The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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The preliminary episodes and skirmishings, therefore, which went before
the spiritual self-consciousness of America, will be treated here in
outline only; only such events and persons as were the sources of
subsequent important conditions will be drawn in light and shadow. This
period of adventure and exploration is, it is true, rich in picturesque
characters and romantic incident, but they have little organic relation to
the history of the true America--which is the tracing of the development
and embodiment of an abstract idea. They belong to Europe, whose life was
present in them, though the men acted and the incidents occurred in a
strange environment. They are attractive subjects of study in themselves,
but have small pertinence to the present argument. Our aim will be to
maintain an organic coherency.

Still less can we linger in that impressive darkness before dawn which
prevailed upon the continent before the advent of Columbus. The mystery
which shrouds the origin and annals of the races which inhabited America
previous to the European invasion has been assiduously investigated, but
never dispelled. At first it was taken for granted that the "Indians," as
the red men were ignorantly called, were the aboriginal denizens of the
country. But the mounds, ruined cities, pottery and other remains since
found in all parts of the land, concerning which the Indians could furnish
no information, and which showed a state of civilization far in advance of
theirs, were proof that a great people had existed here in the remote
past, who had flourished and disappeared without leaving any trace whereby
they could be accounted for or identified. They are an enigma compared
with which the archeological problems of the Old World are an open book.
We can form no conception of the conditions under which they lived, of
their personal characteristics, of their language, habits, or religion. We
cannot determine whether these forerunners of the Indians were one people
in several stages of development, or several peoples in simultaneous
occupation of the land. We can establish no trustworthy connection between
them and any Asiatic races, and yet we are reluctant to believe them
isolated from the rest of mankind. If they had dwelt here from their
creation, why had they not progressed further in civilization?--and if
they emigrated hither from another continent, why do their remains not
indicate their source? By what agency did they perish, and when? The more
keenly we strive to penetrate their mystery, the more perplexing does it
appear; the further we investigate them, the more alien from anything we
are or have known do they seem. Elusive as mist, and questionable as
night, they form a suggestive background on which the vivid and energetic
drama of our novel civilization stands out in sharp relief.

Scarcely less mysterious--though living among us still--are the red men
whom we found here. They had no written languages or history; their
knowledge of their own past was confined to vague and fanciful traditions.
They were few in numbers, barbarous in condition, untamable in nature;
they built no cities and practiced no industries: their women planted
maize and performed all menial labors; their men hunted and fought. Before
we came, they fought one another; our coming did not unite them against a
common enemy; it only gave each of them one enemy the more. After an
intercourse of four hundred years, we know as little of them as we did at
first; we have neither educated, absorbed nor exterminated them. The
fashion of their faces, and some other indications, seem to point to a
northern Asiatic ancestry; but they cannot tell us even so much as we can
guess. There have been among them, now and again, men of commanding
abilities in war and negotiation; but their influence upon their people
has not lasted beyond their own lives. Amid the roar and fever of these
latter ages, they stand silent, useless, and apathetic. They belong to our
history only in so far as their savage and treacherous hostility
contributed to harden the fortitude of our earlier settlers, and to weld
them into a united people.

Posterity may resolve these obscurities; meanwhile they remain in
picturesque contrast to the merciless publicity of our own life, and the
scientific annihilation of time and distance. They are as the dark and
amorphous loam in which has taken root the Flower of the Ages. If extremes
must meet, it was fitting that the least and the most highly developed
examples of mankind should dwell side by side, at the close of the
nineteenth century, in a land to which neither is native: that Europe, the
child of Asia, should meet its prehistoric parent here, and work out its
destiny before her uncomprehending eyes. The world is an inn of strange
meetings; and this encounter is perhaps the strangest of all.

The most dangerous enemy of America has been--not Spain, France, England,
or any other nation in arms, but--our own material prosperity. The lessons
of adversity we took to heart, and they brought forth wholesome fruit,
purifying our blood and toughening our muscles. So long as the Spirit of
Liberty was threatened from without, she was safe and triumphant. But when
her foes abroad had ceased to harry her, a foe far more insidious began to
plot against her in her own house. The tireless energy and ingenuity which
are our most salient characteristics, and which had rendered us formidable
and successful on sea and land, were turned by peace into productive
channels. The enormous natural resources of the continent began to receive
development; men who under former conditions would have been admirals and
generals, now became leaders in commerce, manufactures and finance; they
made great fortunes, and set up standards of emulation other than
patriotism and public spirit. Like the old Spanish and English
adventurers, they sought for gold, and held all other things secondary to
that. An anomalous oligarchy sprang into existence, holding no ostensible
political or social sway, yet influential in both directions by virtue of
the power of money. Money can be possessed by the evil as well as by the
good, and it can be used to tempt the good to condone evil. The exalted
maxim of human equality was interpreted to mean that all Americans could
be rich; and the spectacle was presented of a mighty and generous nation
fighting one another for mere material wealth. Inevitably, the lower and
baser elements of the population came to the surface and seemed to rule;
the ordinary citizen, on whom the welfare of the State depends, allowed
his private business interest to wean him from the conduct of public
affairs, which thereby fell into the hands of professional politicians,
who handled them for their personal gain instead of for the common weal.
We forgot that pregnant saying, "Eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty," and suffered ourselves to be persuaded that because our written
Constitution was a wise and patriotic document, we were forever safe even
from the effects of our own selfishness and infidelity. As some men are
more skillful and persistent manipulators of money than others, it
happened that the capital of the country became massed in one place and
was lacking in another; the numbers of the poor, and of paupers,
increased; and the rich were able to control their political action and
sap their self-respect by dominating the employment market. "Do my
bidding, or starve," is a cogent argument; it should never be in the power
of any man to offer it; but it was heard over the length and breadth of
free America. The efforts of laboring men, by organization, to check the
power of capitalists, was met by the latter with organizations of their
own, which, in the form of vast "trusts" and otherwise, deprived small
manufacturers and traders of the power of independent self-support.
Strikes and lockouts were the natural outcome of such a situation; and the
sinister prospect loomed upon us of labor and capital arrayed against each
other in avowed hostility.

Danger from this cause, however, is more apparent than actual. The
remedy, in the last resort, is always in ourselves. Laws as to land and
contracts may be modified, but the true cure for all such injuries and
inequalities is to cease to regard the amassing of "fortunes" as the most
desirable end in life. The land is capable of supporting in comfort far
more than its present population; ignorance or selfish disregard of the
true principles of economy have made it seem otherwise. The proper state
of every man is that of a producer; the craving of individuals to own what
they have not fairly earned and cannot usefully administer, is vain and
disorderly. Men will always be born who have the genius of management; and
others who require to have their energies directed; some can profitably
control resources which to others would be a mischievous burden. But this
truth does not involve any extravagant discrepancy in the private means
and establishments of one or the other; each should have as much as his
needs, intelligence and taste legitimately warrant, and no more. Such
matters will gradually adjust themselves, once the broad underlying
principle has been accepted. Meanwhile we may remember that national
health is not always synonymous with peace. It was the warning of our Lord
--"I am not come to bring peace? but a sword." The war which is waged with
powder and ball is often less contrary to true peace than the war which
exists while all the outward semblances of peace are maintained. We must
not be misled by names. America is perhaps too prone to regard herself in
a passive light, as the refuge merely of the oppressed and needy; but she
has an active mission too. She stands for so much that is contrary to the
ideas that have hitherto ruled the world that she can hardly hope to avoid
the hostility, and possibly the attacks, of the representatives of the old
order. These, she must be able and ready to repel. We have freely shed our
blood for our own freedom; and we should not forget that, though charity
begins at home, it need not end there. We should not interpret too
strictly the maxims which admonish us to mind our own housekeeping, and to
avoid entanglements with the quarrels or troubles of our neighbors. We
should not say to the tide of our liberties, Thus far shalt thou go, and
no further. America is not a geographical expression, and arbitrary
geographical boundaries should not be permitted to limit the area which
her principles control. We, who seek to bind the other nations to
ourselves by ties of commerce, should recognize the obligations of other
ties, whose value cannot be expressed in money.

America wears her faults upon her forehead, not in her heart; her history
is just beginning; she herself dreams not yet what her ultimate destiny
will be. But so far as her brief past may serve as a key wherewith to open
the future? a study of it will not be idle.

