A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  By late 2004, Iraq was still far from a stable society; bin Laden had not been captured or killed; and with every new arrest of a terror suspect came an awareness of new vulnerabilities. But many terrorism experts thought that if the corner had not been turned, it was, at least, in sight. Even so, it is unlikely Americans will soon return to a 9/10 mentality.

  CONCLUSION

  If the immediate horror of 9/11 has dissipated, the attack nevertheless served as a profound reminder that buildings, however symbolic they might be, are nothing more than concrete and steel. The precious human lives they contained testified, by their loss, that what remains are ideas. Intending to shatter the “materialism” of the United States, Osama bin Laden’s terrorists merely reminded the world of the supremacy of the intangible over the physical, of the spiritual over the temporal. Focusing Americans’ thoughts once again on freedom—and its enemies—terrorists united a nation seriously divided by an election and elevated a president under fire to a position of historical greatness.

  The fatal flaw of bin Laden—like Hitler, Stalin, and even the nearsighted Spaniards of five hundred years ago—was that they fixed their gaze on the physical manifestations of the wealth of the West, failing to understand that wealth is a mere by-product of other, more important qualities: initiative, inventiveness, hope, optimism, and above all, faith. The people who had set foot in Virginia and Massachusetts almost three centuries ago often arrived poor, usually alone, and certainly without lofty titles or royal honors. After they plowed the fields and founded their enterprises, it was not the farms alone that made Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia flourish, nor trade alone that breathed life into the Boston of John Adams. Mere plantations did not produce George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, nor did a legal system spawn Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. American determination and drive, vision and commitment came not from acquisition of material things—though the freedom to acquire things was a prerequisite. Rather, greatness came from an all-consuming sense that this was, after all, the “city on a hill,” the “last, best hope for mankind.” The United States was, and is, a fountain of hope, and a beacon of liberty.

  American democracy flowed from the pursuit of opportunity, governed by respect for the law. American industry burst forth from the brains of Carnegie and Weyerhaeuser, Vanderbilt and Gates, most often coming from those owning the least in material goods. And American strength came from the self-assurance—lacking in every other nation in the world by the twenty-first century (or what Bush called liberty’s century)—that this nation uniquely had a charge to keep, a standard to uphold, and a mission to fulfill. In the end, the rest of the world will probably both grimly acknowledge and grudgingly admit that, to paraphrase the song, God has “shed His grace on thee.” Knowing perfection is unattainable, Americans have not ceased in its pursuit. Realizing that war is unavoidable, Americans have never relented in their quest for peace and justice. But understanding that faith was indispensable, Americans have, more than any other place on earth, placed it at the center of the Republic. The American character, and the American dream, could never be disentangled, and ultimately the latter would go only as far as the former would take it.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 469.

  Chapter 1. The City on the Hill, 1492–1707

  1. J. E. Olson and E. G. Bourne, eds., The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 985–1503 (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1906).

  2. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford, 1990); Robert L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  3. James Burke, Connections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 122–23; Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovations and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).

  4. Esmond Wright, The Search for Liberty: From Origins to Independence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 5.

  5. Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Wheels of Commerce, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 211.

  6. Wright, Search for Liberty, 15.

  7. Oliver Perry Chitwood, A History of Colonial America, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961 [1931]), 24.

  8. Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 57–69, entry for October 11, 1492.

  9. Chitwood, A History of Colonial America, 27.

  10. Columbus, Diario, 57–69.

  11. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 7–11.

  12. Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, trans. Cecil Jane (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), 191–201.

  13. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 5.

  14. Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37–38 and passim.

  15. Victor Davis Hansen, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 195.

  16. Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  17. Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide to History, updated ed. (New York: Perennial, 2000), 63.

  18. Hansen, Carnage and Culture, 228.

  19. Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1974 [originally published circa 1576]).

  20. Gilberto Freyre, quoted in Wright, Search for Liberty, 160. On the population of North America at this time and the impact of diseases, see Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  21. Hansen, Carnage and Culture, 4.

  22. Robert C. Puth, American Economic History, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth: Dryden Press, 1993), 39.

  23. James Axtell, “The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America,” in his The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 41.

  24. Las Casas, quoted in John Boyd Thacher, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), 63–64.

  25. For a review of the literature on piracy, see B. R. Burg and Larry Schweikart, “Stand by to Repel Historians: Piracy and Modern Historical Scholarship,” The Historian, March 1984, 219–34; for specific examples of pirate horrors, see Alexander O. Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, trans. Alexis Brown (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969 [1678 Dutch]).

  26. Winston Churchill, The Great Republic: A History of America (New York: Random House, 1999), 14.

  27. Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner, Pessimist’s Guide to History: From the Big Bang to the New Millennium (New York: Quill, 2000), 77–88.

  28. Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 26; William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 667.

  29. Jaime Vicens Vives, “The Decline of Spain in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Economic Decline of Empires, ed. Carlo Cipolla (London: Methuen, 1970), 127.

