David hackett fischer albions seed (v5 0)

Albion’s Seed

AMERICA
A CULTURAL HISTORY

VOLUME I: ALBION’S SEED
VOLUME II: AMERICAN PLANTATIONS


ALBION’S SEED

FOUR BRITISH FOLKWAYS IN AMERICA
BY
DAVID HACKETT FISCHER


Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1989 by David Hackett Fischer
First published in 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1991

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fischer, David Hackett, 1935Albion’s seed: four British folkways in America/
David Hackett Fischer.
p. cm. (America, a cultural history; v. 1)
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN-13 978-0-19-506905-1
1. United States—Civilization—To 1783.
2. United States—Civilization—English influences.
I. Title. II. Series: Fischer, David Hackett, 1935America, a cultural history, v. 1.
E169.1.F539 vol. 1 [E162] 973 s-dc20 [973] 89-16069 CIP


23 25 27 29 30 28 26 24
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper


For Robert and Patricia Blake


PREFACE

An Idea of Cultural History

History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies … The converse is also

true: cultural schemes are historically ordered.
—Marshall Sahlins, 1985
THIS BOOK is the first in a series, which will hopefully comprise a cultural history of the United
States. It is cultural in an anthropological rather than an aesthetic sense—a history of American
folkways as they have changed through time.
Each volume (five are now in draft) centers on a major problem in American historiography. The
first volume, Albion’s Seed , is about the problem of cultural origins. The second volume, American
Plantations, studies the problem of culture and environment in the colonial era. The third volume
examines the coming of independence as a cultural movement. Volume four takes up the problem of
cultural change in the early republic, and volume five is about the Civil War as a cultural conflict.
Other volumes will follow if the author is allowed to complete them.
This project has grown from an intellectual event that happened in the 1960s—a revolution in the
writing of history, very much like the thought-revolutions described in Thomas Kuhn’s essays on the
history of science, and Michael Foucault’s studies of social thought. Three generations ago, there was
an established “paradigm” or “episteme” of historical knowledge. A writer had only to call his book
a history in order to announce what sort of work it was, for history books were very much the same.
History was about the past. It was a narrative discipline—a story-telling art. The stories that it told
were about the organization of power and authority. Not all historians wrote political history, but
most were interested in the politics of the subjects they studied. Labor historians wrote about labor
leaders; historians of eduction studied school systems and the men who ran them; historians of women
wrote about suffrage leaders and reform elites. Large masses of less eminent people also passed
through the history books, or loitered in the wings like armies of anonymous extras on a Hippodrome
stage. But the leading actors were small and highly individuated power-elites.
Historians studied these people through documentary sources. The results were organized as
narratives and presented in the form of testimony—sometimes with specific citations, but for the most
part historians testified to their readers, “I have steeped myself in the sources, and here is what I
believe to have happened,” and they were believed, for this was a time when scholars were
gentlemen, and a gentleman was as good as his word.

All of this activity created a coherent and plausible idea of history, which was at once a body of
knowledge about the past and also a way of knowing it. Its masters were the great “narrative”
historians such as Macaulay, Michelet, Ranke and Parkman. The last of this breed in America were
Allan Nevins and Samuel Eliot Morison, who are both in their graves.
Early in the twentieth century, this paradigm of history began to come apart. Its ethical framework
disintegrated. Suddenly, there were many new interests and problems that no longer seemed to fit.
Anomalies were found; young scholars were promoted primarily for finding them. For two
generations, historians became hunters after the anomalous fact. Each of their successes was a blow
against the old synthesis, which was soon reduced to something like a ruin.
Some scholars struggled to repair it. Others attempted to replace it with a new synthesis. In the
United States, the work of Turner, Beard, Parrington, Hofstadter, Boorstin and Hartz might be
understood as a series of highly tentative paradigm sketches. But nobody could put the pieces together
again. This was the period (1935-60) when historical relativism came into fashion, and every
convention of the American Historical Association became an organized expression of professional
Angst.
Then, in the decade of the 1960s, something new began to happen. Young scholars in Europe and
America were inspired by the French school of the Annales to invent a new kind of history which
differed from the old paradigm in all of the characteristics mentioned above. This new history was
not really about the past at all, but about change—with past and present in a mutual perspective. It
was not a story-telling but a problem-solving discipline. Its problematiques were about change and
continuity in the acts and thoughts of ordinary people—people in the midst of others; people in
society. The goal of this new social history was nothing less than an histoire totale of the human
experience. To that end, the new historians drew upon many types of evidence: documents, statistics,
physical artifacts, iconographic materials and much more. They also presented their findings in a new
way—not as testimony but as argument. An historian was required not only to make true statements
but also to demonstrate their truthfulness by rigorous methods of logic and empiricism. This epistemic
revolution was the most radical innovation of the new history. It was also the most difficult for older
scholars to understand.
In its early years, the new social history claimed to be not merely a new subdiscipline of history
but the discipline itself in a new form. It promised to become a major synthesizing discipline in the

