This description of pre-Revolution New England from a Victorian English historian reminds us how much ordinary Americans and educated English historians have changed in a century or two:
Still with every drawback the bulk of the New Englanders were a people of strong fibre and high morals. Strictly Sabbatarian, rigidly orthodox, averse to extravagance, to gambling, and to effeminate amusements, capable of great efforts of self-sacrifice, hard, stubborn, and indomitably intractable, they had most of the qualities of a ruling race.