Ideas

by Peter Watson

  28

  The Invention of America

  To Chapter 28 Notes and References

  ‘The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society…’1 This is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Earl J. Hamilton, in his famous essay ‘American treasure and the rise of capitalism’, traced the various changes in sixteenth-century Europe–the advent of nation-states, the ravages and opportunities of war, the rise of Protestantism–and concluded that none of these had the effect that the discovery of America did. Hamilton was convinced that America was the main cause of European capital formation. ‘The consequence of the discovery was to encourage the growth of European industries, which had to supply manufactures in exchange for the produce of America; [which provided] Europe with the silver it needed for its trade with the East–a trade which contributed powerfully to capital formation because of the vast profits which accrued to its promoters; and to provoke a price revolution in Europe, which again facilitated capital accumulation because wages lagged behind prices.’2 In another famous work, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (1933), H. M. Robertson argued that the significance of the discoveries was ‘not confined to the strictly material sphere. For the consequent expansion of commerce meant a necessary expansion of ideas’. Above all, he said, there was ‘an increase of opportunity…[and that] from these new opportunities there emerged an entrepreneurial class with a spirit of capitalism and individualism, which acted as a solvent on traditional society.’3

  Walter Prescott Webb, in The Great Frontier (1953), was more specific. For him, Europe was the metropolis whereas America was the great frontier. Despite the many problems encountered, and the new type of farming needed on the Great Plains, ‘The opening of this frontier transformed the prospects of Europe in that it decisively altered the ratio between the three factors of population, land and capital in such a way as to create boom conditions.’4 In particular, he said, in 1500 Europe’s 3,750,000 square miles of land supported a population of roughly 100 million, which meant a density of 26.7 persons to the square mile. After the discovery of the New World, these 100 million people suddenly had access to an additional 20 million square miles of land. This surplus, Webb said, launched Europe on four centuries of boom, ‘which came to an end with the closing of the frontier around the year 1900’. On this account, the four centuries between 1500 and 1900 were a unique period in history–a time-frame in which the ‘Great Frontier’ of America transformed Western civilisation.5 As John Elliott says, ‘The consensus of studies on the impact of America boil down to three recurrent themes–the stimulating effects of bullion, trade and opportunity.’*

  The age of discovery, culminating in the sixteenth century, brought with it the establishment of the first global empires in history. This not only provided new sources of conflict between European states, ‘far beyond the pillars of Hercules’, Europe’s traditional boundaries, but it also had consequences for the relationship between secular authorities and the church. The Vatican had always claimed world-wide dominion, yet its scriptures showed no awareness of the New World and made no mention of it.7 On the face of things, the discovery of millions of people living without the benefits of Christianity offered the church an unparalleled opportunity to extend its influence. But in practice the consequences were more complex. For a start, the discoveries coincided with the Reformation and the Counter, or Catholic, Reformation. This latter preoccupied the religious authorities in Rome more than the opportunities in the New World though it may also be true that the debates in Europe suffered because so many of the more effective evangelists had decamped across the Atlantic (the Council of Trent barely discussed American affairs). But in any case the very presence of missionaries in the new territories was dependent on the permission of the secular powers. In particular, the Spanish Crown was ideally placed to direct the pace and form of evangelisation, the more so as it had negotiated a papal authority for its explorations, known legally as patronato.8 It has even been suggested that the absolutist powers of the Spanish kings in the Indies helped generate the growth of absolutist ideas back in Europe.9 In similar vein, Richard Hakluyt, in England, suggested that colonisation ‘siphoned off’ those individuals most prone to sedition.10 ‘Just as the authoritarian tendencies of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century state may have encouraged the disaffected to emigrate, so, in turn, the emigration may have enhanced the prospects of authoritarianism at home…There was presumably less inducement to fight for opportunities and rights at home if these could be secured at less cost by emigration overseas.’11

  John Elliott confirms that the centre of gravity of the Holy Roman Empire shifted decisively in the 1540s and early 1550s away from Germany and the Netherlands to the Iberian peninsula.12 ‘The change was symbolic of the eclipse of the old financial world of Antwerp and Augsburg, and its replacement by a new financial nexus linking Genoa to Seville and the silver mines of America. In the second half of the sixteenth century, but not before, it is legitimate to speak of an Atlantic economy.’13

