Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history) 1st Edition

I purchased this book after Malcolm Gladwell referenced it in "Outliers". This book is dauntingly large in format, but actually straightforward to read and deeply engrossing. It covers four separate migrations from the British Isles to America, hence the size. I particularly liked the breakdown of each group into their 'folkways' - that is, attitudes about sex, child rearing, education etc. It's not academically dense writing, easy to absorb and ended up being very touching to me seeing how folkway characteristics from hundreds of years ago in England are still perpetuated in my family today.

This sizable book is invaluable to all serious students of American history. It's not written in narrative fashion as a more popular treatment would be, but in sections, so that a reader can flip easily to the pertinent place.

The author covers four basic people groups that left the British Isles for the New World: the people who colonized New England, those who settled the middle colonies (including Quakers), the class-conscious settlers of the southern tidewater, and the Scots-Irish, who came over in a huge wave after 1700.

It's not a treatment of events but rather culture. How many kids did the average family have in New England? What was a Scots-Irish marriage like? There are lots of statistics that might be boring to the casual reader but serve as a gold mine for someone writing a paper or doing background research for a historical project or novel.

David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America" is a stunning academic achievement. Each of the four folkways described by the author are book length and authoritative. It is remarkable to read just how unique each of these "great migrations" were and how they have left an indelible cultural imprint on those geographic areas long after the original inhabitants faded into oblivion (when's the last time you've seen a Puritan in Boston or a Quaker in Philadelphia?). Fischer explores each migration in great detail, comparing and contrasting a variety of "ways" that defined their cultures: wealth, elites, sex, sports, architecture, religion, speech, family, aging, death, child-rearing, naming conventions, food, work, supernatural beliefs, philosophy and so on.

The author begins with the Puritans, the vast majority of whom emigrated from the East Anglia region of England, who settled New England from 1629 to 1641. The special features of the Puritan experience, according to Fischer, included a relatively salubrious climate; the immigrants tended to be older and middle class (few poor or aristocrats); wealth distribution remained even (top 10% only owned 20% of property); age was revered over material possessions or social status; literacy and education were highly prized; while "order" and "liberty" were an obsession, although not how we would think of those terms in a modern sense (mostly collective and community restraints on conduct ensuring the ability to live a truly Puritan lifestyle, a sort of fundamentalist Christian society that Al Qaeda would likely approve of).

The cavaliers who settled Virginia in the second great migration from 1642 to 1675 were quite distinct from the Puritans - and in many ways, Fischer writes. The author presents Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley, who served for 35-years, as the embodiment of the cavalier gentleman, just as Puritan leader John Winthrop represented the Puritan culture of New England. What made the Virginia cavaliers unique were that they tended to come from southern England; most were younger sons (and thus disinherited because of primogeniture) of wealthy families who hailed from a hierarchical society of "deep and pervasive inequalities"; nearly three-quarters of the immigrants were servants from the lower class while the top 10% owned 75% of the region's productive assets; they were overwhelmingly Anglican in their religion and passionately so; most lived in rural and widely distributed communities unlike the compact New England Puritan town; families were large, extended and intermingled unlike the Puritan nuclear family; it was a society that honored rank and wealth and seniority, not simply age; there was a cultural focus on "hegemonic liberty" or "dominion over oneself", an ethos that was deeply embedded in the Tidewater and produced sterling examples over the centuries, from George Washington to Robert E. Lee to George Marshall. In one of the author's many keen insights, he writes that "Slavery did not create the culture of Tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery."

If the Puritans had John Winthrop and the cavaliers William Berkeley, the Quakers, representing the third great migration, who settled the mid-Atlantic region from 1675 to 1725, had William Penn as the embodiment of their migration and culture. The Quakers were generally of humble origin, hailing from the midlands of northern England, many of whom had suffered serious persecution for their beliefs and thus saw the New World in religious terms similar to the Puritans but unlike the cavaliers. The Quaker sense of family extended exclusively to all co-religionists ("Friends"), not just a nuclear or extended family; they enjoyed the closest equality between the sexes of any migration and were much more indulgent toward their children; the aged were not venerated (the Puritans) and neither were patriarchs (the cavaliers), but rather were treated as community mentors, but only if "deserving"; death was welcomed as a fulfillment of life, not something to be feared as by the Puritans and cavaliers; both black magic and higher learning were generally eschewed in Quaker society; sports were almost universally condemned, whereas the Puritans loved their ball games and the cavaliers their horse races; Quakers sought to "redeem" time, rather than "improving" it (Puritan) or "killing" it (cavalier); wealth distribution was even like the Puritans (top 10% owned 25% of productive assets) while social rank and hierarchy were abhorred; if the cavaliers adhered to "hegemonic liberty," Quakers remained faithful to the "inner light," a belief that everyone, man or woman, were capable of embracing Jesus' love and grace.

