The Four British Folkways Still Shaping America
A review of Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, a magisterial work of cultural history.
Colonies then are the Seeds of Nations, begun and nourished by the care of wise and populous Countries; as conceiving them best for the increase of Humane Stock.
-William Penn, 1681
Fischer’s Vision: the “Idea of Cultural History”
Into the tapestry of historical scholarship, David Hackett Fischer, professor of history emeritus at Brandeis University, has woven a beautiful pattern that illustrates something essential about America’s sociocultural heritage and its enduring identity, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). This monumental work, running almost to 1000 pages, aims to explain America’s character or in Fischer’s words:
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 and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.
In Albion’s Seed, (Albion is the earliest recorded name for the island of Great Britain) Fischer offers neither a materialist nor ideological nor solely narrative history. It is something he calls, “the idea of cultural history.” It is a fascinating approach that presents a cultural model that both draws from and synthesizes prior approaches to historical study. He fuses both new and old history. Essentially, it is a folkways theory, where a folkway is “the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture.” Concretely, this has to do with the religious practices, family structures, linguistics, buildings, and social ideas of a people (see here for a full list of folkways). These folkways are “often highly persistent” but “never static” and illuminate “the determinants of a voluntary society.”
Fischer adopts this ambitious approach to history in Albion’s Seed to trace the origins and development of America through the arrival of four distinct cultures from Britain that settled four separate regions: New England, the Mid-Atlantic (the Delaware Valley), the South, and the Backcountry (Appalachia). Fischer argues that these regions were shaped by the folkways of four different groups of British migrants (Puritans, English gentry, Quakers, and Scots-Irish borderers), who settled in America from the 17th to the 18th centuries, and that their cultural legacies still profoundly influence American society today. Fischer confidently insists, “the persistence of regional cultural in the United States explains many things about American history.” By which he includes both “the broad areas of consensus in American life” and the “major conflicts in American history.”
The Four British Folkways and Their Regional Origins and Destinations
The main four chapters of Albion’s Seed describe the four British migrations and extensively but engagingly catalogues their respective folkways. I’ve highlighted certain facts about each region that I found interesting:
East Anglia to Massachusetts: The Puritans (1629-1641)
Roughly 20,000 members of a Calvinist sect alienated by the Church of England migrated to the region known as New England today, bringing with them peculiar ideas about religion and their place in the universe.
The Puritans believed in “ordered liberty” and “instrumental fatalism” (more commonly termed predestination) and had a notable obsession with death. Their beliefs powered a highly educated, economically egalitarian, and ascetic lifestyle.
Consistent with this cultural profile, the Puritans had extremely high rates of literacy. They also had very high marriage and fertility rates (average family in 1730s Waltham, MA had 9.7 children!), while maintaining a very low pre-nuptial birth rate. Crime was also remarkably rare.
In contrast with wealth or some other form of social prestige, absolute age afforded important social status.
Puritan speech was defined by “a sort of nasal twang” (kiver for cover; hev for have; yistidy for yesterday), especially distinctive for its pronunciation of the letter r (Haa-v’d for Harvard). These patterns of speech still persist in some places in New England.
The South of England to Virginia: The English Gentry/Cavaliers (1642-1675)
Approximately 50,000 people of English nobility and their indentured servants migrated from mostly agrarian regions south or southwest of London to the tidewater region of Virginia, famously including Chesapeake Bay. Some of the migration also included the Carolinas.
These disaffected aristocrats (Oliver Cromwell killed King Charles I in 1649 forever changing the monarchy in England) were more hierarchical than the Puritans, believing in the idea of “hegemonic liberty” or dominion over self and others for those of status.
An important demographic fact: the overwhelmingly majority of migrants to this regions were indentured servants (~75%).
The ruling elite of Virginia were all closely related to each other. Fischer calls them a great “cousinage.”
Mortality rates in Virginia were horrifyingly high because of infectious diseases like malaria and typhoid.
The Cavaliers were the foundation of plantation culture in the South, establishing the foundation of race-based slave trade in America.
North British Midlands to the Delaware Valley: The Quakers (1675-1725)
The Quakers or the “Society of Friends” were a Protestant sect, like Puritans, founded by a man named George Fox. They believed that an “Inner Light” connected everyone directly to God, abolishing a need for ritual or priesthood. Hence, they refused to recognize traditional social ranks, addressing all people only as “Friend.” Their migration to America was largely spearheaded by a convert named William Penn.
Penn was defector from English nobility who managed to finagle himself and many of his people out of persecution for their religious beliefs by obtaining a refuge of land in America, Pennsylvania.
~20,000 Quakers, from northern midland regions of England, settled the Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania (aka Penn’s woods). This also include a contingency of Welsh people. Quakers eventually spread into much of the Midwest and were eventually joined by like-minded groups from regions of Germany and the Netherlands. In contrast to the Puritans, Quaker migration was actually inspired much more by religious persecution rather than a theological vision.
Also, interested in the idea of freedom, Quakers practiced “reciprocal liberty” and “liberty of the conscience,” which animated practices that many of us today would recognize as a type of liberal secularism, including property rights and civil rights. The Quakers were notable for their pacifism, tolerance, and modesty.
As a window into their prudishness: a splinter group of Quakers, called the Shakers, are notorious for completely abstaining from sexual intercourse. The Shakers, of course, no longer exist.
