Wales, the Welsh and the Making of America , livre ebook

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In 1971, Californian congressman Thomas M. Rees told the US House of Representatives that ‘very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life in the shaping of American history’. This book is the first systematic attempt to both recount and evaluate the considerable yet undervalued contribution made by Welsh immigrants and their immediate descendants to the development of the United States. Their lives and achievements are set within a narrative outline of American history that emphasises the Welsh influence upon the colonists’ rejection of British rule, and upon the establishment, expansion and industrialisation of the new American nation. This book covers both the famous and the unsung who worked and fought to acquire greater prosperity and freedom for themselves and for their nation.

Sujets

Histoire

USA

Great Britain

États-Unis

History

Wales

Europe

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Publié par	University of Wales Press
Date de parution	15 juillet 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786837929
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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W ALES, THE W ELSH AND THE M AKING OF A MERICA
W ALES, THE W ELSH AND THE M AKING OF A MERICA

Vivienne Sanders
© Vivienne Sanders, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781786837905
eISBN: 9781786837929
The right of Vivienne Sanders to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, anddoes not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design:Olwen Fowler / iStock
C ONTENTS

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Wales, the Welsh and the Making of America
1 Madoc: Explorer and Discoverer of North America?
Madoc and the early colonisation of America
Madoc’s descendants: the Welsh Indians
‘Madoc fever’ in America
‘Madoc fever’ in Wales
Opposition to the Madoc story
2 The Welsh and the Colonisation of North America
Welsh Quakers, Penn and Pennsylvania
Welsh settlers in Delaware and South Carolina
The Welsh contribution to education in the colonies
Conclusions
3 Richard Price and the American Revolution
Price and the taxation of the American colonies
Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty
Price and the American Declaration of Independence
Price’s invitation to America
Price and the American Constitution
Richard Price: conclusions
4 The Welsh American Military Contribution to the American War of Independence
Charles Lee
‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne
Daniel Morgan
Welsh American Loyalists, neutrals and the case of Daniel Boone (1734–1820)
Conclusions
5 The Welsh American Political Contribution to the American Revolution
The search for Welsh American contributors to the American Revolution
Robert Morris (1734–1806)
A lost Founding Father – Button Gwinnett (1735–77)
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
6 Meriwether Lewis, James Monroe and the American West
Meriwether Lewis’s background
The aims of the Lewis and Clark expedition
The expedition’s relations with the Indians
Other problems on the expedition
Lewis’s achievements
Lewis’s life after the expedition
James Monroe and the American West
7 The Welsh Go West
Getting to America
Why emigrate from Wales?
The Welsh on the East Coast
From the East Coast to the West Coast
Life in the West
Conclusions
8 Welsh Americans and the American Civil War
Jefferson Davis (1808-89)
Welsh American contributions to the Union victory
The Welsh contribution to a Civil War that helped make America
The perils of ethnic history
9 The Welsh and the Industrialisation of America
Oliver Evans (1755–1819)
Industrialisation
Iron and steel
Coal
Industry and business
Quarrying and the stone industry
Copper and tinplate
Conclusions
10 Assimilation and the Vanishing Welsh
How and why the Welsh ‘Americanized’
The acceptance of the Welsh – a myth?
Welsh, Welsh American or American?
John L. Lewis (1880–1969) and the American Dream
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)
Beyond John L. Lewis and Frank Lloyd Wright
11 Wales, the Welsh and the Making of America – Conclusions
A special people?
‘Nauseating’ Welsh writers
Bibliographical Essay
Bibliography of Works Referred to in the Text
L IST OF F IGURES

