I’d long wondered how, in a nation that fetishizes size, tiny New England managed to inject so much of its culture into the American mainstream. I’d been reading about the Puritans for years, but at some point I realized that my interest was less in them and more about the legacy they left to America.
New England Puritanism, historians tell us, ran its course by the early 1700s. But elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees. This culture was transmitted in a variety of ways, through the establishment of schools, universities, publications, lecture series, social and political causes, commercial enterprises, as well as in the founding of cities and towns throughout the United States.
Long confident in their superiority, New Englanders sought to impose their culture on the country at large. Their first major regional expansion ran through Western New York State onto the northeastern quadrant of Ohio known as the Western Reserve.
Charles Grandison Finney is considered the father of modern revivalism, the activist brand of American Protestantism that emphasizes mass religious conversion through vigorous preaching and emotional appeal. Born in Connecticut, raised in Oneida County in Western New York, and finishing his career at Oberlin College, Finney’s journey —both geographically and spiritually—exemplifies the great Yankee migration westward after American independence.
Between 1790 and 1820, an estimated 800,000 New Englanders set off Westward, most either settling in or passing through Upstate New York. Yankee farmers in search of fertile land—and in the case of Massachusetts also running from high taxes—quickly overwhelmed the early Dutch settlers in the counties on the west side of the Hudson River Valley. Sloops carrying families and their household goods from Connecticut sailed up the Hudson while sleighs and ox carts trudged over the mountains that separate New York from Eastern Massachusetts. During one three day period in 1795, roughly 1,200 sleighs carrying men, women, children, and furniture passed through Albany on their way Central and Western New York.