The Reader's Companion to American History
Houghton Mifflin Company
2004


Writing in 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crvecoeur tried to
define "the American, this new man." He was, Crvecoeur
argued, "neither a European nor a descendant of a European"
but an "American, who, leaving behind all his ancient
prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of
life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new
rank he holds." Crvecoeur presumed that America was a melting
pot, that the environment created a homogeneous American
culture, with similar values, beliefs, and social practices.
Such cultural uniformity is inherently plausible. After all,
most white colonial Americans worked the soil, enjoying the
fruits of their labor, and practiced similar Protestant
faiths. Moreover, they believed in private ownership of the
means of production by individual cultivators. Generations of
scholars, following the lead of Frederick Jackson Turner in
the early twentieth century, argued that free and open land on
the frontier created an American people whose identity was
shaped by the independence land ownership provided and whose
ideology was characterized by individualism, democracy, and
equality of opportunity.

Colonial cultures, however, were far less uniform than
Crvecoeur imagined. The women and men who peopled early
AmericaNative Americans, Africans, East Anglians, Welsh,
Germans, Dutch, among many othersinvented conflicting popular
cultures, meshing the beliefs and practices of their
birthplaces with the demands of the American environment and
the cultures of their neighbors. Indians and Africans, a
substantial part of the colonial population, have been ignored
in models of cultural uniformity. Even white Protestant
immigrants created diverse cultures. While sharing a common
religious vision, Puritans and Anglicans, Baptists and
Quakers, differed vehemently in the particulars of their
faiths. In America, without the pressure of a strong Anglican
established church, the particularities of each group were
accentuated. By the end of the seventeenth century, the main
lines of most of American popular cultures could be clearly
seen.

Notwithstanding continuing cultural differences among ethnic
groups, there was some cultural convergence in the eighteenth
century, a tendency for division among white colonists between
a popular culture of the vast majority and a high culture of
the ruling few who emulated their peers in England. Such
cultural convergence within social classes had several
sources. Waves of evangelical revivalism touched every colony
at different times between the 1730s and 1780s, democratizing
and personalizing religion, Christianizing the unchurched
everywhere. Newly rich merchants, great planters, and lawyers
received similar educations, built mansions in the English
manner, and indulged in conspicuous consumption far beyond the
reach of middling farmers.

The development of vernacular cultures in the colonial era
depended upon two contrasting geographic facts: widely
dispersed settlement and concentrated ethnic enclaves. Even on
the eve of independence, most AmericansIndians and settlers
alikelived in isolated farm neighborhoods or villages,
separated from neighbors a few miles away by almost
impenetrable forests. Most were surrounded by people like
themselves: Iroquois lived with Iroquois, Germans settled in
Pennsylvania villages, East Anglians dominated many New
England towns. Under such circumstances, contrasting popular
cultures could flourish. An examination of three cultural
indicatorsforms of agriculture, patterns of social order, and
family and gender moresbefore colonization and after American
settlement among Indians, New Englanders, white Virginians,
and backcountry residents will suggest the ways that the
interplay of received culture and environment made new popular
cultures. Such an analysis, however, hardly exhausts the
diversity of cultures in early America, ignoring, for example,
African-Americans in the Chesapeake colonies and coastal South
Carolina; Quakers, Dutch, and Scots in the Middle Colonies,
and various Germanic ethnic groups. Moreover, there were class
conflicts in all the seventeenth-century colonies that common
regional cultures did little to hide.

Despite extraordinary differences among groups of Native
Americans, they shared some general cultural similarities.
Indians insisted upon communal ownership and sovereignty over
land; temporary "ownership" came with use. Eastern Woodland
Indians, with the exception of those living in the far
Northeast, practiced subsistence agriculture, growing corn and
vegetables to feed themselves, using extensive slash-and-burn
techniques. Each year, men burned stubble and underbrush; then
women did the planting, hoeing, and harvesting of crops. The
work of women provided the vast majority of the food the
tribes ate. Although they sometimes paid corn as tribute to
chiefs, there was minimal exchange of agricultural goods
beyond the community. While women farmed and cared for
children, men hunted or went to war. Men killed animals for
meat and skins (for clothing) for the community as well as
pelts to trade with whites. Indians maintained social order
through governance by tribal elders; although men made most
decisions about war and peace, women participated in some
tribes, such as the Iroquois. But white settlement profoundly
affected Indian cultures. Indians traded with the first
colonists, exchanging furs and corn for iron goods and cloth.
As settlers farmed land, chasing animals away, and as they
conquered the Indians' lands, Native Americans either had to
move west to preserve their cultures or accommodate to the
market economies and male agriculture of the whites.
English colonists left East Anglia in the 1630s for New
England to escape depression in the cloth trade and to create
a covenanted society free from Anglican persecution. Mostly
middling textile workers and farmers, they traveled in family
groups. Once in New England, communal leaders readily formed
communities and distributed land confiscated from Indians
among the inhabitants by social rank, holding some land in
common for future generations. Communal land thereby became
private property, a pattern very different from that of
Indians. After all the land had been distributed, those
without left to found new communities. Using family labor, New
England farmers grew crops for subsistence, trading small
surpluses at local markets to pay for taxes and consumer
goods. They devised a complex system of local exchange of
labor and goods between area families. These exchanges were
predicated upon a division of labor in which men farmed and
governed while wom- enconsidered subservientgardened, cared
for children, and acted as deputy husbands when their spouses
were away. A strong sense of order pervaded the society:
mutual obligations were expected to tie parents and children
together, and when they overstepped communal norms, they faced
discipline from church or town; disreputable outsiders were
forced to leave the community.

