“The land of steady habits” is New England, and especially Connecticut.
1781. MANNERS and CUSTOMS.—Gravity and a serious deportment, together with shyness and bashfulness, generally attend the first communications of the inhabitants of Connecticut; but, after a short acquaintance, they become very familiar, and inquisitive about news.—Samuel Peters, ‘History of Connecticut,’ p. 302 (Lond.).
1785. The State of Connecticut, a place remarkable for sobriety and sanctity of manner.—Mass. Spy, Aug. 18.
1800. A sarcastic article, ‘Steady Habits and Straight Waistcoats,’ appeared in The Aurora, Phila., Dec. 23. “Another of these steady habits is their calling all the priests of the state together at each commencement of Yale College, to eat and drink at the scholar’s expence; also, to assemble the priests at each election of Governor at Hartford, to eat and drink at the state’s expence.”
1802. Cherishing the steady and rational habits of their ancestors, the men of Newengland pass their evenings by their own firesides. Their breakfasts are not of whiskey julep, nor of gin sling; but of tea and coffee.—Mass. Spy, Aug. 4: from the Newport (R.I.) Mercury.
1803. Pliny Earle and Brothers advertise for a journeyman clockmaker; one who is “a man of steady habits; none other need apply.”—Mass. Spy, Dec. 28.
1805. The significant Essay of the Hero of the Land of Steady Habits.—Intelligencer, Lancaster, Pa., Aug. 20.
1806. Extract of a letter from a Gentleman in the State of Steady Habits to his friend in Newport, Rhodeisland.—Id., Jan. 14.
1807. In Connecticut they have a Slang-phrase, called Steady Habits. As the words are general and not special, they may, like John Adams’s notion of a Republican, mean any thing or nothing. If we may judge from their Practices, their Habits are detestable.—Intelligencer, May 26: from The Aurora.
1807. In Connecticut, a man of steady habits; in Newyork, one of the American ticket; in Pennsylvania, a Quid or Constitutionalist; in New Orleans, an adherent of the Quid Emperor; at the Revolution of 1776, a Loyalist or Tory: means the same thing, those who wish to usurp and monopolize Power, and to exclude the People from it.—The same.
1813. Troops were assembled, ready to repel any invasion of the soil of “steady habits.”—Mass. Spy, June 16.
1816. First then as to Holland;—in that land of steady habits and of hard working, the fathers of New England sojourned for a considerable number of years before they came over to our shores.—Id., Nov. 27: from the Connecticut Courant.
1819. The blue laws of the land of steady habits.—Missouri Gazette, St. Louis, Feb. 3.
1820. The men were chewing their tobacco [on a raft in the Ohio River], with as much complacency as if they had been in “the land of steady habits,” and the various family avocations seemed to go on like clock-work.—James Hall, ‘Letters from the West,’ p. 87 (Lond.).
1827. [I cannot] banish from my mind the old steady habits of Massachusetts. Letter from a Boston gentleman living in Richmond, Va.—Mass. Spy, April 4.
1828. Ours is the land of steady habits. And this town is remarkable for severity of religious discipline, if not for morality.—The Yankee, Portland, Maine, April 2.
1830. A real “blue-nose,” fresh from the land of steady habits.—Northern Watchman, Troy, N.Y., Nov. 30.
1836. The very men he appealed to as his friends to bear him out in his assertion, were themselves from the land of steady habits, and we were ready to die of suppressed mirth at their knowing winks.—Knick. Mag., viii. 555 (Nov.).
1841. A farmer, and a Yankee one too, from the land of steady habits, where they “look for results.”—Mr. Hastings of Ohio, House of Repr., July 29: Cong. Globe, p. 243, App.
1842. The “land of steady habits,” with a House amounting to six hundred members, employed but one clerk.—Mr. Smith of Virginia, the same: Id., p. 243.
1843. This wonderful biped had left the land of deacons, hard cider, and other steady habits, in imitation of Jack in the good old-fashioned story-book—to seek his fortune.—B. R. Hall (‘Robert Carlton’), ‘The New Purchase,’ i. 51–2.
1853. See WOODEN NUTMEGS.
