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Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
Saturday, September 15, 2007
-- by Sara
I don't know how this book got away from me for as long as it did. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by Brandeis history professor David Hackett Fischer has been on the shelves since the late 80s; yet, somehow, I missed it entirely until someone (I think it was Anne Lamott, but I can't find the link) mentioned it in a Salon article last winter.
I got it. I read it. It was one of those books that truly, deeply, rearranges the way you interpret the things that go on in this country. No one theory explains everything, of course: history, even more than science, is notoriously immune to all attempts at a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. But this book sheds a stunning amount of light on why America is the way it is -- and, especially, the way we are with each other when it comes to topics like racism, authority, values, liberty, power, and the boundaries of who we are as a people.
Getting at the whole thing is likely to take several posts, so this discussion is destined to become an informal series of weekend maunderings until we've talked it through. In the next few posts, I'll simply lay out the essence of Fischer's argument, which will be the starting point for a round of deeper discussions.
This is a big book, upwards of 900 pages (not including 100+ pages of source notes). But most of the book comprises scrupulously detailed documentation of what is, in essence, a very simple thesis.
When we think of early America, we think of "The British" in monolithic terms. The first English settlers are usually portrayed as a handful of adventurers, religionists, and opportunists from one small and rather homogeneous island nation -- bringers of a common-enough language, religion, and culture who worked together to create the basic cultural matrix into which every subsequent group of immigrants eventually had to fit. It turns out, though, that this is just another high-school textbook oversimplification -- one that deafens us to some very important historical machinery that's still grinding on noisily in almost every facet of American culture today.
"The British" who came to America may have been subjects of one crown; but Fischer's exhaustive sociological study shows that they were actually four separate groups, each radically different from the others in terms of class, culture, religion, values, and goals. They arrived in four separate waves, each of which originated in a different part of England and came to dominate a specific part of the Colonies. And in the differences between them, Fischer argues, you can hear the origins of the essential American discussion about liberty, power, rights, and values. It turns out that the very arguments we're having in the blogosphere today started long ago in Puritan town halls, Virginian drawing rooms, Quaker meetinghouses, and Appalachian hollows. Incredibly, the issues are the same; the values, priorities, and worldviews behind them have hardly changed; and even the cultural identities of the people doing the arguing are in many cases largely intact. It's not an exaggeration to say that these four groups are still duking it out wherever Americans gather to discuss their common fate to this day.
Before we get started, I'd like to speak to the apparent Anglocentricism of Fischer's thesis. Albion's Seed was intended to be the first of several books (which, sadly, have not yet materialized) studying the folkways of all the major ethnic groups that have contributed to the American blend. He had plans to discuss the contributions of the Native Americans, Africans, Germans, Scandinavians, Mexicans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and so on -- which means he's quite clear that the English were not the end-all and be-all of American culture as it currently stands. No historian of Fischer's stature could (or would) ever deny that we've all left our marks.
However, the historical fact remains that the English were here first. And that simple primacy gave them the power all pioneers have to frame the national discussion, and establish the baseline society with which all later arrivals will have to negotiate if they're to find their place. Notably: many of them did this by casting their lot with one of the four existing English cultural groups. The Irish, Mexicans, and Native Americans joined up with the more tribal Borderers; the Germans and Scandinavians blended in seamlessly with the pietist Quakers; African-American freemen found a sort-of home among both the Puritans and Quakers. None of these arrangements were entirely smooth; but they did, over time, serve to reinforce and extend the four cultural patterns established by the English.
The next post sketches out the story of each of those four groups. Later posts will look at the way their beliefs and interactions continue to affect American politics and culture, and the implications of this for some of the specific questions we address in this blog.
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Albion's Seed I: The Puritans 1620-1640
Saturday, September 15, 2007
--by Sara
Though earlier groups tried to settle the Chesapeake several decades earlier (and failed, for reasons we'll see in the next post), the first group of English settlers to make a go of it were the Puritans, who came from East Anglia to settle up New England between 1620 and 1640.
From East Anglia to New England
The Puritans were middle-class Calvinist mercantilists in the Dutch Reformed model -- not surprisingly, since East Anglia looks directly across the Channel onto the Netherlands, and many of the Puritans had family and business ties there. Though they'd been comfortably settled in the region for generations, that all changed between 1630 and 1641, the "eleven years' tyranny" when Charles I tried to rule England without a Parliament. This led to economic and social chaos across England, which worsened in East Anglia when the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to deal with the upheaval by stepping up persecution of the region's Puritan heretics. During those 11 years alone, over 80,000 Puritans pulled up stakes and moved on. One-quarter of these eventually landed in the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts, safely beyond the reach of the Anglican menace.
Back home in East Anglia, they'd built tidy salt-box homes around green town commons. Everything about them -- their clothes, homes, and churches -- was unpretentious and practical, reflecting their Calvinist thrift and their love of simplicity and order. Their cuisine was the same stuff that gives English food a bad rep to this day: boiled everything, from mutton to cabbage to peas. (Peas porridge cold, nine days old was a common staple food. It's what's for breakfast.)
Happily, their new home on the rocky coasts of New England was very similar in terrain and climate to the one they'd left behind. They promptly re-created the same gabled villages, and set about their familiar trades: fishing, whaling, sailing, and trading. The Norfolk Whine became the Yankee twang; their peas porridge and stewed mutton turned into Boston baked beans and the New England boiled dinner; their simple, durable furniture is now a classic American style; and their plain-but-practical clothes are still sold today at Brooks Brothers and LL Bean. They may have left home; but, like the other three groups, they also brought a lot of it with them -- and we're all still living with it to this day.
