Coming to America

Until fairly recently most history was concerned with political leaders and wars and politics; not with the lives of ordinary people. Family histories and local histories connect the general with the particular. In trying to imagine what the lives of our ancestors were like and how they may have been influenced by their cultural and social environments, I have been influenced by a recent study by Prof. David Hackett Fischer.[1] He argues that, although less than 20% of Americans today trace their ancestry back to Britain, our culture is still strongly influenced by four distinct cultures that came from different regions of the British Isles and settled in four regions in North America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Aside from our Huguenot immigrant couple, all of the Popenoe ancestors until the 20^th century were British who arrived here in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Most of them were New England puritans, but because the Popenoe family traveled far in its first 150 years it was exposed to all four regional cultures. So before we get into the details of the family, lets see what these four cultures were.

Migrations involve both a push and a pull. Today we often classify immigrants to America as those who are pushed by persecution vs. those who are attracted by economic opportunity. The same factors applied in the 17^th century, although in most cases the push—particularly due to religious persecution--was stronger than the pull.

The New England Puritans. Between 1629 and 1640 when King Charles I tried to rule England without Parliament—some 20,000 Puritans left England and settled in New England. Known as the Great Migration, these 20,000 people became the breeding stock for America’s Yankee population, doubling every generation for two centuries. Most of them came from East Anglia, something of a rural backwater today, but in that time the most advanced and industrialized region in England. In those days the easiest transport was by sea and the culture was strongly influenced by earlier invasions of Angles, Jutes, and Danes, and more recently by the Dutch. For centuries this area had had more freemen and fewer serfs than elsewhere in England. East Anglia also led the rest of England in its educational and cultural attainments. This is where Calvinist Protestantism became most firmly planted in England and it was the center of resistance to Charles I after 1625.

The migrants to America were driven by a desire to create a religious commonwealth where they could worship God in their own way and raise their families in accordance with their beliefs. In transferring their society across the ocean they brought not only their religious convictions but their East Anglian folkways regarding speech, dress, food, architecture, and much else. The leaders of the emigration actively discouraged servants and persons of humble means, and the cost of passage—at least Ł50—was far beyond the reach of the poor. The great majority of these emigrants were from the middle levels of English society: yeomen (small landowners), husbandmen (small farmers), artisans, craftsmen, merchants and traders. More than 50% had been engaged in a skilled trade or craft in England; less than a third had a farming background. Less than 5% were laborers and the few servants arrived with the families they served. This mix brought unusually high levels of literacy and this, in turn, led to an emphasis on schooling in the New England colonies. In 1647 a Massachusetts law compelled every town of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster, and every town of one hundred families to keep a grammar school that offered instruction in Latin and Greek.

By comparison with other colonies, marriages came rather late. At the same time, due to strong rules against extra-marital sex, rates of prenuptial pregnancy were among the lowest in the Western world. The Puritans thought of the family not as an end in itself, but as an instrument of their highest religious purposes. Like the Hebrews, they thought of themselves as God’s chosen people. In 17^th century New England, some 90% of children received biblical names, often carefully selected for the moral qualities they represented. Two thirds of first-born sons and daughters were given the forenames of their parents. The Puritans believed that infants are born ignorant and naturally disposed to do evil in the world unless carefully reared. The most urgent purpose of child rearing was called the "breaking of the will"—a determined effort to destroy a spirit of autonomy in a small child. Many parents practiced "sending out", putting their children in another family where they were thought to learn better manners and behavior.

The Puritans believed that every Christian has two callings: the first to live a Godly life in the world; the second to have a vocation—a way of serving God in the world. Their pattern of farming was similar to that in East Anglia—small family farms which combined field crops and farm animals. Most New England towns had commons for pasture and meadow. But trade also developed rapidly. By the mid 17^th century New Englanders had become the Dutch of the British Empire with small seaports thick along the coast. Distribution of land recognized differences in rank but was relatively egalitarian compared to other colonies. There were few great landlords and few landless families. Studies of wealth distribution in 25 Massachusetts towns between 1630 and 1750 showed that the top 10% of wealth holders held only 20 to 30% of taxable property. New Englanders did not follow the English pattern of primogeniture but usually gave a double portion of their estate to the first-born son—following advice given in Deuteronomy.

The New England social order was permeated by what might be called ordered liberty. This included the idea of collective liberty for the community, which was achieved in part by close restraint on the behavior of individuals. For the first generation, nobody could live in the colony without approval of the General Court. There were individual liberties that applied to certain categories of people—some granted to all men, some to all free men (property holders) and some only to gentlemen. The town constable was chosen by his neighbors. He served processes, made arrests, summoned town meetings and frequently collected taxes, organized elections, and kept a record of newcomers. When serious trouble threatened, the constable was expected to summon all the men of the town, who were required by law to support him. All of these traditions and values made violent crime and disorder uncommon in Massachusetts—less than half those of the Chesapeake colonies, and this tradition lasted for 300 years. Most people never bothered to lock their houses.

