Diversity and Unity in Early North America

Phillip Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134881611
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Philip Morgan's selection of cutting-edge essays by leading historians represents the extraordinary vitality of recent historical literature on early America. The book opens up previously unexplored areas such as cultural diversity, ethnicity, and gender, and reveals the importance of new methods such as anthropology, and historical demography to the study of early America.

Part I
WHOLES AND PARTS: REGIONS AND AMERICAN SOCIETY

To comprehend the early North American experience requires an understanding of the acute regional differences that fragmented Americans and of the distinctive ties that bound those same Americans together. Bernard Bailyn’s essay highlights regional variety, although also identifying some emerging features shared by all colonial Americans. Jack Greene’s essay is sensitive to regional variety but devotes more attention to the development of a single American society and culture. The reader ought to assess the reasons for the difference in emphasis between the two essays. Is it best explained, for example, by recognizing that Bailyn is considering the seventeenth century and Greene the eighteenth century?

1
A DOMESDAY BOOK FOR THE PERIPHERY

Bernard Bailyn

After conquering England in the eleventh century, William I ordered investigators or legati to survey his new realm. The information they collected became known as the Domesday Book. Six centuries later, another foreigner, William of Orange, succeeded to the English throne. In an illuminating flight of fancy, Bailyn wonders what a group of legati would have discovered in 1700 had they constructed a domesday book for William III. In an imaginative tour de force, Bailyn emphasizes two findings. First, the investigators would have noted great differences between the four major zones of settlement in mainland North America. The contrast between the plodding, pious, puritanical New Englanders and the crude, cruel, “Conquistador-like” Carolinians could not have been more stark. Second, they would have glimpsed common elements, all stemming from North America’s status as a marchland, a border country, where violence mingled with civility.

Bailyn’s profound insights and pungent prose invite reflection. Did, for example, the differences between regions outweigh the similarities in 1700? Do the sharp distinctions ascribed to the various regions sit awkwardly with a view of North America as one single marchland? In addition, should England be the only or primary standard of measurement for judging colonial developments? For Bailyn (and for many colonists, it should be added), England was the appropriate yardstick; consequently, he is most impressed by the backwardness of the colonies, their “diminishment of metropolitan accomplishment.” But if other colonies were the gauges of British American achievements, would a more positive view be possible? Although recognizing growing refinement in turn-of-the-century America, Bailyn emphasizes the violence, crudity, and primitiveness of so much of early American life. Is this emphasis overdrawn? Compare Bailyn’s emphasis on the ferocity that marked Indian-white relations with Merrell’s argument that mundane, peaceful, and even cooperative contacts were commonplace. Moreover, is the early American language of civilization and savagery appropriate for twentieth-century historians?

***

Suppose William III had set out to survey his empire in North America as of, say, 1700. And suppose, further, that he had wanted not only a record of land tenures but also a social description of North America as it then existed, and to accomplish this had sent out teams of legati to report on this great territory in four large circuits.

In each of the areas these legati would have found developments under way that fundamentally shaped the emerging local characteristics of early American culture. But in addition, and more important, they would have found a strange common element running through all of these regions, a peculiar quality that persisted in the generations that followed. This common characteristic could not have been found in an earlier age; and at any later stage it would seem immutable, too deeply set, too elaborately interwoven into the general fabric of society, to be clearly identified. The crucial phase of origins lay in these transition years at the turn of the century—a soft, plastic moment of history when what would become familiar and obvious to later generations was just emerging, unsurely, from a strange and unfamiliar past.

Change was everywhere, together with confusion and controversy. The legati in the first circuit, New England, would have reported an agonizing transformation, impelled by the inmost tendencies of a highly self-conscious and cultivated religious culture and by the buffeting of external events. They would have found a Puritan world whose inner spirit, once powerfully creative and fearless, had survived into a third generation in a faded and defensive form. The fierce religious intensity, the sense of daring and risky enterprise in the service of a demanding God—an enterprise of great relevance to the whole informed Protestant world—all of that had passed. The first generation’s accomplishments had been products of passionate striving in an atmosphere of fear and desperation; but to their children the rounders’ world was an inheritance they were born into—respected but familiar and routine. And to their children, adults at the end of the century, what had once been rebellious, liberating, and challenging had become a problematic anachronism.

