by Bill Bryson
In the circumstances, it is little wonder that the Indians began to view their new rivals for the land with a certain suspicion and to withdraw their goodwill. This was a particular blow to the Virginia colonists – or ‘planters’, as they were somewhat hopefully called – who were as helpless at fending for themselves as the Mayflower Pilgrims would prove to be a decade later. In the winter of 1609-10, they underwent what came to be known as the ‘starving time’, during which brief period the number of Virginia colonists fell from five hundred to about sixty. When Sir Thomas Gates arrived to take over as the new governor the following spring, he found ‘the portes open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty howses (whose owners untimely death had taken newly from them) rent up and burnt, the living not able, as they pretended, to step into the woodes to gather other fire-wood; and, it is true, the Indian as fast killing without as the famine and pestilence within.23
Fresh colonists were constantly dispatched from England, but between the perils of the Indians without and the famine and pestilence within, they perished almost as fast as they could be replaced. Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. Of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619-21, 3,000 were dead at the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.
For those who survived, life was a succession of terrors and discomforts, from hunger and homesickness to the dread possibility of being tomahawked in one’s bed. As the colonist Richard Frethorne wrote with a touch of forgivable histrionics: ‘I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth dailie flow from mine eyes. He was dead within the year.24
At least he was spared the messy end that awaited many of those who survived him. On Good Friday, 1622, during a period of amity between the colonists and native Americans, the Indian chief Opechancanough sent delegations of his tribes to the newly planted Virginia settlements of Kecoughtan, Henricus (also called Henrico or Henricopolis) and Charles City and their neighbouring farms. It was presented as a goodwill visit – some of the Indians even ‘sate down at Breakfast’, as one appalled colonial wrote afterwards – but upon a given signal, the Indians seized whatever implements happened to come to hand and murdered every man, woman and child they could catch, 350 in all, or about a third of Virginia’s total population.25
Twenty-two years later, in 1644, the same chief did the same thing, killing about the same number of people. But by this time the 350 deaths represented less than a twentieth of Virginia’s English inhabitants, and Opechancanough’s incursion was more a brutal annoyance than a catastrophe. Something clearly had changed in the interim. What it was can be summed up in a single word: tobacco. To the Indians of Virginia this agreeable plant was not tobacco, but uppówoc. Tobacco was a Spanish word, taken from the Arabic tabāq, signifying any euphoria-inducing herb. The first mention of tobacco in English was in 1565 after a visit by John Hawkins to a short-lived French outpost in Florida. With a trace of bemusement, and an uncertain mastery of the expository sentence, he reported that the French had ‘a kind of herb dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup on the end, with fire, doe suck through the cane the smoke thereof’.26 Despite Hawkins’s apparent dubiousness about just how much pleasure this sort of thing could bring, he carried some tobacco back to England with him, where it quickly caught on in a big way. At first the practice was called ‘drinking’ it, before it occurred to anyone that smoking might be a more apt term. Wonderful powers were ascribed to it. Tobacco was believed to be both a potent aphrodisiac and a marvellously versatile medicine, which ‘purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body’.27 Before long, it was all the rage and people simply couldn’t get enough of it.
The Jamestown colonists began planting it in the second decade of the seventeenth century and found to their joy that it grew nearly as well as poison ivy. Suddenly fortunes were to be made in Virginia. People began to flock to the colony in numbers the Indians couldn’t cope with. Virginia’s future was secure, and almost entirely because of an addictive plant.
In the mean time, the persecution of Puritans in Britain made New England a much less lonely spot. During the years 1629-40, 80,000 Puritans fled the Old World for the New. Only some 20,000 went to New England. A similar number settled in the Caribbean, in places like Barbados and St Kitts. Some formed a new, and now almost wholly forgotten, colony on Old Providence Island along Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. The West Indies were for a long time the most populous part of the New World. By 1700 Barbados had almost a third more English-speaking inhabitants than Virginia and more than twice as many as New York. None the less, enough Britons settled in Massachusetts to secure its future beyond doubt. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it had a population of 80,000. Its wealth, too, had an unseemly side. As early as 1643, just twenty-two years after the Pilgrim Fathers first planted their feet on American soil with a view to making the world a better, more godly place, New England entrepreneurs were busily engaged in an enterprise that would make them very rich indeed: the slave trade.
Such was the outflow of immigrants in the seventeenth century that by 1700 the British government had grown alarmed by the exodus of sturdy, industrious people and effectively cut off the supply, apart from regular boatloads of transported felons (among them the fictional Moll Flanders).*10 Convicts apart, very few true Englishmen or women emigrated to America after 1700. None the less, in the first half of the century the population of the colonies quadrupled. It achieved this apparent paradox by drawing large numbers of people from other New World colonies – Carolina, for instance, was founded in 1669 by only about a hundred people from England; the rest were planters from Barbados28 – and from an influx of non-English peoples: Germans, French and most especially Scots-Irish from Ulster, of whom possibly as many as 250,000 arrived just in the middle fifty years of the eighteenth century.29 All of this contributed significantly to America’s long, slow drift away from the standard, London-based branch of English.
