The real reason for the persistence of sectionalism in U.S. foreign policy can be found in the ethnoregional theory of American politics, which has been developed by the historians David Hackett Fischer, Daniel Elazar, D.W. Meinig, Kevin Phillips, and others. The ethnoregional theory holds that in the United States powerful ethnic and regional subcultures are more important and enduring than political parties or ideologies. . . .
The greatest insight of ethnoregional theorists is that immigrants in the United States do not assimilate to a uniform American national culture; rather, they assimilate to one of a small number of preexisting regional cultures. The historian Wilbur Zelinsky has defined a thesis he calls the Doctrine of Effective First Settlement that holds: “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the inital band of settlers may have been.” . . .
Historians differ on the question of how many of these enduring regional cultures there are in the United States. Most agree on three: a Yankee culture that spread westward overland from New England; a Quaker culture originating in Pennsylvania; and a Cavalier culture originating in the coastal South. Most, but not all, identify a fourth regional culture, that of the Scots-Irish Highland South from Appalachia to the Ozarks and Texas. In his magisterial Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer argues persuasively that these four “hearth cultures” originated in different regions of early modern Britain and were transplanted to North America by four waves of immigrants. In the first wave (1629-40), Puritans from the eastern counties of England settled New England. The second wave (1642-75) brought anti-Puritan, royalist Cavaliers from the south of England to Virginia. Quakers from the North Midlands of England colonized Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley after emigrating during the third wave (1675-1715). The fourth and final major Anglo-American migration, which lasted from 1717 to 1775, transplanted so-called Scots-Irish from northern England, lowland Scotland, and the north of Ireland (Ulster).
In addition to having distinctive folkways and dialects of English, these four groups of British-American immigrants had their own unique variants of a common individualistic and liberal British political culture. Fischer describes the New England ideal as “ordered freedom,” the Quaker ideal as “reciprocal freedom,” the Scots-Irish ideal as “natural freedom,” and the coastal southern ideal as “hegemonic freedom” (deference to traditional elites). . . .
These British-American regional cultures have been overlaid and altered by waves of European and, more recently, Latin American and Asian immigration. The concentration of European Catholic immigrants in the industrial belt more or less effaced the older midatlantic Quaker region. By 1955, New England itself had ceased to be Yankee; thanks to European immigration, fewer than 30 percent of the inhabitants of Connecticut had ancestors who had lived in New England for more than two generations. The Yankee tradition therefore lived on chiefly in the Great Lakes region, the upper prairie, and the Pacific Northwest. Along with the Scots-Irish Highland South and the Anglo-American Tidewater South, the western section of Greater New England has been little affected by large-scale immigration, other than that of German- and Scandinavian-Americans whose cultures have tended to reinforce Yankee norms. These three regions show greater continuity in attitudes toward foreign policy than do areas such as the industrial belt or California and the Southwest, where populations have been churned by massive immigration and relocation. Contrary to popular belief, regional cultures tend to be far more stable than the ethnic cultures of immigrant groups, which usually fade away after a generation or two.
The ethnoregional theory provides the answer to the mystery of American sectional differences with respect to war. Regional disagreements about war are part of a larger pattern of regional disagreement about the legitimacy of all forms of violence. “Historians of Southern mores are agreed that violence as an aspect of Southern life clearly distinguished the region from the rest of the country,” writes historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Of the southerner, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the energy which his [northern] neighbor devotes to gain turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.” Southern states lead the nation not only in military academies but in homicide rates and death penalty laws and in low penalties for domestic violence. Northern states have the lowest homicide rates and the greatest number of statutes requiring a citizen to retreat before attacking an assailant or intruder in his home.
These regional differences reflect the differences in moral systems between the post-Calvinist Puritanism of Greater New England, which shuns violence as a means for resolving disputes, and the cultures of honor of the Scots-Irish and the Anglo-American Tidewater South. The two southern cultures are quite different, but compared to Greater New Englanders, both Highland and Tidewater southerners look with greater approval on violent retaliation for insults. But southerners are not indiscriminately violent. The difference between northern and southern homicide rates is accounted for almost entirely by the violent responses of southerners to personal offenses: arguments, insults to women, lovers’ quarrels, and disputes within the family. The researchers Richard E. Nisbet and Dov Cohen discovered that, at the same university, white southern students were more likely to respond aggressively than white northern students to the same set of insults and provocations. The same researchers have pointed out the similarities between the culture of honor of white southerners and that of inner-city black Americans, most of whom are descendants of southern migrants.
In addition to different attitudes toward violence, both collective and personal, Greater New Englanders and southerners have inherited different conceptions of the character of the United States. The idea of American messianism or exceptionalism, of a special American destiny in the world, is a northern idea. It is a secularized version of the Calvinist utopia of the perfect Puritan commonwealth, safe in the New World from the corrupting influences of the Old. The power of this utopian tradition, both in Protestant and secular forms, explains why almost every wave of social and moral reform in American history has emanated from New England or areas settled by New Englanders such as California: abolitionism, prohibition, animal rights, pacifism, suffragism, and, most recently, the antismoking campaign. By contrast, the Tidewater southern gentry and the Highland southern yeomen have viewed North America in terms of cheap land and quick wealth. For southerners, British North America is a “new England,” different in scale but not in kind from the old England; for the Puritans and their cultural descendants, North America is, or should be, a New Jerusalem.
The fundamental incompatibility of the mentalities of the rival American regions was captured by Henry Adams: “The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea. No such character belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in long, unbroken line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forest with the energy of so mean beavers, and with no more moral purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried with them was rarely illumined by an idea.” Of the mostly southern Jeffersonian Republicans this quintessential Yankee intellectual, the descendant of two scholarly Massachusetts presidents, wrote: “I am at times almost sorry that I undertook to write their history, for they appear like mere grasshoppers kicking and gesticulating on the middle of the Mississippi River. There is no possibility of reconciling their theories with their acts.” To southerners, even intellectual and progressive southerners, the notion that a government or an entire society should be organized according to a theory or idea, rather than on the basis of tradition and custom, is the ultimate in New England folly.
