THE PEOPLE & THEIR ORIGINS

1. THE BEGINNINGS

It has often been said that America has no history, or not much of it. This is a false opinion that must be quickly removed if we are to understand the modern nation. There is indeed no American Louis XIV, no Richelieu, no Henry VIII; no Napoleon, no Bismarck, no Potemkin; no long record of foreign wars; American school children can hardly be asked to look back at any great national military hero to revere. Washington and Lincoln, and the Revolution and Civil War, are sometimes used to fill this unimportant gap. The Revolution was not really a revolution as far as the Americans were concerned; for them it was only an episode by which they cut the surviving political links with their far-off British homeland; links which were already no more than a trivial encumbrance, interfering slightly in the process of their own development. The Civil War, which they fought among themselves after nearly a hundred years of independence, was indeed an important stage in the history of the technology of war; it taught a lesson to the world in general — that for success in war, skillful leadership and courageous fighting qualities are not enough unless supported by industrial power. For the Americans in particular it merely confirmed a well-established principle that had just been challenged for the first time: that the United States formed a single nation — though it also created resentments that still survive.

The things that really matter in American history are not wars and major events of this kind; what matters is the process by which first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people built their own society, developed the natural resources of their country, and produced a political system which has been not only stable and resilient but also tolerant and able to stimulate and respond to very substantial, constructive and genuine self-criticism — as with Vietnam and then Watergate.

It is only partly true to say that French history belongs to the French people, British to the British people. Their history (or that part of it which children learn at school, and which influence their thinking) is mainly the story of the actions and interactions of rulers and great men and women. More recently the ordinary people have developed a significance oа their own, less controlled from above, less passive, less alienated. In Europe this process has involved revolutionary change. But in American history, the ordinary people have been the most significant actors from the very beginning. America's past belongs to all the people, and the present and the past can talk to one another on equal terms. Modern Europeans are, in a sense, separated from their past by fundamental changes in their systems of values, as they have come to respect achieved success more than inherited privileges. But America-has always valued achievement and deliberately rejected hereditary privilege.

In every society the things that actually happen are often far different from the things that are supposed to happen according to the accepted ideals, and this is true of America too. But myths are influential, and the mythology of America is concerned with individual effort, enterprise, adventure, a practical belief in equal respect for all people, equality of opportunity and, through the free exchange of goods, fair reward for each person's work.

The twentieth century has brought two big new elements into the foundations of American life. On the one hand, in a world made smaller by modern communications, the United States has become a great power, unable to avoid involvement and responsibility in international affairs. On the other hand, at home the old system of individualistic free enterprise has had to be supplemented by state intervention. But the Americans' view of themselves and their ideals have not been greatly affected by these changes. Their past, and the myths connected with it, have an immediate and continuing part to play in their present-day life. There is a continuous thread running back from modern industrialisation and automation, through the advance of civilisation the old frontier, to the earliest beginnings of settlement from Europe.

The first settlement of North America from Europe was slow, hesitant and without plan, quite unlike that of the area to the south. In the few decades after Columbus' journey of 1492, the exploration and then the conquest of Mexico and the southern continent, from Spain and Portugal, soon gathered an astonishing momentum, helped by the gold and other treasures which were found.

In 1497 — 8 John Cabot made two pioneering journeys across the North Atlantic. On the first, in the ship Matthew, with a crew of eighteen, he reached islands off the St. Lawrence estuary in Canada. The second expedition, with several ships, sailed down the mainland coast to a point well south of what is now New York. Cabot was a Venetian who had settled in England and changed his name from Cabot. He was financed by merchants in Bristol, and supported by the English King Henry VII. His expedition met native Americans and bartered European goods for furs. Cabot died soon after the second voyage, and his claim that the lands he had visited belonged to England was made quite unreal by the lack of any further expedition for many decades. Instead there were irregular forays and piratical attacks on Spanish treasure ships in the late 1500s.

By this time the Spanish and Portuguese had completed the conquest of Mexico and parts of the southern continent. They had created a coherent system of administration, and had founded more than two hundred Spanish towns, including most of today's national capitals. Missionaries had converted most of the surviving native inhabitants to Christianity; there were two dozen bishops, some offices of the Inquisition, and plans for building fine stone churches and cathedrals, soon to be completed. The scale of the Spanish achievements of the sixteenth century was made possible by the exploitation of the native people and of their already well-developed skills, together with the labour of the first slaves from Africa. It was all rather like the conquest of Western Europe by the Romans fifteen hundred years before — but probably with more cruelty and a deeper cultural penetration on a far bigger scale.

