Wales' own Aled Llion Jones has researched the history of the "Welsh in New England" with the help of the Consulate, the backing of the Welsh Assembly Government, and the support of Harvard's Center for Celtic Studies.

Our next phase is likely to be a study into the Welsh connections in New England today - in the business, political, and cultural fields.

The goal of this project was to explore and recognise the extent to which Wales and the Welsh have influenced the development of New England, from education and culture to business. We are also looking to explore how the Welsh of New England - and Welsh culture in New England - are today contributing to its vitality.

THE WELSH OF NEW ENGLAND
by Aled Llion Jones

HOW WELSH IS NEW ENGLAND?
Think of a number and then double it. Then double it again. Keep doubling it for a while longer and you might get to the level of influence of Wales in America. You’ll probably stop short.

Wales often seems invisible. It was for centuries recognised as little more than a minor part of England or, at best, of Britain. The Encyclopaedia Britannica used to tell you if you looked for "Wales" to "see England", and the same has been true for many aspects of Welsh-American life. Early Welsh migrants would on both sides of the Atlantic be habitually listed as ‘English’, and there were complaints during the Civil War that Welsh soldiers were ‘swallowed up’ in companies of other nationalities. Enthusiastic patriots have compensated by claiming colonists, philosophers, presidents, generals, explorers and industrial pioneers, as well as a third of all signatories to the Declaration of Independence, to have been Welsh.

The best part of the story is that these patriots were usually right, for this small country of Wales, whose population for most of recorded history never exceeded 500,000, and which today has only marginally more speakers of its native language, has a transatlantic history and culture which can do little but surprise. In this case it seems that small is not merely beautiful but also influential.

It is a small country, in many ways the archetype of a small country, but its smallness is not petty: on the contrary, it is profound, and if its frontiers were ever to be extended, or its nature somehow eased, its personality would lose stature, not gain it.

Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country

Wales is small and Welsh America also. In 1900 while Pennsylvania had a Welsh-born population of 35,453 and Ohio 11,481, Massachusetts and Vermont had a combined total of 2,736. By the year 2000 the census returns from the six New England states listed 74,000 individuals as “Welsh”, with some 500,000 declared in the larger nearby states. These numbers are not huge, but yet Welsh migrants, and their families after them, have changed the tide of North American history.

And they continue to do so.

Consider a random “top ten” (in roughly chronological order) of what America would have missed out on if it hadn’t been for the Welsh. Then read on to find out more:

• Its name
• Ellis Island
• The philosophy of the Declaration of Independence
• Three Presidents
• Yale University, Brown University and Bryn Mawr
• Pennsylvania
• The roof over each President’s head..
• The New York and Vermont slate industries
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The New York Times
• Frank Lloyd Wright, Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta Jones

AMERICA: WELSH WIZARDS, PRINCES AND PENGUINS

[The Welsh were] a people who were numerically tiny, awkward and yet in some respects peculiarly potent; a people who, apart from their language, lacked practically every attribute of a nation except for the perverse and persistent belief that they were one. This was a people who had already dislocated the European historical mind with their magical King Arthur and were now about to disturb the American continent with their tenacious memory.

Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth

It is at times difficult to distinguish fact from legend, and it is often undesirable to do so, as with King Arthur, an early British warlord who emerged from the cauldron of Welsh storytelling to stride majestically into world literature. Ironically it was a colonial project which first brought Arthur an international audience: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain provided the conquering Normans with many of the “secrets of the isle”, including Arthur and the early Welsh prophet-poet, Myrddin (rendered in Geoffrey’s Latin as Merlin).

It was a later Welsh wizard, the sixteenth-century alchemist and antiquarian John Dee, who persuaded Elizabeth I that she should put another native tale to good colonial use. Spanish land claims in the New World were to be disproved by the fact that centuries earlier in 1170 the British prince Madog, son of Welsh king Owain of Gwynedd, had left his war-striven homeland, sailed the Atlantic and settled. Madog’s journey was proved not only by the tenacity of memory but also by the ‘fact’ that there were to be found in the Americas white-skinned Indians who spoke the Welsh language. Walter Raleigh was among those who vouched for the origin of the word ‘penguin’ in the Welsh (pen ‘head’ and gwyn ‘white’).

AMERICA: A SERIES OF WELSH DISCOVERIES
So it was that Wales discovered America, and so it was that this small country, England’s first colony, contributed to the Atlantic colonial project. And this would of course not be the last time the Welsh would be key players. Throughout the history of the USA Wales has been present, a hidden though often driving force. If John Dee and his Madog were behind the early political myth, Richard Amerik is strongly believed by many to have been the major financial backer of John Cabot’s 1498 voyage to the Americas, whose name – rather than that of the upstart Vespucci – became that of these continents. Even if proof is impossible, it is yet fact that these histories might be true, and it is a further fact that good stories like these have changed the course of kingdoms.

THE NEW WORLD: NEW ENGLAND and WELSH DISCOVERY
The earliest settlers, those who fled persecution for the New World, would never have found hallowed ground at Plymouth Rock had it not been for their Captain, Christopher Jones, a Welshman.  He carefully and skillfully shepherded his precious crew over 65 days at sea aboard the rugged Mayflower.  Captain Jones was not the lone Welshman aboard, indeed upwards of 20% of the 102 souls that stepped out and into the New World, New England, were of Welsh descent.  These early colonists can still be found in the lineage of thousands today.  No small wonder that they were so well represented some years later at key points in American history – including its founding as a nation.

