American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Woodard writes that there were six distinct revolutions instead of just one American Revolution. The first was a mass uprising in New England, which was more supportive of the revolt against the British than any other part of the country. Rather than fighting for universal human rights, the Yankees fought to defend their way of life, including their town governments and the primacy of their Congregationalist (Puritan) Church. Militias functioned as self-governing units. Their ragtag quality and insubordinate attitude alarmed Washington, head of the Continental Army, but after fighting broke out, the British were unable to break the Yankee forces besieging Boston. The British left Boston, and, from 1776 on, Yankeedom was the stronghold of the rebellion.

New Netherland, in contrast, was the stronghold of the Loyalists. It was the place to which Loyalists from different regions fled, and it had a monopoly on imperial trade. It had never experienced self-government as Yankeedom had and therefore did not feel the need to protect it. In addition, the Dutch in New Netherland were afraid of losing their power if the British left. Though New Netherland experienced a brief patriot uprising that sent the royalist governor to live on a frigate in the harbor, by 1776, the arrival of an English armada established Loyalist control of the city. As the headquarters for both the royal fleet and army, New Netherland was the staging ground for British incursions into Yankeeland and the Midlands. 

After the British lost the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 (to troops from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and upstate New York), the independence of Yankeedom was secure, and France joined the war on the rebels’ side. However, even after American independence was achieved in 1783, many in New Netherland hoped the British crown would retain control of their region, and some fled to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Britain when it became clear that wasn’t going to be the case.

The Midlands attempted to maintain neutrality throughout the war and did not want independence until representatives from Yankeedom, the Tidewater, and the Deep South interfered in their affairs, backed by the Appalachian contingent of the region. When the British invaded, they found little resistance and camped comfortably in Philadelphia while Washington’s troops starved at nearby Valley Forge; the people in the Midlands preferred not to supply troops that could not pay them in hard currency. In 1778, the British abandoned the Midlands to return to New York and the West Indies. Appalachian residents then headed the occupying Continental Army, which cracked down on the opposition.

Residents of the Deep South were wary of supporting independence until the battles at Lexington and Concord, but they then saw the revolution as a way to defend their way of life, as they feared the British supporting a rebellion of enslaved Black Americans. Fear swept through South Carolina, and the planters organized an executive committee called the Council of Safety and pushed the royal governor out, fashioning a new constitution based on the old one. Georgia was even more loath to support the revolution. The British easily occupied the Deep South in 1778, sensing that the region was not wholeheartedly in support of the rebellion. The British strategy might have been successful if they had not had to contend with the Appalachians in the region.

Likewise, Yankeedom was only successful in its quest for independence because the Tidewater gentlemen saw the British as an affront to their liberty and because the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas fought anyone who tried to control them. In Pennsylvania, the majority of the troops were made up of Borderlanders, and the Scots-Irish Borderlanders made common cause with the Tidewater elite to fight against the British. However, in North Carolina, the Borderlanders despised the Tidewaters and fought on the British side. A similar backcountry conflict broke out in Georgia and South Carolina, notable for its brutality and guerrilla tactics. In Pennsylvania and what would become Kentucky and Tennessee, Appalachian people picked up arms and captured political power, but they were less fortunate in areas to the south. 

The Tidewater gentry formed a large number of the officers and troops in the Continental Army. Though Washington, the commander, was from the Tidewater, many of the other officers were Yankees. The Tidewater liberated itself from the British early on. When the British returned in 1780, enslaved individuals flocked to them, hoping to win their freedom. Unfortunately for them, the British surrendered in 1781.

At the end of the fighting, the nations within the new United States had forged closer bonds with each other. They now wrestled with two side effects: a loose collection of states and a widespread call for democracy. The compromises the states made around these issues would shape the emerging country.

When the Revolutionary War started, the states joined a treaty-making organization called the Continental Congress, which resembled what NATO would be in future years and which had a military command called the Continental Army. In response to fears about disunion, leaders formed the Articles of Confederation, which was much like the European Union in that it was a collection of sovereign states with a joint command that had the powers formerly held by the British king, including conducting foreign relations and waging war. The congress was divided along regional lines, with Yankeedom opposing the Tidewater and Deep South. British observers at the time felt sure that the confederation of states would unravel. 

Other than in Yankeedom, few people had experience participating in politics, but leaders were suddenly alarmed by the general cry for democracy, particularly in Appalachia. During the war, people had participated in democratic uprisings and had witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For example, Scots-Irish soldiers had deposed their officers and marched on Philadelphia to demand their overdue pay, and free Black Americans began asserting their right to be citizens. Everywhere, concessions such as lowering the property requirements for voting had been made during the war, and in 1786, there was an uprising against tax collectors in western Massachusetts. 

Leaders, including Washington, Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, were concerned that the lower classes were getting unruly. After the uprising in western Massachusetts, the leaders called a Constitutional Convention. Representatives from Yankeedom, the Deep South, and the Tidewater supported a Virginia Plan with a strong central government, while their opponents from New Netherland and the Midlands supported the New Jersey Plan, which made only minor modifications to the Articles of Confederation. The Virginia Plan triumphed. The next debate was about representation in the two houses of Congress. The Deep South and Yankeedom opposed each other on this issue, while Appalachia was, as usual, largely left out of the discussion. Ratifying the Constitution was also difficult. New Netherland wanted a guarantee of civil liberties similar to what the Dutch had received from the British, and if the Bill of Rights had not been added to the Constitution, the country might not have survived more than a decade.

