Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

In this engagingly written study, Joseph A. Conforti examines how three centuries of New Englanders constructed a powerful regional identity, each generation reimagining the essence of New England in ways that addressed the concerns of its own times. In the colonial era, New Englanders continually redefined the founders' “errand into the wilderness” (actually a product of the second generation, Conforti argues), as the Bible Commonwealth was first drawn into the empire and then toward independence. But while Conforti argues for the continued relevance of the Puritan past, he does not present New England identity as an endless variation on Puritan themes. From his point of view, the most enduring legacy of Puritanism was the tradition of literacy, print, and historical-mindedness that fostered a well-developed—and nationally disseminated—regional identity adaptable to centuries of change. To be sure, Jedidiah Morse's geographies and Timothy Dwight's travel volumes presented the New England town as a republican “city upon a hill,” but from the early nineteenth century New England identity had much less to do with asserting a distinctive mission and much more to do with negotiating threats to a distinctive way of life. In the antebellum era, the dominant emblem of New England was the “white village” of John Barber's engravings and Harriet Beecher Stowe's stories. Steepled churches, picket fences, and picturesque commons did indeed exist, but they were hardly the artifacts of a timeless communalism and pastoralism. Instead, they were the products of the very same quickening market activity in the countryside to which, through deliberate omission, the image of the white village was a response. Similar omissions mark colonial revival images of the “real”—now the “olde”— New England: hardy Pilgrim fathers and women at the spinning wheel, but not a city, factory, or immigrant in sight. In the twentieth century, in a further escape from the ethnic mill towns of southern New England, the symbolic heart of New England traveled north to the Vermont of Robert Frost (born in San Francisco) and the New Hampshire of Yankee magazine. Thus the imagined center of New England migrated continuously, from Puritan Boston to the Connecticut River valley to the Old Colony to the North Country, as changing circumstances demanded that some truths be ignored and others celebrated.