For the different groups engaged in the struggle to gain political and economic control of the misnomered "New World," "Americanization" meant radically different things. In exchange for western manufactured goods, whiskey, and horses, Native Americans were decimated by disease, warfare, and cultural subordination. African slaves faced an equally harsh transformation, from their passage across the Atlantic to being under the total legal control of another human being. Nevertheless, the slaves quickly reestablished elements of their prior culture (most enduringly through music) despite their degraded status, while the Native Americans maintained a remarkable degree of cultural difference. The numerous European regional, ethnic, religious, and national groups also brought their own beliefs and customs; there were 150 different ethnoreligious groups by 1750. All these peoples immediately commingled. While some slaves worked on isolated rural plantations, many thousands worked with whites and Native Americans at the numerous ironworks or in the small but growing towns that eventually became bustling urban centers. Thus, from the moment of initial contact, Americanization was a perpetually changing, interactive process with global ramifications.
Within the colonies, the English established the cultural baseline by being the first group to settle in large numbers during the seventeenth century. In Albion's Seed (1989) David Hackett Fischer describes four waves of English immigrants who brought radically different cultural assumptions with them from different parts of their home country: the Puritans arrived between 1629 and 1640; the elitist Cavaliers and their indentured servants between 1642 and 1675; the Quakers between 1675 and 1725; and the Scots-Irish from 1718 to 1775. A huge surge of immigrants from London and Scotland started in the 1750s, a migration that could only be stopped by the American Revolution. Throughout the colonies, the new subcultures were diverse, but primarily English, ranging from the Yankee, the Yorker, the Quaker, and the Cavalier to the Scots Irish. In The Shaping of America (1986, 1993), D. W. Meinig concluded that the colonies were more culturally English than either Ireland or Scotland on the eve of the American Revolution.
Yet as Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out in his famous series of essays on the effects of the frontier on American culture, the combination of wide-open spaces and continual warfare with the indigenous population gradually changed Englishmen into optimistic, aggressive Americans whose rugged individualism assumed a middle-class conception of equality (at least for all white males). As the colonists progressed westward to their small towns and tiny plots of land, they became increasingly "American." Although an elite bound by family relations and wealth ran each colony, hereditary aristocracy could not thrive within a political system that guaranteed the franchise to many more of its citizens than did England. Because England never had a grand, hierarchical design for its colonies, the colonists flourished with little political guidance while paying few taxes.
Having come from many different backgrounds, the colonists never merged themselves into a religious majority and thus gradually became more tolerant of different religious beliefs (even though widespread wariness of Catholicism lingered for many more decades). Two surges of evangelical Christianity—the Great Awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century and the Second Awakening at the turn of the century—transformed the American religious experience into what two scholars called a "free market religious economy." Just as the average American could choose where to live and what to buy, he or she did not have to conform to the more staid, hierarchical versions of Christianity embodied in the Congregational, Episcopal, or Presbyterian churches. Rather, anyone could start or join a church that emphasized a personal and passionate relationship with Christ and God that focused on the perpetual battle against sin and corruption. In addition, all religious groups were prone to schisms. While such self-righteousness can cleanse people of selfdestructive behavior, energize them to embrace life, and provide them with necessary fellowship, it also helps breed the "paranoid style" of American politics. At least until the slavery issue splintered the country, the churches self-consciously ameliorated such tendencies by creating national religions and interdenominational institutions. Once again, "Americanization" consisted of a complex, evolving blending of diversity, uniformity, and individual choice.
As with all other English norms and institutions, the colonists retained whatever parts of the English common law they felt were necessary and discarded, modified, or supplemented the rest.
Colonial wariness of external authority provided necessary fodder for the American Revolution. The colonists shifted from seeing themselves as a crucial part of the British Empire to being a separate and superior people uncorrupted by European decadence and class strife. Americanization turned from a subtle, sociological force to a self-conscious, political proposition. In 1765, Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina told the fellow delegates who had gathered from nine different colonies in response to the Stamp Act: "There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on the continent; but all of us Americans." Patrick Henry echoed these sentiments nine years later when the country considered armed revolution: "The distinctions between Virginians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more, I am not a Virginian, but an American."
The Constitution (1787) provided something of a grand imperial design by creating a republican empire that could spread across the continent. For some leaders, a unified America was paramount. Alexander Hamilton saw states as little more than fictions, Chief Justice John Marshall consistently invoked "the People" to justify his controversial opinions that expanded federal power at the expense of the states, and George Washington warned against regional factionalism in his Farewell Address (1796). But the Constitution also left much political power to the states and to the individual; its federal structure explicitly incorporated the dual loyalties of numerous Americans. Many southerners and New Englanders remained more committed to their region and their state than to the new nation. At the Constitutional Convention, some southern leaders threatened not to join secession lest the new federal power interfere with their slave economy. A group of Yankee Federalists met at the Hartford Convention during the winter of 1814-1815 to protest the continuing war against the British. A minority of the delegates, successfully opposed by Alexander Hamilton, considered secession. This provincialism all but destroyed the Federalist Party, which suffered severe defeats in the 1816 election. But the ensuing debate in 1820 over which new states should be free or slave, a debate that the Missouri Compromise temporarily quelled, unmasked the issue that would fundamentally threaten American nationalism and identity.
By the time Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, the nation had become glaringly different from England. Americans had remained uniquely free of external political authority but were under great social pressure to conform to the mores of equality, democracy, and the restless pursuit of wealth. Thus, every honest profession was honorable. There was a "general equality of condition" which revealed that American democracy had economic and cultural as well as political connotations. Law and religion remained important adhesives, but American character was being formed in the many clubs and groups that provided energy and direction to the civil as well as the political culture. Even the lawyers, who served as something of an aristocratic buffer against the excesses of democracy, knew that public opinion was more powerful than the law. This bustling openness created a form of pluralism—relentlessly increased by the influx of immigrants coming from more distant regions of the world than earlier—that made Americans wary of grand philosophy, abstract political ideals, and religious fanaticism. Of course, the consensus to pursue wealth had its costs: fraudulent speculation; geographical expansion at the expense of Native Americans and rival European powers; widespread sexual subordination; the slave economy; brutal working conditions for wage earners; and environmental degradation. But Americanization was never a timid force. From the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Americans envisioned an era when their country would achieve moral and political preeminence. Such optimism sometimes seems cruelly naive, but it provides energy and hope—preconditions to success in the struggle between different political cultures.