthrop and John Cotton shaped the future of their region when they decided to bring the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company to the New World, to define church membership in a rigorous way, to create a standard model for town government, and to block the growth of a Puritan aristocracy in New England. In Virginia, Sir William Berkeley made many critical decisions when he recruited a colonial elite, encouraged the growth of slavery, drove out Puritans and Quakers, and discouraged schools and printing. In Pennsylvania, William Penn’s decisions transformed the history of a region—in the design of local institutions, the recruitment of German immigrants, and the content of libertarian laws. In the southern highlands the backcountry “ascendancy” played a seminal role. All of these cultural leaders gave a direction to regional development.
The second stage was a cultural crisis of great intensity. It always began as an internal conflict among immigrant elites who supported the founding purposes of their colony, but disagreed on issues of authority, order, and individual autonomy. In Massachusetts, the crisis came with the Separatist challenge of Roger Williams (1635-36) and the Antinomian Crisis of Anne Hutchinson (1638-39). In Virginia, the critical period was that of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) and the violent repression that followed
(1676-77). Pennsylvania’s crisis occurred in the 1690s, when William Penn briefly lost control of the colony (1692-94) and the Quaker colonists were deeply divided by the “Keithian schism” (1692). The critical time in the back settlements was the Regulation (1768-70). In each case a new clarity was brought to regional cultures by these events.
These crises were followed by a period of cultural consolidation which occurred in Massachusetts during the 1640s, in Virginia during the 1680s, in Pennsylvania during the early decades of the eighteenth century, and in the backcountry during the late eighteenth century. In every case, the dominant culture of each region was hardened into institutions which survived for many years. In Massachusetts, for example, courts, churches, towns, schools, and militia all were given their definitive shape in laws which were passed within the span of a few years, mostly in the period from 1636 to 1648. Something similar happened in most other colonies at comparable stages in their development.
This period of consolidation was followed by a complex and protracted process of cultural devolution. In New England, that trend occurred in the half-century from 1650 to 1700, when Puritans became Yankees. It happened in Virginia from 1690 to 1750, when Royalists became Whigs. It took place in the Delaware Valley during the transition from the second to the third stage of Quakerism, and the development of a more inward-looking faith in an increasingly pluralistic society. In the backcountry, it happened as backsettlers evolved into frontiersmen. In every instance, founding purposes were lost, but institutions were preserved and regional identities were given new life.17
Regional Conflict in the Colonies
From the start, the four major cultures of British America did not get on well with one another. Long before collisions of material interest developed, they were divided by conflicts of value. Puritan New Englanders detested the people of Virginia. As early as 1651 one Puritan observed of Virginians in general, “I think they are the farthest from conscience and moral honesty of any such number together in the world.”1 This attitude of moral disapproval toward the Chesapeake settlers was shared by the Delaware colonists. When a young gentleman of New Jersey was preparing to take a job in Virginia, friends warned him that “the people there are profane, and exceeding wicked.”2
Virginians equally despised New England Puritans and Delaware Quakers. In 1736, William Byrd II expressed his contempt in a letter to the Earl of Egmont. “The saints of New England,” Byrd wrote, “I fear will find out some trick to evade your Act of Parliament. They have a great dexterity in palliating a perjury so as to leave no taste of it in the mouth, nor can any people like them slip through a penal statute. … A watchful eye must be kept on these foul traders.”3
One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers. However inoffensive the Society of Friends may seem today, they were genuinely hated in their own time as dangerous radicals, disturbers of the peace, and pious frauds and hypocrites who were said to “pray for their fellow men one day a week, and on them the other six.”4
Many Quakers in turn not unreasonably developed an intense hatred of Puritans. Members of this sect which preached the idea of universal salvation made an exception for the people of New England. As late as 1795, a Pennsylvania Quaker collectively reviled all Yankees as “the flock of Cain.”5
The North British borderers who came to the backcountry were heartily disliked by Puritans, cavaliers and Quakers alike. New Englanders regarded them as savages and barbarians. A Pennsylvania Quaker called them the Goths and Vandals of
America; another described them as the “unlearned and uncivilized part of the human race.” Tidewater Virginians doubted that they were part of humanity at all; one cavalier defined them as “a spurious race of mortals.”6
The backsettlers reciprocated these opinions. In the Pennsylvania interior, the Paxton Boys slaughtered a group of peaceable Indians, and “made boast how they had gotten so many scalps they would go to Philadelphia and the Quakers should share the same fate.” There was also very bad blood between backcountry folk and the tidewater gentry in Virginia and the Carolinas, and between the North British backsettlers and New England Yankees.7
Familiarity did not improve these attitudes. On close acquaintance, various members of the four folk cultures were startled to discover how very different they were from one another. The New Jersey tutor Philip Fithian wrote to a Yankee friend about the Virginians, “their manner of living, their eating, drinking, diversions, exercise &c, are in many ways different from any thing you have been accustomed to.”8
On many occasions these antipathies gave rise to acts of violence. Fighting broke out repeatedly between Puritans and Quakers in central New Jersey. The inhabitants of the Delaware Valley and the people of Chesapeake region met in armed combat along what is now the Mason-Dixon Line. Backsettlers and tidewater folk came to blows in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Pennsylvania. North Britons fought New Englanders in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Connecticut Valley after the Revolution.
These tensions were reduced by the simple expedient of physical separation. In the great American spaces, the four British folk cultures found room enough to protect their differences merely by moving apart. This process of spatial separation created a curious paradox in colonial America. “Early America,” observes John Roche, “was an open country dotted with closed enclaves.”9
To this general rule, there were many exceptions—notably in the seaport cities which collected very mixed populations. But in relative terms, the urban population of early America actually declined during the period from 1720 to 1775. At the same time, many rural parts of British America grew more uniform rather than less so, and more fixed in their traditional ways.
Regional Cultures and the Coming of Independence
In the mid-eighteenth century, the four cultures of British America suddenly faced a major challenge from a new imperial elite in London. This small ruling class developed its own special variety of English culture, which differed very much from the older folkways of British America. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, it invented its own distinctive language which is still the hallmark of England’s upper class. To American ears, the salient feature of this speech was its very broad a, which is sometimes said to have been popularized by David Garrick on the London stage. That story may be apocryphal, but the broad a became fashionable during Garrick’s life (1717-79). With other refinements of idiom and intonation, it created an elite dialect which promoted the integration of England’s ruling few.10 It also increased the cultural distance between the few and the many.11
This new dialect of England’s ruling class differed markedly from the speech ways of American colonists, to whom it seemed contrived and pretentious. On the other hand, British officers who came to the colonies remarked that natives even of high rank seemed to be speaking in archaic accents of the seventeenth century. Loyalists who fled to Britain after the Revolution were startled to discover that their old-fashioned speech and manners were far removed from the latest affectations of London drawing rooms.12
The new speech ways of England’s governing class were only one part of a complex elite culture which was also distinctive in its ideas of family life, marriage practices and especially its child-rearing customs. It also had its own ideas about order, freedom and power which became major threats to the cultures of British America.
In the century from 1660 to 1760 England’s elite created many new institutions which still dominate the life of their nation. The regimental traditions of the British army were formed in this period. The Royal Navy, despite its claims to be the “senior service” founded by King Alfred, was largely a creation of this era. So also were many legal institutions; the rituals, ceremonies, architecture and costumes of English law still preserve the fashions of the century in which they were elaborately developed. In this period the Church of England created new institutions of evangelical Anglicanism, notably the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The Bank of England and many great commercial institutions were founded in the same time. A new national bureaucracy began its inexorable growth in Whitehall’s neoclassical buildings. Above all these various institutions hovered the King-in-Parliament, an elaborately integrated idea of sovereignty that had scarcely existed before 1689.
These new ideas and institutions were no sooner formed than they were brought to bear upon the American colonies, whose independent ways appeared to be archaic survivals from an earlier and less happy age of strife and social confusion. As late as 1903, an English historian of high rank was still raging against the narrowness and provincialism of the American colonies. “There was not one of these communities,” wrote Sir John For-tescue, “not even the tiniest of the Antilles, but possessed its little legislature on the English model, and consequently not one but enjoyed facilities for excessive indulgence of local feeling, local faction and local folly.”13
England’s governing elites mounted a major effort to bring the American colonies into line with the new national institutions. This challenge was not only political, but broadly cultural. It included proposals for an American aristocracy on the model of the Irish peerage; an American bureaucracy like that in Whitehall; and an American religious establishment like the Church of England. The folkways of British America were deeply threatened by these policies.
Shortly before the American Revolution, for example, the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Gospel sent missionaries to Massachusetts for the conversion of the “heathen.” They built one of their missions not on the frontier but across the street from Harvard College and labored to convert the sons of Congregational New England. The head of this Anglican organization, Bishop Thomas Seeker, made no secret of his contempt for the colonists, whom he collectively characterized in 1741 as “wicked, and dissolute and brutal in every respect.”14 In 1758, this man became Archbishop of Canterbury and tried to create uniform Anglican establishments in the colonies. His grand design simultaneously posed a mortal threat to the Congregational orthodoxy of New England, the Quakers’ regime of religious freedom of Pennsylvania, the powerful lay-vestries of Virginia, and Presbyterians in the backcountry.15
The new imperial elite also tried to force educational institutions and social structures in the colonies into line with its own ideas. The authors of the Stamp Act believed that
the Duties upon admissions to any professions or to the University degees should be certainly as high as they are in England; it would indeed be better if they were raised both here and there in order to keep mean persons out of those situations in life which they disgrace.16
They imposed a heavy stamp tax of two pounds on matriculation papers, and two pounds more on diplomas “in any university, academy, college, or seminary of learning within the said colonies” (compared with two shillings, eighteen pence in England). To restrict the growth of professions, they placed a duty of ten pounds on papers of admission to practice law.17
They also attempted to restrain the institutional growth of regional cultures in even more direct ways. In 1769, for example, backcountry Presbyterians in Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, founded an institution (which still exists) called Queen’s College. A charter was reluctantly granted by the North Carolina legislature, only after a “considerable body” of backsettlers marched on the colonial capital. When Queen’s College began to operate it was the only such institution south and west of Williamsburg, but it was one too many for imperial authorities. In 1773 after long delay, the charter of Queen’s College was disallowed in London on the ground it gave preference to Presbyterians. At the same time, the Crown also disallowed an amended North Carolina Marriage Act which permitted Presbyterian ministers to solemnize marriages, on the ground that it did not give preference to the Church of England. These decisions became symbolic issues which infuriated the backsettlers and deepened their determination to “support the Government under which we find the most liberty,” as one Mecklenberg petition ominously threatened.18
While Bishop Seeker was trying to change the religious life of the colonies, others of the imperial elite reformed its legal institutions. Each cultural region had its own system of courts which had long remained in their own hands. Now Americans were given an expanded system of vice admiralty courts which operated without juries under Roman Civil Law which was alien to American customs. The colonists were also forced to deal with novel legal doctrines, and new hierarchies of barristers and legal officers.
England’s imperial elite also mounted another assault on the political institutions of British America. The result was a decline in the power and autonomy of regional cultures. As late as 1660, for example, five out of seven mainland colonies in British North America had elected their governors. By 1760, only two out of thirteen colonies did so. The rest were ruled by royal governors, who had been appointed in London from the ranks of England’s ruling class. One of these men, Governor Francis Bernard, was chosen governor of Massachusetts solely because he had married the cousin of a powerful peer. In 1774, Bernard formally proposed the creation of an American aristocracy. “A nobility appointed by the King for life, and made independent,” he wrote, “would probably give strength and stability to the American governments, as effectually as an hereditary nobility does to that of Great Britain.”19
These various challenges threatened all four American cultures at the same time. In response to a common danger, they forgot their differences and joined together in the movement that led to the American Revolution. The indigenous elites of New England, Virginia and the backcountry were united in that struggle. Only the Delaware elite was divided—not so much by their views of British policy as by their reluctance to use force against any provocation.
The Revolution as a Rising of Regional Cultures
The Revolution was not a single struggle, but a series of four separate Wars of Independence, waged in very different ways by the major cultures of British America. The first American Revolution (1775-76) was a massive popular insurrection in New England. An army of British regulars was defeated by a Yankee militia which was much like the Puritan train bands from which they were descended. These citizen soldiers were urged into battle by New England’s “black regiment” of Calvinist clergy. The purpose of New England’s War for Independence, as stated both by ministers and by laymen such as John and Samuel Adams, was not to secure the rights of man in any universal sense. Most New Englanders showed little interest in John Locke or Cato’s letters. They sought mainly to defend their accustomed ways against what the town of Malden called “the contagion of venality and dissipation” which was spreading from London to America.
