Old Stock Americans

The Old Stock (also called Pioneer Stock or Colonial Stock) is a colloquial name for Americans who are descended from the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies, especially ones who have inherited last names from that era ("Old Stock families"). Historically, Old Stock Americans have been mainly White Protestants from Northern Europe whose ancestors emigrated to British America in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In the 19th and 20th centuries the Old Stock, especially English Protestants, gained a reputation for some of their members opposing or mistrusting Catholic immigrants to America, whom they saw as a threat to traditional American republican values due to their perceived allegiance to a foreign pope.

Settlement in the colonies
Between 1700 and 1775, the overwhelming majority of settlers to the colonies (up to 90%) were Britons of varying ethnic backgrounds such as English, Scottish (including Ulster-Scots), Welsh, and native Irish, with initial settlements focused on the colonial hearths of Virginia, New England and Bermuda under Elizabeth I, James VI and I and Charles I. By 1776 there were between 2 and 2.5 million colonists in the Thirteen Colonies.

Early European settlers
Populations of French Huguenots, Dutch, Swedes, and Germans arrived before 1776, some as fellow royal subjects, other populations as legacies of earlier colonies such as New Netherland, which became the Middle Colonies of British America, and the Dutch colonial capital of New Amsterdam retained a distinct commercial cosmopolitan character as New York which became America's largest city. Ethnic Finns made up the majority of settlers of New Sweden colony which passed to Dutch and English rule. While small in number, Forest Finns left an outsized legacy, among European Americans uniquely accustomed to a pioneer life taming wilderness on frontiers of the Swedish Empire, bringing slash-and-burn agriculture and resourceful timber usage to the New World in the 17th century. From Tavastia, Savo and Karelia, Finnish log cabin architecture arrived early in colonial America, like the 1638 Nothnagle Cabin–adopted by later pioneer settlers like the Scotch-Irish to become symbols of American frontier culture advancing westward across North America. As the Scotch-Irish first resettled Ulster from the violent Scottish borderlands before departing for America, Forest Finns lived on the rough frontier borderlands of eastern Finland until the Swedish king invited them to resettle and clear wooded central Sweden, before remigrating to America. In 1776, a descendent of Finnish New Sweden settlers, John Morton, joined Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson to cast the deciding vote of the Pennsylvania delegation in support of independence and became a signer of the Declaration of Independence two days later.

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 arrived as hearty pioneers, taming harsh frontier wilderness to settle their own homesteads amid streams and hilly terrain, 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 politics.

Starting in the 1840s, millions of German and Irish Catholics immigrated to the rapidly industrializing United States during the 19th century. Anti-Catholic elements formed the Know Nothing movement that had brief success in the mid 1850s, then faded away. Its presidential candidate, former president Millard Fillmore, took 22% of the total national vote in the 1856 United States presidential election.

American settlers arriving in the formerly Spanish or Mexican holdings of the Southwest were labelled as "Anglos".