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Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America

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Albion's Seed by Brandeis University History Professor David Hackett Fischer is the history of the four main regional migrations from Britain to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Professor Fischer examines each of these four migrations in great detail, describing the origin, motivations, religion, timing, and numerous cultural attitudes or folkways for dealing with everyday life, including birth, child rearing, marriage, age, death, order, speech, architecture, dress, food, wealth, and time, to cite only a few. He devotes special attention to the different concepts of liberty and freedom held by each of these four British cultural groups.

The first major wave consisted predominantly of the Puritans from East Anglia who settled in New England between 1629 and 1640, the years immediately preceding the English Civil War in which Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan army defeated and beheaded King Charles I.

The second wave consisted of defeated (or soon to be defeated) supporters of the king and the Established (Anglican) Church of England, primarily from the south and west of England, who settled in the Chesapeake Bay regions of Virginia and Maryland between 1642 and 1675.

The third wave was the migration of Quakers from the English midlands (and their religious kin from various German sects) who settled in the Delaware Valley (southeast Pennsylvania, west New Jersey, north Delaware) between 1675 and 1615.

Finally, the "Scotch-Irish", referring collectively to immigrants from the north of England, lowland Scotland, and Ulster, settled the Appalachian backcountry from Pennsylvania southwest through Virginia, the Carolinas, and into Tennessee and Kentucky from 1717 to 1775. Less homogenous in religion than the prior waves, the Scotch-Irish were a mixture of Presbyterians, the dominant group, and Anglicans, a significant minority.

Each of these four folk established an amazingly enduring culture in their region, a culture that successfully incorporated later immigrants from other origins who shared little or none of the dominant folkway that had become established in their new home. Their contrasting concepts of liberty are among the most visible today. The Puritan concept of liberty, "ordered liberty" in Fischer's terminology, focused on the "freedom" to conform to the policies of the Puritan Church and local government. The Virginia concept of liberty, "hegemonic liberty", was hierarchical in nature, ranging from the great freedom of those in positions of power and wealth down to the total lack of freedom accorded to slaves. The Quaker concept of liberty, "reciprocal liberty", focused on the aspects of freedom that were held equally by all people as opposed to the unequal and asymmetric freedoms of the Puritans and Virginians. Finally, the Scotch-Irish concept of liberty, "natural liberty", focused on the natural rights of the individual and his freedom from government coercion.

Albion's Seed was a delight to read, filled with quaint, instructive, and amusing anecdotes that reflect folkways that endure today. It should be equally appealing to those interested in defining and contrasting the cultural histories of different groups, the process and cultural impact of human migrations, the foundations of the Anglo-American world, and the different roots of the concept of liberty.

Freedom's liberty tree is planted in the fertile soil of the many cultural groups who have made our land a "melting pot." In
Fishcer's brilliant work he traces with fascinating detail the transposition from Britain to the American colonies the folkways that have made each region distinctive. The four folk cultures he delineates are:
1. New England-the Puritans came from the East Anglia region of
England. They were pious, hardworking and intoxicated with theology and ordedr.
2. The Middle Colonies-the Quaker influence is profound in this region of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. William Penn and the followers of the Quaker founder George Fox were the most liberal minded of the quartet of folk cultures chronicled by Fischer. The Quaker culture was influential in the southwest and midland counties of Britain. Their belief in religous toleration has added much to American democracy.
3. The tidewider and coastal south was settled by southern English natives who were Cavaliers supportive of the Stuart
dynasty. This society was hierarchial and based on honor and
fueled by chattel slavery.
4. the backcountry region was settled by Englishmen from the northern border region of England, Scotland and Ulster Scotch-Irish. Exemplified by such paragons of this violent and emotional culture were men like Andrew Jackson and James Knox Polk. Composed of Hoosiers and Rednecks, Crackers and doughty pioneers this society believed in individual freedom.
The almost 1000 page book is filled with illustrations, population data and election results of Presidential elections which reflect how political choices are reflected in the four major mass migrations made to America by Britishers.
While only about 20% of our nearly 300 million population has direct ties to British ancestry the British influence in America is profound-indeed formative in the formation of American society as it exists today with all its strengths and weaknesses.
This book is essential reading if one wants to understand many aspects of American history and life.
Hackett-Fisher is an esteemed historian and with this work is legacy is assured in American histography for generations to come.
Excellent!

As with several other people, the biggest complaint I have with this book is that Prof. Fischer hasn't yet followed up with further works on U.S. cultural history.

But what's here is marvelous. Fischer traces the distinctive folkways and religious influence of the four great waves of English emigration to the American colonies, and shows how they combined to make modern USAmerica.

I have 19th century immigrant roots, and have never lived in the South or New England. I can't therefore confirm or dispute what Fischer and the various reviewers say about the distinctive regional U.S. differences that persist there today, and how they go back to the original English immigrants. But as a modern USAmerican from California, I can see the various strands that make up our general culture in each of the four founding regions.

