Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  To a wonderful extent the New England township achieved all these things; and, in purely secular form, it lingers still, with its characteristic institutions, the town-meeting and the selectmen (annually elected administrative officers), in the quieter corners of New England. But land-hunger in Connecticut and Massachusetts continued to be strong. Land was plentiful; and, until the looming of the English Civil War dried up the supply of new immigrants, there was, as has been stated,23 an eager market for agrarian products of all kinds. Prices collapsed, it is true, in 1642; but they gradually recovered as New England sailors found markets abroad. Soon the demands of the market made themselves felt again on the farm; and, thus assured of profit, the farmers opened up more and more new land. They could not be kept within range of the towns and the ministers, and their land-hunger made them somewhat unreceptive to exhortations. ‘Outlying places’, said one preacher, ‘were nurseries of ignorance, profaneness and atheism.’ Said another, ‘The first that came over hither for the Gospel could not tell what to do with more land than a small number of acres, yet now men more easily swallow down so many hundreds and are not satisfied.’ A third exclaimed, ‘Sure there were other and better things the People of God came hither for than the best spot of ground, the richest soil.’ No doubt: but the People of God chose to forget it. They chose to live in America, not as members of a close-knit community of piety, but as individualist farmers, each seeking his and his family’s salvation, economically and spiritually, on his own. Had they cared to they could have argued that they were the truest Puritans, individual salvation being the central value of Puritanism; no wonder that, in propitious circumstances (and the frontier of settlement in North America was very propitious), the value was followed to its logical, ‘he travels fastest who travels alone’, conclusion. But by the perhaps excessively strict standards of its founders the city on the hill began to look less like Jerusalem than like a displaced Sodom or Gomorrah; and Bradford shook his head over the degeneracy of Plymouth, too.

  So perhaps it was as well that the eyes of all people were directed elsewhere; but this, too, was a cause of distress and saddened John Winthrop before his death. First there was Laud: they had fled him. Then there was the Presbyterian Parliament: they defied it. Then Cromwell arose, an Independent, one of their own – and instead of adopting the New England way of compulsory Congregationalism, as exemplified in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, he took up the ideas of the black flock among them, Roger Williams’s sheep of Rhode Island, that hotbed of religious liberty! ‘Toleration’ was all the cry.24 The New England Puritans were rising to the peak of their political strength: Connecticut and New Haven were settled, and in 1652 Massachusetts asserted its dominion over the regions of New Hampshire and Maine to the north, where many of the ungodly had been rash enough to settle within reach of the saintly commonwealth’s long arm. In the same year it assumed one of the chief attributes of sovereignty and began to mint its own money. But to what avail? The errand into the wilderness had failed. Very success was corrupting the new Canaan from within; and the Puritans they had left behind were neglecting the lessons of Massachusetts orthodoxy. What could it matter to an English Independent that Master Thomas Shepard, the minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had declared it ‘Satan’s policy, to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration’? To the men of Bunyan’s generation only the adoption of such a policy could save them from Bedford jail. To their eyes (some of them began to say so as early as 1643, when Roger Williams, seeking, successfully, to protect Rhode Island from Massachusetts expansionism, went to England for help) the compulsory orthodoxy of New England was cold and sterile. Later holders of this opinion were to talk of the ‘glacial age’ of the New England mind. The saga was over.

  Had it nothing to show but anticlimax? The diminuendo of a commercial republic where the founders had intended to build the City of God? ‘Thus stands the case between God and us,’John Winthrop had boasted in 1630, ‘we are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a Commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own Articles, we have professed to enterprise these Actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon besought him of favour and blessing.’ He had earnestly warned his followers that there must be no backsliding, for fear of the Lord’s judgement; and he had promised them God’s blessing if they were faithful. Perhaps the promise was a presumptuous mistake. ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ They had backslid; and yet, to judge by all earthly standards, God had blessed them. It was more than a little awkward and absurd. A sense of humiliating failure haunted the ministers at the end of the seventeenth century. New England was no longer the land of the covenant. They could take no comfort in its sublunar achievements: a high, and improving, standard of living for all; a free and stable society; a thriving life of the mind and spirit.25 Where was Zion?

