Day of Empire
Page 28
The itinerant evangelicals, who had insisted on individual religious choice, had some unlikely successors: the nation's Founding Fathers. While adopting Latin pen names such as Publius and Fabius in open emulation of the Roman Republic, the leaders of the American Revolution were above all men of the Enlightenment. Although not necessarily irreligious, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and many others elevated reason over Scripture and were deeply critical of orthodoxy. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”5
Even before independence, the American revolutionaries had experienced the tangible benefits of tolerance. To have any chance against the British, the Americans had no choice but to field a religiously diverse army. As John Adams noted after the colonists’ victory, those who fought included “Roman Catholicks, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians, Priestlyans, Socinians, Independents, Con-gregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists; and ‘Protestants que ne croyent rien.’”
The Constitution adopted in 1789 by the Founding Fathers was truly radical. Going further than England's Toleration Acts, the representatives of the thirteen colonies deliberately refrained from making the Constitution a religious document or from establishing a single official church for the country. The only mention of religion in the original Constitution was a provision rejecting religious tests as a precondition for holding office.
The absence of religiosity in the Constitution produced outrage and charges of ungodliness and betrayal in many quarters. But the Founding Fathers—who were highly educated patricians, not necessarily representative of the general population—believed that free religious choice was the best way to avoid sectarian strife in a pluralistic society. Many of them, including Madison, were deeply influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith, who had written that, just as with unregulated markets in goods, “a great multitude of religious sects”—preferably at least two to three hundred—would lead to healthy competition among religious leaders and ultimately produce less fanaticism and more moderation.6
In 1791, the First Amendment was adopted, formally prohibiting Congress from establishing a national church and protecting the free exercise of religion. Eight years later, in amazing language for the time, the United States announced to the world in the Treaty of Tripoli, “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tran-quility of Musselmen [Muslims].” Again, many colonists were aghast at the “rebellion against God” by public officials. Opponents of the Constitution predicted with horror that a papist, Jew, or Mahometan might become president.
The Founding Fathers were unflinching in their defense of a secular Constitution. George Washington, while believing that churches fostered moral character, proudly urged the rest of the world to follow the American model. “The citizens of the United States of America,” he wrote, “have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience.”
Perhaps most striking—and what sharply distinguishes America's first president from Cyrus the Great or even William of Orange—was Washington's view that religious liberty was a fundamental right, not just a favor granted by those in power. In his own words, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”7
Of course, even after 1791, many people in the United States did not actually enjoy full religious freedom in practice. For one thing, the First Amendment originally applied only to the federal government. A number of states, mainly in New England, continued to have established Protestant churches; some even had compulsory churchgoing requirements. In addition, most of the original American states limited voting rights and the right to hold public office to Christians. It would take a few decades before these last vestiges of established churches were eliminated.
But the bottom line is this: From its birth, the United States was founded on the Enlightenment principle of religious tolerance, which it inherited from Holland and Britain but then expanded and extended. By the end of the eighteenth century, no rival power on earth was more religiously tolerant than the United States.
Religious tolerance, however, is not to be confused with racial tolerance. With only a few arguable exceptions, all the Founding Fathers suffered from the blinding racism of their time. It probably never occurred to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that freedom of religion might extend to their black slaves. As late as 1813, records show slaves on Southern plantations born with the traditional Muslim names “Fatima,” “Saluma,” and “Otteman,” but renamed “Neptune,” “Plato,” and “Hamlet” by their owners. Under the “enlightened” United States Constitution, Native Americans and slaves had essentially no rights at all.8
For reasons that we may never fully understand, skin color and intolerance have often been closely related. We saw this in Great Britain's attitude toward its nonwhite colonies, and western Europe continues to confront the painful realities of racism today. In America's case, race-based discrimination has characterized the entire history of United States immigration and assimilation. The original colonists and the Founding Fathers of the United States were all of western or northern European descent. The more a new wave of immigrants looked and acted like them, the more they were likely to be tolerated.
