by Hugh Brogan
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Hugh Brogan was educated at Repton School and Cambridge. He worked on the Economist for two years before his first visit to the United States as a Harkness Fellow in 1962. He was a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, for the period 1963–74 and thereafter, until his retirement in 1998, taught at the University of Essex (he was R. A. Butler Professor of History for the period 1994–8). His works include a study of Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville (1973), The Life of Arthur Ransome (1984), Mowgli’s Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell’s Scouts (1987) and Kennedy (1996). His most recent work is Signalling from Mars: Selected Letters of Arthur Ransome (1997).
HUGH BROGAN
The Penguin History of the United States of America
Second Edition
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published as The Longman History of the United States of America by Longman 1985
Published as The Pelican History of the United States of America in Penguin Books 1986
Reprinted as The Penguin History of the United States of America in Penguin Books 1990
Second edition published by Longman 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2001
14
Copyright © Addison Wesley Longman, 1985, 1999
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or omerwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193745-8
Contents
A Note of Thanks
Note for the Revised Edition
Acknowledgements
BOOK ONE: The Settlement
1 Prelude c. 30,000 BC–c.AD 1600
2 The Roots of English Colonization
3 The Planting of Virginia 1607 – 76
4 The Planting of New England 1604-c. 1675
5 Indians 1492–1920
BOOK TWO: The Old Order and the American Revolution
6 Imperial Britain 1660–1763
7 Thirteen Colonies c. 1675–1763
8 The Waking of the Revolution 1759–66
9 The Road to Ruin 1766–75
10 The War of the Revolution 1775–83
11 The Peace and the Constitution 1783–9
BOOK THREE: The Age of Equality
12 The Planting of the West
13 The Development of a Democracy 1789–1841
14 Slavery and its Consequences 1800–1861
15 The War About Slavery 1861–5
16 Reconstruction 1865–77
BOOK FOUR: The Age of Gold
17 The Billion-Dollar Country 1865–1900
18 Congressional Government and its Critics 1869–96
19 The Progressive Adventure 1897–1914
20 The Education of Woodrow Wilson 1914–21
21 Irresponsibility 1921–33
BOOK FIVE: The Superpower
22 The Era of Franklin Roosevelt 1933–8
23 The Reluctant Giant 1933–45
24 Cold War Abroad and at Home 1945–61
25 Unfinished Business 1954–68
26 The Crisis of the New Order 1963–74
27 A World Restored? 1977–89
A Note on Further Reading
Index
List of Maps
1 The United States of America
2 The Indians and the Anglo-Americans
3 British North America, 1765
4 The expansion westward
5 The principal battles of the Civil War
6 South-East Asia, 1954–75
A Note of Thanks
This book has been fifteen years in the making – rather more, if the time taken for printing it is allowed for – and so my first thanks must be to my publishers, who have shown exemplary patience (they were expecting something much shorter, much sooner). Next I must thank my two academic homes, St John’s College, Cambridge, and the University of Essex, not only for paying my salary but for providing excellent conditions for the pursuit of learning. One of the great advantages of belonging to such institutions is that at points of difficulty you can always turn to a colleague for reliable advice; an invaluable circumstance.
In so long a period, during which I have tried to master so enormous a subject as the history of the United States (I may say I grew rather weary of being told what an easy job I had, since America was so new a country), almost everything I have done or learned seems to have contributed to the making of my book; and I have benefited directly from innumerable conversations with learned and sharp-minded historians, both British and American. It would seem to claim too much if I were to name them all here: I hope I am not a name-dropper. Better to say, in general terms, that I have profited hugely from many lectures, seminars, classes, articles, monographs and stray encounters which, though uncited, have helped to strengthen this history in innumerable ways. I have learned a lot from my pupils, both through discovering what they really needed to know and (when they asked me questions I couldn’t answer, or, in their essays, included information or references that were new to me) where my own ignorance lay. I have also benefited from various visits to the United States, from discoveries in academic libraries there, and from opportunities to get to know the various regions of that immense country. So I ought also to name the University of Chicago, Lewis and Clark College (Portland, Oregon), the University of Washington (Seattle) and the University of Tennessee, all of which greatly assisted my studies and my understanding of America, in return, at most, for a little summer teaching. And I must name the men who got me to the places: John Hope Franklin, Don Balmer, Dwight Robinson and Milton Klein, my good friends. I am also well aware of how much this book owes to the two years which I spent as a Harkness Fellow at the Brookings Institution and at Yale between 1962 and 1964. Last but not least, indeed above all, I and my book are immeasurably indebted to my father, the late Denis Brogan. It will soon be ten years since he died, but the longer I live the more I am aware of how much I owe him; in particular I know that it was he who made me an Americanist, and he who taught me all the most important things I needed to learn about the United States. I wish he could have lived to see this result of his teaching (if only because he would have told me very frankly where it fell short); his memory and example have been with me ceaselessly as I worked at it.
