Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History)

1902 Pages·1989·15.32 MB·English

by  David Hackett Fischer

Albion’s Seed

AMERICA
A CULTURAL HISTORY

VOLUME I: ALBION’S SEED
VOLUME II: AMERICAN PLANTATIONS
ALBION’S SEED

FOUR BRITISH FOLKWAYS IN AMERICA

BY
DAVID HACKETT FISCHER
Oxford University Press

Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay
Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi
Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1989 by David Hackett Fischer

First published in 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1991

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-
Albion’s seed: four British folkways in America/
David Hackett Fischer.
p. cm. (America, a cultural history; v. 1)
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN-13 978-0-19-506905-1
1. United States—Civilization—To 1783.
2. United States—Civilization—English influences.
I. Title. II. Series: Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-
America, a cultural history, v. 1.
E169.1.F539 vol. 1 [E162] 973 s-dc20 [973] 89-16069 CIP

23 25 27 29 30 28 26 24

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Robert and Patricia Blake
PREFACE

An Idea of Cultural History

History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies … The
converse is also true: cultural schemes are historically ordered.
—Marshall Sahlins, 1985
THIS BOOK is the first in a series, which will hopefully comprise a cultural history
of the United States. It is cultural in an anthropological rather than an aesthetic
sense—a history of American folkways as they have changed through time.
Each volume (five are now in draft) centers on a major problem in American
historiography. The first volume, Albion’s Seed, is about the problem of cultural
origins. The second volume, American Plantations, studies the problem of
culture and environment in the colonial era. The third volume examines the
coming of independence as a cultural movement. Volume four takes up the
problem of cultural change in the early republic, and volume five is about the
Civil War as a cultural conflict. Other volumes will follow if the author is
allowed to complete them.
This project has grown from an intellectual event that happened in the 1960s
—a revolution in the writing of history, very much like the thought-revolutions
described in Thomas Kuhn’s essays on the history of science, and Michael
Foucault’s studies of social thought. Three generations ago, there was an
established “paradigm” or “episteme” of historical knowledge. A writer had only
to call his book a history in order to announce what sort of work it was, for
history books were very much the same. History was about the past. It was a
narrative discipline—a story-telling art. The stories that it told were about the
organization of power and authority. Not all historians wrote political history,
but most were interested in the politics of the subjects they studied. Labor
historians wrote about labor leaders; historians of eduction studied school
systems and the men who ran them; historians of women wrote about suffrage
leaders and reform elites. Large masses of less eminent people also passed
through the history books, or loitered in the wings like armies of anonymous
extras on a Hippodrome stage. But the leading actors were small and highly
individuated power-elites.
Historians studied these people through documentary sources. The results
were organized as narratives and presented in the form of testimony—sometimes
with specific citations, but for the most part historians testified to their readers,
“I have steeped myself in the sources, and here is what I believe to have
happened,” and they were believed, for this was a time when scholars were
gentlemen, and a gentleman was as good as his word.
All of this activity created a coherent and plausible idea of history, which was
at once a body of knowledge about the past and also a way of knowing it. Its
masters were the great “narrative” historians such as Macaulay, Michelet, Ranke
and Parkman. The last of this breed in America were Allan Nevins and Samuel
Eliot Morison, who are both in their graves.
Early in the twentieth century, this paradigm of history began to come apart.
Its ethical framework disintegrated. Suddenly, there were many new interests
and problems that no longer seemed to fit. Anomalies were found; young
scholars were promoted primarily for finding them. For two generations,
historians became hunters after the anomalous fact. Each of their successes was
a blow against the old synthesis, which was soon reduced to something like a
ruin.
Some scholars struggled to repair it. Others attempted to replace it with a new
synthesis. In the United States, the work of Turner, Beard, Parrington,
Hofstadter, Boorstin and Hartz might be understood as a series of highly
tentative paradigm sketches. But nobody could put the pieces together again.
This was the period (1935-60) when historical relativism came into fashion, and
every convention of the American Historical Association became an organized
expression of professional Angst.
Then, in the decade of the 1960s, something new began to happen. Young
scholars in Europe and America were inspired by the French school of the
Annales to invent a new kind of history which differed from the old paradigm in
all of the characteristics mentioned above. This new history was not really about
the past at all, but about change—with past and present in a mutual perspective.
It was not a story-telling but a problem-solving discipline. Its problematiques
were about change and continuity in the acts and thoughts of ordinary people—
