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Myth Oj the Middle Colonies" Reconsidered: the Process Oj Regionalization in Early America

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Myth Oj the Middle Colonies The "Myth oj the Middle Colonies" Reconsidered: The Process oj Regionalization in Early America N A PROVOCATIVE ESSAY published in 1983, Robert Gough argued that some scholars have moved too hastily to conceptualize I a regional entity—the "Middle Colonies"—from the merely contiguous provinces of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.1 He suggested that, in attempting to redress an old his- toriographical bias toward colonial New England and the South, these scholars have "assume[d] the uniformity" of those colonies and "pro- jected] characteristics" from some onto others, while "overlook[ing] more important regional distinctions within" the very geographical entity to which they hoped to call interpretive attention.2 One risk of this process, he argued, was that of reifying a concept that might "obscure more than clarify" the geographical complexity of early American society and culture.3 Gough marshalled an impressive array of evidence in support of his arguments. Addressing cognitive dimensions of the problem, he claimed that perceptive colonial observers—including travel writers, cartographers, political commentators, compilers of almanacs, and architects of the English imperial bureaucracy—did not seem to think that there was (or needed to be) any such thing as a "Middle Colonies" as we now presume to know it.4 He sifted through data on such diverse phenomena as soil types, growing seasons, settlement patterns, I am grateful to Michael Zuckerman, Jean Soderlund, and Patricia Bonomi for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this essay. 1 Robert J. Gough, "The Myth of the 'Middle Colonies': An Analysis of Regionalization in Early America," Pennsylvania Magazine oj History and Biography (hereafter, PMHB) 107 (1983), 393-419. 2 Ibid., 393-94. 3 Ibid., 394. 4 Ibid., 396-403. THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXIII, No. 4 (October 1989) 528 WAYNE BODLE October demographic behavior, and waterway networks to show the lack of any compelling geographical or cultural basis for such a region.5 His data might have supported as many alternative schematic groupings of colonies as there were categories of arcana, but Gough chose one involving a "middle section" containing two distinct "regions." The first included "New York, parts of western Connecticut, eastern New Jersey, and the northeast corner of Pennsylvania." The other com- prised "most of Pennsylvania, part of Maryland, and all of western New Jersey and Delaware." Perhaps most provocatively, Gough ar- gued that while these "regions" were adjacent they did not embrace or even face each other. Rather, they looked outward, to the north and south, from their point of conjunction in central New Jersey. "What inter-regional contacts they did have," he claimed, "tended to be with the South, for the Philadelphia-centered region, and with New England, for the New York-centered region."6 Even the most insistent advocates of the importance of the Middle colonies have understood that the region could never be compre- hended as neatly or categorically as "Puritan" New England or the "Cavalier" South. Indeed, they have found in its very complexity and contradiction sources both of the region's importance and of its invisibility to scholars.7 No critic of this formulation has done a more thorough job than Gough of articulating the substantive anomalies that give the region its slippery character and its kaleidoscopic cast. His analysis, however, displays a disregard for process, and a depend- ence on morphologic argument, that renders it unsatisfying and ul- timately almost ahistorical. 5 Ibid., 404-6. 6 Ibid., 394-95. See also p. 405. 7 See, for example, Patricia U. Bonomi, "The Middle Colonies: Embryo of the New Political Order," in Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias, eds., Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honor oj Richard B. Morris (New York, 1973), 63-92; Milton M. Klein, "New York in the American Colonies: A New Look," in Klein, ed., The Politics oj Diversity: Essays in the History oj Colonial New York (Port Washington, 1974), 183-204, and Klein, "Shaping the American Tradition: The Microcosm of Colonial New York," New York History 59 (1978), 172-97; John M. Murrin, "Pluralism and Predatory Power: Early New York as a Social Failure," Reviews in American History 6 (1978), 473-79; Douglas Greenberg, "The Middle Colonies in Recent American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter, WMQ) 36 (1979), 396-427; and Michael Zuckerman, "Puritans, Cavaliers, and the Motley Middle," in Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's First Plural Society (Philadelphia, 1982), 3-25. 1989 THE PROCESS OF REGIONALIZATION 529 It seems insufficient to show, as Gough does, that the two polar polities of the area (New York and Pennsylvania) differed in terms of government form (royal and proprietary); governmental effec- tiveness (strong and centralized/"impotent" and local); group set- tlement distribution ("mosaic"/dispersed); prevailing trade patterns (transatlantic/Caribbean); or a host of other variables, and to assume that these differences—even if they are valid—prevented regional integration.8 One of Gough's own theoretical models of regionaliza- tion, after all, stresses the "functional" aspects of that phenomenon, by which structural differences might actually promote, rather than preclude, such integration.9 Whatever the precise "fit" between ma- terial preconditions to regional development (e.g., soil types, growing seasons, geophysical barriers or connectors) and their operational out- comes (e.g., export market shares, urbanization rates, age pyramids, political cultures), that fit must have been the product of specific human intentions, or at least mediated by the perception of, and choice among, alternatives and by the operation of contingency in all human affairs. This sense of process, possibility, and evolution, however, seems largely absent in Gough's basically static account of American colonial regionalization. He approaches the phenomenon after the fact, as it were, as with a cadaver ripe for postmortem. Data for such diverse economic and social categories as product export destinations in the 1810s, newspaper circulation ranges in the 1770s, religious consocia- tion boundaries in the 1720s and 1740s, and federal judicial circuits in the 1790s are mixed promiscuously with more subjective charac- terizations about such phenomena as "style of politics" and "accept- ance of religious pluralism."10 From this welter of materials, by a kind of ad hoc balancing of the differences method, Gough's bifur- cated and centrifugally tending "section" emerges. This approach may make sense for (or sense out of) New England or the South, where the early imposition of unique and uniform crop, labor, and religious systems by large numbers of similar people on discrete, thinly inhabited spaces provided, as Gough suggests, a broad 8 Gough, "Myth of the 'Middle Colonies,'" 406-10. 9 Ibid., 395. 10 Ibid., 407-9, 411-12, 414-15. 530 WAYNE BODLE October foundation on which to arrange divergent empirical evidence. The "Middle Colonies," however, were a fabricated spatial and cultural entity, one erected—to a degree perhaps unique in early American experience—by identifiable parties, agents, and interests from the institutional rubble left by a later era of imperial consolidation and colonial reorganization. The same bewildering array of interests, in- stitutions, and social arrangements that Gough picked through, ret- rospectively, to delineate his spatial organizational model was already there, prospectively, for early American inhabitants of the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna valleys. Its complexity enabled, indeed compelled, them actively to construct trans-local systems for managing their lives and fortunes. In attempting to understand how they did so, and over what ranges, it will be more useful to observe the process happening sequentially, as in tracing the development of an embryo, than to adopt an almost omniscient, after-the-fact, autopsic viewpoint. Ironically, in the area where Gough does most implicitly admit this developmental or "process" approach—that of political behavior, broadly construed—his use of evidence seems distressingly partial. He acknowledges, for example, "some interregional connections among middle states politicians," but he illustrates them with a brief allusion to an episode of 1750s cooperation between New York and Pennsylvania factional leaders that he dismisses as something that "remained inchoate before Independence."11 The latter assertion will not bear close scrutiny of American colonial development during the century before the Revolution. Instances of such cooperation, woven into a dense fabric of territorial competition and even overt conflict among many of the same cooperating parties, began to appear as early as 1682. This fabric became highly developed during the 1680s and 1690s, which period forms the substantive focus of this essay. Building on this tradition of often adversarial but always entangling political interaction, two generations of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York leaders elaborated an important regional public culture during the first half of the eighteenth century.12 11 Ibid., 403. 12 The interactive political behavior that Gough saw as only "inchoate" or embryonic by 1760 was thus actually the end product of several generations of evolving regional practice. This elaboration between 1700 and about 1755 will be the subject of a separate essay. 1989
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