Skip to content
- Author: David Hackett Fischer
- Full Title: Albion’s Seed
- Category: #books
- Puritan theology became a set of insoluble logic problems about how to reconcile human responsibility with God’s omnipotence, how to find enlightenment in a universe of darkness, how to live virtuously in a world of evil, and how to reconcile the liberty of a believing Christian with the absolute authority of the word.
- Young gentlemen of Virginia were given “freedom of the will” not as an end in itself, but as a means of achieving virtue—that is, of living in harmony with reason, nature, and fortune. This idea was very far from the restless striving of New England Puritans. It was a stoic ideal which cultivated a calm acceptance of life. It taught that one must fear nothing and accept whatever fate might bring with courage, honesty, dignity and grace. The mastery of this stoic creed was one of the central goals of socialization in Virginia.
- In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tradition of hegemonic liberty entered a third stage of development, in which it became less hierarchical and more egalitarian. Such are the conditions of modern life that this idea is no longer the exclusive property of a small elite, and the degradation of others is no longer necessary to their support. The progress of political democracy has admitted everyone to the ruling class. In America and Britain today, the idea of an independent elite, firmly in command of others, has disappeared. But the associated idea of an autonomous individual, securely in command of self, is alive and flourishing.
- For the first years of infancy, Quakers believed in what they called a “guarded education.” They thought that small children should be sheltered from the world and raised within a carefully controlled environment. Behind this idea lay an empiricism which held that children could be “trained up” by control of their surroundings. “Virtue passes not by lineal succession, nor piety by inheritance,” said the London meeting.
- William Penn put it thus: If God give you children, love them with wisdom, correct them with affection: never strike in passion, and suit the correction to their age as well as fault. Convince them of their error before you chastise them … punish them more by their understandings than the rod.
- A strict obedience is so important that no head of a family can support their station with any degree of peace and satisfaction, without [it], and by timely and steady care is easily maintained, whereby a great deal of jarring, scolding and correcting is avoided.14
- The third stage of life was one which the Quakers called youth, and which we know as adolescence—a period they defined as life from fourteen to twenty-one.19 One Quaker called this “the slippery and dangerous time of life.”20 In this stage, Quaker parents tended to be more active and constraining than Puritans and Anglicans had been. Quakers argued that young people should remain within their families. “I think it is better,” one wrote, “for children to be at home than a gadding abroad.”21 Many strenuously condemned the custom of “sending out” which was widely practiced among the Puritans. William Penn wrote angrily against those who “do with their children as with their souls, put them out at livery for so much a year.”
- Higher learning was regarded with suspicion even by Quakers as erudite as William Penn. His aphorisms often returned to this subject: [Universities are] signal places for idleness, looseness, prophaneness, prodigality and gross ignorance. We are at pains to make them scholars but not men, to talk rather than to know, which is true canting. We pursue false knowledge and mistake education extremely. Children had rather be making of tools and instruments of play, shaping, drawing, framing, etc., than getting some rules of propriety of speech by heart. If man be the index or epitome of the world, as philosophers tell us, we have only to read ourselves well to be learned in it.17
- In all of these ways, the Quakers provided an ethical and cultural environment which strongly supported industrial and capitalist development. Frederick Tolles writes from long acquaintance with the records of Quaker capitalists, “One is probably justified suggesting that in the conduct of business, the Quaker merchants were extremely cautious and prudent, meticulously accurate in details, and insistent upon others being so. It is not difficult to understand how men who exhibited these traits in their commercial dealings (no matter how generous and sympathetic as individuals and friends) should have acquired a reputation for driving a hard bargain.”13
- Quakers founded the first bank in British America, and made Philadelphia the most important capital market in the New World until the emergence of New York in the early nineteenth century. From the beginning, the Delaware Valley also became a hive of industry—more so than New England.
- Here was yet another irony. The Quakers created a social system in Pennsylvania which gave them increasing opportunity to exercise their charitable impulses. They became deeply concerned about a class of paupers which their own values and institutions had helped to create. Some Quakers understood this system very well. John Woolman observed that “the money which the wealthy receive from the poor, who do more than a proper share in raising it, is frequently paid to other poor people.”28
- As always, the leading exponent was William Penn himself. He defined order as a system which “enjoins men to be just, honest, virtuous; to do no wrong, to kill, rob, deceive, prejudice none; but to do as one would be done unto.”2 The same idea was written into the laws of West Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, which made their officers responsible for maintaining “good order,” by which was meant a condition of social peace in which each individual was forbidden to intrude upon the quiet of another person.3
- This was a revolutionary idea in its own time—a conception of order in which everyone did not have to believe the same creed or to fit into a single hierarchy. Here was an open idea of order, grounded in the golden rule and the doctrine of the “light within.” To Anglicans this Quaker idea of order appeared to be dangerously permissive; to Puritans it seemed a contradiction in terms. But an idea of order as mutual forbearance defined its own obligations, which the Quakers enforced very strictly in their colonies. Their conduct of this experiment was more tough-minded than either their admirers or their critics have believed.