CHAPTER FIRST

COLUMBUS, RALEIGH AND SMITH

The records will have it that America was discovered in consequence of
the desire of Europe to profit by the commerce of Cathay, which had
hitherto reached them only by the long and expensive process of a journey
due west. One caravan had passed on the spices and other valuables to
another, until they reached the Mediterranean. It was asked whether the
trip could not be more quickly and cheaply made by sea. Assuming, as was
generally done, that the earth was flat, why might not a man sail round
the southern extremity of Africa, and up the other side to the Orient? It
was true that the extremity of Africa might extend to the Southern ice, in
which case this plan would not serve; but the attempt might be worth
making. This was the view of Henry of Portugal, a scientific and ingenious
prince, whose life covered the first sixty years of the Fifteenth Century.
And Portuguese mariners did accordingly sail their little ships far down
the Atlantic coast of the Dark Continent; but they did not venture quite
far enough until long after good Prince Henry was dead, and Columbus had
(in his own belief) pioneered a shorter way.

Columbus was a theorist and a visionary. Many men who have been able to
show much more plausible grounds for their theories than he could for his
have died the laughing-stock of the world. Columbus was a laughing-stock
for nearly twenty years; but though the special application of his theory
was absurdly wrong, yet in principle it chanced to be right; and he was so
fortunate as to be empowered to bring it to a practical demonstration. His
notion was that the earth was not flat, but round. Therefore the quickest
route to the extreme East must be in exactly the opposite direction; the
globe, he estimated, could not be much over fifteen thousand miles in
girth; Cathay, by the land route, was twelve thousand miles or so east of
Europe; consequently the distance west could not be more than three
thousand. This could be sailed over in a month or two, and the saving in
time and trouble would be immense.--Thus did he argue--shoving the
Atlantic into the Pacific Ocean, subtracting six or seven thousand miles
from their united breadth, and obliterating entirely that western
continent which he was fated to discover, though he was never to suspect
its existence.

The heresy that the earth was a sphere had long been in existence;
Aristotle being the earliest source to which it could be traced. Sensible
people did not countenance it then, any more than they accept to-day the
conjecture that other planets than this may be inhabited. They
demonstrated its improbability on historical and religious grounds, and
also made the point that, supposing it were round, and that Columbus were
to sail down the under side of it, he would never be able to climb back
again. But the Genoese was a man who became more firmly wedded to his
opinion in proportion as it met with ridicule and opposition; proofs he
had none of the truth of his pet idea; but he clung to it with a
doggedness which must greatly have exasperated his interlocutors. By dint
of sheer persistence, he almost persuaded some men that there might be
something in his project; but he never brought any of them to the pitch of
risking money on it. It was only upon a woman that he was finally able to
prevail; and doubtless the intelligence of Isabella of Castile was less
concerned in the affair than was her feminine imagination. Had she known
more, she would have done less. But so, for that matter, would Columbus.

Almost as little is known of the personal character of this man as of
Shakespeare's; and the portraits of him, though much more numerous than
those of the poet, are even less compatible with one another. The
estimates and conjectures of historians also differ; some describe a pious
hero and martyr, others a dissolute adventurer and charlatan. We are
constrained, in the end, to construct his effigy from our own best
interpretation of the things he did. Some little learning he had; just
enough, probably, to disturb the balance of his judgment. He could read
Latin and make maps, and he had ample experience of practical navigation.
His life as a mariner got him the habit of meditation, and this favored
the espousal of theories, which, upon occasion, he could expound with
volubility or defend with passion, as his Italian temperament prompted.
His imagination was portentous, and the Fifteenth Century was hospitable
to this faculty; there was nothing--except plain but unknown facts--too
marvelous to be believed; and that Columbus was even more credulous than
his contemporaries is proved by the evidence that even facts were not
exempt from his entertainment. An ordinary appetite for the marvelous
could swallow stories of chimeras dire, and men whose heads do grow
beneath their shoulders; but nothing short of the profligate capacity of a
Columbus could digest such a proposition as that the earth was round and
could be circumnavigated. The type of half-educated fanatics to which he
belonged has always been common; there is nothing exceptional or
remarkable in this fanatic except the fortune which finally attended his
lifelong devotion to the most improbable hypothesis of his time. It has
been our custom to eulogize his courage and his constancy to the truth;
but if he had adopted perpetual motion, instead of the rotundity of the
earth, as his dogma, he would have deserved our praises just as much. His
sole claim to our admiration is, that in the teeth of all precedent and
likelihood, he succeeded by one mistake in making another: because he
fancied that by sailing west he could find the Indies, he blundered upon a
land whose identity he never discovered. Doubtless his blunder was of
unspeakable value; but a blunder not the less it was; while as to his
courage and perseverance, as much has been shown by a thousand other
scientific and philosophical heretics, whose names have not survived,
because the thing they imagined turned out an error.

