Colin Woodard (9 page)

There were no towns at all until the end of the seventeenth century, apart from Jamestown and St. Mary's City, and even these twin capitals remained little more than villages with a few hundred inhabitants each. Gentlemen would travel to them occasionally to convene their assembly or perhaps make a rare call on the governor but otherwise had little to do with them. Both capitals were crude and appeared abandoned when the provincial assembly was out of session, with many houses uninhabited and the taverns empty. New capitals would eventually be built in Williamsburg and Annapolis, but they, too, were government campuses, not urban communities.
¹⁴
In sharp contrast to New England, there were no public schools (gentlemen's children had live-in tutors) or town governments (the county courthouse sufficed).

By the early 1700s the Cavaliers and their descendants had turned Tidewater into a country gentlemen's utopia, their manors lining the creeks and tributaries of the Chesapeake. Plantations were also taking shape on Albemarle and Pamlico sounds in the new colony of North Carolina and on the Atlantic shores of southern Delaware and the lower Delmarva peninsula.

Power in Tidewater had become hereditary. The leading families intermarried in both America and England, creating a close-linked cousinage that dominated Tidewater generally and Virginia in particular. The Virginia Royal Council served as that colony's senate, supreme court, and executive cabinet, and it controlled the distribution of land. By 1724 every single council member was related by blood or marriage. Two generations later, on the eve of the American Revolution, every member was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660. In the interceding century they rewarded one another with the majority of the public lands under the colony's control and appointments to the (very lucrative) post of collector of customs. At the county level, gentlemen controlled the distribution of justice and charity in their roles as justices of the peace and could hire and fire pastors at will from their seats on the church vestry. One newcomer recalled a gentleman's warning him “against disobliging or offending any person of note in the Colony [because] either by blood or marriage we are almost all related and so connected in our interests that whoever of a stranger presumes to offend any one of us will infallibly find an enemy of the whole.”
¹⁵

Running afoul of Tidewater gentlemen was a dangerous proposition. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century visitors constantly remarked on their haughty sense of personal honor and their furious reaction to the slightest insult. While the Yankee elite generally settled their disputes through the instrument of written laws, Tidewater gentry were more likely to resort to a duel. Commoners were equally prideful: arguments in the tavern commonly led to nasty fights in which it was acceptable to kick, bite, strangle, gouge out eyes, and dismember genitals of one's opponent. Lower-status people almost never challenged their betters for fear of savage retribution, as gentlemen could have lesser persons whipped for minor offenses. When one commoner spoke out against a governor, a court ordered that he be brutally beaten by forty men, be fined £200 (a decade's income for a peasant), have a hole bored through his tongue, and then be forever banished from Virginia. Indeed, cases that came to court were resolved by gentlemen judges who believed that issues should be decided by their own sense of justice rather than by precedents written in law books, even in matters of life and death. Court records show a clear pattern: leniency for masters and males, harsh sentences for servants and women. Even before the spread of full-fledged slavery, Tidewater's hierarchy was maintained by the threat of violence.
¹⁶

One might ask how such a tyrannical society could have produced some of the greatest champions of republicanism, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison. The answer is that Tidewater's gentry embraced
classical
republicanism, meaning a republic modeled after those of ancient Greece and Rome. They emulated the learned, slaveholding elite of ancient Athens, basing their enlightened political philosophies around the ancient Latin concept of
libertas
, or liberty. This was a fundamentally different notion from the Germanic concept of
Freiheit
, or freedom, which informed the political thought of Yankeedom and the Midlands. Understanding the distinction is essential to comprehending the fundamental disagreements that still plague relations between Tidewater, the Deep South, and New Spain on one hand and Yankeedom and the Midlands on the other.

For the Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, and other Germanic tribes of northern Europe, “freedom” was a birthright of free peoples, which they considered themselves to be. Individuals might have differences in status and wealth, but all were literally “born free.” All were equal before the law, and all had come into the world possessing “rights” that had to be mutually respected on threat of banishment. Tribes had the right to rule themselves through assemblies like Iceland's Althingi, recognized as the world's oldest parliament. Until the Norman invasion of 1066, the Anglo-Saxon tribes of England had ruled themselves in this manner. After the invasion, the lords of Normandy imposed manorial feudalism on England, but they never fully did away with the “free” institutions of the Anglo-Saxons and (Gaelo-Norse) Scots, which survived in village councils, English common law, and the House of Commons. It was this tradition that the Puritans carried to Yankeedom.

The Greek and Roman political philosophy embraced by Tidewater gentry assumed the opposite: most humans were born into bondage. Liberty was something that was granted and was thus a privilege, not a right. Some people were permitted many liberties, others had very few, and many had none at all. The Roman republic was one in which only a handful of people had the full privileges of speech (senators, magistrates), a minority had the right to vote on what their superiors had decided (citizens), and most people had no say at all (slaves). Liberties were valuable because most people did not have them and were thought meaningless without the presence of a hierarchy. For the Greeks and Romans there was no contradiction between republicanism and slavery, liberty and bondage. This was the political philosophy embraced and jealously guarded by Tidewater's leaders, whose highborn families saw themselves as descendants not of the “common” Anglo-Saxons, but rather of their aristocratic Norman conquerors. It was a philosophical divide with racial overtones and one that would later drive America's nations into all-out war with one another.
¹⁷

