Historian David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial Albion’s Seed describes how the British came to America in four streams. From East Anglia came the Puritans seeking freedom to practice their religion. They settled first in Massachusetts. By the time of the Revolution, they had spread throughout New England and into the eastern part of New York and had become known as Yankees.
From the south of England came the Cavaliers, who had lost out during the English Civil War, accompanied by large numbers of impoverished English who signed contracts to work as their indentured servants. The first wave settled in Virginia’s tidewater, and the second around the Chesapeake Bay. They spread southward through the tidewater regions of the Carolinas and Georgia.
From the North Midlands came the Quakers, who, like the Puritans, were seeking a place to practice their religion unmolested. They settled first in the Delaware Valley and then spread throughout eastern and central Pennsylvania, with some of them drifting southward to Maryland and northern Virginia.
The fourth group came from Scotland and the northern border counties of England. Some of them arrived directly from their ancestral homelands, but the great majority arrived in the New World after an extended stopover in the north of Ireland—hence the label by which we know them, the Scots-Irish. They landed in Philadelphia but quickly made their way west on the Great Wagon Road to settle the Appalachian frontier running from west-central Pennsylvania to northeast Georgia.
The four groups did indeed share a common culture insofar as they had all come from a single nation with a single set of political, legal, and economic institutions. But our topic is cultural diversity as it affects the different ways in which Americans think about what it means to “live life as one sees fit.” That consists of what I will call quotidian culture: the culture of everyday life. In terms of quotidian culture, the four streams shared the English language, barely. They differed on just about everything else, often radically.
Religion was culturally divisive. Anglican Christianity among the Cavaliers retained much of the pomp and ritual of Catholicism, and it permitted a lavish, sensuous lifestyle that the Yankees’ religious heritage, Puritanism, and Quakerism forbade. But Puritanism and Quakerism were also very different from each other. The Puritans saw themselves as God’s chosen people—“the saints”—and the religion they practiced was as harsh and demanding as reputation has it, epitomized by the title of the most famous sermon of the 18th century, Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Sunday service, which might last five or six hours, even in unheated churches in the dead of a New England winter, consisted mostly of long lecture-like sermons and long teachings of the Word. It also included a ritual of purification, as members who were known to have committed specific sins were compelled to rise and “take shame upon themselves,” which sometimes included crawling before the congregation.
The Quaker First Day meeting was completely different. Whereas the congregation in a Puritan church was seated according to age, sex, and rank, Quakers were supposed to take the seat nearest the front according to the order of arrival. There was no multi-hour lecture or even a preacher. Anyone who was moved by the spirit could speak, including children, but the strictly observed convention was that such interventions lasted only a few minutes. Sometimes nothing would be said for the entire meeting, and those were often thought to be the best—“gathered” meetings during which the spirit of God was felt wordlessly by all. Instead of trying to live blamelessly to avoid the wrath of an angry God, Quakers worshipped a God of love and forgiveness. Sinners in need of forgiveness were “held in the light.”
Meanwhile, the Scots-Irish in the Appalachian backcountry combined passionate enthusiasm for Protestant teachings with equally passionate hostility toward the religious establishment. Thus an Anglican missionary to the region was told by one family that “they wanted no damned black gown sons of bitches among them” and was warned that they might use him as a backlog in their fireplace. Others to whom he intended to minister stole his horse, drank his rum, and made off with his prayer books.
The nature of the family varied across the four streams. Yankee and Quaker families were nuclear. To them, marriage was a covenant that must be observed by both husband and wife, and it could be terminated when one party failed to live up to the bargain. But Yankees and Quakers differed in the roles assigned to each party. Among the Yankees, marriage was a strict hierarchy with the man in charge; among the Quakers, marriage was seen as a “loving agreement,” a partnership between man and wife.
Among the Cavaliers, the father was the absolute head of an extended family that embraced blood relatives, other dependents, and sometimes slaves. Marriage was not a covenant but a union before God, and indissoluble. A Scots-Irish family was a series of concentric rings, beginning with the nuclear family and successively widening to include extended family and American versions of Scottish clans, lacking the formal structure of clans in their ancestral home but consisting of related families with a few surnames who lived near one another and were ready to come to one another’s aid.
Marital and premarital morality varied among the four streams. The criminal laws of Puritan Massachusetts decreed that a man who slept with an unmarried woman could be jailed, whipped, fined, disfranchised, and forced to marry the object of his lust. In cases of adultery, both Yankees and Quakers punished the man as severely as—sometimes more severely than—the woman. Among the Cavaliers, it was just the opposite: Men who slept with women not their wives were seen as doing what comes naturally and were treated leniently. Women were harshly punished for accommodating them.
Once people were married, Puritanism wasn’t all that puritanical. Surviving letters between Yankee spouses commonly expressed their love in ways that leave no doubt about their mutual pleasure in sex. It was the Quakers, more gentle and consensual in many aspects of marriage, who were more likely to see sex as sinful in itself. Many Quaker marriages included long periods of deliberate sexual abstinence.
Yankees, Quakers, and Cavaliers alike looked down on the morals of the Scots-Irish, who practiced an open sexuality that had no counterpart among the other three groups. That persecuted Anglican missionary to the Scots-Irish I mentioned was scandalized that, among other things, the young women of the backcountry “draw their shift as tight as possible round their breasts, and slender waists” in a deliberate display of their charms. He calculated that 94 percent of the brides in the marriages he performed in 1767 were already pregnant.
I have read both this book and also “American Nations.” If it was discussed, I don’t recall: why didn’t Canada join the Rebellion? Or the West Indies? Why just those 13 colonies?
At the time, Canada was a French colony that had only recently passed to the British, and the British granted them the right to maintain their language, their faith, and their customs. The colonists to the south were vocally anti-Catholic, and then their attempt to take over Canada failed miserably. (The British could support their own troops along water.)
After the war, English-speaking Loyalists flooded northward, and Canada became not-so-French.
If you’re only going to read one book about American politics, I’d make this the one.
The West Indies were very culturally similar to the South but are islands, and the British Royal Navy was strong enough to prevent resupply. The Bahamas were actually invaded by the US.
Canada had recently been French, yes, but the Atlantic seaboard province of Nova Scotia (which once included all the current Canadian Maritime provinces and the US state of Maine) had been a hot potato thrown between the French and the English for the better part of century. Little known trivia fact: Nova Scotia was the most fought over piece of ground in the 17th and 18th century because of its strategic location on the Atlantic trade routes. In order to pacify the territory, the British expelled the French speaking Acadians and then imported German protestants and encouraged New Englanders to migrate north (called the Planters) to repopulate the province. When the revolution broke out in the 1770s and 1780s most Nova Scotians were sympathetic with the rebels but the presence of the powerful British navy in Halifax secured their compliance. Once the revolution was over the arrival of 50,000 United Empire Loyalists in Nova Scotia – a significant number from New York and Virginia – secured its future allegiance to the British crown. Although a small province the cultural differences are still recognizable within local areas. Planters who settled in the Annapolis Valley have a different mindset than the German descendants living in Lunenburg County and who are different again from the loyalist-settled areas of Cumberland and Colchester Counties to the late arriving Scots who settled in the north and on Cape Breton Island. Only with the commitment of many locals to fighting overseas during the First World War did the barriers among these various subsets start to come down.