Among the men who met each day at the London Coffee House in Philadelphia, the precursor of the merchant exchange, to drink punch, eat biscuits and discuss business were 27 who, on 29 October 1766, penned an agreement to create the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club (GFHC), the first fox-hunting club in America. Mere months after the repeal of the Stamp Act, an act that had provoked the worst crisis in the American colonies’ relations with England to that point in history, these men agreed to spend at least two days each week taking part in a uniquely English sport.

These newly successful merchants and lawyers of Philadelphia, whom this essay will call the ‘professionals’, could gain only limited access to Philadelphia's Quaker-dominated elite society. They would have been familiar with the steps fellow professionals in England took to establish themselves as gentlemen and raise themselves above their near rivals. Following in their footsteps, the Philadelphia professionals intended to elevate themselves by becoming English gentlemen; though born in America at a time when the colonies were becoming more consciously American, they intended to Anglicize.

The founders of British colonial America were predominantly English, bringing their English culture to the North American shores. Though some of them had hoped to alter aspects of their culture to create better societies – the puritans’ City upon a Hill or Penn's Holy Experiment – the settlers never totally ‘abandoned’ their cultural heritage. The cultural continuity and regional identities of David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed were under constant pressure from time, distance, environment and deliberate design, all of which combined to transform Englishmen into Americans in colonies quite different from one another and from the mother country. By the early to mid-1700s the colonists were less English than their great-grandfathers had been, and it was they who needed to refresh their Englishness, to re-Anglicize.