The desire to discover, a Welsh tradition, did not stop with the founding of the new colony.  While the Mayflower and its Captain eventually returned to the United Kingdom, those that remained and those that followed made a lasting impression. 

Some twenty-five years after the founding of the Massachusetts Colony, Elihu Yale was born in Boston, Massachusetts.  This young Welshman grew up to become a Governor in the British East India Trading Company, exploring and developing settlements in India.  However, he never forgot his roots, both Welsh and American.  So, when he learned that a young upstart lecturer, Cotton Mather, had started a small institution of learning at New Haven, Connecticut, he immediately came to help.  His early investments and support led to that small college being renamed in his honour. 

In 1630, Roger and Mary Williams set sail for Boston on the Lyon. Arriving on February 5, 1631, he was almost immediately invited to replace the pastor, who was returning to England.  He came with two revolutionary ideas in mind for how to run civil and religious society in the New World.  The first idea—that the magistrate should not punish religious infractions—meant that the civil authority should not be the same as the ecclesiastical authority. The second idea—that people should have freedom of opinion on religious matters—he called "soul-liberty." It is one of the foundations for the United States Constitution's guarantees of non-establishment of religion and of freedom to choose and practice one's own religion.

In the summer of 1633, Williams arrived in Salem and became unofficial assistant to Pastor Skelton. In August, 1634, (Skelton having died), he became acting pastor and entered almost immediately into controversies with the Massachusetts authorities that in a few months resulted in his exile by law from Salem after being brought before the Salem Court for spreading "diverse, new, and dangerous opinions" that questioned the Church. The law exiling Williams was not repealed until 1936 when Bill 488 was passed by the Massachusetts House.
He left for Rhode Island, and in 1647 the colony on Rhode Island was united with Providence, his settlement, under a single government, and liberty of conscience was again proclaimed. The area became a safe haven for people who were persecuted for their beliefs—Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and others went there to follow their consciences in peace and safety. On May 18, 1652, Rhode Island passed the first law in North America making slavery illegal.  The Colony Williams, a man of Welsh descent, founded was based on the very principles that led the early revolutionaries to declare independence. 

THE FOUNDING OF A NATION: FROM DECLARATION TO DISCOVERY
There is an inscription halfway up the steps of the Washington Monument which reads Fy iaith, fy ngwlad, fy nghenedl Cymru - Cymru am byth! ("My language, my land, my nation of Wales - Wales for ever!").   It is said that Thomas Jefferson requested this be inserted into the Monument – a patriot and a Welshman.  He was fiercely proud of his accomplishments and his heritage.  Furthermore, he was not the only Welshmen responsible for the endeavor that created the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known. 

Indeed, it is said that upwards of 50% of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence had Welsh heritage, including: George Clymer, Stephen Hopkins, Robert Morris, William Floyd, Francis Hopkinson, John Morton, Britton Gwinnett, Thomas Jefferson, John Penn, George Read, John Hewes, Francis Lewis, James Smith, Williams Hooper, Lewis Morris, and William Williams.  Crucial to the finding, founding and furthering of the American nation, the Welsh have played a prominent role.

And, where would these patriots turned politicians be without financial backing? They did not need to look far as another Welshman, Robert Morris, was prepared to serve as a major financier to their cause.  Morris, born in England but of Welsh descent, was a merchant in Philadelphia and organized action against the British Government’s Stamp Act.  He was one of the first to coin the term, ‘taxation without representation’, and used his impressive wealth to rally others.  He gave so much to the cause of American Freedom that he died some years later, in debtor’s prison.
 
On a quest partly inspired by the opium-fuelled forger and literary genius Iolo Morganwg, John Evans set off in the early 1790s in search of Madog’s white Indians. This Welsh Methodist minister’s son would be imprisoned by the Spanish as a spy before succeeding to map for the first time the upper reaches of the Missouri River Basin. His near-perfect maps would be acquired by a prominent Welsh-American (Thomas Jefferson) and entrusted to a further one (Meriwether Lewis). Lewis would use these tangible results of the quest for Welsh-speaking white-skinned Indians to proceed with Clark overland to the Pacific Ocean, thus effecting another Welsh discovery of America with origins in history-making legend.

In addition to President Thomas Jefferson (whose autobiography tells that his family emigrated from a place "at the foot of Snowdon" in North Wales), there were many more leading citizens with at least some Welsh in their family trees who played instrumental parts in the founding of the new nation, including Presidents James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge and Richard Nixon as well as Vice President Hubert Humphrey. President Jefferson Davies of the Confederacy could also claim some Welsh blood.

WALES: CREATED BY AMERICA IN 1875
America is a land of firsts, and Wales has shared in many of these. Wales was there at the beginning of the European America, and yet it is perhaps not too much to say that this was where modern Wales was itself born. If Wales perhaps discovered America, it is more certain that America discovered Wales. The United States Emigration Service recognized Welsh as a distinct ethnic category some thirty years before the British, and so between 1875 and 1908 a family from Gwynedd or Ceredigion could leave home having been listed as ‘English’ emigrants, only to arrive in New York to be duly recorded as ‘Welsh’.  The trans-Atlantic journey was a rite de passage of modern ethnicity, and it was official America that created the Welsh. By this point, though unconnectedly, the main point of immigrant arrival to the US had been named after the “Little Welshman” who used to run a tavern on the island: Samuel Ellis.

