A Confluence of Cultures

Contemporary American society is the direct descendant of the colonists – and slaves – who sailed in Columbus’s wake.

By James Axtell

We might well call America a Columbian mosaic because it was the Italian admiral who effectively bound together all of the world’s continents with the shipping lanes of one continuous ocean sea. When Columbus bumped into America en route to Asia after a maritime apprenticeship in Europe and Africa, he made it likely – indeed, inevitable – that the peoples of the world’s insular continents would no longer live in splendid isolation. Although he never set foot on the North American continent, he was personally responsible for introducing Europeans to America and Americans – albeit in chains – to Europe. It was left to Nicolas de Ovando, his successor as governor of the Indies, to introduce African slaves to the western hemisphere in 1502, just as Columbus set sail on his fourth and final voyage. The paternity of triracial America is not in doubt; the only question is, How did the new American mosaic that had taken shape by 1790 come about?

One short answer is that Columbus and his European successors found a “virgin” paradise of innocence and harmony and proceeded to rape the land, kill the natives, and pillage Africa to replace the American victims of the “genocide”. There is, of course, some truth to that, but not enough to be morally useful or historically honest. If we can take our itchy fingers off the trigger of moral outrage for a spell, we might be able to view the human phase of what is being called the Columbian Encounter less as an excuse for passing judgment than as a vehicle for understanding.

For we stand in sore need of some critical distance from the irreparable problems of the past. We might well cultivate a little disinterestedness toward both the failing and successes of our predecessors in hopes of taking courage and counsels of prudence from their struggles and solutions. Since their circumstances – their field of experiences, opportunities, and limitations – are never the same as ours, we cannot draw universal laws from their actions, good or ill. We can only try to emulate their good example and to avoid their worst mistakes by paying close attention to the historical circumstances in which they acted, by recognizing that their time is not our time and that we must be equally alert to the complexity and uniqueness of our own circumstances as we strive to thread a moral path through the present. Perhaps then we can see that the American social mosaic of the 1990s is the lineal descendant of the 1790s, and that, although we cannot change the facts of history, we can, through a critical and disinterested examination of their causes, suggest a few ways to improve the personal and group relations Americans continue to fashion in their modern mosaic.

A test of moral mettle and patience arises as soon as one begins to discuss the influx of Europeans or white people into monochromatic Indian America. On the simplest level, what do we call the process and the participants? Since all language is loaded with value judgments, it makes quite a difference whether we refer to the process as colonization, imperialism, settlement, emigration, or invasion. By the same token, were the newcomers imperialists, conquistadors, invaders, trespassers, and killers, or were they, on balance, only Europeans, whites, colonists, strangers, and settlers? It has been one of the cardinal rules of the historical canon – one I see no reason to lay aside – that the parties of the past deserve equal treatment from historians, equal respect and empathy but also equal criticism and justice. As judge, jury, prosecutor, and counsel for the defense of people who can no longer testify on their own behalf, the historian cannot be any less than impartial in his or her judicial review of the past. For that reason, I suggest, we should avoid language that is inflammatory or prejudicial to any historical person or party.

How, then, did the face of America become so blanched when only 300 years earlier it had been uniformly brown? The short answer is that Europeans emigrated in great numbers to the Americas and, when they got there, reproduced themselves with unprecedented success. But a somewhat fuller explanation must take account of regional and national variations.

The first immigrants, of course, were Spanish, not merely the infamous conquistadors, whose bloody feats greatly belied their small numbers, but Catholic priests and missionaries, paper-pushing clerks and officials who manned the far-flung bureaucracy of empire, and ordinary settlers: peasants, artisans, merchants, and not a few hidalgos, or minor noblemen. In the 16^th century perhaps 240,000 Spaniards entered American ports. They were joined by 450,000 in the next century. The great majority were young men; only in the late 16^th century did the proportion of women reach one-third. This meant that many men had to marry, or at least cohabit with, Indian women, which in turn gave rise to a large mestizo or mixed population.

In sharp contrast to the moderately large number of Spanish immigrants were the French in Canada, which Voltaire dismissed as “a few acres of snow”. In a century and a half, Mother France sent only 15,000 emigrants to the Laurentian colony, the majority of them against their will. Only 500 paid their own way, many of them were merchants eager to crash in on the fur and import trade. the rest were reluctant engages (indentured servants), soldiers, convicts, and filles du roi or “King’s girls”, sent to supply the colony’s superabundant, and lonely bachelors with wives. Not until 1710 were the Canadian genders balanced. But even in the 17^th century, Canadians married young and produced often, doubling the population at least every 30 years. Fortunately for their Indian hosts and English neighbors, this high rate of natural increase was wasted on a minuscule base population.

The biggest source of white faces in North America was Great Britain. In the 17^th century she sent more than 150,000 of their sons and daughters to the mainland colonies and at least 350,000 more in the next century. In 1690, white people numbered around 194,000; a hundred years later they teemed at more than three million.