So John Winthrop, Jr.,^a a second-generation Puritan, physician, amateur scientist, and imaginative entrepreneur, lived out his life in backwoods Connecticut struggling to maintain contact with the larger world from which his parents had dared to escape. He wrote letter after letter to the Royal Society in London, of which he was the first American member, in an effort to keep in touch. He sent over scientific specimens, anything he could get hold of—rattlesnake skins, birds’ nests, plants, crabs, strange pigs. He studied the Society’s Transactions so as not to fall too far behind. And to those concerned with the propagation of the Gospel he dispatched John Eliot’s Algonquian translation of the Bible and two essays written in Latin by Indian students at Harvard. But these were failing efforts. In the end loneliness and isolation overcame him. He died, venerated in the villages along the Connecticut River—themselves changing like autumn leaves from vital, experimental religious communities to sere, old-fashioned backwoods towns—but forgotten in the greater world at home. His sons, however, provincial land speculators and petty politicians, had no such memories as their father had had, and no such aspirations; they suffered, therefore, no such disappointments. They were altogether native to the land, and their cultural horizons had narrowed to its practical demands.

The third generation, adults at the end of the century, were dull, rather rustic provincials, whose concerns had little to do with the spiritual yearnings and ascetic self-discipline of their grandparents. Their interests centered on much more mundane matters—on the struggle to profit from their farms, on the conduct of trade; above all, on the consequences of extraordinary population growth.¹

The New England population—self-enclosed, lacking in significant accretions from abroad—was growing, in the seventeenth century, at a rate of 2.6 or 2.7 percent in a year, hence doubling every twenty-seven years. This phenomenal growth was no consequence of a peculiarly high birth rate—New England and old England scarcely differed in this— but of a low death rate, the result not of the absence of epidemics but of their low intensity, which allowed swift demographic recoveries. This regional population growth and low mortality rate—which declined in the eighteenth century—had the effect of propelling the boundaries of Anglo-American settlements out from the original coastal and riverbank enclaves. By the early eighteenth century, a settlement map would show a pattern surprisingly like the Soviet crossed hammer and sickle, the sickle being a fifty-mile- wide band of British settlements south along the coast from New Hampshire around the Cape to the New York boundary, the hammer being the northern penetration of settlement up the Connecticut River—a solid arm two or three townships wide, reaching inland straight up from Long Island Sound north to the level of Brattleboro, Vermont. Between 1660 and 1710, 209 new townships had been settled in New England, an average of over four per year.²

Behind this remarkable spread of settlement lay the central mechanism at work in this northernmost circuit of the turn-of-the-century Domesday survey. In any newly established New England town, founding families were able to subdivide their land to the satisfaction of at most only two successive generations. The fourth, sometimes even the third, generation felt a relative land shortage, or rather a land hunger created by their expectations, which led some to venture out into new settlements, often on land earlier invested in, speculatively, by far-sighted kin. There is no absolute lower boundary of acreage per child that marks the point at which a family broke out of its original location. Some sent representatives out soon after their establishment; some managed to maintain four generations in the original community by the comprehensive utilization of the family’s initial properties. But the common experience was for families to reach out to newly opening territory in the third or fourth generation, when some kind of threshold of optimal town population and maximal morselization of land was reached—optimal and maximal in terms of certain widely shared expectations.³

None of this concern with population growth and land distribution—any more than with local trade and overseas commerce—was felt to be incompatible with the restrained and serious way of life instinctive to these third-generation provincial Puritans. But, combined with the cooling of religious passion, it shifted the tone and quality of New England culture in fundamental ways. New England was culturally and ethnically a homogeneous world, derived from a single period of English emigration, 1630–40, spreading out quickly, westward and northward, into uncultivated lands and forming a network of communities set in forest clearings and natural meadowland and linked by hundreds of footpaths, by rough, stump-filled horse-and-wagon trails, and by river routes. In these isolated but associated communities lived a population of austere and prolific country folk, pious without passion, ambitious for worldly things, yet still attuned, in some degree, to the appeal of their ancestors’ spiritual quests, still aware of, and to some extent unified by, a distinctive cultural heritage.

No such homogeneity would have been found in the area of the second circuit. It was a remarkably different world. In the settlements scattered from the Hudson River south to the Delaware, the legates would have found ethnic diversity of the most extreme kind, and not a single expanding network of communities impelled outward by the dynamics of a distinctive demographic process, but half a dozen different demographic processes moving in different phases at different speeds.