Most of the Welsh of course needed no granting of official status to convince them of who they were;  through the centuries the journey to “liberty” was for them, as much as for the dozens of other ethnic and national groups, a chance to find freedom in self-identity. And this self-realisation of nationhood was often a mutual process, as the Welsh, in their own often forgotten way, contributed beyond their small numerical presence to the growth of the new polity.

The proud claim was made in the United States Senate by Senator John Sharp of Mississippi that no nation in proportion to its size had contributed more to the development of the United States than had the Welsh, and it was duly entered in the Congressional Record.
David Williams, “The Contribution of the Wales to the Development of the United States”

FROM SWANSEA TO SWANSEA
From the beginning the Welsh were involved in the mutual creation which was America. Though it was not until the seventeenth century that Welsh migration began to occur in anything like substantial size, the earliest groups of settlers would have had Welsh members in their numbers,. The contribution to New England history was immediate and marked. Among the early migrants was John Myles, founder of Welsh Baptism, who in 1663 brought an entire congregation with him from Gower, to found a church in what became Swansea, Massachusetts. The American history of this denomination owes much to the Swansea Massachusetts church from Swansea, Wales.

Rhode Island and Massachusetts themselves, of course, have Welsh origins. While some may suggest that fully believing Roger Williams to be a Welshman is an example of the surname misleading the historian, there was absolutely no doubt among the Welsh-Americans of the period that he was one of them. Massachusetts colony had its origins in settlement from Neath, South Wales, and among the earliest settlers throughout New England were individuals and families from Wales: Paul Revere completed his famous ride by making his delivery to the house of Samuel Cutts, of the long-established Welsh merchant family of New Hampshire.

DISSENT AND DISAGREEMENT
The joke has long been that wherever a Welshman goes he will build a chapel… and then build another, so as to have a place to avoid going. When it was suggested that differences be put aside to form a single Welsh church in nineteenth-century Boston, strong opposition came from those who said that such disagreement was precisely the heart of religious belief. Such fierce individualism was bred out of the spirit of debate fostered first in the crucible of religious dissent, and later in the literary and philosophical societies in the Old Country; it is a dialectical characteristic which may well be considered essential to both the founding of America and the Welsh migration to it.  

Dissenters are quick to dissent, even from each other, and perhaps New England would be even more Welsh had it not been for doctrinal differences. Following the Swansea settlement (itself displaced from Reheboth, following conflict with the Plymouth authorities), a trend began of settling further west; from 1683, Pennepeck (now in Philadelphia) became a focus for Welsh Baptist settlement until a disagreement over a point of theology caused many to move in 1703 to 30,000 acres of Welsh land in today’s Delaware. Thus a theological debate effected the settlement of the famous ‘Welsh Tract’, from which itself in 1736 a mass migration began southwards to another exclusively Welsh community on some 173,000 acres around a bend in the Peedee river (the ‘Welsh Neck’, today’s Society Hill, South Carolina).

FROM OLD WALES TO NEW CAMBRIA
Morgan John Rhys planted his town and gave it the name of Beula. The creek and the country he called Cambria. For five years and more he had been on a Mission for this Nation, a mission which had taken him to revolutionary Paris to battle for Protestant liberty, to Savannah in Georgia to battle for a black church, to Greenville in Ohio to battle for the Iroquois coming in to surrender. He who had stood on the ruins of the Bastille and, in his own words, felt the earth shake to the principles which were breaking an old and making a new order of things, had fifteen months earlier stood on ‘the unbroken grass’ of the newly-liberated Ohio and, on Bastille Day 1795, claimed the American frontier as a National Home for the Welsh People.
G. A. Williams, The Search for Beulah Land, p. 6

America became the site for a number of failed attempts to build not merely a New England but also a new Wales, from the proto-Democratic Morgan John Rhys’s Cambria in the 1790s to Nova Cambria in Missouri nearly a century later. The story told by William Penn himself holds that he wished to name his land acquisition ‘New Wales’ but that he settled for second best, knowing that Penn-sylvania would combine Latin and Welsh in meaning “the high woodlands”. This part of America with its anthracite coalfields unlocked by Cymric secrets would indeed later shelter the largest of American-Welsh populations in areas where the language could stay strong for more than a century, but the dreams for an autonomous Welsh ‘barony’ harboured by early Quaker settlers (apparently fostered by an oral guarantee from the ‘Welsh’ Penn) were never to be realised.

In places like the Welsh Tract, Arvonia, Gwynedd and Nova Cambria, plans were laid and relaid for developments which would ensure the continuation of Welsh language and culture, away from the “melting-pot” of homogeneity, and the Welsh-American dream followed the frontier. Welsh nationalism itself is often considered to have been born in Cincinnati in the 1840s where Congregational minister Michael D. Jones was working. Jones was responsible in 1865 for establishing the only lasting Welsh-language colony, though to do this he had to set his eyes even beyond the frontier, and his ship, the Mimosa sailed to establish the Gwladfa of the Chubut region of Patagonia.