  Perhaps there was one answer which would have comforted them somewhat. At any rate it must be offered today. Puritanism, it must be said again, influenced the whole of English Protestantism, being only its most radical form. Its most characteristic note was one of intense introspection, intense concern with individual salvation. As it seeped through England and conquered America it deeply affected the lives of countless men and women, many of whom were anything but Puritans in the strict sense. The result was that, in spite of clerical jeremiads, the English and American character, at its best and most effective, was sober, respectable, self-reliant, energetic, content on the whole with decent, homely pleasures. Its dominant traits of earnestness and uprightness can be found as much in Jane Austen and Dr Johnson as in John Adams and Dr Franklin, and lay behind the greatest achievements of the Victorians. It was the most remarkable work of the English Reformation, and might, however reluctantly, have been accepted as a sufficient justification by those ministers who tried so earnestly to create a godly people. They well knew, after all, how inevitably far short of perfection all human endeavour must fall.

  In America, the New England character became almost proverbial. We shall see it making the Revolution, the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. Its greatness lay in its reasonableness, earnestness and zeal for righteousness; its weakness in a tendency towards hypocrisy, covetousness and self-righteousness. Through it Puritanism persisted into later times. The city on a hill failed; but it was one of greater authority even than John Winthrop’s who promised that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within you’. The course of American history would have given a Puritan reason to suppose that this promise, at least, had been kept.

  5 Indians 1492–1920

  We were happy when he first came. We first thought he came from the Light; but he comes like the dusk of the evening now, not like the dawn of the morning. He comes like a day that has passed, and night enters our future with him…

  Plains Chieftain, c. 1870

  Friends, it has been our misfortune to welcome the white man. We have been deceived. He brought with him some shining things that pleased our eyes; he brought weapons more effective than our own. Above all he brought the spirit-water that makes one forget old age, weakness and sorrow. But I wish to say to you that if you wish to possess these things for yourselves, you must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your store-room filled, then look around for a neighbour whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has.

  Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux

  Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith.

  Felix S. Cohen, 1949

  Virginia and Massachusetts exacted the space devoted to them here, for not only did they retain their primacy among the English settlements down to the American Revolution and beyond, but between them they perfectly illustrate, indeed epitomize, the great colonizing movement and its
roots. But the sister settlements that followed them rapidly must not be forgotten. As England put forth her strength in the seventeenth century her colonies spread further along the Atlantic coast of North America, and flourished in the West Indies. Massachusetts bred New Hampshire (finally created an independent province in 1692) as well as Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Dutch of New Amsterdam extinguished New Sweden (the future state of Delaware) only to fall themselves to English conquest in 1664, when New Amsterdam and New Netherland became the city and colony of New York. Further south three proprietary colonies were planted – ‘New Caesarea or New Jersey’ (1664), the work of Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret; Pennsylvania (1681), founded by William Perm to be a refuge for Quakers and to enrich his family; and Maryland (1632), founded by the first Lord Baltimore as a refuge (though it was not to be much used as such) for Catholics. Virginia sprouted North Carolina, on Albemarle Sound, first settled from the older colony during the 1650s, though its legal existence dates from 1663. South Carolina, on the other hand, though born legally of the same 1663 charter, acquired no settlers until 1670, when it began a thriving career. The last addition to this string of colonies was Georgia, founded in 1732, in part to serve as a place of rehabilitation for persons imprisoned for debt in England, partly as a plantation for the cultivation of silk, but chiefly as a buffer state against the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana.

