Penguin History of the United States of America (152 page)

1
To understand these anxieties, look at Map 2.(p.54).

2
William Brandon,
The American Heritage Book of Indians
. As its readers will recognize, I have drawn heavily on that wonderful volume for this chapter.

3
American soldiers are said to have helped themselves to pieces of his skin to keep as souvenirs.

4
W. H. Auden,
City Without Walls
(London, Faber, 1969), p. 58.

5
For what they are worth, IQ tests carried out in the 1940s showed groups of Indian children regularly performing better than the control groups of white children.

6
To be understood, before the Mexican War (1845–8), as, very roughly, the area bounded by the rivers Colorado, Gila, Grande and Pecos, and by the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the East.

7
Not the Pueblo, who remained sedentary agriculturalists, living in the adobe townships that got them their name
{pueblo
, Spanish, ‘town’).

8
One buckskin or
buck
became so generally known as the basic unit of exchange in the traffic that it is now universal slang for a dollar.

9
Later, Six, when the Tuscaroras migrated north after a losing war with the colony of North Carolina, 1711–13.

10
‘King Philip’ was the English name for Pometacom, Chief of the Wampanoag Indians who had, in his father’s time, done much to aid the Pilgrims.

11
Except for the rare occasions when they passed them on deliberately, as in 1763, when an attempt was made to spread smallpox among the warriors besieging Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania.

12
Wampum consisted of bead-belts, beautifully patterned. It reached its height after the whites brought steel tools with which tubular beads could be fashioned. The patterns of the finest belts were symbolic, and were frequently used to record treaties and other important events.

13
For both, see below, pp. 67-8 and 69-70. The Allotment Act is also known as the Dawes Severalty Act.

14
Apache children were being kidnapped and enslaved in Arizona as late as 1871 – eight years after Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, ending black slavery, and six years after the surrender of the South.

15
Scalping seems to have been the invention of the North-Eastern Indians. The Dutch of New Amsterdam first took advantage of the custom by offering a bounty for every scalp brought in. The English copied them, and then took to scalping themselves; they and the French ended by spreading it throughout the continent. Only the Nez Percés (see below, p. 69) were wise enough to eschew the practice.

16
Wife and child were later sold into West Indian slavery.

17
The Reverend Cotton Mather, Increase’s son (1663–1728), commented: ‘To think of raising these hideous creatures into our holy religion! – Could he see anything angelical to encourage his labours? All was diabolical among them.’

18
Though as the favourite form of display was to give huge parties, known as
potlaches
, at which the host proved his wealth by giving much of it away, their acquisitive instinct must be reckoned to have been singularly innocent.

19
In 1977, during a winter drought in the Pacific North-West, the states of Washington and Idaho began to quarrel about the division of rainfall obtained by ‘seeding’ the clouds. It was solemnly observed that it had never been settled who owned rainclouds.

20
The trouble with this formula was that the Americans habitually ignored its distinctions. The Iroquois and Cherokees were primarily farmers, but they were turned off their lands just the same. It was so easy to pretend that they were savage hunters.

21
A programme that could sometimes be enunciated with staggering frankness, as by the Indian Commissioner in 1872 who stated: ‘No one certainly will rejoice more heartily than the present commissioner when the Indians of this country cease to be in a position to dictate, in any form or degree, to the government, when, in fact, the last hostile tribe becomes reduced to the condition of suppliants for charity.’ But as we have seen, most men preferred to disguise their actions and their motives. For example, the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company showed a naked Indian begging for the light of the Gospel in words adapted from the Acts of the Apostles (xvi, 9): ‘Come over and help us.’ The Puritans went over and helped themselves.

22
Known to Americans as the French and Indian War.

23
Who was three-quarters white. McGillivray is an outstanding illustration of the point that it is culture, not colour, that makes a man an Indian, European or American.

24
This figure is solely for the eastern Cherokees; it does not take into account those (about 5,000) who had earlier moved to Indian Territory.