WHAT HAVE THE WELSH EVER DONE FOR US?
The question ‘What have the Welsh ever done for U.S.?’ should ideally be considered purely rhetorical, for the activities of the Welsh in New England – and, on a wider scale, in the USA – were in many ways essential. For a full understanding of the last few centuries of Welsh history it is impossible to ignore the ‘Atlantic dimension’, and it is true also that in order to understand America, one should do more than merely pay lip service to Wales. Philosophically, economically and ideologically, Wales and America perform a fascinating dance in close unity across the thousands of miles of ocean, especially during the period which saw massive immigration not only from Wales to America but also within Wales to the south Wales mining valleys.

[T]he fates of the communities in which [the migrants] settled were uncannily similar. Scranton, the heart of Pennsylvania's coal industry, had 140,000 inhabitants in 1930 and 100,000 in 1960. The Rhondda, the heart of Wales' coal industry, had 141,000 inhabitants in 1930 and 99,000 in 1960.
John Davies, “Wales and America”

Welsh Americans have pioneered in the United States in fields as diverse as medicine, engineering, economics, politics and literature. Wales had itself been transformed early into one of the major industrial centres of the world (with more workers in industry than agriculture by 1824) and the experience gained at home in the industries of coal, steel and slate made the skilled Welsh worker a valuable commodity when the industrial potential of the United States began to be realised. In industrial Britain as well as America the coal and steel industries were synonymous with Welsh enterprise.

Beyond the coalfields of Pennsylvania (where the Welsh formed their largest communities in places like Scranton) New England industry saw not only the early contributions of men like Joseph Jenks who co-founded the Saugus Iron Works in 1642. Jenks was himself born in London, of a family recently moved from the Welsh borders with a lineage traced back through a certain “Jenken Cambrae” to Elystan Glodrydd ab Cyhelin ab Ifor and thence to Rhodri Mawr, one of Wales’ greatest medieval kings. From kings of Wales to kings of industry. Key to New England pioneering was the Welsh near-domination of the Vermont slate industry from the second half of the nineteenth century.

WELSH STEEL AND THE MOST FAMOUS WELSH BANKER IN AMERICA
Born in Hartford, Connecticut to parents from Boston, John Pierpont Morgan was descended from an immigrant from Neath who helped establish the Massachusetts colony in the early 1600s. On inheriting his father’s company in 1890, J. P. Morgan turned his interests into the largest in the USA, establishing the US Steel Corporation in 1901 and International Harvester in 1902. He was also responsible for arranging the formation of General Electric in 1892, a major American investor in Wales today.

Before Morgan obtained the Carnegie Steel Company in 1901, it had been two other Welshmen, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and Percy Carlisle Gilchrist, who had enabled Carnegie to obtain such success: the Bessemer process perfected by these two cousins was the key to revolutionizing steel manufacture, and led Carnegie himself to describe them as “two men [who] did more for Britain’s greatness than all the Kings and Queens put together.”

EARLY WELSH MARKETING
Cambrian Pills
The Cambrian Pills have been composed by a Welshman who is knowledgeable in the medical arts. They are to be depended upon as a smooth and effective means of displacing any illnesses which the human constitution is wont to suffer, such as pain in the head, the stomach or the intestines, pain in the back or the limbs, together with illnesses which have their origins in the liver and the gall-bladder; and while they work they cause no pain or discomfort.
Price: 25c a box.
Advertisement translated from Y Seren Orllewinol (‘The Western Star’, Baptist weekly), May 1856

Early American trade was of course tailored to its important markets, and medication was not the only nineteenth-century commodity sold with a Welsh flavour. Advertised more intriguingly than perhaps anything else in the Welsh media was tea: Te’r Hen Wlad (Old Country Tea); Te Y Ddraig Goch (Red Dragon Tea); Te Y Werin (The People’s Tea); Te Eryri (Snowdonia Tea). The suitably-initialled entrepreneur George T. Matthews bagged himself a fortune with slogans such as “Yfed Te’r Brenin a Darllen Y Drych” (‘Drinking the King’s Tea and reading Y Drych’). Earlier than this, Dorothy Jones of Boston had received in 1670 or 1671 a license “to keepe a house of publique Entertainment for the selling of Coffee & Chochaletto.” By 1674 she was allowed in addition to sell “cider and wine”.

The contribution of Welsh women to American life has remained a constant high: Rachael Paynter Davies (a.k.a. Rahel o Fôn) (1851-1916) was a Baptist preacher and one of America’s first female evangelists. Clarina Nichols (1810-1885) was a pioneer leader in the women’s rights movement; Martha Carey Thomas (1857-1935) was a  suffragist and president of Bryn Mawr College. Martha Washington, daughter to an immigrant from Anglesey (another lady “o Fôn”) became the first First Lady of the USA and, as this booklet goes to press, Ann Romney has eyes on following her footsteps, while Hilary Clinton is campaigning to be the first Welsh-American female President.

RICHARD PRICE: THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WELSHMAN IN AMERICA
Richard Price (1723-91) was certainly one of the most influential Welshmen in eighteenth-century America, even though he lived most all of his life among the Non-Conformist Welsh, Scottish and English intellectuals of London. Price demonstrates wonderfully the fact that in thinking “Wales” we should look beyond geographic or ethnic definitions – the ideas developed and promoted by so many of the Welsh whose influence contributed to the intellectual and political atmosphere of America certainly had their roots in a local, Welsh-language environment, but they spoke – literally – of universal values and liberties.