This is a long book, perhaps a bit too long, but I recommend it highly, and since discovering it I automatically read any book Fischer produces. I have yet to read a bad one by him. Now let's have further volumes in the series!

"Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer explains in clear understandable language how four waves of English migration to these shores in the 17th century forever impacted on who and what we would become as Americans. The "folkways" that they brought with them have, to this day, remained, and traveling through what were once the original 13 colonies, one can still see and hear what our original English forebears brought with them, if you look and listen close enough. In particular, one of the more revealing things about the book is the explanation of the deeper causes of our American Civil War, which we are always taught in history classes was rooted in slavery. Fischer goes beyond the obvious to point out a basic conflict of "folkways" that had begun back on English soil with the English Civil War between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, who on American soil would become the Southerners and the Yankees. This deeper cause explains why even today echoes of the Civil War remain in the political differences between North and South. This book is a very important reference for anyone interested in any variety of topics, from genealogy to linguistics to history to architecture to urban planning and so much more. Fischer explains how each of these cultures had unique patterns of town planning, marriage, food, death, birth, speech, religion, education and more. Jam packed full of important information, this book belongs in the library of anyone who has an interest in who we are and why we Americans are such a pluralistic nation. I cannot recommend this book enough, and eagerly await other books in this series on the cultural history of America. This book explained so much to me about my own family and I saw a microcosm of the age old North-South conflict in my own maternal grandparents. My grandfather was of old Cavalier stock and was born and raised in the Deep South. My grandmother was of New England Irish stock that had married into old Yankee blood. They bickered about everything imaginable, and I often wondered why their frequent disagreements. However, when grandfather died, I found out that in spite of it all, grandmother truly loved him, and that it was just her New England ways that caused the constant clashes with her Southern Cavalier husband. I found myself at times laughing out loud as I recognised speech patterns in my own family that have been passed down to me, and other assorted echoes of folkways from my family's past as well were recognisable in Fischer's book. I came to know myself better through a better understanding of who my family is, where they came from and why they acted the way they did. So from a genealogist's standpoint, this book is also of tremedous value. VERY RECOMMENDED! FIVE STARS!

How lucky I feel to have come across and finished one of those rare books that not only provides critical historical information, but also indelibly transforms the way I view the world.

The massive tome is about four discrete immigrant movements from Britain to the U.S. and their critical influence on modern regional cultures here. The migrations covered in the book start around 1630 with the East Anglian Puritans, and conclude with Ulster Scots-Irish and Anglo-Scots whose journey from impoverished regions of Britain into the backwoods areas of the Appalachians ended around 1775. His scholarship on the regional British cultures that defined the nucleus of each of the migrations is extremely impressive, and it gives him loads of ways to compare the original culture with its transplanted descendant in America. Incidentally, I never knew much about the history or geography of Britain up until I read this book, but after finishing it I found myself fascinated by just how much regional variation there was and was inspired to learn more.

One conclusion well-developed throughout Fischer's opus is that ethnic culture can remain strikingly uniform even after being transplanted to an entirely new geography and passing through many generations there (Kurds in Germany or Jews in ancient Babylon come to mind). He also argues that it was the values of the elites (mercantile and industrious in New England, humble and humanistic in New Jersey and east Pennsylvania, aristocratic and labor-averse in Virginia) that led to differences in the development of the economy.

Take the example of slavery, which was fundamental to antebellum southern states but less popular in the north. Fischer contends that slave ownership in southern colonies was more extensive due to the political hegemony of country squires (aka Cavaliers) originally from the Wessex region in SW England, particularly in the colony of Virgina. These privileged colonials believed that only landholding was an acceptable source of income for their sort, while physical labor and mercantilism were seen as contemptible, suitable only for those of low station. So while fertile lands farther north were being worked in small plots by yeoman farmer types with few or no slaves, the colony of Virginia became dominated by large plantations and manor houses that mirrored Saxon aristocracy. But since the region was semi-tropical and malarial, they chose African slaves over the white servants/serfs that were so essential to the manors of their ancestors. In other words, an imported British culture created the plantation system, not Virginian geography.

The final portion of the book deals with the pervasiveness of these original cultures throughout our national history. Fischer considers them as regionally dominant even now, despite the arrival of throngs of non-British immigrants over the centuries. Just like English has maintained itself as our national language even though less than 20% of our nation is of British descent, the prejudices of British immigrants 200-300 years ago still persist in a much more ethnically varied peoplescape.