During the sixteenth century Spanish explorers went all along the western and southern coasts of North America and up the rivers, and by 1600 had established scattered settlements. In 1609 they were far enough advanced to build a palace for the government of New Mexico on the plaza of their new town of Santa Fe, far north of the border of Mexico itself. Effectively the two-thirds of the present United States territory west of the Mississippi became part of the Spanish Empire, except for parts temporarily colonised by the French in the first half of the eighteenth century. By the time these territories came into possession of the United States, at various dates in the first half of the nineteenth century, there were towns with Spanish names (and a few French, in particular, New Orleans), but penetration into the country from Mexico had lost its original momentum.

The first northern settlements were unsuccessful. Some French Huguenots established themselves on the Atlantic coast of Florida but were wiped out by a Spanish naval expedition which built a fort and founded the city of St. Augustine inJJ565^ Though it was Spanish for more than two hundred years it is considered to be the oldest city in the United States. Two attempts at colonising North America from England failed in the 1580s. The first group of settlers stayed only for a year, the second vanished, and no trace of them has ever been found. But in 1607 a London merchants' company gathered a group of men, some of them criminals released from prison, who bound themselves to, a period of 'indentured' service, under supervisors appointed by the company. They landed at a place which they called Jamestown, a little way up one of the rivers which flow into Chesapeake Bay, in what is now Virginia — though that name, in honour of the English Virgin Queen Elizabeth I, had already been adopted to describe the whole of North America.

The Jamestown settlers were followed by others in the next few years, and by 1620 there were about a thousand, including families. The misery and discontent of the first groups were replaced by a new confidence, as settlers were allowed to have their own land and learned to grow tobacco. Slightly later than this Virginia settlement, a French colony was set up at Quebec, far up the St. Lawrence River which Jacques Cartier had explored a long time before.

When they remember the beginnings of their nation, Americans think not so much of the rather miserable Jamestown settlement, but of the English Puritans, now known as the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed at Cape Cod, near Boston, in 1620. They had first left England, after conflict with the authorities over their refusal to comply with current religious laws, and spent a dozen years in exile at Leyden, Holland. There they planned to go to America, and in 1620 the small ship Mayflower took them, and others who joined them in England, across the Atlantic. In November the M ay flower reached Cape Cod, on the coast of what is now Massachusetts, and they decided to stay⁷ there, at a place near modern Boston which they called Plymouth, after the English port from which they had sailed.

The Pilgrim Fathers suffered terrible hardships at first, and half of them died during their first winter months; but those who survived for the first year managed to live on fish and reap a harvest from the land in the summer, with the help of friendly native Americans. A year after they arrived, another ship came from England, and they celebrated this arrival, and the harvest they had gathered, with a feast of thanksgiving. The anniversary of their thanksgiving feast is still celebrated every November as a public holiday; Thanksgiving and Independence Day are the two great occasions by which Americans remember each year the two main stages in their national history, foundation and independence.

Between 1620 and 1640 the Pilgrim Fathers were followed by many more shiploads of settlers in New England. During the same period New Amsterdam was founded from Holland on the small island of Manhattan, further south. In 1664 (by which time there were 7,000 people in New Netherland) the English took over the colony and changed its name to New York. But Dutch names still survive, such as Harlem, originally a village in the north of Manhattan Island.

Meanwhile, further south, Virginia developed and the settlers were helped by the beginnings of the cruel slave trade, through which merchants, mainly English, brought slaves from Africa. And some small «groups from other parts of Europe established themselves on parts of themiddle coast.

The last of the main foundations came in 1682. At this time the Quakers had become the most energetic representatives in England of ; Puritan tradition, and William Penn, a prominent English Quaker, lied a group of religious sympathisers to settle in Pennsylvania, with attractive arrangements for the allocation of land and with a ready-imade plan for a central town at Philadelphia. This settlement may be padded to that of the Pilgrim Fathers at the centre of the American mythology; the Protestant individualism of these early pioneers has been idealised to provide the United States with a symbol of its original purpose.

The idealistic motives which inspired the first migrants to New England in 1620-40 still remain important for the Americans' picture |of themselves. These early adventurers were for the most part intensely religious people, and though religion was not the only source of inspiration for their enterprise it was an important element in a set of motives in which one can see signs of consistency. Many wanted to escape from the oppressive religious and social atmosphere of the England which they left behind. Most of them were Protestants not ready to accept the structure of doctrine and religious practice of the Church of England which had been evolved from the Reformation. In England their beliefs caused them inconvenience and sometimes danger. But their individualism was not only religious, but also economic and social. A European middle class, based on individual enterprise and effort, was already developing rather painfully, and more, effectively in England and the Netherlands than in the rest of Europe. The idea of migration to America was attractive to some of the energetic individualists of the time, who were able to think for themselves and understand argument on political, religious and philosophical questions; they easily became critical of the pattern of English society. When they crossed to America they brought with them a determination, to build a new society which was free of the bad elements of the old, while preserving those which seemed to them good.