Many years later, historian George Bancroft asked a New England townsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution. Had he been inspired by the ideas of John Locke? The old soldier confessed that he had never heard of Locke. Had he been moved by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom Paine. Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference? The veteran thought not. When asked to explain why he fought in his own words, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their own affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.
In 1775, these Yankee soldiers were angry and determined men, in no mood for halfway measures. Their revolution was not merely a mind game. Most able-bodied males served in the war, and the fighting was cruel and bitter. So powerful was the resistance of this people-in-arms that after 1776 a British army was never again able to remain in force on the New England mainland.
The second American War for Independence (1776-81) was a more protracted conflict in the middle states and the coastal south. This was a gentlemen’s war. On one side was a professional army of regulars and mercenaries commanded by English gentry. On the other side was an increasingly professional American army led by a member of the Virginia gentry. The principles of this second American Revolution were given their Aristotelian statement in the Declaration of Independence by another Virginia gentleman, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that he was fighting for the ancient liberties of his “Saxon ancestors.”
The third American Revolution reached its climax in the years from 1779 to 1781. This was a rising of British borderers in the southern backcountry against American loyalists and British regulars who invaded the region. The result was a savage struggle which resembled many earlier conflicts in North Britain, with much family feuding and terrible atrocities committed on both sides. Prisoners were slaughtered, homes were burned, women were raped and even small children were put to the sword.
The fourth American Revolution continued in the years from 1781 to 1783. This was a non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle, in which the elites of the Delaware Valley played a leading part. The economic war was organized by Robert Morris of Philadelphia. The genius of American diplomacy was Benjamin Franklin. The Delaware culture contributed comparatively little to the fighting, but much to other forms of struggle.
The loyalists who opposed the revolution tended to be groups who were not part of the four leading cultures. They included the new imperial elites who had begun to multiply rapidly in many colonial capitals, and also various ethnic groups who lived on the margins of the major cultures: notably the polyglot population of lower New York, the Highland Scots of Carolina and African slaves who inclined against their Whiggish masters.
Regional Cultures in the New Republic:
The Constitutional Coalition, 1787-95
After the achievement of independence, the four regional cultures found themselves in conflict with one another. Even during the war, the Continental Congress divided into factions which were not primarily ideological or economic, but regional and cultural in their origin. Three voting blocs appeared: an “eastern” bloc of colonies settled by New Englanders; a southern bloc centered on tidewater Virginia; and a midland bloc which consisted mainly of delegations from the Delaware Valley. A leading historian of the Continental Congress has found that regional conflicts among these cultures were the leading determinants of Congressional voting on major issues from 1777 to 1785, such as oversight of the army, the taxing power of Congress and navigation of the Mississippi River.20
So strong were these regional identities in the new Confederation that the British secret agent Paul Wentworth reported that the American states comprised not one but three republics: an “eastern republic of Independents in church and state”; a “middle republic of toleration in church and state”; and a “southern republic or mixed government copied nearly from Great Britain.” Wentworth asserted that the differences among these American republics were greater than those between European states. “There is hardly any observation, moral or political, which will equally apply,” he believed.21
The Constitution of 1787 was an attempt to write the rules of engagement among these regional “republics” of British America. The purpose of the Constitutional Convention was to create an institutional consensus within which four regional cultures could mutually agree to respect their various differences. In the Great Convention itself, some of the most important compromises were not between states or sections or ideologies, but between cultural regions.
A case in point was the question of representation in the new government. Edmund Randolph’s “Virginia plan” was accepted as a basis for discussion, but required major modification before it was generally acceptable. The result was a series of compromises between big states and little ones on the two branches of Congress. Not so familiar, but equally important was another compromise between cultural regions. Randolph’s plan envisioned a national polity such as Virginia possessed—an oligarchy of country gentlemen who dominated the legislature by long tenure and infrequent elections. This system was alien to New England. Roger Sherman explained to the Virginians, “ … in Connecticut, elections have been very frequent, yet great stability and uniformity both as to persons and measures have been experienced from its original establishment to the present time; a period of more than 130 years.”22
On this question the little state of Connecticut and the large state of Massachusetts voted together against Virginia. The result was a regional compromise of high complexity. Several generations of political scientists have misled us into thinking that the “great compromise” was mainly intended to mediate between large states and little ones. But the more serious task was to reconcile different political cultures in the four regions of British America. Regional compromises were also necessary on questions of representation, taxation, economic policy, slavery and ideas of law and liberty. In the great convention, as in the Continental Congress, the strongest voting patterns were regional in nature.
One region, the backcountry, was largely unrepresented in the convention. The federal Constitution was enacted mainly by a coalition of cultural elites from New England, Virginia and the Delaware Valley. It was generally opposed by the backsettlers, and by dissenting minorities in the various regions. Opposition came from boundary cultures between the major regions—notably the Clintonian elite of New York, the Chase faction in Maryland and Rhode Islanders of every description. But the dominant coalition of three regional elites supported the Constitution, and secured its ratification.
In 1789, the coexistence of the regional cultures was further protected by the Bill of Rights. A case in point was the first sentence of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This deceptively simple statement was another regional compromise of high complexity. Its intent was to preserve religious freedom of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and at the same time to protect the religious establishments of New England from outside interference. As time passed its meaning was enlarged; a measure which was written to protect regional pluralism became a basis for national libertarianism.23
The Persistence of Old British Cultures in the New Republic
After the revolution, foreign travelers in the United States continued for many years to remark on what one called the “essential Englishness” of its culture. The agricultural reformer William Strickland wrote, “ … the predilection of these northern states for everything that is English, and their attachment to the Old Country, as they call England, is truly remarkable, of the New England states in particular … it is not quite so strong in N. York, which is inhabited by a mixed people.”24
Another commentator remarked in 1818, “Whoever has well observed America cannot doubt that she still remains essentially English, in language, habits, laws, customs, manners, morals, and religion. … the great mass of our people is of English origin, and not made up, originally, of convicts, mendicants and vagabonds, according to the vulgar but erroneous opinion.”25
Well into the nineteenth century, foreign travelers were still repeating these remarks. In 1835, French visitor Michel Chevalier described the people of New England as not merely English, but “double distilled English.”26 Alexis de Tocqueville added, “In spite of the ocean that intervenes, I cannot consent to separate America from Europe. I consider the people of the United States as that portion of the English people who are commissioned to explore the forests of the new world.”27
In the Appalachian highlands, nineteenth-century travelers were even more startled by the patterns of cultural persistence which they discovered there. George Flower, in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, was surprised in 1816 to find “a style of conversation that prevailed in England about Cromwell’s time.”28 That same discovery would often be made by others through the next two centuries. A student of American language, Albert Marckwardt, has written that “on the average of once every five years some well meaning amateur in the field of folklore or cultural history ‘discovers’ that either the Kentucky or Virginian or Ozark mountaineers … speak the undefiled English of Chaucer or Shakespeare.”
In fact, this impression of cultural stasis was not correct. What appeared at first hearing to be merely a linguistic archaism was produced by a complex pattern of continuity and change. Nevertheless, each of the four folkways of English speaking America retained its linguistic identity for many years after independence.29
The Hegemony of Four Cultural Regions
After independence, all four Anglo-American cultures began to expand very rapidly. Each of the original areas in Massachusetts Bay, tidewater Virginia, the Delaware Valley and the Appalachian highlands were what folklorists call “cultural hearths” or “seedbeds” from which four different populations overspread the nation.
These various groups intermingled very little, except along the edges of the great migration-streams. Even there, they tended to settle in homogenous communities, and regarded one another as aliens. In south-central Illinois, for example, an area settled mostly from the southern highlands, a New Englander named Lucy Maynard wrote, “Our neighbors are principally from Indiana and Kentucky, some from Virginia, all friendly but very different from our people in their manners and language and every other way.” An English traveler William Oliver observed in 1843 that pioneers from the various cultural regions were as unlike one another “as if they were different nations.”30
Traces of these separate migrations are still visible today in the regional patterns of American speech. During the mid-twentieth century, linguistic geographers discovered four major dialect regions in the continental United States. They are the areas in which the four English folkways expanded after independence.
One area, the “northern speech region,” included New England, upstate New York, northern Ohio and Indiana, much of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern plains, and the Pacific North West, together with islands of urban speech at Denver, Salt Lake City and San Francisco. A second area of “midland speech” covered the middle states, the middle west, and the middle latitudes from Pennsylvania to the Pacific coast, broadening outward in the Mississippi Valley; its cultural hearth was the Delaware Valley. The third speech region, called “coastal south,” extended from Virginia to Florida along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Its soft southern drawl of this region was carried from the Chesapeake. The fourth speech region was “highland southern,” from the Appalachia and the old southwest across the lower Mississippi Valley to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California. Similar patterns also appeared in material culture, vernacular architecture, onomastic customs, folklore and many other indicators. All of this evidence describes an historical process by which four regional cultures expanded throughout the United States.
The Presidency as a Case Study
For two centuries after 1789, the four major regions controlled the national politics of the United States as completely as they dominated its language and its culture. Not until the late twentieth century did this pattern begin to change. An indicator of this hegemony may be seen in the cultural origins of American Presidents. In two centuries from 1789 to 1989, the highest office has been held by forty men, of whom thirty-eight were descended from one or another of the four folk migrations.
Of those four cultural groups, this historian was surprised to discover that the largest number of Presidents, eighteen in all, were descended in whole or in part from North British borderers, most of whom had settled in the backcountry during the eighteenth century. They included Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt (who was nearly three-quarters North British), Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.31
The next largest group of Presidents, sixteen altogether, traced their American ancestry wholly or partly to Puritans who had landed in Massachusetts during the great migration (1629-1640). They included John and John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and George Bush.32 Also in this group was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was three-quarters New England Yankee despite his Dutch name.33
New England ancestry was important to the self-identities of these men. All but one of them took a suitably solemn pride in their Puritan forbears. The exception was Abraham Lincoln, who made a typically Lincolnian joke about his Puritan past. “The first ancestor that I know anything about,” he told a friend, “was Tom Lincoln who came over in 1634 and settled at a place [called] Hingham—or perhaps it was Hanghim. Which was it, judge?”34
Except for Lincoln, the others strongly identified with their New England roots, even far beyond the genealogical fact. Ulysses Grant, for example, was only one-quarter New Englander, but he was taught by his genealogist-father to think of himself as mainly of New England stock.35 Even Warren Harding, the least puritanical of American Presidents, made a hobby of his New England genealogy, and devoted many proud hours to tracing his Calvinist forbears.36
A third group of ten Presidents were descended from Virginia’s “distressed cavaliers.” They were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor (part), Benjamin Harrison (part), Harry Truman (part) and Jimmy Carter (part).37
Three of these lineages were very thin. Benjamin Harrison was only one-quarter Virginian through his presidential grandfather. Truman had only a tenuous tidewater connection which was discovered after he became President and had no part in forming his cultural identity. Jimmy Carter also had a distant connection to the old Virginia family of the same name. But that relationship was of less significance than his deep roots in the southern back-country. As chief executive Carter formally changed his official forename from the royal James to the proletarian Jimmy—a specimen of backcountry onomastics which descendants of Puritans and cavaliers alike observed with surprise.
The fourth folk culture contributed comparatively little to the presidency. The English Quakers and German Pietists who settled the Delaware Valley did not approve of politics. Nevertheless, seven American Presidents had a connection with this culture. Abraham Lincoln’s Puritan ancestors intermarried with Pennsylvania Quakers. Grover Cleveland had a German Quaker grandmother from Pennsylvania. William McKinley had a Quaker great-grandmother. Warren Harding was of Quaker descent on his mother’s side. Herbert Hoover was descended from mixed German and English Quakers and Dwight Eisenhower came from German Mennonites whose experiences and beliefs were similar to English Quakers in many ways.38 The black sheep of the presidential flock, Richard Nixon, also traced his ancestry to Quakers who migrated to Pennsylvania before 1730.39
These lists count several Presidents more than once if they were of mixed ancestry. There is an interesting pattern in that respect. Before the year 1856, every American President but one came from a single cultural stock. The sole exception was John Tyler, who had a Huguenot grandmother. Here is another indicator of cultural homogenity in regional elites through the first two centuries of early American history.
With the election of 1856, that pattern began to change. American Presidents began to combine two or even three cultures in their own ancestry. The first to do so was James Buchanan (b. 1791). The second was Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809), whose father’s forbears had been both Puritan and Quaker, and whose mother’s ancestry was largely unknown even to the President himself. Six Presidents in the late nineteenth century had plural origins, and eight Presidents did in the twentieth. There was a good deal of intermarrying among British elites, French Huguenots, Dutch Calvinists and German Protestants. But British culture remained predominant in most of these mixed unions.
