Colin Woodard (15 page)

T
he most prototypically American of the nations was one of the last to be founded. From its inception in the 1680s, the Midlands was a tolerant, multicultural, multilingual civilization populated by families of modest means—many of them religious—who desired mostly that their government and leaders leave them in peace. Over the past three centuries, Midland culture has pushed westward from its hearth in and around Philadelphia, jumped over the Appalachians, and spread across a vast swath of the American heartland, but it has retained these essential qualities. It is Middle America, the most mainstream of the continent's national cultures and, for much of our history, the kingmaker in national political contests.

Ironically, its beginnings were far from ordinary. Like Yankeedom, the Midlands were intended to be a model society, a utopia guided by the tenets of an unorthodox religion. In fact, Pennsylvania was created by perhaps the most controversial religious cult of the era, a group contemporaries accused of undermining “peace and order” and “sowing . . . the seeds of immediate ruin of . . . religion, Church order . . . and . . . the state.” Difficult though it may be to understand today, the Quakers were considered a radical and dangerous force, the late-seventeenth-century equivalent of crossing the hippie movement with the Church of Scientology. Quakers spurned the social conventions of the day, refusing to bow or doff their hats to social superiors or to take part in formal religious services of any sort. They rejected the authority of church hierarchies, held women to be spiritually equal to men, and questioned the legitimacy of slavery. Their leaders strode naked on city streets or, daubed with excrement, into Anglican churches in efforts to provide models of humility; one Quaker rode naked on a donkey into England's second-largest city on Palm Sunday in an unpopular reenactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Overcome with rapture, they would fall into violent fits, or “quakes,” that frightened nonbelievers. Many embraced martyrdom, repeatedly marching into unfriendly neighborhoods or onto New England town greens to preach or challenge ministers, reveling in the imprisonment, whippings, tongue borings, and executions that followed. “The will of the Lord be done,” martyr Mary Dyer told a Yankee governor after he handed down her death sentence. “Yea, joyfully shall I go.”
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These disruptive behaviors were the expression of deep-held religious convictions. The Quakers believed that each person had an “Inner Light” holding the Holy Spirit within him or her. They didn't study and obey scripture to achieve salvation, but instead found God through personal mystical experience—meaning that priests, bishops, and churches were superfluous. All humans were thought to be essentially good and were to treat one another as they would wish themselves to be treated. All were equal before God, regardless of sect, race, or gender, and all earthly authority was ultimately without legitimacy. Some individuals might be richer or poorer than others, but that didn't give the wealthy any special powers over the lives of their neighbors. And by the 1690s, just a halfcentury after its creation, Quakerism had developed an intense aversion to violence and war, a commitment to pacifism that was so total it would doom the Quakers' control of the Midlands.
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So how did so unpopular a cult ever get permission to found its own colony—especially from Catholic, authority-loving King Charles II?

