The Persistence of Old British Cultures in the New Republic

After the revolution, foreign travelers in the United States continued for many years to remark on what one called the “essential Englishness” of its culture. The agricultural reformer William Strickland wrote, “ … the predilection of these northern states for everything that is English, and their attachment to the Old Country, as they call England, is truly remarkable, of the New England states in particular … it is not quite so strong in N. York, which is inhabited by a mixed people.”²⁴

Another commentator remarked in 1818, “Whoever has well observed America cannot doubt that she still remains essentially English, in language, habits, laws, customs, manners, morals, and religion. … the great mass of our people is of English origin, andnotmade up, originally, of convicts, mendicants and vagabonds, according to the vulgar but erroneous opinion.”²⁵

Well into the nineteenth century, foreign travelers were still repeating these remarks. In 1835, French visitor Michel Chevalier described the people of New England as not merely English, but “double distilled English.”²⁶ Alexis de Tocqueville added, “In spite of the ocean that intervenes, I cannot consent to separate America from Europe. I consider the people of the United States as that portion of the English people who are commissioned to explore the forests of the new world.”²⁷

In the Appalachian highlands, nineteenth-century travelers were even more startled by the patterns of cultural persistence which they discovered there. George Flower, in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, was surprised in 1816 to find “a style ofconversation that prevailed in England about Cromwell’s time.”²⁸ That same discovery would often be made by others through the next two centuries. A student of American language, Albert Marckwardt, has written that “on the average of once every five years some well meaning amateur in the field of folklore or cultural history ‘discovers’ that either the Kentucky or Virginian or Ozark mountaineers … speak the undefiled English of Chaucer or Shakespeare.”

In fact, this impression of cultural stasis was not correct. What appeared at first hearing to be merely a linguistic archaism was produced by a complex pattern of continuity and change. Nevertheless, each of the four folkways of English speaking America retained its linguistic identity for many years after independence.²⁹