Figure 1 Map showing the old counties of Wales
Figure 2 The USA in 1800
Figure 3 Portrait of William Penn, date and painter unknown
Figure 4 Welsh Quaker meeting house in Merion, Pennsylvania
Figure 5a and 5b Welsh Quaker meeting house, Merion, Pennsylvania
Figure 6 Richard Price
Figure 7 Benjamin Franklin
Figure 8 The title page of Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty
Figure 9 Major battles of the American War of Independence
Figure 10 Robert Morris (right), painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1783
Figure 11 Jefferson’s Monticello home
Figure 12 The recreated slave quarters at Jefferson’s Monticello home
Figure 13 The Lewis and Clark expedition, charting the expedition route from St Louis to Fort Clatsop
Figure 14 The 700-ton Tamerlane
Figure 15 Grant for land in Beulah, Pennsylvania
Figure 16a and 16b Bethel Welsh Church, Wymore, Nebraska
Figure 17 The major battles of the American Civil War
Figure 18 John L. Lewis at the West Frankfort mining disaster
Figure 19 John L. Lewis addressing the miners
Figure 20 John L. Lewis with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Pennsylvania
Figure 21 Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Pennsylvania
Figure 22 Frank Lloyd Wright and Clough Williams-Ellis at Portmeirion
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Merion Friends: figures 4 and 5 ; Paul Frame: figures 6 , 7 , 8 and 15 ; Mrs Gladys Jones Rumbaugh, figure 16 ; Portmeirion Ltd: figure 22 ; Wikimedia Creative Commons: figures 3 , 10 and 21 (Sxenko); United Mine Workers of America: figure 19 ; Thomas Jefferson Foundation Monticello: figures 11 and 12 .
For my parents and Great Aunt Kitty, who loved both Wales and America.
INTRODUCTION

W ALES, THE W ELSH AND THE M AKING OF A MERICA

I CAN STILL remember my surprise during a tour of Shirley plantation in Virginia in 1970, when our guide said someone in colonial America hailed ‘from a place in England called Wales’. Although the early 1970s saw an outburst of white ethnic assertiveness and pride amongst groups such as Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans, Californian congressman Thomas M. Rees told the US House of Representatives in 1971 that ‘very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life in the shaping of American history’. That statement remains true half a century later.
Why have Welsh and Welsh American contributions to American history been frequently underestimated or ignored? First, Wales is a small country, sparsely populated and long dominated by England and the English. Many Americans have been unaware of Wales or have thought it simply ‘a place in England’. Second, although a considerable proportion of colonial Americans were Welsh or of Welsh ancestry, they would soon be greatly outnumbered by immigrants from other nations. Dr Arturo Roberts, founder of a North American Welsh newspaper, pointed out: ‘There are 20 people of Irish descent for every one with Welsh descent – that makes a big difference.’ Third, the Welsh assimilated relatively easily. ‘They bought into the American dream,’ said Professor John Roper of the American Studies department at Swansea University. As George Washington supposedly said, ‘Good Welshmen make good Americans.’ Edward Hartmann, the son of a Welsh immigrant mother and writer of Americans from Wales (1967), argued that Welsh immigrants and their descendants were ‘not chauvinistic over past wrongs or vengeance-minded over former ill-treatment, they came over quietly, modestly, willing to accept what opportunities the new environment might have to offer’. A possible fourth reason might be the lack of any long-lasting and frequently replenished concentration of Welsh Americans in big cities – there has been no Welsh equivalent of the ‘Boston Irish’. Much Welsh emigration took place before the United States became increasingly industrialised and urbanised during the nineteenth century, and those early immigrants tended to settle in small townships in rural areas.
There have been a few studies of the Welsh and America, notably the respected Welsh historian David Williams’s pamphlet Wales and America (1945). Edward G. Hartmann’s Americans from Wales was reprinted in 1978 and 1983, and then by the National Welsh-American Foundation (NWAF) in 2001. There have also been more specialised studies of the Welsh in areas such as the Pennsylvania coalfields, Iowa, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Overall, though, as Arturo Roberts noted, ‘The Welsh have low visibility.’ Ronald L. Lewis, author of Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields (2008), used a similar vocabulary when he described the Welsh as ‘nearly invisible to most Americans’. Perhaps it is time to try to make the invisible visible, especially if doing so helps illuminate the nature and development of the United States of America.

Figure 1. The old counties of Wales, as they were during the emigration of the Welsh to America during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These county names were changed in the later twentieth century, but this book uses the names familiar to the Welsh emigrants discussed here.

T HE NUMBER OF A MERICANS OF W ELSH DESCENT
While 2.5 million Americans said they had Welsh ancestry in a recent US census, most of the 20 million who said they were simply ‘Americans’ came from the South, to which many Welsh people had emigrated in the colonial period. As a result, the number with Welsh descent may well be greater.
CHAPTER ONE

M ADOC: E XPLORER AND D ISCOVERER OF N ORTH A MERICA?

I N 1979, I attended Professor Gwyn Alf Williams’s inaugural lecture at Cardiff University. He was an unforgettable speaker with a distinctive appearance – a white mane, piercing periwinkle blue eyes, the shortest of short Welshmen. His stutter guaranteed attentive and supportive listeners willing him to g