Unlike the other three great cultural migrations, the backcountry migration flowing from Scotland and Ireland (1717 to 1775) were not looking for religious freedom, although they mostly shared the Presbyterian faith. They were the first American migration focused mainly on finding a better, more prosperous life in the New World. The main theme of this culture, according to Fischer, is violence, which was a product of the British borderlands from whence they came. The author uses Andrew Jackson as the archetype for this culture: proud, principled, hardworking, and physically aggressive. These migrants, who settled the early mid-west, were overwhelmingly poor, but had their own version of the "elite," where local leaders depended on charisma, loyalty, influence, and all too often physical force. Fischer stresses the importance of the warrior culture and the centrality of violence in the backcountry folkway. His section on backcountry "sport ways" is especially fascinating. Wrestling and fistfights, for example, were main events, including "rough & tumble" brawls that allowed biting and eye-gouging. The backcountry was among the most unequal in terms of wealth distribution (top 10% held from 40-80% of productive assets), yet there was a social system that called for the equality of esteem, no matter one's wealth, a need to be recognized as an equal, which may help explain the prevailing system of lex talionis (rule of retribution). This was the culture, after all, that produced the Hatfields and the McCoys.

There are several themes that emerged from this weighty tome: America has been fundamentally shaped by the voluntary nature of the great migrations that populated her regions (unlike the compulsory and centralized migrations engineered for New France and New Spain); slavery developed very slowly in America and was generated by the unique transplanted cultures that grew there, not the other way around; the regional differences in the United States are often more dramatic than between countries in Europe (e.g. the wealth disparity between New England the South in the late 1800s was similar to the difference between Germany and Russia in the same time period); the four folkways had some things in common, but generally speaking they were all antagonistic to one another, which was all too evident from the American Revolution to the present day; these regional differences have often led to omnibus strategies for electing presidents, an attempt to find a candidate who appeals to at least two of the traditional folkways, such as Harrison (1840), Taylor (1848), Pierce (1852), Eisenhower (1952) and Bush (1988).

All told, this book is an eye-opening education. It runs nearly 1,000 pages in length and can be daunting at times; however, the insights and erudition Fischer delivers are worth the effort.

The finest book on American history I've ever read. It outlines the four British 'folk' groups who immigrated to America as founding populations. There were the Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers and Border folk, who arrived in turn and settled the east coast from the late 1500's to the early 1700's. This story illustrates how 'colonial' the pattern was, and in fact was identical to the patterns of colonizing Africa, (as you can see from the book 'Africa as a Living Laboratory', 2011 U Chicago Press, by Dr. Helen Tilley.) First came the 'friendly whites' aka the Puritans and Quakers, then the ruling class of Cavaliers, and then the 'army' in the form of extremely poor whites who had been herded into militaristic communities for centuries before being sent to America. In the case of these Border folks, they first piled up on the borders of Scotland, where they fought and languished for 300 years, until in 1607 they were forcibly sent to Ulster, Ireland. From there in the early 1700's they were sent on to America. They were then 'driven' south, where, although splinter groups settled the entire east coast, the majority finally settled in Georgia and north Florida.

Meanwhile the Cavaliers, or ruling class, represented in the majority by 'second sons' from Britain who could not inherit, proceeded to plan and set up a system of government and banking that was designed from the beginning to serve mainly themselves. Also, since the Puritans and Quakers, who settled the north, were generally peaceful, educated and religious, they were forever at odds with the Border folk whose roots were in a militaristic and enslaved background. This tension ensured that each group would have their own definition of concepts such as 'freedom' and that this would be reflected in both pubic and personal life values that could not be reconciled.

The most interesting element of this book for me, was discovering that the culture we now call 'black' is the nearest thing to the Cavalier culture that remains in existence. The language and grammar are almost identical to the Cavalier class, and the social system with its blending of families to include relatives and friends, and its tendency to be emotional and flamboyant, is identical to Fischer's description of Cavalier behavior. Even the physical production of the voice - low in the chest - (think Bernie Mac) is identical to the Cavalier cultural norm. As Fischer points out - the Cavalier ruling class felt entitled to take anyone in, make their own rules, and often lived, slept and ate with African slaves, merging their private lives with Africans to an extent unknown amongst Puritans and Quakers. Ironically, Puritans and Quakers developed and strongly stated an antipathy to the Cavalier culture long before they applied any antipathy to Africans, who over time had adopted the same culture, language attributes, social norms and speaking style.

In short - this book is a gem. Highly recommended as a source of understanding the social system we live in today.