people in the midst of others; people in society. The goal of this new social
history was nothing less than an histoire totale of the human experience. To that
end, the new historians drew upon many types of evidence: documents, statistics,
physical artifacts, iconographic materials and much more. They also presented
their findings in a new way—not as testimony but as argument. An historian was
required not only to make true statements but also to demonstrate their
truthfulness by rigorous methods of logic and empiricism. This epistemic
revolution was the most radical innovation of the new history. It was also the
most difficult for older scholars to understand.
In its early years, the new social history claimed to be not merely a new
subdiscipline of history but the discipline itself in a new form. It promised to
become a major synthesizing discipline in the human sciences—even the
synthesizing discipline. Unhappily, these high goals were not reached. The new
social history succeeded in building an institutional base, and also in exploring
many new fields of knowledge. But in Fernand Braudel’s words, it was
overwhelmed by its own success. Instead of becoming a synthesizing discipline,
it disintegrated into many special fields—women’s history, labor history,
environmental history, the history of aging, the history of child abuse, and even
gay history—in which the work became increasingly shrill and polemical.
Moreover, too many important subjects were excluded from the new history—
politics, events, individuals, even ideas—and too many problems were
diminished by materialist explanations and “modernization models.” By the
1980s the new social history had lost much of its intellectual momentum, and
most of its conceptual range. It had also lost touch with the larger purposes that
had called it into being.
From this mixed record of success and failure, a question inevitably arises.
What comes after the new history? How can we continue to move forward? How
might we strengthen the weakened hand of synthesis in an analytic discipline?
What larger intellectual and cultural purposes might an historian seek to serve?
To those questions, this series offers an answer in its organizing idea of
cultural history. Briefly, it seeks to find a way forward by combining several
elements which the old and new histories have tended to keep apart. In terms of
substance, it is about both elites and ordinary people, about individual choices
and collective experiences, about exceptional events and normative patterns,
about vernacular culture and high culture, about the problem of society and the
problem of the state. To those ends, it tries to keep alive the idea of histoire
totale by employing a concept of culture as a coherent and comprehensive
whole.
In causal terms, this inquiry searches for a way beyond reductive materialist
models (of both the left and the right) which are presently in fashion among
historians in the United States and Britain, where materialism became a cultural
mania during the Reagan and Thatcher years. Without denying the importance of
material factors in history, one might assert that they are only a part of a larger
whole, and that claims for their priority are rarely grounded in empirical fact.
This inquiry seeks to place them in their proper context.
In terms of epistemology, this work tries to find a way forward in yet another
way. The old history was idealist in its epistemic assumptions. Its major findings
were offered as “interpretations” which tended to be discovered by intuition and
supported by testimony. The new social history aspired to empiricism, but the
epistemic revolution was incomplete—and something of the old interpretative
sweep was lost in the process. This work tries to combine the interpretative
thrust of the old history with the empiricism of the new—interpretative sails and
empirical anchors, so to speak.
In its temporal aspect, this inquiry seeks a new answer to an old problem
about the relationship between the past and the present. Many working historians
think of the past as fundamentally separate from the present—the antiquarian
solution. Others study the past as prologue to the present—the presentist
solution. This work is organized around a third idea—that every period of the
past, when understood in its own terms, is immediate to the present. This
“immediatist” solution cannot be discussed at length here; it must be defined
ostensively by the work itself, and especially by the conclusion. Suffice to say
that the temporal problem in this volume is to explore the immediacy of the
earliest period of American history without presentism, and at the same time to
understand the cultures of early America in their own terms without
antiquarianism.
An immediatist idea of a relationship between the past and present might also
support a more spacious relationship between history and other fields of
knowledge. The old history was conceived as an autonomous discipline. The
new history was more interdisciplinary—but its efforts consisted mainly of
borrowings from other fields. This work is meant to suggest that major problems
in many disciplines are insoluble without the application of historical
knowledge. A case in point is the problem of wealth distribution; this work will
argue, for example, that the distribution of wealth is determined not merely by
timeless economic laws but by the interplay of cultural values and individual
purposes which are rooted in the past.
Such an approach to the relationship between past and present might also help
to enlarge historical inquiry in its ethical dimension. This work, for example,