Colin Woodard Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE - ORIGINS 1590 to 1769

  CHAPTER 1 - Founding El Norte

  CHAPTER 2 - Founding New France

  CHAPTER 3 - Founding Tidewater

  CHAPTER 4 - Founding Yankeedom

  CHAPTER 5 - Founding New Netherland

  CHAPTER 6 - The Colonies’ First Revolt

  CHAPTER 7 - Founding the Deep South

  CHAPTER 8 - Founding the Midlands

  CHAPTER 9 - Founding Greater Appalachia

  PART TWO - UNLIKELY ALLIES 1770 to 1815

  CHAPTER 10 - A Common Struggle

  CHAPTER 11 - Six Wars of Liberation

  CHAPTER 12 - Independence or Revolution?

  CHAPTER 13 - Nations in the North

  CHAPTER 14 - First Secessionists

  PART THREE - WARS FOR THE WEST 1816 to 1877

  CHAPTER 15 - Yankeedom Spreads West

  CHAPTER 16 - The Midlands Spread West

  CHAPTER 17 - Appalachia Spreads West

  CHAPTER 18 - The Deep South Spreads West

  CHAPTER 19 - Conquering El Norte

  CHAPTER 20 - Founding the Left Coast

  CHAPTER 21 - War for the West

  PART FOUR - CULTURE WARS 1878 to 2010

  CHAPTER 22 - Founding the Far West

  CHAPTER 23 - Immigration and Identity

  CHAPTER 24 - Gods and Missions

  CHAPTER 25 - Culture Clash

  CHAPTER 26 - War, Empire, and the Military

  CHAPTER 27 - The Struggle for Power I: The Blue Nations

  CHAPTER 28 - The Struggle for Power II: The Red and the Purple

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ALSO BY COLIN WOODARD

  ALSO BY COLIN WOODARD

  Ocean’s End

  The Republic of Pirates

  The Lobster Coast

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Colin Woodard, 2011 All rights reserved

  Maps drawn by Sean Wilkinson, Sean Wilkinson Design

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Woodard, Colin,—————.

  American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America /

  Colin Woodard.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54445-7

  E98.F39W66 2011

  970.004’97—dc22 2011015196

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For my father,

  James Strohn Woodard,

  who taught me to read and write

  THE AMERICAN NATIONS TODAY

  Introduction

  On a hot late-August day in 2010, television personality Glenn Beck held a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the forty-seventh anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Mr. Beck stood where Rev. King had stood and addressed the white, mostly middle-aged crowd encircling the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool. “We are a nation, quite honestly, that is in about as good a shape as I am, and this is not very good,” he joked. “We are dividing ourselves,” he said, “but our values and our principles can unite us. We must discover them again.”

  It’s a theme heard again and again in times of crisis: Americans have become divided on account of having strayed from the core principles on which their country was founded—a “firm reliance on divine providence” and “the idea that man can rule himself,” in Mr. Beck’s analysis—and must return to those shared values if unity is to be restored. When society was turned upside down by mass immigration at the turn of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, intellectuals counseled that America was in danger of losing the “Anglo-Protestant” culture and associated “American creed” that had supposedly kept the nation unified. In the aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s, conservatives like Irving Kristol denounced liberal intellectuals, philanthropists, and social workers for abandoning America’s traditional capitalist values in favor of utopian social engineering; the liberals fervently defended these projects as promoting shared national principles of equality, justice, and freedom from oppression. With the United States allegedly divided between red states and blue ones in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to “beat back the politics of fear, doubt, and cynicism” in favor of hope, a sentiment that had allegedly rallied Americans to rebel against Britain, fight and defeat Nazism, and face down segregation in the South. “We are choosing hope over fear,” he said before the Iowa caucus. “We’re choosing unity over division.”1

