You want diversity - we had it, we have always had it, and we continue to have it! In my new book "Albion's Seed" Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer, that is what he calls Andrew Jackson. This book is a tome, 946 pages, with some genealogy and the first in a cultural history of the United States. This book details and explains how North America from 1629 to 1775 was settled by four great waves of English speaking immigrants. The four groups differed in religion, rank, generation and place of origin. They were different in everything! Even different ideas of comity, order, power and freedom. Hackett shows that four British folkways in early America created an expansive pluralism which became more libertarian than any single culture alone could be. The Four: 1. Exodus of Puritans from the east of England to MA (1629-40) 2. The movement of the Royalist elite and their indentured servants from the South of England to Virginia (1640-75) 3. The Friend's (Quakers) migration from the North Midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware Valley (1675-1725) 4. The Flight from the borderlands of North Britain and northern Ireland to the American Backcountry (1717-75) In what time i have put into the book so far, it appears that most of the leaders and people of note who made America were actually from the elite and gentry of their particular area. As regards the backcountry, Hackett says, "Not all of these backcountry settlers were people of humble origins. Some had held high rank in the Old World. Their motive in moving to America was not to rise higher in society, but to keep from falling below the status which they had already achieved. A case in point was the family of Andrew Jackson, the first of many American Presidents to spring from border stock." "Jackson's campaign biographies have stressed the plebian origins of this popular leader. But in fact he did not come from poor or humble people. He always considered himself a Gent. His Irish grandfather, Hugh Jackson, was a rich man who called himself a "weaver and merchant of Carrickfergus, Ireland, and left his American grandson a large legacy. His father had been a well-to-do farmer near the town of Castlereagh in northern Ireland, and led an entire party of immigrants to America in 1765. His wife Rachel Donelson was the daughter of Colonel John Donelson, and was one of the most powerful men in the southern backcountry. She was the grandneice of Dr. Samuel Davies, a learned Presbyterian minister who became president of Princeton College." With this kind of backup the lady could do whatever she pleased. The same can be said of Lincoln, James Knox Polk (came from a narrow elite known in the borderlands as the "Ascendancy", The Calhoun Clan-John Caldwell Calhoun, The Henry family-Patrick Henry, William Penn's Delaware Elite, and so on an so on. In 1825 the "New Englander John Quincy Adams was President and once again the New England spirit of ordered freedom was brought to Washington by a moralistic President who favored an active role for the national government in economics, education and morality. These measures were strongly supported in New England, but Americans from three regions deeply disliked the policies of the Yankee President, and detested his political style." Enter Andrew Jackson 1829-1837. "Jackson's goals for the government of an "extensive republic" were the preservation of honor broad and the protection of liberty at home. By liberty, he had in mind the natural freedom of the backcountry-minimal government, maximal autonomy for each individual and no "unwarrantable interference" by the people of one region in the customs of any other." "The Jacksonian coalition was built upon principles which most Americans accepted, but many voters were deeply troubled by the behavior of President Jackson himself". The author, David Hackett Fischer was born in Baltimore, degrees acquried from Princeton & Johns Hopkins, has taught at Harvard and wrote most of this volume while a Harmsworth Professor of American History and Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. According to the back jacket cover, "He concludes and explores the ways in which regional cultures have persisted in the United States from 1789 to 1989, and still control attitudes toward politics, education, government, gender and violence-on which differences between American regions are greater than those between European nations." Very interesting point of view. josie Josephine Lindsay Bass Confederate Southern American 216 Beach Park Lane Cape Canaveral, FL 32920 321-868-1771 My Southern Family, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mysouthernfamily/