There's much to learn AND to enjoy. Despite its 900+ pages Fischer is a lucid and focused writer, and he sprinkles the dry facts and figures with compelling anecdotes. This is essentially a polemical work, and he does jam a few squarish pegs into round holes (there are NYC Jewish gun-nuts, New Jersey Italian mobsters, and Alabama Scots-Irish peaceniks out there), but the overall evidence is so compelling that I feel this should be a standard text in high school American History courses. The belief structures of the four migrations (two really, since the Virginian/backcountry worldviews loosely align, as does that of the Puritans with the Quakers) are organized by Fischer around four distinct definitions of "freedom". Regional political conflicts are made understandable once the reader grasps these four separate outlooks.

The most provocative part of the book, in my opinion, is Fischer's scholarship and speculation about the basis of Borderer culture. "Borderers" came from southern Scotland and northern England and primarily settled and dominated the hillier, more forested regions in the Appalachians. They are often called Scots-Irish, but Fischer shows that most spoke English rather than Gaelic and had no immediate Irish blood or background. These were the people who even at that time might be called "crackers" or "rednecks" (terms that came from Britain). Centuries of cross-border warfare, raiding, and exploitative absentee lords left them with little belief in the ability of governments to promote justice and peace, and a sense that one must always be ready to defend oneself with violence. These values prepared them for the dangers of settling first the Appalachian frontier and then the Wild West, but left their descendants with a predilection toward violent conflict, as well as valuing physical prowess and robust sexuality over education and economic prosperity. We don't have any Hatfield-McCoy clan feuds in this day and age, as far as I know, but many of the fundamental belief structures of the ancient Borderers still exist through large portions of country. To my mind they bedevil us, even as they define our "average Joe" better than any other culture. People like Sen. Jim Webb and author Joe Bageant exemplify both the value and pitfalls of Borderer beliefs; they exemplify mental talent and fierce will but also carry the gloomy, suspicious, violence-prone outlook of their forebears.

Not only that, but Fischer's throw-aside supposition that long-term political instability tends to promote Borderer-style worldviews does a lot to help people from more cooperative areas understand aggressive clannish peoples, such as Somalis, Albanians, Tuaregs, and the Kurds of SE Turkey.

There's a large mental gap between someone raised in a home that trusts in guns over government and someone raised in a home with a focus on kindness, cooperation, and non-violent conflict resolution. The former sees the latter as childish and naive, while the latter sees the former as needlessly aggressive and paranoid. Both may be "correct" about the other, especially within the conditions of their region, but for any human it is difficult to imagine the effect of growing up in a culture with such fundamentally different assumptions. It's much easier to simply label one another as "wrong".

So I see this book as a Rosetta Stone, an incomplete primer into how to speak another person's internal language when that person has a different understanding of the nature of "freedom" in society as compared to you. It's straight-up BRILLIANT.

I hate to use a superlative to describe any piece of scholarly work, because there are so many fine pieces of work out there that I read while working on my BA and MA in History, but I can't think of any single serious history book that has left me more impressed. It is scholarly -- and shows an astonishing command of a truly amazing collection of primary and secondary sources. At the same time, it is beautifully written -- one of the few serious scholarly history books that I can, in good conscience, recommend to any reasonably well-educated person -- and have confidence that they will find it interesting. Mot important of all, it is extraordinarily important, because it shows the still dominant role that America's four British folkways play in creating both the national and regional cultures that still dominate American society.

I read this book while writing my book Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger Press, 1999), and Albion's Seed made it possible for me to adequately determine the origins of the backcountry Southern culture of violence that created such havoc in the early Republic -- and created the structure of violence and weapons control laws that still dominate the current political debate.

I can't adequately summarize this massive and wonderful book in the available space, but let me give you just a clue as to the power of it. It provides a persuasive explanation for regional variations in housing design, birth month distribution, naming conventions, cooking styles, and male/female power relationships -- and without ever seeming forced to me, the skeptic of "one theory does it all" approaches.

I can't recommend a book more highly than this.

Albion's Seed details the "folkways" of four groups of people that moved from distinct regions of England to the US. The premise is that ther culture of each of the groups persisted and that these cultures provide the basis for the modern United States. The folkways are the cultural beliefs in religion, magic, child raising, family, age,food and other interesting things. Since reading the book I have been asking everyone I spend any time with about their background and quizzing them about beliefs. The book has opened up a whole new world to me about the types of things Fischer discusses in his book. Traces of the cultures he describes are still very much with us and I am finding it remarkable the degree that you can predict the overall pattern of a person's beliefs based on their background. Another aspect of the book is that though it is 900 pages of text, it never got boring to me. By talking about people and how they lived it brings them to life as well as any novel.