  It is not so surprising then that the envy of Spain and Spanish conquests was aroused in France and England. The silver supplied from Peru first drew the attention of these rival powers, and these supplies were most vulnerable at the isthmus of land at Panama. A Protestant policy of taking Spain ‘by way of the Indies’ was another idea, and confirms that politics was acquiring a global dimension, marking the fact that sea power was becoming recognised as more and more important. Politically speaking, the New World also played its part in the development of European nationalism. Spain naturally felt that, as the centre of civilisation shifted to the Iberian peninsula, she was now ‘the chosen race’. But in the middle of the sixteenth century her image abroad suffered grievously from the publication of two works which gave birth to what became known as the ‘Black Legend’. These books were Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Spain in 1552, which was a frank attempt to reclaim for the Indians a humanity that had been widely denied them, and Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World, published in Venice in 1565.14 Both books were quickly translated into French, Dutch, German and English, and the Huguenots, Dutch and English no less quickly confessed themselves appalled by the Spaniards’ behaviour. Montaigne, after reading of the Black Legend, voiced what others also felt: ‘So many goodly citties ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so infinite millions of harmlesse people of all sexes, states and ages, massacred, ravaged and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest and the best part of the world topsiturvied, ruined and defaced for the traffick of Pearles and Pepper…’15 The destruction of twenty million Indians was henceforth produced as evidence of the Spaniards’ ‘innate’ cruelty. This, says John Elliott, was the first example, at least in European history, of a metropolitan power’s colonial record being used against it.16

  The fact remains that for more than a century after the discovery of America there was no real intellectual progress in assimilating the New World into European thought patterns. For a start, how was she to be explained? There was, for example, and as was referred to above, no mention of America in the scriptures.17 Did that mean, perhaps, that she was a special creation, emerging late from the Deluge, or had she perhaps suffered her own quite different deluge, later than the one that had afflicted Europe and from which she was now recovering? Why was the New World’s climate so different from Europe’s? The Great Lakes, for example, were on the same latitude as Europe but their waters froze for half the year. Why was so much of the New World covered in marshes and swamps, why were its forests so dense, its soil too moist for agriculture? Why
were its animals so different? Why were the people so primitive, and so thin on the ground? Why, in particular, were the people copper-coloured and not white or black? Most important of all, perhaps, where did these savages come from?18 Were they descended perhaps from the lost tribes of Israel? Rabbi Manasseh Israel of Amsterdam believed that they were, finding ‘conclusive evidence’ in the similarity of Peruvian temples to Jewish synagogues. For some, the widespread practice of circumcision reinforced this explanation. Were they the lost Chinese perhaps, who had drifted across the Pacific? Were they the descendants of Noah, that greatest of navigators? Henry Commager says that the most widely held theory, and the one that fitted best with common sense, was that they were Tartars, who had voyaged from Kamchatka in Russia to Alaska and had sailed down the western coast of the new continent, before spreading out.19

  The question as to whether America was part of Asia, or a landmass in its own right, was settled in the early 1730s. Vitus Bering had originally been commissioned by the Russian czar in 1727 to determine whether Siberia stretched all the way to America. He had reported back that there was sea between the two continents but the lack of detail in his account, and its similarity to stories circulating among the local inhabitants on the Russian side of the water, threw doubts on the veracity of his claims, sparking a debate that has lasted to this day.20 People in the Kamchatka area of Siberia knew that land wasn’t very far over the horizon from the many reports of driftwood washed up on Karginsk island, where the wood came from a species of fir that didn’t grow in Kamchatka. In 1728 Bering handed over his commission to another commander and it was two of his men, Ivan Fedorov and Mikhail Grozdev, who finally discovered Alaska in 1732.

  While that issue was settled, and settled unequivocally, other arguments about America, her purpose and meaning, went on and on. Early ideas that the New World was an El Dorado, full of precious metals, magical rivers and seven enchanted cities, never materialised.21 For some, America was a mistake, whose main characteristic was backwardness. ‘Marvel not at the thin population of America,’ wrote Francis Bacon, ‘nor at the rudeness and ignorance of the people. For you must accept your inhabitants of America as a young people; younger a thousand years, at the least, than the rest of the world.’22 The comte de Buffon, no less, argued that America had emerged from the Deluge later than the other continents, which explained the swampiness of the soil, the rank vegetation, and the density of the forests.23 Nothing could flourish there, he said, and the animals were ‘stunted’, mentally as well as physically, ‘For Nature has treated America less as a mother than as a step-mother, withholding from [the native American] the sentiment of love or the desire to multiply. The savage is feeble and small in his organs of generation…He is much less strong in body than the European. He is also much less sensitive and yet more fearful and more cowardly.’ Peter Kalm, a Swedish professor, thought that there were too many worms to allow plants to grow, making oaks in America feeble, ‘and the houses built from them’. Even Immanuel Kant thought that native Americans were incapable of civilisation.24

  Others expressed the view that America was so bad that she was nowhere near ready to be brought into the mainstream of history, not yet ready to be Christianised or civilised and that syphilis was a divine punishment for the ‘premature’ discovery and the great cruelty meted out by the Spanish during the conquest.25 The buffalo was an unsuccessful and pointless cross between a rhinoceros, a cow and a goat.26 ‘Through the whole extent of America, from Cape Horn to Hudson’s Bay,’ wrote the abbé Corneille de Pauw in the Encyclopédie, ‘there has never appeared a philosopher, an artist, a man of learning.’27

