Note: this summarizes the colonial family culture of our nation.
This page really goes hand and hand with this page.

Puritan New England

Order – order that “preserves the whole”; individual order but with institutional violence; little or no separation between Church and State.

freedom – “ordered liberty”; conceived in terms of collective, not individual liberty; “liberty maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority.” ; perfect freedom to do what is right; a collective obligation of the-community to protect individual members from the “tyranny of circumstance.”

Power -town meetings whose object was to build consensus. Hierarchy in society was determined by age, estate and reputation respectively. Characterized by use of fundamental documents. Conscious attempt to have a “middling” of society by eliminating both the top and bottom tiers in society.

Virginia Tidewater Royalists

order -hierarchical, legitimized violence between superiors and inferiors; sense of civic responsibility based on classic Roman and Greek republicanism; emphasis on secular ethics.

freedom – hegemonic liberty: freedom to do what your superiors knew was right; “noblesse oblige”; exaggerated sense of personal liberties.

power -local and regional power structures dominated by self?perpetuating oligarchies. Democratic among those who had the requisite amount of property.

Pennsylvanian Quakers

order -a condition of peace founded on the Golden Rule and the doctrine of the “light within”; considered by others to be radically permissive

freedom -reciprocal liberty; exceptionally strong belief in “liberty of conscience”; actively supported ethnic and cultural pluralism power -institutionalized dissent, organized parties, political pluralism, commission government, light taxes and minimal gov’t.

Backcountry Borderers

order -“retributive justice”; each individual was the guardian of his own interests.

freedom -“natural liberty”; radical libertarianism, minimal gov’t and the right of armed resistance to authority in all cases which infringed liberty. Highly individualist; “elbow room”

power -little formal structure; improvisational; characterized by personal and charismatic leadership; anti-aristocratic; a sort of tribal chieftain in a meritocratic warrior ethic.

Note: These two (hand-in-hand) pages really are notes taken dur­ing a class while I attended col­lege around 1997.  At the time, I just knew this was infor­ma­tion that led to a gen­eral insight when it comes to geneal­ogy. -Peg