Contractual Obligations
Along with these enduring customs and folkways, though, they also brought very definite (and equally enduring) ideas of family, community, and the social contract. At the heart of these ideas was a strong focus on mutual obligation -- an order based on expectation that people would fulfill their designated roles within the family and community, and derive their identity from their relationships to the larger whole. It's been said that Protestant guilt is all about duty. For that, we can thank the Puritans.
Women, though not remotely equal, had an easier time of it in New England than elsewhere. They were considered partners in their husband's businesses, explicitly entitled to love and respect, and legally protected from spousal abuse. Marriages were contractual agreements entered into after long courtships, and women had a lot of freedom to negotiate their side of these arrangements -- a right that prefigured the region's early embrace of feminism.
Relationships between the generations were also viewed as a covenant in which children were expected to hold up and be worthy of the family name; parents were expected to manage the family's resources so a legacy could be left; and elders were attended to with utmost respect. Because of these tightly-defined social roles and expectations, the Puritans had the highest literacy rates, the lowest divorce rates, and the lowest rates of out-of-wedlock childbirth (which was virtually unheard of, due to the brutal social sanctions against it) in the New World. On the literacy and divorce fronts, those figures hold steady in New England to this day.
In the Puritan view, children were born wicked, and raising them meant breaking their will until they were able to sublimate their own desires to those of the family and community. Elders were viewed as cherished saints, entitled by their wisdom to govern. In another holdover from East Anglia (the most literate region of England at the time), education was prized as both a cultural as well as a religious advantage. Unusually for the time, inheritances were typically divided in ways that ensured every child, male and female, got something.
Through it all, Puritans held up a high level of cooperation, kindness, and harmony as their familial ideal. Fischer describes the results as "a complex web of mutual obligation between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants. The clarity of this contractual idea, the rigor of its enforcement and especially the urgency of its spiritual purpose, set the Puritans apart from other people -- even other Calvinists -- in the Western world."
For the Common Good
This idea of all relationships as contractual obligations extended into Puritan views of community and government, resulting in what Fischer calls "ordered liberty." Individuals could only have privileges. Rights belonged to institutions and governments -- and chief among them was the right of the institution to do what it must to maintain civil order and see to it that people met their responsibilities. While that attitude led to draconian excesses like witchburnings and shunnings, it also gave the Puritans a strong sense of obligation to take care of the weakest among them, and see to it that nobody went without.
The New England town meeting persists as a symbolic artifact of the unity with which Puritans tried to manage shared burdens. It's the physical expression of this idea that "freedom" rightly belongs to the entire community acting together. Individual liberties only exist in relationship to the duties and obligations people take on within the larger whole.
Economically and socially, the Puritans were as enamored of rank as any English of the era -- but they went well out of their way to eliminate English-style extremes of rich and poor. The distribution of property in East Anglia had been the most egalitarian in England, and they radically improved on this tradition by deliberately preventing both the highest and lowest classes of the English ranking system from taking hold in their colonies.
John Winthrop famously told would-be immigrants with titles leave them in England: there was no place for a separate aristocracy in his colony. Instead, the Puritans established a social hierarchy based on age and "usefulness" -- one in which each individual had to earn a place on his or her own merits. Even servants (called "help") were entitled to respect, and the lines between them and the higher orders were flexible and thin. (Fischer argues that African slavery wasn't economically viable, because the slaves proved exceptionally vulnerable to disease in New England's cold climate -- a historical truth that's since evolved into a convenient fiction explaining away the presence of African-Americans in many places since.) Puritan communities were willing to make investments in their poor (and kept intrusively close watch over them in return), because the whole community bore the costs and the shame when a household failed. To fund the common good, the Puritans taxed themselves more aggressively than any of the other groups -- another tradition that's carried on in New England to this day.
The sense of community obligation was so strong that it was over half a century before the Puritans even considered commissioning full-time law enforcement. However, those obligations were enforced by a level of institutional violence that's still the stuff of legend. Puritan judges were endlessly creative in their brutality, raising public torture and humiliation to a ritualized art form that later Americans, including the Founders, regarded as barbaric. And thus was order maintained -- with no sheriff required.
Ordered Liberty
Fischer notes that New England writers and oraters used the word "liberty" in four different senses, each of which still colors our current understanding of the word.
The first sense was communal liberty, which applied only to institutions and never to individuals. It was always spoken of as "the liberty of Boston," or "the liberty of America" -- the freedom of communities to rule themselves. This definition reinforced the idea that the needs of individuals must be subordinated to the needs of institutions, which have a superior right to impose their will.
The second usage referred to an individual's "liberties," which were specific privileges granted to a person by virtue of their station in life. One had the "liberty" to fish in the town's creek (a right denied to others); gentlemen had the "liberty" to avoid being whipped as a punishment for most infractions (a sentence which was often inflicted on the lower ranks). In this context, "liberty" was a class distinction: one person's "liberty" always came at the price of another person's restraint.
The third notion was "soul liberty" -- the freedom of both individuals and communities to serve God according to their own consciences. In the earliest days, of course, this meant the freedom to do exactly what the Calvinist preachers told you to do, other circumstances be damned -- and also the liberty to vigorously persecute anyone who didn't agree with you. But in time, "soul liberty" evolved to the more modern freedom of individual conscience that allowed their descendants to embrace the widest possible vision of religious liberty.
The fourth Puritan ideal of liberty was reflected in the Massachusetts Poor Laws, enacted shortly after the colony was founded. Later, Roosevelt articulated them clearly as the Four Freedoms: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Under this definition, liberty meant the right to have one's basic needs met, and to live life with as much dignity as possible, regardless of one's means. A community that allowed people to starve on its watch was failing to hold up its end of the social contract -- and also failing in its duty to God.
