Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
There was far more enlightenment, anticlericalism, and even good humor in Spanish officialdom under Charles III and Charles IV than is usually recognized. These men had considerable vision and a reasonable grasp of the empire's problems. If they were unable to do anything, it was because social tensions were too far-gone, and there was an incredible amount of obstructive machinery in their way.
The society of New Spain was not composed of citizens. When the Indians were finally granted "citizenship" in the 1790s, this was an empty act. Hispanic society was frozen into a series of human corporations—classes, state, and church—each with its own bureaucracy, and most mutually hostile. It was rigidly centralized in theory by the power of the Crown, which in the face of the corporations was often powerless. New Spain strongly resembled Roman society in the days of the Dominate and suffered from the same flaws. In a structure so organic, even the concept of citizenship failed. Only the symbol, and the legitimacy, of the Crown held the whole fragile framework together, as much by centrifugal force as anything else.
Spanish officialdom in New Spain during the last quarter of the century was aware Spanish power was sitting on a local volcano. The criollos were disaffected; the
mestizo
element was restless; and even the Hispanicized Indians were showing signs of rebellion. The governors and officers in North America were beset with the generations-old wild Indian problem, and a newer problem that frightened them considerably more: the ominous approach of another outside people toward their empty landscapes. For within seven years after Spain had erased the French danger with the acquisition of Louisiana, the English-speaking settlements that had been confined to the Atlantic seaboard for two hundred years began to move toward the Mississippi, in one of the greatest armed migrations of all time.
If Spain built rigidly in its own image in the New World, the British Isles tended to spin off a haphazard swarm of dissidents, diehards, and refugees to America. If cavaliers and assorted gentlemen came to build estates or seek their fortunes as did the
hidalgos
of Spain, vastly more Britishers emigrated because the home country was, for various reasons, unbearable. The first Massachusetts settlers were middle-class refugees from the gaudy episcopacy of Laud and Hooker; they were followed, in other areas, by persecuted Roman Catholics, and during the Civil Wars of the 17th century, conquered adherents of the Crown. Following the Restoration, hundreds of Cromwell's officers sailed, with whatever fortune they possessed, to the middle Atlantic colonies. Other dissidents, religious or economic, followed.
Two characteristics of this American immigration stood out: the people left mainly for ideological reasons, not to seek their fortunes; therefore, few ever had any intention of returning. Second, the emigration was never controlled, certainly not in its decisive years. For long periods the various governments of Great Britain paid only minimal attention to its Atlantic dominions. This, plus the long-developed traditions of county government in England, allowed the scattered colonies to build viable local societies of their own.
To understand the pattern of sudden Anglo-American expansion after the middle of the 18th century, it is necessary to understand that English-speaking society between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was not a cohesive whole. In modern times, the differences between Puritan New England and the plantation South have been thoroughly explored. Actually, these differences were probably not so great in the 18th century as a century, or two centuries, later. If the "aristocratical spirit" reigned south of the Mason-Dixon Line, still Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware had evolved a tight and interrelated landed and mercantile elite. The local affairs of Massachusetts Bay were not in the hands of Yankee small farmers. A Middleton or Rutledge of South Carolina was perfectly able to room with, or communicate his views to, New England's Hancock or Sam Adams in the Continental Congresses at Philadelphia.
By the year 1750 the British colonies in America had evolved into a newly prosperous, Protestant, inherently liberal "deferential society" in the seaside counties and towns. One enormous difference between America and Europe was that on this side of the Atlantic there was almost no poverty on the European scale. Underpopulation had something to do with this, but human poverty seems to be more often the result of social forces than the nonavailability of resources. In Europe, with an abundance of the richest soils on earth, millions still went hungry; on the rock-scrabble soil of Massachusetts no one, after the first few winters, starved.
The social structure of British America and the position of the landed and mercantile elite could best be described as that of an oligarchy or squirearchy, with limited powers. Institutions as they developed on the coast were remarkably free. Local governments were elected by mass ballot. The laws of most colonies required electors to be freeholders or to own land, but this requirement does not seem to have been strenuously enforced. George Washington as a young squire was returned to the Virginia Burgesses by "cheerful, rumpot elections" in which he bought the barrel. But the clusters of men and families colonial America deferred to possessed a remarkable ethical sense. A Washington, Jefferson, Richard Stockton, Livingston, or Hancock, from Virginia to Massachusetts Bay, did not sit in the seats of power due to law or caste, but more by use and wont and demonstrated ability. In this squirearchy America had a gentry fully equal to its role.
This elite was fully influenced by the enlightenment and rationalism of the century, and they inherited the Enlightenment without the crippling weight of the customs, traditions, and establishments that plagued older societies. Because it was rational and ethical, the American leadership was inherently liberal, and these men were optimistic, as men who believe in the rationality of mankind must be. The one dark cloud on this rational and optimistic horizon was the institution of Negro slavery, which was early established in all European colonies where it was economically feasible, English, Spanish, and French. This troubled the Jeffersons, Rutledges, and Lees apparently more than it did the New England squires in the 18th century, since they saw it at close hand. There was general agreement that the institution should not be permitted to spread, but beyond that there seemed to be no workable economic or social solution. No one was less fitted by rationale to make human chattels of other men than Anglo-Americans, but the problem was horribly complicated by economics, social factors, and race.