Tidewater's leaders imposed
libertas
on their society in countless ways. They referred to themselves as “heads” of their respective manors, dictating duties to their “hands” and other subservient appendages. Finding Jamestown and St. Mary's City too crude, they built new government campuses in Williamsburg and Annapolis from central plans inspired by Rome; Williamsburg featured a sumptuous formal “palace” for the governor (surrounded by Versailles-like formal gardens) and the elegant Capitol (not “state house”) decorated with a relief of Jupiter, the god whose temple stood at the center of Roman civic life. They named counties, cities, and colonies after their superiors: English royals (Prince George, Prince William, Princess Anne, Jamestown, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Georgetown, Virginia, Maryland) or high nobles (Albemarle, Baltimore, Beaufort, Calvert, Cecil, Cumberland, Caroline, Anne Arundel, Delaware). While they were passionate in defending their liberties, it would never have occurred to them that those liberties might be shared with their subjects. “I am an aristocrat,” Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”
¹⁸

While the gentry enjoyed ever-greater liberties—including leisure (liberty from work) and independence (liberty from the control of others)—those at the bottom of the hierarchy had progressively fewer. Tidewater's semifeudal model required a vast and permanent underclass to play the role of serfs, on whose toil the entire system depended. But from the 1670s onward, the gentry had an increasingly difficult time finding enough poor Englishmen willing to take on this role. Those who completed their indentures often could not support themselves in an agricultural export economy increasingly dominated by great plantations, and ex-servants led or joined rebellions in 1663, 1675, and 1683.

Slave traders offered a solution to this shortage, one developed on the English islands of the Caribbean and recently introduced in the settlements they'd created in the Deep South: the purchase of people of African descent who would become the
permanent
property of their masters, as would their children and grandchildren. This slave caste grew from a tenth of Tidewater's population in 1700 to a quarter in 1720 and 40 percent in 1760. As one scholar would later put it: “The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.” As we will see, this statement does not hold true for “the South” as a whole but rather for the distinct cultural nation of Tidewater.
¹⁹
It was a strategy that would set Tidewater on a path to destruction.

CHAPTER 4

B
y a twist of history, the dominant colonies of New England were founded by men who stood in total opposition to nearly every value that Tidewater gentry held dear. Hostile to landed aristocracy, noble privilege, the Anglican Church, and the Royalist cause, the Pilgrims of Cape Cod and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay had an entirely different vision for their new society. A moralistic nation of churches and schoolhouses, where each community functioned as its own self-governing republic, Yankeedom would leave an indelible mark on a vast swath of the continent.

The Pilgrims and, to a greater extent, the Puritans came to the New World not to re-create rural English life but rather to build a completely new society: an applied religious utopia, a Protestant theocracy based on the teachings of John Calvin. They would found a new Zion in the New England wilderness, a “city on a hill” to serve as a model for the rest of the world in those troubled times. They believed they would succeed because they were God's chosen people, bound to Him in an Old Testament–style covenant. If they all did his will, they would be rewarded. If any member did not, they might all be punished. In early Massachusetts, there was no such thing as minding one's own business: the salvation of the entire community depended on everyone doing their part.

According to a central myth of American history, the founders of Yankeedom were champions of religious freedom fleeing persecution at home. While there is some truth to this in regard to the Pilgrims—a few hundred English Calvinists who settled Cape Cod in 1620—it is entirely false in regard to the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, who would soon bring Plymouth and the other colonies of New England under their control. The Puritans left England en masse in the 1630s—25,000 in just twelve short years—because of their unwillingness to compromise on matters of religious policy. While other colonies welcomed all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for “heretic.” Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion. They fined farmers who tended their cows, raked hay, or hunted birds on the Sabbath. Boston magistrates put Captain Thomas Kemble in the stocks in 1656 because, having returned from a three-year absence, he kissed his wife at his doorstep—“lewd and unseemly behavior” in the eyes of the court. Early Yankeedom was less tolerant of moral or religious deviance than the England its settlers had left behind.
¹

But in other respects, the Puritans created a genuinely revolutionary society. Having secured, through deception, a royal charter for their colony, they were not beholden to feudal nobles (as were early Maryland and New France) or distant corporations (as were Virginia and, later, the Carolinas). New Englanders intended to rule themselves.

Nearly half of Yankeedom's early settlers came from East Anglia, the most economically sophisticated part of the British Isles. Its seven easternmost counties were the most densely settled, urbanized, and educated part of England, with a burgeoning middle class and a long history of rebellion against arbitrary rule. It was a region profoundly influenced by the Netherlands, the most commercially and politically advanced nation in Europe, which lay just across the English Channel. Dutch Calvinism, republicanism, agriculture, architecture, art, and commerce had left their mark on the region, which had tulip gardens, gabled houses, and a highly literate population of artisans, craftsmen, and yeoman farmers. Champions of the Germanic notions of freedom, East Anglians participated in town meetings and chose selectmen to run local affairs. Not surprisingly, the region would strongly support Parliament against the king in the English Civil War. Many of these East Anglian characteristics were transplanted to New England.

The Puritan exodus had a demographic character entirely unlike that of Tidewater, New France, and El Norte. The Yankee settlers came as families and were generally middle class, well-educated, and roughly equal in material wealth. While Tidewater was settled largely by young, unskilled male servants, New England's colonists were skilled craftsmen, lawyers, doctors, and yeoman farmers; none of them was an indentured servant. Rather than having fled poverty in search of better lives, the early Yankees had traded a comfortable existence at home for the uncertainties of the wilderness. Seventy percent came as part of an established family, giving early Yankeedom far more typical gender and age ratios than those of the other nations. This demographic advantage—and the fact that New England had relatively few epidemic diseases—enabled the population to expand rapidly from its initial settlement base. Although few immigrants entered the region for a century after 1640, colonial New England's European population doubled every generation. By 1660 it had reached 60,000, more than twice the population of Tidewater, which had a generation's head start. The largest population center north of the Rio Grande, Yankeedom was already the most cohesive, given that nearly everyone had arrived at the same time and for much the same reasons.
²