  Such calls for unity overlook a glaring historical fact: Americans have been deeply divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth. The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Islands, and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain, each with their own religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics. Throughout the colonial period, they regarded one another as competitors—for land, settlers, and capital—and occasionally as enemies, as was the case during the English Civil War, when Royalist Virginia stood against Puritan Massachusetts, or when New Netherland and New France were invaded and occupied by English-speaking soldiers, statesmen, and merchants. Only when London began treating its colonies as a single unit—and enacted policies threatening to nearly all—did some of these distinct societies briefly come together to win a revolution and create a joint government. Nearly all of them would seriously consider leaving the Union in the eighty-year period after Yorktown; several went to war to do so in the 1860s. All of these centuries-old cultures are still with us today, and have spread their people, ideas, and in
fluence across mutually exclusive bands of the continent. There isn’t and never has been one America, but rather several Americas.

  Any effort to “restore” fundamental American values runs into an even greater obstacle: Each of our founding cultures had its own set of cherished principles, and they often contradicted one another. By the middle of the eighteenth century, eight discrete Euro-American cultures had been established on the southern and eastern rims of North America. For generations these distinct cultural hearths developed in remarkable isolation from one another, consolidating characteristic values, practices, dialects, and ideals. Some championed individualism, others utopian social reform. Some believed themselves guided by divine purpose, others championed freedom of conscience and inquiry. Some embraced an Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity, others ethnic and religious pluralism. Some valued equality and democratic participation, others deference to a traditional aristocratic order. All of them continue to champion some version of their founding ideals in the present day. The United States had Founding Fathers, to be sure, but they were the grandfathers, great-grandfathers, or great-great-grandfathers of the men who met to sign the Declaration of Independence and to draft our first two constitutions. Our true Founders didn’t have an “original intent” we can refer back to in challenging times; they had original intents.

  America’s most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, capital and labor, blacks and whites, the faithful and the secular. Rather, our divisions stem from this fact: the United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. Six joined together to liberate themselves from British rule. Four were conquered but not vanquished by English-speaking rivals. Two more were founded in the West by a mix of American frontiersmen in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some are defined by cultural pluralism, others by their French, Spanish, or “Anglo-Saxon” heritage. Few have shown any indication that they are melting into some sort of unified American culture. On the contrary, since 1960 the fault lines between these nations have been growing wider, fueling culture wars, constitutional struggles, and ever more frequent pleas for unity.

  I have very consciously used the term nations to describe these regional cultures, for by the time they agreed to share a federated state, each had long exhibited the characteristics of nationhood. Americans—because of this particular historical circumstance—often confuse the terms state and nation, and are among the only people in the world who use statehood and nationhood interchangeably. A state is a sovereign political entity like the United Kingdom, Kenya, Panama, or New Zealand, eligible for membership in the United Nations and inclusion on the maps produced by Rand McNally or the National Geographic Society. A nation is a group of people who share—or believe they share—a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols. Some nations are presently stateless—the Kurdish, Palestinian, or Québécois nations, for instance. Some control and dominate their own nation-state, which they typically name for themselves, as in France, Germany, Japan, or Turkey. Conversely, there are plenty of states—some of them federated—that aren’t dominated by a single nation, like Belgium, Switzerland, Malaysia, Canada and, indeed, the United States. North America’s eleven nations are all stateless, though at least two currently aspire to change that, and most of the others have tried to at one time or another.

  This is the story of the eleven nations, and it explains much about who we North Americans are, where we’ve come from, and where we might be going.

  American Nations reveals the history of North America’s nations from the moment of their respective foundations to their present positions within the continent’s three federations: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. It shows how their conflicting agendas shaped the scope and nature of the American Revolution, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and a chain of violent citizen uprisings against the early American Republic. While every American knows about the great intraregional conflict that was the Civil War, it was in fact neither unprecedented (both Appalachia and New England entertained secession in the decades after the revolution) nor strictly two-sided. (The war actually involved a complicated six-nation diplomatic minuet over the future of the West.) Northern Mexicans—including those who built the culture of what is now the extreme southwest of the United States—have for centuries seen themselves as separate from their purported countrymen in central and southern Mexico; they rallied behind numerous secession schemes, including the Texas Revolution of 1836. English-speaking Canadians endlessly ponder the weakness of their identity, and it’s no wonder: their federation is comprised of very strong Québécois and far northern aboriginal entities and the northward extensions of four English-speaking regional nations whose cultural cores now lie in the United States.

