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New England Basics

The six New England states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine like to view themselves as the repository of all that is intrinsically American. In this version of history, the tangled streets of old Boston, the farms of Connecticut and the village greens of Vermont are the cradle of the nation. Certainly, nostalgia is at the root of the region's tourist trade; while the real business of making a living goes on in cities for the most part well off the tourist trail, innumerable small towns have been dolled up to recapture a past that is at best wishful, and at times purely fictional. Picturesque they may be, with white-spired churches beside immaculate rolling greens, but they're not always authentic: there's little to distinguish a clapboard house built last year from another, two hundred years old, which has just had its annual fresh coat of white paint.

The genteel seaside towns of modern Cape Cod and Rhode Island are a far cry from the first European settlements in New England. While the Pilgrims congregated in neat and pristine communities, later arrivals, with so much land to choose from, felt no need to reconstruct the compact little villages they had left behind in Europe. Instead, they spread themselves across existing Native American fields, or straggled their farmhouses in endless strips along the newly built highways (thus establishing a more genuinely American style of development). As the European foothold on the continent became more certain, the coastline came increasingly to be viewed as prime real estate, to be lined with grand patrician homes - from the Vanderbilt mansions of Newport to the presidential compounds of the Bush and Kennedy families.

Inland, the Ivy League colleges - Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth et al - still embody New England's strong sense of its own superiority - though in fact the region's traditional role as home to the WASP elite is due more to the vagaries of history and ideology than to any economic realities. Its thin soil and harsh climate made it difficult for the first pioneers to sustain an agricultural way of life, while the industrial prosperity of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is now a painfully distant memory.

New England can be a rather pricey place to visit, especially in late September and October when visitors flock to see the magnificent fall foliage. Its tourist facilities are aimed at weekenders from the big cities as much as outsiders; places like Cape Cod make convenient short breaks for locals, but they're not the bucolic retreats you might expect. Connecticut and Rhode Island in particular clearly form part of the great East Coast megalopolis which stretches from Washington to Boston - you rarely escape the feeling that you're travelling through some vast suburb of New York. Boston itself, however, is a vibrant and stimulating city, while further up the coast the towns finally thin out and the scenery gets interesting (as does the seafood). Inland, too, the lakes and mountains of New Hampshire, and particularly Maine, offer rural wildernesses to rival any in the nation.

History

The Native Americans who first peopled the northeast shoreline lived by farming and fishing along the coast in summer, and retreating with their animals to the relative warmth of the inland valleys in winter. Though the Algonquin did not always live in harmony with each other, they did manage to repel the first European invaders, earning themselves five hundred years' grace, some time around 1000 AD, by forcing the Viking Leif Ericsson to abandon the settlement of Vinland the Good - which may have been anywhere between Newfoundland and Massachusetts.

Within five years of Columbus' first voyage, John Cabot nosed by in 1497, in search of the Northwest Passage. Over the next century, European fishermen began to return each year, but it was not until the early 1600s that the French and English attempted to found permanent colonies, in what is now Maine. The name "New England" was given in 1614 by John Smith, who particularly appreciated the plentiful lobsters.

This was not promising land: as a character in Robert Lowell's Endecott and the Cross put it, "I'm not a birdwatcher or an Indian. . . . I don't see the point of this outpost of England." Without precious metals to be mined, or the potential to grow lucrative crops, the first major impetus for emigration was religion. Refugees from intolerance - notably the Puritans, beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620 - made the arduous voyage to find the freedom to build their own communities. The Pilgrims only survived at first thanks to the Indians; they were aided by a certain Squanto, who had been kidnapped, sold as a slave in Spain and returned home via England. In return, the Pilgrims forced the Indians from their terraces they had farmed for generations, dismissing as inappropriate their solution to the problems of survival in such terrain: "Their land is spacious and void, and there are few and do but run over the grass. . . . They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it."

The possibility of a serious Indian threat was removed by victory in King Philip's War of 1675-76, when a leader of the Narragansett persuaded feuding groups to bury their differences in one last despairing throw. By then, white colonization was beyond the stage where it could be controlled by a few high-minded zealots. The Salem witch trials of 1692 provided a salutary lesson of the potential dangers of fanaticism, and as immigration became less English-based, with influxes of Huguenots after 1680 and Irish in 1708, Puritan domination decreased and a definite class structure began to emerge.

While the strand of history which began with the Pilgrims is just one among many - even forgetting the Indians, the Spanish were in Santa Fe before the Pilgrims ever left England - it is true to say that the metropolis of Boston deserves to be celebrated as the place where the great project of American independence first captured the popular imagination. The leading port of colonial America was always the likeliest focus of resentment against the latest impositions of the British government, and was ready to take up the challenge thrown down by British Prime Minister Townshend in 1766: "I dare tax America." So many of the seminal moments of the Revolutionary War took place here: the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Paul Revere's ride and the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775.

Nationhood secured, however, New England's prosperity was ironically hit hard by the loss of trade with England, and Boston was slowly eclipsed by Philadelphia, New York, and the new capital, Washington. The Triangular Trade in slaves, sugar and rum provided one substitute source of income, the brief heyday of whaling another, and New England was also briefly at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, when water-powered mills created a booming textile industry. The attempt to farm the north, however, foundered: careless techniques served to exhaust the land, and as the vast spaces of the west opened to settlement many of the inland towns fell silent.

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