In summary, during the first two centuries of American history (1789-1989), every President except two was descended from one or more of the four hearth cultures of Anglo-America. All but two Presidents were also descended from ancestors who arrived in the four major folk migrations. The only exceptions were Martin Van Buren (a Dutch Calvinist from New York), and John F. Kennedy (an Irish Catholic from New England).40 No Presidents came from the South Carolina low country, Maryland, Rhode Island or Maine. For two centuries the dominion of the four major regional cultures has remained remarkably strong.
Four Regional Cultures in Washington’s Presidency: The Constitutional Coalition vs. the Backcountry, 1789-97
During the first years of George Washington’s administration (1789-93), regional elites in New England, the Delaware Valley and the coastal south strongly supported the new federal government. The unanimity of Washington’s election was produced not by his personal popularity alone, but by a fundamental consensus on the frame of government among the leaders of three major regions.
These groups did not agree in every respect. Intense regional conflicts arose over the location of the national capital, and the regulation of foreign trade. Major differences also developed from the fiscal policies of Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture.1
These questions were full of trouble for the ruling coalition through the First and Second Congresses (1789-93). But the major cultural regions were able to resolve most of their differences. In a complex series of regional compromises, a home was found for the national capital, a fiscal policy was agreed upon, a foreign policy was adopted and foreign trade was regulated in a manner acceptable to leaders from three regions.
The fourth region, however, remained stubbornly opposed to this coalition. The backcountry did not support the federal government. Throughout the interior parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, hostility to the new regime grew stronger as it began to function. In 1794, after a federal excise tax was enacted, the backcountry rose in an armed insurrection which has been miscalled the Whiskey Rebellion—a label which has trivialized a regional movement of high seriousness and danger to the republic.2
The rebellion broke out in mountain counties of Pennsylvania (Allegheny, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Washington) which had been settled by British borderers. It was much more than merely a protest against a whiskey tax. Behind it lay a culture which felt its ideal of natural liberty to be deeply threatened by the new Federal system. One North Carolinian expressed his feeling in cadences that called to mind the border poets of North Britain, and many earlier conflicts in the American backcountry:
The country’s a’ in a greetin mood
An some are like to rin wud blud:
Some chaps whom freedom’s spirit warms
Their liberty they will maintain.
They fought for’t, and they’ll fight again.3
The violent acts of the backcountry rebels were similar to risings in North Britain. Federal officers (themselves often borderers with names such as Graham, Johnson, Boyd, Wilson and Connor) were brutally beaten, tortured, and mutilated just as many a North British exciseman had been.
The rising spread swiftly throughout the back settlements of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Backcountry leaders approached the governments of Britain and Spain, with plans for their own separate republic. Only President Washington’s instant application of overwhelming force prevented a major crisis which might have ended in disaster for the new republic. The backcountry rebellion ended in scenes that were also reminiscent of North Britain: marching armies, fortified houses, small skirmishes, and hundreds of ragged, barefoot captives held at bayonet-point by uniformed troops from other regions.
Separatist movements continued to flourish in the back settlements—the Blount conspiracy, Wilkinson’s intrigue and the Burr affair. These were not marginal movements; many leading figures of the backcountry Ascendancy were involved. The restlessness of the back settlements was alarming to contemporaries, who feared that the separatist spirit might spread throughout America, and every region would become a nation. The balkanization of British North America (as happened in Latin America) would have been catastrophe for the cause of freedom in the modern world.
A National Experiment in Ordered Liberty:
New England’s Hegemony in the Adams Presidency, 1797-1801
The constitutional coalition survived this danger, but it did not long remain intact. The French Revolution caused a major realignment in American politics by raising urgent new questions about the nature of liberty and republican government—questions to which every regional culture had its own range of answers. During the era of the French Revolution, voting patterns in Congress on both domestic and foreign policy were primarily partisan in nature, but party pluralities were regional in their base.
A leading example was Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain, which became the major issue of Washington’s second term. More than any other question, Jay’s Treaty caused two new political parties to form in the national capital—the Federal Republicans (a different group from the Federalists of 1787) against the Democratic Republicans. New England and the Delaware Valley solidly supported Jay’s treaty; the coastal south and backcountry were strongly opposed.4
After the retirement of George Washington, the new President was New Englander John Adams, who was narrowly elected by a plurality of three electoral votes. In office, he surrounded himself with men from his own region. So complete was New England’s hegemony that in 1800 the President, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of War (more than half of the entire Cabinet) came from Massachusetts and Connecticut alone.
During the presidency of John Adams, New Englanders and their allies responded to the great questions of the French Revolution by attempting to create a national system of ordered liberty, such as had long existed in their own region. This idea meant an active role for government, increased taxation, a strong navy, an expanded national judiciary with broad common law jurisdiction, a more active regulation of commerce, narrow restriction of immigration, an active attempt to suppress dissent, and a moralistic tone of government that was deeply resented by others of different persuasions. All of these policies were enacted by the Fifth and Sixth Congresses in the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Naturalization Act of 1798, the Navy and Army acts of 1798, the Bankruptcy Act of 1800, the Judiciary Act of 1801 and many new federal taxes, including a direct tax, a salt tax and even a stamp tax. New England’s idea of ordered liberty was very different from the ideology of the French Revolution, which Federalists condemned for its violence, its corruption and its hostility to religion.
After 1797, the American republic found itself embroiled in a “quasi-war” with France, which briefly caused an interesting realignment in regional politics. With war fever at its height in 1798, voters in the coastal south and the backcountry suddenly rallied to the government. In the Congressional elections of 1798, Federalists carried 63 out of 106 seats, including 20 seats below the Potomac and in the back settlements. Even counties that gave rise to the Whiskey Rebellion now voted Federalist.5
The war fever of ’98 marked the beginning of a consistent pattern in American military history. From the quasi-war with France to the Vietnam War, the two southern cultures strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against. Southern ideas of honor and the warrior ethic combined to create regional war fevers of great intensity in 1798, 1812, 1846, 1861, 1898, 1917, 1941, 1950 and 1965. Here is another subject that remains to be studied in detail.
But in the Delaware Valley, Quaker and German voters turned against the Federalist administration in 1798. So strong was this feeling that it led to an insurrection in Bucks, Montgomery and Northampton counties of eastern Pennsylvania. Historians call this event Fries Rebellion after a German who forcibly opposed a federal marshal in the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Contemporaries knew it as the Hot Water War, after the weapon which angry farm wives used against federal troops and tax assessors.
President John Adams observed the growth of this war fever with increasing alarm. The effective head of the new national army was Alexander Hamilton, whom the President distrusted. Conservative military officers interfered in elections and assaulted civilians of other political views; a captain and lieutenant of marines even attacked Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke. Suddenly it appeared that the “Friends of Order,” as they called themselves, were beginning to become a greater danger to Adams’s ideal of balanced government and ordered liberty than the specter of revolution from the left.
In February 1799, John Adams suddenly reversed the foreign policy of his administration, and sent a peace mission to France. By that act, he instantly stopped the war movement, but also shattered his party and wrecked his chances for reelection. As the war fever rapidly cooled, southerners abandoned against the administration. Adams’s decision led to a regional realignment in 1799, and an electoral revolution in 1800.
The Jeffersonian Coalition: Virginia, Pennsylvania and the Backcountry against New England, 1801-25
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson was elected President by the combined votes of the middle states, the coastal south and the southern highlands, against the entrenched opposition of New England which still strongly supported Adams.6 This new Jeffersonian coalition of Virginia, Pennsylvania and the backcountry was destined to dominate American politics for a quarter-century (1801-25). Its ideology was a complex and highly unstable combination of three different ideas of liberty, which derived not from “classical republicanism” in Europe but from the inherited folkways of British America. Jeffersonians in the middle and northern states believed in reciprocal liberty; the backcountry thought more in terms of natural liberty; tidewater Virginians drew upon their heritage of hegemonic liberty. The Republican leaders—Jefferson himself, Madison and Gallatin—had their own highly developed principles. Together they created a pluralist libertarian movement.7
But even as Jeffersonians espoused different libertarian ideals, they all opposed New England’s idea of ordered liberty, which most Americans regarded as a contradiction in terms. The major legislation of the Adams presidency was repealed: the Alien Friends Act, the Sedition Act, the Naturalization Act, the Bankruptcy Act of 1800, the Judiciary Act of 1801, and the new tax measures all were overturned. Support for the Federal party dwindled everywhere except New England. The purchase of Louisiana (1803) and the annexation of West Florida (1810) vastly enlarged the backcountry, and promised to shift the balance of regional power toward the south and west.
Now it was New England’s turn to think about disunion. In the period from 1804 to 1814, a separatist movement gathered strength in that region. It was very different from backcountry separatism. In place of mobs and lynchings there were sermons and town meetings which talked of God’s Providence for his chosen people. Yankee children were taught to sing (to the tune of Rule Britannia): “Rule, New England! New England rules and saves!”8 One little girl stitched this sentiment into a sampler:
Amy Kittredge is my name,
Salem is my dwelling place
New England is my Nation.
And Christ is my salvation.9
The Federalist leader Fisher Ames believed that New England was “of all colonies that were ever founded, the largest, the most assimilated, and to use the modern jargon, nationalized, the most respectable and prosperous, the most truly interesting to America and to humanity, more unlike and more superior to other people (the English excepted).”10
New England Republicans shared this nascent sense of Yankee nationalism. James Winthrop, for example, praised the determination of New Englanders to “keep their blood pure.” He added, “ … the eastern states have, by keeping separate from the foreign mixtures, acquired their present greatness in a century and a half, and have preserved their religion and morals.”11
These feelings were most intense from 1807 to 1814, when the American republic was caught up in a bitter conflict between Tory Britain and Napoleonic France. The Jefferson administration desperately sought a way of defending national honor by the Great Embargo, an “experiment in peaceful coercion” which virtually
stopped America’s foreign trade from 1807 to 1809. The effect of this policy was greatly to increase material disparities between American regions. Jefferson’s embargo was an economic disaster which fell hardest on his own region; it shattered the staple agriculture of the coastal south, and encouraged industrial development in New England and the Delaware Valley.12
The War of 1812 divided the nation more deeply than any event since the Revolution, on both regional and party lines. Once again, the coastal south and backcountry strongly supported the war: of 60 Congressmen from those regions, 52 voted for it, and only 8 against. New England and the middle states were internally divided, and experienced an unprecedented growth of organized political parties, and a revolutionary surge in popular participation in democratic politics. These divisions prevented disunionist movements from developing in the northern states, but the democratization of politics increased the cultural differences between the north and south—adding another dimension to regional disparities.13
The Jacksonian Coalition:
A Border Chieftain in the White House, 1829-37
After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the great questions of a revolutionary age suddenly lost their urgency in American politics. The immediate result was the collapse of the first party system. The Federalist party disappeared and the Jeffersonian coalition rapidly disintegrated in a post-war period inaccurately remembered as the Era of Good Feelings. During the presidency of James Monroe (1817-25), national politics became a conflict of personal cliques and followings. One of those factions gained the presidency in 1825 for New Englander John Quincy Adams in a series of complex and highly controversial parliamentary maneuvers.
The presidency of John Quincy Adams attained few of its own goals, but it had an unintended consequence of high importance in American history. Once again, the New England spirit of ordered freedom was brought to Washington by a moralistic President who favored an active role for the national government in economics, education and morality. These measures were strongly supported in New England. But Americans from three regions deeply disliked the policies of the Yankee President, and detested his political style. In the elections of 1828, John Quincy Adams won every electoral vote except one in his native region of New England. He also ran well in boundary states which had voted Federalist in the early republic.14
But Adams was deeply unpopular in other regions. Once again, Pennsylvania, the coastal south and the highland south joined together against New England in a new coalition which governed the nation for twelve years, from 1829 to 1841. Its structure was similar to the Jeffersonian coalition; voting patterns in 1828 and 1832 were much the same as in 1804 and 1808. But its style was very different. Its leader was not a Virginia planter but a back-country border captain, Andrew Jackson. The values of Jackson-ian democracy varied broadly from one cultural region to another, but the dominant purposes of Andrew Jackson himself owed much to the folkways of his ancestors.15
President Jackson was deeply conscious of cultural differences between American regions. In his Farewell Address he declared:
In a country so extensive as the United States and with pursuits so varied, the internal regulations of the several States must frequently differ from one another in important particulars; and this difference is unavoidably increased by the varying principles upon which the American colonies were originally planted; principles which had taken deep root in their social relations before the Revolution, and, therefore, of necessity influencing their policy since they became free and independent states. But each state has an unquestionable right to regulate its own internal concerns.16
Jackson’s goals for the government of an “extensive republic” were the preservation of honor abroad and the protection of liberty at home. By liberty, he had in mind the natural freedom of the backcountry—minimal government, maximal autonomy for each individual and no “unwarrantable interference” by the people of one region in the customs of any other.