The Puritan Legacy
As the country settled up, the Puritans' descendants tended to move out across the northern tier of the expanding country. Their footprint is particularly noticeable in the Pacific Northwest, where many New Englanders eventually migrated. The Puritan notion of "ordered liberty" still shapes the governing styles and social priorities of the coasts, large cities, and river valleys. (The inland areas are another story for another post.)
And Puritan ideals still crop up in our political conversations today, as well. When conservatives invoke "states' rights," the rights of capital, or the sovereign freedom of America to do as it likes, they are drawing on the Puritan concept of communal liberty -- the superior right of institutions against those of individuals. When economic royalists assert a greater right to do as they please -- helping themselves to what they want, and breaking laws that they think don't really apply to them -- they are exercising their "liberties" in the second sense, taking what the Puritans would have regarded as fair advantage of their well-earned (at least in their own minds) superior station.
And when either side charges the other with "political correctness," or "witchhunts," they're simply invoking those intrusive old Puritan judges who used the whip and the gallows to promote ideological conformity on behalf of "the common good."
But we liberals should be able to counter these preposterous claims, since we are the majority heirs to the Puritan legacy. When we assert our freedom of conscience in matters of religion or politics; the right to be heard in the public square; the need to flatten out the socioeconomic extremes in favor of the common good; or the essential dignity of the individual and our mutual responsibilities as a society, we're invoking the legacy of our Puritan ancestors, too.
It's ironic that New England and the areas its descendants pioneered are now America's liberal strongholds -- and, that those narrow-minded old prudes ended up spinning the warp threads on which much of American liberalism was eventually woven. But, given their enduring fondness for the common good, social harmony, sharing, and education, that slow shift may have been inevitable. The Puritans' cultural descendants are alive among us, and we hear their voices whenever anyone modestly and cogently reminds us that we exist within the context of the larger whole, and have obligations to each other that we cannot ignore if we are to survive.
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Albion's Seed, Part II: The Cavaliers 1642-1675
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia
-- by Sara
Introduction
Part I
The wave of Puritan migration from England to America slowed dramatically after 1641. Through the English Civil War and Cromwell's Protectorate, the Puritans found themselves politically and economically ascendant in England -- which greatly diminished their interest in leaving it. But the Puritan victory came at the expense of another English subculture, whose flight from Cromwell propelled the second wave of English migration to America.
These were the Cavaliers -- loyal Royalists, many of them nobles and courtiers, who sought refuge from the chaos in Virginia. David Hackett Fischer notes that Southern historians have long debated the actual extent and effects of the Cavaliers' influence on the region's culture; but 210 pages of Albion's Seed are given over to studying their specific folkways and cultural values as they existed on the estates of southern England, and as they later expressed themselves in the Chesapeake region. The detailed analysis is convincing: like the Puritans, the Cavaliers brought the culture they knew, and transplanted it firmly and deeply in the soil of tidewater Virginia. In the process, they added a second enduring English voice to America's conversation about rights, freedom, and power.
Aristocrats and Peasants
The Cavalier wave actually brought two kinds of people to Virginia. About a quarter of the immigrants between the peak years of 1641 and 1675 were either "distressed nobility," or (later) the younger sons of England's best families, looking to re-create their older brothers' grand English farming estates in their Virginia plantations. Frequent visits, business interests, and intermarriage across the Atlantic kept their ties to the old country close: culturally, the Old Dominion still looks back to England with more fondness than most of the rest of America does.
Sir William Berkeley, Virginia's governor throughout this period, granted these fortunate sons high offices, titles, and vast land grants upon their arrival -- thus creating an instant oligarchy of elite landholding families that kept an iron grip on the colony's developing economic and social orders. Where John Winthrop worked to prevent class extremes on either end in Massachusetts, Berkeley deliberately set out to recruit a new Royalist aristocracy, and put control of the Chesapeake entirely in its hands. These families built their self-sufficient plantations all throughout the Tidewater, duplicating the rural model of their old southern English country estates in almost every detail.
Of course, there's no point in being an aristocrat if you don't have serfs to boss around. After the local Indian tribes were offered the job -- only to vigorously decline it -- Virginia's would-be elite sent home for indentured servants. By 1675, these servants -- almost entirely uneducated, unmarried, unskilled young men between 15 and 35 -- comprised the other three-quarters of the colony's white residents. At the same time, the number of African slaves began to burgeon as well. Between 1642 and 1675, the population of Virginia Colony grew from about 8,000 to an estimated 50,000 souls.
Most of the white servants worked as farmers on the plantations. Illiterate, unpropertied, unlikely to marry, and locked into the most rigid social hierarchy in the Colonies, they were in no position to determine the direction of Virginia's culture, despite their far greater numbers. For that reason, Fischer's story only touches on them. Their lives, like so much of the history of the Chesapeake, were dominated by the actions of their masters.
Like agricultural societies around the world (and in strong contrast to the mercantilist Puritans), the Cavalier culture that emerged during these early generations was tradition-bound, static, patriarchal and hierarchical, suspicious of book-learning, and more than a bit authoritarian -- attributes which were buttressed by the teachings of Virginia's state-supported Anglican churches. As a direct result, Virginia very soon distinguished itself with the widest inequities in wealth, social mobility, education, domestic conditions, and political rights in colonial America.
While the Puritans held up the Calvinist belief that power, freedom, rights, and authority all legitimately rested with the community, early Virginians brought with them the reigning view of the British upper classes: that is, that the legitimate exercise of power, freedom, rights, and authority properly belonged in the hands of free white male landowners. They believed that the country would be best served if these autocrats were given their liberty to create wealth, exercise power, and lead the lesser folk forward toward a future of their choosing.
This second view of "liberty" is still a very recognizable part of our national conversation to this day, so it's useful to have Fischer's account of where it began, and how it played out in the earliest years of English settlement in America.
