Unearthing the Reality
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| Annin Flag Co., Verona, N.J. Marjory Collins/OWI, March 1943. |
I recall two parts of American history that I didn't learn much about in school - the time before the Revolution, and the decades after the Civil War.
After I got out of school I made a few stabs at filling some of the gaps that any education contains - there is, after all, only so much time.
I did read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (my copy is from the sixteenth printing of Samuel Eliot Morison's 1952 edition, which I bought in Plymouth, Massachusetts). Bradford served quite a few years as governor of the Plymouth colony; when he wrote he had not only his personal experience but also access to documents.
I was stunned by his description of the Pequot War, and particularly of the Mystic massacre in 1637, which involved the burning of a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River in what is now the state of Connecticut.
"It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire," writes Bradford, who adds, "and horrible was the stink and scent thereof" (Bradford, p. 296).
What had the Pequot Indians done to deserve this wholesale slaughter? It's a complicated story, but basically the Pequots and the English were neighbors, and they kept stepping on one another's toes. This led to violence, and in time the English decided they had had enough. The ensuing war led to the virtual destruction of the Pequot tribe; those who were not killed were incorporated into other tribes or enslaved, with a number apparently being sent to Bermuda.
All of this doesn't exactly square with my childhood images of the first Thanksgiving. Which is probably why it is one of the many lacunae in our school books.
Another thing I recall from my childhood exposure to American history is the occasional abrupt transition. Where, for instance, did the doctrine of Manifest Destiny come from? As I recall, it was presented to me as a last-minute cobbling together of novel ideas coupled with some brilliant phrase making. But what if there was nothing last-minute about it? What if Manifest Destiny - the term was coined in 1845, just before the war with Mexico - has firm roots dating back to the beginning of the English colonies, shortly after 1600?
Gaps and twists can be signs that facts are being adjusted to fit a theory. But my thinking about the flaws in our national narrative didn't go much beyond Hey, I think there's a problem here. And then my son gave me Aziz Rana's The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010). Rana thinks American society has two basic issues that are tying us in knots today, and they have their roots, in North American soil, in the early seventeenth century.
Our two problems are tension between an ingroup and several outgroups, and an insatiable lust for land, which has, over time, manifested itself in various ways. They are related problems, and Rana, who is a professor at Cornell's law school, brings them together in the term settler empire. (Rana, pp. 3, 12-14, 109-111. I think this term is basically a koan. The more I think about it, the more I see in it.)
Rana traces the development of these two ideas in American history from the seventeenth century up to today.
I'd like to suggest these two cultural constructs are not unique to America, but in fact occur spontaneously in human society. One has to do with defining a group, and the other has to do with defining the space from which the group gets its food.
Ingroups, Outgroups
Sociologists have been studying ingroups and outgroups for decades. Perhaps the most famous early experiment is known as Robbers Cave, from 1954. And the most vivid description of the ingroup-outgroup dynamic that I know of is the 1954 Lord of the Flies, which William Golding apparently wrote independently of the research literature. (For my understanding of ingroups and outgroups I rely heavily on Lilliana Mason and her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement, which was another eye-opener for me. Here's a link to the story I wrote in 2018.)
Ingroups and outgroups are a complicated subject. For an example from American history, let's look south for a minute, to Virginia, where the first English arrived in 1607. Like the Puritans up north they immediately encountered their first outgroup, the Indians. And then, in 1619, a new outgroup showed up, the Africans.
And here is where it gets interesting. The outcome for the Africans - centuries of slavery and oppression - was not foreordained. The social situation in Virginia in its early days was actually rather fluid. Many of the whites in the colony were also in an unfree status as indentured servants. These whites had an advantage over the black slaves in that their servitude came to an end after a defined number of years. It became an accepted practice to do the same with the Africans, freeing a slave after a number of years of service.
And the former slaves had rights. Notes Rana, "In Virginia, free blacks were able to acquire property, vote, hold minor office, take legal action against Anglo settlers, and even own their own white indentured servants." They could also own slaves, and sometimes did.
And those free blacks could and did marry whites. However, the most famous case of interracial marriage in early Virginia was between an Indian, Pocahontas, and a white man, John Rolfe, in 1614. When it comes to early Virginia, that was the main thing that I learned in school.
And then things changed. It appears that the people at the top found their situation a little bit wobbly, and they found it convenient, among other measures, to develop a program of racial discrimination. Rana observes, "Perhaps the very first such law was passed in 1670 and denied free blacks in Virginia the right to own white indentured servants." Virginia's ship of state had changed course, and the Africans were excluded from the ingroup. It didn't have to be that way.
In the seventeenth century, decisions were made by a small group of white men in Virginia that have dramatically affected the course of American history to this day. (For the situation in early Virginia, see Rana, pp. 43-45, 47-48.)
Expansion
When it comes to both outgroups and the impulse to push boundaries, the Puritans would have had a ready-made roadmap for their journey - the story of Moses and Joshua leading the chosen people to the promised land. (For more on this, see Abortion and the Bible.)