The Jacksonian coalition was built upon principles which most Americans accepted, but many voters were deeply troubled by the behavior of President Jackson himself—a political style characterized by intensely personal leadership, charismatic appeals to his followers, demands for extreme personal loyalty, and a violent antipathy against all who disagreed with him. This style of leadership had long been rooted in the political folkways of the back-country, but it was alien to other American cultures. In some ways it seemed merely absurd to others—as in the Peggy Eaton affair (1831), when a petty quarrel among Cabinet wives grew into a test of personal loyalty which became a matter of the highest moment to a border chieftain. To the astonishment of Americans from other regions, this tempest ended in the disruption of the administration, the discharge of the Cabinet, and political feuds that continued for many years.
If the Peggy Eaton affair amused Jackson’s critics, other events genuinely alarmed them. In the Nullification crisis, Jackson’s proclamations and force bills challenged southern ideas of hegemonic liberty. In his battle with Nicholas Biddle and the “Monster Bank,” and the removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United States, the President badly frightened the elite of Philadelphia. His refusal to respect a ruling of the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia and his trampling of Indian rights outraged moral opinion in New England.
During Andrew Jackson’s presidency, voting returns were mainly regional in nature. Patterns of partisan allegiance to the Jacksonian Democratic Republicans and anti-Jacksonian National Republicans in 1828 and 1832 were very similar to those in the early republic. Jackson was deeply distrusted in greater New England and in the Delaware Valley. He was generally supported in central and western Pennsylvania, in the Mississippi Valley, the coastal south and the highland south. These regional patterns were so strong that in 1828 Jackson carried the electoral votes of every southern and western state, and lost virtually all of New England. Congregationalists, Quakers, Mennonites and Moravians were strenuously hostile to him. Most large denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, and Baptist—divided on regional lines.
Regional culture was the primary determinant of party allegiance in this period. The backcountry rallied to the idea of natural freedom under the banners of Jackson’s Democratic Republican party. Greater New England supported the idea of ordered liberty and the National Republicans. The coastal south held to its idea of hegemonic liberty. Other regions and ethnic groups aligned themselves with one group or another, according to their customs and beliefs.17 In the election of 1832, the pattern was a little different as a consequence of the defection from the Democratic party of South Carolina and Kentucky, caused by feuds between Andrew Jackson and his rival border chieftains Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Otherwise, the Jacksonian coalition continued to dominate the republic from 1824 to 1840, against the minority opposition of greater New England.
The Whig Omnibus, 1840-52
In 1834, Andrew Jackson’s many enemies joined together to found the Whig party. The name they chose revealed the root of their distrust of his border-chieftain politics. But coming as they did from every cultural region in the United States, they found it difficult to stand together. In consequence, during the election of 1836, the Whigs ran not one but three presidential candidates, in hopes of winning pluralities within each region and forcing the election into the House of Representatives. They simultaneously supported Daniel Webster in New England, Hugh Lawson White in the highland south, and William Henry Harrison, a Virginia gentlemen who had moved to Ohio.
This stratagem failed. Webster won only the votes of New England, and White carried only Tennessee and Georgia. Enough of the Jacksonian coalition held together to carry Jackson’s lieutenant Martin Van Buren into the White House. But one of the Whig candidates, William Henry Harrison, proved to be unexpectedly popular in many regions. Thus was born a new strategy in presidential politics—the omnibus candidate. William Henry Harrison was an aged military hero: an unknown soldier in politics with few discernable opinions to divide the electorate. An omnibus image was carefully created for him. In 1840, Harrison was nominated as the only Whig candidate, and won 80 percent of the electoral vote.
The election of 1840 was something new in American politics—the triumph of an omnibus campaign carefully designed to appeal to all cultural regions, not by issues but by symbolic identities. Harrison was a Virginia gentleman, a backcountry settler and the candidate of a political party which showed some sympathy for New England ideas of ordered liberty and moral reform. His party mounted its classic “log cabin and hard cider campaign,” by combining many different cultural symbols: the western log cabin, the gravitas of the Virginia gentleman, and hard cider which was a temperance alternative to hard liquor.
This omnibus strategy succeeded brilliantly for the Whigs, not only in 1840 with William Henry Harrison’s election, but again in 1848 for Zachary Taylor. Both men were military heroes, Virginia gentlemen, western settlers and unknown soldiers who ran strongly in every cultural region.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders struggled to keep alive the memory of Old Hickory. In 1844, they won the presidency for another border captain from Appalachia, James Knox Polk, who was called Young Hickory. Polk’s Jacksonian foreign policy led to the Mexican War, a war of conquest which was immensely popular in the coastal south and southern highlands, and strongly opposed in the Delaware Valley and New England. Northern critics of the war invented a new form of politics called civil disobedience, which in substance and form expressed the values of those cultures.18
The omnibus candidates of both Whigs and Democrats reached across regional lines. In the 1840s New England was divided in its party allegiance. The state of Massachusetts voted Whig in every presidential election from 1836 to 1852; so also did Vermont and Connecticut throughout the 1840s. But New Hampshire and Maine were Democratic, and Rhode Island went its own way.
The southern states were also split. Virginia consistently produced Democratic pluralities in every presidential election from 1836 to 1852; as did Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas. Kentucky and Tennessee, on the other hand, voted Whig throughout the period. Three other states (North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia) were divided, and South Carolina as always was sui generis.
The midland states were equally divided. New York and Pennsylvania changed their party allegiance in every presidential election—Democrat in 1836, Whig in 1840, Democrat in 1844, Whig in 1848 and Democrat in 1852. These reversals were caused by the shift of only a few votes. The states of the old northwest were also bitterly contested.
The period from 1840 to 1848 was the only era in American history when every major cultural region and most states were deeply divided in their party allegiance. This extraordinary effect was produced by the breadth of the Jacksonian appeal and also by the success of the Whigs’ omnibus strategy. Individual voting patterns became highly complex—compounded of class, ethnicity, and religion. Regional patterns became more muted in this era than in any other period of American history.
In the presidential election of 1852, the Whigs tried their omnibus strategy yet again. They put up General Winfield Scott, a Virginia gentleman, a long-time resident of the west, and a hero of two wars. But Scott was also highly intelligent, intensely conservative and outspoken in his political opinions—not at all what was wanted in an omnibus candidate.
Against this formidable figure, the Democrats tried an omnibus strategy of their own. They adopted the ingenious expedient of nominating a New England Jacksonian and gentleman-Democrat named Franklin Pierce. His party called him “Young Hickory from the Granite Hills,” and his ticket was perfectly tailored to attract support in every political culture. This Democratic omnibus succeeded brilliantly. “Young Hickory” from New Hampshire carried all the states in the union except the Whig bastions of Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee.19
From Regions to Sections
Ironically, while the omnibus politics of the second party system were disguising regional differences, the effect of cultural and material change in the early nineteenth century was to reinforce them—and also to change their nature. New England and the middle states became more similar to one another, and increasingly different from the coastal and southern highlands. The effect of these tendencies was to combine regions into sections. That pattern had not existed in the United States before 1820. The words “north” and “south” were rarely used in a sectional sense during the early years of the republic. But they developed very rapidly.20
In the late eighteenth century, every part of the nation had been heavily agricultural. By the mid-nineteenth century, the proportion of farm workers in the north was only 40 percent; in the south it was 84 percent. By 1860, 26 percent of northerners lived in cities, compared with 10 percent of the south. In that year, the value of farmland per acre was 2.6 times greater in the north than in the south; the amount of manufacturing capital per capita was nearly four times as great. But in another economic indicator, the south led the north. Concentration of wealth was greater below the Potomac than above it. With only one-third of white population, the south had nearly two-thirds of its richest men and a large proportion of the very poor.
The national communications network also developed on sectional lines; both the north and the south created dense railroad networks by 1860, but the rail links between them were very thin. Patterns of internal migration occurred mainly within sections, and not between them. Foreign immigration also become a sectional process. In 1860 seven-eighths of immigrants came to the north. The effect of ethnic diversity was not to diminish sectional differences, but actually to increase them.21
Cultural disparities were also very great. In the north, 94 percent of the population was found to be literate by the census of
1860; in the south, barely 54 percent could read and write. Roughly 72 percent of northern children were enrolled in school compared with 35 percent of the same age in the south. The average length of a school year was 135 days in the north and 80 days in the south.
From 1800 to 1852, the northern states dominated the many reform movements that developed in this era—education, temperance, penology, care for the insane and the blind, feminism, pacifism and especially abolitionism. Most leaders of these reform movements came from New England and Quaker stock. A majority were descended from families who had arrived in the Puritan great migration of 1629-40, and the Friends’ migration of 1675-95.22
One of these movements, antislavery, gradually became a political movement of increasing power. Its electoral strength was especially strong among Quakers, German Pietists and New Englanders. In the states of Ohio and New York, for example, votes by county for the Liberty party and black suffrage correlated more strongly with the proportion of the population who were of New England origin than with any other variable.23 At the same time, most reform movements—not merely abolitionism but “isms” of every kind—found few followers in the coastal south, and even fewer in the southern highlands. The Richmond Enquirer roundly attacked what it called “Our Enemies, the Isms.” Modern ideologies in general were regarded as hostile to southern folkways.24
Regional Cultures and the Republican Coalition: Greater New England and the Midlands against the Coastal and Highland South, 1856-1924
During the decade of the 1850s, a revolution of parties occurred in American politics. The Whig party disintegrated after the election of 1852, and eight years later the Democratic party came to pieces as well. The critical factor was the emergence of a new issue which shattered both the Whig and the Democratic omnibus strategies and polarized sectional opinion.
That issue of course was slavery and particularly the question of its expansion into new territories, which threatened to upset delicate sectional balances. The question had been compromised many times before—in the Constitutional Compromises of 1787, the Missouri Compromise of 1819-21, the Compromise of 1850, and the admission of almost every new state. In 1854, Stephen Douglas tried compromise once again. He introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which proposed to preserve sectional balances and regional autonomy by adopting the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which held that the question of slavery in the territories would be left for local populations to settle in their own way.25
The result was political disaster—for Douglas himself, his party and his nation. By 1854 slavery was increasingly regarded in many parts of the north and south as a moral issue which could not be compromised. This perception defeated Douglas’s proposal. It shattered the Democratic party, destroyed the Whigs, gave birth to the new Republican party and revived regional and sectional voting in American politics.
In presidential politics, these new regional and sectional patterns first clearly emerged in the election of 1856. The new Republican party swept every state in the northern tier from New England to upstate New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. This pattern of Republican support in 1856 was a map of greater New England. Every state that voted Republican had been colonized by descendants of the Puritan migration. Within those states, votes by county for Republican candidates correlated more closely with the proportion of the population who sprang from New England stock than with any other variable.26
But the support of one cultural region was never enough to carry a national election. In 1856, the Democrats nominated an omnibus candidate named James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian of border ancestry with strong ties to the south. Buchanan’s candidacy attracted the electoral votes of three cultural regions of midland America, the coastal south and the southern highlands. He won every electoral vote outside the northern tier except the boundary state of Maryland, and promised to build a new coalition of midland and southern cultures.
The events of Buchanan’s presidency quickly shattered this emerging coalition. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s proslavery and negrophobic decision in the Dred Scott case deeply outraged opinion in the north, and John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry polarized opinion in every region. One by one, the national institutions of the republic divided on sectional lines. Churches such as the Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists who had been able to recruit members in many regions broke apart into northern and southern wings. After Harpers Ferry, northern colleges lost their southern students. And in 1860 the Democratic party itself disintegrated.
At the same time, a new coalition of northern regional cultures began to form—the first time since Washington’s administration that the north had been firmly united. In the election of 1860, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was himself a fitting personal symbol of this new coalition. On his father’s side, Lincoln was descended from New England Puritans who had intermarried with Pennsylvania Quakers and migrated to Appalachia and the Ohio Valley. He represented every regional component of the Republican coalition.
The election of 1860 was carried by this new sectional alliance. Lincoln won every New England county, most of the northern tier, and all but three electoral votes in the middle tier from the Delaware Valley west to the Pacific. At the same time, he lost every electoral vote in the southern states. This pattern became the basis of a Republican coalition that dominated American politics from the Civil War to the New Deal.
In the elections of 1864 and 1868, the Republican coalition grew a little stronger with the addition of non-slaveholding parts of the highland south—West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, north Georgia and northern Alabama. This region was courted in 1864 by a presidential ticket composed of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, a back-country Democrat from East Tennessee. Upper Appalachia began to vote Republican in that year, and continued to do so for more than fifty years. With its accession in 1864, the Republican coalition was complete. It governed the nation from the inaugural of Abraham Lincoln in 1861 to the retirement of Herbert Hoover in 1933, with only occasional intermissions. Throughout that long period, the hearth states of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania voted together in every presidential election from 1860 to 1924 except one (1912).
The Civil War as a Conflict of Regional Cultures
With the success of the Republican coalition in 1860, the southern regions lost control of the Senate, House of Representatives and presidency altogether for the first time since the eighteenth century. New England had often been in that position before, but its culture had discouraged violent responses. Southern folkways caused a different reaction. The Republican victory was seen not only as a challenge to southern interests, but as an affront to southern honor and a threat to southern freedom—that is, to its special ideas of hegemonic liberty and natural liberty. Without consciousness of contradiction, southern masters cast their defense of slavery in libertarian terms, and demanded the freedom to enslave.
The Republican coalition promised not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, but proposed to halt its expansion into new territories, and to protect its own ideas of ordered liberty and reciprocal liberty. Both the north and south began the Civil War in a defensive mood, determined to preserve two different ways of life.
The war was not a contest of equals. In 1861, the Union outnumbered the Confederacy in total population by 2.5 to 1, and in free males of military age by 4.4 to 1. So different had been the pattern of economic growth in the two sections that the north exceeded the south in railroad mileage by 2.4 to 1, in total wealth by 3 to 1, in merchant ships by 9 to 1, in industrial output by 10 to 1, in firearms production by 32 to 1, and in coal mining by 38 to 1. A much smaller proportion of northern workers were farmers, but the Union outreached the Confederacy in farm acreage by 3 to 1, in livestock by 1.5 to 1, in corn production by 2 to 1 and in wheat production by 4 to 1.
But the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic. The southern states produced a larger proportion of regular army officers than did the north. There were many military academies below the Mason-Dixon line and few above it. Militia units were more popular in the south; in 1852, for example, Massachusetts had one militia officer for every 216 men; North Carolina had one officer for every sixteen men. By 1864, 90 percent of southern freemen were fighting, compared with 44 percent in the north.1
In defense of their different cultures, the two sections also fought differently. The armies of the north were at first very much like those of Fairfax in the English Civil War; gradually they became another New Model Army, ruthless, methodical and efficient. The Army of Northern Virginia, important parts of it at least, consciously modeled itself upon the beau sabreurs of Prince Rupert. At the same time, the Confederate armies of the southwest marched into battle behind the cross of St. Andrew, and called themselves “Southrons” on the model of their border ancestors.2
The regional cultures of the northern and southern states also appeared in the politics of the Civil War. The greatest figure of the war, Abraham Lincoln, perfectly represented the Republican coalition of regional cultures. Lincoln’s abiding sense of morality in politics, his lifelong defense of ordered liberty, the simplicity and strength of his biblical prose, his plain style and egalitarian manner were all derived from the folkways of his Puritan and Quaker ancestors, and personified the high moral ideals that lent power and seriousness to the Union cause.3
Below the Mason-Dixon line, the leaders of the Confederacy were also products of their regional folkways. Their ideals were personified in the character of Robert E. Lee—himself the direct descendant of an English gentleman who had moved to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century. Lee’s nobility of conduct symbolized an ethic of honor which had existed in his region for many generations. The symbolic qualities of Lincoln and Lee were often far removed from the sordid realities of the Civil War. But symbols themselves became realities of high importance in this great and terrible strife.4
Within the Confederacy, southern folkways were also the source of major weaknesses in the war effort. The Confederacy did not die of democracy, as some conservative scholars have argued, but suffered much from the vices of its old oligarchical ways—in particular from the extreme restlessness of southern gentlemen under any sort of restraint, their exaggerated sense of personal honor and their lack of sympathy for the rights of others. The same cultural values which caused secession were also partly responsible for its eventual defeat.
The events of the war itself radically transformed northern attitudes toward southern folkways. As casualty lists grew longer northern war aims changed from an intention merely to resist the expansion of southern culture to a determination to transform it. As this attitude spread through the northern states the Civil War became a cultural revolution.
The results were mixed. The southern armies were broken by the north, and southern slavery was abolished. But southern culture survived the war, and so did its animus against the north. An extreme but not untypical example of this attitude was the Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin, who was said to have fired one of the first shots of the war in 1861, pulling the lanyard on a cannon aimed at Fort Sumter in Charlestown harbor. After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865, he fired the last shot of the war into his own brain, committing suicide after composing a defiant epitaph for himself and his cause. “With what will be my last breath,” he wrote, “I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.”5 Many Confederates shared his attitudes, which did not bode well for the prospects of postwar Reconstruction.
Regional Cultures in Reconstruction, 1865-77
After the War, old regional patterns briefly disappeared from voting maps of national elections, but in no period of American history was regional consciousness more intense, or regional hegemony more complete. The Republican coalition dominated national politics by its electoral majorities in the north, and by military occupation of the south. Radical reconstruction was an attempt to impose by force the cultures of New England and the midlands upon the coastal and highland south. The southern states were compelled to accept Yankee constitutions and Yankee judges, Yankee politics and Yankee politicians, Yankee schools and Yankee schoolma’ams, Yankee capitalists and a Yankee labor system.
This cultural revolution continued in some parts of the south until 1876. It succeeded for a time in modifying many southern institutions—its labor system, its politics and its schools. But with the exception of slavery itself, most of these effects lasted only as long as they were supported by northern bayonets. In the end, Radical Reconstruction was a revolution that failed.6
Some historians believe that this failure occurred primarily because freedmen were not given land. This materialist explanation is very much mistaken. The fundamental cause of failure was not narrowly material but broadly cultural. Reconstruction regimes collapsed because they were unable to change southern folkways. Such a truly radical reconstruction of southern culture was impossible in 1868, for it would have required acts of a sort that were forbidden by the culture of the north. And as long as the old folkways survived in the south, it was inevitable that the material and institutional order of southern life would rapidly revive when Yankee soldiers went home.
The experiment of reconstruction continued for a decade. After the elections of 1876, a weary north finally gave up its attempt to transform the south, and Union troops were withdrawn. Southern whites quickly recovered control of their regions and rapidly undid the reforms of Reconstruction. Yankee school systems were abolished; Yankee schoolma’ams were shipped back to New England; Yankee constitutions were rewritten. Former slaves were rapidly reduced to a condition of economic exploitation, political dependency and social degradation which was only one step removed from slavery. Despite talk of a “new South” after 1876, young southerners (both white and black) continued to learn the old folkways. Material differences between American regions grew greater than ever before—as great as the disparities between the richest and poorest European nations. Historian C. Vann Woodward discovered that in 1880 the relative difference in per capita wealth of the southern states ($376) and the northeastern states ($1,353) was almost exactly that of Russia and Germany.7
The Republican Coalition versus the Solid South, 1880-96
When the southern states returned to the union, sectional voting patterns instantly reappeared in national politics, stronger than ever. In every presidential election from 1880 to 1908, the south voted as a single bloc, casting virtually all of its electoral ballots for candidates of the Democratic party. The expression “solid South” was popularized in this period.8
In these years, the great majority of electoral votes in the northern states were also united behind the Republican candidate.
The only exception occurred in 1892 when Populists carried electoral votes in six western states, and Democrat Grover Cleveland ran strongly in the north. Otherwise, regional identities were absolutely the decisive factor in every presidential election from 1880 to 1908.
Regional voting patterns were even stronger and more persistent in Congress. The most detailed study of Congressional voting in this period concludes that “sectional competition … has been and remains the dominant influence on the American political system.” Social scientist Richard Bensel finds evidence in roll-call analyses that “the geographical alignment of sectional competition has undergone very little change in the last one hundred years [1880-1980].”9
Bensel discovered that Congressional voting was primarily regional on most leading questions in this era, including tariffs, military pensions, contested elections, admission of new states, imperialism and foreign policy. Other scholars also discovered strong regional patterns in other issues. On the Bland Free Coinage Bill (1892), and the Gold Standard Act (1899), for example, New England Congressmen voted as a bloc, and the south was almost equally united. The middle states were rather more mixed.10 These major Congressional issues were not merely collisions of material interest. They were also conflicts of cultural value.11
Regional identity was not, of course, the only determinant of political behavior in this period. Ethnicity, class and party loyalty also made a difference. But these other factors were closely interlocked with cultural regionalism. In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other. Republican Speaker Thomas Reed of New England declared that it was “just as fair for the Republicans to poll ignorant Negroes in the South as for Democrats to poll ignorant immigrants in the North.”12
Partisan allegiance was also very strong in this era. Party battles between Democrats and Republicans were exceptionally hard-fought, and often decided by paper-thin pluralities. The dominant
Republican coalition could not afford to lose any of its regional components—not New England and the northern tier, or the midland states, or even Appalachia. It is interesting to observe that most Republican Presidents in this period had backgrounds which included more than one cultural region. Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Arthur, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Harding and Hoover all in various ways symbolized the union of New England, the midlands and parts of Appalachia which together constituted the Republican coalition.
Regional Responses to Imperialism
During the presidency of William McKinley, the American republic joined the ranks of the imperial powers. It annexed Hawaii in 1897, seized the Spanish possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines in 1898, sent 5,000 troops to China in 1900 and made Cuba a protectorate in 1901. The Spanish-American War was one of the most popular conflicts in American history. Every region supported it—especially the south. Of four new major generals, two were aging Confederate veterans who in combat referred to the Spanish as “the Yankees.”
But during the war there were rumblings of dissent, and later a full-fledged anti-imperialist movement which opposed the acquisition of territory against the wishes of their inhabitants, and protested against the American suppression of popular insurrections in the Philippines and Cuba. Anti-imperialism was a regional movement, centered in New England. Its leading spokesmen in the Senate were George Hoar of Massachusetts and Eugene Hale of Maine. The Anti-imperialist League was founded in Boston. There was support from other parts of the nation, but historian Frank Friedel found that New England was its stronghold. This regional pattern has appeared many times in American history, from the War of 1812 and the Mexican War to the Vietnam War and the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s.13
Regional Origins of Populism and Progressivism
Regional cultures also defined the reach of reform impulses during this period. Two very different reform movements developed in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Populism and Progressivism. Both were national in their aspirations, but regional in their appeal. The Populist movement was strong in the south and west, but weak in the north and east and nearly nonexistent in New England. The emotional violence of its rhetoric, the intensity of its agrarian reforms and the flamboyant individuality of its leaders brought success in one region and failure in another.
The Progressive movement was very different from Populism in its political style and cultural base. Progressivism developed mainly in the northern and northeastern states. A large proportion of its leaders were men and women of Yankee stock, who traced their ancestry to the Puritan great migration. Progressivism tended to be rationalist and moralist. Its approach to social problems was intellectual; its solutions were institutional. Generally it adopted an idea of ordered liberty which was consistent with New England’s Puritan past. The cultural style of the Progressive movement made it strong in one part of America, and weak in others.
Both Populism and Progressivism developed great power in American politics, but neither was able to transcend its regional limits. The descendants of the Puritans looked with horror upon Populist leaders such as Leonidas Polk of North Carolina, James H. “Cyclone” Davis of Texas, “Sockless Jerry” Simpson of Kansas and Davis H. “Bloody Bridles” Waite. In 1896, the Populist rhetoric of Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan attracted strong support in the south and west, but failed to carry a single county in New England.
The Progressives, on the other hand, drew their support mostly from the north and northeast, and ran poorly below the Mason-Dixon line. In 1904, the Progressive presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt carried every county in New England, and all but a handful in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the Old Northwest. But he lost every county except one in the southern states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama.
Woodrow Wilson: The Omnibus Reformer, 1913 -20
Only one reformer ran well in every region. He was Woodrow Wilson, the southern-born Progressive governor of New Jersey who came of border stock. His Georgia and Virginia roots made him attractive to the south, and his Presbyterian morality had strong appeal in greater New England. In national elections, Wilson proved to be an omnibus reformer with exceptional breadth of support throughout the nation.