25
See below, pp. 342-3.

26
General Hartley: ‘I have lived on this frontier fifty years and I have never yet known an instance in which war broke out with these tribes, that the tribes were not in the right.’

27
I.e., his brother, Chief OUokot.

1
In modern idiom, on the lavatory.

2
A phrase lifted from Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon,
Kings and Queens
(London, 1932), the first book to interest me (at the age of eight) in history.

3
A. de Tocqueville,
L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution
(first published in 1856), Book III,
Chapter 5
. My translation.

4
Legally, at first, England, Ireland, ‘the dominion of
Wales’
and the town of Berwick-on-Tweed. Scotland became a full partner in ‘the realm’ under the Act of Union (1707). Ireland never enjoyed more than a tithe of British privileges and prosperity.

5
This was of no little importance in an era when a politician might well leave office far poorer than he entered it. The Duke of Newcastle was estimated to be £300,000 worse off at the end of his political life than at its beginning; George III came to North’s rescue by paying his debts and making him Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; the enormous debts of the younger Pitt (as reckless as his father in his personal finances) had to be settled by his friends after his death.

6
Sir John Plumb, whose categories these are, dates them as 1714–42 and 1742–84 respectively. See his
England in the Eighteenth Century
(Harmondsworth, 1950).

7
Specklewood was a product of Jamaica, used in fine cabinet-making. Many additional products were to be enumerated during the eighteenth century: cacao (or cocoa), rice, molasses, naval stores (listed on p. 84), copper, beaver and other furs. After 1763 the enumeration was extended still further.

8
Officially the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations – a title too easy to confuse with that of the Board’s forerunner, a Privy Council committee known as the Lords of Trade.

9
C. M. Andrews,
The Colonial Background of the American Revolution
(Yale paperbound edn, 1967), p. 93.

10
A fuller discussion of slavery and the slave-trade will be found in
Chapter 7
.

11
Though from the beginning there were critics who argued that, economically at least, Britain would have gained more by free trade. Certainly the British greatly exaggerated the value to them of the colonial trade and undervalued that of the trade with France which, deeming it immoral and unpatriotic, the government denied them.

12
Even so, the colonial tobacco planters never managed to perfect their monopoly of the British market, and they had to pay duty on their exports to Britain – duties imposed, and from time to time increased, solely to raise revenue. In fact it was the ease of taxing tobacco brought in by sea, and the impossibility of taxing tobacco grown in the realm, which lay behind the ban on British leaf.

1
The number of poor quadrupled in Boston between 1687 and 1771, though the population merely doubled: part of the reason may have been the refusal of the country towns to do anything for each other’s poor, who therefore tended to drift to Boston.

2
The Boston article competed successfully with West Indian rum because, though much nastier, it was also much cheaper, which was a decisive consideration with the poor and frugal consumers of North America.

3
See
Much Ado About Nothing
.

4
The Board was also shrewd enough to see that the prospective migrants were attracted as well by colonies which enjoyed a fair measure of self-government. Accordingly it bowed to the inevitable, tolerated the colonial assemblies and carefully provided local legislatures when it came to make constitutional arrangements for new colonies such as Nova Scotia and the Floridas.

5
So real seemed the threat of Anglicanism that the Congregationalists thought it prudent to appeal to the English Act of Toleration lest their religious order be overturned as their political one had been and an Anglican Establishment be forced upon them.

6
Said Whitefield, ‘It grieves me to find that in every little town there is a settled dancing-master, but scarcely anywhere a settled minister.’ He was talking of North Carolina; but dancing was just as popular in the other colonies.

7
Named by Charles II after his dead friend Admiral Penn, the founder’s father, not after the founder himself.

8
Or Dutch, a corruption of
deutsch
– hence ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’. They can still be heard speaking German in the Pennsylvanian countryside today.

