Andrew S.

Terrell - HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750 15 September 2010

Précis: Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989. (Section: Borderlands to the BackCountry: The Flight from
North Britain, 1717-1775)

Dr. David Fischer is the Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University. In his
first monograph of a series on American cultural history, Albion’s Seed, he argues that the legacy
of four British “folkways” from the early 17th century up to the Revolutionary War were the most
powerful determinants of the voluntary society found in the United States today. He defines
folkway for his work as a normative structure of values, custom, and meanings that exist within
cultures. He differentiates the four folkways in his monograph between immigrant origins within
the British Empire: the Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and north Britons. Each group brought
what Fischer contends are at least two dozen cultural ties to each of their colonial areas. Of
greatest interest were ties with speech and dialects, architecture, family structure and life,
religion, naming, food, leisure, work places and ethics, ranks within society, and interpretations
of democracy, freedom, and liberties.
The fourth section covered the back country of America, the Appalachian Mountains
region to be more precise. The immigrants who would settle and expand the borderlands of
colonial America were from northern Britain, Ireland and parts of Scotland. Fischer documents
that this migration was the largest of any of the prior cases in his monograph. Recorded and
estimated immigration averaged more than 5,000 individuals per year from 1718-1775. Other
than numbers, what separated this group from the prior three were desires for material and social
betterment; not religious experiments or replications of the motherland.
When exploring how to classify this fourth group of immigrants, Fischer chose to label
them not as Ulster Irish as some historians have, but rather as simply as a mixed people to be fair
to all portions of the immigrant wave. They already had a joined culture and history from the
many wars that ravaged the borderlands in the British Isles, so there were few significant
distinctions between them. When they came to the New World, Quakers labeled them as a lower
social class already and even tried to lay a duty upon entrance to Philadelphia and Newcastle for
their “sorts.” Had William Penn’s holy experiment not cut the grain for such notions, who knows
what sort of uprising they would have to deal with since the mixed people seemed to have
violence and pride in their blood. The Quaker solution to their mass exodus was to encourage
the new squatters to settle lands further to the west, the Appalachian Borderlands.
The mixed people of the backcountry built their log cabins along architecture already
employed in the British borderlands. The family structures changed little from their homes
abroad. They maintained strong familial ties and built clans (although not as many were so
violent as they were in Britain). Marriage between clans was sometimes difficult as wives would
be cut from their former clans so this enforced their strong belief that blood ties were much
stronger than marriage ties. The majority of the families and clans in this folkway were
protestant which tied, yet also separated them from the Atlantic seaboard colonies.
Overall, Fischer’s synthesis, in particular his fourth section, was a refreshing look at the
origins of immigration as the British colonies expanded and matured toward the Revolutionary
War. The vast array of material is organized thoroughly and the monograph is well-written with
plenty of details and first hand accounts to please the most discerning yet uninformed student.