In 1641, just as the Puritan Great Migration was coming to an end, Sir William Berkeley arrived in Virginia as the King’s new Governor. In his 35 years as Governor, he labored to build an ideal society that was an expression of his own social values. His most important role was to recruit a Royalist elite. During the 1650s when the Puritans in England gained the upper hand, thousands of Royalists emigrated to escape persecution. These "distressed cavaliers" came predominantly from south and west England, the hinterlands of London and Bristol, which had been the strongest areas in support of the king. Many were younger sons of eminent English families with no hope of inheriting an estate in England who had entered mercantile and maritime occupations in London and Bristol which brought them into contact with Virginia. They tried to reconstruct in Virginia a cultural system from which they had been excluded at home. They continued to intermarry on both sides of the Atlantic, creating a tightly integrated colonial elite.

An English gentleman was described as one who could live idly and without manual labor. Maintenance of this lifestyle required the immigration of many workers and servants. Between 1645 and 1670, there were 40,000 to 50,000 immigrants to Virginia, more than 75% of them indentured servants. Three fourths of them were half grown boys and young men between 15 and 24. Unlike emigrants to New England, others paid their passages. In summary, immigrants to Virginia were more highly stratified, more male-dominant, more rural, more agrarian, less highly skilled, and less literate. Later, due to high death rates among this white servant class, African slaves were imported to take their place.

The Virginia dialect followed speech patterns in southwestern England, as did fashion, architecture, food, and many other folkways. Settlement was largely in plantations; towns were few. Due to the unhealthy environment, more than three-quarters of children in tidewater Virginia during the 17^th century lost at least one parent before reaching the age of eighteen. Frequently, the extended family picked up the pieces. Accordingly, Virginians gave more importance to the extended family and less to the nuclear family than did New Englanders. The religion was Anglican. For many years Puritans and other Protestant sects were banned and everyone had to pay church taxes.

Among landed families, marriage was regarded as a union of properties as much as persons. Love was not regarded as a precondition, and divorce was not available. One marriage manual advised: "Children are so much the goods, the possessions of their parents, that they cannot without a kind of theft, give away themselves without the allowance of those that have the right in them." Many of these unions were cousin marriages. Males married at twenty-five or twenty-six on average, but most girls were married by seventeen. Sexual relations were less strictly regulated in Virginia than in New England; many more women—especially among servants—were pregnant at marriage. While women of good families were held to the highest standards of sexual virtue, males were expected to be predators. An old folk saying defined a virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle.

Biblical names were less common in Virginia than in New England. Typically first-born children were named for their grandparents; second born for their parents. Surnames were frequently used as forenames to reinforce connections between families and strengthen the solidarity of the elite. Children were taught detailed rules of right conduct. Among the earliest writings by George Washington was a list of 110 rules of civility and decent behavior in company and conversation. Education was encouraged for the elite but not for the common people. These learning ways, which downplayed public education and printing, were rooted in a culture which came out of 17^th century England but persisted in the southern states for three hundred years.

From an early date, Virginia laws required that when there was no will, the entire estate must go to the eldest male heir. Many parents made similar arrangements in their wills, to keep large estates together. The average size of individual land holdings in Virginia in the 17^th century was much larger than in New England; there were also many more landless. Social rigidity was great. It was exceptionally difficult to cross the great divide that separated common folk from gentle folk. People of the lower orders were expected to show deference to those higher than them, and those higher were expected to show condescension to their inferiors, meaning to treat them with kindness, decency and respect. Flowing from this was the political order, which was run by men from the more important families. The Virginia idea of liberty was hierarchical liberty—the birthright of freeborn Englishmen which gave them the right to rule lesser people. As one Virginia declared, "I am an Aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality."

The next big migration to North America began about 1675 with the exodus of Quakers from the Midlands and North England to the Delaware Valley: what is now eastern Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and northern Delaware. Viking invaders had colonized the North Midlands, more than any other part of England. From the Norsemen came the customs of assemblies in the open, and of individual ownership of houses and fields. The farmers of this region had a reputation for independence and a custom of equality among themselves. The family and farmhands all ate together; they dressed alike in simple gray homespun suits and dresses. Their houses were sparsely furnished and they made a virtue of simplicity and plain speech. All of these folkways became a part of Quakerism.

The Quaker settlement of the Delaware Valley began in Salem, New Jersey in 1675 (which we will come back to later in this paper) and continued with William Penn’s settlement in 1682. As many as 23,000 colonists moved to the Delaware Valley between 1675 and 1715 and the majority were Quakers or Quaker sympathizers. By 1750 Quakers had become the third largest religious denomination in the British colonies, exceeded only by Congregationalists and Anglicans.