- The people of the southern highlands would become famous in the nineteenth century for the intensity of their xenophobia, and also for the violence of its expression. In the early nineteenth century, they tended to detest great planters and abolitionists in equal measure. During the Civil War some fought against both sides. In the early twentieth century they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic. In our own time they are furiously hostile to both communists and capitalists. The people of the southern highlands have been remarkably even-handed in their antipathies—which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion or nationality.
- For backcountry boys, the object was not will-breaking as among the Puritans, or will-bending as in Virginia. The rearing of male children in the back settlements was meant to be positively will-enhancing. Its primary purpose was to foster fierce pride, stubborn independence and a warrior’s courage in the young. An unintended effect was to create a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in their way.
- One wrote, “for three centuries … parents often look on it as evidence of spirit and smartness to see their children rudely insulting the quiet and often humble citizens of the country.”
- From an early age, small boys were taught to think much of their own honor, and to be active in its defense. Honor in this society meant a pride of manhood in masculine courage, physical strength and warrior virtue. Male children were trained to defend their honor without a moment’s hesitation—lashing out instantly against their challengers with savage violence.
- Where the warrior ethic is strong, the work ethic grows weak. This was so among the borderers and backsettlers, on both sides of the water. A traveler in North Britain remarked that the inhabitants were “indolent in high degree, unless roused to war.”1 In the American backcountry, other travelers frequently repeated similar observations. “They are very poor owing to their extreme indolence,” wrote an itinerant clergyman. A Philadelphia Quaker wrote: “ … the Irish are mostly poor beggarly idle people.”
- This “indolence” was in some ways more apparent than real. The impression of idleness rose in part from the fact that men and women in this culture worked differently from others. Most of them lived by a combination of farming and herding which required heavy labor in some seasons and little effort in others.
- The traveler Johann Schoepf was much interested in ideas of law and liberty which he found in the backcountry. “They shun everything which appears to demand of them law and order, and anything that preaches constraint,” Schoepf wrote of the backsettlers. “They hate the name of a justice, and yet they are not transgressors. Their object is merely wild. Altogether, natural freedom … is what pleases them.”
- The rulers of Virginia adopted still a third immigration policy. Puritans and Quakers were not welcome; many were banished or driven out. But the Virginians actively recruited a servile underclass to support their manorial ideal, first by bringing in large numbers of English servants, and then by importing African slaves. Their object was not merely to solve a problem of labor scarcity (which might have been done in many other ways) but to do so in a manner consistent with their hierarchical values.
- The backsettlers were not able to control immigration to the southern highlands in any formal way. But local neighborhoods had other methods of deciding who would go or stay. The old folk custom of “hating out” was used when necessary. The prevailing cultural climate also had a similar effect; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, Quakers and Congregationalists left the southern backcountry, moving north to a more congenial cultural environment.
- To understand the relationship between race and regional culture in British America, one must study carefully the timing and sequence of historical change. An important and neglected fact about race slavery in British America is that it developed very slowly. Africans did not begin to arrive in large numbers until the late seventeenth century. The presence of blacks did not begin to have a major cultural impact on British America until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Then, the impact was profound. The problem of race relations moved rapidly to the center of cultural history in the plantation colonies. African folkways also began to transform the language and culture of Europeans, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery created new folkways of its own.
- In this first volume, the major conclusion is that race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies; that culture created slavery.
- The Constitution of 1787 was an attempt to write the rules of engagement among these regional “republics” of British America. The purpose of the Constitutional Convention was to create an institutional consensus within which four regional cultures could mutually agree to respect their various differences.
- The events of the war itself radically transformed northern attitudes toward southern folkways. As casualty lists grew longer northern war aims changed from an intention merely to resist the expansion of southern culture to a determination to transform it. As this attitude spread through the northern states the Civil War became a cultural revolution.