Old Stock American (also known as Colonial Stock, Founding Stock, Heritage Americans, or Pioneer Stock) is a colloquial name for Americans who are descended from the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies. Historically, Old Stock Americans have been mainly Protestants from Northwestern Europe whose ancestors emigrated to British America in the 17th and 18th centuries.
, the statistical terminology of the U.S. Census Bureau identified Americans from the third-, fourth-, and fifth-generations as "Old Stock" unless they were Afro-Americans, Asian Americans, or American Indians.Stephan Thernstrom, ed. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) p. 379.
17th to late-18th century
The primary settlers of the 17th century were more homogenously English and established the foundations of the country and basis of its culture, whereas the later settlers of the 18th century were more varied in ancestry: 90% of them were Scots, Scots-Irish, Irish, Germans and Huguenots. This period was more characterized with expanding the established settlements.https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/colonization-and-settlement-1585-1763https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-colonies
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the population of the Thirteen Colonies in July 1776 was 2.56 million, and around 3.9 million in 1790 - of which around 3.2 million were of European American stock.Derick C. Moore, "Looking Back 250 Years: The 1773 Boston Tea Party" (U.S. Bureau of the Census, December 14, 2023) online. It provides ethnic detail for each state in 1790. About 85% of the White population in 1790 was British: English and Welsh (64%), Scottish, directly from Scotland or via Ulster, (15.8%) and Irish (5.8%). In addition there were Germans (8.9%) Dutch (3.1%), French (2.1%) and others including Jewish immigrants (less than 0.1%).
British settlers in New England
While the majority of colonists were from Great Britain, these were not monolithic in ethnic, political, social, and cultural origins, but rather transplanted different Old World folkways to the New World. The two most significant colonies had been settled by opposing factions in the English Civil War and the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The founders of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony in the North were mostly Puritans from East Anglia, who had been influenced by egalitarian Roundhead republican ideals of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth of England and the Protectorate; in New England they concentrated in towns where decisions were made by direct democracy, prizing communal conformity, social equality, and Puritan work ethic. Partially owing to the insularity of Puritan communities, colonial New England was far more homogeneously "English" than other regions, in contrast to the historically tolerant Dutch colonial parts of the Northeast, and more diverse colonies of the Mid-Atlantic and the South which from an early stage had strong elements of German and Scottish stock, from varying religious traditions.
British settlers in the Old South
Conversely, in Chesapeake Colonies to the south, the Colony of Virginia had been settled by their Cavalier royalist rivals—many younger sons of English gentry who fled Southern England when Cromwell took power, accompanied by indentured servants. Sir William Berkeley, colonial governor of Virginia, loyal to King Charles I, banished Puritans while offering refuge to the Virginia Cavaliers—many of whom became First Families of Virginia. For his colony's fidelity to the Crown, Charles II awarded Virginia its nickname "Old Dominion". In contrast to egalitarian and collectivist New England Colonies to the north, settlers of the Southern Colonies in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and Georgia recreated a hierarchical social order governed by an aristocratic American gentry which would dominate the antebellum Old South for generations. Sons of British nobility established American plantations where the planter class employed indentured servants to farm cash crops; later replaced by African slaves, especially in Deep South states where a feudal West Indies-style slave plantation economy developed. Freed English American indentured servants, along with Scottish Americans, Scotch-Irish Americans, Palatines and other German Americans pioneered hilly wilderness areas not yet settled by Europeans, becoming old stock of the mountainous backcountry. To contrast against Yankee "Anglo-Saxon" democratic radicalism of New England, at times even English Americans in Dixie (especially in decades leading up to the American Civil War) would not only identify with chivalrous Cavaliers, but even assert a distinct aristocratic racial heritage as knightly heirs to the Normans who conquered and civilized "barbaric" and unruly Anglo-Saxons of medieval England.
19th to mid-20th century
Until the second half of the 20th century, the Old Stock dominated American culture and Republican party politics. Of the 15 leading American cities, 7 elected a Catholic as mayor before the Civil War, and 13 had done so by 1893. The last two were Edward Dempsey in Cincinnati in 1906, and James Tate in Philadelphia in 1962.Melvin G. Holli and Peter D'A. Jones, eds. Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors 1820-1980, (1981) pp.xi, 406–413, 425—426.Jenny DeHuff, "Pop quiz: Who was the city's first Catholic mayor?" PhillyVoice (Dec. 1, 2016) online
Beginning in the 1840s, millions of German and Irish Catholics immigrated to fill new jobs in the rapidly industrializing United States. The Know Nothing movement emerged with an anti-Catholic platform in the North. It had brief success in the mid 1850s, but subsequently collapsed. Its presidential candidate, former president Millard Fillmore, took 22% of the total national vote in the 1856 United States presidential election, but he was not a party member and he disavowed its anti-Catholic tone.Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860: a study of the origins of American nativism (1938) pp. 407–436. online
Sub-groups
English-Americans
The largest and most principal ethnic group within the Old Stock are the English-Americans, whose ancestors emigrated via England directly, or via partially English-descended populations, such as the Anglo-Irish and Scots-Irish. English Americans as the dominant ethno-cultural group comprised most of the primary 17th century settlers rather than immigrants from the 18th century. Most of these early settlers came from what is referred to as Southern England.