Gilded Cages
In Virginia, we find the American roots of the idea that only a free white man of property can be a legal person in his own right. The identities of everyone else in his household -- wives, lower-ranked siblings, children, servants, and slaves, who often numbered into the hundreds on Virginia's estates -- were merged into him as extensions of his identity, and legally existed only in relationship to him. The patriarch was invested with a serious moral obligation to provide for and protect his many charges; but in return, he held absolute decision-making power over every detail of their lives -- including the explicit right and duty to exploit them all for his own pleasure and profit.
And the Cavaliers did revel in their pleasures -- and their profits. Like their families back home in England, they loved beautiful clothes in the latest London fashion, grand houses, fast horses, elaborate manners, and sumptuous feasts and balls (their diet was the freshest and most varied in the Colonies, and they preferred their food roasted or fried -- a cooking legacy that came straight from the kitchens of southern England to the tables of southern America). They also loved gambling, especially on blood sports: shooting games, coursing small game, cockfights, and every kind of hunting.
Beyond that, many married men openly indulged in another kind of sport -- the seduction of women, which many of them energetically pursued to well into old age. Fischer suggests that those old Virginia gentlemen (a few of whom left diaries documenting their liaisons with several women a week for decades on end) would be regarded today as dangerous sexual predators.
Cavalier marriages, like those in upper-class England, were often arranged, and usually had more to do with social or economic advantage -- or the cold calculus of "good breeding" -- than love. The result, according to observers of the time, was an unusual number of bitterly hostile marriages, some of which were legendary in their mutual cruelty. Unlike their Puritan sisters, women in Virginia could legally be beaten by their husbands, and had no property and no rights apart from marriage. Undereducated and openly referred to as "breeders," they were known far and wide for their explosive domestic fury, which was usually aimed at children and servants. (Apparently, William Faulkner merely recorded recurring scenes from a very old drama.) In too many cases, this rage was fueled by their husbands' endless dalliances with mistresses, neighbors, servants, and slaves.
Like the slaves, the children, and the livestock, a woman was simply another piece of chattel to be counted among a man's holdings, and used as he saw fit. Small wonder, then, that by the 1730s, even before Virginia's male nobility began discussing its oppressive relationship with the Crown, its formidable women stepped up to petition for their full and equal rights as Englishwomen. The time came, very early in the colony's history, that they simply had enough.
Matters of Honor
Wherever you find rigid hierarchies and powerful men asserting their liberties, you find a preoccupation with personal honor. The Cavalier insistence on honor expressed itself in some unique ways, some of which are still visible in parts of American culture.
While women, children, servants, and slaves got the worst end of Cavalier notions of hierarchy, Virginians accorded a great deal of respect to the seniority conferred by age. Fischer notes that even young noblemen of manners were taught to speak with deference to older men of lower rank. People figured that if a man had lived a long time, he'd probably accumulated wisdom worth listening to. And that seniority made him a patriarch in his own right, regardless of the size of his holdings.
Cavalier religion reinforced cultural ideals of honor, too. Where Puritanism was intensely personal and private, Anglican Virginia was led by priests recruited from England's upper crust; and their devotionals were High Church affairs full of formal liturgy, public piety, fine music, and learned (and mercifully brief: you don't waste the time of powerful men) sermons. As with much else in Cavalier culture, church participation was all about holding up the family honor by putting on a good public show.
The Cavalier work ethic honored the indolent -- or, at least, those who could manage to look like they were indolent. Gentlemen, by definition, were only allowed to supervise other people's work. It violated the code for them to be seen doing anything for themselves, so Cavalier men hid all signs of labor with the same obsessive sense of shame that the Puritans brought to hiding their sexuality. Running a plantation really was hard work. But that work had to be done out of sight and in secret, lest anyone be moved to question your rank. The Cavaliers' unofficial work motto was "Never let 'em see you sweat."
One of Fischer's recurring themes is that how you define "freedom" and "authority" -- and whom you allow to exercise both -- determines what you consider a crime. In the Puritan colonies, crimes against God were regarded as crimes against the integrity of the community (which, as we've seen, is where all legitimate authority resided). Thus, Massachusetts courts obsessed over private moral lapses like sexual indiscretions, drinking, swearing, and so on. However, in Virginia, where Cavalier society saw all legitimate authority as resting with the landholder, the crimes that filled the courts were predominantly crimes against property: theft, trespassing, poaching, and any other act that transgressed against a lord's absolute right to control over his own holdings.
Because of the Cavalier's extremely well-developed sense of honor, the worst crime of all in early Virginia was failing to defer to your betters. Surviving and succeeding in the Old Dominion meant knowing exactly where you stood in the pecking order -- and, thus, who owed you deference, and whom you were required to defer to in turn. Lower-ranked people were expected to pay obsessively careful attention to the feelings and opinions of those above them; but the upper ranks had no obligation to spend their time or pity listening to those less fortunate (though the willingness to grant "condescension" -- yes, they called it that -- toward the lower orders was a mark of good breeding). Failure to defer to your betters could get you whipped; among gentlemen, it was a leading cause of duels (another popular Cavalier blood sport).
Deference reinforced a stiflingly fixed class system. It ensured that in Virginia, wherever you were born, that's where you were going to stay.
Death in the Tidewater
It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read Jared Diamond that the geography of America's eastern coast played a critical role in the success of European colonies there. The Puritans contended with scant, poor farmland and bitter winters; but Virginia's English settlers had far and away the highest rates of illness and death in colonial North America. The Chesapeake -- beautiful, warm, and fertile as it was -- was also essentially a subtropical swamp. The occupants of its lovely waterfront plantation homes spent their lives continually ill from malaria, typhus, amoebic dysentery, parasites, and assorted fevers-of-the-month. Every year, in late summer and early fall, "the dying season" took a heavy toll (and is quite likely why a dismal succession of early Virginia colonies failed entirely).