Born in 1723 at Tyn-ton, Llangeinor, Glamorgan, Price was orphaned in his early teens and moved to an uncle in London. During his four years at school there he received a fine education in mathematics and physics from John Eames, a friend of Sir Isaac Newton.  Although he went on to make a career as a preacher in various London chapels, it was as a financial genius and a moral and political philosopher that he came to be revered in the New World. 

He was active in the world of eighteenth-century Non-Conformist learned societies – such as the Club of Honest Whigs – a world that united London intellectuals with the thinkers of the Edinburgh enlightenment.  Among those with whom he associated in those societies were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Thomas Paine, the Unitarian theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and Mary Wollstonecraft.  He corresponded with a number of other Americans, including Joseph Willard, a professor of science and president of Harvard; Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut; and Henry Laurens, minister of the influential First Church in Boston.

He worked on demography and the theory of probability, developed actuarial principles for the Society for Equitable Assurances that would shape the insurance industry, and aggressively advocated the use of sinking funds to reduce dangerous levels of national debt.  His Observations on reversionary payments on schemes for providing annuities for widows, and for persons in old age (1771) went through seven editions.  He was a true pioneer in addressing the need of societies to provide for the indigent and the aged while at the same time maintaining their overall fiscal health.

He also wrote, from a libertarian point of view, about religious and civil liberty.  His political philosophy was grounded, like that of many of the American Founding Fathers, in a rationalist moral philosophy – a belief that human reason could discover the principles of morally just behavior, and that such rectitude, fostered by a similarly rational state guided by sound mathematical principles, would lead to the betterment of the human condition, the ‘happiness’ whose pursuit is guaranteed as an inalienable human right  by the American Declaration of Independence. 

His pamphlets On the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) and Additional Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1777), combined with his financial acumen, made him even more of a  hero for American revolutionaries, particularly  in the northern colonies, because his opposition to slavery was a stumbling block for southern colonists.  New England Congregationalists saw him as their particular champion in moral, political, and fiscal philosophy.  In 1776 and again in 1778, the Continental Congress invited him to come to the United States as a minister for finance, but he declined the invitations.

So much admired was Price by the intellectuals of Colonial and early Federalist New England that, along with George Washington, he was awarded Yale’s first honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1781.

LESSONS FROM THE WELSH IN EDUCATION
In New England, when thinking of the Welsh influence on education, one may point immediately to the key names of Elihu Yale and Morgan Edwards. Yale, born in Boston though taken back to Wales by his mother as a small child, was a member of the prominent Wrexham family of Plas yn Iâl (the ‘Iâl’ which is anglicized to ‘Yale’). His career took him into Imperial service in (and governorship of) the British East India Company, before his bequest to the Collegiate School in Connecticut led to its being renamed for him. Edwards, along with another native Welshman, Samuel Jones, were responsible for founding Rhode Island College (later Brown University). Outside New England itself in Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr (‘Big Hill’ in Welsh) became the first institute of higher education to offer graduate degrees to women.

Some evidence has also been forwarded suggesting that the Harvard family came from Breconshire, Wales, and while due not to John Harvard but rather the efforts of such as F.N. Robinson and Paul D. Evans, the Harvard Library system houses a major collection of Welsh-American (and Welsh) material, from books and periodicals to newspapers and pamphlets, in both languages, as well as remarkable early manuscripts. The collection at Brown is also well-endowed, having inherited the library of William Richards, the dedicated Welsh revolutionist of Lynn, Norfolk. Educational connections continue to today, from the large numbers of graduates of Harvard’s Department of Celtic (alone of its kind in North America) who contribute immeasurably to the work done in Welsh universities, to the current First Minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan, who holds a Masters Degree in Government from Harvard.

AMERICA’S MOST UNIFIED BRITISH ETHNIC GROUP
Welsh migrants were consistently characterised by a degree of group solidarity (even if there was also a fractiousness between groups, as seen in the earlier cases of the Dissenting denominations). It has been noted that more than any other British ethnic group the Welsh used to settle in groups (albeit small and scattered groups), and this group unity may also be discerned in the fact that the Welsh were regularly the nationality which topped the league tables of percentage taking US citizenship: the censuses of 1920 and 1930 show that 73% of Welsh immigrants had taken citizenship, more than any other ethnic group, and far above the average of 47%.

While one might wish to be careful about generalising ethnic or national characteristics, it is surely of interest that during the controversies surrounding abolition not a single Welsh publication argued the side of the slave-owners; indeed, not a single article was written in Welsh in favour of slavery, and the degree to which the Welsh were univocal in this issue set them apart from most if not all other ethnic groups: the history of a people is of course more than that of notable individuals. The earliest evidence of common Welsh-American anti-slavery sentiment is given in a petition sent to the House of Representatives in 1837 signed by 137 people who declared themselves clearly and ethnically:

We, the undersigned, Welsh Inhabitants of Steuben and Remsen, Oneida County in the State of New York, believing that SLAVERY as it exists in America, is a heinous sin against God and a flagrant violation of the rights consistent with Christianity, with our National Declaration of Independence, and with our Republican Institutions… do solemnly and importunately petition and implore your Honorable bodies, to take all measures within … your constitutional powers, for the abatement and removal of this great evil.