Yet numbers alone do not allow us to draw a moral bead on the early American story. We must know not only how many Europeans immigrated to – or invaded – Indian America but why.

For many but by no means all settlers of New England, religion played a key role in their decision to uproot their families and move to America. But religious motives did not always guarantee the health, sovereignty, or well-being of the American natives. New England missionaries not only reduced the native land-base by resettling the Indians in smaller, anglicized “praying towns”, but inadvertently increased the natives’ risk of contagious disease. In other words, good intentions alone are not sufficient to exempt historical actors from criticism, and history, unlike the law, has no statute of limitations.

Other motives are equally hard to exonerate or condemn wholesale. Can we blame ordinary European farmers, craftsmen, and merchants for wanting to forge a better life for their families, even if they wound up on land that once belonged to America’s native inhabitants? The vast majority of immigrants hardly, if ever, saw the original owners, much less cheated or forced them from their land. Even male freeholders seldom knew about the back-room chicanery of their elected representatives who speculated with ill-gotten Indian lands. Much less could the voters control the machinations of imperial officials and army officers who schemed for native property. If we blame ordinary colonists for wanting lower taxes, less crowding, more land, higher wages, healthier climates, more and better food, and family harmony, we will have to include most of the human race in the blame.

On the other hand, immigrants were not only drawn to America but pushed out of Europe. Many shipped out because they were trying to run away from something. We may have little sympathy for those who chose to evade their civil responsibilities and the law, but what about the scrupulous avoiders of sin and immorality, who ran from drinking, gambling, and wantonness as if from plague?

If we want to take a hard-nosed stance on the spoiling, illegitimate, or immoral character of white immigration, we would do better to focus on those who came solely to hijack America’s wealth to Europe, often with the health, witting or unwitting, of its native owners and trustees, or those who carried war and destruction to Indian country, directly or indirectly in pursuit of European geopolitical objectives. Obviously it is easier to pillory the designers, and to some extent the agents, of military and economic imperialism than it is the immigrants who carried no conscious intent to defraud, harm, or dispossess anyone. Oppressive Spanish mine owners, freebooting pirates, absentee owners of West Indian sugar plantations, and fork-tongued traders who swindled Indians of their furs and skins with watered rum and false measures undoubtedly deserve our censure, mostly because they contravened the moral standards of their own day.

At the same time, we should recognize that to condemn every aggressive military, religious, or economic action in the past is to question some of the fundaments of Western society, past and present. If everything associated with mercantilism, capitalism, evangelical religion, and armed force is beyond the moral pale, we may find it difficult, if not impossible, to approach America’s past – or the histories of most of the world’s cultures – with the requisite empathy, understanding, and disinterestedness.

Another topic that requires an abundance of all three qualities but allows ample room for moral judgment is slavery. Nineteen percent of the population of the newly founded United states was black, the result of a legal, culturally sanctioned, but heinous trade in African slaves. The slave trade was already ancient by the time America was brought into the European orbit in 1492. But the discovery of gold, the development of sugar plantations, and the founding of cities in Spanish and Portuguese America created a vast new market for the human chattels brought from the African interior by rival African kings, merchants and war chiefs.

Before independence, the Spanish alone transported 1.5 million blacks to their colonies, perhaps 200,000 before 1650. In the Caribbean the blacks replaced Indian laborers who had died in massive numbers from oppression, dislocation, and imported diseases. By the 17^th century, the native populations of Mexico and coastal Peru were also seriously depleted, so black slaves were substituted as panners of gold, cutters of sugar cane, sailors, shipwrights, and particularly domestic servants in urban households. They did their work so well that by the 18^th century the majority of these blacks were free, especially the women and children of the cities who were often liberated when their owner died.

In Canada the French preferred Indian slaves from the eastern Plains and Great Lakes. In 125 years they imported only 1,132 Africans (fewer than 10 a year), mostly as household servants in Quebec and Montreal. In contrast, French Louisiana between 1719 and 1735 imported some 7,000 Africans. Yet in 1735 only 3,400 remained to be counted. The same loss of life must have occurred during the next 50 years: more than 20,000 slaves arrived, but the black population in 1785 was only 16,500. Even the importation of slaves could not keep pace with Louisiana’s morbid climate and the physical demands of plantation labor.

The English demand for black labor grew much more slowly than did the Spanish, largely because the supply of indentured servants from the British Isles was adequate until the late 17^th century. After 1720, demand for acculturated west Indian slaves outstripped the supply, and 80 percent of the slaves for English plantations came directly from Africa. Although the condition of perpetual bondage was never easy, life on English farms and plantations – for economic more than humanitarian reasons – was tolerable enough to allow the black population to increase naturally as well as by constant infusions of new Africans.

