Colin Woodard (10 page)

The Puritan emigrants were led not by highborn nobles or gentlemen—virtually none ever came to Yankeedom—but by an elite distinguished by education. “These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time,” the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of early New England in 1835. “All, perhaps without exception, had received a good education and many of them were well known in Europe for their talents and achievements.”
³

The Puritans had been hostile to royal and aristocratic prerogative at home and continued to be so in America. From the beginning Yankeedom was opposed to the creation of a landed aristocracy and suspicious of inherited privilege and the conspicuous display of wealth. Unique among the colonies, its leaders didn't hand out massive swaths of land to friends, family, and allies so the latter could become rich by retailing lots out to others. Instead the Puritans gave town charters to approved groups of settlers, who in turn elected a committee of their peers to select the location of the public road, church, schoolhouse, and town green and to divvy up family lots. While larger or wealthier families might have been granted larger lots, the division was surprisingly egalitarian. The townspeople often named settlements for the eastern English towns they'd left behind: Haverhill, Ipswich, and Groton (all in Suffolk), Springfield, Malden, and Braintree (in Essex), Lynn, Hingham, and Newton (in Norfolk), and the southern Lincolnshire port of Boston. Townspeople were supposed to work together toward the common good of their community. Squabbling over land and other material things was thought a distraction from their true calling before God.
⁴

The New England settlement model differed from Tidewater not merely in the presence of towns but in the power vested in them. Puritans believed every community of the chosen should govern itself without interference from bishops, archbishops, or kings; every congregation was to be completely self-governing. Worldly matters were to be dealt with in exactly the same way. Every town was to be a little republic unto itself, with total control over the enforcement of laws, the administration of schools and real estate, the collection and (for the most part) spending of taxes, and the organization of militias for self-defense. While counties had almost no powers at all, every town had its own government: a group of selectmen elected by the adult male members of the church. The selectmen acted as a plural executive, while the town's eligible voters gathered for town meetings and functioned as a miniature parliament. Although New England was an intolerant and in many ways authoritarian place to live, it was, by the standards of the age, shockingly democratic: 60 to 70 percent of adult males (or 30 to 35 percent of the total adult population) had the right to vote, and the rich and wellborn were given no special privileges either in politics or before the law. This tradition of self-government, local control, and direct democracy has remained central to Yankee culture. To this day, rural communities across New England still control most local affairs through an annual town meeting at which every expenditure is debated and voted on not by an elected representative but by the inhabitants themselves.

Indeed, Yankees would come to have faith in government to a degree incomprehensible to people of the other American nations. Government, New Englanders believed from the beginning, could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools. More than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of government as being run by and for themselves. Everyone is supposed to participate, and there is no greater outrage than to manipulate the political process for private gain. Yankee idealism never died.

The Puritan belief that each individual had to encounter divine revelation through reading the scriptures had far-reaching implications. If everyone was expected to read the Bible, everyone had to be literate. Public schoolhouses, therefore, were built and staffed by salaried teachers as soon as a new town was established. While the other American nations had no school systems of any kind in the mid–seventeenth century—education was a privilege of the rich—New England required all children to be sent to school under penalty of law. While few Englishmen could read or write in 1660, two-thirds of Massachusetts men and more than a third of women could sign their own names. And while basic education was universal, those with higher education were accorded the sort of respect and deference other societies reserved for the highborn. Early New England had an elite, a group of leading families who intermarried and came to dominate political and religious affairs, but it was an elite based not on wealth but education. Of the original 15,000 settlers who came to Massachusetts Bay, at least 129 were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, a shockingly high figure for the age; virtually all of them assumed leadership roles. None of the men who served as governors in early Massachusetts or Connecticut was a noble, but many had graduated from the English universities or Harvard, a homegrown alternative founded just six years after the first Puritans had arrived. (It was instituted, according to a 1645 brochure, “to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches.”) Boston today is said to be the intellectual capital of the continent; indeed, it has been so since its very foundation.
⁵

 

If the Puritans had kept to themselves, their neighbors might have taken little notice of them. But what would cause Yankeedom eventually to be so loathed by the other nations was its desire—indeed, its
missio
n—to impose its ways on everyone else. For the Puritans didn't merely believe they were God's chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world. All Yankee Calvinists were thought to have a “calling,” a vocation through which they would, priestlike, further God's work. They had to be constantly vigilant in the performance of their calling, be it as a missionary, a merchant, or a cobbler. Idleness was ungodly. Personal wealth was expected to be reinvested in one's good works—professional or philanthropic—to bring the world in closer accord with the divine plan. Other societies and cultures would presumably see the “light on the hill” and wish to conform; woe be to those who did not.

The Puritans tended to be affronted by and fearful of otherness, which could make them rather dangerous to have as one's neighbors. They especially feared the wilderness, a disorderly, impulsive place at the edge of their fields where Satan lurked, ready to tempt those who wandered too far from the watchful eyes of the community. The people of the forest, the Native Americans of New England, had clearly fallen under devilish influence, what with their unrestrained manners, open sexuality, skimpy clothing, belief in spirits, and disrespect for the Sabbath. Unlike the settlers in New France, the Puritans regarded the Indians as “savages” to whom normal moral obligations—respect of treaties, fair dealing, forgoing the slaughter of innocents—did not apply. When a group of dissatisfied Puritan settlers marched into the wilderness to found a squatter's colony called Connecticut in 1636, Massachusetts authorities engineered a genocidal war against the Pequot Indians so as to have a pretext to seize the region from under the squatters by conquest. In one notorious incident they surrounded a poorly defended Pequot village and butchered virtually every man, woman, and child they found there, mostly by burning them alive. The slaughter was shocking to the Puritans' temporary Indian allies, the Narragansetts, who called it “too furious.” Plymouth governor William Bradford conceded that it had been “a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same” but concluded that “the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice” which God “had wrought so wonderfully for them.” Full-scale conflicts with the Indians continued throughout the colonial period, many of them made worse by the Puritan practice of attacking a neutral or friendly tribe while at war with another. Captured Indian children were killed or sold to slaveholders in the English Caribbean. Puritan preacher William Hubbard endorsed this practice, seeing the seizure of so many “young serpents of the same brood” as another sign of “Divine Favour to the English.”
⁶

The Puritans' program of conquest was not limited to Indian peoples. During and immediately after the English Civil War, Massachusetts soldiers and preachers attempted Yankee coups in Maryland and the Bahamas, annexed the Royalist colony of Maine, and reduced Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Hampshire to mere satellites of their Bible Commonwealth. For four decades, Boston ruled the region as the capital of the United Colonies of New England, a confederation that incorporated all the Yankee settlements save those in Rhode Island. Puritan courts enforced Calvinist morality on hard-living Maine fishermen and drove Anglican priests from New Hampshire.
⁷

Here were the kernels of the twin political ideologies of America's imperial age: American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. The first held that Americans were God's chosen people, the second that He wished Americans to rule the continent from sea to sea. Both ideas had their origins in Yankee Puritan thought and would be developed and championed by the sons of New England. The concepts would remain popular in Yankeedom until the early nineteenth century, when it became clear that their own culture would not dominate the United States as it had New England. To Yankee frustration, the other nations would actively resist their hegemony.

From the outset, the Yankees were opposed to the very values cherished by the aristocratic society taking shape in Tidewater, including their “Norman” cultural identity. When the English Civil War broke out, hundreds of Puritans returned home to fight in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, a military force founded on the radical notion that promotions should be based on proficiency rather than social status. As they clashed with Royalist armies, they grew to believe they were fighting to liberate their Anglo-Saxon lands from the Norman invaders six hundred years after the latter had arrived with William the Conqueror. “What were the lords of England,” a group of common soldiers declared to a wartime visitor to their encampment, “but William the Conqueror's colonels?” King Charles, they decreed, was “the last successor of William the Conqueror” who had to be cast out if the people were to “have recovered ourselves from under the Norman yoke.” The soldiers drew up a lofty document called the Agreement of the People, which asserted their natural freedom, called for every parish to select its own clergy, and demanded an end to aristocratic privileges before the law. “Our very laws were made by our conquerors,” one New Model Army veteran asserted. “We are now engaged for our freedom.”
⁸