  30. Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

  31. Ibid., 5.

  32. Ibid., 13–14.

  33. Chitwood, History of Colonial America, 41.

  34. Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffigues, and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: J. M. Deut, 1926–31).

  35. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

  36. Jack A. Goldstone, “Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation: The Divergence of East an
d West in the Early Modern World,” Sociological Theory, Fall 1987, 119–135 (quotation on 119).

  37. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdsell Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economist Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Larry Schweikart, The Entrepreneurial Adventure: A History of Business in the United States (Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2000).

  38. Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1600 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).

  39. The charter is found at http://www.mu.cc.va.us/home/nusageh/Hist121/Port1/VACom Charter.htm

  40. Quoted in Wright, Search for Liberty, 119.

  41. Shepard Kretch III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 79.

  42. Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); and Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia: 1606–1625 (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1907).

  43. Interestingly, the Walt Disney Pictures film Pocahontas reversed this historical truth, having the Indian princess converting John Rolfe to animism.

  44. James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 36–37.

  45. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975); Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

  46. See the entire issues of the William and Mary Quarterly for April 1999 and for January 1997, but some of the relevant articles are James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” (January 1997, 143–66); Robin Blackburn, “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” (January 1997, 65–102); David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” (January 1997, 7–21); David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and the Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” (April 1999, 243–72); and Christopher L. Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” (April 1999, 273–306). Also see Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), for a discussion of the process of manumission in New York City.

  47. Douglas M. MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544–1699 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  48. Chitwood, History of Colonial America, 65.

  49. Merrell, Indians’ New World, 244.

  50. Quoted in Virginius Dabney, Virginia: The New Dominion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), 62–63; Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1607–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

  51. Chitwood, History of Colonial America, 81.

  52. Ibid.

  53. The Toleration Act is found in Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1902), 130a.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Leslie H. Fishel Jr. and Benjamin Quarles, The Black American: A Documentary History (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1976), 20–21.

  56. Ibid., 21–22.

  57. Paul Johnson, “God and the Americans,” Commentary, January 1995, 24–45.

  58. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge, 1991), x.

  59. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  60. Found at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/amerdoc/mayflower.htm.

  61. William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plymouth Plantation” (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing, 1898), 114–16.

  62. The best short biography of John Winthrop is Edmund S. Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958).

  63. Clifford K. Shipton, “A Plea for Puritanism,” American Historical Review, April 1935, 467.

  64. Kretch, The Ecological Indian, 73.

  65. Chitwood, History of Colonial America, 111.

  66. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 7.

  67. Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

  68. Anderson, New England’s Generation, 196.

  69. Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  70. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 213.

  71. A Maryland Anglican minister, in 1775, quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage, 1964), 351. Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1991).

  72. Ibid.

  73. Johnson, “God and the Americans,” 27.

  74. John Courtney Murray, “The Problem of Pluralism in America,” Thought, 65, September 1990, 323–28, quotation on 343.

  75. Johnson, “God and the Americans,” 28; Timothy L. Hall, Separating Church and State: Roger Williams and Religious Liberty (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

  76. Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” William and Mary Quarterly, January 1953, 7–18, quoted in Wright, Search for Liberty, 213.

  77. Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Vital Few: The Entrepreneur and American Economic Progress, exp. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 65.

  78. Murray, “Problem of Religious Pluralism,” 345.

  79. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), supports this point, further arguing that although the Europeans indeed changed the land through property ownership, Indians had their own ecological impact.

  Chapter 2. Colonial Adolescence, 1707–63

  1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, abridged, ed. Richard D. Heffner (New York: New American Library, 1956), 170.

  2. Francis L. Broderick, “Pulpit, Physics, and Politics: The Curriculum of the College of New Jersey, 1746–1794,” William and Mary Quarterly, 6, 1949, 42–68.

  3. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Russell B. Nye (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958), passim.

  4. Franklin, Autobiography, 38–40, 94–105.

  5. Krech, Ecological Indian, passim.

  6. Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

  7. Thomas C. Leonard, News for All (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford, 1989); Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford, 1994); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1990).

  8. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 191–202.

  9. Ibid., 209–39.

  10. Clifton E. Olmstead, History of Religion in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960).

  11. Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968 [1957]); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

  12. Ola E. Winslow, ed., Basic Writings of Jonathan Edwards (New York: New American Library, 1966), 115
, 128–29; Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland: World, 1959).

  13. Quoted in John Morton Blum, et al., The National Experience: A History of the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 65.

  14. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), passim.

  15. Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (London: Palgrowe, 2002).

  16. Frederick K. C. Price, Race, Religion, and Racism . 3 vols. (Los Angeles: Faith One Publishing, 2000–2002). Noah, not God, cursed Ham; there was no indication in the Bible that this curse was skin color. Noah, even if his curse was legitimate, could only affect Ham’s son because Ham was blessed by God. There is no evidence of racial prejudice by Jesus or the disciples, and indeed one and perhaps two of the disciples were black. Of the family tree of Jesus, there are only a handful of women mentioned, and the evidence suggests that in each case the women were black or dark skinned, based on descent from the Hittites through Bathsheba.