Old Stock Americans

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Old Stock Americans
Pioneer Stock, Anglo-Americans
Regions with significant populations
United States and Canada [1]
Languages
American English, Pennsylvania German, historical minority Jersey Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and French.
Religion
Christianity (primarily Protestantism, with some Catholicism especially in Maryland) and minority Judaism
Related ethnic groups
British, English, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Ulster-Scots, Old Stock Canadians, Pennsylvania German, New Netherlander, Afrikaners, Huguenots, Anglo-Celtic Australians, European New Zealanders, Anglo-Indians, British diaspora in Africa

Old Stock Americans, Pioneer Stock, or Colonial Stock, are Americans who are descended from the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies. They were mainly white Protestants from Northern Europe, who emigrated to British America in the 17th and the 18th centuries. [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Some Old Stock Americans, primarily English Protestants, saw Catholics as a threat to traditional American republican values, as they were loyal to a foreign pope. [6] [7] [8] [9]

Settlement in the colonies

Between 1700 and 1775, the overwhelming majority of settlers to the colonies (up to 90%)[ citation needed ] were Britons of varying ethnic backgrounds such as English, Scottish (including Ulster-Scots), Welsh, and native Irish, with initial settlements focused on the colonial hearths of Virginia, New England and Bermuda under Elizabeth I, James VI and I and Charles I. By 1776 there were between 2 and 2.5 million colonists in the Thirteen Colonies.[ citation needed ]

Early European settlers

Populations of French Huguenots, Dutch, Swedes, and Germans arrived before 1776, some as fellow royal subjects, other populations as legacies of earlier colonies such as New Netherland, which became the Middle Colonies of British America, and the Dutch colonial capital of New Amsterdam retained a distinct commercial cosmopolitan character as New York which became America's largest city. Ethnic Finns made up the majority of settlers of New Sweden colony which passed to Dutch and English rule. While small in number, Forest Finns left an outsized legacy, among European Americans uniquely accustomed to a pioneer life taming wilderness on frontiers of the Swedish Empire, bringing slash-and-burn agriculture and resourceful timber usage to the New World in the 17th century. From Tavastia, Savo and Karelia, Finnish log cabin architecture arrived early in colonial America, like the 1638 Nothnagle Cabin–adopted by later pioneer settlers like the Scotch-Irish to become symbols of American frontier culture advancing westward across North America. [10] As the Scotch-Irish first resettled Ulster from the violent Scottish borderlands before departing for America, Forest Finns lived on the rough frontier borderlands of eastern Finland until the Swedish king invited them to resettle and clear wooded central Sweden, before remigrating to America. [11] [12] In 1776, a descendent of Finnish New Sweden settlers, John Morton, joined Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson to cast the deciding vote of the Pennsylvania delegation in support of independence and became a signer of the Declaration of Independence two days later. [13]

British settlers in New England

While the majority of colonists were from Great Britain, these were not monolithic in ethnic, political, social, and cultural origins, but rather transplanted different Old World folkways to the New World. The two most significant colonies had been settled by opposing factions in the English Civil War and the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The founders of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony in the North were mostly Puritans from East Anglia, who had been influenced by egalitarian Roundhead republican ideals of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth of England and the Protectorate; in New England they concentrated in towns where decisions were made by direct democracy, prizing communal conformity, social equality, and Puritan work ethic. Partially owing to the insularity of Puritan communities, colonial New England was far more homogeneously "English" than other regions, in contrast to the historically tolerant Dutch colonial parts of the Northeast, and more diverse colonies of the Mid-Atlantic and the South which from an early stage had strong elements of German and Scottish stock, from varying religious traditions. [14] [15] [16] [17]

British settlers in the Old South

Conversely, in Chesapeake Colonies to the south, the Colony of Virginia had been settled by their Cavalier royalist rivals—many younger sons of English gentry who fled Southern England when Cromwell took power, accompanied by indentured servants. Sir William Berkeley, colonial governor of Virginia, loyal to King Charles I, banished Puritans while offering refuge to the Virginia Cavaliers—many of whom became First Families of Virginia. For his colony's fidelity to the Crown, Charles II awarded Virginia its nickname "Old Dominion". [18] In contrast to egalitarian and collectivist New England Colonies to the north, settlers of the Southern Colonies in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and Georgia recreated a hierarchical social order governed by an aristocratic American gentry which would dominate the antebellum Old South for generations. Sons of British nobility established American plantations where the planter class employed indentured servants to farm cash crops; later replaced by African slaves, especially in Deep South states where a feudal West Indies-style slave plantation economy developed. Freed English American indentured servants, along with Scottish Americans, Scotch-Irish Americans, Palatines and other German Americans arrived as hearty pioneers, taming harsh frontier wilderness to settle their own homesteads amid streams and hilly terrain, becoming old stock of the mountainous backcountry. To contrast against Yankee "Anglo-Saxon" democratic radicalism of New England, at times even English Americans in Dixie (especially in decades leading up to the American Civil War) would not only identify with chivalrous Cavaliers, but even assert a distinct aristocratic racial heritage as knightly heirs to the Normans who conquered and civilized 'barbaric' and unruly Anglo-Saxons of medieval England. [15] [16] [19] [20] [17]

19th century to present

Cartoon from Puck, August 9, 1899 by J. S. Pughe. Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters and asks, "Why should I let these freaks cast whole ballots when they are only half Americans?" Hyphenated Americans Voting Cartoon 1899.jpg
Cartoon from Puck , August 9, 1899 by J. S. Pughe. Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters and asks, "Why should I let these freaks cast whole ballots when they are only half Americans?"

