American Colonies: The Settling of North America (The Penguin History of the United States, Volume1) (Hist of the USA) by Taylor Alan

Author:Taylor, Alan [Taylor, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101075814
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2002-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

DIVERSITY

Colonial empires sowed unintended and paradoxical consequences maddening to their rulers. In 1664 the English conquered the mid-Atlantic seaboard to consolidate a more homogeneous and docile empire stretching from Carolina to Canada. But that conquest absorbed a medley of non-English peoples: Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Walloons, Flemings, Huguenots, Germans, and Norwegians. This diversity contrasted markedly with both the Chesapeake and New England, where almost all of the white colonists came from England. That diversity also violated the traditional English conviction that social cohesion and political order depended on ethnic and religious uniformity. In 1692 an English New Yorker lamented, “Our chiefest unhappyness here is too great a mixture of nations, and English the least part.” Xenophobic English officials did not adjust easily to the diversity of their new subjects.

The English conquest only compounded the region’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity as the victors created the new colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which attracted more non-English emigrants. That very diversity became the defining characteristic of the middle colonies, the collective name for New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because they lay between the Chesapeake and New England. In the early eighteenth century, the middle colonists included Anglicans (mostly English), Presbyterians (Scots and Scotch-Irish), Congregationalists (relocated New English Puritans), Quakers (English and Welsh), Reformed (Dutch and German), Lutherans (the Scandinavians and some Germans), an array of pietistic sects (German and Swiss), and a few Catholics (primarily Irish) and Jews (from the Netherlands). In addition, most of the enslaved Africans preserved their traditional beliefs, which remained mysterious to their indifferent masters. Neither any single ethnic group nor any particular religious denomination enjoyed a majority in any middle colony.

Conventional political wisdom insisted that a polity should be organic and tradition-bound: a unified body of unequal parts ruled by a natural elite guided by long precedent. Defying those expectations, the middle colonies were new societies composed of diverse peoples who could not agree to give deference to a shared elite. Instead, ethnocultural groups were openly contentious and disrespectful of authorities, even within their own communities. In 1704, William Penn complained that the Pennsylvania colonists needed “to be humbled and made more pliable; for what with the distance and the scarcity of mankind there, they opine too much.” In the mid-eighteenth century, a German immigrant reported, “They have a saying here: Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.”

Although engaged in especially fractious political competition, the middle colonies avoided the violence that accompanied ethnic and religious difference in Europe. The rhetorical rancor of ethnocultural politics apparently vented resentments peacefully, which precluded a resort to house burnings and murder. The combination of contention and restraint appeared in the 1764 Pennsylvania election, when Benjamin Franklin criticized the bloc voting by German voters as “the Palatine Boors herding together.” His opponents freely translated Franklin’s words into the German complaint “that I call’d them a Herd of Hogs.” Turning out in unprecedented numbers, the Germans ensured Franklin’s defeat—but no one died or lost their home to a riot.

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