The New England Yankee Diaspora
“The New England Yankees … were almost entirely the descendants of 21,000 Puritans who arrived between 1629 and 1640.”[1] For the next 150 years confined, except through sea trade, to the borders of today’s six New England states they prospered, became Unitarians, and procreated. The American Revolution, arguably triggered by Yankee belligerence, and the establishment of the American Republic in 1789 changed all that. Mad Anthony Wayne’s victory over Native Americans in Fallen Timbers in 1796 also changed all that. The first, movement was within New England itself, to Vermont and Maine which tripled in population from 1790-1810. But then the New Englander surged across the upstate New York border—and the race to the Pacific Ocean had started.
New England shared upstate New York with downstate New York, Philadelphia capital and speculators. Speculators such as Robert Morris, of Revolutionary War fame, bought up huge swatches of upstate New York. In Morris’s case, his bankruptcy resulted in the land being transferred to the Dutch-based Holland Company who hired Joseph Ellicott and he hired Pierre L’Enfant (who would later design Washington D.C., of course). Together they platted much of central and Western New York (Buffalo and Rochester in particular) which they sold to New England emigrants. Other speculators such as William Bingham (could you guess Binghamton) did the same for other swatches. Bingham also sold the land to New Englanders who came in groups, often extended families from the same town. For example, thirty fishermen from Martha’s Vineyard/Nantucket established the town of Hudson in Columbia County along the Hudson in 1783. In 1805 New Englanders founded Syracuse.
Massachusetts laid claim to all of present-day (Upstate) New York west of Seneca Lake—six million acres in all—an area larger than Massachusetts itself …. New York [compromised] in 1786; the region would be part of the state of New York, but Massachusetts would own the property and could sell it at a profit. The result: settlement of much of the region was directed by Boston-based land speculators, and virtually all of its settlers came from New England.[2]
Upstate New York, with a population of 121,000 in 1790, exploded and population increased to nearly 1.4 million by 1830—“at which point Upstate New York had more people than any other single state”. [3]
The Erie Canal (completed in 1825) facilitated manufacturing expansion into the Upstate: textiles in Utica, flour milling in Rochester. Buffalo, through its innovation, the grain mill, developed into a great logistics and transshipment center between the Midwest and New York City. From the beginning, it was abundantly clear that Yankee migration meant city-building—industrial cities, as well as commercial trade. New Englanders didn’t just settle lands and hack out a homestead;
Entire families would pack their possessions, rendezvous with their neighbors, and journey en masse to their new destination, often led by their minister. On arrival they planted a new town—not just a collection of individual farms—complete with master plot plan, with specific sites set aside for streets, the town green and commons, a … meeting house, and the all-important public school. They also brought their town meeting government with them.[4]
The Yankee Diaspora bore little resemblance to the Scotch-Irish migration.
After Upstate New York, Ohio was next. The Northwest Ordinance among other features prohibited slavery within its borders and divided the land into 36 square mile townships each divided into 35 sections for private sale plus one section reserved to build a public school. The state of Connecticut held title to a strip of Ohio land, the Western Reserve, through 1800 (as such it was not included in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance); The Western Reserve included present day Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland—and (in theory) extended across several states beyond that. Connecticut (1795) sold much of the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company. With 1796 Fallen Timbers victory land speculators and surveyors headed west. In 1796 Moses Cleaveland, the lead surveyor of the Connecticut Land Company, platted the land into townships and formally founded the cities of Cleveland and Youngstown.[5]
Settlers from Connecticut did stake out land there, including Moses Cleaveland …and was settled almost entirely by Yankees and in the years after the Civil War, when New England cities were thronged with Irish Catholic immigrants, the Western Reserve was, with Vermont, the most Yankee dominated part of the country. Yankee domination lasted until the early twentieth century, when Ellis Islanders thronged to work in the new steel, auto and tire factories in Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown.[6]
The remainder of Ohio was settled by just about everybody—Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Scotch-Irish and as we shall soon see, Germans. But, especially in the northern half, Yankees predominated. Yankees founded several colleges: Ohio University who’s first President was William McGuffey, Hiram College, alma mater of President Garfield, Baldwin-Wallace, Antioch (Horace Mann its first President), Oberlin (1833 by Vermonters), Kenyon (Rutherford B. Hayes) and, logically, Western Reserve College.
Yankees laid down the cultural infrastructure of a large part of Ohio, portions of Iowa and Illinois, and almost the entirety of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They had almost near-total control over the politics in the latter three states for much of the nineteenth century. Five of the first six governors of Michigan were Yankees, and four had been born in New England. In Wisconsin nine of the first twelve governors were Yankees ….(By contrast, in Illinois—where Midlands and Appalachian cultures were in the majority—not one of the first six governors was of Yankee descent—all had been born south of the Mason-Dixon line). A third of Minnesota’s first territorial legislature was New England-born and a great many of the rest were [transplanted New Englanders] from Upstate New York … In all three Upper Great Lake states, Yankees dominated discussions in the constitutional conventions and transplanted their legal, political and religious norms.[7]
When the first steamship on the Great Lakes was launched in 1818 Yankee immigrants, (disproportionately Vermonters who moved into the Saginaw River Valley to form a lumber industry), left Buffalo and Western New York for Michigan[8]. The Michigan Territory governed by General Lewis Cass, a New Hampshire native, became home to quite a few transplanted New Englanders. Solomon Sibley, Massachusetts born and a Brown University graduate was Detroit’s first mayor (1806) and Elijah Brush, a Vermonter (Dartmouth), it’s second. Indiana, Iowa and Illinois followed after Michigan.
Northwest Ohio and northern Indiana, slower to be settled than the southern portions of these states, attracted Yankee migrants as well, as did northern Illinois. Though far less numerous in Indiana than Ohio, Vermonters and Connecticut men established northern Indiana towns such as Montpelier, Wolcottville, and Orland. Among its Vermont-born settlers was Governor James Whitcomb, who set up the state’s public school system and Caleb Mills, the first President of Wabash College.[9]
New England’s “jewel in the crown”, however, was Chicago. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (Vermont), immediately after Black Hawk War’s end (1832), hired William B. Ogden (Delaware County New York) as his lawyer, and along with Grant Goodrich (Chautauqua County New York), formed “Chicago’s first urban elite … made up mostly of young, self-made men from New England and New York State”. The original city-builders of Chicago, they transformed a wilderness outpost into the great metropolis of Chicago.[10]
Chicago, however, was far from the end of the line for Yankee immigration. Vermont born John Deere set up a plow factory on the Mississippi at Moline (Illinois) and from the 1830’s onward Yankees piled into Wisconsin (as did Germans) and after the 1840’s saturated Iowa. Burlington, Iowa, was named for another Burlington back east, and Grenville Dodge (Danvers Massachusetts, later chief surveyor for the transcontinental Union Pacific) founded Grinnell Iowa, also becoming Iowa College’s first President. A few years later Yankees rushed into Kansas and Nebraska to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories (John Brown[11], for example was born in Torrington Connecticut). Yankees liked to travel. But they also liked to preach and reform[12].
The moralistic, reforming, didactic Yankee spirit produced movements that reshaped America in these years: the temperance movement that reduced American’s alcohol consumption by more than half, the nonsectarian evangelical movement that stressed self-improvement and good works, the building of thousands of schools and dozens of colleges and the proliferation of a print culture [establishing newspapers] that dominated at least the northern states…. The Yankee Diaspora, never embarrassed about imposing its views on others, made them great national movements that in time prevailed.[13]
Other groups who fundamentally disagreed with New England values avoided the region on account of the Yankee’s reputation for minding other people’s business and pressuring newcomers to conform to their cultural norms. Catholics—whether Irish, south German or Italian—did not appreciate the Yankee educational system, correctly recognizing that the schools were designed to assimilate their children into Yankee culture …. The new comers created their own parallel system of parochial schools precisely to protect the children from the Yankee mold …. Whenever possible, Catholic immigrants chose to live in the more tolerant multicultural Midlands, or the individualistic Appalachia.[14]
Yankees, it seems, wore religion on their sleeves—no matter how secular that religion would become. Their diaspora generally brought with it a flowering of all sorts of religions and millennial movements which usually included the ending of the world (sort of like climate change today). Mormonism, of course, began in “the burned over district” (Oneida County New York) which also generated Charles Finney (who became President of Oberlin College) the personification of the Second Great Awakening.
Yankee Economic Development: Structures and Priorities
More interested in government action at the state and national level, Yankees were considerably less focused on sub-state governance. Their local agenda consisted of a reverence for the New England township governance, schools, and internal improvements. Yankee public policy tended to be “people-focused”, education, caring for the widows and disabled, and the most economically disadvantaged—who, in this time period, were African-Americans who were very conveniently located in the South. Town[15] and townships, aside from infrastructure, did not manifest sustained policy agendas relevant to economic development. Even today, this form of government is the least involved in sub-state economic development than other governmental forms (city/village manager, mayor).
The New England Puritans, however, demonstrated their (Progressive) sense of governance by establishing towns as a community enterprise which accommodated a strong state-level government with a vital local direct democracy tasked with providing “people-centered” policy outputs. There was minimal county government buffering the contact between state and town/city.
The device the Massachusetts Bay colonial legislature chose to (create sub-state governance entities) was to create in each instance a town or land corporation that behaved much like a (town-level) trading company or any limited-liability business corporation of the time….these land corporations had shareholder members who were proprietors of the common land… (such) land or town corporations … were formed when the shareholders made formal agreements …which required the shareholders to perform certain common tasks, such as dividing the land, settling the lots, paying taxes and maintaining the commons.
This, of course, was the legal and structural basis of “New England town democracy” with its “town meeting” which was the a municipal governance based on shareholders forming a community through mutual compact. These distinctive styles of governance produced their own distinctive policy systems.
The towns founded during the seventeenth century were quasi-public, quasi-private entities— private enterprises sponsored by land corporations, whose members were shareholders. They owned the common land given to them by the assembly…shared the costs of organizing the town—raising revenues among themselves, spending funds on public ways … gaining profit as they divided and sold the land to other settlers. Early New England towns were comprised of circles within circles of people: the town residents (whether voters or not), the politically empowered voters (whether proprietors or not), and proprietors (whether residents or not). In both their founding and early political life, there was a pervasive ambivalence as to whether the early New England towns were public or private undertakings.[16]
There was variation within New England—Rhode Island, in particular, departed from the state-centric “tightly regulated founding and settling of towns (with) much detailed legislation”.[17] Indeed, the Massachusetts system broke down during the eighteenth century when towns in western Massachusetts were granted more autonomy from the state.
Unlike, the southern plantation-style governance, the New England system, however, was not carried uniformly through lands settled by the Yankee Diaspora. The Yankee Diaspora either went through lands governed by another state (New York), or were shared with settlers from the Midlands (Ohio, for example).The Middle Atlantic colonies developed their own style of sub-state governance reflecting their New Netherlands or Midlands political culture.
New York, as individual-focused a political culture as any, devised a municipal incorporation process by which individuals or groups would petition the colonial/state legislature for grants of land to found a town. With the opening up of western New York after Fallen Timbers, business corporations, such as the Holland Land Company, acquired from the state large tracts of land, which the Land Company platted and sold to individual Yankee Diaspora settlers. The Land Company would set up the central towns or market areas, such as Buffalo, and plat and settle these areas as pre-urban communities. Having “outsourced” town and city-building, the state of New York reasserted its governance role through a system of empowered state-dominated counties. In future years. New York cities and counties competed and cooperated as their needs and politics suited them-they were, in fact, rivals in governance.
Pennsylvania (New Jersey and Delaware) was another matter entirely. William Penn originally recreated the classic medieval agricultural village in Pennsylvania. In this model of governance. individual l farms would extend outward from the village center. For the first twenty years or so, the colonial (state) government surveyed and platted the land accordingly: Germantown, Newtown and Bucks Counties reflected this structural pattern. Planned commercial centers were envisioned as “county seats” whose purpose was both commercial and administrative. Philadelphia, Bristol, Chester and New Castle were examples of these early planned centers. As other settlers moved into more rural areas Penn’s hodge-podge system broke down. Settlers moving into the western hinterlands, beyond Penn’s effective control established diverse homesteads, more resembling the southern shredded community than his planned medieval village communities.[18]
Instead, the farther out from Philadelphia these planned centers were, the more they functioned as strong central units of government with their own hinterland; York, Reading, Carlisle, Easton, Bedford and Sunbury are examples. Following yet another governance model, Gettysburg, Chambersburg and Lebanon were established by a private city-builder.[19] This latter model was prevalent in the mountain areas of Pennsylvania where the town or borough served as a county seat and was founded by an private city-builder. Bellefonte, for example, was founded by speculator Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord[20] around a spring and an iron ore mine. “During the course of the eighteenth century Pennsylvania became blanketed with clustered settlements”.[21] The net effect of all this was a distinctive Mid-Atlantic style of governance:
The middle colonies created a dual arrangement: contiguous (unlike the South) townships (like New England) throughout the colony, but with primary political authority vested in county governments (like the South).[22]
As new Mid-West states set up their governments and state constitutions, the systems they devised and incorporated into their state constitutions reflected the examples of different styles of governance that could be copied, and the impact of those who populations which affected state constitutional decision-making. Consider the Wisconsin constitution and SSS which was approved in 1848 (and still in operation today). In Wisconsin counties, while absent a court system, possessed considerable autonomy from the state, and were robustly empowered to assume responsibility for many policy areas (enjoying powers relevant to economic development, for instance). Wisconsin townships embraced the New England town meeting and were especially active in the provision of town road and bridge infrastructure and indigent residents to include the provision of medical care and funeral expenses (reflecting the Progressive concern for the community’s disadvantaged). Finance, however, was a “complicated mix of state-county-township revenue-raising and spending”.[23]
Hence, the development of individual state SSS came very early in American (and economic development history) and has had ample time to harden into distinct patterns which subtlety continue to affect contemporary policy-making and its structural/program outputs.[24]
[1] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 52,
[2] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p.174.
[3] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 66.
[4] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p.176.
[5] The story has it that the “a” was dropped out of Cleveland’s name by a printer who wanted to crowd a sentence into a single line of print—which, by the way, I was unable to do in this footnote.
[6] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 64.
[7] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 177.
[8] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 69.
[9] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 69.
[10] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 70. Also quoted is Donald Miller, City of the Century: the Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996). Each of the three were characterized by Donald Miller as “versatile, risk-taking businessmen”.
[11] Interesting irony of history is that John Brown’s father Owen, an owner of a tannery in Connecticut, hired as his apprentice the father of Ulysses S. Grant, Jesse Grant.
[12] Politically, Yankees were Federalists. After the War of 1812 they turned to other parties, often the Whig (Henry Clay). They were not Jacksonian Democrats, however (except Maine and New Hampshire who tended to be disproportionately settled by those protesting Massachusetts governance). The Yankee policy agenda was more national, than local, favoring tariffs which protected their various manufacturing start-up, internal improvements, and national banks. Eventually, the Yankees, thru the Republican Party, were able to carry their agenda once again to the national government and the Morrill Act (1862, land grant colleges), the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad (followed by the Credit Moblier scandal), the constitutional abolition of slavery, and the Reconstruction confirmed a persistent Yankee tendency to use the national government, and focus secondarily on the local level..
[13] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 75.
[14] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 179.
[15] See David J. Russo, American Towns: An Interpretive History (Chicago, Ivan R Dee, 2001)
[16] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 94.
[17] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 94.
[18] Penn finally abandoned the open strip, scattered land plots in favor of an individual contiguous farm.
[19] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. pp. 16-17.
[20] Yes, this is the famous Talleyrand of Congress of Vienna fame. In 1790 he visited Pennsylvania and entered into a land speculation deal which founded Bellefonte.
[21] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 17.
[22] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 93.
[23] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. pp. 103-104.
[24] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. pp. 103-104.
Ron W. Coan 