New England

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NEW ENGLAND

As one of the distinct cultural and political hearths of colonial settlement in British North America, New England played a decisive role in the shaping of the new American Republic. From the area's initial colonization through the early nineteenth century, New Englanders developed and maintained a strong regional identity that helped give rise to various nationalistic visions, but in many cases they also were a local counterpoint to such larger allegiances. Yet this idea—this sense of identity, of "New Englandness"—operated not only as a defining element of New Englanders' identification with the new American nation, but as a powerful part of their critique of the Republic when they perceived their place within it challenged and threatened. In a somewhat ironic demonstration of the dynamic and evolving nature of the new Republic's nationhood, New England's regional distinctiveness served first to bolster, but then often critically to examine the bonds of union in the early American Republic.

colonial era

New England was the second major region of English colonization in North America. Unlike the preceding Chesapeake colonies, the New England settlements were, socially and culturally, initially more stable and homogenous. Founded primarily as Puritan enclaves, these colonies possessed a greater collective identity and sense of purpose than most of their counterparts in England's American domain. This Puritan-inspired sense of mission was summed up most famously by John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay (founded 1630). Winthrop exhorted his fellow Puritan settlers that they must be "a Citty upon a Hill. The eies of all people are uppon us." The Puritan "errand into the wilderness," meant to provide a beacon of reform for the unregenerate mainstream of the Anglican Church, ultimately proved a failure, however. Subsequent colonies in the region were founded by dissenters from this orthodoxy, testimony to the increasing divergence of views within the larger Puritan colonial community.

Most significantly, the Puritan mission of Massachusetts Bay became a victim of the colony's success. The thin, rocky soil of New England was unsuitable for agriculture beyond the scale of small family farming. But the extensive lumber supplies, rich fisheries, and numerous harbors of the region provided a path to economic growth that looked seaward through such pursuits as shipbuilding, naval stores, whaling, fishing, and commerce. As Boston became a preeminent center of Atlantic trade, the colony's economy grew significantly. This in turn attracted new settlers, many of whom did not share in the original Puritan ethic. Economic growth begat new social and cultural priorities; by the 1660s, Puritan ministers were preaching jeremiads lamenting the increasing worldliness of their flocks, which ultimately threatened the success of the Puritan experiment. These lamentations proved prescient—by the end of the century, New England resembled the other English colonies much more closely in its more secular nature. Most symbolic of this transformation was the crown's reorganization of its American colonies in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. The new royal charter of 1691 for the colony of Massachusetts combined the original Puritan colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay into one unit and tied political participation to property ownership rather than membership in a Puritan congregation. Despite the failure of the reformist mission articulated by such figures as Winthrop, the Puritan identity continued to exert a profound influence on the cultural and social development of New England. Much of New England's regional identity in the Revolutionary and early national periods arose from the Puritan legacy.

revolutionary and early national eras

Bolstering this sense of regional importance was New England's primary role in the events and debates leading to the Revolutionary War and American independence. Boston emerged as the center of colonial resistance to British policies in the years following the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Many of the prominent figures associated with this colonial resistance were New Englanders. James Otis (1725–1783) first articulated the colonists' constitutional arguments about taxation and representation. Samuel Adams (1722–1803) was the mastermind behind many of Boston's displays of resistance, as well as an early advocate of the Revolutionary Committees of Correspondence. His cousin, John Adams (1735–1826), was a prominent leader in Boston's Sons of Liberty, as was the silversmith Paul Revere (1735–1818). The wealthy merchant John Hancock (1737–1793) lent wealth and social prominence to the movement, and he served as president of the Continental Congress when it ratified the Declaration of Independence. Many key events along the road to revolution occurred in Boston and elsewhere in New England. Boston was the site of the largest protests against the Stamp Act (1765), protests which set the pattern of popular participation and agitation that would become a hallmark of the era. The Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 1775) and Bunker Hill (June 1775)—the coming of American independence seemed to be charted by events in Boston and its environs. No other region produced as many of the events and figures associated with the Revolutionary movement in the public imagination.

During the American Republic's first decades, New Englanders—like many other Americans—reckoned with exactly what their Revolution had wrought. Revolutionary ideals of republicanism and liberty eroded many of the norms that had characterized colonial society. Deferring to one's "betters" was no longer accepted protocol, for example; urban centers like Boston saw groups such as merchants, laborers, and even blacks and women lay claim to participation and acceptance within the larger public sphere. Assertiveness by traditionally subordinate groups could turn threatening, and even violent, in the eyes of traditional elites. Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts (1786–1787) seemed to embody the uncertain and contested nature of the Revolutionary legacy. The institution of slavery quickly receded throughout the northern states for these same reasons. Leading the way was Massachusetts, whose supreme court (in the celebrated Quok Walker case) declared slavery unconstitutional in 1783. By the end of the decade, slavery had been abolished throughout New England. This "first emancipation" would be a primary reason for New England's becoming the hearth of the abolitionist movement in later years.