Like a lot of strange experiments, the founding of Pennsylvania came about because a rich, respectable man had accumulated favors that were later cashed in to benefit a rebellious, unorthodox young man. In this particular case, the gifts were made posthumously. Admiral William Penn was a self-made man who'd trimmed his sails to the political winds, first fighting for Parliament in the English Civil War, then championing the restoration of the monarchy. Cromwell made him rich by giving him confiscated Irish estates, but Admiral Penn later loaned £16,000 to Cavalier King Charles. He groomed his son William to be a respectable gentleman and sent him to study at Oxford. But young William was expelled for criticizing Oxford's Anglican Church services and in 1667, at age twenty-six, he horrified everyone by joining the Quakers. His father tried everything to get his son on the right track—beatings, whippings, banishment, a plum posting at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles, a turn at managing the family estate in Ireland—but nothing seemed to work for very long. William came back from France with “a great deal, if not too much, of the vanity of the French garb and affected manner of speech and gait,” according to family friend Samuel Pepys, but still defiantly claimed allegiance to the Quakers, or Friends of God, as they by then called themselves. He published dozens of belligerent pamphlets extolling Quakerism, was arrested four times, and spent a year in prison. He used his father's connections at the royal court to gain the release of Quaker converts and spent his allowance traveling in Germany and the Netherlands as a Quaker missionary. He became close to the sect's founder, George Fox, and helped shape the Friends' practices. On his father's death in 1670, William Penn was one of the most famous Quakers in England and very, very rich.
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Penn enjoyed the finer things in life—confiscated manor houses, expensive clothing, fine wines, a staff of servants—but nurturing Quakerism was his first priority. Quakers, he decided, needed their own country, a place where they could conduct a “holy experiment” that would serve as an “example to all nations” that would prompt “all Mankind to go hither.” In 1680 he settled King Charles's debt to his late father in exchange for a grant of 45,000 square miles of real estate located between Lord Baltimore's Maryland and the Duke of York's New York. The province (which was as large as England itself) would be named Pennsylvania, after the late admiral. William Penn would have the authority to do pretty much whatever he wished there.
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Penn envisioned a country where people of different creeds and ethnic backgrounds could live together in harmony. Since his faith led him to believe in the inherent goodness of humans, his colony would have no armed forces and would exist in peace with local Indians, paying them for their land and respecting their interests. While all the other American colonies severely restricted the political power of ordinary people, Pennsylvania would extend the vote to almost everyone. The Quaker religion would have no special status within the colony's government, the Friends wishing to inspire by example, not by coercion. Government would be limited, unable to levy taxes without the annual approval of the elected assembly. Pennsylvania itself would be centered around a new, centrally planned capital on the Delaware River with a gridiron street pattern, systemized street names, and uniform distances between buildings. (Indeed, Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, would become the model for later American towns and cities across the Midlands.) But Penn's civilization was to extend well beyond the borders of Pennsylvania to incorporate the Quaker-controlled colony of West Jersey (now southern New Jersey), the scattered Dutch, Swedish, and Finnish settlements along the lower reaches of Delaware Bay (now the state of Delaware), and northwestern Maryland (which Penn believed, erroneously, to be part of his royal grant).
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Penn's colonization effort was extremely well organized. Offering political and religious liberty and land on cheap terms, he advertised Pennsylvania aggressively, printing pamphlets not just in England and Ireland but in the Netherlands and wide swaths of what is now Germany. He presold 750,000 acres of farm lots to some 600 investors, raising the money needed to underwrite the initial wave of colonists, establish Philadelphia, and keep the colonial government running for several years without having to collect taxes. In 1682 Penn sent twenty-three ships to Pennsylvania carrying 2,000 colonists with tools, provisions, and livestock. Four years later 8,000 people were living in and around Philadelphia, a population level that took Tidewater twenty-five years to achieve and New France seventy years. Most were skilled artisans and farmers of modest means who had come as families, instantly giving the Midlands a settled and civilized tone. With ample food, good relations with the Indians, and a Quaker majority, the “holy experiment” had gotten off to a highly promising start.
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Penn's marketing campaign was so successful that it soon brought an even larger wave of settlers, one that would give the Midlands its pluralistic and decidedly un-British character, with lasting effects on the spirit and identity of the future United States.