Visitors from England often wrote home about the general sickliness, low energy, bad tempers, and poor color of the Virginians; but modern geographers are now realizing that the stereotypically slow-moving pace of Southern culture may have far more to do with the characteristics of the land than with those of the people. It was just plain hot and humid. But, beyond that, from birth to death, they were all fighting something -- and usually, several particularly lingering somethings at once.
The horrific death rates made the Virginians (in contrast to the sentimental Puritans, who made a daily ritual out of contemplating death) extremely stoic in their acceptance of loss. They buried the body, made a cursory nod to the vagaries of fate, and went on about their business without much further fuss. Life is for the living. Let's carry on.
Of the four groups Fischer discusses, the Cavaliers were the only ones who didn't take off in large numbers for the western frontier during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Southern aristocracy eventually colonized the coastal lowland crescent that skirts the southern states from the Chesapeake and the Carolinas down through Georgia and Alabama, then along the Gulf Coast ending at New Orleans. They didn't venture into Texas; they left that, along with the southern interior highlands, to the Borderers, who proved much better suited to it. Bound to England, to the land, to family, to tradition, to farming, and to slavery, they had very little incentive to pull up stakes and try their hand elsewhere. In retrospect, this may have been a good thing for the nation as a whole.
The Cavalier Legacy: Hegemonic Liberty
Fischer quotes Dr. Samuel Johnson, pondering the Cavalier view of freedom. "How is it," Dr. Johnson asked, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" And, frankly, we're still wondering: How did the descendants of these Royalist plantation owners, who among all the English settlers held on most stubbornly to their noble British roots, end up supplying so many of the revolutionaries that ultimately led America to independence?
Fischer has an answer. He argues that the Cavalier cry against tyranny expressed by Jefferson, Washington, and other Virginians wasn't the least bit out of character. In fact, it came straight out of their essential conviction that free white men of property are the morally proper holders of all the rights and liberties that matter:
Virginian ideas of hegemonic liberty conceived of freedom mainly as the power to rule, and not to be overruled by others. Its opposite was "slavery," a degradation into which true-born Britons descended when they lost their power to rule....It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone. It was thought to be the special birthright of free-born Englishmen -- a property which set this "happy breed" apart from other mortals, and gave them a right to rule less fortunate people in the world....
One's status in Virginia was defined by the liberties one possessed. Men of high estate were thought to have more liberties than others of lesser rank. Servants possessed few liberties; and slaves [and women] had none at all. This libertarian idea had nothing to do with equality. Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: "I am an aristocrat," he declared. "I love liberty; I hate equality."
In Virginia, this idea of hegemonic liberty was thought to be entirely consistent with race slavery....The growth of race slavery in turn deepened the cultural significance of hegemonic liberty, for an Englishman's rights became his rank, and set him apart from other less fortunate than himself. The world thus became a hierarchy in which people were ranked according to many degrees of unfreedom, and they received their rank by the operation of fortune, which played so large a role in the thinking of Virginians. At the same time, hegemony over others allowed them to enlarge the sphere of their own personal liberty, and to create the conditions within which their own special sort of libertarian consciousness flourished.
Edmund Burke made similar observations when describing this new Southern breed in Parliament:
A circumstance attending these colonies...makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is that, in Virginia and the Carolinas, they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom...
I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward...In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."
Since Albion's Seed was written 18 years ago, a lot of writers have drawn on it to explain events in modern America (a tradition I plan to continue, in due time). It's notable that the overwhelming majority of them seized on Fischer's dissection of the Scots-Irish Borderers, pointing out that the rednecks, white trash, holy rollers, crackers, and other assorted lower-class yahoos that supported Bush have been with us from the beginning -- and been nothing but trouble from then to now.
In the rush to blame the Borderers, though, this section on the Cavaliers has been almost entirely ignored. Yet I found it to be at least as powerful in its explanatory power. Because, as Dr. Robert Altemeyer's work makes clear, authoritarianism is always a two-part problem. While the Borderers may supply more than their fair share of right-wing authoritarian followers, they'd go nowhere without a high-social-dominance authoritarian leadership to guide them. And in Fischer's description of the Cavaliers, we see the early American prototype of that high-SDO authoritarianism.
It's all there: the love of luxury, the crony capitalism, the unabashed right to exploit others for what you can take, the love of hierarchy for its own sake, the tacit understanding that those who have more stuff also have more rights. Altemeyer's description of the high-SDO leader -- amoral, manipulative, intimidating, hedonistic, pitiless, exploitative, prejudiced, nationalistic, hostile to equality, religious only for outward appearances, and almost always politically conservative -- fits Fischer's portrait of the Cavalier gentleman like a fine Spanish kid glove on the hilt of a Sheffield dress sword.
And these people are still very much with us. It's not a coincidence that the Religious Right's two most influential leaders, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, built their headquarters in Virginia; and that Washington's Republican elite still clusters in the old Cavalier city of Arlington. We hear Cavalier voices whenever someone tells us that wealth gaps are no big deal; that women and racial minorities are naturally inferior; that nobody besides the rich have a right to education or health care or anything else; that torture and war are necessary to maintain the American order; that the nation's corporate oligarchy will solve all of our problems if we simply give them their unfettered "freedom" to exploit every possible opportunity; and that we are upsetting the God-given moral order of the universe if we even think about trying to restrain them.
Among Cavaliers and corporatists, there is no morality beyond might makes right. There is no law -- and no honor -- beyond their own desire to expand their own sphere of power. There is no equality, no justice, and no universal freedom as we understand it. Theirs is the ancient plantation mentality we Americans have spent over 220 hard, bloody years trying to put behind us. It's an outdated social system that has no place in a modern technological society -- yet, in almost every detail, it's the very world our new corporate royalists want to drag us back to.
