These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  16.The letter was originally published as James Baldwin, “A Letter to My Nephew,” The Progressive, January 1, 1962; a revision appears in James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; New York: Vintage International, 1993), 3–5.

  17.Ibid.

  One: THE NATURE OF THE PAST

  1.Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, transcribed and translated by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelly Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Las Casas, summarizing a passage by Columbus, wrote “vireon gente desnuda” (“they saw naked people”); I have changed this to “we saw naked people,” which, as is supposed, is what Columbus wrote. On the history of the diary, see Samuel E. Morison, “Texts and Translations of Columbus’s of the Journal of Columbus’s First Voyage,” Hispanic American Historical Review 19 (1939): 235–61.

  2.Columbus, Diario, 63–69.

  3.Columbus, “The Admiral’s Words [c. 1496],” in Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians [1498], ed. José Juan Arrom, trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), appendix.

  4.Pané, Antiquities of the Indians, 3.

  5.Ibid., introduction.

  6.Ibid., 3, 11–12, 17.

  7.Ibid., 20.

  8.Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indias, as excerpted in 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Marvin Lunefeld (1529; Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991), 152–53.

  9.Pané, Antiquities of the Indians, 31.

  10.David A. Zinniker, Mark Pagani, and Camille Holmgren, “The Stable Isotopic Composition of Taxon-Specific Higher Plant Biomarkers in Ancient Packrat Middens: Novel Proxies for Seasonal Climate in the Southwest US,” Geological Society of America 39 (2007): 271.

  11.Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 4th ed. (London, 1866), 375.

  12.On the debate over population figures, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005), 92–96, 132–33.

  13.Useful sources include Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978, 2008); Alvin M. Josephy Jr., America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples before the Arrival of Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); and Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  14.Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

  15.Broadly, see Charles Maier, Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1550 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  16.George Bancroft, The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race (New York: New York Historical Society, 1854), 29.

  17.On the native peoples of North America, see Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). On Zheng He, see, for example, Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). On the Maya, see Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On West Africans, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  18.Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage; Or, Relations of Man . . . from the Creation unto This Present (London, 1614).

  19.Samuel Purchas, “A Discourse of the diversity of Letters used by the divers Nations in the World,” in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905), 1:486.

  20.Diario, 63–69.

  21.Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 3.

  22.See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

  23.Quoted in J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (1970; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10.

  24.Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus: Letter to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici, trans. George Tyler Northrup (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1916), 1.

  25.Sir Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964). On the traveler’s voyage with Vespucci, see 12–13.

  26.Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, translated and introduced by Stephen A. Barney et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), introduction.

  27.John R. Hébert, “The Map That Named America,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 62 (September 2003).

  28.Quoted in Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1944] 1994), 4.

  29.Pané, Antiquities of the Indians, 35.

  30.All of these numbers are estimates and all are contested. On European migration, a useful introduction is Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986). For African numbers, see David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), a study of the Voyages Database: Estimates, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed June 2, 2017. For the continuing controversy over indigenous population, see, for example, Jeffrey Ostler, “Genocide and American Indian History,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  31.Quoted in Elliott, The Old World and the New, 76.

  32.Elliott, The Old World and the New, 59–61; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 3 vols. (1776; New York: Collier, 1902), 2:394. On the rise of capitalism, see Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2010). On the long history of slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  33.Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, chs. 3 and 4.

  34.Columbus, Diario, 75.

  35.On the environmental consequences of 1492, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), and Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The quotation is from Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 166.

  36.Quoted in Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 175.

  37.Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, ch. 9.

  38.David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 1–4.

  39.Quoted in Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 215, 208.

  40.Aristotle, Politics, Book One, parts 1, 3–7. And, broadly, see Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), ch. 1; Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); and James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

  41.Antonio de Montesinos, December 21, 1511, Hispaniola, as quoted in Justo L. González and Ondina E. González, Christianity in Latin America: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30. On the relationship between Christianity and human rights, see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Moyn writes: “Without Christianity, our commitment to the moral equality of human beings i
s unlikely to have come about, but by itself this had no bearing on most forms of political equality—whether between Christians and Jews, whites and blacks, civilized and savage, or men and women” (6).

  42.The Requerimiento, 1513, in Major Problems in American Indian History: Documents and Essays, ed. Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 58.

  43.Miguel Léon-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (1962; Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 137.

  44.Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 14–17.

  45.Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (1552; New York: Penguin Books, 1992).

  46.Lewis Hanke reconstructs the debate in All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). For the arguments made by Las Casas and Sepúlveda, see Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, ed. and trans. Stafford Poole (1542; DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Democrates Alter: Or, On the Just Causes for War Against the Indians (1544).

  47.Richard Hakluyt (the Younger), “Discourse of Western Planting,” 1584, in Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580–1640, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 45–61.

  48.Constance Jordan, “Woman’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 421–51; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124–51.

