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Great Migration

How To Be a Swamp Yankee

A swamp Yankee is born, not made. Those who aspire to swamperdom may tell you differently, but they’re wrong.

Though definitions of “swamp Yankee” vary from “trailer trash” to “salt of the earth,” they agree on one thing: the swamp Yankee goes back generations to the same part of New England. Mark Patinkin , in his Providence Journal column, defined them as “earthy, proud New Englanders who date to the Revolution, but haven’t made or spent much money since.”

Thomas Barnes, a New Bedford raccoon hunter, illustrated a 1925 article explaining swamp Yankees.

The pushback he got from that column prompted him to write another. In it, he concluded, “I think I’m more confused than when I started.”

We understand.

“The outside world has never understood the Swamp Yankees,” wrote one denizen of Hope Valley, R.I., a hotbed of swamperdom. “We act dumb to keep our privacy.”

Swampers

In 1963, Ruth Schell wrote a scholarly essay on swamp Yankees. She concluded the typical swamper is “…a rural dweller—one of stubborn, old-fashioned, frugal, English-speaking Yankee stock, of good standing in the rural community, but usually possessing minimal formal education and little desire to augment it. “

A more disdainful definition comes from the urban dictionary. “Someone whose family has been in America for generations (several of which may actually reside together) but has never gotten off the ground, couch, or smack long enough to build a functional family or become a redeeming member of society.”

An even more scornful description came from the late Walter Stone, longtime Rhode Island state police chief who retired in 1990: “illiterate woodchopper.” (T-shirts were subsequently made with the slogan, “I’m an illitrit woodchoppah.”)

Otis Dyer wrote a book, Swamp Yankee, in which he explains where “woodchoppah” comes from.

Edward Buzzell, [swamp] Yankee dairy farmer from Slocum R.I.

Swamp Yankees were usually small dairy farmers who supplemented their income by spending their winters in the swamps, cutting firewood to sell in Providence and Pawtucket and saw-logs to local sawmills.

They also worked as fishermen and shop owners, wrote William Sisson in Soundings:

They were tough, smart, laconic fishermen, farmers and merchants who grew up in Rhode Island and Connecticut and could wrest a living from land, sea and small shops. Best as I can tell, they were an independent, hard-working lot who spoke what was on their minds and didn’t suffer fools.

Pete MacPhee, who designs rock ‘n roll posters, motorcycle ads and beer cans, calls himself Swamp Yankee. “A Swamp Yankee to me is a blue-collar guy who marches to the beat of his own drum,” he told The Newport Daily News. (MacPhee once handled the props for a heavy metal band called the Amish Alcoholics – “Spinal Tap but worse,” MacPhee said.)

Where the Swamp Yankee Dwells

Grayson Hugh, an R&B singer-songwriter, wrote a song called Swamp Yankee.

(I ain’t no punk (ain’t no punk)
just a little bit stanky (a little bit stanky)
I got the funk (I got the funk)
I’m a swamp yankee (swamp yankee))

Hugh describes himself as “from the western hills of Connecticut,” but he’s a first-generation American born in Hartford, so no, he ain’t no swamp Yankee.

In a 2003 article in New England Quarterly about President Calvin Coolidge, Kerry W. Buckley called Calvin Coolidge a swamp Yankee because he came from an old family “no longer prominent or monied.”

Calvin Coolidge Swamper wannabe?

Another former Massachusetts governor, William Weld, was also described in a newspaper as a swamp Yankee. Perhaps he earned the designation because he liked to brag about his $8 drugstore glasses. But Weld came from Long Island and Coolidge from Vermont, so no, they ain’t no swamp Yankees, either.

The real swamp Yankee comes from the watery lowlands of southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island or eastern Connecticut.

Some argue Massachusetts has only one swamp Yankee county: Bristol. Others make a case for southern Worcester County, too. As for Cape Cod: absolutely not.

Connecticut has four swamp Yankee counties: Middlesex, New London, Tolland and Windham. Four of Rhode Island’s five counties are swamper country: Bristol, Kent, Providence and Washington.

Proud swamper Barry Browning in 2000 argued swamp Yankeeland is smaller than that. According to him, swamp Yankees come from South County – which exists only in the minds of Rhode Islanders. It’s a mythical county along the southern coast of the state.

According to Browning, swampers come from rural parts of South County, such as Perryville, Hope Valley, Richmond, Hopkinton, Exeter, Alton, Woodville, “Tuckertown” and Matunuck. Driving south from Providence, swamp Yankee country it starts past the old Bostich-Textron Plant on Route 2 in East Greenwich.