human sciences—even the synthesizing discipline. Unhappily, these high goals were not reached. The
new social history succeeded in building an institutional base, and also in exploring many new fields
of knowledge. But in Fernand Braudel’s words, it was overwhelmed by its own success. Instead of
becoming a synthesizing discipline, it disintegrated into many special fields—women’s history, labor
history, environmental history, the history of aging, the history of child abuse, and even gay history—
in which the work became increasingly shrill and polemical. Moreover, too many important subjects
were excluded from the new history—politics, events, individuals, even ideas—and too many
problems were diminished by materialist explanations and “modernization models.” By the 1980s the
new social history had lost much of its intellectual momentum, and most of its conceptual range. It had
also lost touch with the larger purposes that had called it into being.
From this mixed record of success and failure, a question inevitably arises. What comes after the
new history? How can we continue to move forward? How might we strengthen the weakened hand of
synthesis in an analytic discipline? What larger intellectual and cultural purposes might an historian
seek to serve?
To those questions, this series offers an answer in its organizing idea of cultural history. Briefly, it


seeks to find a way forward by combining several elements which the old and new histories have
tended to keep apart. In terms of substance, it is about both elites and ordinary people, about
individual choices and collective experiences, about exceptional events and normative patterns, about
vernacular culture and high culture, about the problem of society and the problem of the state. To
those ends, it tries to keep alive the idea of histoire totale by employing a concept of culture as a
coherent and comprehensive whole.
In causal terms, this inquiry searches for a way beyond reductive materialist models (of both the
left and the right) which are presently in fashion among historians in the United States and Britain,
where materialism became a cultural mania during the Reagan and Thatcher years. Without denying
the importance of material factors in history, one might assert that they are only a part of a larger
whole, and that claims for their priority are rarely grounded in empirical fact. This inquiry seeks to
place them in their proper context.
In terms of epistemology, this work tries to find a way forward in yet another way. The old history

was idealist in its epistemic assumptions. Its major findings were offered as “interpretations” which
tended to be discovered by intuition and supported by testimony. The new social history aspired to
empiricism, but the epistemic revolution was incomplete—and something of the old interpretative
sweep was lost in the process. This work tries to combine the interpretative thrust of the old history
with the empiricism of the new—interpretative sails and empirical anchors, so to speak.
In its temporal aspect, this inquiry seeks a new answer to an old problem about the relationship
between the past and the present. Many working historians think of the past as fundamentally separate
from the present—the antiquarian solution. Others study the past as prologue to the present—the
presentist solution. This work is organized around a third idea—that every period of the past, when
understood in its own terms, is immediate to the present. This “immediatist” solution cannot be
discussed at length here; it must be defined ostensively by the work itself, and especially by the
conclusion. Suffice to say that the temporal problem in this volume is to explore the immediacy of the
earliest period of American history without presentism, and at the same time to understand the
cultures of early America in their own terms without antiquarianism.
An immediatist idea of a relationship between the past and present might also support a more
spacious relationship between history and other fields of knowledge. The old history was conceived
as an autonomous discipline. The new history was more interdisciplinary—but its efforts consisted
mainly of borrowings from other fields. This work is meant to suggest that major problems in many
disciplines are insoluble without the application of historical knowledge. A case in point is the
problem of wealth distribution; this work will argue, for example, that the distribution of wealth is
determined not merely by timeless economic laws but by the interplay of cultural values and
individual purposes which are rooted in the past.
Such an approach to the relationship between past and present might also help to enlarge historical
inquiry in its ethical dimension. This work, for example, tries to apply new empirical methods and
findings to old problems about the history of freedom in the world. It suggests that the problem of
liberty cannot be discussed intelligently without a discrimination of libertarianisms which must be
made in historical terms. Empirical knowledge of the past is not merely useful but necessary to an
understanding of our moral choices in the present.
Finally, in terms of rhetoric, a problem has arisen from the empirical requirements of the new
history, which have destroyed the possibility of simple story-telling in original scholarship without

changing the narrative nature of the writing that historians do. This series seeks to combine storytelling and problem-solving in a “braided narrative” of more complex construction.


