The Whys of Pre-Revolutionary America with Jon Butler
Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History and Religious Studies at Yale University. His books include Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Societ, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, and Religion in American Life: A Short History. This interview was conducted via email.
Neda Raeker: In the beginning of the eighteenth century, which cultures were most prominent in the colonies of America?
Jon Butler: In many regards, the"eighteenth century" began in the mid-1680s because of slavery's dramatically rising importance throughout the British mainland colonies, especially in the Chesapeake and to the south. If we accept the notion of a"long eighteenth century," the answer to the question still remains complicated. In territory under British control, British cultural norms predominated everywhere except in New York, where Dutch norms still held sway in the face of recent British acquisition of the former Dutch colony. In territory under control of native groups, multiple native cultures predominated, and it would not be accurate to say that a single native culture held sway. As would be true to the present, individual"tribal" or group identities, not a generic"native" or"Indian" culture predominated. Finally, as the numbers of enslaved Africans grew, relatively informal practices that farmers employed in managing slaves hardened into a slaveholding culture of greater rigidity and violence, while slaves began developing their own communities within the strictures set down by European owners.
Raeker: In what ways did these varying peoples differentiate themselves from one another?
Butler: Differentiation among the multiple peoples inhabiting British North America—in the mid-1680s being the English, the Dutch in New York, the many still remaining native groups, and in the rapidly expanding enslaved African population—occurred at every level, most obviously in language, economy, social structure and kinship, and religion. Practices and understandings in every area remained largely distinct and usually spread tension, not agreement.
Raeker: What cultures were the quickest to lose their defining characteristics and/or assimilate between the 1680s and the American Revolution?
Butler: Assuming that dominant cultures do not assimilate in societies where other peoples are present—a complicated question, actually—the Dutch of New York and Huguenot refugees (French Protestants) in Boston, New York, and South Carolina were the principal European candidates for assimilation, since their early arrival in America only placed them under pressure longer than those to migrated later. The need to use English, rather than Dutch or French, brought tension as well as acquiescence. By the 1750s, assimilation flowed in an English direction. Intermarriage among the Dutch, English, and Huguenots in New York and the frequent use of English made even the Dutch Reformed congregations there markedly different than they had been seventy years earlier. And by the Revolution, all but one Huguenot congregation would close, while disease, warfare, and less than random attacks continuously decimated native American groups. Many simply disappeared—Crevecoeur listed many vanished tribes in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer—and others moved west as the line of European settlers advanced. But native American"assimilation" occurred rarely.
For enslaved Africans, the grossly involuntary nature of"assimilation" makes the term inappropriate. European slaveholders (slaveholding became one of the Huguenots' most obvious signs of assimilation) forced Africans to learn English, eschew almost all traditional religious practice, forgo traditional marriage, and, of course, surrender children for sale when European owners demanded.
Raeker: In what ways did different peoples begin to mingle and coalesce?
Butler: "Mingling" and" coalescence" depended in good part on simple proximity and infers voluntarism. Huguenots took non-French marriage partners soon and everywhere when they settled in Boston and New York, both because the English and Dutch would have them and because they all lived in close proximity. In South Carolina, Huguenot intermarriage proceeded somewhat more slowly in rural settlements, in part because of their isolation. But their small numbers and the fact that their isolation also was not segregation also encouraged contact with nearby English farmers that, in turn, produced exogamous marriages—for each.
Native American and enslaved African"mingling" and" coalescing" with Europeans occurred, but usually surreptitiously with no legal recognition or protection, illustrating the usually exploitative nature of the relationship.
Raeker: How did these interactions result in a broader"American" culture?
Butler: Interactions among Europeans in British America slowly built a diverse society, although whether this, in turn, developed a less English-centric culture is a matter of debate. The arrival of Scots, Scots-Irish, and German-speaking immigrants, plus smaller numbers of other Europeans in the colonies south of New York created a society aware of increasing differences among Europeans in British America. Benjamin Franklin's anti-German sentiment of the 1750s represented one well-known example of British resentment of non-English settlers.
Interactions between Europeans and enslaved Africans and native Americans produced a culture increasingly comfortable with violence and cruelty expressed in daily relationships with slaves and eruptive violence toward native Americans, both of which became fixtures through and past the American Revolution and into the twentieth century.
Raeker: In what ways did immigration change leading up to the American Revolutionary War?
Butler: In general—and there are exceptions—after 1760 British migration to the colonies persisted (documented in Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West), while immigration of other Europeans and the importation of enslaved Africans slowed, the latter especially from the multiple crises affecting pre-Revolutionary America.
Raeker: How did culture play into the propagation of revolutionary ideas? Were there any specific cultures that were specifically active?
Butler: This question raises basic questions about the causes of the American Revolution, over which historians have argued since men and women first began to write the Revolution's history. My own view, scarcely unique, is that the Revolution was a political event that drew ethnic and cultural groups into its orbit, though they did not shape the Revolution as ethnic or cultural groups, using relatively narrow understandings of both terms. However, if we shift ground and instead refer to a" culture of American politics," then a different answer would emerge. And, of course, there are exceptions. Enslaved Africans, especially in Virginia, ran from owners to take up the promise of freedom offered by the British, and native American groups saw some opportunities in the turmoil of the Revolution to reshape their own positions with regard to European settlements and settlers in the revolting British colonies. And some groups exhibited conflicting patterns. Several Presbyterian ministers, most famously John Witherspoon, avidly supported colonial protest, but the 1775 pastoral letter from the Scottish-dominated Presbytery of Philadelphia worried about an impending" civil war," in America of a kind that had torn Scotland asunder only thirty years earlier. And, of course, most Church of England ministers opposed the Revolution, while New England's tax-supported established Congregational clergy supported it.
Raeker: How did culture inhibit the concept of unification prior to the Revolutionary War?
Butler: American revolutionaries worried about support among backcountry settlers in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas because colonial legislatures often had treated backcountry settlers and settlements poorly, sometimes because the settlers represented different ethnic and religious interests. In 1775 South Carolina patriots sent a Presbyterian, William Tennent III, and a Baptist, William Drayton, into the backcountry to raise support for anti-British action, and Pennsylvania patriots sometimes fretted about German support for anti-British protest. And southern slaveholders and frontier settlers worried about enslaved Africans and native American groups, fearing violence on all sides and within.
Raeker: In what ways did the concept of culture change in the years immediately after the Revolutionary War? In what ways did it stay the same?
Butler: If Thomas Paine could already argue in Common Sense that"We are not the little people now," in January 1776, it scarcely was surprising that in 1782, with victory essentially in hand, the Continental Congress could authorize a seal emblazoned with the motto"Novus ordo seclorum," by which its designer Charles Thompson meant"the beginning of the new America era." The successful revolution transformed the colonies' cultural ground. If many of the parts remained the same—some tragically so, such as slavery and relations with native America groups—a European colonial society now became the master of its own destiny. This changed the concept of culture as it would emerge in post-Revolutionary America because so many questions now centered on maintaining independence and shaping a new society, questions European Americans answered with both spectacular success and devastating failure.