  49.Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 82.

  50.On this triangulation, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 9.

  51.See Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, eds., Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays: A Selection (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014); on Ralegh reading Montaigne, see Alfred Horatio Upham, The French Influence on English Literature from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 289–93.

  52.Michel Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 80, 152.

  53.Quoted in Karen Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), 17. See also Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), ch. 1.

  Two: THE RULERS AND THE RULED

  1.Gregory A. Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians of the Colonial Southeast, ed. Waselkov et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 453–57.

  2.James Stuart, The True Law of Free Monarchies in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1598] 1918), 310. And see Glenn Burgess, “The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered,” English Historical Review 107 (1992): 837–61.

  3.“The First Charter of Virginia, April 10, 1606,” in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, ed. Francis Newton Thorpe, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 3:3783. On Jamestown, see James P. Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), and Karen Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

  4.“The First Charter of Virginia, April 10, 1606.”

  5.Ibid.

  6.David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

  7.Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “English Liberties Outside England: Floors, Doors, Windows, and Ceilings in the Legal Architecture of Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 38.

  8.John Locke in Second Treatise of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie (1690; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4, 63.

  9.Paine, Common Sense, 12.

  10.Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes (1628; London, 1684), 97b. On the process of preparing charters, see Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 79–86. On Coke, see Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence,” Law and History Review 21 (2003): 439–82. For a dissenting view on Coke’s contribution to the 1606 charter, see Mary S. Bilder, “Charter Constitutionalism: The Myth of Edward Coke and the Virginia Charter,” North Carolina Law Review 94 (2016): 1545–98, especially 1558–60.

  11.John Smith, Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:lviii. I discuss Smith and the Jamestown colony in The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), ch. 1.

  12.Kupperman, The Jamestown Project, 58, 64–68.

  13.John Smith, Captain John Smith, ed. James Horn (New York: Penguin Group, 2007), 44.

  14.Ibid., 42; Smith, Complete Works, 1:207.

  15.Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), chs. 3 and 4.

  16.Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 78.

  17.A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, 1610), 11.

  18.Smith, Complete Works, 2:128–29.

  19.Smith, Captain John Smith, 1100–1101; Smith, Complete Works, 1:xlv.

  20.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 96–97. On Hobbes and the Virginia Company, see Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” in Aspects of Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53–79.

  21.Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 108–9, 158–59.

  22.Martha McCartney, “Virginia’s First Africans,” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, July 5, 2017.

  23.Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), introduction and ch. 5 (quotation, 117). Also see Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007).

  24.Samuel Morison, introduction to William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (New York: Knopf, 1952), xxvi–xxvii.

  25.Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 3, chs. 9 and 10.

  26.Stephen Church, King John: And the Road to Magna Carta (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 21.

  27.Quoted in Nicholas Vincent, ed., Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15–16. And on the general question, see R. C. van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 2–3.

  28.Vincent, Magna Carta, 12.

  29.David Carpenter, Magna Carta (New York: Penguin, 2015), 252.

  30.Quoted in Carpenter, Magna Carta, ch. 7.

  31.Church, King John, 148; Carpenter, Magna Carta, 81; Nicholas Vincent, ed., Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom, 1215–2015 (London: Third Millennium Publishing, 2015), 61–63.

  32.Church, King John, 210.

  33.Magna Carta, 1215, in G. R. C. Davis, Magna Carta (London: British Museum, 1963), 23–33.

  34.Quoted in The [Cobbett’s] Parliamentary History of England, ed. William Cobbett and J. Wright
, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20), 2:357.

  35.On this transformation, see Leonard W. Levy, The Palladium of Justice: Origins of Trial by Jury (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1999); John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (1977; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Paul R. Hyams, “Trial by Ordeal: The Key to Proof in the Early Common Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris S. Arnold et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

  36.Barbara J. Shapiro, “The Concept ‘Fact’: Legal Origins and Cultural Diffusion,” Albion 26 (1994): 227–52; Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). See also Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Lorraine Daston, “Strange Facts, Plain Facts, and the Texture of Scientific Experience in the Enlightenment,” in Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority, Objectivity, and Evidence ([Tournai]: Brepols, 1996), 42–59.

  37.James I, Speech in the Star Chamber, June 20, 1616, in J. R. Tanner, Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I: 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 19.

  38.Vincent, Magna Carta, 4, 90. Vincent, Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom, 108.

  39.John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, [1630] 1838), 31–48. See also Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958).

  40.Quoted in Karen Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18.

  41.Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity; Edward Winslow, Good News from New England, ed. Kelly Wisecup (1624; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 114; John Winthrop, February 26, 1638, Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,” 1630–1649, ed. James Kendall Hosmer (New York: Scribner, 1908), 260. On the conversion mission, see Lepore, The Name of War. On New England and slavery, see Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016).