The Society of Friends was organized as a complex structure of meetings. They recognized a need for leadership by elders and overseers, but authority belonged to the society itself. Quakers created a rigorous system of social discipline that regulated marriage, sex, business ethics, dress, speech, eating and drinking, politics and law. These teachings (many of which emanated from the culture of the North Midlands) entered deeply into the culture of the Delaware Valley. The Friends and their neighbors alike embraced religious freedom and social pluralism. They favored a weak government and strong communal groups. Most came to share the Quakers’ concern for basic literacy, the sanctity of property, equality of manners, simplicity of taste, as well as their ethic of work. Benjamin Franklin exemplifies these traits although he was not a Quaker and was actually born in New England.

From its beginnings, the Society of Friends was an evangelical movement that spread from its birthplace in northern England to Wales, Ireland, Holland and Germany, and many other places. Accordingly, people of great ethnic diversity settled the Delaware Valley and they were well accepted. The Pennsylvania "Dutch" sects are similar in many ways to the Quakers. By 1760, English Quakers were a minority in the colonies they had founded but they remained in control long enough to shape the character of the region. For eighty years they wrote the laws, distributed the land, decided immigration policy, and created institutions that survive to the present day.

Of all the English-speaking peoples in the 17^th century the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes. They usually named their first born children after grandparents, being careful to honor maternal and paternal lines in an even-handed way. Some scholars believe that the origins of the modern American family are to be found in the folkways of the Delaware Valley. One called the Quaker settlements "the first scene of a major, widespread, obviously successful assertion of the child-centered, fond-fostering, nuclear family in early America and most likely in the Anglo-American world.”[2] They believed that small children should be sheltered from the world and raised within a carefully controlled environment. When children reached "the dawn of reason" the parents were urged to love them with wisdom, correct them with affection, never strike in passion, and suit the correction to their age as well as their fault. During adolescence, Quaker parents tended to be more active and constraining than the Puritans and Anglicans; children were kept with their families rather than "sent out".

A Pennsylvania Act of 1683 required that all children must be taught to read and write by the age of twelve and trained in a useful trade or skill, no matter whether rich or poor. At the same time, the Quakers had little respect for higher learning and were very slow to start colleges.

In the 17^th century the average land holding in Pennsylvania was about 250 acres—twice as large as town grants in Massachusetts but less than half the size of land patents in Virginia. For a long period the distribution of wealth in the Delaware Valley was more egalitarian than any other region of British America. Primogeniture was uncommon, widows usually received their "third", daughters received their inheritance in forms other than land, and grandchildren were often remembered, at least in token ways.

In England Quakers played a role far beyond their numbers in the industrial revolution. Quakers started the great banking houses of England. The same thing happened in America. From the beginning the Delaware Valley became a hive of industry—more so than New England. Quakers founded the first bank in British America and made Philadelphia the most important capital market in the New World until New York took over in the early 19^th century.

The Quaker idea of social order was not unity as among Puritans, or hierarchy as among Anglicans. Order was a condition of social peace grounded in the golden rule--in which individuals were forbidden to disturb the peace of others. Rates of violent crime were relatively low. The Quaker idea of liberty was reciprocal liberty beginning with liberty of conscience. Many Quaker immigrants had experienced religious persecution; they shared a determination to prevent it in America. Pennsylvania law established complete freedom of worship and provided penalties for those who derided the religion of others.

For seven centuries the border region between England and Scotland was fought over by kings on both sides. The pervasive violence provided opportunities to criminals to rob and rape and murder with impunity. Blood relationships became important: families grew into clans and many of these clans lived outside the law, claiming to be either English or Scotch when it suited their purpose. This incessant violence created a social system different from that in the south of England. Forms of tenancy were designed to maintain large bodies of fighting men. Like the Mafia today, people settled disputes by blood or by paying protection to powerful families.

The region was gradually "pacified" as the two warring kingdoms came together with the Act of Union of England and Scotland in 1706-7. This pacification disrupted a culture that had been many centuries in the making. Entire families were outlawed, many of the most disorderly were shipped to Northern Ireland. The old warrior families were replaced by a new class of entrepreneurs who saw the future of the region in commerce and coal. Arable lands passed into the hands of agricultural capitalists who rarely visited their estates. The properties were run by stewards and bailiffs who sent the income to southern England, creating a worse distribution of wealth in the region than before. Major crop failures occurred in the 18^th century. Each was followed by a surge in emigration. Between 1717 and 1775 more than a quarter million of these economic emigrants sailed to North America from northern English ports, the Scottish lowlands and northern Ireland. They came from different ethnic groups and religions (most were Presbyterians), but a common culture. Perhaps 2% came from the gentry of these regions around the Irish Sea, more were yeoman, but the great majority was farmers and farm laborers who had owned no land. Accordingly the social origins of these emigrants were more humble than those of the Puritans and Quakers, but there were few desperately poor or totally unskilled.