People in Yankeedom generally supported the Constitution, as did Midlanders, New Netherlanders, Deep Southerners, and Tidewaterites. People from Appalachia and Scots-Irish enclaves in New Hampshire and upstate New York opposed it. The Constitution was, Woodard writes, “a messy compromise” (148). It involved the Deep Southern idea of a strong president elected by the electoral college rather than directly by the people, the New Netherland-endorsed Bill of Rights, and the Midlanders’ insistence on strong state sovereignty rather than a parliamentary system. The Yankees received their demand that small states have an equal say in the Senate, and they also ensured that enslaved individuals would be counted as three-fifths of a person (rather than a full person, as states that allowed slavery wanted) for the purposes of representation. Nevertheless, this uneasy coalition would face threats from Yankeedom as well as Appalachia.

In the late 1700s, nearly half of the population of the Canadian Maritimes, including Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, were Yankees. They successfully petitioned the Nova Scotia Assembly to be excused from military service against their former compatriots, and many wanted to be annexed by Massachusetts.

The British largely wiped New France off the map, and many of its people settled in Louisiana as “Cajuns.” However, the population of Québec City was too large for the British to remove, and, in 1763, they granted the people of the city the right to speak their language and practice Catholicism. Yankee units invaded Québec in 1775-1776 and were hailed as liberators, but they were forced to withdraw. 

Canadians have been raised on the “Loyalist Myth”—the idea that their nation’s cultural DNA comes from the British Loyalists who escaped the American Revolution and settled in Canada, creating a sense of communalism over the pursuit of independence. This myth, Woodard writes, is false, as the Loyalist culture did not eradicate the Yankee presence in the Maritimes and New France. In Ontario, much of the population was German, Quaker, or Dutch from the Midlands and New Netherland—not British. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Loyalists contended with Yankees who had more social cohesion and were connected to Maine and Massachusetts, while the Loyalists, who mainly came from New Netherland or the Midlands, lacked that kind of cohesion. Yankee culture absorbed the splintered Loyalists. 

Even the settlers in what would become Ontario were not monarch-loving British, as myth would have it, but instead poor immigrants responding to British offers for cheap land. Most of them were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, including people from pacifist sects such as the Mennonites and Quakers. Ontario, despite a later wave of British immigration, retains a Midlander culture.

Many people in the new United States were alarmed by the conservatism of the new constitution, with its Tidewater institutions that kept power in the hands of the elite (something the Founding Fathers wanted). After the war, people in northeastern New York broke away to form Vermont, with a state constitution that banned slavery and property requirements for voting. They were disgusted by taxes that burdened the poor to help already wealthy bondholders. 

Resistance to the Constitution was greatest in Appalachia, where people considered it an affront to their natural liberties. Appalachians had been largely unrepresented at the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. Though they were regarded as backcountry louts, they were rebelling against a scheme that was meant to enrich the elite. During the war, the Continental Army paid people in IOUs. Needing money, they were forced to sell these chits to the wealthy for a fraction of their worth. After the war, Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury (from, the author points out, the West Indies), proposed paying back these wealthy speculators by levying taxes on the poor. In Appalachia, where most people had not seen money for years, whiskey was the closest thing they had to cash, but Hamilton also imposed a high excise tax on whiskey. If people couldn’t pay, they would lose their farms.

The result was an uprising known as the Whiskey Rebellion, which raged for over a decade throughout Appalachia. In what is now western Tennessee, the people formed the State of Franklin and made apple brandy, tobacco, and animal skins legal tender. Meanwhile, Borderlanders in Pennsylvania had prohibited the entry of government officials for years, and they even accosted and shook down tax collectors—a tactic later adopted in the rest of Appalachia. In 1794, they formed a militia and marched on Pittsburgh, which capitulated until Washington sent a force of 10,000 to put down the insurgency. 

The spirit of resistance in Yankeedom died down when Adams succeeded Washington as president. However, Adams ran into trouble when he tried to enforce Yankee values on the rest of the nation. Amid anti-French hysteria after the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in France, Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it more difficult to become a citizen and which punished anyone who wrote or said anything against the government. Opposition came mainly from the Tidewater, where Jefferson and Madison wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which supported the idea that states could resist the usurpation of powers by the federal government. 

The coalition that brought Adams down—New Netherland, Appalachia, the Midlands, the Tidewater, and the Deep South, which had rejected the idea of “communal freedom” endorsed in New England—then assumed power. Jefferson’s support of France over England put New England on edge. Though New Englanders supported the acquisition of the Northwest Territories (now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), as they recognized that New Englanders would populate this region, they were opposed to the Louisiana Purchase. They thought the acquisition of this region would strengthen the power of slavery societies and dilute New England’s power. 

Yankeedom’s power slipped as other states continued to import enslaved individuals and other immigrants, and New England opposed the embargo acts of 1807 and 1808, which interrupted its shipping trade. It contemplated a truce with Great Britain and secession from the US; the declaration of war against Britain in 1812 pushed New England to the edge. It tried to free captured British soldiers and refused to fight against its counterparts in Canada. In 1814, it called the Hartford Convention, where the prospect of secession was present. The conventioneers restrained themselves and pushed for a series of constitutional amendments, including the provision that the South would no longer be able to count enslaved individuals toward representation, thereby diluting the power of the South. However, the US then declared victory in its war, and the convention, which appeared treasonous, dropped its demands. The country celebrated its new Appalachian hero, Andrew Jackson.