  For while, to the north, the English colonies and their outposts – Nova Scotia and Newfoundland – jostled Canada, the southern boundary of English North America was a matter of continuous international strife from the foundation of South Carolina onwards. French enterprise linked the two areas of friction. Louis XIV’s brave explorers, inspired partly by an imperial vision and partly by a hunger to monopolize the fur-trade, claimed the Great Lakes and the Mississippi for their King; and in 1699 founded a colony about the mouths of the great river which they named Louisiana in his honour. The Spaniards, by contrast, stood mainly on the defensive, having much to lose. They still had the energy to reconquer New Mexico (lost to a great rebellion of Pueblo Indians in 1680) and, so late as 1769, to enter and settle Upper California. But their policy was dominated by dread of English competition to the north and French competition to the west. On their side the English dreaded encirclement and extinction by the French, or by a Franco-Spanish combination. The French dreaded an English challenge for control of the Mississippi.1 The obsessive rivalries of Europe had reached North America; for more than a century they would determine its history.

  The three competing empires differed in character. Florida’s value to Spain was chiefly strategic: the colony protected the Bahamas Channel and Spanish communications with Mexico and the sugar islands. Accordingly it was garrisoned rather than inhabited, though Franciscans did their usual excellent missionary work among the Indians. The English colonies, we have seen, were agrarian and commercial, and grew ever more thickly populated. New France gradually acquired a farming population, but its lifeblood, like that of Louisiana, was the trade in peltries – beaver fur and deer hides.

  Such dissimilar entities, it may be thought, could well have afforded to co-exist. Unhappily they were not different enough. All had an interest in the fur-trade, for one thing; and the habit of suspicion, fear and rivalry, common to all three, did the rest. In this, we see, Old and New Worlds were much alike.

  But in the means of competition the continents differed sharply. Not for many years could there be a conventional war of regular soldiers in North America, or even conventional commercial rivalry. The tangled forests were too wide, white numbers (for warfare) too few, European tactics too inflexible. All Europeans had to learn the lessons taught New Englanders by King Philip’s War (1675–6), that ‘it is one thing to drill a company in a plain champaign and another to drive an enemy through the desert woods’; and that Indian allies were absolutely necessary, to act as auxiliaries and scouts. The Indian, it emerged, was the key to dominion in the wilderness. When North America was at what passed for peace, imperial success was measured in terms of influence with the tribes. When, as repeatedly happened, peace was admitted to be war, the Europeans, it has been well said, showed themselves ‘ready to fight to the last Indian’.2

  Luckily for the intruders, the tribes were commonly happy to fight each other. They had the usual human grievances against their neighbours, and war was a principal occupation among them. Success in war was the leading source of individual prestige. Indeed, before the European arrival, wars seem to have been waged in many cases solely to provide chances for warriors to win this prestige. It was a lethal game, with elaborate rules, and so addicted were most of the Indians to it that in the early eighteenth century the Cherokees could remark, ‘We cannot live without war. Should we make peace with the Tuscaroras, we must immediately look out for some other nation with whom we can engage in our beloved occupation.’ The skill gained in this wilderness conflict proved invaluable for attacking or defending European possessions.

  Furthermore, only Indians could provide the commodities of the peltries trade; and there was much money to be made out of them. For as time went on the Indians grew ever more dependent on European goods. By the same token they grew more and more manipulable. Those who controlled the supply of essential articles such as guns controlled their customers. And so the curtain rose on the tragedy of the native peoples of North America.

  There had been a long prologue. It is easy to forget, when studying the comparatively gentle rule of Spain north of Mexico (at any rate after the Pueblo revolt), what the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas had involved. The crimes of the Anglo-Americans pale beside those of Cortès and his successors. Hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed outright; even more were worked slowly and horribly to death as slaves. The fact that European diseases were even more destructive hardly excuses the conquistadores. One Carib Indian, about to be burned to death after a rebellion, refused baptism, though it could take him to heaven, because he feared he would find more Christians there. Genocide is an unpleasant word, but it seems appropriate here. If the North American Indians had known what had happened south of the Rio Grande, they might well have trembled at the future.

  2. The Indians and the Anglo-Americans

  But they were blessedly ignorant. They did not even know how completely they were trapped in the destiny of the Europeans. Towards the end of their days of freedom and power one man of genius among them, the Shawnee Tecumseh (1768–1813), saw the truth and realized that only by uniting in one nation might the Indians save themselves. Tecumseh (‘Crouching Tiger’) was a great general, a compelling orator, a generous and humane man. But his vision came too late, the red men had thrown away their safety and their numbers in ceaseless wars among themselves; after delusive early success Tecumseh failed, and died in battle.3 The Fates were not to be balked.

