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ONE: The New England Yankee Homeland
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r o n e The New England Yankee Homeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martyn J. Bowden H. L. Mencken found the term Yankee, first recorded in 1758, to be a derisive Dutch expression directed at English colonial yokels in Connecticut. In the 1760s Yankee spread rapidly to encompass plebeian New Englanders, and by the time of the Revolution it meant New England American and anti-British patriciate—and “Yankees began to take pride in it” (Mencken 1936, 111). Yankee does seem appropriate as a term for the first European-derived indigenous American culture in New England and for the new home-grown plebeian culture and social order that diffused, with varying degrees of receptivity, throughout most of settled New England by the eve of the Revolution. The drawback is that applying it to New England before the 1760s is anachronistic. In this chapter I try to pinpoint in time and place the inception and development of this Yankee culture and a Yankee homeland. I find that an American Yankee culture evolves primarily among East Anglians, but with measurable input from West Country and Southeastern Englishmen, in a lowland hearth adjacent to Boston between approximately 1645 and 1680. I use settlement patterns and vernacular houses in my attempt to define the attributes of this new Yankee culture. I then delimit a “pure” Yankee homeland found in upland areas beyond Massachusetts Bay between 1680 and 1790. Regions where Yankee culture diffused outward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , invariably in diluted form, to be superimposed on observably different 1 regional cultures that developed in the seventeenth century, I suggest, cannot be thought of as Yankee homeland. These areas are termed here the Yankee periphery, as are frontier areas settled after 1770 where a sizable minority of settlers came from the Yankee periphery. The homeland itself, I find, experiences dilution, decline, and eventual demise from the center outward at least from 1790 onward, yet clear evidence can be offered why a Yankee homeland once existed. English Source Areas in the Seventeenth Century Using genealogical evidence and place name transfers, I mapped for the seventeenth century the counties in England that supplied emigrants and the destinations of these Englishmen in New England (Bowden 1994a). The genealogical data were originally gathered by Charles E. Banks (1937), and from his compilation I could map 2,451 individuals in England and New England from 1620 to 1650 (Bowden 1994a, 76). Place names transferred from England to New England were generally those of preindustrial market towns and villages familiar to the settlers, which I mapped for the period 1620–1720. Considerable agreement existed between the two sets of data for 13 of 15 cultural beachheads found in New England; further study is needed to sort out discrepancies in coastal New Hampshire and the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts . In England both data sets also show a clear hierarchy in five regional emigrant source areas. Of the five regional source areas in England in the seventeenth century, East Anglia was clearly the leader in population numbers (map 1.1). Suffolk, Essex, and Norfolk, all counties in East Anglia, led all other counties in number of emigrants (1620–50) and in transfer place names (1620–1720) (Bowden 1994a, 74, 110). The Stour Valley on the Suffolk-Essex border was an especially important emigrant source. In decreasing order after East Anglia came the Southeast (notably Kent and Hertfordshire) and London; the West Country (especially Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire); the North (Yorkshire ); and the Midlands. East Anglia from Domesday (1086) onward was England’s most populous area. It had a strong legacy of Danish-based freeholding (Postgate 1973, 306– 8). This had contributed to land consolidation and enclosure in wood-pasture East Anglia, whence came the majority of East Anglian settlers in Massachu2 . . . martyn j. bowden [3.15.147.53] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:55 GMT) Map 1.1. English source areas for emigrants to New England in the seventeenth century . Shown are five regions (ranked by importance) and selected counties. The map is based on emigrant numbers (1620–50) and transfer place names (1620–1720). Source: Bowden 1994a, figs. 1, 3, 12. setts Bay. The tendency toward enclosure was reinforced by the demands of the market—namely, East Anglia’s strong medieval trade connections with nearby London and with the technologically advanced Low Countries, and its position as the preeminent industrial region in England from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century (Postgate 1973, 284–85; Roxby...