From another point of view, however, Columbus is specially a creature of
his age. It was an age which felt, it knew not why, that something new
must come to pass. The resources of Europe were exhausted; men had reached
the end of their tether, and demanded admittance to some wider pasturage.
It was much such a predicament as obtains now, four hundred years later;
we feel that changes--enlargements--are due, but know not what or whence.
The conception of a voyage across the Atlantic, in that age, seemed as
captivating, and almost as fantastic, as a trip to the Moon or Mars would,
to an adventurer of our time. Given the vehicle, no doubt many volunteers
would offer for the journey; Columbus could get a ship, but the chances of
his arriving at his proposed destination must have appeared as
problematical to him as the Moon enterprise in a balloon would to a
world-weary globe-trotter of to-day. It was not merely that the ship was
small and the Atlantic large and stormy; there were legends of vast
whirlpools, of abysmal oceanic cataracts, of sea-monsters, malignant
genii, and other portents not less terrifying and fatal. Columbus would
not have been surprised at falling in with any of these things; but the
physical courage which must have been his most prominent trait, added to
incorrigible pride of opinion, brought him through.

But the significant feature of his achievement is, not that he sailed or
that he arrived, but that he was impelled, irresistibly as it were, to
make the attempt. He made it, because it was the one thing left in the
world that seemed worth doing; it was the only apparent way of escape from
the despair of the familiar and habitual; it was an adventure charged with
all unknown possibilities; once conceived, it must be executed at whatever
cost. Columbus was fascinated; the unknown drew him like a magnet; he was
the involuntary deputy of his period to incarnate its yearnings in act.
The hour had struck; and with it, as always, appeared the man. So it has
ever been in the history of the world; though we, with characteristic
vanity, uniformly put the cart before the horse, and declare that it is
the man that brings the hour.

Be that as it may, Columbus was fitted out with three boats by the
Spanish king and queen, set sail from Spain on the 3d of August, 1492, and
arrived at one of the Caribbean islands on the 12th of October of the same
year. He supposed that he had found an East Indian archipelago; and with
the easy emotional piety of his time and temperament, he fell on his knees
and thanked God, and took possession of everything in sight in the name of
Ferdinand and Isabella.

The deed had been done, and Columbus had his reward. It would have been
well for him had he recognized this fact, and not tried to get more. He
had found land on the other side of the Atlantic; what no other man had
believed possible, he had accomplished; he had carried his point, and
proved his thesis--or one so much resembling it that he never knew the
difference. This, and not a more sordid hope, had been the real motive
power of his career up to this time; and the moment when the light from
another world gleamed across the water to his hungry eyes had been the
happiest that he had ever known, or would know. A mighty hope had been
fulfilled; the longing of an age had been gratified in his triumph; a
fresh chapter in the world's history had been begun. The thoughts and
emotions that surged through the ardent Italian, as he knelt on that coral
beach, were lofty and unselfish; as were, in truth, those of the age whose
representative he was, when it saw him depart on his adventure. But before
the man of destiny had risen from his knees, he had ceased to act as the
instrument of God, and had begun to think of personal emoluments. So much
he must make over to Spain; so much he might keep for himself; so much was
promised to his shipmates. He would be famous--yes: and rich and powerful
too; he would be a great vicegerent; his attire should be of silk and
velvet, with a gold chain about his neck, and gems on his hands. So
adversity set his name among the stars, and prosperity abased his soul to
dust. The remaining years of his life were a fruitless struggle to secure
what he deemed his rightful wages--to coin his immortal exploit into
ducats; and his end was sorrowful and dishonored. The proud
self-abnegation of the ancient Roman was lacking in the medieval Genoese.

