How British Are You?

There were at least four great migrations. From the Puritan East of England came the pious families of Massachusetts Bay. Their numbers were small. But the twenty-one thousand emigrants who arrived between, roughly, 1629 and 1640 were sufficient to dominate the social, religious, and political life of the Northeast. Eastern England was close to the Netherlands. Dutch influences can be found in the region’s architecture and religion, in its burgher life of small towns and crafts and devotion to learning. This heritage is still very much alive in New England today. Much of the Massachusetts economy is based on educational institutions that grew out of the Puritan tradition.

Virginia’s character stems not from the frail founding of Jamestown but rather from a later time: 1640-80. During and after the English Civil War, younger sons of gentry households tried to create in Virginia an aristocratic order, to reproduce the style of life in which they had been raised. Historians still have it wrong: They deny any validity to the Old South legend of shining knights and “Cavaliers.” Of course, there was nothing very glorious about these Royalists, but they did set the style for Virginia life. They also imported large numbers of indentured sevants—about 70 percent of the population—from the South of England.

The Quakers of the Delaware Valley appeared later in the same century. Unlike the Puritans, who belonged to the middling ranks, Quakers came from the lower end of the social order. But not from the very bottom. Like the Puritans and the Cavaliers, they sought a haven from an unsympathetic government. They chiefly emigrated from the English North Midlands and Wales.

The fourth great migration brought people from the British borderlands—Ireland, Scotland, the North of England, and Wales. Hundreds of thousands poured in from 1720 to the American Revolution. These people endowed the hinterlands with a culture that Americans associate with the Wild West—the frontier spirit.

All these groups had much in common. They all spoke English, lived under British laws, and cherished British liberties. But they also differed in many ways: their separate dialects; wedding, child-naming, and child-rearing customs; attitudes about rank, age, gender, work, and leisure. These discrete folkways, as I call them, are perpetuated in our own regional cultures.

Take speech, for example—something we all are aware of. New Englanders have a noticeable twang. It is a way of speaking that developed from the dialects of eastern England, such as the “Norfolk whine.” Or clothing. New Englanders have long cultivated an indifference toward high fashions, preferring “sadd” colors, sensible shoes, and so on. This attitude was brought to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. It survives in the famous Harvard crimson. It’s really a muddy color, not blood red at all.

Now contrast these two patterns with Virginia's. Yankees chose to say “I am,” “You are,” “She isn’t,” “I haven’t.” Virginians, even the wealthy, preferred to say “I be,” “You be,” “She ain’t,” “I hain’t.” They often dropped the “as if” in favor of “like": “He looks like he’s dead.” They dropped or softened their R’s. No respectable Puritan would say “book learning,” but in Virginia, where intellectuality was not so highly regarded, that was the preferred term for education. These peculiarities of vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and accent were derived from the South and West of England. In dress the Virginia elite mimicked the styles of London. Women wore bright red cloaks, men seldom went without a sword. It was a symbol of their claim to being “gentlemen.” Commoners were denied that equipage. Many upper-class Virginians displayed coats of arms and stamped their books, silver, and coaches with these emblems of their genealogical lines.

Most interesting is the speech of the Delaware Valley. It was here that arose the flat accent, which linguists call midland speech, stretching from mid-New Jersey all the way across Middle America to Utah and beyond. Appropriately enough, that dialect is derived from the North Midlands of England—Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, et cetera. An amusing example is the way people translated the noise their horses made. In East Anglia and New England they neighed —related to the Dutch neijen . In Wessex and the Chesapeake they whickered , but in midlands of both countries they whinnied .

Finally, the backcountry. The clothing of this culture underscored manliness for men, femininity for women. Bodices were cut low, and the dresses were comparatively short. They were thought to be immodest by Quaker, Puritan, or even Anglican standards. Backwoodsmen wore clothes that emphasized muscularity, with the broad seams running horizontally. The shirt was “cinched” tightly at the waist. This style enlarged the shoulders and narrowed the hips. We like to think that this attire sprang from the frontier life of these people. Not so. It was a direct importation from the borderlands. As for speech, do you remember Lyndon Johnson’s speech with its whar for where, far for fire, narrer for narrow ? This is typical of the British borderlands, especially Northern Ireland. Double negatives abound: “He don’t do nothin’.” Of course, linguistically and sartorially much has changed in both America and Great Britain. Yet the persistence of many old patterns of speech and even of clothing is striking.

Let me make a comment before doing so. These topics—I have about twenty-five or so categories—are important in themselves but also in their cumulative and integrative capacity. They dovetail and reinforce each other. In other words, you won’t find housing styles out of line with modes of social ranking or clothing habits out of alignment with religious and magical beliefs and so on. To illustrate: Virginia’s upper-class houses were designed like the manor houses of southern England. In both countries they were built with a distinct public function in mind: In the great center halls the gentry conducted their business, entertained their guests with balls, administered local justice, and so forth. That form of vernacular architecture was suited to the kind of life and culture the big planters developed.