This second immigration wave consisted of German-speaking peasants and craftsmen from the Palatinate. They were essentially refugees, fleeing famine, religious persecution, and war, traumatized by generations of horrific imperial and religious conflicts that had made their south German homeland a killing field. They were Protestants almost without exception, and they arrived in large extended family groups, or even as entire transplanted villages, reinforcing the Midlands' existing middle-class ethos. Some were from sects that wished to order their lives in a particular way, like the Amish, the Mennonites, or the Brethren of Christ. Thousands more were mainstream Lutherans and German Calvinists, wanting nothing more than to build prosperous family farms in a peaceful setting. Penn let them all settle their own communities where they could maintain their ethnic identity and practice whatever Christian religion suited them. This plan proved incredibly successful: Pennsylvania
Deitsch
, a Palatinate dialect of German, continued in everyday use in Germantown and other “Pennsylvania Dutch” settlements well into the twentieth century; the Amish and Mennonites maintain their way of life to the present day. Altogether some 5,000 German speakers emigrated to the Midlands between 1683 and 1726, imprinting their cultural values on the region early on. Between 1727 and 1755 another 57,000 flooded in, making Pennsylvania the only English-founded colony without an English majority.
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The Germans easily adapted themselves to Quaker plans for this new society. They were generally content to let the Quakers run things, supporting Quaker candidates in elections and endorsing Quaker policies. The Germans' small-scale farming skills became legendary; they knew how to select farmland with top-quality soil, conserve it through crop rotation, and improve livestock through selective breeding. For the next two centuries, visitors invariably remarked on their tidy and prosperous farms, usually comparing them favorably with those of their non-German neighbors. “It is pretty to behold our back settlements where the barns are large as palaces,” a Wales-born surveyor remarked in 1753. “How much we are indebted to the Germans for the economy they have introduced [to this] . . . infant colony.” They were also renowned for their skills as craftsmen, having perfected the building of log cabins (a design learned from the Swedes and Finns of the “lower counties” of Delaware) and invented the famed Conestoga wagon, which carried generations of settlers over the Appalachians and beyond. Most of them belonged to disciplined religious sects that prized thrift and sobriety, solidifying their affinity with their Quaker neighbors.
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The Germans and Quakers also shared a strong aversion to slavery, a stance that would set the Midlands apart from New Netherland, Tidewater, and the Deep South. As family farmers, the Germans had little need for slaves, but their antipathy seems to have been a function of cultural values, as well. Small groups of Germans also settled in the Deep South (in places like New Bern, North Carolina, and New Braunfels, Texas) but had markedly lower rates of slave ownership than their Anglo- and Franco-American neighbors, who were also small farmers. Indeed, the first formal protest against slavery in North America was articulated by German Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania. “We shall do to all men like as we will be done ourselves,” the protestors declared in 1712, “making no difference of what generation, descent or color they are.” Many wealthy Quakers, Penn included, had come to Pennsylvania with slaves, but within a decade, Friends were advising one another that slaveholding violated the Golden Rule. In 1712, the Quaker-run legislature even imposed a prohibitive duty on the import of slaves, but it was overturned by a royal court. With German support, they tried again to suppress slavery in 1773 but were vetoed by the crown. By then most Quaker slaveholders had freed their slaves, and some also tried to compensate them for their past labor. It was a moral stand that would later lead the Midlands to side with Yankeedom against the ambitions of its neighbors to the south.
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Early Pennsylvania was an economic success, but its Quaker-run government was a complete disaster.

The Quakers' ideals proved to be at odds with successful governance. Believing that all people were followers of Christ and innately good, the Quakers assumed citizens could govern themselves through mere selfdiscipline and the application of the Golden Rule. This turned out not to be the case, as Quakers were also by nature inclined to challenge authority and convention at every juncture. The community's leaders quarreled with one another over doctrinal questions while government fell into disarray, failing to maintain public records or to pass laws essential to the functioning of the court system. The governing council couldn't manage to hold regular meetings, while the colony went through six governors in its first decade. The Dutch, Swedes, and Finns of the “lower counties” became so desperate for proper government that they broke away to form one of their own, founding the tiny colony of Delaware in 1704. “Pray stop those scurvy quarrels that break out to the disgrace of the province,” Penn wrote from London. “All good is said of [Pennsylvania] and but little good of [its] people. These bickerings keep back hundreds [of settlers], £10,000 out of my way, and £l00,000 out of the country.” In desperation Penn finally appointed a succession of outsiders to run the place, including a Yankee Puritan (John Blackwell), a successful Anglican merchant from Boston (Edward Shippen), and an arrogant English gentleman (David Lloyd). None of them succeeded in getting Quaker leaders to assume responsibility for the community they'd created. Philadelphia's Quakers preferred to focus on their respective Inner Lights than to tend to the worldly responsibilities of running a colony.
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