Small migrant flows over many years had produced New York’s population of 1700. Originally people had come from the Netherlands; then, in small numbers, from New England, from England, from France, from the German principalities, from Brazil, indirectly from Africa, and from Virginia and Maryland. Still only slowly growing, the colony of only 18,000 souls was a mosaic of groups, ill-integrated and often hostile to each other. In the Hudson Valley there were Dutch, French, Walloons, Palatines, and English. Manhattan, with a population of only 5,000, was dominated numerically by the Dutch but politically, socially, and economically by the English and French; it had a small community of Jews and a sizable group—perhaps as much as 15 percent of the population—of Africans, almost all of them slaves. And the religious scene was even more complex than the ethnic, and had been from the colony’s earliest years. “Here,” Governor Dongan reported in 1687, “bee not many of the Church of England, [and] few Roman Catholicks, [but] abundance of Quakers—preachers, men and women, especially—singing Quakers, ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some Independents, some Jews; in short, of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part of none at all.”⁴

Elsewhere in this middle circuit the ethnic complexity was similar. The Jerseys had been settled by widely differing groups entering from different directions. Originally Dutch from Manhattan and New Englanders had settled in the northeast of the colony; then English Quakers began the occupancy of West Jersey, approaching from the Delaware River in the southwest. Some Swedes, long established on the Delaware, moved east to the Atlantic coastal plain; and hundreds of Scots—clients of the Scottish East Jersey proprietors—settled a hopeful new capital at Perth Amboy, an excellent harbor opposite the tip of Staten Island, and then fanned out in an inland arc, joining in with New Englanders and Dutch to populate, in the 1680s, a series of poly-ethnic settlements in the Raritan Valley. Only a few original settlements of New Englanders and Dutch in the northeast remained ethnically homogeneous.

Pennsylvania’s diversity was similar. By 1700 the settlements there, expanding back westward from the Delaware River, filled out the whole south-eastern corner of the colony, and throughout that large area, as in New Jersey and New York, settlement had advanced without central organization or control, creating a mosaic whose pattern was formed simply by ease of routes of access, accidents of land claims, and the contours of the terrain.

This whole middle circuit of British North America, founded by diverse peoples from all over the American colonies, and from Britain, western Europe, and West Africa, was the scene of continuous contention: Dutch vs. Anglo-French; Scots vs. English; Quakers vs. Quakers. The worst struggle was in New York City. There the animosities between numerically dominant Dutch and the politically and economically dominant Anglo- French had led to a violent upheaval—Leisler’s Rebellion^b—that tore the colony apart in 1689 and was only temporarily resolved two years later by the judicial murder of the ringleaders. In 1700 that fierce politico-ethnic struggle, whose origins lay deep in the peopling process, was still the dominant fact in the colony’s public life, though it was beginning to fade and to reshape into a new configuration.

Pennsylvania too had had turmoils rooted in political and ethnic diversity. William Penn,^c harassed at every turn and frustrated in his hopes for a tranquil, well-structured society in Pennsylvania, cursed and cursed again what he called these “scurvy quarrels that break out to the disgrace of the Province.” And so too did a succession of governors in the other colonies of this region, who struggled to maintain public authority and a modicum of community spirit and social order in widely scattered settlements of different peoples, living, often, in primitive conditions.

It was a strange, disorderly world, the commissioners for the second circuit would have had to report—lacking anything like a uniform land system; lacking social cohesion; and chaotic in public affairs to the point of political violence. Yet, amid all this diversity and turmoil a more coherent world was emerging, with something of the normal hierarchy of statuses and wealth, if not of rank, which in traditional societies reinforced private as well as public order. In New York a small provincial aristocracy of sorts was taking stable form. It was largely Anglo-French in origins, though it included significant Dutch elements too. Based on political and economic privilege, it was just then, at the turn of the century, being secured by a series of spectacular land grants along the Hudson and on Long Island, grants that had been and still were being hotly contested, but would soon be solidly confirmed. The Dutch dominated only the upriver center at Albany, with its monopoly of the Indian trade, but the leaders there were doubly provincial: gentry on the outer frontier of a frontier world. And in Pennsylvania too a leadership group was emerging from the confusion of the settling years—Quaker merchants for the most part, together with a few Anglicans who arrived with some capital and connections throughout the Atlantic trading world and who knew how to turn political advantage to economic profit.⁵

But if these w...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DIVERSITY AND UNITY IN EARLY NORTH AMERICA
• EDITOR’S PREFACE
• TABLES AND MAP
• GENERAL INTRODUCTION
• Part I: WHOLES AND PARTS: REGIONS AND AMERICAN SOCIETY
• PART II: ETHNIC ENCOUNTERS
• PART III: PRIVATE AND PUBLIC WORLDS
• PART IV: CONCLUSION
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING