New England Yankee Diaspora
“New England Yankees were almost entirely the descendants of 21,000 Puritans who arrived between 1629 and 1640” (Barone, 2013, p. 52). For the next 150 years, confined to the borders of today’s six New England states (except through sea trade), they prospered, became Unitarians, and procreated. The American Revolution, triggered by Yankee belligerence, and the Constitution that followed in 1789 set the stage; but “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s victory over Native Americans at Fallen Timbers in 1796 pulled the cork from the bottle. First was migration within New England itself, to Vermont and Maine—both populations tripled between 1790 and 1810. But then New Englanders surged across upstate New York, and with that the Yankee dash to the Pacific really started.
Upstate New York
New England shared upstate New York settlement with downstate New York and Philadelphia land speculators such as Robert Morris, of Revolutionary War fame. Morris bought huge swathes of upstate New York in the earlier days, but his bankruptcy transferred titles to the Dutch-based Holland Company. The Holland Company hired Joseph Ellicott, and he hired Pierre L’Enfant (designer of Washington D.C.); together, they platted central and western New York, which was subsequently sold to New England emigrants. Other speculators such as William Bingham did the same for central/southwestern New York (could you guess Binghamton?). Bingham sold the land to New Englanders who came in groups, often extended families from the same town. For example, 30 fishermen from Martha’s Vineyard/Nantucket founded Hudson along the eponymous river in Columbia County in 1783.
Eastern and east central New York was settled as a consequence of a little-known compromise between New York and Massachusetts. Massachusetts claimed the area (about 6 million acres) and New York, of course, contested Massachusetts’ ownership. In 1786 a compromise was negotiated in which New York got the title for the land but Massachusetts got the proceeds from its sale. So, Boston land financiers put the land up for sale and sold it to New Englanders—and that is how New Englanders moved into New York. In 1805 New Englanders incorporated the city of Syracuse (Woodard, 2011, p. 174). Upstate New York’s 1790 population of 121,000 exploded and increased to nearly 1.4 million by 1830: “at which point Upstate New York had more people than any other single state” (Barone, 2013, p. 66). New York State, little more than New York City at the time, was minimally involved in the settlement itself—in effect it had contracted it out to out-of-state land speculators. From the beginning it was abundantly clear that Yankee migration meant city-building—industrial cities and commercial trade. New Englanders didn’t just 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. (Woodard, 2011, p. 176)
The resulting settlements, predominantly New Englanders, created tension between the state and the municipal government. New England towns contested with New York cities. To remedy this, New York State empowered county government as an administrative partner to deliver state services and coordinate those New England-style municipal government activities. That structural heritage continues today.
The Erie Canal (proposed in 1810, started in 1817 and completed in 1825) was another effort by New York State to control its upstate counties. The canal, in any case, facilitated upstate manufacturing and linked Midwestern agriculture to New York City. So textiles in Utica and flour milling in Rochester flourished. Buffalo, its innovation the grain mill, developed into a great logistics and transshipment center between the Midwest and New York City. This meant that upstate New York was developing cutting-edge industrial cities. Textiles, familiar to New Englanders, and agricultural processing were the first agglomerations that developed. Transportation, the source of raw materials and export of the finished product, was critical. Upstate New York was a transshipment center on a regional scale. Its export economy was not based on native raw materials or resources.
Ohio and Michigan to Iowa and Indiana
Ohio came next. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery and divided land for private sale into 36 square mile townships, each sub-divided into 35 sections— including one section reserved to build a public school. Believe it or not, the state of Connecticut held title to a strip of Ohio land (the Western Reserve) not included in the Northwest Ordinance. The Western Reserve included present-day Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland—and (in theory) extended across several states beyond. Connecticut (1795) sold much of the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company. With the 1796 Fallen Timbers victory, land speculators and surveyors quickly headed west. In 1796 Moses Cleaveland, lead surveyor for the Connecticut Land Company, platted the Reserve into townships, formally founding Cleveland and Youngstown.12
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. (Barone, 2013, p. 64)
The remainder of Ohio was settled by just about everybody—Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Scots-Irish and, as we shall soon see, Germans. That is why it remains a political swing state to this day. In the northern half, Yankees dominated. Following Yankee tradition, settlers founded colleges: Ohio University (first President William McGuffey), Hiram College (President Garfield’s alma mater), Baldwin-Wallace College, Antioch (Horace Mann first president), Oberlin (1833 by Vermonters), Kenyon (Rutherford B. Hayes) and Western Reserve College.
When the first Great Lakes steamship launched in 1818, Yankee immigrants (disproportionately Vermonters) left western New York and moved into Michigan’s Saginaw River Valley to start a lumber industry (Barone, 2013, p. 69). 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), its second. Northern Indiana, Iowa and Illinois followed the same pattern as Michigan. Though far less numerous in Indiana than Ohio, Vermonters and Connecticut men established northern Indiana towns such as Montpelier, Wolcottville and Orland. Among its first 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 (Barone, 2013, p. 69).
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 [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. (Woodard, 2011, p. 177)
New England’s jewel in the crown, however, was Chicago. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (Vermont), following the 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” (Barone, 2013, p. 70). As the original city-builders of Chicago, they transformed a wilderness outpost into the great metropolis.
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). From the 1830s onward Yankees piled into Wisconsin, and after the 1840s saturated Iowa. Burlington, Iowa (named for another Burlington back east) and Grenville Dodge (from Danvers Massachusetts, later chief surveyor for the transcontinental Union Pacific Railroad) founded Grinnell Iowa. Yankees rushed into Kansas and Nebraska to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories—John Brown, for example, was born in Torrington Connecticut. (Interesting irony: John Brown’s father Owen, owner of a Connecticut tannery, hired as his apprentice Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses.)
Left to another chapter is the tale of New Englanders in Oregon and San Francisco—not to mention Hawaii. Yankees liked to travel.
Diaspora structures
More interested in government at the state and national level, Yankees were noticeably less focused on sub-state policy. Yankee first settlers installed the New England Township with its preference for schools, internal improvements and people-focused policy outputs such as education and caring for widows, disabled people and the economically disadvantaged. Such townships, aside from infrastructure, rarely ranked Privatist-style economic development as a high priority. Even today townships, compared to other governmental forms, are the least involved in sub-state economic development—leaving that policy area to higher levels of government.
The New England system was not applied uniformly in states settled by the Yankee Diaspora. The Yankee Diaspora spread into lands governed by another state (New York), or was shared with settlers from the Midlands and the Scots-Irish. Middle Atlantic states developed their own style of sub-state governance reflecting their New Netherlands, Greater Appalachia and Midlands political cultures. As Midwest states set up their initial government and state constitutions, the structures incorporated into their state constitutions reflect influences from different first settlement cultures, tempered by the nature of constitution-making, a process naturally dominated by elites. Consider the Wisconsin constitution approved in 1848 (and still in effect today).
Wisconsin counties, 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). Yet, Wisconsin townships adopted New England town meetings and highly prioritized road and bridge infrastructure while providing indigent residents base-line medical care and funeral expenses. Fiscal affairs, however, were a “complicated mix of state-county-township revenue-raising and spending” (Russo, 2001, pp. 103–4). From this example it is evident that development of various sub-state systems came early in economic development history, thus having ample time to harden into distinct patterns that subtly affect contemporary policy-making. Wisconsin was a typical example of the patchwork blend of administrative cultural experiences.
Ron W. Coan 