(46) Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously and distinctively "Southern"—the decades after 1815. Consequently, the cultural history of Britain’ s North American empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been written almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras has been depicted as having been simply an extension of New England Puritan culture. However, Professor Davis has recently argued that the South stood apart from the rest of American society during this early period, following its own unique pattern of cultural development. (47) The case for Southern distinctiveness rests upon two related premises: first, that the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences, and second, that what made those colonies alike also made them different from the other colonies. The first, for which Davis offers an enormous amount of evidence, can be accepted without major reservations; the second is far more problematic.
What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly, Davis decries the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascriptions by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. (48) Throughout, Davis focuses on the important, and undeniable, differences between the Southern and Northern colonies in motives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences.
(49) However, recent scholarship has ply suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the p religious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of America. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan (Northern) colonies appears to Davis to be peculiarly Southern—acquisitiveness, a p interest in politics and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models—was not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost certainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. (50) Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern but the Northern colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the last Colonial period.
(46) Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously and distinctively "Southern"—the decades after 1815.