Until the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of (voluntary) immigrants to the United States were what today we would consider “white.” Of course, “white” was always a moving target. Consider, for example, the extraordinary statement on skin color made by Benjamin Franklin in his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind”:
The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted who with the English make the principle [sic] Body of White People on the Face of the Earth…Perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country…[yet] such partiality is natural to Mankind.
This was Franklin's view before America achieved independence, while he was still an ardent British patriot. (He himself deleted this passage before allowing the rest of the essay to be published in 1754.) But in the late 1760s, Franklin underwent a profound personal transformation. On a visit to London, he was disdained by the British elite and instead found company among Scots and Quakers. He was angered by descriptions of the American colonists in English newspapers as a “mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts, ungrateful rebels, etc.” When Franklin returned to Philadelphia, he was a changed man. Not only had he come to see the colonies as having a separate identity from the mother country, but he now favored an inclusive approach to American citizenship. By 1783, Franklin was one of the strongest champions of open immigration: “ [E]very Man who comes…and takes up a piece of Land” added to the nation's strength.9
Franklin had come to believe that immigration would be the key to American success. The next two centuries would prove him right.
“CRAFTY” AMERICANS AND THE EARLY
BATTLE FOR EUROPE'S SKILLED LABOR
Massachusetts towns placed ads in English newspapers offering free land and wood for any immigrants willing to build and operate a mill. Entrepreneurial New Yorkers recruited thirteen of Sheffield's “best” ironworkers by offering them a “cash award” for emigrating: two years’ guaranteed salary and support payments for their family members who stayed back home. American recruiting agents scoured Europe in search of skilled laborers. In 1784, Connecticut's Wadsworth and Colt persuaded one hundred English textile workers to relocate to Hartford. The same year, a Baltimore entrepreneur brought back from Europe sixty-eight glassblowers from Germany and another fourteen from Holland.
The rivalry between the United States and Europe soon became cutthroat. Harsh laws were enacted in Europe prohibiting foreign recruitment. In 1788, for example, Thomas Philpot was imprisoned and fined five hundred pounds for inducing Irishmen to migrate to America. In England especially, anxiety mounted. An anti-emigration tract published in London in the 1790s avowed that “plenty of agents [were] hovering like birds of prey on the banks of the Thames, eager in their search for such artisans, mechanics, husbandmen, and labourers, as are inclinable to direct their course to America.” In a similar pamphlet, William Smith, who would later serve as chief justice of Canada, warned that “crafty” Americans were enticing Englishmen to abandon their country. “Under the specious pretense of opening their ports by a commercial treaty” to English manufacturers, the Americans were actually trying to lure England's best artisans and industrial workers, making “Englishmen do what the whole House of Bourbon were never able to accomplish by the sword.”
London responded by passing increasingly draconian laws prohibiting British and Irish artisans from migrating to the United States. By the early nineteenth century, no would-be emigrant could board a ship in Liverpool or other British port without a certificate signed by the “Churchwardens and Overseers” of his parish declaring that he “is not, nor hath ever been, a manufacturer or artificer in wool, iron, steel, brass, or any other metal, nor is he, or has he ever been, a watch-maker, or clock-maker, or any other manufacturer or artificer whatsoever.” Penalties included loss of nationality and confiscation of property. If caught in the act, an illegal emigrant could be convicted of treason.
Such measures were not unique to England. Venice sequestered its glassblowers on the island of Murano, threatening potential emigrants with the death penalty. At one time or another in the eighteenth century every European country passed anti-emigration legislation (even while often sending spies to recruit skilled workers from rival powers). In Germany, emigrants were required to obtain—and pay dearly for—permission to leave. Tracts were published describing horrific poverty in America. One such account claimed that German immigrants to America had become so poor that they had to “give away their minor children,” who would “never see or meet their fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters again.”10
But the tide of European immigration could not be stemmed. Determined Americans—both private entrepreneurs and government officials such as the secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton—found ways to counter anti-American propaganda abroad and to circumvent European restrictions. Letters from America to friends in the Old World spread the word:
[Anyone], in any vocation, manual or mechanical, may by honest industry and ordinary prudence, acquire an independent provision for himself and family; so high are the wages of labour, averaging at least double the rate in England, and quadruple that in France; so comparatively scanty the population; so great the demand for all kinds of work; so vast the quantity, and so low the price of land; so light the taxes; so little burdensome the public expenditure and debt.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, more than 2.5 million “illegal emigrants”—illegal not in the sense of violating American immigration laws, which were virtually nonexistent, but of violating the laws of their home countries because they possessed prohibited skills—found their way to America from the Old World. Most of America's cotton mills were managed by experienced English immigrants. As late as 1850, three-quarters of the skilled weavers and textile workers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, were new arrivals.