In 1912, a division in Republican ranks gave Wilson his opportunity. Former President Theodore Roosevelt indulged in a style of highly personal politics which were akin to the ways of his border ancestors. His antics split his party and alienated the normally Republican voters of the northern states. The Republican coalition disintegrated, and regional voting patterns disappeared beneath the Democratic landslide, which put a southern-born President in the White House for the first time since 1865. Wilson’s exceptionally broad personal popularity gave him a victory in 1916 as well.
But Wilson’s national popularity did not attach to Progressivism in general. Votes for and against leading Progressive measures continued to be primarily regional. A case in point was women’s suffrage. The Congressional suffrage resolution of 1919 was strongly supported in the northern states, and strenuously opposed in the south. The suffrage amendment failed of ratification in ten states—all southern. These regional patterns cannot be explained by any material factor. Here was a question that turned primarily on cultural values. Many other Progressive measures showed similar voting patterns.14
The High Tide of Regional Politics, 1920-28
After Woodrow Wilson retired from politics, the old regional voting patterns immediately reappeared. They were very strong in the election of 1920, and even stronger in 1924, when a solid northern bloc supported Calvin Coolidge and an even more solid south voted for West Virginian John W. Davis. In 1928, the Democratic party nominated Alfred Smith, the first Roman Catholic
presidential candidate in American history, and a Manhattan politician closely linked to Tammany Hall. He proved to be immensely unpopular throughout the nation. The result was a divided southern Democratic vote, and a landslide for Republican Herbert Hoover. The Republicans won the Congress, in strongly sectional voting.
Within Congress during the decade of the twenties, political scientist Richard Bensel finds that sectional voting patterns were stronger than ever. The Sixty-seventh Congress (elected in 1920) was the most deeply divided on sectional lines of any session in a century. Democrats held all but two seats in ten southern states. The Republicans won all but one seat in the rural northern and middle states. The northern cities were divided. Congressional votes were intensely sectional on Henry Ford’s Muscle Shoals proposal, on the first McNary-Haugen bill, on prohibition, women’s suffrage and many other questions.15
Many years earlier, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had predicted that sectionalism would disappear after the closing of the frontier. But as he watched the politics of the 1920s, Turner was forced to revise his own thesis. “That sectionalism is not dying away in the United States,” he wrote, “will be clear enough to anyone who examines the newspapers and reads the debates in Congress, not to speak of analyzing the votes in that body.”16
Old Folkways and the New Immigration
Even as the old sectional politics reached their apogee in the 1920s, a major transformation was taking place in the ethnocultural character of American society. As late as 1900 nearly 60 percent of Americans had been of British stock. The old English-speaking cultures still firmly maintained their hegemony in the United States. But that pattern was changing very rapidly. By 1920 the proportion of Americans with British ancestry had fallen to 41 percent. Still, three-quarters of the nation came from northwestern Europe, but other ethnic stocks from eastern and southern Europe were growing at a formidable rate.
As always when threatened from abroad, the four Anglo-Saxon cultures joined together in the 1920s to restrict the flow of the new immigration. Every region voted as one on this question—so much so that the immigration restriction bill of 1921 passed the Senate by a margin of 78 to 1. The House of Representatives approved it in a few hours without even bothering to take a roll call.17
By these measures, Congress succeeded in reducing the numbers of new immigrants during the twenties. But the ethnic composition of the United States continued to change very rapidly by natural increase. By 1980, the proportion of the American population who reported having any British ancestors at all had fallen below 20 percent. Nearly 80 percent were descended from other ethnic stocks. The largest ethnic stock in the United States was no longer British but German. Many other minorities were growing at a great rate.18
In the northeast, the new and old ethnic groups found themselves increasingly in conflict on cultural questions. In a New York referendum on pari-mutuel betting in 1939, for example, communities settled by Yankees before 1855 united in their opposition. The new immigrants were equally solid in support. The lines of conflict between the older communities and the new immigrants were sharply drawn on these issues.19
But these ethnic collisions were only one part of a complex process of acculturation, which had an important regional dimension. The growth of ethnic pluralism did not diminish regional identities. On balance, it actually enhanced them. This was so because the new immigrants did not distribute themselves randomly through the United States. They tended to flock together in specific regions. Ethnic pluralism itself thus became a regional variable.
Further, the new immigrants did not assimilate American culture in general. They tended to adopt the folkways of the regions in which they settled. This was specially the case among immigrant elites. This process of regional assimilation might be illustrated by a few individual examples. A familiar case in point was President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose ancestors came from Ireland to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Kennedy was raised within a distinctive Irish Catholic culture and acquired many of its values. At the same time, he was also a New Englander in his education, associations, prejudices, dress ways and even his speech ways (“Cuber”). Kennedy’s social and political identity combined ethnic and regional elements.
A second example was one of the most powerful politicians in the city of Washington during the late twentieth century. He was an Afro-American, a descendant of black slaves, and a leader of the black power movement in American politics. At the same time, his attitudes, beliefs, and speech were in many ways those of a Virginia gentleman. So also was his name, Walter Fauntroy, which derived from one of the proudest Royalist families in the ancient dominion. The thoughts and acts of this prominent American politician, like those of John F. Kennedy, were shaped both by his ethnic and regional heritage.
Another representative of this process was Barry Goldwater, an American of Jewish descent who lived his formative years in the southwest. He became deeply interested in the history of that region and collected a library of western history which was one of the best in private hands. His speech, dress, attitudes, political principles, and his idea of natural liberty were drawn from the culture of the backcountry and the southwestern frontier. His manners and behavior conformed to old border and backcountry folkways.
A fourth instance was Grace Kelly, the American film actress who was deeply conscious of her Irish Catholic heritage, and so active in maintaining it that one of the most important centers of Irish Studies today is improbably to be found in the principality of Monaco. At the same time, Grace Kelly was also a loyal Philadelphian, and very much a product of its culture. Her dignity of manner, simplicity of appearance, and directness of speech all owed much to the culture of the Delaware Valley. Grace Kelly was also the product of both an ethnic and a regional culture.
These were not isolated examples. Black culture throughout the United States tended generally to be an amalgam of African and southern folkways. Hispanic Americans in Texas and southern California combined the legacy of Latin America with the culture of the backcountry. Irish, Italian, Greek and French Canadian immigrants in Massachusetts all joined their special ethnic heritage to the customs of New England. The Germans and Scandinavians who settled the middle west learned the folkways which had spread outward from the Delaware Valley. Similar patterns of regional acculturation appeared in most major American ethnic groups. The author’s Protestant stereotypes about the culture of Judaism were utterly exploded by his Brandeis students who have included Yankee Jews, Philadelphia Jews, southern Jews and, most startling of all, backslapping Texas Jews in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats. Here again, their culture was a product of ethnicity and region.
The New Deal Coalition: Ethnic and Regional Cultures
The new immigrants were slow to move into positions of leadership in the United States. A complex system of discrimination by licensing, quotas and covenants kept their numbers small in prestigious professions, the strongest schools and the best neighborhoods. But by 1932 their voting strength made a powerful difference in American politics and produced a major realignment of ethnic and regional groups which put Franklin Roosevelt in the White House.
During the Great Depression, the sufferings of southern farmers and northern workers created the basis for a new coalition which was destined to dominate national politics for nearly twenty years. This New Deal coalition united disparate cultural groups who shared little more than their common revulsion to the cultures, policies and moral purposes of the Republican coalition that had failed so dismally during the Great Depression. The political economy of laissez-faire and the Protestant ethic had been discredited by the Depression. The “noble experiment” of ordered freedom in national prohibition was regarded as a social disaster. This was a period when “puritanism” became a pejorative term in American speech. Descendants of the great migration were ridiculed as absurd and pathetic figures in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Grant Wood’s American Gothic.
The old Republican coalition still remained strong, especially in the northern and midland rural regions which had been settled from New England and Pennsylvania. The states of Maine and Vermont voted Republican in every presidential election but one from 1856 to 1960.20 Republican candidates also ran strongly in the parts of the old northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), in the many northern plains states (Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and the Dakotas), and in the Pacific northwest state of Oregon. In the depths of the Depression, the old Republican coalition still remained the strongest single culture in American politics. But the growing pluralism of American society now made it impossible for that cultural bloc to dominate national politics as it had done from 1860 to 1932.
The New Deal coalition was a response to this development. It united the many enemies of the old Puritan ethic: Catholic immigrants, Jewish intellectuals, southern gentlemen, black sharecroppers, Appalachian mountain folk, Texas stockmen and California hedonists. All joined in one movement improbably led by a patrician Democrat of New England stock from New York.
The various groups who supported Roosevelt all believed that the national government should play a larger economic role. But they did not share the same moral values and cultural purposes. The policies of New Deal reflected this diversity of cultural origins. It was an American middle way, “slightly left of center” in Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite phrase—a series of pragmatic
experiments designed to preserve the capitalist and democratic fabric of American society by increasing public intervention in the material life of the nation. At the same time, the New Deal also opposed public legislation on questions of private morality. It abolished national prohibition, and rejected the moral activism of the Republican coalition.
Here was the central paradox of the New Deal—material intervention and moral non-intervention. It increased the economic role of government, but diminished its role as the instrument of any single system of ethnic or regional culture. The south received strong material support, but was not required to change its folkways. The ethnic cultures of new immigrants in northern cities were given economic aid in many forms, but legislative challenges to their culture were abandoned. The cultural hegemony of the Republican coalition was finally destroyed.
Regional Cultures in World War II
When the Second World War began, many Americans wished not to be involved in quarrels of the Old World. But as the fascist juggernaut crushed the infant democracies of Europe until only Britain stood alone, America slowly awakened to a mortal danger. All doubts were removed when Japan launched its surprise attack against Pearl Harbor, and Germany and Italy declared war against the United States. Americans forgot their differences, and rallied together as never before—or since—on any public question.
Each American culture had its own motives for supporting the war. Northeastern liberals joined it as a crusade against fascism and militarism—an idea that gained strength as the full horror of German and Japanese regimes was gradually revealed. Southern conservatives, always more internationalist than the nation as a whole, were drawn into the conflict by their kinship with Britain. The backcountry, bellicose as ever, fought for national honor—and also for the joy of fighting. Even Quakers and pacifists non-violently supported a war against the warrior spirit.
These various cultures also contributed in different ways to the conduct of the war. The behavior of the nation’s major military leaders reflected the regional origins. A case in point was George S. Patton, Jr., America’s most brilliant field commander. Patton was descended from North British immigrants who had settled in the backcountry during the eighteenth century, and whose progeny had found their way to southern California. They thought of themselves as a warrior race. George Patton as a little child was told the hero tales of the borders and the martial deeds of his forebears. Many Pattons had fought in the Revolution, and at least fourteen had served in the Civil War. “Men of my blood … have ever inspired me,” he once remarked. “Should I falter, I will have disgraced my blood.” Patton believed that his ancestors literally hovered over him on the battlefield. Of combat during World War I he wrote, “I was trembling with fear when suddenly I thought of my progenitors and seemed to see them in a cloud over the German lines looking at me. I became calm at once, and saying aloud, ‘It is time for another Patton to die,’ called for volunteers and went forward to what I honestly believed was certain death.”
Patton’s method of making war was also true to the customs of his ancestors. Even in an age of mechanized war he led from the front. American prisoners of war at Mooseberg, Germany, were astounded when an armored spearhead fought its way into their camp, and General Patton himself emerged from one of the lead tanks. The victories of his Third Army owed much to Patton’s aggressive spirit and brilliant battlefield improvisations. Behind the front, however, his volatile emotions and uncontrollable rages nearly led to his removal.1
Patton’s long-suffering superior was a soldier of another stripe. Dwight David Eisenhower, born in Abilene, Texas, was descended from Swiss Mennonites and German Pietists who had settled in Quaker Pennsylvania before 1733. His forebears had refused to bear arms in the Revolution and the Civil War, and his parents were of a pietist sect called River Brethren who raised their children to believe in hard work, simplicity, decency and strict self-discipline. Eisenhower remembered his mother quoting the Bible: “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.”2 He went to West Point primarily for a free education, rose in the army as a staff officer and never served in combat during his entire military career. As Allied commander, Eisenhower rarely ventured even as far forward as army group headquarters, and preferred to toil at his desk far in the rear. He was a soldier who hated fighting and thought of war as a business in which the object was to succeed with all possible economy of human life.