9
By 1775 there were approximately 100,000 Germans in Pennsylvania. In the early eighteenth century Irish Protestants in large numbers, driven out by the economic subjection of their country, had come to add their numbers and energy. Other ethnic groups, who were either survivals from earlier attempts at colonizing the region or were attracted by William Penn’s pamphlets, were Finns, Swedes, Dutch, Welsh and Huguenots (French Protestants).

10
Named after Conestoga Creek in Lancaster County, a centre of German settlement on the Susquehanna due west of Philadelphia. The farmers there not only perfected the covered wagon, but bred the sturdy horses needed to draw it.

11
It may have been the second largest city in the British Empire, from which it was about to secede, and was certainly one of the four biggest (the others being London, Dublin and Edinburgh).

12
Brick was increasingly used, but it was a comparatively rare and expensive material, and the supply could not keep up with the demand for new buildings.

13
His other activities included: organizing the American post so that it was for the first time efficient and profitable; launching a scheme for paving the streets of Philadelphia; inventing an improved stove for mitigating the effects of the American winter, which sometimes froze the ink in inkwells (Franklin refused to patent this useful invention); inventing the armonica, an improved form of musical glasses, for which Mozart and Beethoven eventually composed pieces (all good musical dictionaries describe the instrument); acting as secretary to the first Masonic Lodge in Philadelphia; devising an abortive scheme for spelling reform.

14
For example, a Boston court case listed as goods ‘Two negroes, four casks of brown sugar, two casks of cocoa and two Pateraroes [
sic
]’.

15
This is especially true of the statute of 1547, which provided for the branding and enslaving of vagrants, whom their masters might beat, chain, half-starve and put to labour ‘how vile so ever it be’. But this statute was so harsh as to be unenforceable, and was repealed within three years.

16
Not that the English were first in the field. As a matter of fact the first sugar island worked by African slaves was Cyprus under the Venetians.

17
See above, pp. 89 and 92.

18
Richard Pares,
Yankees and Creoles
(London, 1956), p. 1.

19
See Philemon, 10-20.

20
A naval officer, ‘lieutenant of a man of war, whom I am a stranger to, designing to put an indignity upon me’, Mather complained, ‘has called his
negro slave
by the name of
COTTON MATHER
’. The lieutenant was perhaps as much annoyed by Mather’s attempts to clean up the sexual morality of the port of Boston as by his advocacy of inoculation and friendliness to Africans. The racial attitudes in all this defy elucidation.

21
The longer the voyage, the higher the mortality among both slaves and slavers. Ironically, if justly, the attempts to lower the death-rate of the cargoes were somewhat successful, but the death-rate of the crews remained constant, and constantly high. Not for nothing was the West Coast of Africa known as the white man’s graveyard.

22
The British must not make too much of these incidents. At late as 1763 a white woman was burned in England for murdering her husband.

23
Herbert Aptheker,
The Colonial Era
(second edn, New York, 1966), pp. 41-3. The most humane entry Aptheker quotes from Mr Byrd’s diary reads: ‘I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny, and beat her too much, for which I was sorry.’ Nine days later he was at it again.

24
Versailles and Monticello also have this in common, that each was the grandest gesture of a chronically bankrupt regime.

25
In practice sheriffs often ignored restrictions, allowing white tenants to vote, which was a gesture to democracy, but frequently led to disputed elections.

26
This technique was once described as ‘swilling the planters with bumbo’. It could be employed too enthusiastically. In 1758 a Mr Marrable poured 30 gallons of rum down the voters’ throats in Lunenburg County. This was held to be going too far, and he was unseated by the assembly. On the other hand, in the same election George Washington dispensed 66 gallons and 10 bowls of rum punch, 58 gallons of beer, 35 gallons of wine, 8 quarts of hard cider and 3½ pints of brandy: and nobody objected. In 1777 the young James Madison, standing for re-election to the revolutionary assembly, was defeated because, in a fit of republican virtue, he refused to set up barrels of free whisky in the courthouse square of Orange County.