In all of those many ways, this idea of cultural history rests upon an assumption that the old and the
new history are not two disciplines but one. The progress of historical knowledge is best served by
their creative integration.
Old Headington, Oxford
Wayland, Massachusetts
D.H.F.


CONTENTS
PREFACE
An Idea of Cultural History
ILLUSTRATIONS
Drawings, Maps and Tables
INTRODUCTION
The Determinants of a Voluntary Society
EAST ANGLIA TO MASSACHUSETTS: The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41
THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND TO VIRGINIA: Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants,
1642-75
NORTH MIDLANDS TO THE DELAWARE:
The Friends’ Migration, 1675-1725
BORDERLANDS TO THE BACKCOUNTRY:
The Flight from North Britain, 1717-1775
CONCLUSION
Four British Folkways in American History: The Origin and Persistence of Regional Cultures in the
United States
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Sources for Maps
Index


ILLUSTRATIONS

Drawings
by Jennifer Brody
ew England’s Transatlantic Elite
uritan Ministers in the Great Migration
Puritan Physician in the Great Migration
he Salt Box House in Old and New England
he Gabled Box in Essex, England and Essex County, Massachusetts
he Apparatus of Courtship in Puritan New England
The Technology of Will Breaking: Whispering Sticks
The Iconography of Old Age in New England: Mistress Anne Pollard
A New England Meeting House
Pulpit Eye and Elder Bench
Spirit Stones in Massachusetts
Steeple Hats and “Sadd Colors”
The Swing Plow in New England and East Anglia
Symbols of Belonging: “Towne Marks” in Massachusetts
John Winthrop’s Little Speech on Liberty
Sir William Berkeley and Charles I
Colonel Richard Lee
Anna Constable Lee
Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt
Tenant Farmers in Oxfordshire
Virginia’s First Great House: Sir William Berkeley’s Green Spring
Stratford

The Hall-and-Parlor House in Virginia
William Byrd II
Lucy Parke Byrd
Virginia’s “Spirited She-Britons”: Sarah Harrison
Colonel Daniel Parke
Bruton Church, Williamsburg, Virginia
Yeocomico Church, Westmoreland County, Virginia
Christ Church, Lancaster County, Virginia
Slashed Sleeves


The
Iconography
of Deference
A Freeborn
Gentleman
of Virginia: Thomas Lee
William Penn in Youth
William Penn in Maturity
Vernacular Architecture in Pennsylvania
Pent Roofs and Door Hoods
A Quaker Woman Preaching
Quaker Meetinghouses
A Hexagonal Quaker Schoolhouse
A Quaker Wedding Dress
Quaker Outbuildings
The Great Quaker Bell
Penrith Beacon
Andrew Jackson
James Knox Polk

John Caldwell Calhoun
Cabin Architecture in the Borderlands and Backcountry
The Abduction of Rachel Donelson
Age and Authority in the Backcountry
Crackers, Rednecks, Hoosiers
Patrick Henry
Maps
by Andrew Mudryk
English Regional Origins of the Puritan Migration
English Origins of Massachusetts Place Names
The Regional Culture of Eastern England
The Tradition of Dissent in Eastern England
Town Founding in New England
Patterns of Settlement in East Anglia and Massachusetts
English Regional Origins of Virginia’s Great Migration
The South of England
The Chesapeake Region
Patterns of Settlement: Gloucestershire, England
Patterns of Settlement: Gloucester County, Virginia
English Regional Origins of the Friends’ Migration
English Origins of Pennsylvania Place Names
The North Midlands of England


The Quaker Heartland
The Delaware Valley
Patterns of Settlement in Pennsylvania
The Flight from North Britain
Scotland and Northern Ireland
The Borderlands

