Albion's Seed

David Hackett Fischer's "Albion Seed" is not a casual read. At about 900 pages (although a few hundred pages are taken up by bibliography), it is more of an academic history book than a typical popular non-fiction book that one can get through in a matter of weeks.

But if you get through the book, it is rewarding in its own right. Hackett's main thesis: the English migration are actually composed 4 distinct waves of people, which their own idiosyncratic mores and ways:

• Puritans
• Cavaliers
• Quakers
• Borderers
  

The mores, cultures and ways of these 4 groups in turn interact and synthesize in the New World, forging the American culture that endures to this day, even as subsequent migrations from continental Europe and beyond wash out their demographic primacy.

The 4 groups were not just different- they were sufficiently distrustful of each other. The Oliver Cromwell Civil War back in England matched the Puritans against the Royalist Cavaliers. And very fundamental difference in worldview separated these groups- the communitarian ethos of the Puritans clashed with the libertarian instincts of the Cavaliers ("libertarian" in so far as the state should not interfere with the aristocracy class to own slaves) . The communitarian/libertarian tug-of-war dynamics was manifest at the founding of the Republic- Alexander Hamilton, an Englishman-upon-New Yorker who lived under the confluence of the Quaker and the Puritan culture, advocated a more Federalist governance. Thomas Jefferson, the quintessential Cavalier gentleman, believed in a confederacy of farmers (although his libertarian instinct was of course observed in the breach- The Louisiana Purchase was as antithetical to his libertarian instinct as they come, it is to our benefit that he knew a good deal when he saw one).

Significantly, these clashes in worldviews persist to this day in a regional manner; echoing the sentiments of the original English settlers, Massachusetts is more liberal than South Carolina today even though Massachusetts is less Puritan and more Catholic Irish today in terms of demographics. Culture is more enduring than DNA, and ink is thicker than blood.

Implicit in this thesis is the question of how America exist as a single nation when the alternate reality of 4 separate nations seemed just as plausible in 1800. This regional clash led to the Civil War in 1860, and perhaps the question is not why that occurred but why it hasn't happened more often. One reason is probably due to the size of America itself- it is literally a big country and most of the time the local/federal demarcation in political governance reduced the possibility that each group can rub each other the wrong way.

And perhaps, the reasons for their respective emigration struck each other as kindred spirits in the vaguest sense. They were all refugees of sorts from England- Puritans and Quakers fleeing religious persecution and Cavaliers and Borderers leaving as victims of war. And hanging together is better than hanging separately.