The ‘Two Ships’ Theory of American History - The Atlantic

Are Americans one people, or many? Our national motto, “e pluribus unum,” seems to offer the definitive answer to the question: We are many, but one. Even on the verge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln insisted in his first inaugural address that Americans were united by “the mystic chords of memory” stretching back to Revolutionary battlefields and Patriot graves. In the aftermath of the war, as millions of Irish, English, and German immigrants swarmed to our shores, Frederick Douglass began delivering a talk titled “Composite Nation,” which celebrated both the pluribus and the unum. “Gathered here from all quarters of the globe,” Americans are bound to one another “by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine-right government and privileged classes,” he declared—with premature optimism, to say the least.<br>Others regard the unum as a pious myth. In Who Are We? (2004), the political scientist Samuel Huntington mocked the beloved shibboleth of “a nation of immigrants” as “a misleading falsehood”; America was in fact an “Anglo-Protestant” nation at risk of disintegration due to the pressures of multiculturalism. In a similar vein, Vice President Vance has claimed that Americans who can trace their ancestry to those who fought in the Civil War are more American than those who can’t.<br>The historian David Hackett Fischer articulated a more intriguing, and certainly less divisive, view in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). He endorsed a modern spin on what he called the “germ theory” of American history—first advanced, Fischer wrote, by 19th-century historians who described the “Teutonic germs” of liberty migrating from Germany to England to the New World. In Fischer’s version, early immigrants from four different regions of Great Britain established cultures in different regions of the American colonies. Though fewer than a fifth of Americans had British ancestry at the time of Fischer’s writing, “in a cultural sense,” he provocatively argued, we are all descendants of an “expansive pluralism” with its source in Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker, and Scotch-Irish societies.<br>Perhaps Fischer’s pluralism is too expansive. In the new book Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America, the historian and literary scholar David S. Reynolds argues that America is not one or many or four, but two. We are the residuum of two irreconcilable cultures, red and blue from the get-go, issuing from the Mayflower and a slave ship known as the White Lion. Drawing on an astonishing wealth of references to the metaphor of two ships by figures from the early colonial era through the Civil War, Reynolds lops off the Quakers and the Scotch-Irish in favor of the groups that came first and seemed most antithetically opposed—Puritan and Cavalier. And whereas Fischer described without judgment the family patterns, social customs, and religious lineage of his four groups, Reynolds contrasts his two on ideological and ultimately moral grounds. He presents American history as a perpetual struggle between a Puritan North dedicated to liberty and equality and a Cavalier South predicated on hierarchy and domination.<br>Two Ships is thus a narrative for our time, when the aspirational vision of oneness has given way to intractable twoness. Each side has now acquired its own historical narrative. On the left, “The 1619 Project,” first published in 2019, recast the national story as the endlessly ramifying consequence of the original sin of slavery. “Some might argue,” in the lead essay’s words, “that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” The answering blow from the right, “The 1776 Report,” insisted that America was an exceptional nation dedicated to “natural equality” and shaped by “self-sacrifice, courage, and nobility.” In 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, the conservative scholar Peter W. Wood made the case that 1620 was in fact America’s founding moment—not the arrival of the slave ship but the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Reynolds’s response is, in effect: No, it was both. Americans were separated at birth, and have remained so ever since.<br>Reynolds adopts Fischer’s germinal metaphor (though he never acknowledges doing so). “Early differences in religions, laws, and slave systems,” he writes,<br>planted seeds for societies that eventually developed into the opposing cultural identities of the Cavalier South, with its hierarchical class system and reliance on chattel slavery, and the Puritan North, which moved toward democratic government, free labor, and ultimately widespread opposition to slavery.

The northern seed, in Reynolds’s telling, first sprouted on the other side of the Atlantic. The Pilgrims abhorred the hierarchy of the Church of England and began to practice a democratic politics among themselves in Holland, where they had fled. The language of the Mayflower...