How the Swamp Yankee Got Started

The origins of the term are also disputed. Some say the name started in Thompson, Conn., during the American Revolution. Townsfolk who feared a British attack hid overnight in the swamp.

According to others, swamp Yankee refers to the descendants of those who fought in the Great Swamp Fight during King Philip’s War. (Not really something to be proud of.)

Engraving depicting the colonial assault on the Narragansetts’ fort in the Great Swamp Massacre in December 1675

Still others say they arrived in the Great Puritan Migration, but usually as indentured servants or underpaid crew on the ships. Further, the story goes, the servants got paid at the end of their indenture with swampland.

To add to the confusion, the New York Times reported in 1935 that swampers were Yankees driven out of mill towns by immigrants ( “Out of the Whirlwind,” The New York Times, May 26, 1935 .)

Hunh?

Browning explained in 2006 why the Times might have gotten confused. “The ”great” cotton mill families of South County’s nineteenth century….are inextricably entwined with many old-line South County families who would now consider themselves “Swampers,” he wrote.

Back in the day, he wrote, one would have correctly described swampers as uneducated and poor. “However today I know several who would call themselves “Swampers” who have attended Brown, Wellesley Smith, and other Ivy League colleges,” he wrote. Others, he wrote, serve on bank boards and own over 1,000 acres of land. The ownership and coveting of land is an inherited trait, he noted.

“Swampers” seem to take pride in accumulating ancestral objects, and they practice frugality. They paint the bathroom floor, though they can easily afford ceramic tile.

How To Spot a Swamp Yankee

One way to tell a swamp Yankee is to look in the yard. There’s a big woodpile and a clothesline in it because swampers heat their houses with woodstoves and dry their clothes in the fresh (often winter) air. You might spot an accumulation of shells, evidence of all the quahogs they’ve eaten. You might also spot an accumulation of old vehicles.

Montville, Conn., in New London County — swamper territory.

The house might be unpainted, but flowers will bloom in the yard. A swamp Yankee might also leave an old washing machine in the dooryard for decades, or recycle a bathtub in the pasture to water the cows. A swamp Yankee might still patch his roof with corrugated tin.

Swamp Yankees wouldn’t buy new clothes because that would be showy and embarrass the family. They drive old pickup trucks or perhaps a Buick Skylark with a rotting muffler.

Eating and Talking

You used to be able to find swamp Yankees at the Swamp Yankee Days festival in Ashaway, R.I. It featured a tractor parade, baked bean-eating competition, a Mr. and Mrs. Swamp Yankee contest and cow chip bingo. To play, you put some well-fed cows out on some grass and lay bets on who will produce a cow chip first.

The Country Store by Otto Land

Ashaway’s annual fest has ended, but you might find a swamp Yankee in an old country store telling lies to another swamp Yankee. Those are disappearing, too.

But if you do happen to find such an emporium, you’ll know if the patrons are swamp Yankees by the way they talk. There’s no “r” at the end of a syllable, and “i” is pronounced “oi.” They can also improvise with added syllables.

Catherine Presley , who grew up in Hope Valley, tried to explain it:

Theyugh in Hope Valley. Ole Ben James would saye to mah brother’s “Whaccha saye bouy!”

And

We wood goeh dowun to the main street theyugh, to the squayugh and get summuh that theyugh sodey wahtah.

Swampers eat as their ancestors did. Supper might consist of johnnycakes, cube steak and codfish cakes. Or fried eels, baked beans(home made) and johnnycakes. An upcountry swamp Yankee could dine off slab bacon, boiled potatoes and johnnycakes, while a coastal swamper might feast on smoked buckies (river herring), bluefish and johnnycakes.

So, whaccha saye to theyat?

Images: Mattity Swamp By Swampyank – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105080393. Edward Buzzell Delano, Jack, photographer. Mr. Edward Buzzell, Yankee dairy farmer of Slocum, Rhode Island. United States Rhode Island Washington County Slocum, 1940. Dec. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017793117/. Country Store: Lang, Otto, -1940, Artist. The Country Store. , ca. 1890. [Between and 1910] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009616966/. Montville: Montville: Delano, Jack, photographer. Untitled photo, possibly related to: Houses and small farms in the Montville, Connecticut area. United States Connecticut Montville, 1940. [Nov] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017748612/.

