The Presidency as a Case StudyFor two centuries after 1789, the four major regions controlled the national politics of the United States as completely as they dominated its language and its culture. Not until the late twentieth century did this pattern begin to change. An indicator of this hegemony may be seen in the cultural origins of American Presidents. In two centuries from 1789 to 1989, the highest office has been held by forty men, of whom thirty-eight were descended from one or another of the four folk migrations.
Of those four cultural groups, this historian was surprised to discover that the largest number of Presidents, eighteen in all, were descended in whole or in part from North British borderers, most of whom had settled in the backcountry during the eighteenth century. They included Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt (who was nearly three-quarters North British), Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.31
The next largest group of Presidents, sixteen altogether, traced their American ancestry wholly or partly to Puritans who had landed in Massachusetts during the great migration (1629-1640). They included John and John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and George Bush.32 Also in this group was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was three-quarters New England Yankee despite his Dutch name.33
New England ancestry was important to the self-identities of these men. All but one of them took a suitably solemn pride in their Puritan forbears. The exception was Abraham Lincoln, who made a typically Lincolnian joke about his Puritan past. “The first ancestor that I know anything about,” he told a friend, “was Tom Lincoln who came over in 1634 and settled at a place [called] Hingham—or perhaps it was Hanghim. Which was it, judge?”34
Except for Lincoln, the others strongly identified with their New England roots, even far beyond the genealogical fact. Ulysses Grant, for example, was only one-quarter New Englander, but he was taught by his genealogist-father to think of himself as mainly of New England stock.35 Even Warren Harding, the least puritanical of American Presidents, made a hobby of his New England genealogy, and devoted many proud hours to tracing his Calvinist forbears.36
A third group of ten Presidents were descended from Virginia’s “distressed cavaliers.” They were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor (part), Benjamin Harrison (part), Harry Truman (part) and Jimmy Carter (part).37
Three of these lineages were very thin. Benjamin Harrison was only one-quarter Virginian through his presidential grandfather. Truman had only a tenuous tidewater connection which was discovered after he became President and had no part in forming his cultural identity. Jimmy Carter also had a distant connection to the old Virginia family of the same name. But that relationship was of less significance than his deep roots in the southern back-country. As chief executive Carter formally changed his official forename from the royal James to the proletarian Jimmy—a specimen of backcountry onomastics which descendants of Puritans and cavaliers alike observed with surprise.
The fourth folk culture contributed comparatively little to the presidency. The English Quakers and German Pietists who settled the Delaware Valley did not approve of politics. Nevertheless, seven American Presidents had a connection with this culture. Abraham Lincoln’s Puritan ancestors intermarried with Pennsylvania Quakers. Grover Cleveland had a German Quaker grandmother from Pennsylvania. William McKinley had a Quaker great-grandmother. Warren Harding was of Quaker descent on his mother’s side. Herbert Hoover was descended from mixed German and English Quakers and Dwight Eisenhower came from German Mennonites whose experiences and beliefs were similar to English Quakers in many ways.38 The black sheep of the presidential flock, Richard Nixon, also traced his ancestry to Quakers who migrated to Pennsylvania before 1730.39
These lists count several Presidents more than once if they were of mixed ancestry. There is an interesting pattern in that respect. Before the year 1856, every American President but one came from a single cultural stock. The sole exception was John Tyler, who had a Huguenot grandmother. Here is another indicator of cultural homogenity in regional elites through the first two centuries of early American history.
With the election of 1856, that pattern began to change. American Presidents began to combine two or even three cultures in their own ancestry. The first to do so was James Buchanan (b. 1791). The second was Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809), whose father’s forbears had been both Puritan and Quaker, and whose mother’s ancestry was largely unknown even to the President himself. Six Presidents in the late nineteenth century had plural origins, and eight Presidents did in the twentieth. There was a good deal of intermarrying among British elites, French Huguenots, Dutch Calvinists and German Protestants. But British culture remained predominant in most of these mixed unions.
In summary, during the first two centuries of American history (1789-1989), every President except two was descended from one or more of the four hearth cultures of Anglo-America. All but two Presidents were also descended from ancestors who arrived in the four major folk migrations. The only exceptions were Martin Van Buren (a Dutch Calvinist from New York), and John F. Kennedy (an Irish Catholic from New England).40 No Presidents came from the South Carolina low country, Maryland, Rhode Island or Maine. For two centuries the dominion of the four major regional cultures has remained remarkably strong.