Various people at various times read all or part of my drafts, and whether by correction or encouragement helped me along. I end this note by naming them with all gratitude: J. R. Pole, H. C. Porter, A. F. Row
lands, Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Steinberg, Howard Temperley, Hugh Tulloch, Alexander Tusa, Fiona Venn and Stuart Woolf.
Wivenhoe, 25 July 1983
Hugh Brogan
Note for the Secound Impression
I am most grateful to the reviewers and correspondents who have enabled me gradually to correct various errors that disfigured the first edition of this history.
Wivenhoe, 12 November 1986
H.B.
Note for the Revised Edition
History does not stand still, as I was well aware when this book was first published in 1985, but neither I nor anybody else foresaw what radical changes it would bring forth in the next few years. The end of the Cold War was a gigantic series of events, the consequences of which are still making themselves felt; we must therefore wait for anything like a full understanding of its importance. But today, a full decade after the Soviet Union and its empire began to break up, it is none too soon to add to my chronicle a chapter recounting the last years of the Cold War, and to revise earlier chapters in the light of our new knowledge. To push the tale further, into the 1990s, would be possible but not really useful: the pattern underlying events is not yet clear, and in a book of this kind the pattern is what matters. So my narrative now goes down to the retirement of Ronald Reagan but (except incidentally) no further.
I have maintained my division of American history into five main epochs, but have changed the label attached to the last: once called ‘The New World’, it is now called ‘The Superpower’. This reflects my conviction that the central theme of world history in the twentieth century, for good and evil, has been the emergence of the United States as a power and civilization that surpasses, in its reach and strength, all empires of the past, and that those who begin their analyses at other points – with the Russian Revolution, say, or the collapse of the old colonial empires – are profoundly mistaken.
The torrent of research into all aspects of American history has continued to flow throughout the past fourteen years, and the fashionable pre-eminence of social history (in the broadest sense) has been constantly reaffirmed. This makes less difference to the study of American history than might be supposed: as I hope is clear from what follows, the history of the United States has always been primarily the history of a society. But in this revised edition I have tried to take account of the most important discoveries and fresh hypotheses. And I continue to be grateful to the readers who have written to me with comments, criticisms, corrections and suggestions: I have taken careful note of all that they have said, and revised my text in many places as a result. I also wish to acknowledge help from Virginia Sapiro and Graham K. Wilson; Louis Claiborne; Tim Hatton; Ken Plummer and Tony Badger.
I have also revised the dedication, but in its new form it is still meant to express my thanks to all those students, at Essex, Cambridge and elsewhere, for whom this book was written, who over the years have taught me so much (perhaps at least as much as I have taught them) and who, from first to last, have made my professional involvement with American history so enjoyable.
Wivenhoe, January 1998
H.B.
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to author’s agents on behalf of The National Trust for permission to reproduce extracts from ‘Captains Courageous’ and ‘The White Man’s Burden’ both from The Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse published by Hodder & Stoughton.
For permission to reproduce we are grateful to the following: for loosely based adaptation of map on endpaper of text of R. A. Billington, Westward Expansion, published by Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc. 1949; for map loosely based on maps from A. M. Josephy, The Indian Heritage of America, published by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1973.
Dedicated to All My Pupils
1. The United States of America: State Captials and Principal Cities
BOOK ONE
The Settlement
As in the Arts and Sciences the first foundation is of more consequence than all the improvements afterwards, so in kingdoms, the first foundation or plantation is of more dignity and merit than all that followeth.
Francis Bacon
1 Prelude c. 30,000 BC – c. AD 1600
Karlsefni and his men sailed into the estuary and named the place Hope (Tidal Lake). Here they found wild wheat growing in fields on all the low ground and grape vines on all the higher ground. Every stream was teeming with fish. They dug trenches at the high-water mark, and when the tide went out there were halibut trapped in the trenches. In the woods there was a great number of animals of all kinds.
Eirik’s Saga 1
Human history has been largely the story of migrations. The first crossings to the American continents seem to have taken place towards the end of the last Ice Age. So much water had gone to the making of the great northern ice-cap that the oceans receded from the shallow Bering Straits, and proto-Mongolians, it is thought, moved across the land-bridge thus formed. Then they gradually found their way, as generation followed generation, southwards down ice-free valleys. Their driftings went on for thousands of years. The Bering traverse may have begun before 30,000 BC. Patagonia, the extreme southern tip of South America, was reached by 9000 BC. Man established himself in all parts of the two continents and in the related islands of the Caribbean. His cultures grew to be many, varied and fascinating. None of them advanced to the use of iron or to complete literacy; by other measures of human progress the achievements were striking, especially those of the Mayan, Aztec and Inca civilizations of Central and South America. But by AD 1492 the New World, in its isolation, lagged substantially, in culture, behind the Old.
