Quakers, the Delaware Valley, and North Midlands Emigration to America

Abstract

I N the third major section of Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer describes how religious radicalism and cultural conservatism shaped society along the Delaware Valley in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His argument is that Quakers were the most important migratory group that established the rules of engagement among people of different ethnic groups and that even as the Quakers became a minority of the population, their values remained embedded in the institutional structure of the region for centuries to come (p. 433). But, although the Quakers were dominant, their religion was not the only formative cultural influence they brought to bear. Fischer maintains that Quakerism was itself an expression of the particular folkways of the lower classes of the North Midlands. Consequently, the development of society in the Delaware Valley was profoundly influenced by cultural characteristics associated with the poor people of the northern Midland counties of England. The importance of North Midlands culture emerges from Fischer's count of early settlers. He traces the geographical origins of many British settlers who arrived in the Delaware Valley before I725 by analyzing six lists, four of which deal with laymen-some I,458 families in all-who invested in Delaware Valley land or actually settled it. The North Midlands provided a majority of settlers on two of the four lists and, when all four lists are combined, more settlers than from any other British region. Many of these early settlers were poor husbandmen; a majority were Quakers or Quaker sympathizers.1 In Fischer's view, the seventeenth-century North Midlands was split