The proclamation “I contain multitudes” waves like a banner in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” One of the great American bards, Whitman grasped the essential importance of bigness and variety for the United States—from swelling cities to the reaching plains, from the austere Yankee to the hounded slave.

American freedom also contains multitudes. Matching the great diversity of American life, a number of different understandings of freedom have permeated American culture since early colonial days. In his acclaimed 1989 book Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer sketches these different traditions of freedom. Recovering a sense of the diversity of freedom in American culture offers insight into contemporary debates.

Albion’s Seed outlines four clusters of “folkways” of traditions and practices. Each can be derived from groups of early settlers: the East Anglians who established Puritan New England, the pro-royalist cavaliers who settled the Virginia area, the Quakers who gathered in the Delaware Valley, and the independent “borderers” from the British north who took root in Appalachia.

Fischer argues that these different folkways have influenced American life for centuries. For instance, the Appalachian region has long resisted centralized federal control, while New England has often shown more technocratic sympathies. Moreover, these folkways have spread far from the original settlements. For instance, though he spent much of his youth in Hawaii, Barack Obama has many affinities with a Puritan mode of politics (infused with moralizing and managerial sentiments). And he can likely trace his maternal family lineage to the Dunham family, which settled in northern Massachusetts in the 1630s.