The trans-Bering migration probably ceased when the Ice Age ended and the sea rose, so that the straits appeared again, making any large movement of population impossible. Then civilization began to develop in the great river-plains of China, India and the Middle East. That process too went on for thousands of years. Cities were founded and destroyed and re-founded, empires rose and fell, nomad hordes attacked, conquered and were absorbed into more stable population groups; the stock of human knowledge slowly increased. At length one fruit of that knowledge, the perfected Scandinavian long-ship, gave such impetus to one particular migratory group that it could dare to achieve the conquest of the ocean. About AD 800 the Vikings reached the Faeroe Islands; in 870 they landed in Iceland, and by the beginning of the eleventh century Leif the Lucky had discovered Vinland the Good, part of the continent of North America. Vinland was given its name and its epithet because it was far better suited to human habitation than Greenland (settled in 981-2), or even Iceland, but the Vikings were unable to settle it. The inhabitants, whom they called Skraelings (roughly, ‘wretches’), were numerous and soon became hostile; the Vikings possessed no weapons that could compensate sufficiently for their numerical inferiority. The distances to Greenland, Iceland and Europe were too great to be conveniently and regularly crossed, even by long-ships. So Vinland was never colonized, though knowledge of it and of the regions to its north, Markland and Helluland – even a certain measure of intercourse – persisted in the Norse lands for centuries, as is shown by, among other things, the survival in Greenland of chests made apparently of larch wood from North America.
In the end worsening climatic conditions destroyed even the Greenland settlements. The Viking migrations led to nothing, unless (as is just possible) Christopher Columbus learned of the Vinland tradition.
Europe had other dreams of the West. Islands lying far out towards or beyond the sunset – the Islands of the Blest, the Garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, Atlantis, Tir-na-Og, Estotiland, the Seven Cities of Antillia – are omnipresent in legend. The Irish had traditions that St Brendan and others of his kidney, travelling in leather boats, found peaceful retreats for prayer across the seas (Irish monks do indeed seem to have got to Iceland before the Vikings, though not necessarily any further). The Welsh at some stage invented the saga of Prince Madoc, who sailed into the West, and, they eventually alleged, there became either the an
cestor of the Indians or the begetter of their language (the quest for Welsh-speaking Indians was to last into the nineteenth century). From time to time significant objects were washed onto the coasts of the Old World: bodies of strange men, wood carvings, branches of unknown trees. But these clues, like Vinland, led to nothing: they were displayed to a world which for long had no particular reason to bother about them.
The rediscovery of Vinland came about through coarser circumstances. By the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese were alarming their neighbours by their success as navigators and ocean-travellers. They had powerful motives: slaves, ivory and gold could be got from Africa, and they hoped to gain a share in the lucrative spice-trade, monopolized until then by the Venetians and the Turks. They succeeded in finding new routes to the Indies, by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Others determined to emulate them. In 1492 Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain, sent out a Genoese sailor of eccentric genius to find a westward route to the Indies, as he was sure he could. Instead he found the islands of the Caribbean. He made four voyages in all, on the last two of which, in 1498 and 1502, he discovered the mainland. Columbus called the Skraelings ‘Indians’ and supposed that the lands he had found were part of Asia; but at least he recognized the scope of his discoveries and prophesied their importance.
Now greed spurred on the Europeans to subdue the Americans. Even if gold and silver had not been discovered in Mexico and Peru, the quest for these metals or for a sea-route to Asia, or for such other wealth as America contained, would have drawn the white man into the New World, once he knew of its existence; but as it was, the resplendent civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas were staggeringly effective advertisements for the enterprise. Total lack of scruple where heathen savages were concerned made the work of despoliation morally easy as well as agreeable, and conquest could further be justified by the universally accepted necessity of preaching the Christian God’s word throughout the world. European diseases destroyed the American population more effectively than any weapons and demoralized the survivors by their scale: perhaps 90 per cent of the Indians died of these infections – smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever – in the first century after the discoveries. Lastly, European technology had advanced greatly since the Viking era. The Spaniards and Portuguese (who divided the western and eastern hemispheres between them) had guns, swords, armour, horses, improved sailing vessels and improved navigation. They also had first-rate military and political organization, perfected in the struggle against the Moors, and easy access to America along the Trade Wind latitudes. They could go where they wanted and do as they liked. By the middle of the sixteenth century they had effectively asserted their rule over most of Central and Southern America, and the Spaniards had also acquired, and were very slowly beginning to realize, claims to the dark continent north of Mexico.