It does not take much imagination to think of the courage and other admirable qualities needed by the early settlers. They left behind them all security and everything that was familiar, they knew the risk of shipwreck, they faced tremendous uncertainty and hardship in their new home. Each was far more of a pioneer than any of today's computer-aided astronauts.

The early American communities were religious, hardworking and serious. They were searching for a new freedom, but their enthusiasm for freedom did not prevent them from building their own demands for conformity, and they could themselves be intolerant towards unconventional people. Their enterprise and their ideals have provided modern America with an inspiration made the more lively by the fact that it is easy to concentrate on the favourable aspects of their story. But there are many unfavourable aspects too.

In the eighteenth century the settlements along the east coast were organised as thirteen colonies, each with a governor, under British rule. Relations with the home government were not always good. Meanwhile, the colonies grew and developed, their populations constantly reinforced from Europe and particularly from Britain, Holland and Germany. In fact, many of the settlers did not come willingly. Some bound themselves to serve for long periods to pay for their transport; some were convicts, transported in servitude instead of being hanged; some were thieves or murderers; others, people who had offended the British authorities in ways for which we would now have sympathy. And there was also the flood of slaves brought over from Africa and sold to work in the plantations of the South.

Even the New England Puritans did some things which, by the standards of their own ideals, were thoroughly discreditable. For a time Massachusetts had a government in which religious enthusiasm was carried to tyrannical lengths, and in some of the provinces, power was concentrated in the hands of a few privileged people.

When the colonists declared their independence in 1776 they were still predominantly British in origin and in outlook, and for some time afterwards the British were still the most numerous among the new settlers. Later migrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were for the most part not brought to America by ideals of the same kind as those which inspired the Pilgrim Fathers and the settlers who went with William Penn. The people from Ireland, Italy and Poland in particular, went to America in order to escape from intolerable poverty

in their own home countries, and they were regarded as inferiors by the Americans of earlier generations. Even so, however different the position of the new arrivals as compared with the old, there is still an important element in common among them all. All were in rebellion against something which they did not like in their own environments and all were prepared to take great risks and face great hardships in trying to build a new life for themselves. All white American-born citizens today are descended from people who at some time made the great decision to move from Europe. This very fact gives them a common cultural background, and they are very conscious of sharing it.

The picture of early America would not be complete without reference to the special type of development in the South, with a rural economy and organisation different from that of the northern states. The first settlements in Virginia were commercial ventures employing subordinate workers; English investors made money from the tobacco they planted. Later, further south, cotton plantations demanded labour on a large scale, and could most suitably be organised in large units. The need for labour was fulfilled by the trade in slaves brought over from Africa. So the population of European origin was supplemented by vast numbers of African slaves, who soon came to seem necessary to the economy of the South. Thus there is a certain irony about the inclusion of the South in the American story. The ideals of the Pilgrim Fathers and those who settled in the northern states were above all individualistic and egalitarian, based on the idea that all people were ^eijiial in the sight of God and that they should have equal consideration and opportunity in their earthly life. Yet in the South the plantations produced a social structure far more rigidly divided than that of the old England which the Pilgrim Fathers had rejected. From the beginning many Americans in the North found slavery offensive to their philosophy, while people in the South not оЪ1у accepted slavery but seceded from the Union to preserve it. It took four years of war to bring them back and to free the slaves, but inequality survived.

Another unfavourable part of the story, concerning both the South and North, is the relationship of the settlers with the, native Americans. Before any settlement from Europe, America was populated, by scattered tribes of people, who are thought to have come originally from central Asia and Siberia. They probably migrated between twelve and thirty thousand years ago, crossing by raft or ice to Alaska and making their way southwards to more hospitable climates. By 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic from Europe, all the Americas were inhabited by the descendants of these original migrants from central Asia. The European explorers called them 'Red Indians'.

This description was unfortunate and confusing, but it is still in common use. Spanish estimates made nearly a hundred years later suggest that there may have been about twenty million 'Indians' in the area to the south of the present United States. Among them some, in certain areas, had quite highly organised and creative societies, though some of their civilisations had collapsed long before. The Spanish — Portuguese conquest undoubtedly killed large numbers of the old inhabitants of these countries; but most of those who survived were so heavily and speedily influenced by the conquerors that within a dozen generations the majority of the population were no longer definable as Indians or Europeans.

With the native Americans of North America the story is very different. Modern estimates suggest that in 1600 there were only about a million people in the whole of what is now the United States, few of them were near the east coast and for most, the first contacts with settlers from Europe were spread over two centuries or more. These 'Amerindians' (as they are sometimes called) lived scattered in many dozens of small tribes, each with little knowledge of any world beyond the areas where it lived or wandered. They had simple tools, no writing, no substantial social organisations; some were nomadic. To the European settlers they seemed primitive, and through four centuries the relationship has been partly peaceful and collaborative, partly hostile. In the long run, whenever there was conflict, the Indians were the losers.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1152