Sprinkled among this motley assemblage of new arrivals were increasing numbers of black Africans. Blacks had begun arriving in Virginia as early as 1619 – thus easily predating the oldest New England families – but not until late in the century did their usefulness as field workers and household servants become overwhelmingly evident. Though their removal to America was involuntary, they were at first regarded as servants, with the same rights of eventual earned freedom as indentured whites. The irony is that all these early menials, white and black alike, were called slaves, the term having temporarily lost its sense of permanent involuntary servitude. Servants were called indentured, incidentally, because their contract was indented, or folded, along an irregular line and torn in two, master and servant each keeping one half.30
Gradually, out of this inchoate mass a country began to emerge – loosely structured, governed from abroad, populated by an unlikely mix of refugees, idealists, slaves and convicts, but a country none the less. By the fourth decade of the eighteenth century the British were feeling sufficiently confident of their standing in the New World to begin looking for an excuse to throw their weight around a little. In 1739, the Spanish gave it to them when they made manifest their long and wholly understandable exasperation with British privateers by cutting off the ear of an English smuggler named Edward Jenkins. Never mind that Jenkins was little more than a common criminal. The British responded by launching possibly the only interesting-sounding conflict in history, the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
The war was in fact pretty dull, but it did have a couple of interesting linguistic spin-offs. One came with the introduction of a daily ration of rum and water for the sailors on the instructions of the commander of the fleet, Edward Vernon. Vernon’s nickname was Old Grog – no one seems to know why – and the drink, as you will doubtless have guessed, was soon called grog. (And those who drank too much of it w
ould perforce become groggy.) Vernon was by all accounts an inspiring figure, and was greatly loved by his men. One of his colonial officers, Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George, was so taken with the admiral that he named his Virginia plantation Mount Vernon in his honour.
However – and here we come to the point of all this – the euphonious if largely forgotten War of Jenkins’ Ear marked a telling semantic transition. It was then for the first time that the British began to refer to their colonial cousins as Americans, rather than as provincials or colonials. American had been recorded as early as 1578, but previously had been applied only to the native Indians. No one realized it yet, but a new nation had begun.
3
A ‘Democratical Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
I
When dawn broke on that epochal year 1776 – a year that would also see the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – America’s war with its British masters was already, in a sense, several years old. The much despised Stamp Act was eleven years in the past. It was nearly three years since the Boston Tea Party (which wouldn’t in fact generally be called that for another half-century) and six since the infamous, if widely misreported, Boston Massacre. It had been nine months since some unknown soul had stood at Concord green and fired, in Emerson’s memorable phrase, ‘the shot heard round the world’, and not much less since the bloody, curiously misnamed Battle of Bunker Hill, which did not take place on Bunker Hill at all (or Bunker’s Hill as it was then more commonly called). Though the battle was intended to take place on Bunker Hill (these matters being rather more formally arranged in the eighteenth century), for reasons unknown colonial troops under Col. William Prescott fortified the wrong hill, the neighbouring Breed’s Hill, and it was there that the first pitched battle of America’s war for independence was fought. To complicate matters, Breed’s Hill was often thereafter referred to as Bunker Hill. At any rate, and by any measure, in January 1776 Britain and a significant portion of its American colonies were at war.
We might reasonably ask why. In 1776 Americans already were ‘the freest people in the world’, as Samuel Eliot Morison has noted.1 Most Americans enjoyed economic mobility, the right to vote for their own local representatives, a free press and the benefits of what one English contemporary tellingly called a ‘most disgusting equality’. They ate better, were more comfortably housed and on the whole were probably better educated than their British cousins. (In Massachusetts, for instance, the literacy rate was at least double that of Britain.)2 The Revolution when it came would not be to secure America’s freedom, but to preserve it.
What the colonists did lack were seats in Parliament. They resented – not unreasonably, it seems to us today – being required to pay taxes to the mother country when they were denied a voice in the House of Commons. To the British such a notion was overambitious, if not actually preposterous, since most Britons did not themselves enjoy such a lavish franchise. Only about one Briton in twenty had the right to vote and even some large thriving cities such as Liverpool and Manchester had no directly elected Member of Parliament. Why should mere colonists, the semi-British, be accorded greater electoral privilege than those reared on British soil?
Nor, it should be noted, were the taxes levied on the colonists by any stretch onerous or unreasonable. The principal aim of the stamp duties and other revenue-raising measures was to fund the protection of the colonies. It was hardly beyond the bounds of reasonableness to expect the colonists to make a contribution towards the cost of their own defence. In the 1760s, it was estimated, the average American paid about sixpence a year in tax. The average Briton paid twenty-five shillings – fifty times as much. And in any case, Americans seldom actually paid their taxes. The hated Townshend duties raised just £295 in revenue in their first year and cost £170,000 to implement. The equally reviled Stamp Act duties were never collected at all.