The white-maned horses of the Atlantic once mastered, there came riders
enough. During the next thirty years such men as Amerigo Vespucci (who
enjoyed the not singular distinction of having his name associated with
the discovery of another man), the Cabots, father and son; Balboa, and
Magellan, crossed the sea and visited the new domain. Magellan performed
the only unprecedented feat left for mariners by sailing round the earth
by way of the South American straits that bear his name; but Vasco da Gama
had already entered the Pacific by the Cape of Good Hope. It was by this
time beginning to be understood that the new land was really new, and not
the other side of the old one; but this only prompted the adventurers to
get past or through it to the first goal of their ambition. They had not
yet realized the vastness of the Pacific, and took America to be a mere
breakwater protecting the precious shores of Cathay. Later, they found
that America repaid looting on her own account; but meanwhile there was
set on foot that search for the Northwest Passage which resulted in the
discovery of almost everything except the Passage itself. To the craze for
a Northwest Passage is due the exploration of Baffin's and Hudson's Bays,
of the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence, and of the Great Lakes; the
establishment of the English and French fur-trading Companies, which
hastened the development of Canada; and the settlement of Oregon and
Washington. It led English and Spanish explorers and freebooters up the
California coast, and on to Vancouver and Bering Straits; Alaska was
circumvented, and the Northwest Passage was found, though the everlasting
ice mocked the efforts of the finders. In short, the entire continent was
tapped and sounded with a view to forcing a way through or round it; and
by the time the attempt was finally given up, the contour, size, and
possible value of America had been estimated much more quickly and
accurately than they would have been, had not India lain west of it.

All this time Spain had been having the best of the bargain. She had
fastened upon the West Indies, Mexico, and Central and South America, and
had found gold there in abundance; she bade other nations keep hands off,
and was less solicitous than they about the rumored riches of the Orient.
Spain, in those days, was held to be invincible on the sea; England's
fight with the Spanish Armada was yet to come. But there were already
Englishmen of the Drake and Frobisher type who liked nothing better than
to capture a Spanish galleon, and "singe the king of Spain's beard"; and
these independent sea-rovers were becoming so bold and numerous as to put
the Spaniards to serious inconvenience and loss. But the latter could not
be ousted from their vantage ground; so the English presently bethought
themselves that there might be gold in the more northerly as well as in
the central parts of the Continent; and they turned to seek it there.
Nothing is more noticeable in every phase of these events than the
constant involuntary accomplishment of something other--and in the end
better--than the thing attempted. As Columbus, looking for Indian spices,
found America; as seekers of all nations, in their quest for a Northwest
Passage, charted and developed the continent: so Sir Walter Raleigh and
his companions, hunting for gold along the northern Atlantic seaboard,
took the first steps toward founding the colonies which were in the sequel
to constitute the germ of the present United States.

Queen Elizabeth was on the throne of England; more than ninety years had
passed since Columbus had landed on his Caribbean island. In 1565 a colony
of French Huguenots at St. Augustine had, by a characteristic act of
Spanish treachery, been massacred, men, women, and children, at the order
of Melendez, and the French thus wiped out of the southern coast of North
America forever. While England remained Catholic, the influence of Papal
bulls in favor of Spanish authority in America, and matrimonial alliances
between the royal families of Spain and England, had restrained English
enterprise in the west. Henry VIII. had indeed acted independently both of
the Spaniard and of the Pope; but it was not until Elizabeth's accession
in 1558, bringing Protestantism with her, that England ventured to assert
herself as a nation in the new found world. Willoughby had attempted, in
1553, the preposterous enterprise of reaching India by sailing round
Norway and the north of Asia; but his expedition got no farther than the
Russian port of Archangel. In 1576 and the two succeeding years, Martin
Frobisher went on voyages to Labrador and neighboring regions, at first
searching for the Northwest Passage, afterward in quest of gold. The only
result of his efforts was the bringing to England of some shiploads of
earth, which had been erroneously supposed to contain the precious metal.
In 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had obtained a patent empowering him to
found a colony somewhere in the north; his object being rather to develop
the fisheries than to find gold or routes to India. He was stepbrother of
Sir Walter Raleigh, and the latter started with him on the first voyage;
but they were forced to put back soon after setting out. Gilbert went
again in 1583, and reached St. John's, where he erected a pillar
commemorating the English occupation; but he was drowned in a storm on the
way home. Raleigh, who had stayed in England, and had acquired royal favor
and a fortune, remained to carry out, in his own way, the designs which
Gilbert's death had left in suspense. In 1584 he began the work.

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