In large part because of immigrants, many of whom brought training and expertise acquired from years of working in Europe's factories, American industry exploded in the nineteenth century. One of the most critical contributors was Samuel Slater, often called the father of America's industrial revolution. As a teenager in England, Slater worked as an apprentice in a textile mill that used the innovative new spinning machines invented by Richard Arkwright. Quick and perceptive, Slater was soon promoted to overseer. But Slater could not resist the stories of America's bounty. By pretending to be a farmhand, Slater crossed the Atlantic, arriving in America without any technical drawings or equipment.
Reconstructing it by memory, Slater essentially transferred the world's most advanced textile technology from Britain to the United States. By the early nineteenth century, textile mills based on the Slater model were operating throughout America. Around the same time, Massachusetts’ Francis Cabot Lowell, after several years of “touring” the factories of Glasgow and Manchester, invented a machine that allowed all stages of textile production— carding, spinning, weaving—to take place in a single factory. Within a few years, the world's first integrated cotton mill began operation in Waltham, Massachusetts. By the 1820s, America's manufacturing productivity had closed in on Britain's, and its textile technology was already in many ways more advanced.”
Many other immigrants further infused young America with vital technological secrets and know-how. Irénée Du Pont, an immigrant from France, brought gunpowder technology to the United States. He also founded E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, today one of the largest chemical companies in the world. Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen and made major breakthroughs in electricity. (The inventor of carbonated water, Priestley has also been called the father of soda pop.) These and countless other “brain drains” from Europe helped transform nineteenth-century America from a technological backwater to one of the world's premier industrial powers.
American tolerance was essential to all this. Of course, the vast majority of these highly skilled and inventive immigrants were not fleeing religious or political persecution. They were seeking economic opportunity. But a vital part of what made the United States a land of opportunity was its relative openness and pluralism. The countries of Europe were not “nations of immigrants” in the way America was. For the most part, throughout the nineteenth (and even much of the twentieth) century, the ability of poor but enterprising Europeans to leave their homes and find success in another European country was burdened by a host of barriers, including historic religious enmity, cultural chauvinism, social rigidity, and linguistic differences. By comparison, America—with its religious pluralism, social fluidity, and polyglot communities—was remarkably open to talent and entrepreneurial drive from every European background. In America, relatively speaking, the sky was the limit.
Immigrants could and did ascend to the highest levels of early American society, politically and economically. Albert Gal-latin, a brilliant financier from Switzerland, served as Jefferson's secretary of the treasury; it was Gallatin who arranged for the purchase of the Louisiana Terr
itory and funded Lewis and Clark's explorations. John Jacob Astor, a German, started off in the New World selling musical instruments. Before long, he founded the American Fur Company and became the wealthiest man in pre-Civil War America. Marcus Goldman, a German Jew, began as a peddler in a horse-drawn cart. Soon he was buying and selling promissory notes. By 1906, Goldman Sachs & Co. had $5 million in capital. (The firm's market capitalization in June 2007 was around $100 billion.) In 1847, a penniless twelve-year-old Scot named Andrew Carnegie emigrated to Pittsburgh with his family. Fifty years later, having founded the company that would become U.S. Steel, he was the world's richest man.12
THE GREAT ATLANTIC MIGRATION AND THE
RISE OF AMERICA AS A REGIONAL POWER
European immigrants did not bring just know-how and entrepre-neurialism to America. They also brought sheer manpower. Throughout the nineteenth century, America had an almost insatiable demand for labor to cultivate its land, build its railways, populate its interior, and expand its frontiers. As Abraham Lincoln put it in 1863, “There is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals.”