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Abe Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors (Cavaliers and Baptists, Too)

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Unifier, didn’t talk much about his Puritan ancestors. Nor did he talk much about his ancestors from Virginia, where the original Anglican settlers were known as Cavaliers.

He had good reason to hide the fact that his ancestor Samuel Lincoln had come to Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration. Lincoln also downplayed his Anglican, or Cavalier, ancestors who settled in Virginia.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

“Exposing either of the ancestral strands could have been politically risky,” wrote David S. Reynolds, in his recently published Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.

Lincoln had to try to unify the country. So he hid his Cavalier and Puritan ancestors and claimed dubious Quaker roots. The North and the South found Quakers an acceptable compromise, something that would have astonished the early Puritans.

Puritan Ancestors vs. Cavaliers

During Lincoln’s presidency and afterward, people viewed the Civil War as a contest between Puritans and Cavaliers. More recently, Kevin Phillips in his book, The Cousins’ Wars, made the same argument. He maintained the American Civil War was merely an extension of the English civil wars.

The argument has some truth to it. Puritans from eastern England largely settled New England. Anglicans, or Cavaliers, from the west fled Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan uprising and settled in Maryland and Virginia.

The Puritan Northerners prized liberty, innovation, education, reform and hard work. From the southern point of view, they were fanatical, narrow-minded, money-grubbing commoners who disturbed the peace.

Prince Rupert of Rhine, considered the quintessential cavalier

In contrast, the Cavalier southerners thought of themselves as hospitable, chivalrous, traditional and aristocratic. Northerners called that oppressive, decadent and unjust – especially in regards to slavery.

In the late 1850s, The New York Herald wrote, “The people of the North and those of the South are distinct and separate.” They think differently, wrote the Herald, and they spring from a different stock. Different in every way, they cannot coalesce.

“The Puritan and the Cavalier…will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”

Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors

Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was born out of wedlock to a poor young woman who’d been taken advantage of by a plantation owner. Lincoln proudly described his mother as “the daughter of a nobleman…so-called of Virginia.” He told a friend he had inherited through his mother his brains and ambition from his Virginian grandfather.

Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, had qualities associated with his Puritan ancestors: piety, honesty and lack of pretension.

Lincoln learned that his ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, had settled Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration in 1637. He had come from Hingham in Norfolk County, a hotbed of anti-Anglican sentiment. His pastor arrived a year later, excommunicated for his radical views. Samuel Lincoln helped fund and build the Old Ship Church in 1681.

In 1848, Lincoln spoke in Dorchester and mentioned his Puritan ancestors, describing himself as one of the “Hingham Lincolns.”

Samuel had two brothers, and he and his wife had 11 children, so within the first generation Hingham had 60 Lincolns. Another Massachusetts Lincoln with Puritan ancestors from Hingham was Levi Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general and governor of Massachusetts. His son, Levi, Jr., also won election as governor of Massachusetts, and another son, Enoch, served as governor of Maine.

Samuel’s son Mordecai moved to Scituate and brought smelting furnaces to Massachusetts. Mordecai’s son, also Mordecai, married Hannah Saltar. Their son, John, was Abraham Lincoln’s great-grandfather.

Obadiah Holmes

Significantly, Hannah Saltar was descended from Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist and therefore a heretic in Puritan eyes. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts in 1651 ordered him whipped 30 times in public.

An engraving of Obadiah Holmes about to be whipped.

News spread about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. Baptist minister John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre with a book that included a description of Holmes’ whipping. That put pressure on the Puritans to allow more religious freedom.

But Lincoln had no interest in summoning the memory of his illustrious Baptist ancestor. Baptists in Lincoln’s time reminded people of the divisions over slavery. The Baptist church in 1845 split apart into northern and southern conferences over the issue.

So Lincoln didn’t tell people during his campaign for president about his Puritan ancestors. Or about his Baptist or Cavalier forbears. He said he came from Quakers who left Berks County, Pa., for Virginia.

Mordecai’s son Mordecai had moved to Berks County, Pa. But it’s unlikely they were Quakers.

Everyone Likes Quakers

In the run-up to the Civil War, Quakers had broader appeal than Baptists, Cavaliers/Anglicans or Puritans/Congregationalists. Both southerners and northerners could tolerate them. The North saw Quakers as opponents of slavery, the South as a group unlikely to go to war over slavery.

