New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware are often grouped as the "middle colonies", but I'd like to get people's views on how culturally similar they really were. I'm interested in this both before and after the ARW, for the 1750-1850 period.
In some timelines New York is often grouped more with New England, based on trade links, but I wonder if that is too much based on New York City. I would have thought upstate New York would have had a lot of similarity to Pennsylvania, but I don't really know. What was Philadelphia's economy most like?
In terms of their interests and economics it is very, very reasonable to link the middle colonies as a single group. Yet they did not engage in cooperation in the same way the New England colonies did nor share the same sense of shared interests that developed by the 1820s in the Deep South. This is just because of the factor you note: culture.
New York had a substantial and (being urban) influential Dutch population. As much of a factor was its ongoing and long relationship with the Iroquois. In it's early history it was outright dependent on it, a fact that made the New York attitude to native issues and paganism in general dramatically different to its neighbors. Like East Jersey, New York had a background in slavery unparalleled in the colonies, in both disproportionately used in urban and semi-urban settings and higher by percentage of county population than anywhere in the northern colonies. It's heavy use was responsible the New York and New Jersey dates of abolition falling 15 and 20 years after the rest of the "free" states. Upstate New York, though, was colonized partially by New Englanders, meaning that it differed quite a bit culturally from the lower Hudson. Hence the Vermont secession.
All-in-all, New York's culture was closest
of the Middle Atlantic states to that of New England. But in truth it was relatively singular, with East Jersey being the only place that was truly equivalent.
There's also the aspect that these colonies were more ethnically diverse than other places, but it seemed it was more Dutch in New York and more German in Pennsylvania. How well did these groups get on?
Despite the fact that Germans came to be the larger group, they were not the decisive one in Pennsylvania. The Quakers were. West Jersey and PA shared a Quaker heritage. This was the reason for Pennsylvania being the first to issue a gradual abolition bill, for New Jersey to issue women the vote in 1780, and a host of other unusually progressive legislation (much of which was repealed as both states' cultures acclimatized to and diffused into a general northern standard). In Pennsylvania a large effort was made to invite immigrants who shared the Quaker's egalitarian and pacifist outlook, which is where those Germans came from in the first place. A lot of Welsh came at the same time, but it didn't matter because the English, Scotch-Irish, Scottish, and Germans
kept coming, so they were diluted completely a hundred years in. German culture shouldn't be downplayed - Plattsdeutsch is still spoken from central PA to Iowa (if you know where to look) - but in terms of political culture the early Germans followed the Quaker line.
East Jersey differed from Pennsylvania in that it only got the backwash of German immigration from the latter, but no other state links as much to the pair. Even East Jersey had a dramatically different culture, at least early on. Penn's Woods, though, links extremely closely to the general culture of the midwest as far as the Great Plains by virtue of serving as the main conduit for early western settlement. A little off-topic, but worth noting.
Finally, Delaware was a slave state with powerful ruling families. Surely this is more similar to Virginia than New York?
Every colony had powerful ruling families. Delaware was linked to Pennsylvania politically from its outset, and only diverged overtime. Still, it continued to engage in slave state pursuits less intensely than Maryland next door. Maryland, though, is the closest state. Both states shared an agricultural package with Virginia, but were deeply separated from it by their small size, location toward the edge of effective Tobacco country, lack of western land claims, and proportionally stronger fishing and trade economic sectors. Then the Methodist revolution went straight through the pair and tied them very tightly to each other. For a long time the two were essentially Methodist provinces/states, while just across their southern and northern borders the religious mix underwent a sudden shift. Since early Methodism entailed proscriptions and outlooks that set practitioners far apart from contemporary faiths, this is a very big deal.