If you have ever wondered why Yankee's are yanks and southerners are southerners, David Hacket Fischer's Albion's Seed is must reading. In this first of five volumes dealing with American historiography, the author colorfully describes the original immigrants who came to populate our great land. By examining the various twenty-four "folkways" of the four waves of immigrants that populated our land from 1629 to 1775. Using these folkways as his acrylic, Fischer paints a picture of our early settlers, which is as rich and colorful as it is varied. These folkways have, in various forms, persisted through the present and have been even been adopted by newcomers to these cultural regions. Each of these four waves originated from distinct regions in Great Britain and each was characterized by unique cultural folkways that have shaped American culture since. Fischer has done remarkable work in linking the past to our present culture. The histories of voting patterns, black's and women's suffrage, and even wealth distribution today can be understood by examining the profound effects each of these "waves" has had on our regional cultural development. From 1629-41, the first "wave" of settlers was the Puritans fleeing religious persecution in eastern England. They settled in the Massachusetts Bay area bringing with them four libertarian ideas: collective liberty, individual liberty, soul liberty and freedom from the tyranny of circumstance with all four collectivized in the concept of `ordered liberty' for God's chosen few. The second "wave" arrived from the south of England and settled Virginia and the Carolinas during 1642-75. This wave was predominantly made of the second born sons of Southern England's armigers and their indentured servants. They too were fleeing oppression having been beaten back fighting for Charles I and II. (Virginia was the last English territory to renounce allegiance to Charles I and their affirmation of Charles II predates the restoration.) Their idea of liberty was a hegemonic liberty, which allowed them the right of laisser asservir or the freedom to enslave. This hegemonic liberty was at the heart of their culture and is evident in lesser degrees today. 1675-1725 was the period of the Friend's (Quakers) migration from the northern Midlands of Britain to Rhode Island, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Their idea of liberty was best characterized by the concept of `reciprocal liberty' and serves as the basis for modern libertarianism. This concept decidedly influenced many of the framers of our constitution. Fischer maintains it is this concept of reciprocal liberty that has most shaped our current national concept of liberty. The fourth wave from Northern Britain to the North American back-country began in 1717. The magnitude of this movement was huge as compared to the migrations preceding it, with more than a quarter-million people populating the American back-country by 1775. Demographically similar to the previous groups, these back-country settlers distinguished themselves from the others by populating America not to play out some bold religious experiment or to escape religious persecution, rather they came for material betterment. Coupled to and ascendant from their concept of `natural liberty' came their system of order known as "lex talionis', or the rule of retaliation. They were rugged, self-reliant individuals who had little use for organized law. David Fischer has crafted a superb work linking our past with the present. His exhaustive use of references and tables and a writing style that challenges the reader without being pedantic, combine to make this text a most enjoyable read for anyone teaching history and for those who hope to understand why we Americans are as we are.

In, Albion's Seed, author David Hackett Fischer traces the origins of four major immigrations to America and shows how cultural norms were transplanted from various parts of England to America. He theorizes the folkways they brought with them explain how and why different regions in America developed as they did. He believes they are still having an impact today.

The first migration was the Puritans. They emanated from Southeast England from 1629 until 1641 and settled in the Massachusetts area. Strict, pious, and extremely frugal, they fled religious persecution in England only to deny religious liberty to all but their own in New England.

The second were the, "Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants," who left Southwest England between 1642 and 1675 settling principally in Virginia. The ruling elite, primarily the second sons of noblemen, brought with them the sense of pride and honor of which so many Southern legends are told.

Third were the, "Friends," commonly called, "Quakers," who settled in Pennsylvania from 1675-1725. Emanating from the northern midlands, they were tolerant, hard working men and women who eschewed violence as they followed the, "inner light," they believed indwelled all mankind.

Last were the Scotch-Irish who settled what was called, "the back country." Coming from the northern borderlands of England, these people brought a fierce pride and a warrior ethic that translated into many blood feuds in what is now Appalachia.

Fischer theorizes this pattern of regionalism persists to this day. He cites as evidence the fact that political candidates must seek to appeal to more than one region if they hope to be elected nationally. George Bush's and Jimmy Carter's elections are two examples.

This work first came to my attention when it was used as a reference in upper level history classes. While it is long, (898 pages plus the index with numerous footnotes), it is a valuable asset to anyone seriously studying how and why things have developed as they have in this nation. I strongly recommend it to any serious student of the history or sociology of this nation. Five Stars!!

I picked up this book in hopes to gain a better insight into a part of American History that I didn't focus on in College (European History major) or when I have taught US Hist 101-103. Why? Well, I was working on a genealogical research project associated with my wife's family who were part of the 1620 immigration and the 1630-1649 immigration to the USA.

This book was awesome!! It gave history, linguistics, politics, religion, sex as seen through the four distinct English cultural settlements prior to the American Revolution. ANY GENEALOGIST WORKING ON PRE AMERICAN REVOLUTION FAMILY LINES NEEDS TO READ THIS BOOK. Without a doubt it will be a book I will turn to for many things beyond just the original intent I had when I bought it.

The maps are also a great addition to the book. So, get a copy spend the time with it and I swear you won't be disappointed.