Albion's Seed: Wealth and Rank

Wealth and rank are obviously related, although not the same. One thing Fischer discusses is that in the 17th Century, rank was seen more in terms of "orders" and "degrees" than wealth. The more materialist concept, equating wealth and rank, began in the 18th Century. Perhaps a more important concept he does not discuss directly is what a society means by equality. He describes at length (later) what the four different cultures meant by liberty. But implied in the text is that there are at least two different concept of equality -- equality of wealth and equality of manners. These things often correlate, but not always.

They correlated fairly well in three of the four societies, but with one striking anomaly.

In Virginia, distribution of wealth was very unequal. A narrow oligarchy owned most of the land and nearly all of the slaves. While there was a middle class of land holding yeoman farmers, they were not numerous. Far more common were landless tenants and migrant laborers. Indeed, in a land with abundant natural resources and a distinct shortage of labor, Virginia nonetheless managed to have a significant number of paupers. And, of course, there were slaves who by definition never owned anything, even themselves. Not surprisingly, rituals of deference were eleborate. Fisher remarks that rituals of deference were more elaborate in the 16th and 17th centuries than at any time before or since.

The Quakers, by contrast, were fierce egalitarians, both in wealth and in manners. They set out to make a deliberate policy of encouraging owner-cultivated family farms of roughly the same size, and of discouraging great landholders, landless tenants, and slaves. About three-fourths of all Virginians came over as indentured servants. While they might serve out their term of indenturement, their chances of advancement were slim to none. Quakers, by contrast, had about half the members of their colony come over as servants, but once their term was complete, they could take their places in general society. Quakers were also shockingly egalitarian in manners. They rejected bowing, curtsying, raising of hats, and all the other elaborate rituals the time, and instead greeted everyone with a handshake. They also dropped the elaborate titles of the day, such as "my lord," "your grace," "your excellency," "master," "mistress," "sir" or "ma'am." Everyone was simply addressed as "Friend." Quaker's famous use of "thou" and "thee" was also originally part of their radical egalitarianism -- they addressed social superiors in the familiar.

The Puritans were somewhere in between. Their goal was to keep something like the society of an East Anglia village, maintaining the social distinctions that would exist within such a society, but excluding both the top and bottom of society that would not be part of their village. This manifested itself in both wealth and manners. Like the Quakers, Puritans set out to create mostly a middle class of family farmers, and to avoid great landlords or landless tenants. The did not, however, divide land equally, but reserved a larger share for more prominent members of society. (The ratio was about 3:1). The Puritans deliberately excluded an aristocracy from their society, so there were no "lords" or "graces," but the leading members of the community were addressed as "your excellency" or "your honor." Gentlefolk were "master" and "mistress." The yeomanry were "goodman" and "goodwife." Only the poor and landless had no titles.

The anomaly was in the back country. Contrary to popular belief, frontier conditions did not make for equality of wealth. Despite abundant land, it was concentrated in relatively few hands, with large numbers of landless tenants. Fischer says the back country had the least equal of all four cultures, but his statistics do not bear this out. Rather, the least equal counties look comparable to the most equal counties in Virginia; while the most equal counties in the back country have wealth distributions similar to Boston, the least equal part of New England. The reason people do not think of Appalachia or the back country in general in those terms is that manners there were very equal, scandalously so to outsiders. People of all ranks addressed one another by their first names. Rank made very little difference in terms of manners, dress or rules of conduct.

Fischer suggests that people's concepts of deference, like their attitudes toward witchcraft changed with the times. The later migrations, the Quakers and back countrymen, were less rank-obsessed, as rank and rules of deference were beginning to decline. Color me unconvinced. The egalitarian manners of the Quakers and back countrymen scandalized their contemporaries and were seen as radical departures from accepted norms.

The truly striking thing is not just that there are (at least) two different concepts of equality, but that the back country attitude appears to have won out. Americans today are willing to tolerate substantial inequality in wealth. What we are not willing to tolerate is any sort of inequality in manners or any demand to show deference to our "betters."

Next up (perhaps over several posts) order, local government, and concepts of freedom.

Albion's Seed: Learning, Time and Work

Learning

Reading about the cultures' attitudes on learning, I could begin to see where a lot of Americans' later attitudes toward learning come from. Puritans had great regard for learning. It was from them that the whole idea that every child should go to school comes from. Every community was required to provide schools, and every child to learn to read (though not necessarily to attend school). To Puritans, it was everyone's duty to learn to read in order to read the Bible. They were the first society to achieve universal literacy. They also supported higher education, quickly establishing colleges to train ministers.