  Few historical themes are of greater fascination than the tale of the North American Indian; but it cannot be told here for its own sake. A history of the United States must be a history of victors; the defeated are relevant chiefly for what they tell us of their conquerors. Sed victa Catoni; the sage Auden, however, tells us that

  Few even wish they could read

  the lost annals

  of a cudgelled people.4

  Honour to those few; but they must seek satisfaction elsewhere. Let us see what the cudgelled can reveal of their oppressors.

  Names are revealing. What did the races call each other?

  The Anglo-Americans had a long list of savoury adjectives and nouns for the Indians: for example, besotted, childish, cruel, degraded, dirty, diseased, drunken, faithless, gluttonous, insolent, jealous, lazy, lying, murdering, profligate, stupid, thieving, timorous, uncivilizable, vindictive, worthless; barbarians, demons, heathen, savages, varmints (vermin). The red men were no less definite. At first, by the gentle Caribs, the Europeans were called ‘The People from Heaven’. Later, Indians to the north, who came to know them well, dubbed them ‘People Greedily
Grasping for Land’. Members of the Algonquian group most commonly called the English ‘The Coatwearing People’; next often, ‘The Cut-Throats’.

  In many respects the Indians badly needed to be discovered by Europe. The greatest intelligence5 must be limited by the means available to it, and Indian technological backwardness was largely inevitable, because of the absence in the Americas of easily worked tin and iron deposits, and of draught animals (hence the principle of the wheel could not be exploited). The sacred book and higher mathematics of the Maya, staggering stone and metalwork achievements, the great Inca political system, might make Central and Andean America glorious: they could not nullify the Indians’ weakness in other respects. So it was in part with delight and fascination that the intelligent red men greeted the coming of the People from Heaven and their marvellous possessions. When the Spanish entered New Mexico6 in 1598 they brought with them sheep, goats and horses. Time, chance and the Pueblo rebellion gradually spread these things among the western tribes who thereupon began to evolve the dazzling Plains culture which has so long enchanted the world’s imagination. Many Indians now became shepherds and horsemen (and brilliant horse-thieves);7 mounted on piebald ponies and armed, originally, with spearheads made from old Spanish sword blades, then with guns got in trade from the East, they became mighty hunters of buffalo. No longer was it necessary to stampede a herd over a cliff, or to wait for a weak or injured beast to stray; now swift riders could select, pursue and bring down their prey whenever they chose. The result was health and wealth: finally abandoning almost all sedentary pursuits to the women, the men brought in meat in such vast quantities that there was more than enough for everybody. As a result the population grew strong and numerous. Male leaders of the Sioux, resplendent in eagle-feather war-bonnets, made the most picturesque appearance; but it is through the women’s work that we can most clearly see what the new way of life amounted to. Men might be artists and paint pictorial calendars on buffalo leather; it was the women who, for example, jerked the surplus meat; that is, sliced it thin and dried it; or pounded it together with berries and poured melted fat and marrow over it to make pemmican. It was they who ornamented clothing and parfleche (bags made of raw buffalo hide) with porcupine needles, beadwork, elks’ teeth and paint; they who made and painted the buffalo hide lodges (tipis). Meantime the men danced the annual Sun Dance, to win supernatural favour for the tribe; or ritual dances to secure a good hunt; or the war dance, after which they would go off to raid rival tribes and earn personal glory. The greatest feat was to count coup, that is, to touch a chosen foe with a special stick and get away without harming him or being harmed. At times war would be suspended. Then there would be great gatherings, for gambling, trade, foot races, horse races; it was thus that the sign language of the Plains developed, to make communication possible between tribes that spoke different languages. The problem of communication with fellow-tribesmen over a distance was solved by the device of signals made with smoke from buffalo-dung fires. It was a good life; small wonder that many tribes abandoned their settled villages for a nomadic existence. All was well so long as the buffalo herds lasted; and they teemed inexhaustibly until the white settlers came.