  We read this now and smile. For the fact is, as the American historian Henry Steele Commager has put it, in many ways America actually realised the Enlightenment that Europe could only imagine. For ‘America too had its philosophes, though for few of them was philosophy, or even science, a full-time activity. For the most part they were busily engaged in farming, medicine, law or the ministry. More important, they lacked the Courts, Cathedrals, the Academies, the Universities and the libraries that provided so large a part of the patronage and nurture of philosophy in the Old World. They had a confidence in reason and science (where useful) and many had studied in Europe. When they returned they brought Europe with them but selectively, for they saw more to disapprove than approve: this was most consequential.’28

  It was indeed. The first Americans were not at all slow in creating their own Enlightenment, one that was carefully–and sensibly–tailored to the new conditions. There was, for instance, no religious establishment, no Puritanism or, come to that, no Catholic Counter-Reformation zeal. Early American thinking was secular and practical. In Philadelphia the American Philosophical Society (modelled on the Royal Society of London) was created with the deist Benjamin Franklin as its president from 1769 until his death in1790.29 Philadelphia, William Penn’s ‘holy experiment’, quickly became America’s ‘capital of the mind’, adding a Library Company, a college that became a university, a hospital, a botanical garden, and a brace of museums (John Adams called it the ‘pineal gland’ of British America).30 Early Philadelphia was, in its way, every bit as distinguished as, say, Edinburgh. The Reverend David Muhlenberg was a botanist who identified and classified well over a thousand species of plants, Thomas Godfrey, a mathematician and astronomer, devised a new quadrant, while his son Thomas wrote and staged the Prince of Parthia, the first drama in the New World. Philadelphia was home to the first college of medicine in the colonies, the creation of three Edinburgh-trained men–John Morgan, Edward Shippen and Benjamin Rush. Philadelphia was also the natural focus for the artists of the time, for Benjamin West, Matthew Pratt, who painted the Quaker gentry, and Henry Bembridge. It was in Philadelphia that Charles Williams Peale founded the first Academy of Fine Arts and it was to Philadelphia that distinguished émigrés from the Old World gravitated and settled, men such as Tom Paine and Dr Joseph Priestley.

  Above all there was the ‘presiding genius’ of Benjamin Franklin.31 A great coiner of proverbs (‘Lost time is never found again’) ‘his particular genius was for being there…He was there at the Albany Congress of 1754 where he drafted a plan that anticipated the ultimate American confederation; there at the House of Commons to defend the American distinction between external regulation and internal taxation; there in Carpenter’s Hall to help Jefferson draft a Declaration of Independence; and there too on the committee that drew up Articles of Confederation for the new nation. He was there at the Court of Louis XVI to win French support and there at the peace negotiations that acknowledged American independence. He was there, finally at the Federal Convention that drew up a constitution for the new nation.’32 And that was only the half of it. In England for fourteen years and France for eight, Franklin may be counted a major factor of the American, British and French Enlightenments, with many diverse talents–printer, journalist, scientist, politician, diplomat, educator and author of ‘the best of autobiographies’.33

  Benjamin Rush, Franklin’s successor in Philadelphia, was scarcely less talented, with almost as many interests. A graduate of Edinburgh and London Universities, and a disciple of John Locke, he was far more than a doctor, like Franklin a politician and a social reformer.34 Back home in America, he was appointed professor of chemistry at the new College of Philadelphia but still found time to study diseases among Indians and campaign against slavery.35 He created the first dispensary and performed vaccinations against smallpox. It is said that he provided Tom Paine with the title Common Sense for his pamphlet.36 After signing the Declaration of Independence he immediately enlisted in the army.

  Joel Barlow, from Connecticut, was a graduate of Yale and, though a parson, conceived an early idea of evolution. But he found a wider fame as a ‘cultural naturalist’, ‘the first poet of the republic’. He strained for twenty years to create an American epic on the scale of Homer or Virgil, producing in the end six thousand lines, The Vision of Columbus (1887), that surveyed ‘
the melancholy history of the Old World and contrasted the glorious prospects of the New…Byron himself, whether in admiration or derision, called him the American Homer.’37 A successful speculator when he wasn’t writing poetry, Barlow lived in Paris for a while where his salon became immensely fashionable–Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft were regulars. When Paine was jailed, Barlow ensured that the manuscript of the Age of Reason was successfully published. Like Barlow, Manasseh Cutler was a parson and like Benjamin Rush much more than a doctor–in his case, a lawyer, a diplomat and a geographer. Another passionate advocate of vaccination, he was also the first to begin systematically exploring Indian mounds.38 ‘It was from his parish that the first band of intrepid emigrants set out for the Ohio country with their ministers and their bibles and their muskets–new Pilgrims en route to a new world.’39

  Joseph Priestley (who had been part of the American ‘interest’ in British politics) emigrated across the Atlantic at the age of sixty-one.40 He was offered chairs at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia but opted instead for the Pennsylvania frontier, and a farm overlooking the Susquehanna river. Disillusioned with the Old World, Priestley at one stage intended to found a Utopia in America, with his friends Shelley, Southey and Coleridge. Although that never materialised, he did manage to finish his massive General History of the Christian Church, where he compared the teachings of Jesus and Socrates (the book was dedicated to Jefferson).41