None the less, as every schoolchild knows, throughout the 1770s America rang with the cry ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny.’ Actually, not. James Otis, to whom the phrase is commonly attributed, appears never to have said any such thing or at least if he did no one at the time noticed. The famous words weren’t ascribed to him until 1820, nearly forty years after he died.3
The American Revolution was in fact an age drowning in myths. Many of the expressions that are proudly associated with the struggle for independence were in fact never uttered. Patrick Henry almost certainly didn’t issue the defiant cry ‘If this be treason, make the most of it’ or any of the other deathless remarks confidently attributed to him in the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765. The clerk of the convention made no notes of Henry’s speech, and none of those present gave any hint in their correspondence that Henry’s remarks had been particularly electrifying that day. According to the one surviving eyewitness account – written by a French hydrologist who just happened to be present, and found quite by chance in the archives of the National Hydrological Institute of France in 1921 – Henry did make some intemperate remarks, but, far from being defiant, he immediately apologized to the House of Burgesses if ‘the heat of passion might have lead [sic] him to have said something more than he intended’ and timidly professed undying loyalty to the king – not quite the show of thrust-jawed challenge portrayed in countless school books.4
If Henry did engage in a little nervous back-pedalling, we should not be altogether surprised. He was the junior member of the house; he had taken his seat only nine days earlier. His brave and eloquent challenge to monarchy appears to have been invented from whole cloth forty-one years later, seventeen years after Henry died, by a priggish biographer named William Wirt, who had never met, seen or heard him. Thomas Jefferson, who was there, made no comment about the accuracy or otherwise of Wirt’s account of events on that day, but he did freely offer the opinion that Wirt’s effort was ‘a poor book, written in bad taste, and gives an imperfect idea of Patrick Henry’. Nor, while we are at it, is there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: ‘I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.’ Indeed, there is no evidence that Henry ever said anything of substance or found space in his head for a single original thought. He was a country bumpkin, unread, poorly educated and famously indolent. His turn of phrase was comically provincial and frequently ungrammatical. He did, it is true, have certain oratorical powers, but these appeared to owe more to a gift for hypnotic sonorosity than to any command of thought or language. His style of speech was a kind of verbal sleight of hand that, in the words of one contemporary, ‘baffled all description’. Jefferson once bemusedly recalled: ‘When he had spoken in opposition to my opinion, had produced a great effect, and I myself been highly delighted and moved, I have asked myself when it ceased; “What the Devil has he said,” and could never answer the enquiry.‘5
Even those events that did unquestionably take place have often been distorted by history to show the colonials in a more favourable light. The classic example is the Boston Massacre, or the ‘Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston’, as it was provocatively called in Paul Revere’s famous engraving. Revere’s rendition shows the British Redcoats, or lobsterbacks as they were more dismissively known, taking careful aim in broad daylight at a small, startled gathering of colonials, as if blithely executing midday shoppers. It wasn’t quite like that. Five colonials did lose their lives in the incident, but it happened at night, amid great confusion, and after considerable provocation in which twenty British soldiers were repeatedly taunted, jostled, pelted with stones and other missiles and generally menaced by a drunken, ugly and very much larger mob. By the standards of the day, the British troops were eminently justified in replying with fire. John Adams, at any rate, had no hesitation in defending the soldiers in court (and securing the acquittal of all but two; the convicted pair had their thumbs branded, a light punish
ment indeed in a murder trial). It was his more hotheaded cousin, Sam Adams, who with the help of Paul Revere’s artwork turned the incident into effective propaganda and popularized the expression Boston Massacre.
For almost a century afterwards, Paul Revere was known in America, in so far as he was known at all, not for his midnight ride but as the maker of that engraving. It wasn’t until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his romanticized and hugely inaccurate*11 poem ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ (from Tales of a Wayside Inn) in 1863 that Revere became known as anything other than an engraver and silversmith.
Perhaps the most singular instance of historical manipulation is that concerning Betsy Ross and the creation of the first American flag. The traditional story – recorded with solemnity in this author’s school books in the 1950s – is that George Washington entered Mrs Ross’s upholstery shop in Philadelphia in 1776, showed her a rough sketch of a flag and asked her to whip up something suitable for a new nation. The story was not first voiced until ninety-six years after the supposed event when one of her grandchildren presented the tale to a historical society in Pennsylvania. It has never been substantiated.6 However, as a little thought should tell us, in 1776 George Washington had rather more pressing matters to engage his attention than hunting down a seamstress for a national flag. In any case, at the time of the story, America was still flying the Grand Union flag, a banner that had alternating red and white stripes in the manner of the modern American flag, but contained a Union Jack where the stars now go. Not until June 1777 did Congress replace the Union Jack with stars. But even then, such were the emotional ties to Britain, many flag makers arranged the stars in a Union Jack pattern.