In the back of their minds, they're just Virginia gentlemen, taking the liberties such gentlemen have always rightfully enjoyed at the expense of others. It's true that we owe a handful of Cavalier gentlemen a tremendous debt for so clearly articulating the principles of American liberty during the Revolution. But we should also remember that when these first men asserted their God-given right to life, liberty, and happiness, they had no intention of sharing those blessings with anyone else.
Albion's Seed, Part III: The Quakers, 1675-1725
Sunday, October 21, 2007
-- by Sara
Introduction
Part I
Part II
Every Thanksgiving, Americans repeat the ancient schoolbook tale that the English settlers by and large first came to these colonies because they were "seeking religious freedom." But, it turns out, that easy fable really only holds true for the two groups that settled the northern colonies: the Puritans and the Quakers. (The southern Cavaliers and Borderers came mainly for economic and political reasons that had little to do with religion.) And of all four groups, none needed that freedom as desperately -- or had as much to prove to themselves and the world -- as the Quakers. Between 1675 and 1725, they provided the third wave of English migration, bringing over 25,000 plain, upright, thrifty laborers and tradespeople from England's rapidly industrializing midlands, and settling them in the rich and temperate basin of the Delaware Valley.
A New Light
The Society of Friends was founded in England by George Fox in the 1650s, and immediately took England and western Europe by theological storm. It was a religion tailor-made for the continent's emerging industrial middle and working classes. Preaching the dignity of simple living, honest work, community and family, kindness, and thrift, Quakerism elevated virtues that even the poorest wage-earner could afford to cultivate. Furthermore, it told these workers that it was not only unnecessary, but actually immoral, to pay tithes and taxes that supported church hierarchies, buildings, and learned clergy. All souls were equal in the eyes of God, and thus perfectly capable of addressing him without intercession. Everyone has a duty to find truth and meaning for themselves, with the steadfast support of community and family. In God, we are all Friends -- fellow travelers supporting each other on life's way.
Of course, their refusal to pay tithes and church taxes instantly put these heretics on the wrong side of the Anglican church, which came after the Quakers with the viciousness that was the hallmark of 17th century European governments. The Quaker home counties were in England's industrial midlands (Fischer notes that the region's thousand-year history of Scandinavian settlement -- which had already inculcated thrifty self-sufficiency as a local character trait-- may have been one reason the Plain Faith found good root there); and it wasn't long before the hundreds of Quaker meetings throughout this area each started keeping a detailed "Book of Sufferings," documenting the seizures, fines, and jail sentences their members endured at the hands of the Crown. Even now, they are terrifying reading. Entire Quaker families and communities simply vanished into the rugged hills of Yorkshire and northern Wales, embracing the rough life of the wilderness in order to escape persecution.
Still, Fischer argues, the forces that pulled the Quakers toward America were at least as strong as those that pushed them out of England. He argues that the Quaker belief system has gone through at least four major shifts in theological focus in its 350-year history, so the Quakers we know now are not quite like Quakers as he describes them back then. In 1675, they were in their second phase, pursuing a vividly idealistic vision of what the world might become if they were allowed to fully live their faith.
When William Penn -- one of the most powerful men in England, and far and away the most noble of all the Quakers -- secured an American land grant from the Crown in the early 1670s specifically to attempt the Great Quaker Experiment, it triggered a Quaker migration that drained entire Midland and northern Welsh counties of their working classes. Meetinghouse collections were taken up to send a steady flow of families from Liverpool to Philadelphia. Over the course of 40 years, England's dwindling Quaker population fed the burgeoning settlements of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.
The circumstances of their migration are important, because in them we find the seeds of the Quakers' most important legacy: our American ideal of diversity, equality, and tolerance; and the ideal of reciprocal liberty. From the beginning, the Delaware Valley migration swept in not only English Quakers, but also Welsh, Irish, French, Dutch, and German Friends; and, for good measure, a few thousand Bavarian Pietists (Mennonites, Dunkers, and Amish) recruited by William Penn because they shared similar beliefs about the "new light" that shone in each born-again soul. (The New Light movements were the original proponents of the "born-again" idea -- another legacy of this region.) From the beginning, the Delaware Valley colony peaceably brought together people of many different languages and cultures, and expected them to live together as equals in the eyes of God and the law.
They even welcomed people of other religions. Other religious minorities, including Baptists, Catholics, and freethinkers, realized quickly that the Friends made good neighbors, so Quaker towns were typically full of non-Quakers who admired their way of life, even though they never joined the church themselves. This large subset of sympathizers who weren't formally "Friends," were (even then) referred to as "Friendly." Fischer describes the way in which Quaker beliefs were absorbed by these Friendlies, and thus began to shape the culture of an entire region:
The special teachings of Quakerism in this second period entered deeply into the culture of the Delaware Valley. Friends and neighbors alike embraced the idea of religious freedom and social pluralism. They favored a weak polity and strong communal groups. Most came to share the Quakers' concern for basic literacy and their contempt for higher learning. They also accepted Quaker ideas of the sanctity of property, equality of manners, simplicity of taste, as well as their ethic of work, their ideal of worldly asceticism, their belief in the importance of the family and their habits of sexual prudery. All of the attitudes became exceptionally strong in the folkways of an American region.
A New Caanan
In the Delaware Valley, the Quakers ended up with the very choicest piece of British America. More fertile and temperate than Puritan Massachusetts, and less affected by swamp-borne illness that sapped the Cavaliers in the nearby Chesapeake, the valley turned out to be rich with nuts and berries, hardwoods, and an incredible supply of mineral wealth. Beyond that: the native Lenni Lenape tribes were also far more friendly (if not Friendly) than the Pequots or the Powhatans (which had rained down terror on the Puritans and Cavaliers, respectively). Penn, in his idealism, approached them in peace; and peace was returned in kind.
