Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1998 by Wendell Garrett

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

Joseph Wood Krutch, Twelve Seasons, 1949

New England is to this country what old England is to the English-speaking world: the fountainhead of language, literature, law, and learning. New England has long been recognized as having an individuality granted to few other regions. Already in 1789 the American geographer Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826) noted that the states east of New York with "the general name of New England" had "several things" in common, including "their religion, manners, customs, and character; their climate, soil, productions, natural history, &c." He described all the other states separately, without grouping them into regions.

The six New England states comprise an area less than half the size of Montana and a fourth the size of Texas, yet they encompass any number of opposites: the placid waters of Long Island Sound and the turbulent Atlantic off the coast of Maine, the fertile Connecticut River valley and the bald granite peak of stormy Mount Washington in New Hampshire, suburbia and the unpeopled stretches of northern Maine. In tradition no other area of the United States except perhaps the Old South is better known for its self-conscious sense of its own uniqueness.

The emigrants who crossed "that frightful ocean," as the South Carolinian Eliza Lucas Pinckney (c. 1722-1793) called the Atlantic, came to see the trip itself as the rite of passage from one life to another. Having arrived on these shores, they were obliged to come to terms with the indigenous peoples and with the land itself, an alien environment with its own flora and fauna. The gradually evolving sense of place and the accompanying realization that their adopted land had distinctive beauties of its own clearly played an important part in developing regional patriotism. Paradoxically, the colonists devoted much time and energy to re-creating the architecture of the country they had fled. This posed its own dilemma, since the New England communities were caught between the desire to ape metropolitan fashions in order to show themselves the equals of their countrymen at home and the need to construct buildings that would enable them to live in some comfort in what was often a very different climate from the land of their birth.

In the infinitely complex relationship between the mother country and the colonists during the age of Atlantic colonization, the process of serf-definition sometimes advanced and sometimes retreated, but it was never static. Even the perceptions of who the colonists were diverged. One image that was popular in England throughout the colonial period held that the American colonists were the dregs of English society. Others held that the Old World and its inhabitants were decadent and degenerate and that it was England rather than any of the American colonies that was a "dry, heathy, bare, barren wilderness... wherein virtue is an exile." In New England, of course, publicists affirmed the excellence of everything American, from the tall, straight trees harvested for masts, to wheat, wool, and melons. In a spasm of puffery Francis Higginson of Salem, Massachusetts, even declared that "a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draft of old England's ale."