English settlement in what is today America began with Jamestown in the Virginia Colony in 1607. With the permission of James I, three ships (the Susan Constant, The Discovery, and The God Speed) sailed from England and landed at Cape Henry in April, under the captainship of Christopher Newport,"". Spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk. Archived from on April 8, 2014. Retrieved August 21, 2017. who had been hired by the London Company to lead expeditions to what is now America."Newport, Christopher". Infoplease.com. Retrieved March 17, 2015.
The second successful colony was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 by people who later became known as the Pilgrims. Fleeing religious persecution in the East Midlands in England, they first went to Holland, but feared losing their English identity."Bassetlaw Museum". Bassetlawmuseum.org.uk. Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved August 21, 2017. Because of this, they chose to relocate to the New World, with their voyage being financed by English investors. In September 1620, 102 passengers set sail aboard the Mayflower, eventually settling at Plymouth Colony in November.
Of the passengers on the Mayflower, 41 men signed the "Mayflower Compact" aboard ship on November 11, 1620, while anchored in Provincetown Harbor. Signers included Carver, Alden, Standish, Howland, Bradford, Allerton, and Fuller.Bradford, William (1898). "Book 2, Anno 1620" (PDF). In Hildebrandt, Ted (ed.). Bradford's History "Of Plimoth Plantation". Boston: Wright & Potter. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 3, 2016. Retrieved June 1, 2006.William Bradford, Edward Winslow (printer G. Mourt [George Morton], Relation or Iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England, Early English Books Online, p.4 This story has become a central theme in the United States cultural identity.
A number of English colonies were established under a system of proprietary governors, who were appointed under mercantile charters to English joint stock companies to found and run settlements.Herbert L. Osgood, "The Proprietary Province as a Form of Colonial Government, II." American Historical Review 3.1 (1897): 31–55 online.
England also took control over the Dutch colony of New Netherland (including the New Amsterdam settlement), renaming it the Province of New York in 1664."Digital History". Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Archived from the original on April 18, 2012. Retrieved August 21, 2017. With New Netherland, the English came to control the former New Sweden (in what is now Delaware), which the Dutch had conquered from Sweden earlier. This became part of Pennsylvania."New Sweden". U-s-history.com. Retrieved March 17, 2015.
Scottish-Americans
The second largest group were the Scottish-Americans, whose ancestors emigrated via Scotland directly, or via the predominately Scottish-descended Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish, in Ulster. Most Scotch-Irish Americans descended from the largely Scots-speaking Lowlands although a sizeable percentage of them were actually of Northern English in origin.
After the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, King James VI, a Scotsman, promoted joint expeditions overseas, and became the founder of British America.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 12. The first permanent English settlement in the Americas, Jamestown, was thus named for a Scot.
In the 1670s and 1680s Presbyterian Dissenters fled persecution by the Royalist privy council in Edinburgh to settle in South Carolina and New Jersey, where they maintained their distinctive religious culture.Alex Murdoch, "USA", Michael Lynch (ed), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 629-633.
More than 50,000 Scots, principally from the west coast, settled in the Thirteen Colonies between 1763 and 1776, the majority of these in their own communities in the South,Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 20. especially North Carolina, although Scottish individuals and families also began to appear as professionals and artisans in every American town. Scots arriving in Florida and the Gulf Coast traded extensively with Native Americans.Fry, How the Scots Made America, p. 41.
Large groups of Highland Scots started arriving in North America in the 1730s. Unlike their Lowland and Ulster counterparts, the Highlanders tended to cluster together in self-contained communities, where they maintained their distinctive cultural features such as the Gaelic language and piobaireachd music. Groups of Highlanders existed in coastal Georgia (mainly immigrants from Inverness-shire) and the Mohawk Valley in New York (from the West Highlands). By far the largest Highland community was centered on the Cape Fear River, which saw a stream of immigrants from Argyllshire, and, later, other regions such as the Isle of Skye. Highland Scots were overwhelmingly Loyalists in the Revolution.Meyer, Duane (1963). "The Highland Scots of North Carolina". Distinctly Highland cultural traits persisted in the region until the 19th century, at which point they were assimilated into Anglo-American culture.