By 1886, the perception grew that Lincoln served as a bridge between Puritans and Cavaliers. A Georgia newspaper editor named Henry Grady described Lincoln as both:

From the union of colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, came he who stands as the first typical American…Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than the Puritan, greater than the Cavalier, in that he was American.

With thanks to David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln and His Times, published in September 2020.

Images: Samuel Lincoln sign By Timothy Valentine – https://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3232950290/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5821709. This story last updated in 2022.

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Capt. John Underhill Gets Un-Banished From Massachusetts Bay, 1640

Capt. John Underhill paid a steep price for crossing the early Puritan establishment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was banished, and had to do some serious groveling to get back into the Puritans’ good graces.

Underhill had been hired as a captain by the colony to help train the militia. He was born Oct. 7, 1597 in England, the great-grandson of Hugh Underhill, who served as Keeper of the Wardrobe for Queen Elizabeth.

He then fled with his family to the Netherlands after his father got involved in a failed plot to overthrow the Queen. He lived in the Netherlands with a group of Puritan exiles until his early 30s. Then he and his wife, a Dutch woman named Helena de Hooch, emigrated to America aboard the Arbella during the Puritans’ Great Migration.

Bas relief of Capt. John Underhill from the Underhill Burying Ground on Long Island.

Things went well at first. John Underhill was appointed to the General Court and elected a Boston selectman in 1634. In 1636 he was sent to arrest Roger Williams, but Williams had already fled to Rhode Island. In 1637, Underhill headed the militia during the Pequot War. He later published an account of it called Newes from America.

Troubled John Underhill

But then it all fell apart. He supported the Rev. John Wheelwright’s unconventional theology, viewed as heresy by the Puritans. They banished Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson from the colony. Then Underhill lost his job and found himself accused of adultery. He left for England, but couldn’t find work. So he returned to New England and settled in New Hampshire, where he became governor.

In 1641 the Massachusetts Puritans repealed his banishment and acquitted him of the charges of adultery.

Puritan leader John Winthrop described Underhill’s plea for repentance in his journal on Sept. 3, 1640.

Underhill showed up in old clothes and a foul linen cap, apologized abjectly, weeping and blubbering and sighing. It worked.

Winthrop Gives an Account

According to Winthrop, God’s blessing brought Capt. John Underhill “to remorse for his foul sins.” The elders and others gave him a safe conduct to return to the church.

Underhill arrived when the magistrates, called the Court of Assistants, met. On Lecture Day, after the sermon, the pastor called him forth and let him speak.

“[I]ndeed it was a spectacle which caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his ordinances,” wrote Winthrop. “He came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes,” he wrote.

With many deep sighs and an abundance of tears, he “lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his hypocrisy, his persecution of God’s people here, and especially his pride.”

John Winthrop

Pride, noted Winthrop, caused all his troubles, along with “contempt of the magistrates.” Underhill described Satan’s power over him since his banishment. But then the “terrors of God came upon him, so he could have no rest.”

Underhill fell into such despair he considered suicide, but the Lord stopped him, “even when his sword was ready to have done the execution,” wrote Winthrop.

Bondslave of Satan

He faced many fearful temptations. In all of them, wrote Winthrop, “his heart shut up in hardness and impenitency as the bondslave of Satan.”

After a long time and many afflictions, the Lord broke his heart “and brought him to humble himself before him night and day with prayers and tears till his strength was wasted.”

Winthrop noted Underhill worn out with sorrow but could find no peace. Therefore he came back to the church. He spoke well, except his blubbering interrupted him, wrote Winthrop.

“All along he discovered a broken and melting heart, and gave good exhortations to take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his fall,” he wrote. In the end, Underhill “earnestly and humbly” asked the church to have compassion and deliver him from the hands of Satan.

The church let him back in. Then he confessed to the General Court, which met after the Court of Assistants, and asked for a pardon. They pardoned him for his sin against them, but not for his adultery. Instead, he won an acquittal.

Ladies’ Man

The problem with adultery was there had been no law against it when he committed it, wrote Winthrop. Underhill had confessed that he had solicited the woman in question for six months — which, noted Winthrop, “he thought no woman could have resisted.” He gained her affection, but it took that long to overcome her chastity. Once he did, “she was wholly at his will.”

To make peace, Underhill went to her husband, fell on his knees, confessed his wrong and begged forgiveness. The husband, a cooper, freely forgave Underhill and sent Underhill’s wife “a token.”