British Borderers in the American Backcountry
Patterns of Settlement in the Backcountry
The Scale of Settlement in the Backcountry
Regional Taxonomies in British History
Speech and Culture Regions in the United States
Regional Voting in the Early Republic, 1796-1832
The Eclipse of Region: The Second Party System, 1840-52
From Region to Section: The Republican Coalition, 1856-60
The Republican Coalition versus the Solid South, 1880-88
Region and Reform, 1896-1912
The High Tide of Sectionalism, 1920-24
Regional Alliances in the New Deal Coalition, 1932-44
The Regional Revival, 1948-56
The Regional Revolution in American Politics, 1968-88
Regional Patterns of Violence in America
Regional Attitudes toward the Rights of Women
Tables
Cultural Indicators Used in This Work
Religion and the Great Migration: Church Members in New England
Gender and Age Composition in the Great Migration
Occupations in the Great Migration: Five Studies
English Origins of the Great Migration
English Origins of Town Names in Massachusetts
English Residence of University Men in New England
New England’s Puritan Elite: Genealogical Links
Puritan Ministers in England before 1590
Completed Family Size in New England: Eleven Studies
Age at Marriage in New England: Twenty Studies
Prenuptial Pregnancy in Massachusetts: Nine Studies
Illegitimacy Ratios by English Region

“Sending Out” in Massachusetts and East Anglia


Age Bias in New England: Four Studies
Witchcraft Prosecutions in England and America: Six Studies
Literacy in New England and East Anglia: Five Studies
Season of Marriage in New England
Size of Land Grants in Billerica, Massachusetts
Wealth Distribution in Hingham, Norfolk and Hingham, Mass.
Wealth Distribution in New England Towns and English Parishes
Wealth Distribution in New England: Twenty-Six Studies
Rates of Persistence in New England: Eight Studies
Crime Statistics by State, 1790-1827
Criminal Prosecutions in Massachusetts: Three County Studies
Criminal Prosecutions in Massachusetts and South Carolina
Voter Participation in Massachusetts: Ten Town Studies
Virginia’s Elite: Dates of Immigration
Virginia’s Elite: Social Rank in England
Virginia’s Elite: English Counties of Origin
Virginia’s Elite: Genealogical Links
Population Growth in Virginia & Other Colonies
Occupation of Virginia Servants: Four Studies
Religion in Virginia: Patterns of Church Attendance
English Origins of Families, Isle of Wight, Virginia
English Origins of Virginia Servants and Bristol Apprentices
English Origins of Place Names in Virginia and Maryland
Completed Family Size in the Chesapeake: Four Studies
Age at Marriage in the Chesapeake: Seven Studies
Prenuptial Pregnancy in the Chesapeake: Four Studies
Illegitimacy in the Chesapeake: Two Studies

Chesapeake Onomastics
Descent of Names, Virginia and New England
Age Bias in the Chesapeake
Literacy of Europeans in Virginia
Literacy of Africans in Virginia
Literacy by Social Rank in Virginia
Kitchen Equipment in England and the Chesapeake
Season of Marriage in the Chesapeake
Season of Conception in the Chesapeake
Population by Social Rank in Virginia
Wealth Distribution in Virginia


Size of Land Grants in Virginia
Tenancy in Virginia: Seven Studies
African Population in the Colonies
Rates of Persistence in Surry and Northampton Counties, Va.
Rates of Persistence in Northamptonshire, England
Criminal Prosecutions in the Chesapeake: Five County Studies
Voter Participation in Virginia: Sixteen Studies
The Growth of Population in the Delaware Valley
Quakers in Derby Meeting
Churches in Early America
Ethnic Composition of Pennsylvania Population, 1726-90
Religious Composition of Pennsylvania Legislature, 1729-55
Occupation of Immigrants to Philadelphia and Bucks Co., 1682-87
Geographic Origins of Immigrants to Philadelphia and Bucks County
Geographic Origins of Quaker “Ministers”
Geographic Origins of Quaker Autobiographers
Geographic Origins of Quakers with Certificates from Meetings

Geographic Origins of Pennsylvania’s “First Purchasers”
The Delaware Elite: Genealogical Links
English Regional Speechways
Completed Family Size in the Delaware Valley: Six Studies
Age at Marriage in the Delaware Valley: Seven Studies
Descent of Names in Quaker Families
Quaker Onomastics in England and America
Literacy in Pennsylvania: Two Studies
Season of Marriage and Conception in the Delaware Valley
Distribution of Wealth in the Delaware Valley: Two Studies
Rates of Persistence in Chester and Lancaster Counties, Pa.
Rates of Persistence in Nottinghamshire, England
Criminal Prosecutions in Chester County, Pa.
Voter Participation in the Delaware Valley: Six Studies
Scotch-Irish Emigration to America before 1775: Six Studies
Emigration from Scotland: Four Estimates
Family Status of North British Emigrants: Four Studies
Gender of North British Emigrants
Age Distribution of North British Emigrants
Motives for Migration from North Britain: Six Surveys
Occupations of North British Emigrants
Scottish and Irish Surnames in the Census of 1790: Two Studies