Cavaliers, by contrast, seem to be responsible for our common view of learning as elitist. For Cavaliers, learning was elitist. It was a thing every gentleman should have to show his status as a gentleman, but not to be allowed to the common people, lest it give them dangerous ideas. Is it any wonder, then, that the lower classes distrusted learning and literacy as tools of oppression.

Quakers originally came from the lower classes whose superiors didn't want them to be educated. This colored their attitudes, in interesting ways. On the one hand, they wanted to make basic education available to all, with an emphasis on learning the practical. But they distrusted higher education as elitist and "needless." Certainly these are attitudes that live on with us today. Having no clergy, Quakers particularly distrusted learned ministers.

As for back countrymen, their basic attitude toward learning was than when you are fighting endless war with hostile Indians (or between the English and Scotts in borderlands), struggling to get by on a small plot of land, and frequently on the move, you have other priorities. Some schools were available, and learned ministers were much admired. Back country schools also practiced an odd ritual called "barring out the school master." Just as weddings once involved real abductions and violence but later came to practice them only as rituals, so it was with education. Around Christmas time, students would lock their school master out in the cold and let him in only when he promised a long vacation. This practice went back as late as 1558 and appears to have begun as real conflict, but later taken the form of a playful ritual.

Although Fischer does not emphasize this, the century between the Puritan and back country migrations also reflect changes going on in English societies. Fischer remarks how high literacy rates were among the Puritans, significantly higher than in England as a whole. He also comments on the low literacy rates of back country migrants, among the lowest in England. Yet the actual literacy rates he gives for the two migrations are about the same!* The general education level had risen enough that what was once a high rate of literacy had become a low one.

Time and work:

Time and work are closely related subject because work is often governed by time, whether the factory clock, or farm seasons.

Puritans were famously uptight about time, believing it must be put to good use and never wasted. (Benjamin Franklin famously illustrated this attitude in Poor Richard's Almanac). But, Fischer warns us, this must be seen in context. Puritans lived by clock time to an extraordinary degree for the 17th Century, but their clocks were sun dials or mechanical clocks without minute hands. Concern for minutes as well as hours is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Time is a cyclical as well as a linear concept. In terms of cyclical time, Puritans were the strictest of all Christians about the Sabbath, following the Orthodox Jewish concepts of beginning the Sabbath at sundown on the previous day, and forbidding any work, even cooking, or any recreation. But they forbade Christmas, Easter and all religious holidays except the Sabbath. Puritan religious fervor has some paradoxically secularizing effects. Marriages were performed by magistrate, not ministers, and religious holidays gave way to the civic holidays of Election Day, Commencement Day, Training Day (for the militia) and Thanksgiving.

As for work, Puritans were mostly farmers, but soon grew a small surplus for sale and began cultivating a class of merchants. Though a commercial people, they were far from today's laissez faire concept of anything goes. They had strict concepts of what was a just price and forbade a merchant from even raising prices to make up for goods lost a sea. (The assumption was that if it was a merchant's karma to lose wares, it must be punishment for some sin. Only in time of a general shortage could prices be raised, because that showed God was smiting the commodity and not the man).

Cavaliers, predictably, saw time as hierachical. A gentleman's time was his to "kill" in recreation; the lower orders had their time occupied with work. In terms of cyclical time, the High Church Anglicans of Virginia were surprisingly semi-Catholic. They celebrated not only Christmas and Easter, but Lent, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Lady Day (the day Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary, known to Catholics as the Anunciation), and many saint's days. Time was also largely governed by the cycle of growing tobacco -- sprouting, planting, weeding, pruning, harvesting, and curing. Needless to say, all this was a lot of work and occupied a great deal of a gentleman's time (even if he only oversaw the process and did not do actual manual labor). Yet in this culture work was considered unbecoming a gentleman, and living within one's means was considered "mean spirited."

Quakers saw things in quite different terms. They regarded leisure as idleness and debt as immoral. Their ethic was that of a businessman -- live within one's means, keep good records, invest any surplus in something useful instead of blowing it in conspicuous consumption, oh yes, and help out fellow Friends in need. Is it any wonder that, although the original Quakers were poor, their descendents did not stay that way. Quakers were to play a major role in banking, insurance, and industrial development. Like Puritans, Quakers focused on putting all time to good use and rejected religious holidays. They also rejected the traditional names of days of the week and names of months on the grounds that they were taken from the names of pagan gods. Instead, the simply used numbers (First day for Sunday, First Month for January, and so forth).

Back countrymen, for the most part, lived and worked at the mercy of the seasons. They celebrated Christmas on January 6 with bonfires, fireworks, and celebratory gunfire, and Easter with great revelry.

Next up: Wealth and rank (not the same).