English immigrants to the Chesapeake region in the
mid-seventeenth century left highly stratified societies in
London and the south of England to find greater economic
opportunities. The migrants, mostly poor agricultural and
urban wage laborers, had worked in London or Bristol or on
large rural estates, producing grain for the market.
Three-quarters of them, almost all men, came as indentured
servants; once they arrived they cultivated tobacco for
English markets and corn for subsistence. Everyone, free and
servant, male and female, performed agricultural labor. After
initial distribution of land by grant, sale, and headrights
(acreage given for every adult brought to the colony), a
capitalist land market developed. Despite the original
widespread ownership of land, Chesapeake gentlemen soon built
vast estates, which they populated with servants and (later)
slaves. Given the high death rate and the relatively late age
of marriage in the region (servants could not marry until they
were free), widows, orphans, and complex families with step-
and half-siblings became common, breaking down patriarchal
authority in the family, and allowing orphans' courts to
replace the father.

When slaves began to replace servants as laborers in the
tobacco fields after 1680, Chesapeake culture was transformed.
With more laborers, white women no longer had to cultivate
tobacco; and with increasing life expectancy and lower ages of
marriage among whites, male patriarchal authority increased.
Africans, and especially their descendants, created their own
culture with African and European elements, forming complex
cross-plantation communities and intense extended families in
the slave quarters. Within this bicultural society, with its
strict class and racial boundaries, gentlemen gained political
hegemony, insisting upon the liberty to rule otherstheir
slaves, servants, families, and white social inferiors.
Acquiescing in gentry rule, poorer planters expected
occasional credit from gentlemen and legal support for their
dominance over their own families.

The last major group of European migrants during the colonial
era came from Scotland, Ulster, and the north of England
during the middle half of the eighteenth century and moved to
the back parts of the American colonies, from Pennsylvania to
Georgia. Mostly herdsmen, cottagers, and traditional tenants,
they moved to avoid proletarianization in regions of rapid
capitalist transformation. They took with them a culture
constrained by generations of conflicts along the borders of
England that instilled a distrust of authority and an
insistence upon honor and personal integrity. Since they moved
to a frontier similar to their homeland, they could invent new
societies reflecting their culture. Access to or ownership of
land and the open range together provided them with the means
of subsistence that was quickly disappearing in their
homelands. Men and women shared all agricultural labor in the
mountains and valleys they settled, yet each man maintained
control over his wife and family through tradition,
intimidation, and violence. Fathers instilled in sons pride
and independence; mothers trained daughters to be industrious
and subservient to men. Insisting upon limited government,
they personally attacked anyone who challenged enjoyment of
their property, sometimes banding together in vigilante groups.

Waves of evangelicalism that swept over the colonies from the
late 1730s to the 1780s dissolved some of these cultural
differences. Starting in New England in the 1730s, they spread
to the Middle Colonies in the 1740s and to the South in the
1760s and 1770s. Evangelical preachers insisted upon the
spiritual equality of all people, whatever their origin,
class, race, or gender. All could participate in the direct,
experiential religion they mandated. Ordinary peoplesmall
farmers in the Chesapeake, urban craftsmen (masters and
journeymen), blacksinterpreted spiritual equality in secular
terms, allowing the free people among them to contest the
hegemony of the wealthy ruling class of merchants and great
planters. Widespread participation in evangelical religion
provided ordinary rural Americans with a common language,
thereby mitigating differences between ethnic groups.
Once whites had expropriated millions of acres of Indian land,
vast areas were open to whites for settlement. By the early
eighteenth century, farm families, the majority of colonists,
came to expect land ownership. Out of this expectation, a
yeoman ideology developed throughout the colonies. Land
provided farmers with a social and political identity. Small
landowners insisted upon the right to secure land tenure,
arguing that they had earned ownership through their own
labor. This homestead ethic was sustained in a series of
conflicts that covered nearly every colony from New York to
South Carolina between the 1730s and the 1770s. Whenever
landlords, creditors, or venal colonial officeholders
challenged the farmer's title, insisted upon early collection
of debts, raised taxes, or failed to protect them from Indians
or bandits, one of these conflicts resulted.

Notwithstanding continuing differences and the persistence of
colonial loyalties, a high culture that transcended local
peculiarities began to develop in the early eighteenth
century. This high culture was predicated upon the rise of
hereditary fortunes in every colony and the sustained
dominance of these families in high political office. Men of
wealth educated their sons at colonial colleges or in England,
where students not only met their peers from other colonies
but gained a taste for the writings, theater, and consumption
patterns of wealthy English families. They made sure their
daughters knew all the genteel female skills, from music to
sewing. Thus the rich became "cultivated," building large
houses, adorning their homes with the most fashionable
furnishings, holding genteel assemblies, and patronizing the
arts. Wherever a gentleman traveled in the colonies, he was
sure to find similarly cultivated men.

The cultures of early America were complex. By the
mid-eighteenth century class similarities among farmers and
gentlemen pointed toward consolidated class cultures. But
ethnic differences, transformed by varying economic uses
colonists made of the American environment, persisted.
American farmers continued to grow different crops with
different forms of labor; women gained some rights in the
North, but none in the South. Regional differences, within
class cultures, would have a profound effect on American
politics, leading ultimately to civil war.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in
America (1989); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions:
Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989).