Albion's Seed is a monumental book and I don't have the time or the energy to get into all the things I like and don't like about it. But a friend just sent me an excellent review article (JSTOR) that compares Albion's Seed to another very interesting book, The American Backwoods Frontier by Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups (1989).
In asserting that Appalachian culture came from the Borders, Fischer was following a tradition of American scholarship that goes back to the 1700s. The Scotts-Irish, in particular – people from southern Scotland who were settled in northern Ireland, then moved on from there to America – have long been cited as the progenitors of Appalachia. Certain things about white Appalachian culture can indeed be traced in a fairly direct way to the Borders: the music, most obviously, but also tendencies toward clannishness, violence, a kind of egalitarianism that was social but not economic, and a savage aversion to having snobbish outsiders tell them what to do.
But this thesis has always had a glaring problem: how did people from the Borders learn to live in the vast forests of North America?
These folks came from a mostly barren landscape where most buildings were stone and the main economic activity was raising sheep. The people of colonial Appalachia, by contrast, built almost entirely with logs and focused their farming on corn, tobacco, and hogs. As Jordan and Kaups complained, the Scotts-Irish thesis purported to explain Appalachian culture while ignoring all the things that actually enabled British immigrants to survive in their new environment. Jordan and Kaups directed our attention toward a different source group: the Finns who came into the Swedish colony on the Delaware River in the mid 1600s. There were not many of these Finnish immigrants, probably just a few hundred, but certain things about their background and political status made their situation unique. First, they knew how to live in the forest, since they had been living on the forested margins of agricultural civilization in Sweden and Finland (then part of the Swedish kingdom). They knew how to build with logs, practice slash-and-burn agriculture on soils of dubious fertility, make everything they needed out of wood. Once in the New World they found themselves the allies of certain powerful Native nations, notably the Susquehannocks (whom they joined in a war agains the British colony of Maryland) and the Shawnee. These connections allowed them to move out to the frontier and prosper as traders and interpreters. (There are links to my company's reports on the history and archaeology of the Potomac Valley, from which I learned all this, in this old post.)
So to Jordan and Kaups, American backwoods culture was not Scotts-Irish, but "Fenno-Indic."
It seems obvious to me that it was both. It also seems obvious to me that the particular geography and political history of the Appalachians shaped the culture that emerged. The basic economic system of the colonial Appalachians had little to do with northern Britain, owing much more both to the Finnish frontiersmen and to the fusion of European, Native, and Caribbean agriculture that had already been developed in 17th-century Virginia. The question of Appalachian political and social attitudes is harder to answer. Just like the people of the Borders, Appalachian frontiersmen were defined both by war against outsiders (Native, then British) and conflicts with allegedly friendly governments based on the wealthier lowlands, conflicts that culminated during the Civil War with the secession of West Virginia from Virginia and pro-Union risings from northern Alabama to eastern Tennessee. So how much should we attribute to inherited attitudes from the old country, and how much to more recent New World experience? Or, from another angle, did the people and culture of the Broders survive and thrive in Appalachia because circumstances resembled those at home?
These people with their monocausal explanations make me crazy.
2 comments:
Isn't there a case to be made that the cultural traits, or at least modern versions visibly descended from the old ones, have survived to this day, while the economy and building techniques have gone through a series of dire changes ? And if yes, perhaps this would be an example to serve in a larger argument that technology and economics are not necessarily as determinative of culture as is sometimes held.
There's a case for that, but as I said, I am interested in how much the particular circumstances of Appalachia -- e.g., that the region was mountainous and not rich, that most Appalachians were ruled from distant state capitals in the lowlands -- shaped what parts of culture survived and which were lost.
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