Backcountry Elites: Genealogical Links
Backcountry Elites: Origins of Officers at Kings Mountain
Age at Marriage in Three Backcountry Districts
Illegitimacy in North Britain
Backcountry Onomastics
Descent of Names in the Backcountry

Age Bias in the Backcountry, 1776
Rates of Literacy in North Britain
Season of Marriage in the Backcountry: Augusta County, Va.
Wealth Distribution in North Carolina and Tennessee before 1800: Eight Counties
Wealth Distribution in Kentucky before 1800: Eleven Counties
Rates of Persistence in the Borderlands and Backcountry
Criminal Prosecutions in the Backcountry: Ohio County, Va.
Voter Participation in the Backcountry: Four County Studies
Settlements in British America before the Great Migrations
Four British Folk Migrations: Modal Characteristics
British Protestantism in the Seventeenth Century
Taxonomies of Social Rank in England, 1577-1600
Chronology of Anglo-American History, 1558-1760
Four Regions in Early America: Environment
Four Regions in Early America: Culture
Regional Voting on Jay’s Treaty, 1796
Region of Origin and Voting in New York and Ohio, 1840-46
Region of Origin and Voting in New York and Ohio, 1856-60
Ethnic Composition of the American Population, 1820-71
Regional Voting for Richard Nixon
Albion’s Seed


INTRODUCTION

The Determinants of a Voluntary Society

Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
—Paul Gauguin, 1897
IN BOSTON’S MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS , not far from the place where English Puritans splashed ashore in

1630, there is a decidedly unpuritanical painting of bare-breasted Polynesian women by Paul
Gauguin. The painting is set on a wooded riverbank. In the background is the ocean, and the shadowy
outline of a distant land. The canvas is crowded with brooding figures in every condition of life—old
and young, dark and fair. They are seen in a forest of symbols, as if part of a dream. In the corner, the
artist has added an inscription: “D’ou venons nous? Qui sommes nous? Ou allons nous?”
That painting haunts the mind of this historian. He wonders how a Polynesian allegory found its
way to a Puritan town which itself was set on a wooded riverbank, with the ocean in the background
and the shadow of another land in the far distance. He observes the crowd of museumgoers who
gather before the painting. They are Americans in every condition of life, young and old, dark and
fair. Suddenly the great questions leap to life. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we
going?
The answers to these questions grow more puzzling the more one thinks about them. We Americans
are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us
support our republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves
about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that
idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in
fundamental principles … but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.”1
We live in an open society which is organized on the principle of voluntary action, but the
determinants of that system are exceptionally constraining. Our society is dynamic, changing
profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable. The search for the
origins of this system is the central problem in American history. It is also the subject of this book.

The Question Framed


The organizing question here is about what might be called the determinants of a voluntary society.
The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has
remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws,
individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.
Much has been written on this subject—more than anyone can possibly read. But a very large

outpouring of books and articles contains a remarkably small number of seminal ideas. Most
historians have tried to explain the determinants of a voluntary society in one of three ways: by
reference to the European culture that was transmitted to America, or to the American environment
itself, or to something in the process of transmission.
During the nineteenth century the first of these explanations was very much in fashion. Historians
believed that the American system had evolved from what one scholar called “Teutonic germs” of
free institutions, which were supposedly carried from the forests of Germany to Britain and then to
America. This idea was taken up by a generation of historians who tended to be Anglo-Saxon in their
origins, Atlantic in their attitudes and Whiggish in their politics. Most had been trained in the idealist
and institutional traditions of the German historical school.2
For a time this Teutonic thesis became very popular—in Boston and Baltimore. But in Kansas and
Wisconsin it was unkindly called the “germ theory” of American history and laughed into oblivion. In
the early twentieth century it yielded to the Turner thesis, which looked to the American environment
and especially to the western frontier as a way of explaining the growth of free institutions in
America. This idea appealed to scholars who were middle western in their origins, progressive in
their politics, and materialist in their philosophy.3
In the mid-twentieth century the Turner thesis also passed out of fashion. Yet another generation of
American historians became deeply interested in processes of immigration and ethnic pluralism as
determinants of a voluntary society. This third approach was specially attractive to scholars who
were not themselves of Anglo-Saxon stock. Many were central European in their origin, urban in their
residence, and Jewish in their religion. This pluralistic “migration model” is presently the
conventional interpretation.4
Other explanations have also been put forward from time to time, but three ideas have held the
field: the germ theory, the frontier thesis, and the migration model.
This book returns to the first of those explanations, within the framework of the second and third. It
argues a modified “germ thesis” about the importance for the United States of having been British in
its cultural origins. The argument is complex, and for the sake of clarity might be summarized in
advance. It runs more or less as follows.