The important differences, and real tensions, within the British-American community were not between North and South in the 18th century, but between East and West, tidewater and foothills, Cohee and Tuckahoe. New England and the South did not then impinge on each other. They pursued separate ways, culturally, economically, and politically, with the only common focal point the British Isles. Atlantic America looked outward, not inward. It was part of the greater 18th-century world, and it was essentially a maritime world. The mercantile establishments of New England and the Middle Atlantic were geared to European or Caribbean trade. Even the landed estates to the South were mercantile in nature; they raised and sold produce primarily for foreign markets. A high percentage of the American gentry were educated in England, or traveled there. The Benjamin Franklins, Morrises of New York, and Southern planters never thought of themselves as anything but a part of the maritime British world. When they revolted against the home country in 1775–76, they were not so much turning their backs on Europe as demanding new and more favorable arrangements with the Old World. Washington, in reestablishing economic ties with Britain, made this very clear. The Anglo-American leadership, after independence, did not want political connections or political involvement. They had a cold and clear understanding America did not have sufficient power to play that role.
In this essentially Atlantic orientation, the dominant view of the English seaboard was different from the outlook of the backwoods frontier. The people who had pushed to the blocking range of Appalachia by 1750 had a different culture, worldview, and even racial origin from the coast. The predominant strain, and dominant ethic, of the up-country or frontier was that of the Presbyterian, or Scotch-Irish.
Nineteenth-century American historians, who exhaustively sifted American evidence but rarely delved deeply into European sources or documents, were once converted to the idea that the Western frontier and free lands shaped American individualism, self-reliance, democratic ways, optimism, and the notion of virtually unlimited material or economic opportunity. The concept, really the hope, that Americans created something uniquely new on this continent is understandable, if no longer supportable. The best evidence indicates that only the sense of unlimited material opportunity derived from the frontier, for obvious reasons. For decades, the land was limitless. The other ideas and qualities were European transplants.
The background and ethic of the Scotch-Irish who immigrated to America is quite important to understanding the process of Anglo-American expansion out of the Atlantic slope, and of the dominant ethic of all inner America itself. It is a valid question, whether the long frontier shaped Anglo-America, or whether attitudes, prejudices, and ethics brought from Europe shaped the American frontier. Interestingly enough, almost all modern foreign observers, from France to Brazil, believe the latter. One band of European immigrants created Hispanic-American civilization. Very different men, facing reasonably similar conditions in many places, made the United States.
The Scotch-Irish were once Scots borderers in the British Isles, the mixed race of Dane, Gael, and Saxon of the Teutonic Scottish south. They evolved as a tough, stubborn, dour people, conditioned to border war. They fought the English for generations, though they themselves were English-speaking from the Middle Ages. The great break in their history came in the 16th century, when they took up the teachings of John Knox.
Knox brought a stunning new vision of God, man, and the world from Calvin in Geneva. This doctrine was far more than a mere reformation of the rites, and rebellion against the authority, of Rome. At bedrock, it was a rejection of the whole mysterious panoply of the medieval world, and all the pageantry of medieval British life. The Scots of the south swept the religious attic bare not only of Popes and prelates but of the concepts of hierarchy and organic society. When the priest was transformed into the preacher, not only the Church but the entire structure of Christendom was starkly changed. As always, the polities of the new religion became more important than its policies and theology, which grew stale.
Scots Presbyterianism had a common root with English Puritanism of the 17th century. But the Puritans south of the border were dominantly members of the English middle class, the tradesmen, merchants, and artisans of an already highly organized society. The Pilgrims who fled to Plymouth Rock maintained a similar worldview to the border Presbyterians, but with one difference: the Scots were still a rural, and for some centuries a warrior, race.
"Freeholders and Tradesmen are the strength of Religion and Civility in the land," trumpeted a spokesman for both parties in the 17th century. "And Gentlemen and Beggars and servile Tenants are the strength of Iniquity." The social outlook of frontier America can be traced to that feeling. The idea that gentlemen were superfluous and pernicious and beggars were to be despised permeated the American frontier, but it was not born there. The statements, arguments, and atmosphere surrounding the Puritanism that failed to triumph in England and peeled off to British America show more than a hatred of social hierarchy and dependency. They indicate a strident insistence that everyone was, or should be, middle-class.
The religious wars of England's 17th century eroded Laud's insistence on the organic state of State and man, but Calvinism did not win. Modern England was to be a compromise between organic Anglicanism and Protestant Puritanism. Attitudes that were abortive in England fled to, and took root in, America. Merrie England eventually broke out of the Middle Ages keeping many of its social and religious toys intact. The Scots Covenanters made no such deals.
Hating prelacy almost as much as popery, the Scots took part on Cromwell's side in the Civil War. By one act of political genius, the Lord Protector of Great Britain transported some thousands of them to the turbulent province of Ireland. This served two ends: he removed a hardcore, armed, and dissident ethnic group away from the English border, where they were bound to cause trouble, and he delivered that trouble to the rebellious native Irish. In their new home the Scots picked up the name "Scotch-Irish," transferred their blood feuds with the Saxons to the Celts, and carved out Ulster, the greatest pale of all.
These transplanted Presbyterians were unable to become a settled peasantry in Ireland; their surprisingly middle-class ethic, and their hatred of both Irish Papists and Ascendancy Anglicans made this impossible. When the bloody battlefields of 17th-century Ireland faded into the gray, futureless landscape of the next century, the Scots had lost their function. Thousands began to look for a new border, a new frontier. Family after family packed up their Bibles, old fiddles, rusty broadswords, pewter utensils, and bleak, bourgeois ethical baggage, and set sail. By 1730, they were arriving in America by the thousands.
They left an enclave behind; the Scotch-Irish were always leaving enclaves behind. In their three major migrations—from Scotland, from Ireland, and from Appalachia—there may have been something of natural selection. The evidence indicates that those who went were more vigorous than those who stayed behind.