Roots, Routes, And Rootedness: Diversity, Migration, and Toleration in Mid-Atlantic Pluralism

One of the most often cited descriptions of mid-Atlantic society ever penned appeared in 1782, in Letters from an American Farmer, written some years before by the French-born writer and New York inhabitant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In the third letter of that volume, the author, posing as a farmer in Pennsylvania, asked the famous question, "What is the American?" He provided the following answer:

He is either an European, or the descendant of an European; hence the strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now wives of four different nations. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.¹

There are many questions one could ask about the Farmer's description—about nations and groups in the mid-Atlantic, about the nature of family life in the region, even about the gendered connotations of the concept of a new race of men. But the aspect that has always attracted the most attention has been the description of the mixing of peoples, long considered to be among the classic statements of American pluralism. It is fitting that such a passage was penned by an inhabitant of the mid-Atlantic, for there, more than anywhere else in British America, one found early and extensive intermingling of diverse groups of settlers—English, Dutch, French, Scots, Irish, Swedes, Finns, Jews, and German-speakers from diverse jurisdictions—along with similarly varied African and Native American peoples, who Crèvecoeur failed to mention. There one found as well the most often-noted system of religious toleration in British America, if not the whole of the Western world. The Middle-Colony region surely was, in Michael Zuckerman's apt phrase, "America's First Plural Society."²

The prevalence of toleration and pluralism in the region by no means describes all there is to know about diversity in the mid-Atlantic. Implicit in the Farmer's description is not only the fact of the intermixing of peoples in the region, but several different portrayals of how they mixed. In the passage cited above, the Farmer wrote of people of many nationalities "melted into a new race," a phrase that seems to anticipate depictions of America as a melting pot, in which immigrants from diverse backgrounds came to adopt a common culture. Yet at other times the Farmer described people of varying beliefs and habits living side by side, suggesting that those peoples were not really melted together at all. In those passages, the Farmer emphasized instead the toleration of difference, a society in which religious and cultural variety flourished. Moreover, there were clear limits to the author's general sense of inclusion. If the Farmer viewed Americans as assembled from "all nations," both the language and context make abundantly clear that the "nations" to which he referred were entirely restricted to northern and western Europe.

The ambiguities that appear in the Farmer's presentation had existed within the region almost from the beginning. For if toleration and diversity were among the distinguishing characteristics of the Middle Colonies, the ways in which people mixed—the degrees of integration and inclusion, the extent of liberty and tolerance, and the general character of the groups themselves—were quite varied. There were in fact several rather different varieties of pluralism present in the mid-Atlantic, ranging from an apparently large degree of intermixing that often appeared to reduce distinctions among people to a pluralism comprising diverse communities, sometimes living side by side, but with only limited interaction among them. Religious accommodation within the region also varied, from the limited and often grudging acceptance of doctrinal and denominational difference known as toleration to something much closer to true tolerance and full religious liberty. If the Middle Colonies were in fact precursors of American pluralism, that is because all of those forms would have significant echoes later in...