GANGS AND TRADE UNIONS
The Scranton “Welsh Strike” of 1871, in addition to being a remarkable demonstration of Welsh solidarity in the face of unacceptable working conditions, and a key event in the history of the developing trade unions, is also an example of the darker side of ethnic relations between immigrants: this particular episode, tense and protracted, culminated in violence, bloodshed and death. Tensions ran high on many occasions, and the anthracite coalfields bred anti-Irish gangs with names such as the Modocs and the Chin Gang. Group violence, murder and duels occurred, and the infamous Irish gang, the Molly Maguires, were not beyond organising assassination attempts on leading Welsh thugs.

The Welsh were instrumental in making Scranton the anthracite capital of the world and came to enjoy a near monopoly of the positions of innovation and authority. They were slow to strike [but] when they did, they had the support of Scripture-quoting ministers and frenzied wives […].
Van Vugt, From Britain to America, p. 106

It has been said that it is no coincidence that perhaps the most masterful of American trade unionists, John Ll. Lewis, was a Welshman and a miner. The political involvement of the Welsh was strong wherever they settled, and the ‘Atlantic connection’ between Wales and America meant that currents of thought could be shared and developed. Once travel conditions eased, emigration was far from being a once-and-forever affair; workers themselves, as well as letters and newspapers, carried news and ideas between families, communities and thinkers. Fundamental issues such as the debates surrounding workers’ rights, Independence and abolition itself, saw characteristically Welsh engagement from within native cultural positions.

 ROBERT EVERETT: “AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS WELSHMAN”
Organised Welsh activity contributed positively to major religious and political developments in the United States: the 1838 ‘Welsh Revival’ across the border from New England in upstate New York propelled the reforming Welsh Congregationalist minister, Robert Everett to a position of influence from which he could help galvanise a nascent nation of Welsh-speaking Americans in the anti-slavery movement. In addition to swelling the membership of Welsh-language chapels in up-state New York, The ‘Welsh Revival’ added further momentum to the constellation of reform movements which had been taking root in that part of the country since the start of Finney’s Revival some years earlier, and Everett’s own printing press published the influential periodicals Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd (‘The American Missionary’) and Y Dyngarwr (‘The Humanitarian’), championing abolition and temperance as well as women’s rights.

Everett moved in the circles of the leading intellectuals of the day, corresponding with figures such as Harriet Beecher-Stowe. Everett was among those responsible for a dozen Welsh editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (three of which appeared within a year of the English original), and Frederick Douglass himself praised Everett’s publishing, saying of the Welsh that “It is consistent that a people who have loved Freedom so much, for themselves, should lend their efforts towards obtaining it for others.”

AMERICA’S MOST REMARKABLE ETHNIC PRINT CULTURE
The geographically scattered Welsh communities were supplemented by the “imagined communities” of print readership. Welsh-language publishing in the USA began as early as 1721 and was a huge cultural strength in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with books on all subjects coming from the presses. Entire histories can be written of key American events such as the Civil War from the perspective revealed through Welsh-language American writing, and one such book – Jerry Hunter’s Llwch Cenhedloedd (‘Dust of Nations’) – won the Welsh Book of the Year prize in 2004.

Much was published in numerous periodicals such as Cyfaill o’r Hen Wlad (‘Friend from the Old Country’) (1838-1933) and newspapers such as Y Drych (‘The Mirror’), which began in New York City in 1851 and within weeks had an agent in Massachusetts. While many of the newspapers set up by nineteenth-century European immigrants would have been financially supported by their national governments, the Welsh – with no government of their own – achieved remarkable feats of publishing with no such official backing.

The one remaining question that gnaws at the back of the mind is this: why, of all the minority ethnic groups of the United States, was it the Welsh, and perhaps only the Welsh, who succeeded in running a newspaper, without a break, for one hundred and fifty years?
Bill Jones and Aled Jones, “Y Drych and American Welsh Identities, 1851-1951”

ANGLO-WELSH AMERICAN PUBLISHING
English-language publishing was also a concern for prominent Welsh-Americans: the Massachusetts printer, Isaiah Williams, founder of the Massachusetts Spy with a circulation of 3,500 and supporter of Independence, famously had to smuggle his printing press from Boston to Worcester on the eve of the Battle of Concord. John Jones, first American Professor of Surgery at King’s College in New York wrote the first American textbook of surgery as early as 1775.

Nine months after Y Drych appeared, the first issue of the New York Times was inaugurated by George L. Jones, the son of a Welsh weaver whose family had settled in Poultney, Vermont. Under Jones’ editorship the newspaper was responsible for bringing down the infamous Tammany Hall Tweed Ring in New York. Mentioned elsewhere in this booklet are the twelve Welsh translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, itself written by the sister of the proudly-Welsh Henry Ward Beecher and daughter of Lyman Beecher of Connecticut and Boston.

Even when hidden, the Welsh literary influence is often there, and an entire world of fantasy writing would be impossible were it not for the background of the medieval Welsh Mabinogi, a direct key influence not only on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, but also American works such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising or Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, who said that on discovering Welsh mythology, “It was as if all the hero tales, games, dreams, and imaginings of my childhood had suddenly come back to me.”