Until the second half of the 20th century, Old Stock Americans dominated American culture and politics. [21] [22] Starting in the 1840s millions of German and Irish Catholics immigrated to the rapidly industrializing United States during the 19th century. Anti-Catholic elements formed the Know Nothing movement that had brief success in the mid 1850s, then faded away. Its presidential candidate, former president Millard Fillmore, took 22% of the total national vote in the 1856 United States presidential election. [23]

American settlers arriving in the formerly Spanish or Mexican holdings of the Southwest were labelled as "Anglos". [24]

See also

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The Thirteen Colonies were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. Grievances against the imperial government led the 13 colonies to begin uniting in 1774, and expelling British officials by 1775. Assembled at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to fight the American Revolutionary War. In 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence as the United States of America. Defeating British armies with French help, the Thirteen Colonies gained sovereignty with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British colonization of the Americas</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colony of Virginia</span> British colony in North America (1606–1776)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massachusetts Bay Colony</span> 1630–1691 English colony in North America

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Middle Colonies</span> Subset of British American Thirteen Colonies

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of immigration to the United States</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">New England Colonies</span> British American colonies (1620-1776)

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References

  1. ↑ Wilson, Bruce G. "Loyalists in Canada". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Retrieved April 11, 2020.
  2. ↑ Hirschman, C. (2005). "Immigration and the American century". Demography. 42 (4): 595–620. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.533.8964 . doi:10.1353/dem.2005.0031. PMID   16463913. S2CID   46298096.
  3. ↑ Khan, Razib. "Don't count old stock Anglo-America out". Discover Magazine. Retrieved July 14, 2016.
  4. ↑ American Baptist Historical Society (1976). Foundations. American Baptist Historical Society. Retrieved November 25, 2023.
  5. ↑ Qualey, Carlton (January 31, 2020). "Ethnicity and History". MSL Academic Endeavors. Retrieved November 25, 2023.
  6. ↑ David Brion Davis, "Some themes of counter-subversion: an analysis of anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Mormon literature." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47.2 (1960): 205–224 online.
  7. ↑ Olson, J.S.; Beal, H.O. (2011). The Ethnic Dimension in American History. Wiley. p. 187. ISBN   978-1-4443-5839-1 . Retrieved November 25, 2023.
  8. ↑ "2.3: Immigration, Ethnicity, and the "Nadir of Race Relations"". Humanities LibreTexts. March 31, 2020. Retrieved November 25, 2023.
  9. ↑ Blau, Francine D.; MacKie, Christopher, eds. (June 13, 2017). The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/23550. hdl:10919/83151. ISBN   978-0-309-44445-3.
  10. ↑ Purvis, Thomas L. (1999). Balkin, Richard (ed.). Colonial America to 1763 (Almanacs of American Life). New York: Facts on File. ISBN   978-0816025275. OCLC   39368430.
  11. ↑ Jordan, Terry G.; Kaups, Matti E. (1989). The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethical and Ecological Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN   978-0801836862. OCLC   17804299.
  12. ↑ Wedin, Maud (October 2012). "Highlights of Research in Scandinavia on Forest Finns" (PDF). American-Swedish Organization. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 9, 2017.
  13. ↑ Lossing, B.J. (1857). Biographical Sketches of the Signers of the American Declaration of Independence. New York: Derby & Jackson. p. 112.
  14. ↑ Lind, Michael (January 20, 2001). "America's tribes - Prospect Magazine". Prospect Magazine . London: Prospect Publishing Ltd. Archived from the original on September 27, 2022. Retrieved September 28, 2022.
  15. 1 2 Fischer, David Hackett (1989). Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0195069051. OCLC   727645641.
  16. 1 2 Woodard, Colin (2011). American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN   978-0670022960. OCLC   810122408.
  17. 1 2 Watson, Ritchie Devon (2008). Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN   978-0807133125. OCLC   167763992.
  18. ↑ Salmon, Emily J.; Campbell, Edward D.C., eds. (1994). The Hornbook of Virginia History: A Ready-Reference Guide to the Old Dominion's People, Places, and Past (4th ed.). Richmond: The Library of Virginia. ISBN   978-0884901778. OCLC   30892983.
  19. ↑ McKee, Jesse O. (August 21, 2017). Ethnicity in Contemporary America: A Geographical Appraisal. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN   9780742500341 . Retrieved August 21, 2017– via Google Books.
  20. ↑ Nelson, Eric (2014). The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0674735347. OCLC   880122463.
  21. ↑ Oyangen, K. Immigrant Identities in the Rural Midwest, 1830–1925. Iowa State University. ISBN   9780549147114 . Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  22. ↑ Lichtman, Alan J. (2000). Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928. Lexington Books. ISBN   9780739101261 . Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  23. ↑ Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860: a study of the origins of American nativism (1938) pp. 407–436. online
  24. ↑ "The latest to arrive were the English-speaking Americans-called “Anglos ” in New Mexico--who began moving in from the east a century ago." Neville V. Scarfe, "Testing Geographical Interest by a Visual Method." Journal of Geography 54.8 (1955): 377-387.
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