The upshot was that the Quakers were widely spared the lean and violent early years that had characterized the previous two migrations. Working in family and community groups that they'd uprooted intact from England, they found it easy to build homes, establish villages, and set up productive farms and businesses. Penn, unlike the previous colonists, aggressively recruited artisans and tradespeople who could help build up the economy from the beginning. More than any other immigrant group, the Quakers colonists hit the ground running.
Fischer paints William Penn as a complicated man -- visionary, but hardly modern. Penn clearly understood, far better than either the Puritan John Winthrop or the Cavalier John Beverley, what it took to build a successful colony; and he merged that pragmatism with an idealistic vision of "love and brotherly harmony" between the colonists. But, says Fischer:
"Penn never imagined that all people were of the same condition. He expected 'obedience to superiors, love to equals, and help and countenance to inferiors.' There was to be no freedom for the wicked; Penn's laws on sin were more rigorous in some respects than those of the Puritans or Anglicans....
He was not a modern man. He despised the material and secular impulses that were gaining strength around him, and dreamed of a world where Christians could dwell together in love. His vision for America looked backward to the primitive Church, and also to what he called England's ancient constitution. These were not progressive ideas."
Maybe not; but in time, the culture of Penn and the early Quakers supplied much of the character of what we now consider "Midwestern'" America. Fischer traces dozens of familiar Midwesternisms like flabbergasted, cuddle, gumption, spud, and wallop to their roots in the dialects of the North Midlands. Like the earlier immigrant groups, they also replicated their ancestral housing styles, using the valley's handsome fieldstone to re-create the stone cottages of Yorkshire and Cheshire (though the barn out back was usually built in the sturdy style of the German Pietists). While the Puritans baked and the Cavaliers fried, the Quakers preferred the boiled foods that were also common in the Midlands.
Quakers regarded work as a form of worship; and idleness as a cardinal sin. Even social gatherings usually had a "needful" purpose -- barn-raisings, quilting bees, and so on. Because of this, they frowned on dancing, games, idle conversation, and sports -- especially sports that involved cruelty to animals, which included horse racing. A balanced life was important -- but leisure time was better spent on "useful" pursuits like hunting, fishing, and horticulture. To foster this self-sufficiency, they were the first Americans to extend hunting and fishing rights to everyone equally, instead of withholding them as the privilege of a few. Curiously, they were also the first to take up swimming and ice skating just for fun.
Love and Equality at Home
The forthright intelligence and outspokenness American women are known for -- and the extraordinary political and social equalities we enjoy (at least, when compared to other women in the world) -- are another Quaker legacy. Quaker founder George Fox had proclaimed, "Spiritual power was one in the male and the female, one spirit, one light, one life, one power, which brings forth the same witness." It was a profound statement in a time when men in Europe seriously debated whether women had souls at all. Quaker women preached alongside men, went on missions abroad, and endured the persecutions alongside their husbands -- and, sometimes, on their own. Nor did they leave that persecution behind when they sailed from Liverpool: the two earlier colonies were, if anything, worse. Massachusetts Puritans, for example, spared no punishment for Quaker women who dared to preach in public. Elderly missionary Elizabeth Hooten was stripped, beaten, and left in the woods for dead by a mob of Harvard students; another, Mary Dyer, was simply hanged.
This revolutionary belief in gender equality was reflected in the Quaker approach to marriage. Equality in marriage was such a strange and difficult concept that Fox ended up writing over sixty essays explaining to his befuddled followers how it should all work out; and then set the community to stand guard over the institution, just to make sure. As a result, Quaker weddings were Byzantine affairs, following a strict 16-step order in which written permissions for the union were collected from both families, and various committees within the congregations of both parties. If you didn't "pass the meeting," you didn't get married. As a result, Quaker America had far and away the latest age of marriage, and the highest number of life-long bachelors and spinsters, of any of the four groups. And, while the Friends didn't mind living alongside others -- and even tolerated interracial marriage -- out-marriage to a non-Quaker often resulted in shunning and disinheritance.
All of this community oversight was a container for a happier fact: the Quakers believed in marrying for love. Not lust (Fox was adamant that sex was for procreation only), and certainly not money; but both partners were entitled to mutual respect and companionable love. Quaker writings referred to husband and wife as co-equal "heads of household," and mutually responsible as parents. Again, Fischer traces the acceptance of these ideas to the Scandinavian influence throughout the Midlands, heirs to a Viking culture that had also granted exceptional rights to women in its time.
However, despite their emphasis on love matches, the Quakers also set lingering national standards when it came to sexual inhibition. Pious Quaker couples were known to abstain for years at a time, with the help of separate beds and often bedrooms as well -- which may be part of how the Quakers, alone among the English immigrant groups, successfully controlled and limited their family size. Sexuality was thought to destroy the higher spiritual union essential to marriage -- a tenet that found its ultimate expression in the Shaker offshoot sect, which was entirely celibate for life. Fischer suggests that America's notorious sexual prudery may have found its start in Quaker Philadelphia.
Quakers childrearing was nothing short of radical for its time. While most of the English world firmly believed that children were born evil and required a firm hand to bring them to goodness, the Quakers thought children were born innocent and good. In the early years, children were loved and doted on -- and carefully sheltered from the harsh realities of life. Later, when they'd acquired the maturity to handle it all, they were given a Quaker education designed to cultivate common sense and reason, teach a trade, and gently discipline the adolescent to submit his or her will to the needs of the larger community. But higher education was rare. Since they didn't need a trained clergy, Quakers were suspicious of universities. You needed to be able to read intelligently, work productively, speak well, and think clearly. Anything more than that was an indulgence unsuited to plain people.
Quakers avoided corporal punishment, preferring positive reinforcement techniques that simply ignored children who misbehaved. Argument and defiance were met with gentleness; visitors of the time were taken aback at the uppity outspokenness of Quaker enfants terribles as they addressed their elders.
Old people were seen as teachers and community leaders -- a bit more equal among equals. Death was a community affair, as a Friend left this world surrounded by friends and family. Funerals were no-fuss, no-frills, no-wake affairs: a simple disposition of a now-useless body. The spirit was one of confident optimism about the afterlife -- which also, in time, made the Quakers susceptible to seances and other rituals to contact the dead.
The Quaker Legacy: Reciprocal Liberty
Thanks to favorable geography, friendly neighbors, good planning, and their own emphasis on charity, thrift, hard work, and equality, the Quaker Experiment quickly succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Their sterling reputation for honesty and fair dealing -- and a network of family ties that not only reached back to the emerging Industrial Midlands and London, but also covered much of Europe -- allowed them to dominate the new Industrial Age as the leading bankers, managers, and traders in both England and America.
Their open-mindedness and ready acceptance of strangers gave them enormous business advantages over the xenophobic insularity of the Puritans, and the hide-bound classism and condescending unscrupulousness of the Cavaliers. They were trustworthy and fair; and people preferred doing business with them whenever they had the choice. The Friends' nuanced and original vision of what we now call "soft power" served them incredibly well in a rough and uncertain world. It was the core piece of their success -- and it might serve modern Americans well to go back and study how they did it.
They also opposed the slave trade with implacable tenacity. Abolition efforts began in Pennsylvania within the first decade of the colony -- and continued, without ceasing, until the Revolution. Most of these efforts failed when they ran afoul of the English government, which was heavily invested in the trade. Through it all, the Society of Friends kept up social and economic pressure on Pennsylvania's slave owners, and tried to set a better example in their own treatment of free blacks.
The early Delaware residents -- both Friend and Friendly -- took all these traits with them as they moved west through the 18th and 19th centuries to settle up Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, building up mines and farms and factories and great industrial cities wherever they went. Though Quaker's descendants ended up over time in Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, what we now think of as the "Midwestern" character -- modest, plain-talking, straight-dealing, hard-working, fair, and full of optimistic good will -- is a distinctive Quaker mark left on the American frontier. Their long struggle against slavery is another: two centuries later, the determined grandsons of these peaceable people would form the backbone of the Union Army in the Civil War.
Another legacy is their nuanced and democratic approach toward justice -- a necessary stance, given the diversity of cultures in the Delaware Valley. Democratically-chosen judges and sheriffs played a huge role in keeping the peace. After enduring so much at the hands of the English and other colonists, they quickly limited the gallows to traitors and murderers only; and used the lash only on those who'd "invaded the peace" of another. The laws of Pennsylvania granted an unprecedented and expansive set of rights: the right to a jury trial, to a speedy trial, to counsel, and to equal access to evidence and witness. Jails were envisioned as rehabilitation, not punishment. The most serious crimes were those against equality -- abuse of a woman or servant was a very grave offense -- and against property, which was considered an invasion of another's peace.
Fischer also credits the Quakers with establishing much of America's enduring political culture. The Delaware Valley had many varied ethnic and religious groups, but very little in the way of an economic or hereditary oligarchy like those that dominated the earlier colonies. A rough-and-tumble party politics evolved to fill that power vacuum, with a steady level of active engagement by almost everyone. County government, directed by elected commissioners, plus the judge, coroner, and sheriff, held most of the power. The Quaker experience in England left them suspicious of big government and high taxes; all they wanted was a local structure to preserve peace and good order, with as little encroachment and taxation as possible. Americans' deep-seated suspicion of government is another Quaker bequest.
Like the Puritans and the Cavaliers, the Quakers had their own unique idea of liberty, which eventually became an enduring piece of the American conversation. Fischer calls it "reciprocal liberty" -- the egalitarian idea, based on the Golden Rule, that I can only legitimately claim those freedoms for myself that I'm also willing to grant to you. The more liberty we grant each other, the more free we all become.
Their belief in freedom of conscience mandated freedom of religion. Freedom of speech followed naturally from this, and they defended it even when they loathed the ideas being expressed. (After all, we all have the sacred freedom to be wrong.) Their belief in equality of every soul in the eyes of God opened the philosophical door to equal rights for women and minorities. Their deep suspicion of government power resulted in outspoken party politics, strong county governments, faith in good courts, and an enduring animus toward unwarranted taxation. The rights we now associate with the Miranda warning are, almost entirely, attributable to early Quaker law.
Prudish, uptight, and answerable to their community for every moment of their days, you can't fairly say that the 17th-century Quakers were in any sense a liberal people. But in their willingness to meet other people as equals under God -- without regard for race, religion, age, gender, or wealth -- they endowed modern American liberalism with its uniquely expansive sense of equal rights, civil liberty, and social justice.
Perhaps even more important: their extraordinary financial success demonstrated exactly what Penn had hoped to prove -- that a society that dedicates itself to equality and fairness will soon find itself respected and welcomed around the world. And that, ultimately, secures a level of peace and prosperity that can't be achieved by any other means.
Our worst moments as a nation have always come about when we forgot this. And our best have inevitably happened when we remembered again, however briefly, what it once meant in America to be a Friend.
* Here are the links to Sarah's essays:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/09/albions-seed-four-british-folkways-in.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/09/albions-seed-i-puritans-1620-1640.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/09/albions-seed-part-ii-cavaliers-1642.html
<b>Albion's Seed, Part III: The Quakers, 1675-1725</b><br>
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