But to answer your question. Sport is a very good indicator. New Englanders, for instance, were very organized in all things, even the kinds of games they played. They especially liked team sports. In early America football was called the Boston game, and baseball the New England game.

In Virginia sport meant a hierarchy of blood sports. Every rank was encouraged to kill animals of a size proportionate to their status—a great chain of slaughter. Commoners were not allowed to race their mounts against those of the elite. Even their betting was prohibited. Whereas anyone, high or low, could be fined in New England for gambling, in the Tidewater commoners alone were punished for violating their social position by gaming. Virginia gentlemen wagered enormous sums to demonstrate their wealth and power and to defy the fates. The Virginians were obsessed with fortune and astrology. Gambling was a testing of one’s fortune. In fact, Virginians often cast their sense of social order in terms of fortune. That is, it was fortune that placed one rank over another. The New Englanders had a very different way of thinking about the world, dividing it between the forces of good and the forces of evil. So their obsession was with witchcraft, the same as in eastern England. But back to sports. Sundays and court days in Virginia were favorite times for a horse race that often ended in bloody melees over the outcome. Jockeys lashed each other as well as their horses.

In stark contrast were the quiet habits of the Quakers. They preferred gardening. In the backcountry the Scots and Irish imported those sports that suited the warrior mode of their life. Our modern field sports—the javelin, foot race, broad jump, weight throwing, and so on—derive directly from the so-called Caledonian games. Also boxing and wrestling. These sports were a hardy business in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Eye gouging was common. Some backwoodsmen let their nails grow long and hard, the better to spring an eye from its socket.

‘Time ways” is a superb marker of cultural distinctiveness. As you might expect, New Englanders believed in the idea of improving time. Virginians spoke of killing time; Quakers, redeeming time. Backwoodsmen thought in terms of passing the time. Each of these concepts reflected the deepest values of their culture. By improvement New Englanders had in mind personal and spiritual advancement. “Killing time” was not a phrase that appeared in any New England diary I have ever read. After all, it was a native of Boston who invented daylight savings time and an English Puritan who invented the alarm clock. New Englanders thought that one should be working hard at either mental or physical labor, not leaving it to others so that one could simply relax and enjoy. Study—especially religious study—was a high priority for self-enhancement.

On the other hand, very different were the Virginians. Of course, they could hardly avoid disagreeable work in the wilderness setting. But for both commoner and rich landholder, leisure was to be prized. Virginians had to engage in all sorts of commercial activities, but their attitudes toward work were ambivalent. Although no one admired the spend-thrift, the “gentleman of leisure” was a figure of high respectability.

Quakers were less dedicated to the life of the intellect than were the Puritans. They also believed that the Puritans made an idolatry of time. The Quakers’ neat farms, attention to business, and stolid sobriety revealed a sense of godly orderliness.

Backcountry folk had a different economy and a different sense of time’s utility. Their cabins and farms were almost impromptu affairs, compared with those of the Quakers and German pietists who settled in Pennsylvania. These border and backcountry attitudes were a response to insecurity: There was no point in building forever when a conquering army or band of brigands could abruptly destroy your handiwork. In some respects, conditions in frontier America, especially where Native Americans were powerful, seemed little different from the old borderlands. So, idling away time in gossip, storytelling, sipping spirits, or singing ballads was a particular pleasure. Hogs and cattle, foraging in the unclaimed forests, were the prime source of livelihood and required little concentrated labor.

Well, take the Quakers for an example. They were looking for a very special environment. What they wanted was a place to live in peace, a matter of profound importance to them. George Fox, the great Quaker leader, found in Pennsylvania that the local “Indians were loving,” as he put it. He thought there would be less hostility, less conflict with natives than would be the case elsewhere.

By the time the border folk reached America, the coastal areas were pretty well occupied and the lands too expensive. Many arrived through Philadelphia. The Quakers disliked their alien ways and hurried them on to settlements inland. The backcountrymen migrated south along the Appalachian ridge. They did not have a lot of choice, but after all, the harsh life of the herdsman was what they knew. By the way, these people were not all Scots-Irish, as popular opinion has it. Ulster could not have produced the numbers. There were many Lowland Scots, more from Northern Ireland, and some from Southern Ireland, largely nominal Anglicans. We like to think that the backwoods revival camp-meeting was a strictly American experience. It was not. The encampment for worship and fellowship was a border practice, long predating the famous pioneer revivals.