Despite the uninvited presence of some four million Europeans and Africans, it could be argued – and was – that America in 1790 had plenty of elbow room for natives and strangers. Even if the natives had been at full, pre-Columbian strength, some said, a slight change in their economy would have freed up enough land for all the newcomers without any noticeable pinch. By giving up the wild, nomadic life of the hunter for the taming, sedentary life of the farmer, the Indians (by which was meant male Indians) would require only a fraction of their former lands. And if for some perverse reason they did not like the sound of foreign neighbors, they could always move west, beyond the Mississippi River where the white man would never think of moving.

But of course the natives were not at full strength in 1790, and their room for maneuvering was greatly circumscribed by nearly 300 years of cultural crowding and numerical decline. In the South, where they were at their strongest, they had suffered a 72 percent drop in population since 1685, while the white settlers had multiplied 21 times and the blacks nearly 18.

Contemporaries who wishfully asserted that eastern America was big enough for everyone assumed that the natives were primarily hunters who chased wild game over the whole map. Although native men did have to range far and wide to provide the fish and meat that made up 25 to 50 percent of their diet, in fact the Indians in the huge area claimed by the kings of England subsisted primarily on vegetables – corn, beans, and squash – cultivated by women in the most fertile soils available. Among these three-season fields they lived in semipermanent towns and villages ranging from several hundred to a couple of thousand inhabitants. The advent of European farmers in search of those same fields put them on a predestined collision course with the Indians. The issue that was to be decided over the next three centuries was whether an intrusive group of farmers (and land speculators) would replace an ingenuous group of farmers. How this was in fact done varied from colony to colony. But in general the English (and their reluctant black helpers) prevailed by out-producing the natives and causing their precipitous decline as independent people.

The Indians could not reproduce themselves because their mortality rates far outstripped their birthrates. The single greatest cause of native deaths was epidemic diseases imported from Europe without malice. European afflictions such as smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, and whooping cough – many of the childhood diseases – turned into adult killers because the natives had acquired no immunities to them.

The second major cause of the Indian apocalypse was war and the dislocation, starvation, and exposure that accompanied it. In every so-called “Indian” war in colonial America, the warring Indians invariably reacted to European provocations, usurpations, or desecrations, arrogations much more specific and serious than mere trespassing on Indian soil. Because they were quickly outnumbered by the prolific and technologically superior newcomers, warring tribes or confederacies had to have their backs to the wall or their stoical patience exhausted before they would risk armed conflict.

In every English colony, native people found themselves regarded as environmental impediments to colonial “improvement”, not unlike awkwardly placed swamps or indiscriminating wolves. If the crowding of the English did not kill them through war or contagion, the colonists developed an arsenal of tactics to wrest the land from them or to dispirit them enough to move “voluntarily”. One way was to incite “civil” war between rival tribes and to reward one side for producing Indian slaves, who were then sold to the West Indies, often for black slaves. Another was to play on the reasonable native regard for European trade goods, particularly cloth, metal tools, guns and alcohol. By extending credit, the English traders got the Indians into deep debt, which could not be settled without selling land or hunting the local fur-bearing fauna to oblivion.

But there was an even more effortless ploy: English farmers simply released their corn-loving cattle and swine into the natives’ unfenced fields. The Indian plea on this score to the Maryland legislature in 1666 speaks eloquently for the plight of most coastal Algonquians in the 17^th century. “Your Hogs and Cattle injure Us, You come too near Us to live and drive Us from place to place”, the Algonquian chief complained matter-of-factly. “We can fly no farther; let us know where to live and how to be secured for the future from the Hogs and Cattle”. But the assemblymen, like their successors in the national congress of 1790, sat on their hands as Indian America was slowly but inexorably transmuted into a lopsided mosaic – predominantly white and significantly black, with only a fading margin and a few shrinking islands of native brown.

2. Into how many parts can the text be divided? Define the subject matter of each part. Make up a plan of the text.

3. Ask your group-mates 2 questions on each part of the text.

4. Build adjectives from the following words. Use the patterns suggested.

5. Choose the appropriate prefix to build words with negative meaning (ir-, dis-, in-, il-, un-).

6. Match the words on the left with the words on the right to build up compounds.

7. Match the words on the left with the words on the right to make up word combinations. Explain their meaning in English.

8. Comment on the following grammar structures.

1. We might well call America a Columbian mosaic because it was the Italian admiral who effectively bound together all of the world’s continents with the shipping lanes of one continuous ocean set.

2. The great majority were young men; only in the late 16^th century did the proportion of women reach on-third.

III Follow-up activities

1. Go back to Ex. I (3). What is the author’s attitude to the influx of white people in America? Does he give any value judgments or does he try to be impartial?

2. Describe the origin and present state of America’s population. Explain how the new American mosaic appeared. (Use additional sources of information.)

Additional task

Task 1. Read the following jokes and express your opinion to them.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1181