And all the English colonists had pretty much a free hand defining and pushing around outgroups and expanding their territory as they saw fit for about a century and a half. Then, in the 1760s, things began to change.
What changed was not the colonists, but the central government in London, which was facing what is sometimes called a problem of success. During the worldwide struggle known as the Seven Years' War (1756-1763, known as the French and Indian War in North America), the English beat the tar out of the French. The war cost France Canada and effectively ended French power in India, where the English began the slow process of absorbing the entire subcontinent.
Until the Seven Years' War, the British Empire had been largely focused on the North American colonies and a number of islands in the Caribbean that produced sugar cane and rum. All of a sudden London no longer had an empire composed of colonies run by people whose roots lay in England. Instead it had the immediate challenge of figuring out how to incorporate some truly exotic societies into its empire.
In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War the two places of greatest concern were Bengal and Quebec. Quebec was populated almost entirely by French Catholics, who were unlikely to become Protestants and who would certainly resist switching out their laws for the English common law. (There were an estimated 75,000 French and 400 Anglo-Protestants.) In Bengal the situation was, of course, even more extreme. Turning Bengalis into Englishmen was recognized as a non-starter. As Professor Rana puts it, "sheer demographics required the English use of local authorities and practices." (See Rana, pp. 72-74.)
In their planning, the British were informed by their experience in Ireland. The English (and their Norman rulers) first showed up in 1169. Talk about a slow-moving train wreck. Anyway, by the sixteenth century, English control had largely been limited to the Pale - Dublin and its immediate surroundings. In 1565 England started to move out from the Pale, attempting to reestablish control over the whole island. Once again, things didn't go very well, but the English did use the occasion to refine their approach to the problem.
In particular they evolved techniques and rationales for the expropriation and removal of indigenous populations. This approach reached its apogee in Ulster, the northern part of the island, in 1609 - two years after the English arrived in Virginia. In that year King James I reserved 80 percent of Ulster's land for English and Scottish settlers, thereby setting a precedent as the colonial project moved to the New World. (For Ireland, see Rana, pp. 28-30.)
Working with this background, London in 1763 set about reorganizing its imperial apparatus to handle "a massive and culturally diverse empire," as Professor Rana puts it on page 72. This involved a balancing act, because some of these populations had conflicting interests. Whether it wanted them or not, London found itself with 100,000 American Indians who were living in the territory of the empire, and it had to find a way to keep the English settlers and the Indians from squabbling with one another. Removing the Indians would be difficult and expensive, and so, in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, London drew a line at the Appalachian Mountains, reserved the land west of the line to the Indians, and told the English settlers not even to think of moving across the line. (See Rana, pp. 65-69.)
(There's an interesting parallel here with Teddy Roosevelt, who is sometimes called the conservation president. He established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, and five national parks, along with a number of other things like game preserves and national monuments, protecting more than 230 million acres and creating a conflict with settlers like Cliven and Ammon Bundy that persists to this day.)
The ban on western migration enraged the English colonists. The poor people wanted to move west so they could get land of their own. And the wealthy, including people like George Washington (p. 69), saw a great deal of money to be made by speculating in western land. On a deeper level, London's move ran against the two basic beliefs in the concept of settler empire. First, the settlers were no longer being viewed as an ingroup. Instead they were being treated as an outgroup, relatively equal to the Indians and the French Catholics in Quebec and even the people in Bengal. Second, since their founding, the colonies had taken continuous territorial expansion as an article of faith. Not only was it important economically. It was also a big part of their identity. (Remember Moses and Joshua in the Bible.)
From here, the path to the American Revolution is familiar - estrangement, attempts at reconciliation, and finally a lengthy divorce proceeding from 1775 to 1783.
Fast Forward
Now let's fast forward to today. ... Wow, that was a tumultuous trip, which Professor Rana describes in detail (this is a very rich book, brimming with remarkable insights).
On 6 January 2021 a lynch mob stormed the Capitol looking, among other things, to hang Vice President Mike Pence by the neck until he was dead. They even set up a gallows outside the Capitol.
Why did this happen? The seeds of 6 January were planted before the Revolution.
The people who say that we are a white Christian country aren't entirely wrong. Our founders saw their country as one that was ruled by white Protestant English men. In time, because there was a shortage of English men - George Orwell worked as a police officer in Burma, for God's sake - we became a country where the ingroup was white Christian men. And since then other groups have achieved at least formal membership in the ingroup through such devices as legislation and Constitutional amendments. It's possible that some of these admissions have been provisional, or notional.
And it is certainly true that some people refuse to accept any revision of the original setup, except of course for the first revision - the one that expanded Protestant to Christian and English to white.
Here's the nub of the issue: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Is it possible that Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, was feeling his way to a future he did not see clearly? I think so. I'd say the same of Lincoln.
History is a dynamic process. That's why it's so important to have a north star to steer by. And good charts, so we know where the reefs and shoals are. Professor Rana has helped me greatly by providing a roadmap to America's colonial history.
One footnote: Yes, the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is named after the Pequot tribe: "Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes." (Chapter 16.)
See also Rugged Individualism, Mr. Piketty's Book, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, On Demagogues.
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