Each of the regions in Britain and America had a different understanding of liberty. New Englanders believed in ordered liberty. Consensus was a prime requirement. The whole community was an entity to itself, enjoying a freedom of association, but that did not allow for much internal dissent. Quakerism, witchcraft, and other alien heresies or blasphemies had no place at all but were to be suppressed without mercy. Yet in a curious paradox the Puritans were sincere in defending what they called liberty of conscience—even as they failed to see contradictions in their persecutions of those practicing it.

Virginians had a hegemonic or hierarchical notion of liberty—the right to rule others and themselves without interference from outside authorities. Hence, liberty for some—the elite—involved subordination of others. Slaveholding was a right, not just a convenience.

Quakers were the most egalitarian group and saw freedom as a more universal commodity, as a reciprocal matter. Although Quakers recognized the primacy of men, they allowed women to speak at church meetings, for instance, and children were tender plants to be nurtured as if in a garden. Quakers did not resort to the customary cuffings and spankings by which Puritans sought to break the will of a child, naturally evil or amoral. So the Quakers’ sense of liberty eventually brought them in the mid-eighteenth century to the then revolutionary idea that enslavement of Africans was a sin against God.

Backcountry folk saw liberty as a natural endowment. It had an individualistic and familial character—the right of a man to protect himself and his loved ones from enemies outside the clan (or even, in feuds, within it).

I understand the Revolution as a cultural conflict, developing mainly from the challenge of a fifth British culture. Over the years Britain itself had become increasingly united- subduing the Jacobite Scots and Irish—and more bureaucratized. A new national elite emerged with its own distinctive dialect, which we call Oxford English. This imperial elite tried to impose on Americans a new cultural order along with unprecedented modes of taxation—an unworthy, demeaning form of “slavery,” as the Patriots saw it. The people of the four regions had long enjoyed their distinguishable liberties, many of them for nearly two centuries. A common enemy made for a common cause.

A very important purpose of this book is to study the past in a way that speaks to the present. Too many historians are antiquarians. They think the past is separate from the present. Still others see the past as merely prologue to the present, without its own integrity. Neither is correct. I am looking for a way of writing history without falling into either error.

It’s interesting that many Americans feel that early colonial history is irrelevant to things happening in the United States today. We differ in this respect from other cultures in the world. In Latin America, for example, the memory of the colonial period is urgently important in debates about public questions. The same is true for Canada and South Africa or the current ethnic troubles in the Soviet Union. But in America our colonial past has been sanitized. This is partly because Americans think of history as change. We tend to be less conscious of continuities. History, we assume, is something that happens to less fortunate people. I think this is wrong.

It’s true that only 19 percent of us have British ancestry. Nonetheless, most Americans are “Albion’s seed” in a cultural sense. Take the Kennedys of Massachusetts, for example. Though Irish and Catholic, John F. Kennedy and his family were also New Englanders. When he pronounced “Americer” and “Cuber,” he demonstrated the old New England twang. Another example is Franklin Roosevelt. He was three-quarters Yankee, despite his Dutch New York name. His New England culture profoundly influenced his political beliefs.

Very much so. We have had forty Presidents, and all but two, Martin Van Buren and Kennedy, descended from one or more of the four great migrations. Surprisingly, the borderers have supplied the greatest number—some eighteen—from Andrew Jackson and James Polk to Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. Next came the sixteen Presidents from Puritan roots. They include George Bush. Ten can be traced to the “distressed Cavalier” tradition—the early Virginia Presidents down to Harry Truman. Only seven arose from the Quaker-German Pietist background, most notably Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower, a soldier-hero who hated war. Isn’t it curious that, apart from Kennedy, only those of early colonial extraction have reached the White House?

If we turn to major national policy questions, we find that region was the single most salient factor—quite apart from the obviously sectional character of the Civil War. Richard Bensel, the political scientist, has demonstrated that between 1880 and 1908 congressional voting was based more on region than on party, class, or any other factor. Even today political struggles arise from old folk ideas of order, power, and freedom, all of which still define our regional cultures. For instance, the retributive and every-man-his-own-master principles of the border legacy help to explain the Southern and Western opposition to gun control. In contrast, those states most affected by settlement of New Englanders have a low rate of homicide when compared with the statistics of the South and Southwest. On the women’s suffrage and equal rights amendments, where has been the strongest support or challenge? The answers lie in those sections of the land affected by their roots in the colonial past.

Albion’s Seed is the first of other works designed to fill out many questions left unanswered here. For instance, the next book will explain four distinctive African-American cultures that developed in various regions of the United States. Vol>ume three is about Dutch, German, and Spanish cultures in North America. But the first, Albion’s Seed, suggests that the colonial period of American history has left us a rich and dynamic legacy. That bequest continues to be a vital part of our contemporary culture.