The Colonial Mood: Cultural Nostalgia in a New Environment

The founders of the Delaware colonies were religious radicals, but like most American immigrants they also became cultural conservatives who were full of nostalgia for the land they had left. A sense of loss and longing for the mother country was transmitted to their children and persisted many years in the Delaware Valley.

In 1725, this colonial mood was captured in a letter from a young Pennsylvanian named John Jones to a relative in Wales. The writer had been born in America, but he showed nothing of what historians of modern immigration in the twentieth century would call the “second generation syndrome.” John Jones described his native American colony with an air of detachment, as “this woody region, this new world, … this distant and foreign land.” He continued to speak and write in Welsh many years after his parents had come to America. To his kinsman in Wales he described his nostalgia for the mother country.

I have heard my father speak much about old Wales. … I remember him frequently mentioning such places as Llanycil, Llanwchl-lyn, Llanfor, Llangwm, Bala, Llangower, Llyn Tegid, Arenig Fawr, Fron Dderw, Brynllysg, Phenbryn, Cyffdy, Glanllafar, Fron Goch, Llaethgwm, Hafodfadog, Cwm Tir y Mynach, Cwm Glan Lleidiog, Trawsfynydd, Tai Hirion yn Mignaint and many others.

It is probably uninteresting to you to hear these names of places; but it affords me great delight even to think of them, although I do not know what kind of places they are; and indeed I long much to see them, having heard my father and mother so often speak in the most affectionate manner of the kind-hearted and innocent old people who lived in them, most of whom are now gone to their long home.

Frequently during long winter evenings, would they in merry mood prolong their conversation about their native land till midnight; and even after they had retired to rest, they would sometimes fondly recall to each other’s recollection some man, or hill, house, or rock.

Really I can scarcely express in words how delighted this harmless old couple were to talk of their old habitations, their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, having been now twenty-four years in a distant and foreign land, without even the hope of seeing them more.¹

This colonial mood became a cultural instrument of high importance in the Delaware Valley, as it had been in New England and the Chesapeake. It caused Quaker immigrants to cling to the culture which they had carried out of England.

Another part of the colonial mood was intense anxiety for the future, and a fear of cultural disintegration which so often appeared in new settlements. The ironic effect of this cultural angst was to cause much internal strife in Pennsylvania, just as it had done in Massachusetts and Virginia. Within a few years of settlement, the Delaware Quakers fell to quarreling furiously among themselves over the question of whether they needed a written creed to preserve their faith in the New World. For some, the absence of formal doctrines threatened the colony with chaos. For others, the very idea of such a creed betrayed the spiritual purposes which it was meant to protect. The result was a Quaker schism in Pennsylvania, the so-called Keithian controversy (1690-93), which took its name from George Keith, a Scottish Quaker who led the movement for a creed. Keith in turn was accused of “preaching two Christs,” and “denying the sufficiency of the Light within.” The strife caused deep divisions among the Quakers.

At the same time there were many other “wrangles” and “heats” in the early 1690s. When a gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and began to plunder the Delaware Valley, Quakers quarreled among themselves over the difficult question of how a society which renounced the use of violence could suppress crime in its midst. The leaders of Pennsylvania, after much soul-searching, decided to use force against the pirates. But the contrary-minded Mr. Keith denounced the use of arms, and another angry controversy developed in the Quaker colonies.

George Keith and his followers also published highly personal attacks upon the leaders of Pennsylvania accusing them of “spiritual and carnal whoredoms,” and describing the colony itself as “a strumpet cohabiting in the wilderness.” This assault caused Quakers who had spoken out for free expression in England to demand restraints in America. Printers were arrested for publishing “unlicensed books,” and their press and types were seized, as

Quakers struggled to preserve the cultural fabric of their colonies.² In the end, the dissenters were defeated and George Keith left the colony in 1693. But the colonial mood continued for many years.

The culture of the Delaware Valley differed in many ways from the folkways of Massachusetts and Virginia, but the dynamics of its historical development were in many ways the same. Here again one finds strong continuities in the transit of culture from England to America, and also similar patterns of change in a new environment. Let us examine these processes in more detail, by analyzing this culture in its constituent parts. We shall begin with the speech ways of the Delaware Valley.