Eisenhower’s boss, General George Catlett Marshall, came from yet another Anglo-American culture. Though Marshall had been born in Pennsylvania, he was by breeding a gentleman of Virginia. The first Catletts and Marshalls in America were Royalist officers who had settled in the Chesapeake about the year 1650. George Marshall graduated not from West Point but from the Virginia Military Institute; his first wife was a Virginian, Lily Carter. Those who knew him testified to “terrific influence and power” which flowed mainly from a force of character that reminded others of Washington and Lee. The same words were invariably used to describe him—honor, dignity, integrity, character. Even the intrepid George Patton once declared that he “would rather face a whole Nazi Panzer army single-handed than be called to an interview with General Marshall.”3
Marshall’s commander-in-chief was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had still a fourth style of leadership. Roosevelt was Dutch only in name. By birth and breeding he was a Yankee. More than three-quarters of his ancestors were New Englanders, and he had been educated in New England schools (Groton and Harvard). As President, Franklin Roosevelt contributed a special quality of leadership which combined high moral purpose, clarity of vision, toughness of mind, tenacity of purpose, flexibility of method and an implacable will to win. That pattern of leadership was not only a set of personal attributes. It was also a cultural artifact which owed much to the folkways of New England. So also were his statements of war aims and his vision of the future—which expressed an ideal of ordered liberty that owed much to the freedom ways of his ancestors. Even phrases such as “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” had appeared in the records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
America’s regional cultures made a difference not only in styles of leadership, but also in the substance of command decisions, sometimes in a way that caused trouble for the Allied war effort. In 1944, for example, while American soldiers and Marines were fighting the Japanese on the island of Saipan, Marine General Holland M. Smith relieved the army’s General Ralph C. Smith for
“lack of aggressiveness.” That decision caused a “war of the Smiths” which is remembered by military historians mainly as a clash of personalities and institutions, and also conflict between Marine doctrines of frontal assault, and army tactics of fire and envelopment. But it was also a collision of cultures. General Holland M. Smith was a product of the southern backcountry, born and raised in rural Alabama. In battle he was brave, aggressive, violent and profane. Fellow Marines called him “Howlin’ Mad” Smith.
The army’s Ralph Corbett Smith came from old New England stock. His ancestors had arrived in the Puritan great migration, and his grandparents had moved to the middle west where he became a national guard officer. After a distinguished record in World War I he made the army his career. Smith was quiet, calm, serious, soft-spoken and exceptionally self-possessed. An aide recalled, “I have never, never seen him angry. … I have never heard the level of his voice go up any more than in normal conversation. As a matter of fact, I don’t recall the old man ever saying even a ‘God Damn.’” General S.L.A. Marshall, who knew him well, wrote that “his extreme consideration for other mortals would keep him from being rated among the great captains; he is a somewhat rarer specimen, a generous Christian gentleman.”
This affair was more than merely a tactical dispute between soldiers and Marines. The “war between the Smiths” was also a clash of cultures. But strife of that sort was fortunately rare in the American war effort. The regional pluralism of the United States was on balance a source of strength rather than weakness.
The Postwar Revival of Regional Politics, 1945-60
The Second World War kept the New Deal coalition together. But in the first presidential election after the peace, northern liberals and southern conservatives parted ways. There were many divisive issues—primarily the problem of race, on which the two wings of the Democratic party deeply disagreed. The result was the revolt of the Dixiecrats, a bloc of southern conservatives who seceded from the Democratic party in 1948 because of their opposition to civil rights for blacks. In the presidential election of that year, four southern states gave their presidential votes to a regional politician, Strom Thurmond and his States’ Rights Democratic party.
In this election, Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey also proved to be a regional candidate. Dewey was a New Yorker of old Yankee and Puritan stock—narrow-featured, neatly dressed, bland, remote, restrained and rational. He carried every northeastern state except Massachusetts, and ran powerfully in the northern plains and the Pacific northwest.
The Democratic incumbent Harry Truman made a dramatic contrast with both his Dixiecrat and Republican rivals. Truman was a cultural product of the Missouri backcountry. His campaign was high-spirited, coarse-grained, aggressive, informal, emotional, personal and profane. Its spirit was captured in a rallying cry, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” Its substance appeared in its slogan, “Vote your own interests!” Truman managed to be liberal on race and conservative on property, pro-union and pro-farm, pro-producer and pro-consumer. His combination of strong words and moderate acts had powerful appeal in the American midlands.
When the ballots were counted, Truman, no less than his challengers, also proved to be a regional candidate, who drew his electoral majority mainly from the southern highlands, the middle west, border states, the great basin and the far west. He lost greater New England and the northern tier to Dewey and much of the south to Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.
The Eisenhower Omnibus
As the presidential elections approached in 1952, the frontrunners in both parties were classical regional candidates—the back-country Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, and the Ohio Republican of old New England stock Robert Taft. But both parties rejected these men in an effort to broaden their appeal. Democrats turned to Adlai Stevenson, a patrician progressive who promised to run well in the northeast. The Republicans adopted the omnibus strategy so often used by conservative parties, and nominated a folksy military hero with few discernable opinions on controversial questions. The omnibus strategy succeeded brilliantly. In 1952 and again in 1956, Eisenhower carried every American state outside the south. The success of the Republican omnibus dealt a crushing blow to the New Deal coalition.
The Revolution in Regional Alignments, 1960-68
During the decade of the 1960s, a revolution occurred in regional voting patterns. For a century, New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan had voted Republican in nearly every presidential election except when Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had drawn them away. In the same period, the coastal and highland south had gone Democratic in every presidential contest except during the Reconstruction era. This general pattern had persisted from 1856 to 1956.4
Then, during the 1960s, new trends of great strength and stability began to appear. The leading tendency was the growth of a new Democratic voting bloc in New England and New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. These states had been the core of the Republican coalition in the nineteenth century. Now they became the new base of the Democratic party; in the elections of 1960, 1964 and 1968, most of them voted for liberal Democratic candidates.
At the same time, southern states turned toward the Republican party. A new conservative coalition united the coastal and highland south, the mountain states, the great basin and the far southwest. In 1964, the candidate of this alliance was Republican Barry Goldwater. Many conservative Democrats throughout the south changed parties to vote for him. The pattern of support for Republican Goldwater was strongest in the south and west.
Behind this change in regional alignments lay a striking continuity in their environing cultures. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham made an interesting discovery in that respect. While studying the election returns of New York in 1964, he found that the counties which voted Democratic and supported civil rights in 1964 were the same as those which had voted Republican and opposed slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. They were also the counties which had been settled from New England during the late eighteenth century. Burnham concluded that voting in this region was determined by “durable community norms which have their historical origins in the values of the original settlers and their descendants.”5
The New Regionalism, 1968-86
Dean Burnham’s conclusions were not widely shared by his colleagues, who repeatedly predicted the imminent extinction of regional voting in American politics.6 But once again, reports of the death of regionalism proved to be premature. In the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, voting patterns were strongly regional. Conservative Republican candidate Richard Nixon won his largest pluralities in the coastal south, the highland south and Great Basin. He was less successful in the midlands, and least so in the north. The only state that voted against him was Massachusetts. His smallest pluralities were in the northern tier that extended through southern New England, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Oregon.7
These new regional patterns in American politics tended to break down from time to time, just as earlier alignments had done. They came apart when one party nominated a candidate from the regional base of the other. The Democrats, for example, had their strongest successes in this period when they ran Texan Lyndon Johnson (1964) and Georgian Jimmy Carter (1976). Carter won every electoral vote in the south except Virginia; his southern strength divided the conservative coalition and carried the election.
Regional patterns also tended to disappear when either party chose a candidate who seemed to be outside the cultural mainstream. Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Democrat George McGovern in 1968 were both made to appear radicals of the right and left, respectively. In substantive terms neither was very far from the center, but their rhetoric appeared radical with disastrous results for their parties.
Regional ties were also disrupted when the conservative coalition put up an omnibus candidate. In 1980, this device was tried again in a novel form. No victorious generals had emerged from the Vietnam War, but the Republican party discovered that a professional actor made a highly acceptable substitute. Ronald Reagan proved to be a perfect omnibus candidate. In the election of 1980 he carried every cultural region and all but six states.
In 1984, Reagan won an even more commanding victory when Democrats made the fatal mistake of nominating Walter Mondale, a candidate from their only strong region. Mondale’s political style was reminiscent of many northern candidates in the past; it did not attract voters from other parts of the country. The resulting Reagan landslide buried regional patterns. Once again journalists and political scientists predicted that regions were disappearing from American life. But in the Congressional and gubernatorial elections of 1986, regional voting became visible once again.
On most substantive issues of the mid-1980s, regional patterns were also very strong. The nuclear freeze, for example, was supported by all but a few New England Congressmen, and opposed by most Representatives from the south and west. In attitudes toward military affairs, foreign policy, capital punishment and many domestic questions, regional attitudes are still powerful.
These regional patterns were also evident in the presidential campaign of 1988. Among Democratic contenders, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis combined his Greek and Yankee heritage in a manner reminiscent of the Irish Yankee John Kennedy; Dukakis’s managerial style was in the tradition of New England ideas of ordered liberty. Jesse Jackson also combined an ethnic and a regional identity—a black minister and politician, who had been born in upcountry South Carolina, and christened with an old border name—his style was descended from three centuries of field preaching in the region of his birth. Richard Gephardt was a backcountry politician who ran heavily on a single issue, which was to apply the old border rule of lex talionis to foreign affairs; his message was well received in his own region, but found little support outside it. Among Republicans, Robert Dole of Kansas was also a midland candidate who did well in his region and badly everywhere else; Pat Robertson came from the “backcountry ascendancy” and had a very strong regional identity. The candidates who did worst in both parties (Hart, Babbitt, Schroeder, Kemp, Haig, Dupont) had no firm base in any cultural region. The one who did the best, Republican George Bush, had a base in more regions than one—with his old New England origins, his long residence in Texas, and an accent that combined
both a Yankee twang and a southern drawl—an extraordinary feat of political linguistics.
The presidential election of 1988 was marked by cynical manipulation of cultural symbols—which were perceived very differently in various regions. Democrat Michael Dukakis did best in the northern tier from Massachusetts to Washington and Oregon, but his ideas of ordered liberty alienated voters in every region except his own. Republican George Bush carried every southern state plus the conservative Great Basin by very large margins. The American midlands were divided. Bush carried this region too, but often by paper-thin pluralities—51 percent in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Illinois. The final result showed that the new regional voting patterns were very strong, and increasingly stable.
Regional Identities: America’s Mental Maps
These cultural regions were not static in their structure. By 1988, the original four regions of British America had greatly expanded, and were also joined by other regional cultures which did not exist two centuries earlier. Altogether, there were now at least seven cultural regions in the continental United States:
1. The Northern Tier, including New England, the upper old northwest, the northern plains and the Pacific northwest, all settled by Yankees but now dominated by other ethnic groups who are Roman Catholic in New England, Lutheran in the middle west.
2. Greater New York, small in area but 10 percent of the national population, and a very heavy infusion of middle European and Jewish culture grafted on the old Dutch root.
3. Midland America, extending from Pennsylvania west through the Ohio Valley and the middle west to the Rocky Mountains, marked by a diversity of European immigrant groups; the leading religion in many midland counties is Methodist.
4. The Great Basin, a predominantly Mormon culture in Utah, and parts of Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming; a mix of New England, midland and highland southern culture.
5. The Coastal South, from southern Maryland to Florida and the Texas coast near Houston. Its culture is tempered by large numbers of northern immigrants.
6. The Southern Highlands, including Appalachia, the old southwest, the Ozark Plateau, and much of Texas and Oklahoma which are still dominated by the old ethnic groups; the leading religion is Baptist.
7. Southern California, a hybrid of highland southern, midland, Hispanic and Jewish culture, spreading into Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.
Each of these seven cultures is a complex mixture of old regional patterns with new ethic and religious groups. Each has its own speech ways. In addition to the old dialects of northern, midland, coastal southern and highland southern speech, three others have appeared in the twentieth century. New York English developed from a distinctive mixture of northern and midland speech, enriched by central European and Jewish languages, California English combines highland southern and midland speech with many Hispanic expressions. Great Basin English brings together northern, midland and highland southern speech ways in a syncretist accent which is beginning to emerge as American standard speech. In the late twentieth century, national television broad-casters are trained to use the accent of Salt Lake City—the American equivalent of BBC English.