Tensions with Tidewater did not end with the English Civil War. The New Model Army's victory (and the military dictatorship that followed) sparked the “Cavalier Exodus” to Virginia while freeing the Puritans of Massachusetts to annex their neighbors. For Tidewater gentry, New England—complicit in a treasonous rebellion and the execution of the king—was a seditious land populated by radicals committed to destroying the foundations on which society stood. For Yankees, Tidewater was a bastion of reactionary forces, its lords committed to perpetuating the enslavement of the English people begun by their Norman ancestors. Their fears were given new urgency after Cromwell's death in 1658 when, in short order, the monarchy was restored and a “Cavalier Parliament” of Royalist sympathizers convened in Westminster. The gentlemen of Virginia and the Calverts of Maryland once again had the backing of London, and the Puritans faced a mortal threat to their young nation.

America's English colonies were rushing toward their first revolution. But first, there were some foreigners to contend with.

CHAPTER 5

M
ost Americans know the Dutch founded what is now Greater New York City. Few realize that their influence is largely the reason New York is New York, the most vibrant and powerful city on the continent, and one with a culture and identity unlike that of anyplace else in the United States. Incredibly, its salient features developed when Manhattan was still largely a wilderness and the greatest city on Earth was but a tiny village clinging to the island's southern tip.

New Netherland was founded in 1624, just four years after the
Mayflower
voyage and six years ahead of the Puritans' arrival in Massachusetts Bay. Its capital and principal settlement, New Amsterdam, was clustered around the wooden Fort Amsterdam, which stood where the Museum of the American Indian is now located, next to Battery Park and Bowling Green, where the Dutch had their cattle market. When New Amsterdam was conquered by the English in 1664, the city extended only as far as Wall Street (where, in fact, the Dutch had built a wall). The main road, Breede weg (Broadway), passed through a gate in the wall and continued on past farms, fields, and forests to the village of Haarlem, on the north end of the island. Ferrymen rowed goods and people across the East River to Lange Eylandt and the villages of Breukelen (Brooklyn), Vlissingen (Flushing), Vlacke Bos (Flatbush) and New Utrecht (now a Brooklyn neighborhood) or across the harbor to Hoboken and Staaten Eylandt. The area had but 1,500 inhabitants.
¹

But this small village was already unlike anywhere else in North America. Established as a fur-trading post, it was an unabashedly commercial settlement with little concern for either social cohesion or the creation of a model society. A global corporation, the Dutch West India Company, dominated the city's affairs and formally governed New Netherland for the first few decades. Standing between Yankeedom and Tidewater, the city had emerged as a trading entrepôt for both, its markets, ships, and warehouses filled with Virginia tobacco, New England salt cod, Indian-caught beaver pelts, linens, dishes, and other manufactured goods from the mother country, and produce from the farms of Harlem and Brooklyn. Its population was equally diverse, including French-speaking Walloons; Lutherans from Poland, Finland, and Sweden; Catholics from Ireland and Portugal; and Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers from New England. Jews were banned from setting foot in New France, Yankeedom, and Tidewater, but dozens of Ashkenazim and Spanish-speaking Sephardim settled in New Amsterdam in the 1650s, forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the largest Jewish community in the world. Indians roamed the streets, and Africans—slave, free, and half-free—already formed a fifth of the population. A Muslim from Morocco had been farming outside the walls for three decades. Visitors were shocked by the village's religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. In 1643 Father Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit working in New France, estimated New Amsterdam's population at 500 and the number of its languages at 18, an “arrogance of Babel” that “has done much harm to all men.”
²
The different ethnic and national groups often kept to themselves and squabbled with one another for power, with not even the Dutch forming a majority within the settlement. The local elite was comprised almost entirely of self-made men who'd risen from humble origins in the worlds of commerce and real estate speculation. The government, desirous above all to promote trade, embraced diversity even as it eschewed democracy. The village was, to put it simply, New York, and many of its characteristics have endured to the present day.