The Argument Stated

During the very long period from 1629 to 1775, the present area of the United States was settled by at
least four large waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the
east of England to Massachusetts during a period of eleven years from 1629 to 1640. The second was


the migration of a small Royalist elite and large numbers of indentured servants from the south of
England to Virginia (ca. 1642-75). The third was a movement from the North Midlands of England
and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a flow of English-speaking
people from the borders of North Britain and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry mostly
during the half-century from 1718 to 1775.
These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language.
Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing
British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their
religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from
whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which
became the basis of regional cultures in the New World.
By the year 1775 these four cultures were fully established in British America. They spoke
distinctive dialects of English, built their houses in diverse ways, and had different methods of doing
much of the ordinary business of life. Most important for the political history of the United States,
they also had four different conceptions of order, power and freedom which became the cornerstones
of a voluntary society in British America.
Today less than 20 percent of the American population have any British ancestors at all. But in a
cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been. 5
Strong echoes of four British folkways may still be heard in the major dialects of American speech, in
the regional patterns of American life, in the complex dynamics of American politics, and in the
continuing conflict between four different ideas of freedom in the United States. The interplay of four
“freedom ways” has created an expansive pluralism which is more libertarian than any unitary culture
alone could be. That is the central thesis of this book: the legacy of four British folkways in early
America remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today.

The Problem of Folkways

Before we study this subject in detail, several conceptual problems require attention. All are
embedded in the word “folkways.” This term was coined by American sociologist William Graham
Sumner to describe habitual “usages, manners, customs, mores and morals” which he believed to be
practiced more or less unconsciously in every culture. Sumner thought that folkways arose from
biological instincts. “Men begin with acts,” he wrote, “not with thoughts.”6
In this work “folkway” will have a different meaning. It is defined here as the normative structure
of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one
thing, with many interlocking parts. It is not primarily biological or instinctual in its origins, as
Sumner believed, but social and intellectual. Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a
symbolic sense—though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them.
In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact—the conscious instrument of human
will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural
elite.
A folkway should not be thought of in Sumner’s sense as something ancient and primitive which


has been inherited from the distant past. Folkways are often highly persistent, but they are never
static. Even where they have acquired the status of a tradition they are not necessarily very old.
Folkways are constantly in process of creation, even in our own time.7
Folkways in this normative sense exist in advanced civilizations as well as in primitive societies.
They are functioning systems of high complexity which have actually grown stronger rather than
weaker in the modern world. In any given culture, they always include the following things:
—Speech ways, conventional patterns of written and spoken language: pronunciation, vocabulary,
syntax and grammar.
—Building ways, prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to
be related to one another.
—Family ways, the structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality.

—Marriage ways, ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and
divorce.
—Gender ways, customs that regulate social relations between men and women.
—Sex ways, conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance.
—Child-rearing ways, ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture.
—Naming ways, onomastic customs including favored forenames and the descent of names within
the family.
—Age ways, attitudes toward age, experiences of aging, and age relationships.
—Death ways, attitudes toward death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices.
—Religious ways, patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture.
—Magic ways, normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural.
—Learning ways, attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education.
—Food ways, patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting.
—Dress ways, customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment.
—Sport ways, attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport.
—Work ways, work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work.
—Time ways, attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the
conventional rhythms of life.
—Wealth ways, attitudes toward wealth and patterns of its distribution.
—Rank ways, the rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and relations
between different ranks.
—Social ways, conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation.
—Order ways, ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the
disorderly.
—Power ways, attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation.
—Freedom ways, prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions.
Every major culture in the modern world has its own distinctive customs in these many areas. Their
persistent power might be illustrated by an example. Consider the case of wealth distribution. Most
social scientists believe that the distribution of wealth is determined primarily by material conditions.
For Marxists the prime mover is thought to be the means of production; for Keynesians it is the

process of economic growth; for disciples of Adam Smith it is the market mechanism. But to study
this subject in a comparative way is to discover that the distribution of wealth has varied from one
culture to another in ways that cannot possibly be explained by material processes alone. Another
powerful determinant is the inherited structure of values and customs which might be called the