WRITING ON SLATE: THE VISIONARY POETS OF VERMONT
An area of some seventy miles in diameter stretching from western Vermont into Upstate New York became more Welsh than many places in Wales, and the Slate Valley Museum in Granville is one of the most important Welsh-American historical resources, documenting the part played by skilled immigrants from places like Llanberis and Bethesda in quarrying the red, purple, green and mottled slates.  Maine’s famous black Monson slate was itself first worked by Welsh quarrymen. 

The superb R. D. Thomas (better known by his bardic name of Iorthryn Gwynedd) wrote in 1872 of  the "poets and literary men" of the Slate Valley, including Orwig Wyllt ('Orwig the Visionary') of Middle Granville and the "prize-winning poet" Ionoron Glan Dwyryd from Blissville, Vermont. The Welsh immigrants to the Slate Valley were not only highly skilled but also highly literate, and living memory speaks of quarry workers who would pause awhile to write verses of strict-metre poetry on spare slates.

Quarries founded and owned by Welsh immigrants are still in evidence today, and the resurgence of interest in slate as a craft material means that industry and art come together here – and this stone continues to provide a link between New England and Wales: Welsh companies still quarry in Vermont and New York, and connected companies such as Welsh//Slate also import slate from Wales to America.

Beginning in 1975, Poultney, Vermont, experienced a Welsh Ethnic Revival Project funded by a US Government Ethnic Heritage Grant and described by one commentator as “one of the most influential episodes in recent North American Welsh history.” A Welsh Room was established at Green Mountain College Library; all-important oral histories were recorded from early immigrants, and out of this widespread revival of interest grew Cymdeithas Madog, the Welsh Studies Institute in North America.

WALES TODAY
Wales gave the world, particularly America, so much of its talent and was inspired by it in kind.  It gave the world the industrial revolution; its steel, coal and engineering were the foundation stones of the way we all live today.  Since then, of course, the world has moved on.  And so has Wales.  Today the focus of Wales is on tomorrow.  Opportunities abound in life sciences, the arts, culture and business as they do here in America, particularly New England.  The opportunity is ripe, armed with the knowledge of the past, to forge new links and networks between the Welsh of America and the Welsh of Wales, between America and its earliest partner. 

The 20th century ended with the opening of the National Assembly of Wales in Cardiff Bay. It was in many ways an unexpected and unlikely happening, previously seen by many as an impractical outcome.   In the referendum of Sept. 18, 1997, Welsh citizens voted to establish a national assembly.  Today, the Assembly Government has moved a number of significant initiatives forward and Wales continues to grow from strength to strength.

WALES TODAY IN NEW ENGLAND: BUSINESS AS USUAL
The links which join Wales and New England are still being renewed. While immigration has long since dropped from its industrial peaks, key workers from Wales are yet to be found in all aspects of New England business, cultural and academic life – and vice versa – and many branches of science, technology and the humanities have been represented for decades in this Cambro-American exchange. Welsh Universities are fostering Centres of Excellence in key scientific areas (for example, Engineering; Opto-Electronics; Medicine and Pharmacology; Agricultural and Medical Biotechnology and Bio-informatics; Oceanography and Astronomy), leading to breakthroughs of international significance.

Martin Evans of the Cardiff School of Biosciences received a recent Lasker Award for work in the genetics of cancer, and the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics was shared between a Swansea-born professor working in California and a Welsh-American in New York. The Connecticut-based General Electrics (established in 1892 by the Welsh-American J.P. Morgan) is just one of 180 USA companies with a strong presence in Wales.

According to the 2000 US Census returns, 74,000 inhabitants of New England declare their ethnicity to be “Welsh”. As well as the Welsh Society of Western New England, the Boston Cymrodorion and the Poultney Area St David’s Society, which are examples of the more than one hundred Welsh Societies traced in the U.S., the Welsh come together less formally, either quietly – “to embrace words” – or more loudly – to urge rugby victories. Societies exist locally and nationally to encourage participation in and study of Welsh heritage, local history and genealogy, or to organise those most traditionally Welsh of cultural expressions, the Eisteddfod or Cymanfa Ganu. National Welsh cultural organisations such as the Welsh National Gymanfa Ganu Association and National Welsh American Foundation co-ordinate large-scale events which even recently have commanded participatory crowds of thousands. The North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History and the Celtic Studies Association of North America are among a number of academic organisations on both sides of the Atlantic fostering Welsh-American scholarship.

SEIZE THE DAY
The Welsh in America have been at the forefront of history from the earliest recorded memory.  The drive for discovery, innovation and the exploration of new ideas remains a part of the DNA.  The opportunities abound for the energy and enthusiasm that has always been a part of the ether, to materialize and be seized upon. If you are inspired, you are urged to pick up the mantle of those that have come before and build a network for tomorrow.
 
ANNEX A
THE ART OF BEING WELSH
Twentieth-century Welsh-Americans set their own particular disciplines alight, as have actors, actresses and music stars from Wales who have made America their home: Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Ioan Gruffudd, John Cale, Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta Jones, Richard Burton, Geraint Evans… the list goes on. Gigs today from Massachusetts to Maine feature not only stars of the indie music scene such as Gruff Rhys and the Super Furry Animals or Euros Childs and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci but also the incomparable Welsh folk sounds of Ar Log, Robin Huw Bowen and Siân James, and local Welsh voices such as Jodee Jones. Welsh music is heard increasingly on American radio, proving more and more often that “Celtic” can be dragon-red as much as shamrock-green.

