“Albion’s Seed”: Notions of liberty in the US

The eminent American historian David Hackett Fischer has written colossal tomes that are daunting to even look at. His classic Albion’s Seed makes the argument at great length that modern American culture has been fundamentally shaped by four successive waves of migrations from different parts of the British Isles. These migrations brought with them their own distinct “folkways”, which took root in particular parts of the (eastern) United States and in particular strata of society. The book is vast, but this excerpt from the book contains short summaries of the ways in which the four folkways differed on the notion of liberty. I shall summarize the four summaries here so as not to overtax my poor brain.

In Fischer’s own words:

These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World. 

The first of the migrations was that of the Puritans, from eastern England to Massachusetts in the early 17th century. Their folkway was marked by what Fischer calls “ordered liberty”, and indeed used the word “liberty” to refer to four different ideas:

• collective liberty: the ability of a community to make its own decisions
• individual liberties: particular rights granted to individuals or groups that liberated them from otherwise binding constraints
• “soul liberty”: the “freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other”.
• “freedom from the tyranny of circumstance”: guaranteeing everybody some level of protection from the worst that life could throw at them

The second migration, almost contemporaneous with the first, was that of a Royalist élite from southern  England to Virginia, who were accompanied by a large group of indentured servants. The most common notion of liberty here was a sort of “hegemonic liberty” that was available only to free-born Englishmen, which gave them not just dominion over themselves but also over others. It was thus possible to reconcile ideas of liberty with the practice of slavery in such parts.

The third was that of the Quakers from the northern Midlands of England to the mid-Atlantic, particularly around the Philadelphia area. This was a later migration than that of the Puritans, and thus exhibited a very different understanding of liberty. For the Quakers, what mattered most was “reciprocal liberty” that rested on their deep faith in “liberty of conscience”. As the Quakers had suffered greatly in England for their faith, they were willing to use the power of government to establish religious liberties in their communities in the Americas so as to prevent such tyranny from arising again. Their principle of reciprocity—fundamentally different from the Virginian Royalists’ hierarchical, hegemonic liberty—drew inspiration from the Christian Golden Rule. 

The fourth migration was that of the Scots-Irish (which seems a little bit too much of a catch-all to me, but then again I know nothing of this stuff), who came from different borderlands of Great Britain: the border between England and Scotland, the border between Northern Ireland and what is today the Republic of Ireland, and so on. These regions of the British Isles did not have strong centralized institutions, and the people living there were accustomed to “anarchic violence”. It was thus “natural” for them to bring to the Americas an abiding love of “natural liberty” accompanied by a deep mistrust of cultural outsiders.