“wealth ways” of a culture.
These wealth ways are communicated from one generation to the next by many interlocking
mechanisms—child-rearing processes, institutional structures, cultural ethics, and codes of law—
which create ethical imperatives of great power in advanced societies as well as primitive cultures.
Indeed, the more advanced a society becomes in material terms, the stronger is the determinant power
of its folkways, for modern technologies act as amplifiers, and modern institutions as stabilizers, and
modern elites as organizers of these complex cultural processes.8
The purpose of this book is to examine those processes at work in what is now the United States,
where at least four British folk cultures were introduced at an early date. Their variety makes them
unusually accessible for study, as William Graham Sumner himself was one of the first to observe.
He found his leading example of folkways not in primitive tribes but in the regional culture of New
England. Sumner wrote:
The mores of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper and world
philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an illustration be seen, both of the
persistency of the spirit of mores, and their variability and adaptability. The mores of New
England have extended to a large immigrant population, and have won control over them. They
have also been carried to the new states by emigrants, and their perpetuation there is an oftennoticed phenomenon.9
The same historical pattern appears in the American south. However different that region may be
from New England, it also has preserved its own distinctive folkways through many generations.
Something similar also happened in the American midlands, and in the American west. Throughout all
four of these broad areas we find the same processes of cultural persistence, variability and
adaptability that William Graham Sumner observed in New England. Even as the ethnic composition
of these various regions of the United States has changed profoundly, regional cultures themselves
have persisted, and are still very powerful even in our own time. All of them derive from folkways

that were planted in the American colonies more than two centuries ago.
If these folkways are to be understood truly, they must be described empirically—that is, by
reference to evidence which can be verified or falsified. In this work, descriptive examples are
presented in the text for illustrative purposes, and empirical indicators are summarized in the notes.10
Not all of these folkways can be treated empirically, but the work of many scholars has produced a
broad range of historical evidence for each of the four major cultures in British America. Let us begin
with Puritan New England, which was founded by the first great migration, and take up the others in
chronological order.


EAST ANGLIA TO MASSACHUSETTS

The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-1641

You talk of New England; I truly believe
Old England’s grown new and doth us deceive.
I’ll ask you a question or two, by your leave:
And is not old England grown new?
New fashions in houses, new fashions at table,
The old servants discharged, the new are more able;
And every old custome is but an old fable!
And is not old England grown new? …
Then talk you no more of New England!
New England is where old England did stand,
New furnished, new fashioned, new womaned, new manned
And is not old England grown new?
—Anonymous verse, c. 16301
ON A BLUSTERY MARCH MORNING in the year 1630, a great ship was riding restlessly at anchor in the
Solent, near the Isle of Wight. As the tide began to ebb, running outward past the Needles toward the
open sea, a landsman watching idly from the shore might have seen a cloud of white smoke billow

from the ship’s side. A few seconds later, he would have heard the sharp report of a cannon, echoing
across the anchorage. Another cannon answered from the shore, and on board the ship the flag of
England fluttered up its halyard—the scarlet cross of Saint George showing bravely on its field of
white. Gray sails blossomed below the great ship’s yards, and slowly she began to move toward the
sea. The landsman might have observed that she lay deep in the water, and that her decks were
crowded with passengers. He would have noticed her distinctive figurehead—a great prophetic eagle
projecting from her bow. And he might have made out her name, gleaming in newly painted letters on
her hull. She was the ship Arbella, outward bound with families and freight for the new colony of
Massachusetts Bay.2
Arbella was no ordinary emigrant vessel. She carried twenty-eight great guns and was the
“admiral” or flagship of an entire fleet of English ships that sailed for Massachusetts in the same year.
The men and women who embarked in her were also far from being ordinary passengers. Traveling in
the comfort of a cabin was Lady Arbella Fiennes, sister of the Earl of Lincoln, in whose honor the
ship had received her name. Also on board was her husband, Isaac Johnson, a rich landowner in the
county of Rutland; her brother Charles Fiennes; and her friend the future poet Anne Dudley
Bradstreet, who had grown up in the household of the Earl of Lincoln. Other berths were occupied by


