Fischer actually puts this toward the end of his description of each culture, but I find it useful to start out with this. Describing what the overall community looked like helps give context to the descriptions of people’s more private lives.
Although most New Englanders were farmers, they mostly lived in towns, or, rather, hamlets. Indeed, special permission was required to build a house more than half a mile from the local church. This had two effects. One was to allow people to monitor each other and penalize deviant behaviorr. The other was to gather people into New England’s primary unit of self-government – the town meeting. It made everyone (well, every adult male property holder who was a church members in good standing) a participant in the community. Communities were very stable. Young men might leave their town of origin for an apprenticeship, or young women to join their husbands, but once New England Puritans became householders, they stayed put. People moved around a lot less in the 17th Century than they do today, of course, but even by 17th Century standards, Puritan communities were exceptionally stable. Once Puritans moved across the sea from England to Massachusetts, they stayed put.
Virginians, for the most part, avoided towns. Great planters had their own little communities on their plantations; others lived on their farms. Visiting took place regularly among neighbors. On church days and court days, people from all across the local countryside assembled, for gatherings that were as much social as religious. Migration and association was hierarchical in opposite ways. People lower down on the hierarchy were more mobile in the sense that they had less stable residences. Planters rarelyl moved; small farmers moved somewhat morre often; recent arrivals moved quite frequently, and many laborers were migrants with no fixed residence. But in another way, people of higher rank were more mobile. People tended to visit a lot, mostly with their own social peers. For ordinary people, this meant mostly in their own neighborhood. For the gentry, it meant travel to more distant plantations.
Quakers lived in clusters of farms. They lived on their farms, rather than in towns, but William Penn made a deliberate policy to encourage farmers to build their houses near to each other, instead of scattered. Pennsylvania was (is) mountainous, a series of valleys with ridges between them. Each valley would form its own tight-knit, highly conformist, community, some Quaker, some German, but none quite alike. Each community would form its church that would maintain community standard, but they did not have any formal local government (that took place at the county level). Another point was that Quakers in their general asceticism and distrust of anything “needless” extended this view to “needless” socializing. They therefore discouraged gatherings or visiting unless they served a useful purpose (such as raising a barn).
In the back country, people tended to live in isolated cabins. The comment that when you see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney it is time to move on was a back country attituded. And, indeed, people did often move on, with a minimum of fuss and bother. Besides the smoke from your neighbor's chimney, another popular back country saying was, "When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs, and start." But many of these moves were no more than a few miles. A sense of neighborhood formed, and neighbors regularly visisted, stayed over, and helped each other out. These neighborhoods were tight-knit enough to be able to freeze out and squeeze out (in their own words, "hate out") people who did not follow accepted social conduct. Outsiders were viewed with deep suspiciion.
Speech and place names
Fischer has an interesting insight here. All four cultures tended to give American places the names of places from back home. This means we can tell, by looking American place names, what part of England the colonists settling that area came from. Unfortunately, following the details required more knowledge of English and American geography than I have.
The four cultures chose other place names as well. Puritans used virtue names like Salem (a variant on Shalom) or Concord. Despite the Algonquin names of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Indian names were not widely used until later. Cavaliers used royalist names. Virginia is named after Elizabeth (the Virgin Queen), North and South Carolina after Charles II, and Georgia after George II. Quakers used Indian names. And backcountrymen chose place names with a rough and ready familiarity I had always regarded as archetypally American, such as Gordon's Meeting House, Hangover Creek, Hardbargian Branch, Hell's Half Acre, and Devil's Tater Patch.
Fischer also traces various American patterns of speech to parts of England although that, too, could be hard to follow. Most interestingly, the Quakers adopted “plain speech” and addressed everyone as “thou” instead of you. In the 17th Century, this was a shocking familiarity when addressed to social superiors. Quakers continued this well into the 19th Century, long after thou had become a quaint archaism. But the book did clear up a strange quirk I was aware of from historical novels – Pennsylvania Quakers said “thee is” instead of a more standard “thou art.” The Quaker migration came primarily from Yorkshire. It turns out “thee is” was a well-established pattern of Yorkshire speech. London Quakers said “thou art.”
Next: Family, marriage, sex and children
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