In Classical music, besides the global fame of Bryn Terfel, Dennis O’Neill and Katherine Jenkins, Grant Llewellyn is Principal Conductor of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society and has conducted Boston Symphony Orchestra as well as other major North American orchestras. Sculpture, painting and other plastic arts are also injected with Welsh-American fire, in photography, the name of Philip Jones Griffiths probably stands highest, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. Leading installation artist Mags Harries is among the most famous local Welsh artists of New England.
 
ANNEX B
HEB IAITH HEB GALON: THE WELSH LANGUAGE
Welsh was the natural medium of communication for the vast majority of the immigrants from Wales to America, and while trends unfortunately suggest that almost any immigrant language is doomed if there is no supply of replacement immigrants from the mother country, Welsh was remarkably resilient, often being transmitted to the third generation. There are a small number of native speakers of Welsh living in New England today, recent-immigrants and descendants of immigrants from generations ago, and the Welsh language – the widest spoken and most used of all the Celtic languages – is taught in courses in universities, colleges and pubs across New England. Indeed, many Welsh artists visiting the USA perform sets where the majority is given in Welsh.

The vernacular literary tradition of Wales is, with Irish, the oldest in Europe, and Wales has been justly famed for its poetry since long before Dylan Thomas ‘sang in my chains by the sea’, or the Vermont poets wrote their crafted verse on coloured slate. It is perhaps predictable that the East Coast literary world should frequently showcase Welsh talent, from Menna Elfyn’s travelled bilingualism and Grahame Davies’s savvy urban cynicism to the performative humour of Ifor ap Glyn and the rock ’n’ roll modernism of Iwan Llwyd, traditionally “drunk on America”. Such visits to New England may not be daily, but rather like the communities of Welsh-Americans throughout the history of this land, they are yet as intense as they are scattered – Welsh America is, as Iwan Llwyd describes it, a persistently surprising pleasure, whatever language you speak:

yn dawel y deuthum ar eu traws
dydan ni’r Cymry ddim yn rhai i gyhoeddi’n hunain yn hy
fel meibion Sicily ym mhentref Eidalaidd Philadelphia,
a chroeso eu bwyd yn persawru o bell,
neu fel hogiau Dulyn a Derry ym mariau Efrog Newydd,
a’u teyrngarwch yn ddu a gwyn, fel Guinness:

yn dawel deuwn at ein gilydd
i drin geiriau, i gofleidio atgofion […]
yn dawel edrychwn i’r dyfodol
pan ddaw adeg cyfarfod eto
i roi gair wrth air a chreu gwyrthiau.

quietly I came across them:
we Welsh don’t call bold attention to ourselves
like the sons of Sicily in Philadelphia’s little Italy,
whose food wafts a welcome from afar,
or the boys of Dublin and Derry in New York bars,
with loyalty as black and white as Guinness:

quietly we come together
to embrace words, to reminisce,
to exchange whispered dreams,
quietly we look to the future
when we may meet again
to mix words and create miracles.

Iwan Llwyd “Cymry Philadelphia” (‘The Welsh of Philadelphia’)
ANNEX C
* * *

Welsh signatories to the Declaration of Independence
* Francis Lewis
* Lewis Morris
* Thomas Jefferson
* William Floyd
* Button Gwinnet

A Triad of Welsh American Presidents
* Thomas Jefferson
* Abraham Lincoln
* James Monroe

Welsh “kings” of America
* Hugh W. Hughes (1837-1890) Vermont slate manufacturer, “Slate-king of America”
* Charles Ranlett Flint (1850-1934), Maine-born industrialist and “Rubber King of America”; founder of the company which later became IBM

Some Welsh-American firsts
* legendary first European discovery of America: Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, 1170
* first integrated iron works in North America: Saugus Iron Works, Massachussets, co-founded by Joseph Jenks, 1646
* first licensed coffee trader in America: Dorothy Jones of Boston, c. 1670
* first Welsh-language book to be published in USA: Annerch i'r Cymry (‘An Address to the Welsh’) by Pugh Ellis, 1721
* first Welsh-language concordance of the Bible published Philadelphia, 1729
* America’s first high-pressure steam-engine built by Oliver Evans, b. 1755
* first American surgical textbook by John Jones, 1775
* Yale University’s first honorary Doctor of Laws degree awarded to Richard Price (with George Washington), 1781
* first First Lady of the United States: Martha Washington, 1789
* first mapping of the upper Missouri River Basin: John Evans, seeking the Welsh Indians, 1790s
* Meriwether Lewis leads first successful European expedition overland to the Pacific, 1804-06
* first Welsh-language daily newspaper in America: Y Drych, 1851
* One of the first American female evangelists: Rachael Paynter Davies a.k.a. Rahel o Fôn, 1851-1916
* first official state recognition of Welsh nationality: US Emigration Services, 1875

* * *

This writing was immeasurably improved by the most generous advice of Catherine McKenna, Eirug Davies, Jerry Hunter, E. Wyn James and Joseph Pickerill. The many published articles and books (often by these same authors) on which this work rests must in the largest part remain unacknowledged. Additional information was sourced by the Consulate and other contributors beyond that supplied by the original author.

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