the Earl’s high stewards Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Dudley; by an English gentleman called Sir
Richard Saltonstall; and by a Suffolk lawyer named John Winthrop who was destined to become the
leader of the colony.3
Most of Arbella’s passengers were families of lesser rank, but very few of them came from the
bottom of English society. Their dress and demeanor marked them as yeomen and artisans of middling
status. Their gravity of manner and austerity of appearance also said much about their religion and
moral character.
Below decks, the great ship was a veritable ark. Its main hold teemed with horses, cattle, sheep,
goats, pigs, dogs, cats and dunghill fowl. Every nautical nook and cranny was crowded with
provisions. In the cabin were chests of treasure which would have made a rich haul for the
Dunkirkers who preyed upon Protestant shipping in the English Channel.4
The ship Arbella was one of seventeen vessels that sailed to Massachusetts in the year 1630. She

led a great migration which for size and wealth and organization was without precedent in

These Puritan leaders personified the spiritual striving that brought the Bay colonists to America.
John Winthrop (center front) was a pious East Anglian lawyer who became governor of
Massachusetts. His son John Winthrop, Jr. (center rear) was governor of Connecticut,
entrepreneur, and scientist, much respected for what Cotton Mather called his “Christian
qualities … studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.” Sir Harry Vane (right rear) was
briefly governor of Massachusetts at the age of 24. He was reprimanded for long hair and elegant
dress, but was so rigorous in his Puritanism that he believed only the thrice-born to be truly
saved. Sir Richard Saltonstall (right front) founded Watertown and colonized Connecticut, but
dissented on toleration and returned to England. William Pynchon (left front) founded Springfield


and wrote a book on atonement that was ordered burned in Boston. Hugh Peter (left rear) was
minister in Salem, a founder of Harvard and an English Parliamentary leader who was executed in
1660. The original portraits are in the Am. Antiq. Soc., Essex Institute, Mass. Hist. Soc., Queens
College (Cambridge) and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
England’s colonization of North America. Within a period of eleven years, some 80,000 English men,
women and children swarmed outward from their island home. This exodus was not a movement of
attraction. The great migration was a great flight from conditions which had grown intolerable at
home. It continued from 1629 to 1640, precisely the period that Whig historians called the “eleven
years’ tyranny,” when Charles I tried to rule England without a Parliament, and Archbishop William
Laud purged the Anglican church of its Puritan members. These eleven years were also an era of
economic depression, epidemic disease, and so many sufferings that to John Winthrop it seemed as if
the land itself had grown “weary of her Inhabitants, so as man which is most precious of all the
Creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth they tread upon.”5
In this time of troubles there were many reasons for leaving England, and many places to go.
Perhaps 20,000 English people moved to Ireland. Others in equal number left for the Netherlands and
the Rhineland. Another 20,000 sailed to the West Indian islands of Barbados, Nevis, St. Kitts, and the
forgotten Puritan colony of Old Providence Island (now a haven for drug-smugglers off the Mosquito

Coast of Nicaragua). A fourth contingent chose to settle in Massachusetts, and contributed far beyond
its numbers to the culture of North America.6
The seventeen vessels that sailed to Massachusetts in 1630 were the vanguard of nearly 200 ships
altogether, each carrying about a hundred English souls. A leader of the colony reckoned that there
were about 21,000 emigrants in all. This exodus continued from 1630 to the year 1641. While it went
on, the North Atlantic Ocean was a busy place. In the year 1638, one immigrant sighted no fewer than
thirteen other vessels in midpassage between England and Massachusetts.7
After the year 1640, New England’s great migration ended as abruptly as it began. The westward
flow of population across the Atlantic suddenly stopped and ran in reverse, as many Massachusetts
Puritans sailed home to serve in the Civil War. Migration to New England did not resume on a large
scale for many years—not until Irish Catholics began to arrive nearly two centuries later.8
The emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the great migration became the breeding stock for
America’s Yankee population. They multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two
centuries. Their numbers increased to 100,000 by 1700, to at least one million by 1800, six million
by 1900, and more than sixteen million by 1988—all descended from 21,000 English emigrants who
came to Massachusetts in the period from 1629 to 1640.
The children of the great migration moved rapidly beyond the borders of Massachusetts. They
occupied much of southern New England, eastern New Jersey and northern New York. In the
nineteenth century, their descendants migrated east to Maine and Nova Scotia, north to Canada, and
west to the Pacific. Along the way, they founded the future cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, St.
Paul, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Salt Lake City. Today, throughout this vast area, most
families of Yankee descent trace their American beginnings to an English ancestor who came ashore
in Massachusetts Bay within five years of the year 1635.

Religious Origins of the Great Migration