LADD-L Archives

From: "Larry Ladd" <>
Subject: Re: [LADD-L] Edited Chat, Family Migration, and American Culture
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 13:06:55 -0700

> >.Janet> Figure this out for me. I have an ancestor who was a FARMER
> but between 1850 and 1860 he had a child every two years, in a
> different state!

I don't know it's the same Farmer family, Janet, but my family is very
closely entwined with Farmers in Wayne Co., IN and Roane Co., TN. It was a
Farmer cousin who had moved from Roane to Wayne that tipped off my
grandfather in 1934 about an opening for a sharecropper in Indiana. The
family had just lost the farm in Roane, so he took the job and moved. He
stayed in Hoosierland until 1977, when the cold winter that year convinced
him it was time to retire from farming and return to Tennessee.

> >SNOWDIE> Some years ago, we tried to trace a route that the Carolina
> Ladds may have taken to the west. We drove the width of TN along the
> lower tier of the state. Every county there had their county seat
> located on that two lane road.

Some early Ladds may have rafted west and then north along the Tennessee
river.

> LaddofOhio: But Gerrard and his family moved to Ohio in 1808 and some
> even before that

Was he part of the Quaker exodus from Virginia/North Carolina and slavery
around that time? The Friends school of Earlham College in Richmond, IN is
sort of a temple for that old Quaker migration, and thus in some ways
Earlham is a descendent of the of the late 17th-early 18th century Virginia
Friends community that John Ladd and William Ladd were part of.

For folks interested in geography, history, American culture and geneology,
I'd like to strongly recommend a book entitled "Albion's Seed." My wife
has lost my copy, and the name of the author escapes me, but it was an
excellent historical geography of the four main English subcultures that
colonized North America: the Puritans of New England from East Anglia
(1630-1640), Berkeley's exiled cavaliers fleeing from southern England to
the Chesapeake (1640-1650), the Quakers from the Midlands moving to the
Delaware Valley (New Jersey and Pennsylvania 1675-1690), and finally the
violent border ruffians from the intersection of Scotland, England, and
Ireland that are characterized as "Scotch-Irish," but who actually
encompass a larger region and population (1700-1750). The book uses the
biographies, social networks, and family histories of Cotton Mather,
William Berkeley, William Penn, and Andrew Jackson to illuminate how these
Old World regional cultures formed American society and continue to have an
impact today.

>From East Anglian culture and its close ties to the Calvinist Dutch we get
the Republican party, the Congregationalists and the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter Day Saints, and Calvin Coolidge's "The business of America is
business." Berkeley's clique from hierarchical, Frenchified southern
England gave us the legalized institutionalization of slavery after the
restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, Gone With the Wind, and a southern
obsession with breeding, etiquette, and geneology: Berkeley's family is
one of a grand total of two in England that could trace their ancestry past
the Norman conquest to Anglo-Saxon kings. The plain living, socialistic
Scandinavian descendents of the Midlands Quakers gave America the idea of
the melting pot and religious tolerance, with the resulting Balkanization
of places like 18th century Philadelphia, 19th century New York, and 20th
century Los Angeles, which in turn created a style of coalition compromise
politics that formed and maintains the Two Party System. Meanwhile,
centuries of warfare between Scotland and England created an especially
violence-prone local culture along the Anglo-Scottish border. These
criminals and warriors became redundant as Scotland and England gradually
merged into Great Britain, but these same folks found a wonderful new life
dealing with Native Americans on the frontier. The gave us Andrew Jackson
beating Thomas Hart Benton with a bullwhip until Benton's brother shot
Jackson, and then the bandaged Old Hickory leading the militia to Horseshoe
Bend, New Orleans, and Florida; subsequently we have the Trail of Tears,
the conquest of Texas and the Mexican-American War, the Hatfields and
McCoys, the Wild West, George Patton, and -- back in the old country -- the
"troubles" in Belfast.

You can view that quientessentially Anglo-American event, the Civil War, as
a rematch of the English Civil war with the denizens of the Danelaw (East
Anglia and the Midlands) triumphing over the Cavaliers of southern England,
with the borderland crazies fighting amongst themselves - as always.

Larry Ladd

Rancho Cordova, California.

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