After the ratification of the Constitution (in 1788) New England became a consistent base of political support for the Federalist presidential administrations of George Washington (1789–1797) and John Adams (1797–1801). Federalist policy favored the interests of commerce and manufacturing, both of which played central roles in the region's economy. The opposition, led by Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and dubbed the Democratic Republicans, did not make much of an inroad into New England until the early 1800s. New England solidly supported native son John Adams in the controversial election of 1800, but Thomas Jefferson won the presidency. Many New Englanders ascribed the Federalist defeat to extra Republican votes gained from the slave population through the operation of the Constitution's "three-fifths" compromise. Without these "slave votes," New England Federalists argued, Jefferson would have lost. The resentment over these issues of slavery and sectional power formed an important part of the emerging New England critique of Democratic Republican rule.

from center to periphery

Though the Democratic Republicans would control the region's state governments by early 1804, Federalist opposition remained a significant force. New England Federalists decried what they saw as the Republicans' insensitivity to the commercial interests of their region. Key events during the presidencies of Jefferson (1801–1809) and Madison (1809–1817) only served to reinforce this belief. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the nation's size, threatening to render New England an even smaller minority in the national government. Indeed, in the wake of the purchase, a group of New England congress-men—led by Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering—attempted to put into motion a plan whereby New York and the New England states would secede from the southern-dominated Union and form an independent "northern confederacy." The conspirators even cultivated Vice President Aaron Burr, a native New Yorker, as a gubernatorial candidate in an attempt to win the spring 1804 election in his home state. If Burr had won, they planned to begin the process of secession that would culminate in the confederacy desired by these New Englanders. Burr, however, lost the election (blaming his defeat on Alexander Hamilton, he issued a challenge which led to the notorious duel between Burr and his longtime political nemesis) and the Federalists suffered general reverses in the spring elections throughout New England. In the wake of these defeats, the plans of Pickering and his cohorts evaporated. However, despite the failure of this specific plan for a northern confederacy, anti-Republican and anti-southern sentiment in New England remained strong, awaiting only another threat to the region's interests to fan it into full flame.

Commercial disputes with Britain and France, eventually leading to the War of 1812, created resentment in New England, as various Republican retaliatory measures (embargo and commercial nonintercourse) decimated the New England economy and led many in the region to accuse the Republicans of a larger anti-commercial—and anti-New England—animus. The protests emanating from New England had taken on an increasingly sectional tone by this point, a significant contrast to earlier decades. During the War of 1812 itself, New England remained essentially neutral—financiers refused to lend the government necessary funds, governors withheld militias from federal service, and grassroots opposition to a highly unpopular war culminated in a special convention at Hartford, Connecticut, which opened in December 1814. The Hartford Convention, however, was not only the height but the end of New England's sectionalism. The convention demanded constitutional amendments to restrict southerners' political powers and protect what it saw as New England's interests. News of Andrew Jackson's smashing victory at New Orleans (January 1815) and the Treaty of Ghent (signed December 1814) effectively rendered the Hartford Convention moot. New England's Federalists were now seen as opponents to what had become, in the eyes of most Americans, a smashing national triumph, and thus they became tainted in the public mind with an aura of disloyalty and treason.

This remarkable transformation in New England's standing—from the heart to the fringes of the American mainstream—reflected not only the rapid growth of the Republic, but the sense of national consciousness that was evolving beyond regionally centered definitions of "American," like those of New England. New England possessed, throughout this period, a strong and coherent sense of identity. This identity, however, occupied a much different place and served much different purposes by the 1820s than it had during an earlier generation.

With the decline of the Federalists in the wake of the ill-fated Hartford Convention, New England's regional consciousness and self-definition was no longer tied to a specific partisan identity. Taking the place of political agendas was the emerging manufacturing sector of New England's economy, which had its beginnings around the turn of the century in the textile mills of the Rhode Island coast and the Merrimack River valley of Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Since the region was never ideally suited for farming on any scale beyond that of the individual family, there was a surplus of population in terms of what was required for farm work; this surplus became a ready-made labor force available for work in the quickly growing enterprises. As manufacturing spread into other parts of the region, and other types of production, towns like Lowell and Lynn, Massachusetts, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, became the earliest centers of the United States' emergent industrial economy. The rise and steady growth of New England's manufacturing economy would put the region on a much different path than other sections of the United States, and ultimately play a significant role in a later generation's sectional divisions and conflicts. As the factory operative and "Yankee trader" became increasingly representative cultural types in New England, a clear contrast emerged with the rural, agrarian South of yeomen farmers and slave owning planters. Ultimately, as the American Republic matured, the very real sense of a distinctive New England culture and identity—though it now came from different antecedents—continued to be an important factor in the Republic's collection of regional identities, just as it had been from the earliest days of American nationhood.

bibliography

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Gross, Robert A. The Minutemen and Their World. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750. New York: Norton, 1984.

Kerber, Linda K. Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Rutman, Darrett B. Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

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Waller, George M., ed. Puritanism in Early America. 2nd ed. Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1973.

Young, Alfred F. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Kevin M. Gannon

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation