Americans
Many people have asked what it means to be an American. And many have responded that it means being a citizen of the United States. I don’t dispute that citizenship is valuable and indeed fundamental to American identity, and I don’t believe that American identity is ethnocentric. The US, being a country in the New World, has never been fully European; and it especially has not been fully English. America has historically been comprised of the Amerindian, European, and Sub-Saharan African races. These groups have been in the US before it formally came into being as a sovereign state, and as we all know that only occurred from 1776–1789. I am not unbiased, nor have I ever claimed to be, so I won’t promote the largely incorrect narrative of historical and contemporary American identity promoted in academia or popular media. To answer the American question, based on polling from citizens as well as common sense and the common historical definition of nationhood, an American is a native-born citizen of the United States, born to citizens, who is assimilated and integrated into our society from both a cultural and sociological standpoint. That is the most basic definition that I can rationally articulate. I think that when national identity is expanded to a degree of comical broadness, it loses its meaning. That said, I am also of the belief that there is, indeed, an oft-neglected ethnocultural component of American identity. It is fundamentally Northern European, Anglophone, and Christian, particularly Protestant. American culture is, as Lovecraft noted, expanded Anglo-Saxonism: people of different races or ethnicities, have assimilated into a society which derives its institutions from a fusion of Greco-Roman political philosophy and Anglo-Saxon common law, which speaks English and is culturally Protestant. Samuel Huntington, a notable political scientist, discussed this quite elegantly in his 2004 book Who Are We? In this article, the American ethnocultural core will consist of the few groups who settled and formed the bulk of pre-Civil War, pre-Ellis Islander immigrants in America. These groups came to the New World mainly from the British Isles, Western Germany, the Low Countries, Northern France, and Southern Scandinavia. Until 1880, the vast majority of both American settlers and immigrants alike came from such areas, the bulk of whom are known to have come specifically from England.
“They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen. The eastern provinces must indeed be excepted, as being the unmixed descendants of Englishmen. I have heard many wish that they had been more intermixed also: for my part, I am no wisher, and think it much better as it has happened.” — Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters From an American Farmer.
In 1924, the United States was looking to severely restrict the immigration of individuals from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia, and as a result keep the White American population primarily Nordic in its racial stock. Scholars, affiliated with anti-immigrant lobbies, were curious of the racial and ethnic makeup of the United States in 1790, when its first census records were being recorded, based on the surnames of households across the early republic. The National Origins Formula, as they described it, says that around 80% of the population of the United States was White, which is to say of European racial origins, and that nearly 20% of it was Black and a small percentage was indigenous. Of the White people in America, around 60–63% had origins in England, 16% had origins in Scotland and Ulster, 9% in Germany, 3–6% in Ireland (excluding Ulster), 4% in Wales, 3% in the Low Countries (namely Holland), 2% in France, and less than 1% in Sweden. It’s interesting how neatly the American urheimat in Europe aligns with both the North Sea Continuum and Protestant enclaves in Europe’s continental interior, which was otherwise Catholic. Of all the American settlers, about 86% in total originated from the British Isles, and the remaining 14% from continental Europe.
Settlers from different regions of England colonized different areas of what would eventually become the United States. People from the West Country (Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon) led colonization efforts in the Upper South, beginning in 1607 with Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful, permanent overseas English colony and the first American colony. Jamestown was founded on a jagged peninsula, now an island, off the coast of southeastern Virginia, on the northeastern bank of what was then referred to as the Powhatan river, but which is now referred to by the name of the River James. Most of these West Country settlers were part of the Cavalier class, being wealthy, land-owners or merchants who belonged to England’s landed gentry in the lower nobility and who were loyal to the King of England. Contrarily, people from East Anglia, who came from the English Puritan middle class and led colonization efforts throughout what is now known as New England, were more supportive of parliament than the King, James VI and I of Scotland and England. The East Anglians, who we know better as the Pilgrims, came overwhelmingly from Norfolk and Suffolk, though many also came from the counties of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Cavalier settlers in Virginia were more Celtic in admixture due to their homeland being positioned on the western fringes of England, situated near Wales and Cornwall, whereas Massachusetts Puritan settlers came from the eastern fringes of England, facing the North Sea, known to have bore the brunt of Anglo-Saxon and Norse aggression, leading to their genome being more heavily influenced by Germanic admixture. The Mid-Atlantic, defined herein as consisting of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Delaware, was settled disproportionately by Englishmen from Northwestern England, particularly near the border with Wales, and specifically from the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. They were typically Quakers, contrasting with the Anglican Cavalier or Separatist Pilgrim settlers. English settlement was strongest, expectedly, across New England, as well as strong in the Upper South, but was noticeably weaker in the Mid-Atlantic by comparison, although that region was never dominated by any other ethnic group than the English still. English people composed a supermajority in the colonies by virtue of their extremely high fertility and unparalleled naval and military might, indisputably contributed the most to American civilization, providing it with its language, institutions, and its base culture as well as forming a massive portion of the ancestral heritage of its citizenry. In total, most Anglo-American settlers came from Southern England, with East Anglian settlers making up an overall plurality of early American colonists. English Americans led the Revolution, wrote both the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson) and the Constitution (Madison), have historically dominated the US Presidency, and 80% of achievements by the United States were accomplished by people of English blood. Even today, the English form the largest single ethnic group in America.
Scottish settlers colonized rural, heavily contested areas in the American frontier, with settlements concentrated mostly in the Deep South, parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northern New England, and in the Old West. Settlers came to America from Western Scotland, namely the Lowlands as well as the Inner Hebrides and Ulster, a region of Northeastern Ireland colonized by Scottish Protestants in 1609, two years after the founding of Jamestown. The Scots, including the “Scots-Irish,” or Ulster Scots, began migrating to America in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, much later than the English or other groups did. As such, Scottish settlers and many of their children fought directly in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, largely helping ensure the sovereignty of the American Republic. It’s well-established that Scottish Americans, due to their Lowlander origins, had large amounts of Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic origins, as well as Brythonic and Norse components in their ancestry. Scottish Americans contributed disproportionately to the conquest of the frontier and westward expansion of the United States, leading the Texas Revolution and Confederate armies during the Civil War. To this day, Scots are mainly concentrated throughout the American South and the Lower Midwest. In terms of the counties from which their ancestors migrated, Scottish Americans can trace their roots to the lands of Ayrshire, Wigtownshire, Kirkcudbrightshire, Dumfriesshire, Renfrewshire, and Lanarkshire, as well as Down, Antrim, Derry, Armagh, Tyrone, and eastern Donegal in Ulster. Scottish Jacobites who fought at the Battles of Dunbar and Worcester were exiled as indentured servants to the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts, where they completely assimilated into the local Anglo-American society.
The third largest settler group was comprised of German colonists, most of whom came from Southwestern Germany and the Rhineland, particularly the Palatinate region, known as the Pfalz in German. The modern states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, and Baden-Wurttemberg produce most of the German American settlers, whose presence was distributed throught most of the colonies but most concentrated in Pennsylvania (where they formed a third of its total population), Virginia, North Carolina, and New York. Few German settlers came from Northern and Eastern Germany, but there was a small number of people who did, most of whom were employed by the Dutch West India Company and assisted in the founding of the colony of New Netherland. German-speaking Swiss colonists were prominent, often lumped in with the rest of the ethnic German population in the American censuses, and could be found in the same colonies that experienced high settlement rates from individuals native to Germany proper. Many generals and presidents have had German roots, from men like Custer and Pershing to Eisenhower and Trump. Germans formed the largest non-British Isles European ethnic group in the American colonies as well as the historically largest European immigrant group in America, settling in the Midwest and Great Plains. Many Germans anglicized their names and learned English, assimilating into Anglo-American society after a century of refusing to do so, leading to many otherwise English Americans having unknown German roots. That said, there are still small pockets of Amish settlements that still speak archaic Palatine German as a mothertongue and English as a second language.
People from Ireland comprised the fourth largest ethnic group in America, making up around 3–6% of the American population. However, this is not without a caveat; while 5.9% of Americans were specifically Ulster Scots or Anglo-Irish ancestrally, 3.6% of Americans were of native Irish origins, of either Catholic or Protestant affiliations. Many understandably make the mistake of assuming that America was 6% native Irish, but this conflates people with ancestors born in Ireland with the natives, although it ought to be noted that Irish identity is somewhat fluid insofar as it is not an entirely Gaelic and Catholic thing. The Ulster Scots left a larger impact on colonial and early American society due to their independent nature, carving out their own settlements in the West and spearheading westward expansion, as well as their incorporation into larger related demographics, namely the Scottish and English. Native Irish people, however, were often brought to America as indentured servants, soldiers, or religious dissidents, and were either assimilated into local populations or grouped, not unvoluntarily, into small areas. The native Irish could be found in Maryland (especially in the city of Baltimore, named after a small Irish village), urban Pennsylvania, coastal Maine, and in the Shenendoah Valley of Northwestern Virginia. The native Irish, alongside English Catholics, led the Roman Catholic Church in colonial and pre-Civil War America. It is worth mentioning that the native Irish (in this case of Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman origins, regardless of any religious affiliations) did not all come to America as servants, many having been landowners, merchants, and petty nobles, as was the case with both the Carroll and Moylan families of Maryland and Pennsylvania respectively. Most native Irish and Anglo-Irish settlers alike came from either Southeast or urban areas of Ireland, consisting of Cork City and Dublin along with the counties of Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, and Carlow. That said, it is worth noting still that an unknown, if presumably large number of Irish Jacobites banished by Oliver Cromwell to the Caribbean are known to have migrated over to the American South, particularly to the Carolinas.
Welshmen comprised the fifth largest group in America. Although, Welsh settlers came from all over Wales, most of them came specifically from the English Borderlands, and particularly from the counties of Denbighshire, Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire, Brecknockshire, Monmouthshire, and at last Glamorgan, all either directly bordering England or facing it through the Bristol Channel. Many of them were partially Anglicized and natively spoke English, their families being among the first to convert from their native Catholicism to Anglicanism during the English Reformation. Welsh settlers, however, did not fully assimilate into English society, remaining otherwise Welsh and retaining proficiency in their language, engagement with their ancestral culture and heritage, and Welsh identity. Wales, at this time, was annexed into England, a process initiated by King Edward I and concluded, ironically enough, by King Henry VIII, himself of substantial Welsh ancestry. Still, Welsh identity did not cease to exist, even as people from Wales integrated and partook in English-led colonization efforts. The Welsh mostly settled in the Mid-Atlantic and Upper South, namely in states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They were prominent most especially in the Tidewater region.
Natives of the Low Countries made up the sixth-largest group in America during the colonial era. The vast majority of these settlers were Dutch and Flemish, although some of the most notable colonists within this group are considered to be Walloons, French-speaking Protestants from present-day Belgium and French Flanders. Most Benelux settlement occurred in both New York and New Jersey, although Dutch settlers could also be found in Delaware, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Many Dutchmen also moved to the American South and Old West, but underwent Anglicization. The Mid-West also experienced significant amounts of Dutch immigration, although this was overshadowed by German, Scandinavian, and Irish immigration. Many of America’s founding fathers had Dutch ancestry (John Jay, Philip Schuyler, Robert Livingston, etc.) and some of the most notable American elite families originated in the Netherlands. Luxembourgish settlers were present but remarkably small in number and often lumped in with Dutch Americans, much like how Walloons were with French Americans. Dutch settlers did not come overwhelmingly from any one of Holland’s provinces specifically, although more settlers came from North Holland than any of the other provinces, with Amsterdam having produced most of the Dutch colonial elites; Groningen, Friesland, Gelderland, and South Holland also produced many settlers, with Flanders also producing many Dutch settlers in the region.
The title of seventh-largest ethnic group in America belongs to the French. Most French settlers in America were Protestant (or ‘Huguenot’) colonists who originated primarily in and north of the Marais Poitevin in Northern and Western France. The Huguenot homeland corresponds with the areas of Normandy, Brittany, Pays de la Loire, Northern Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and parts of Hauts de France and Ile de France, facing both the Atlantic Coast and English Channel. Central and Eastern French settlers were expectedly rare, and although Southern French colonists did exist, Northern French settlers considerably outnumbered them. Huguenots settled throughout the American colonies, but settlement peaked in South Carolina and New York. However, while most French settlers in America were Huguenots, a notable amount were Catholics from Quebec and Acadia, who populated much of Northern New England and Upstate New York as well as the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley, which belonged to the historical Louisiana territory famously annexed by the United States in 1803. The French share of the American population was supplanted by Quebecois migration and settlement as well as the perserverence of traditional Huguenot surnames and incorporation of the Cajuns. Both Huguenots and the French Canadian settlers largely came from the same areas of France and settled in America at roughly the same time, although Huguenots have historically assimilated more into Anglo-American society on account of their Protestantism.
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Lastly, the eighth-largest ethnic group in America was composed primarily of Scandinavians, particularly Swedes, who colonized the Delaware River Valley in the early-mid seventeenth century prior to the region’s annexation into the Dutch and English empires. New Sweden, which consisted of the entirety of Delaware and parts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Southern Pennsylvania, and Southern New Jersey. Most of the Swedish colonists were from coastal, Southeastern Sweden, namely from Vastra Gotaland and its surrounding counties such as Halland, Jonkoping, Orebro, and Varmland. Accompanying the Swedes in their colony were smaller numbers of Dutch, Northern Germans, Norwegians, Danes, Swedish-speaking Finns, as well as some ethnic Finns. The Swedish Finns were either ethnically Swedish or, in some cases, of mixed Swedish and native Finnish ancestry, and most came from the Ostrobothnian capital of Vaasa as well as surrounding areas. The Forest Finns comprised the majority of the ethnic Finnish population, and came to America either from their forested settlements in Sweden or their original homeland in the counties of Savonia, Ostrobothnia, and Tavastia. Norwegian and Danish settlers, who were present in New Sweden and New Netherland alike, are known to have migrated from larger cities that served as trading posts of the Hanseatic League, namely Bergen and Copenhagen, although some people from Jutland immigrated to colonial America. While Scandinavians represented only the largest of the small groups (<1% of the total American population), their share of the population was considerably enlarged through later immigration, particularly to the Midwest.
“The question is; do Americans desire to remain a vigorous, clean moraled Teutonic-Celtic people; or do they desire to transform their country into a sordid, amorphous chaos of degradation and hybridism like imperial Rome?” — Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1919 Letter.
Even today, despite past migrations, Americans remain a Germano-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon people, united primarily by a common land, birthright, language, base genetic profile, and identity. Our identity is not as similar to that of Britain’s as the Commonwealth peoples’ identities are; nevertheless, we are closer culturally, genetically, and of course linguistically to Britain than we are to anyone else. Americans do not need to be fully homogenized in order for our ethnos to exist: we are a group of extremely similar peoples further united by a common lineage, culture, language, and patriotism, and have a common heritage in and birthright to this land. An American could be fully English, another fully German, or Irish, or French, or Norwegian, and an American could be a mixture of some or all of these groups, but the difference has been rendered quite minimal in scale and importance. The Americans, even if not fully derived from the same settler group or later migration wave, are more homogenous genetically than people from Sicily, Malta, the Greek Islands, and certain Slavic and Turkic populations, as well as Mestizos, albeit this is rather obvious. Americans mostly have the R1b or I1 haplogroups, most prevalent in Western and Northern Europe each, with substantial presence in the British Isles. Americans are likely to descend from Anglo-Saxons, Celtic Britons, Franks, Gaels, and Norsemen in a tribal sense and, like most other Northern Europeans, are rich in steppe ancestry. Lesser Balto-Slavic ancestry may be common in Americans with Finnish or Swedish Finn ancestry, or alternatively Eastern German ancestry, although this is the case only for a small portion of the broader American genome.
For over seventy years after the American Revolution, the US received few immigrants. Those that did immigrate to America from 1776 to 1848 were usually from the British Isles, especially Scotland and Ulster, as well as to a lesser extent Southern Ireland and Germany, France, Scandinavia, Holland, and Switzerland. Crop failures, blight, failed revolutions, and looming wars resulted in millions of German and Irish Catholic immigrants to flood into the United States. Immigration from Germany slightly preceded that which came from Ireland. Both peoples were viewed with suspicion by alarmed nativists, mostly on account of Irish and High German Catholicism as well as the obvious mass immigration and concerns of assimilation. While the assimilastion efforts of these groups were certainly hindered to an extent, statistically they assimilated maritally at the same rates as one another and were among the most likely groups to marry the native-born Protestants of English descent, becoming the top three largest single ethnic groups in the country. Some criticize Antebellum immigration for bearing a subversive strain; this is not unwarranted, but ultimately German support for forms of liberal socialism and abolitionism were either preceded by the Unitarians in New England, most of whom were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or in an ironic twist, were actually supported by their demographic antecedent in colonial Pennsylvania, namely Germantown. In the case of the Irish, it is true that they supported immigration and the Democratic Party, but they were mostly incorporated into urban Northeastern political machines like Tammany Hall against their sovereign judgment by native-born politicians looking to secure votes, and they remained loyal mainly because it ensured social mobility. Many were racist, helped lobby for the Chinese Exclusion Act, and violently rioted against Black exemption from the draft during the Civil War. While Ellis Islander groups are reputed to be conservative, this is largely relative to urban areas which tend to otherwise be non-White, and it has been proven that the most right-wing ethnic groups in America are the ones with dominant roots in Britain and Northwestern Europe. Also, it can be conclusively proven that the intermarriage rates with Ellis Islanders and the colonial, Old Stock and overall marriage assimilation was exponentially lower than that between the kindred Settler and Antebellum stocks.
Larger numbers of British, Scandinavian, German, and Irish immigrants settled in the American West in a period stretching from the 1830s to the 1870s. Expectedly, the English — being the core of the American ethnos and sharing a mothertongue and common Protestantism with the majority of the native-born population, assimilated into American society within only 1–2 generations maritally and culturally. Scandinavian, German Lutheran, and Dutch Calvinist immigrants assimilated easily as well, if not as easily as the English, and Irish and German Catholics, despite forming the bulk of European immigrants to America, took the longest to assimilate, which did not take that long overall, but was not immediate relative to the Protestants’ assimilation. Antebellum-era immigration is best understood as a massive supplanting of the colonial population. Virtually all of the Antebellum-era immigrant groups were present in the colonies, even if the largest formed comparatively marginal elements of the original American stock. Most of the White American population descends from both settler colonial and early immigrant populations to some extent, with this especially being the case in the non-urban North. This is not so much the case in much of the South or the urban North, dominated by English and Scots-Irish Americans and latter immigrant peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe (e.g. Italy, Poland, Austrian & Russian Empires, Iberia, Greece, etc.) respectively.
Statistically, it is highly likely that nearly 85% of White Americans primarily have roots in the British Isles and Northwestern Europe still. The other 15% are highly urbanized, clannish, and maritally unassimilated if not of partial American ancestry already. Most of the time, they breed among themselves instead of with ethnic Americans. This is not to say that White Ethnics don’t marry into American families, as it isn’t uncommon for, say, ethnic Italians historically to marry people of Irish or German Catholic descent, especially after the decline of ethnic organized crime. However, it was not as common for Americans of Irish or German descent to marry people of Italian/White Ethnic ancestry as it was for them to marry people of English ancestry. The English Americans, despite certain misconceptions claiming otherwise, are still the largest single ethnic group in the United States; it is not uncommon for Americans of English and Scots-Irish to simply identity as ‘American’ on census records. Ultimately, America is an English nation at its fundamental basis, from its spirit and culture, its ethos, to its language and indeed much of its stock. America is an Anglo-Saxon frontier republic, and Americans an Anglo-Saxon people — even Americans who have little, if any, English blood are genetically similar to people from England, which is the ethnocultural and geographical center of the American urheimat in Europe, and English-speaking who derive their citizenship from English values and institutions. People of German ancestry will make America out to be more German, and people of Irish or Scottish or French ancestry will do the same; truthfully, it is the case that America is and always has been more English than anything else.
References:
- Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
- American Nations by Colin Woodard
- Conquest of a Continent by Madison Grant
- Re-forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood by Lothrop Stoddard
- Letters From an American Farmer by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