Most of these people entered America through the ports of Philadelphia and Newcastle, from which they spread out and squatted on any piece of vacant land they could find. The local officials found them uncouth and uncivilized, and they encouraged them to move on to the backcountry—what we now call the frontier. Most of them took the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, which ran from Philadelphia to the south through the backcountry east of the Appalachians, finding new homes in the western parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. This was the major source of the American frontier people, and their descendants today make up the people of Appalachia, and much of the upcountry south and west.

These emigrants from North Britain established in the southern highlands a cultural hegemony that was even greater than their proportion of the population. The borderers were more at home than others in this anarchic environment which was well suited to their family system, their warrior ethic, their farming and herding economy, their attitudes toward land and wealth, and their ideas of work and power. Their Scotch-Irish speech became the prevailing speech of the southern highlands and persists today as the English of country and western singers, truck drivers, and back country politicians. The word hoozier in the old north England dialect meant someone who was unusually large and rough. Today it is a citizen of Indiana. And redneck was a slang term for religious dissenters in north England.

Log cabins were not invented in America; they were a transplant from the primitive cabins of the borderlands caused by insecurity of land tenure. Cabins were simple buildings suitable to a migratory people with little wealth, few possessions and small confidence in the future. A folk saying in the Southern highlands was "When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs and start." Except for the times when settlers huddled together in forts or stations for protection from the Indians, the typical house was built near a spring beyond sight and sound from any other habitation.

The sexual customs of the backcountry were very similar to those in northern England. Sexual talk and behavior were more open than in other parts of British America. One minister calculated in 1767 that 94% of the backcountry brides he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day. Marriages occurred frequently between kin. Both brides and grooms were very young, typically women at nineteen and men at twenty-one. Families were larger on average than in the other regions we have discussed.

While Presbyterians generally dominated, the backcountry was very mixed in its religious denominations, with emphasis on dissenters and evangelical sects, frequently noted for their bigotry toward others. A familiar form of evangelical religion was the camp meeting, where a large number of people worshipped together for several days in some country setting. Literacy varied greatly. Several studies showed that more than 90% of French Huguenot and German Protestant settlers in the backcountry could write their names, while as many as 50% of Scots and other northerners could not. Levels of schooling here have been lower than elsewhere in the United States from the 18^th century to the present day.

For backcountry boys socialization was not willbreaking as among the Puritans, or will bending as in Tidewater Virginia. Rather it was will enhancing. Male children were taught to be self-asserting; females to be self-denying. Small boys were taught to think much of and defend their own honor, meaning fierce pride, stubborn independence and a warrior’s courage. At an early age boys were given their own miniature weapons—an axe, a knife, a bow, even a childish gun. One result was to create a society of individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in their way.

There were official sheriffs and constables throughout the back country but the heaviest work of order keeping was done by self-appointed groups who called themselves regulators in the 18^th century, vigilantes in the 19^th, nightriders and Ku Klux Klan in the early 20^th, and militias in our own time. They shared the view that order was a system of retributive violence and that each individual was guardian of his own interests in that respect. Mobs frequently freed prisoners that they sympathized with, and lynched ones that they didn’t.

From the 17^th to the end of the 20^th century, these four regional cultures have continued in the United States. As new ethnic groups migrate to the various regions, they tend to pick up the existing regional culture. Three centuries ago New England was Congregationalist; today it is mostly Catholic. In 1650 its population was English; today it is heavily Irish, Italian and French Canadian. Even so, levels of social violence have stayed low in New England, while they have stayed high in the South, even in predominantly white areas with little ethnic diversity. In the 1980s Massachusetts enacted the toughest gun control statute in the nation; town schools emphasize that violence is not an acceptable form of social behavior. By contrast, Texas places few restraints on gun ownership and Texas law allows a husband to kill his wife’s lover.

Educational differences still are marked among the regions. By 1980, about 20% of the population had completed four years of college in New England; the ratio was 16% in the midland states, 15% in the coastal south, but only 10-12% in the other southern states. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries the status of women was comparatively high in New England and the Delaware Valley, low in Virginia, and lower in the backcountry. More recently, every state in the northern tier voted for the Equal Rights Amendment; every state in the southern highlands voted against it.

Enough. Let us now look at our family and try to imagine what cultural values influenced them and what heritage they bear today.

[1] Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989. The discussion of the four immigrating groups that follows is taken from this book.

[2] Barry Levy, quoted in Albion’s Seed, p 481.