Within these cultural regions, new ethnic group and religious denominations have emerged; but the old regional identities themselves remain remarkably strong. In the mid-1960s, cultural geographers Peter Could and Rodney White measured American attitudes in that respect, by the ingenious method of constructing “mental maps” in which spatial judgments are represented in topographical terms. They found that the mental maps of most Americans shared a few topographical features in common, notably a “California high” and a “Dakota low,” But attitudes also differed profoundly from one historical region to another, Alabamans despised New England; northerners disliked Alabama, Could and White were surprised by the persistence of these historical attitudes, which they regarded as temporary aberrations caused by the Civil War. “By the year 2000,” they wrote, “we may hope that the mental maps of Americans, northerners and southerners, will no longer reflect the wound established over a century ago,” But these regional antipathies had appeared long before the Civil War and they remained remarkably strong in the twentieth century.8
During World War II, for example, three German submariners escaped from Camp Crossville, Tennessee. Their flight took them to an Appalachian cabin, where they stopped for a drink of water. The mountain granny told them to “git.” When they ignored her, she promptly shot them dead. The sheriff came, and scolded her for shooting helpless prisoners. Granny burst into tears, and said that she would not have done it if she had known they were Germans, The exasperated sheriff asked her what in “tarnation” she thought she was shooting at. “Why,” she replied, “I thought they was Yankees!”9
Regional Patterns of Cultural Behavior
The persistence of American regionalism also appeared in every federal census, which continues even today to yield evidence of greater differences between American regions than among European nations. Further, these patterns show remarkably strong linkages with the distant colonial past.
A case in point are statistics of order and violence in the United States. In 1982, the murder rate in the nation as a whole was 9.1 per 100,000. This level of violence was four times higher than most western countries. But within the United States, the homicide rate differed very much from one region to another. The northern tier, from New England across the northern plains to the Pacific northwest, tended as always to have the lowest rates of homicide: 3.8 in Massachusetts, 2.1 in Maine, 3.1 in Wisconsin, 2.3 in Minnesota, 0.9 in North Dakota, 4.4 in the state of Washington. The middle states, on the other hand, had murder rates that were moderately higher, but below the national average: 5.7 in Pennsylvania, 7.2 in the middle west, 5.7 in Kansas, 6.0 in Colorado. Homicide rates were much higher in the upper coastal south. The south Atlantic states averaged 10.9 murders per 100,000 in 1982. The southern highlands and the southwestern states had extremely high murder rates—14.7 in the west south-central states, and 16.1 in Texas, Homicide rates were also high in northern cities with large populations of southern immigrants, both black and white. But southern neighborhoods occupied by migrants from the north tended to have low homicide rates. These patterns are highly complex; many ethnic and material factors clearly have an impact. But in ecological terms, homicide rates throughout the United States correlate more closely with cultural regions of origin than with urbanization, poverty, or any material factor.
One may ask why this is the case. Why have American regions preserved these differences for so long a time? The pattern is particularly striking in New England, because it has persisted in the face of sweeping ethnic changes. Three centuries ago, New England was Congregationalist; today it is mostly Roman Catholic.10 In 1650, its white population was almost entirely English; it has become heavily Irish, Italian and French Canadian. Even so, levels of social violence remain low in New England, just as they have stayed high in the southern highlands. Why?
Some scholars offer a materialist explanation: the comparative wealth of New England against the poverty of the southern highlands. But many a hardscrabble Yankee hill town is poor and orderly, and more than a few southwestern communities are rich and violent.
Others argue that southern violence is mainly a legacy of ethnic or racial diversity. But some of the most violent communities in the southern highlands have no black residents at all, and are in ethnic terms among the most homogeneous in the nation. At the same time, many New England communities are ethnically diverse and yet comparatively peaceful.
A few scholars have explained southern violence in terms of its frontier legacy. But New England was once a frontier too. An occasional explanation of southern violence refers to the Civil War, or to the hot climate or even to human necessity. When one southerner was asked why so many people were killed in his region, he answered that “there were just more folks in the South that needed killing.”11
A less colorful but more promising explanation is cast in institutional terms. At an early date, each regional culture developed its own institutions of order and violence which have persisted powerfully through time. The laws of New England have always given little latitude to violence. This pattern began in Puritan Massachusetts during the seventeenth century; it still existed in the 1980s when Massachusetts enacted the toughest gun-control statutes in the nation.
The laws of New England are actively supported by other institutions. For more than three centuries town schools have taught children not to use violence to solve their social problems. Town meetings strongly condemn internal violence. Town elites teach others by example that violence is not an acceptable form of social behavior in New England. In short, violence “isn’t done” in the prescriptive sence. And when it is done, the regional culture of New England has little tolerance for violent acts, and punishes them severely.
All of these tendencies run in reverse throughout the old southwest and southern highlands. The principle of lex talionis is still part of Texas law, which allows a husband to kill his wife’s lover in flagrante delictu. Texas places comparatively few restraints on the ownership of firearms. Texas schools and schoolbooks glorify violence in a way that those of Massachusetts do not. Texas elites still live by the rule of retaliation, and murder one another often enough to set an example. Texas is entertained by displays of violence; Massachusetts is not amused. In short, violence simply is done in Texas and the southern highlands, and always has been done in this culture—since before the Civil War and slavery and even the frontier—just as it had been done in the borderlands of North Britain before emigration,12
Similar regional disparities. also inherited from the distant past. appeared in other social indicators. A good example is education. By 1980, elementary education was universal in the United States. But large regional differences existed in patterns of secondary schooling and higher education. The proportion of youngsters who graduated from high school varied broadly from one region to another. The highest graduation rates were in the northern tier; the top three states were Minnesota (91%); Connecticut (90%) and North Dakota (90%). Midland states were in an upper middling range (Pennsylvania, 78%. New Jersey 78%, Ohio 80%), and the upper south was in a lower middling position (Maryland, 76%, Virginia, 74%), The lowest states were in the deep south (Georgia, 63%, Louisiana, 63%, and Florida, 62%), and the southwest was also very low (Arizona, 63%, Nevada, 65%, California, 67%), as were northern or midland cities with heavy
immigration from the south (New York, 64%, Michigan, 68%, District of Columbia, 57%). These trends did not correlate with school spending. But they were closely linked to inherited regional attitudes toward education.13
Similar patterns also appeared in higher education. Exceptionally high levels of college attendance were to be found in the northern states originally settled by New England Puritans and Yankees. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont approximately 20 percent of the population had completed four years of college by 1980. The proportion was also comparatively high across the northern tier and in the Great Basin—17 percent in Minnesota, 19 percent in the states of Washington and Oregon, 20 percent in Utah and 23 percent in Colorado. The ratio, was lower in other regions: 16 percent in the midland states, and 15 percent in the coastal south. The lowest levels were in the southern highlands of West Virginia (10.4%), Arkansas (10.8%), Kentucky (11.1%), Alabama (12.2%), Mississippi (12.3%) and Tennessee (12.6%). This regional pattern did not correlate with urbanization or with public spending on higher education. Once again, primary determinants were traditional attitudes toward learning in these various regions.14
Similar regional differences also persist in attitudes toward gender. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we have seen, the status of women was comparatively high in New England and the Delaware Valley, low in Virginia, and lowest in the backcountry. These regional differences persisted through four centuries. The northern states supported women’s suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the South and especially the southwest consistently opposed the enfranchisement of women. In the late twentieth century, precisely the same pattern appeared in voting on the Equal Rights Amendment. Every state in the northern tier voted in favor of this measure. All states in the southern highlands voted against it. The fact that this pattern has persisted for so long a time is evidence that it cannot be explained merely as a temporary cultural lag. It is produced by deep-seated differences in regional cultures.
Yet another pattern of persistence appears in the public life of the major cultural regions. In every region, the dominant forms of local government are descended from institutions which were introduced in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Most New England communities still govern themselves through town meetings. This system has spread through the northern tier to New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Pennsylvania preserves its county commissions. Virginia and the coastal south are still controlled by county courthouse elites. The tone of government in these regions has remained remarkably stable through many generations.
Further, levels of governmental activity (measured by public spending) have remained relatively the same for three centuries. In the mid-eighteenth century, levels of taxation for state and local governments were roughly twice as high in New England as in Virginia, with the Delaware Valley somewhere in between, and the backcountry below all other regions. Precisely the same patterns still appear today, even when controlled by population and wealth. In 1981, for example, a family of four with an income of $75,000 paid state and local taxes of $10,900 in Boston, $7,000 in Philadelphia, $5,700 in Norfolk, $4,800 in Louisville and $4,600 in Houston. Relative levels of taxing and spending by region have changed remarkably little in many generations.15
Persistent Regionalism: Problems of Cause
Why have regional cultures persisted for so long a period in Anglo-America? How does any culture persist? This problem has long been neglected by historians and social scientists. Barrington Moore observes:
There is a widespread assumption in modern social science that social continuity requires no explanation. Supposedly it is not problematical. Change is what requires explanation. … The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering.16
Cultural persistence is not the same as stasis. Many things must happen if a culture is to be transmitted from one generation to the next. Whenever its continuance is challenged by events as large as a revolution, or as small as the birth of a child, some very complex cultural machinery instantly begins to operate.
This process of cultural persistence may be studied from many different perspectives. One obvious approach centers on the ways in which individual people learn their social roles. Some of the most important instruments of cultural persistence operate within schools, churches and families, where children learn to do what is expected of them. Other institutions continue the socializing process through every stage of life. Each of the four cultural regions of British America, as we have seen, kept its own customs of enculturation for many generations.
A second and very different perspective on persistence centers on the functional interdependence of a culture’s various parts. Material and ethical structures, for example, tend to be mutually reinforcing. To change a culture in any fundamental way, one must transform many things at once—no easy task, as many a reformer has learned. Social institutions tend to perpetuate themselves, and have their own means of doing so. These institutional imperatives are powerful instruments of continuity in a cultural system.
Yet another perspective on cultural persistence focuses on the conduct of elites. There is a cultural equivalent of the iron law of oligarchy; small groups dominate every cultural system. They tend to do so by controlling institutions and processes, so that they become the “governors” of a culture in both a political and a mechanical sense.
This iron law of cultural elites is an historical constant, but the relation between elites and other cultural groups is highly variable. Every culture might be seen as a system of bargaining, in which elites maintain their hegemony by concessions to other groups. These bargaining processes worked differently in the four regions of British America. New England’s town system, for example, gave each community a high degree of autonomy and also a common interest in supporting the system itself, Pennsylvania’s system of reciprocal liberty became a basis for bargaining among different groups. In the back settlements, the idea of natural liberty functioned in the same way. These bargaining processes became exceptionally complex in the Chesapeake colonies; historian Allan Kulikoff has brilliantly described the social transactions between gentry and yeomen, gentry and poor whites, and gentry and slaves.17
Finally, when all else fails, the ultimate instrument of cultural persistence is physical force, which every culture must sometimes use to maintain itself. Even the Quakers were compelled to use force against criminals and pirates in the Delaware Bay. Every other culture frequently resorted to violence against aliens and dissenters.
These various perspectives on cultural persistence—enculturation, institutional structures, elite solidarity, intergroup bargaining and physical force, are not alternative to one another. They are different ways of looking at a single cultural process of high complexity.
Conclusion: The Cultural Determinants of a Voluntary Society
The persistence of regional cultures in America is more than merely a matter of antiquarian interest. Regional diversity has created a dynamic tension within a single republican system. It has also fostered at least four different ideas of liberty within a common cultural frame.
These four libertarian traditions were not forms of classical republicanism or European liberalism—even as those alien ideologies were often borrowed as rationales, American ideas of freedom developed from indigenous folkways which were deeply rooted in the inherited culture of the English-speaking world.
Considered in ethical terms, each of these four freedom ways began as a great and noble impulse, but all at first were limited in expression and defective in their operation. The Puritan idea of ordered freedom was no sooner brought to Massachusetts than it became an instrument of savage persecution. The cavalier conception of hegemonic freedom, when carried to Virginia, permitted and even required the growth of race slavery for its support. The Quaker vision of reciprocal freedom was a sectarian impulse which could be sustained only by withdrawal from the world. The backcountry belief in natural freedom sometimes dissolved into cultural anarchy.
But each of these four libertarian traditions proved capable of continuing growth. New England’s Puritan faith in ordered freedom grew far beyond its original limits to become, in Perry Miller’s words, “a constellation of ideas basic to any comprehension of the American mind.” Virginia’s cavalier conceit of hegemonic freedom transcended its association with inequalities of rank and race and gender to become an ethical idea that is relevant to all. Pennsylvania’s Quaker inspiration of reciprocal freedom developed from a fragile sectarian vision into a libertarian creed remarkable for toughness of mind and tenacity of purpose. Border and backcountry notions of natural freedom evolved from a folk tradition into an elaborate ideology.
Each of these four freedom ways still preserves its separate existence in the United States. The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be. It has also become the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States. In time, this plurality of freedoms may prove to be that nation’s most enduring legacy to the world.