Colonial America

Writing in 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur tried to define "the American, this new man." He was, Crèvecoeur argued, "neither a European nor a descendant of a European" but an "American, who, leaving behind all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds." Crèvecoeur presumed that America was a melting pot, that the environment created a homogeneous American culture, with similar values, beliefs, and social practices. Such cultural uniformity is inherently plausible. After all, most white colonial Americans worked the soil, enjoying the fruits of their labor, and practiced similar Protestant faiths. Moreover, they believed in private ownership of the means of production by individual cultivators. Generations of scholars, following the lead of Frederick Jackson Turner in the early twentieth century, argued that free and open land on the frontier created an American people whose identity was shaped by the independence land ownership provided and whose ideology was characterized by individualism, democracy, and equality of opportunity.

Colonial cultures, however, were far less uniform than Crèvecoeur imagined. The women and men who peopled early America--Native Americans, Africans, East Anglians, Welsh, Germans, Dutch, among many others--invented conflicting popular cultures, meshing the beliefs and practices of their birthplaces with the demands of the American environment and the cultures of their neighbors. Indians and Africans, a substantial part of the colonial population, have been ignored in models of cultural uniformity. Even white Protestant immigrants created diverse cultures. While sharing a common religious vision, Puritans and Anglicans, Baptists and Quakers, differed vehemently in the particulars of their faiths. In America, without the pressure of a strong Anglican established church, the particularities of each group were accentuated. By