  Disregard the conventional map of North America, with its depiction of a continent neatly divided into three federations, thirteen Canadian provinces and territories, thirty-one Mexican states, and fifty American ones. For the most part, those boundaries are as arbitrary as those chosen by European colonial powers to divide up the African continent. The lines on the map slash through cohesive cultures, creating massive cultural fissures in states like Maryland, Oregon, or New York, whose residents have often found they have more in common with their neighbors in other states than they do with one another. Banish the meaningless “regions” with which we try to analyze national politics—“the Northeast,” “the West,” “the Midwest,” or “the South”—whose boundaries are marked by those of their constituent states in complete disregard for the continent’s actual settlement history and sectional rivalries. The continent’s states, provinces, and federations do matter, of course, as they are the official forums through which political power is exercised and expressed. But on carefully examining events of the past four centuries, one realizes these jurisdictions are illusions that mask the real forces that have always driven the affairs of our sprawling continent: the eleven stateless nations of North America.

  So what are these nations? What are their defining characteristics? What parts of the continent does each control? Where did they come from? Let me briefly introduce each of them, their spheres of dominance, and the names I have chosen for each.

  Yankeedom was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, a religious utopia in the New England wilderness. From the outset it was a culture that put great emphasis on education, local political control, and the pursuit of the “greater good” of the community, even if it required individual self-denial. Yankees have the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives, tending to see it as an extension of the citizenry, and a vital bulwark against the schemes of grasping aristocrats, corporations, or outside powers. For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on Earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process, and the aggressive assimilation of foreigners. Settled by stable, educated families, Yankeedom has always had a middle-class ethos and considerable respect for intellectual achievement. Its religious zeal has waned over time, but not its underlying drive to improve the world and the set of moral and social values that scholars have sometimes described as “secular Puritanism.”

  From its New England core, Yankee culture spread with its settlers across upper New York State; the northern strips of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa; parts of the eastern Dakotas; and on up into Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Canadian Maritimes. It has been locked in nearly perpetual combat with the Deep South for control of the federal government since the moment such a thing existed.

  While short-lived, the seventee
nth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland had a lasting impact on the continent’s development by laying down the cultural DNA for what is now Greater New York City. Modeled on its Dutch namesake, New Amsterdam was from the start a global commercial trading society: multi-ethnic, multi-religious, speculative, materialistic, mercantile, and free trading, a raucous, not entirely democratic city-state where no one ethnic or religious group has ever truly been in charge. New Netherland also nurtured two Dutch innovations considered subversive by most other European states at the time: a profound tolerance of diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry. Forced on the other nations at the Constitutional Convention, these ideals have been passed down to us as the Bill of Rights.

  Despite the defeat of the Dutch by the English in 1664, New Netherland has retained its fundamental values and societal model, having long ago replaced Amsterdam as the leading world center of Western commerce, finance, and publishing. Its territory has shrunk over the centuries, its southern reaches (Delaware and southern New Jersey) absorbed by the Midlands, its northern ones (Albany and the upper Hudson Valley) by Yankeedom. Today it comprises the five boroughs of New York City, the lower Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and southwestern Connecticut (where Red Sox fans are outnumbered by Yankee fans). As a center of global commerce, New Netherland has long been the front door for immigrants, who’ve made it the most densely populated part of North America. Its population—19 million at this writing—is greater than that of many European nations, and its influence over this continent’s media, publishing, fashion and intellectual and economic life is hard to overstate.