Change and Persistence in the Seventeenth Century

ChangeandPersistence inthe SeventeenthCentury DavidGrayson Allen. In English Ways: TheMovement of Societies and the Transferral ofEnglishLocal Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay inthe Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press for the Institute of Early American Historyand Culture, 1981.312+ xxi pp. StephenSaunders Webb. The Governors-General: TheEnglish Army and the Definition of the Empire, ]569-1681. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press forthe Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979. 549+ xxipp. Lewis R. Fischer Inarecent work T.H. Breen reminds us that both change and persistence were majorcharacteristics of life in the American colonies during the seventeenth century.1 This is a salient rejoinder, because it is indisputable that a majority ofAmerican historians have chosen to emphasize the process of transformation .That is, as a group we have tended to ask Whiggish questions along the linesof "how did we get where we are today'?" This approach has always held aspecial attraction for colonialists, who can seldom forget that the transition fromcolony to nation marks a very obvious end of their particular period. Despite this fascination with change, it is probable that few of us would reject Winthrop Jordan's observation that "history often impresses upon us thosetendencies which have not changed." 2 Clearly, many institutions, ideas and behaviors are modified slowly, if at all. Nonetheless, this recognition has not stopped a number of historians from being decidedly critical of individuals or groups who adhere to what we believe, having the benefit of "perfect" hindsight, to be "outmoded ideas." This reluctance to applaud persistence may have a variety of causes ranging from national character to thenature of our professional training. Yetfor all our concern with "change over time," few historians have failed torealize that persistence co-exists with change. Indeed, the uneasy tension between the two has been with us since the founding of professional historical scholarship in the United States. Perhaps the initial question posed by a Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 1983,279-86 280 Lewis R. Fischer professionally-trained member of our fraternity illustrates this. Herbert Baxter Adams and the students whom he trained in his famous Johns Hopkins seminar focused upon the issue of how English culture was transformed into something distinctively American. While the question concerned the process of change, the argument that they framed in response stressed persistence, This, of course, was the famous "Teutonic hypothesis," which suggested that American institutions, however modified in the process of transportation to the New World, were essentially Germanic in origin. 3 Adams and his students believed that persistence was paramount. Then along came Frederick Jackson Turner. In his "frontier thesis," perhaps still America's most famous contribution to the international world of historical thought, Turner stressed the importance of environmental factors in transforming English culture and institutions into recognizably American forms. Change, or a restlessness with pre-existing ideas and structures , was to Turner what American history was all about. But Turnerian change was not always rapid, or indeed, perceptible. Turner acknowledged the remarkable resistance to modification of many institutions, some ofwhich literally took centuries to lose their European characteristics. Thus, while change was central, even Turner found it difficult to ignore persistence. 4 Within the first generation of professional historical scholarship in America a dialectic had been created. Not surprisingly, the debate which ensued led, in perhaps a typically American manner, to a compromise of sorts. It was the oft-neglected but undeniably insightful Edward Eggleston who in 1901 proposed a method of institutionalizing both concepts. Borrowing heavily from both Adams and Turner, Eggleston sketched a portrait of seventeenthcentury America which was characterized by both change and persistence. Hismethodology was also brilliant: according to Eggleston, the two concepts were not irreconcilable, particularly if persistence, like change, were viewed as a process. The originality of this thought can be best appreciated by acknowledging that it was another half-century before the great American sociologist, Talcott Parsons, independently made the same observation. 5 In advancing this argument, Eggleston, in total innocence, was establishing what we now refer to as a "paradigm." The term, coined by Thomas Kuhn in his seminal work The Structure of Scient(fic Revolutions, is a particularly...