John Underhill Moves On

Despite his acquittal and un-banishment, Capt. John Underhill could find no work in Boston. So he moved to Stamford, Conn. Then in 1644 the Dutch in New Netherlands hired him to attack Lenape settlements in retaliation for a raid on them.

He then moved to New Amsterdam, living on a plot of land where Trinity Church now stands in Lower Manhattan. He attacked and burned an Indian fort on Long Island. In 1648, Gov. Peter Stuyvesant appointed him sheriff of Flushing and then magistrate, but Underhill eventually turned against him.

Underhill Burying Ground

He then learned the Dutch planned to ally with certain tribe to attack English settlements, he switched to the English side. Eventually he settled on Oyster Bay on Long Island.

After his first wife died, he married Elizabeth Feake, the daughter of Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett, who had settled Greenwich, Conn. He sired five children in addition to the three he had with Helena. Underhill died on July 21, 1672.

His descendants include Tom Selleck, Amelia Earhart, Johnny Depp and John Kerry.

This story was updated in 2022.

Image of the sculpture of John Underhill By Idoysterbay – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5962024. By Idoysterbay – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5966156.

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June 14, 1630: The Arbella Comes to Anchor in Salem Harbor

The Massachusetts Bay Colony got its start on June 14, 1630, when the Arbella came to anchor in Salem Harbor after a long, stormy voyage.

One could argue the Arbella’s arrival had a greater impact on the colonization of New England than the Mayflower 10 years earlier. Plymouth Colony struggled along for decades until the bigger and richer Massachusetts absorbed it in 1691.

The Plymouth Puritans did, however, show that a colony could survive in the New England wilderness.

Replica, The Arbella

The Arbella was the flagship for a fleet of 11 ships full of Puritans escaping King Charles I’s repression of Nonconformist religious thought. The fleet carried about 1,000 people, the first of the Great Migration of 1630-42, during which thousands of English families immigrated to Massachusetts.

The Puritans planned the expedition well, bringing along plenty of provisions and diverse skilled laborers to ensure the colony’s survival. The leaders had wealth, which enabled them to obtain a royal charter.

Chief among the Arbella passengers was 41-year-old John Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan lawyer who led the immigrants. They would create new homes in a new colony “to do more service to the Lord.”

“We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” he said in his famous sermon.

The Arbella

The Puritans renamed their flagship after one of its passengers, Lady Arabella Johnson. Also on board were her husband Isaac Johnson. Simon Bradstreet and his wife, Ann, the first female poet to be published in North America. Importantly, the Arbella carried the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The other Puritan leaders, such as Sir Richard Saltonstall, were scattered among the other ships in the fleet.

John Winthrop

The Arbella left England on April 8, sailing nine weeks and two days on the Atlantic Ocean. The weather was cold, wet and rough. Only occasionally could the travelers cook over a fire on a calm sea. The stormy weather caused seasickness. Winthrop on May 3 wrote:

A maid-servant in the ship, being stomach-sick, drank so much strong water, that she was senseless, and had near killed herself. We observed it a common fault in our young people, that they gave themselves to drink hot waters [rum or other distilled liquor] very immoderately.

Code of Conduct

Winthrop anxiously followed the slow progress across the Atlantic, occasionally noting they spotted the other ships in the fleet. Sailors who didn’t follow the Puritans’ strict code of conduct were punished. On May 22, for example,

A servant of one of our company had bargained with a child to sell him a box worth 3 pence for three biscuits a day all the voyage, and had received about forty, and had sold them and many more to some other servants. We caused his hands to be tied up to a bar, and hanged a basket with stones about his neck, and so he stood two hours.

A week before they landed it was calm enough to catch fish. They “heaved their hooks,” and caught 26 cod, some a yard-and-a-half long – just as their salt fish ran out.

On June 8, the Arbella passengers and crew caught sight of land. Two days later, they had a fine fresh smell of land. And two days after that, some passengers went ashore and picked strawberries on Cape Ann.

Five Pieces

On June 14, 1630, the Arbella sailed into what is now Salem Harbor. John Winthrop wrote in his diary:

In the morning early we weighed anchor, and the wind being against us, and the channel so narrow as we could not well turn in, we warped in our ship and came to an anchor in the inward harbor.

In the afternoon we went with most of our company on shore, and our captain gave us [a gun salute of five pieces.

Over the next few days, the other ships would arrive.

Winthrop and his followers would only stay in Salem for a few weeks. They’d move south, to a place they called Charles Town. In September they’d move south again, to a place they called Boston.

This story was updated in 2023.

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