England-Scotland Borderlands to the Backcountry: The Scots-Irish (1717-1775)
Due to a tumultuous war-torn life on the border of Scotland and England, a large group of borderers packed up to Ulster, Ireland. Due to more conflict with Catholics, these Scots-Irish picked up again and emigrated to America, a total of roughly 250,000. These gruff and grizzled people settled the “backcountry” of America - a region we now refer to as Appalachia.
Fischer is not partial to the Scots-Irish moniker for these people from the borderlands of Scotland and England. Nonetheless, this name has stuck and is a nice shorthand. They are notable for their unruly culture characterized by tribalism, intemperateness, violence, and xenophobia.
The gender relations among the Scots-Irish were notably more patriarchal than the other American region in ways that even appalled these neighbors. An Anglican priest in 1767 calculated that almost all (94%) of brides in the backcountry were pregnant on their wedding day.
“Scotch-Irish speech” is strikingly similar to the language spoken in the southern highlands of America’s eastern half today, typically associated with “country western singers, transcontinental truckdrivers, cinematic cowboys, and backcountry politicians.” They said whar for where, hard for hired, he-it for hit, chaw for chew, young-uns for young ones.
The Explanatory Power of the Folkways Theory
History resists the full power of the scientific method. Definitionally, the past is beyond traditional experimentation. This creates room for skepticism about any narrative a historian sketches, extending doubly so to any extrapolations about the present or future made on purported knowledge of the past. However, Fischer assembles such a comprehensive picture of America’s four foundational regions and their respective cultures that it is simply unreasonable to entirely reject his narrative framework. It is persuasive on common-sense, experiential grounds and on scholarly grounds. Plus, his work contains so much that it’s hard to say it isn’t illuminating something about America. He goes to great lengths to substantiate his four folkways model with extensive empirical records and qualitative data from both primary and secondary sources. 900 heavily footnoted pages! And these region-based identities are easy to reconcile with or connect to the major events of American history.
One of the most shocking demonstration of Fischer’s theory appears in his concluding section “The Presidency as a Case Study.” He traces the ethnic origins of American Presidents from 1789 to 1989 where 38 of these 40 descended from one or more of the four folk migrations:
18 Presidents of borderer roots
Highlights include Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt (75% North British despite a Dutch name), Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan
16 Presidents of Puritan roots
Highlights include John Adams and his son John Quincy, Abraham Lincoln (part), Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (75% Yankee despite his Dutch name)
10 Presidents from Virginia’s “distressed cavalier” class
Highlights include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Harry Truman (part).
7 Presidents of the Quakers’ flock
Highlights include William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, and Abraham Lincoln (part)
Obviously, this list adds up to more than 38 because several Presidents were double counted due to roots in more than one lineage. However, before 1856, the Presidents descended from a single regional culture. Moreover, Fischer extends his cultural analysis to explain how campaigns for President were actually run and national parties formed. Interestingly, he shows that after the tumult of Jackson’s presidency, the first borderer President, the new Whig party adopted an “omnibus” candidate strategy that promoted those with ties or attractive qualities to multiple cultural regions. This explanation follows naturally into the regional conflict between the North and the South in the American Civil War.
A Critical Look at the Idea of Cultural History
As with any work, there are some inevitable weaknesses. After his preface, Fischer shows little interest in alternative models of American history. This is largely a necessity given the length required to make his own claims. Plus, a commentary on one’s own theory is almost always tiresomely meta. it also invites charges of pretentiousness. So ultimately, I respect Fischer’s straightforward presentation, but nonetheless it leaves his thesis precariously perched on a vulnerable premise: settling cultures enjoy first mover advantages that persists despite new additions. Fischer’s concluding chapter does demonstrate support for the enduring influence of British folkways through waves of migrations to America, but his case is mostly empirical, making it subject to certain biases There are some ways he could have more robustly made the case for cultural persistence by drawing from unrelated examples in history. Fortunately, the journalist Colin Woodward has backfilled this weak spot in his book, American Nations, showing more explicitly the advantages and persistence enjoyed by the first settling cultures. This persistence can be so potent to actually outlast the entire replacement of the people of a given culture with new immigrants from completely distinct places and cultures. For example, this is more or less what happened to the Quakers in America.
Another spot where I was left wanting a bit more concerned the actual deep origins of these distinct British folkways in Britain themselves. Fischer is vaguer than I would like and engages in some hand-waving about how these cultural distinctions actually evolved in Britain. But of course, Fischer is still a brilliant and rigorous historian and builds a competent argument in his conclusion. He argues the four folkways originate from particular regional influences, religious factors, social status effects, and generational effects.
A Hearty Endorsement
Fischer's book is not only a scholarly masterpiece, but also a great work of communication. He writes with clarity and elegance about complex ideas and details. He engages the reader with vivid descriptions and compelling vignette that punctuate the direct quotations and quantitative data. Ultimately, he paints a rich and nuanced portrait of the origins of American culture.
Albion's Seed is a book that should be read by all Americans. It is a refreshing and enriching way to examine our history. Other than its length, I can’t see why it shouldn’t be promoted as required reading in all advanced U.S. history courses. It is a book that illuminates the past and informs on the present. It is a book that celebrates the richness and vitality of the American experiment. It is a must read.
Other Reviews of Albion’s Seed:
An Interview of Colin Woodward: