"ALL THINGS IN ABOUNDANCE"
COLONIAL AMERICA AS EDEN
Our country, at the beginning, was already a work of art. When the earliest European colonists arrived on the shores of North America, they were astonished by the beauty of their surroundings. Native tribes generally practiced both hunting and agriculture, and both of these required fire. One burned brush to remove the hiding places of game animals and to clear land for planting. The result of this was a man-made ecology that created great stretches of meadow and airy forests; together they resembled what we now call "English" parks. Fire-resistant trees grew tall, shading vast tracts free from undergrowth. You could, an English traveler noted, drive a coach through these woods. In such an environment valuable plants flourished, plants that provided food: persimmons and plums, wild grapes and strawberries and mulberries, black walnuts and hickories.
Colonial agricultural methods necessitated ending the fires; the great trees were felled for lumber; the brush returned, and choked away the persimmons and mulberries. Similarly, the meadows created by regular burning had attracted elk and bison from their pastures across the Appalachians, pastures that had themselves been extended and maintained by native burnings. Such large grazing animals, too, would disappear with time. But as long as native methods prevailed the land retained this parklike quality. Today we can only imagine its loveliness. In Cherokee-dominated northern Alabama it persisted into the nineteenth century; John Abbott, traveling with the famous colonel David Crockett, described the landscape there in 1813: "Upon the banks of a beautiful mountain stream there was a wide plateau, carpeted with the renowned blue grass, as verdant and soft as could be found in any gentleman's park. There was no underbrush. The trees were two or three yards apart, composing a luxuriant overhanging canopy of green leaves, more beautiful than art could possibly create. Beneath this charming grove, and illuminated by the moonshine, which, in golden tracery pierced the foliage, there were six or eight Indian lodges scattered about."
Some early travelers believed they had found paradise, though they had actually found something more significantly American—namely, that which comes just after paradise while keeping a paradisal memory. The distinctively American combination of aggression and nostalgia, of crude self-advancement permeated by wistful sentiment and loss, a culture obsessed with responsibility and its avoidance: this peculiar mind-set was born in the earliest days of our collective experience, and is with us still. Thoughtful colonizers of a biblical bent knew they were enacting the Fall and that the first step in creating their new society was to make, so to speak, its ruins.
Following Columbus's landing on the island of Hispaniola, now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1492, the Spanish and Portuguese set the tone for American life. Their model was essentially one of war followed by enslavement of the defeated natives—soon, also, of imported Africans. These slaves were expected to mine the earth, particularly to dig up gold and silver. There seems never to have been any doubt among the Iberians that their slaves, whether African or American, did not want to be slaves. They were dying in unimaginable numbers. The several million Arawaks on Hispaniola in 1492, for instance, were down to two hundred within fifty years. The Spaniards and Portuguese knew well what they were doing—they kept good records, and ruled their parts of America with efficient bureaucracies. The horrors of this time are mainly known to us now thanks to Iberian writers who, early on, were moved to set them down on paper.
The historian Robin Blackburn has written, "The most disturbing thing about the slaves from the slaveholder's point of view was not cultural difference but the basic similarity between himself and his property." This was true also between colonizers and Indians. People from European, African, and Indian tribes met one another in the bizarre New World and were puzzled by their similarities. Many tried to make sense of these similarities by emphasizing the differences—taking, for example, certain conceptions of race and using them to make a grid of social meaning. Consider the fate of Estevan, Morocco-born, the first African whose individual presence in America has been recorded. He left Spain with his master, Andrés Dorantes, in 1527, as part of an expedition to Florida and whatever might be beyond it. Once on land, the explorers marched briskly from misfortune to disaster. By 1529 their numbers had dropped from about four hundred to sixteen. After five years of enslavement by Gulf Coast Indians, only four travelers remained: Estevan, Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. They escaped together, found friendlier natives, and spent the next two years crossing the Southwest to Mexico.
In Mexico City, Dorantes sold Estevan to the Spanish governor, and the slave told many a story about cities of gold. In 1539 the governor dispatched an expedition to find these cities, with Estevan as guide. Estevan, according to the chronicler Pedro de Castañeda, broke away from the group and pushed northward in pursuit of "reputation and honor." Upon reaching an Indian town, Estevan submitted to questioning by the local leaders. "For three days," Castañeda writes, "they made inquiries about him and held a council. The account which the negro gave them of two white men who were following him, sent by a great lord, who knew about the things in the sky, and how these [men] were coming to instruct them in divine matters, made them think he must be a spy or a guide from some nations who wished to come and conquer them." Why did they not believe Estevan? "Because it seemed to them unreasonable to say that the people were white in the country from which he came and that he was sent by them, he being black. Besides these other reasons, they thought it was hard of him to ask them for turquoises and women, and so they decided to kill him. They did this."
Such a clarifying political use of skin color was not the only choice. If skin color and behavior were consistently related, one might use the first as shorthand for the second. However, skin color by itself is an emptiness; one's actions matter, not one's color. For example, when Estevan and his three presumably lighter-skinned companions first reached New Spain, their identities, from the Indian point of view, derived not from their respective colorings but from the qualities of character they had exhibited in the course of their journey. Estevan's fellow traveler Cabeza de Vaca had admired many of the native people they met during their years of wandering, and some of the Indians evidently respected the sojourners, especially for their medical talents—so much so that when the wayward foursome and their Indian captor-companions finally encountered Spaniards, the Indians refused to give up their men. They refused because they could not believe that such good men as they knew could also be Spaniards. The Indians were willing to give their captives only to other Indians. "This sentiment roused our [Spanish] countrymen's jealousy," Cabeza de Vaca remembered. The Spaniards' leader "bade his interpreter tell the Indians that we were members of his race who had long been lost; that his group were the lords of the land who must be obeyed and served, while we were inconsequential." Why did the Indians not believe the Spaniards? Cabeza de Vaca writes: "Conferring among themselves, they replied that the Christians lied: We had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone. They spoke thus through the Spaniards' interpreter and, at the same time, to the Indians of other dialects through one of our interpreters." One has the sense that Cabeza de Vaca agreed with his captors that perhaps one could not be both Spanish and humanly decent. Cabeza de Vaca's newfound countrymen went so far as to propose to him and his companions that they enslave the Indians. This idea outraged the Spanish and African wanderers: "And to think," Cabeza de Vaca wrote, "we had given these Christians a supply of cowhides and other things that our retainers had carried long distances!" Cabeza de Vaca came very near to seeing his own countrymen as foreigners, at least in moral terms, and "to the last I could not convince the Indians that we were of the same people as the Christian slavers."
It was possible to imagine, even at the time, that these visually distinct peoples among whom one moved were of the same family as oneself and that the similarities were, finally, more significant than the differences. Such was the vision of Francisco López de Gómara, part of whose Historia general de las Indias of 1552 was translated into English in 1555, along with other Spanish reports, by the enticingly named Richard Eden.
López de Gómara wrote:
One of the marvellous things that God useth in the composition of man is colour, which doubtless cannot be considered without great admiration in beholding one to be white, and another black, being colours utterly contrary. Some likewise to be yellow, which is between black and white, and others of other colours, as it were of diverse liveries. And as these colours are to be marvelled at, even so is it to be considered how they differ one from another as it were by degrees, forasmuch as some men are white after diverse sorts of whiteness, yellow after diverse manners of yellow, and black after diverse sorts of blackness . . . Therefore in like manner and with such diversity as men are commonly white in Europe and black in Africa, even with like variety are they tawny in these Indies, with diverse degrees diversely inclining more or less to black or white . . . By reason whereof it may seem that such variety of colours proceedeth of man, and not of the earth: which may well be although we be all born of Adam and Eve, and know not the cause why God hath so ordained it, otherwise than to consider that his divine majesty hath done this as infinite other [than] to declare his omnipotence and wisdom in such diversities of colours as appear not only in the nature of man, but the like also in beasts, birds, and flowers . . . All which may give further occasion to philosophers to search the secrets of nature and complexions of men with the novelties of the new world.
This idea of human diversity as a type of blessing, while unusual, cannot but have occurred to many observers simply by virtue of its logic. The New World had so many tribes of different colors, including various shades of European, that it would have been odd not to entertain an idea of their basic unity, particularly given the powerful Christian belief that God "made of one blood all nations," as Paul wrote. López de Gómara's rhapsody was, in Eden's translation, among the most widely read American accounts in England and informed the views of the first English adventurers. These men were the religious and political enemies of the Spanish, and in the New World their ambition, tempered by circumstance, led them to attempt multiracial communities. Indeed, it was the racial hierarchy of the Spanish that made a multiracial coalition seem an obvious choice to the English.
The earliest multiracial New World coalition to include white Englishmen was led by Francis Drake. Once a slave trader himself, Drake presumably did not act from moral considerations. Such considerations were, however, part of the general mix. The English had a tradition of associating Spain with tyranny, specifically, though not exclusively, Catholic tyranny and papal rule. This tradition was very much sharpened in the sixteenth century, not least because Spain's New World wealth increased its desire and ability to threaten England, and the reports of Spanish chroniclers and others as to the brutality of New World life—the worst bits were quickly translated—transferred English hatred of Spain into a new sphere. The slowly developing ideology of English freedom, of the right of man to be free from monarchical despotism, found, when faced with the despotic vision of Spanish rule in the Americas, a foreign-policy companion. Some among the English came to believe that their role, as both lovers of freedom and lovers of power, was to undermine the Spanish by promoting freedom in America.
Drake put this idea to practical effect in Panama. He wanted to seize the Spanish gold shipment, up from Peru, at a town on the Atlantic coast where the gold was loaded for its final transshipment to Spain, a place called Nombre de Dios, or Name of God—a heist so big as to pass from theft into statecraft. At first Drake attempted it on his own, but, not knowing the timing of the overland pack-train delivery, he failed. Then he thought to enlist the aid of a sizable community living south of Nombre de Dios—the Cimarrons, escaped slaves some three thousand strong. The Spaniards were terrified of the Cimarrons, who did not fear them and regularly raided Spanish settlements to free the slaves there. Probably a mix of Africans and Indians, though an English source described them as "valiant Negroes fled from their cruel masters the Spaniards," the Cimarrons endangered Spanish rule at a sensitive point. Drake, a masterful opportunist, approached the Cimarrons, who took him and his lieutenant, John Oxenham, to a peak from which the Englishmen first saw the Pacific Ocean. (They vowed to sail it one day, and did.) The Cimarrons infiltrated Panama City and discovered when the gold was to be moved. A combined English-Cimarron force—aided by French Huguenots, who had been working with Cimarrons for nearly a decade—succeeded in seizing the gold, and Drake left for England with a fortune. "This league between the English and the Negroes," a Panama official warned, "is very detrimental to this kingdom, because, being so thoroughly acquainted with the region and so expert in the bush, the Negroes will show them methods and means to accomplish any evil design they may wish to carry out."
Three years later, in 1575, Oxenham returned with fifty men and supplies for the Cimarrons. Oxenham's men took all the rigging from their ship, burned it to extract the hardware, then carried everything overland to the Pacific and built a new ship. The English-Cimarron crew proceeded to raid Spanish shipping and settlements and to free slaves, who then joined the Cimarrons. They also destroyed Catholic churches. The Spanish reported that the Cimarrons had all become "Lutherans," a Spanish catchall term for Protestants. The sources contain no evidence of racial friction in the black-English coalition; everyone seems to have marauded happily together. In the end, a substantial black-English threat to Spain was avoided by the capture and execution of Oxenham and his English comrades (and, presumably, many Cimarrons). The Spanish kept their peculiar racial system intact and choked back their fear that, if the English had been able to flee, "they would have returned in such strength that, aided by the negroes, they would have become masters of the Pacific, which God forbid, for this is the key to all Peru." And Peru was the key to Spanish power in the world.
Drake did not forget the value of the Cimarrons. In his trips along the South American coast he did his best to incite Indians to escape slavery and to become "Lutherans." One English sailor, stranded for fourteen years in Mexico, brought back tales of a northern Mexican tribe that, under the leadership of a Negro, was threatening Spanish control over its mines in that region. This story meshed promisingly with the successful multiracial Cimarron experience. Meanwhile, other Englishmen were thinking of colonizing North America, which they saw as their natural sphere of influence. The idea was to make the north a political counterweight to the Spanish south; to take the Protestant struggle against Catholicism to a new field; and to oppose Spanish racial hierarchies and slavery with English notions of equality and freedom. The ideal was muddled from the beginning. Armed opposition from Indians, for example, was not considered by the English an acceptable expression of political opinion. Nor did the English recognize the paradox of bringing freedom to peoples already free; instead, they seem to have believed that freedom, as they understood it, was an English concept and could only be spread under English leadership. From a practical European standpoint this may not have been far wrong. The Spanish and Portuguese conquests in America had been fantastically swift and thorough, and there was little reason to suppose that England's rivals would have more difficulty in North America than they had farther south.
A reconnaissance expedition in 1584 located Roanoke Island; the trip's chronicler, Arthur Barlowe, found the Indians friendly enough, and described the land in Edenic terms: "The earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour." English planners, led by Sir Walter Raleigh, set about organizing a voyage to begin settlement. One of them laid down rules to ensure equal treatment of Indians, including a regulation that "no Indian be forced to labour unwillyngly." The colonists set off in five ships in April 1585.
A second, related expedition sailed in September of that year, led by Francis Drake. As always, Drake held cities to ransom and plundered as best he could. But he seems to have had another, more interesting project in mind. Over the space of a few months he raided Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and Saint Augustine, in each case freeing slaves and spreading a message of liberation. The Spanish were quick to grasp their English enemy's intention: to unite Indians and Africans under English leadership, and by bestowing freedom to create a multiracial rebellion. Drake sought to lure, as a Spanish source put it, "negro labourers who in his country are free." He had several hundred Africans and Indians—as well as, it was said, some Turks and Moors—with his fleet when he set sail for Roanoke.
Upon Drake's arrival there in June 1586, the colony was already foundering badly. Its leader, Ralph Lane, had not performed well. Many of the rank-and-file Roanoke colonists had probably been forced into going in the first place—England's hopes for America included using it as a vast workhouse for the home country's many unemployed and, at the far end, unemployable. Such men were the worst possible candidates for peopling a hardworking Protestant paradise. Likewise, the local Indians, though apparently civil on the whole, as yet showed no sign of wanting to give up their life of light, easily sustainable agriculture, controlled hunting, fishing, foraging, and honorable warfare for the English alternative of intense, sedentary farming and the production of agricultural exports for the London market; and one can't really think of any good reason why, in these earliest encounters, they should have. Lane and his colonists departed with Drake. Two later expeditions left colonists on the island, and both of these groups disappeared. In this way, the first great drama of Anglo-America entered history and our imaginations: the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
Much was lost at Roanoke between 1585 and 1587. The English had tried to start something new there, something that might have reversed the terrible pattern of American colonization begun in 1492: they had intended, apparently, and haltingly, to found a free society of Africans, Indians, and Europeans. The freedom of Roanoke would have been imperfect and born of circumstance, but that is true of all liberties. The alternative, exemplified by the Spanish, was so much worse. It was also well known to the English, because it was the American norm, and would soon enough take hold, with English variations, in North America. John Smith of Jamestown would advocate adopting the Spanish model. The seeds of an English version of Spanish racial empire were already there: the basic principle of European overlordship; a belief in the superiority of the colonizing civilization; and, somewhere deep in the European heart, a conviction that the lives of Indians and Africans were not as valuable or worthy of note as those of Europeans. The most profoundly tragic aspect of the Lost Colony of Roanoke lies in a textual silence, for while there are many records of the English expeditions, there is no mention of what happened to the Caribbean, South American, Floridian, and African voyagers presumably brought by Drake to freedom in Roanoke. Imagine them. Some would probably have been able to remember passing from freedom into a bizarre and pitiless servitude, only to set sail for yet another new life as free men and women in an unknown land. Why did the English forget them, while remembering themselves and the Spanish? We might say that with this sin of omission, this seemingly blithe constriction of the imagination when faced with human multiplicity, the English first became white.
The Roanoke story that has been recorded and remembered to this day is a white story, the first specifically white tale in English North America. It has been told to illustrate the gravity of the dangers faced by the first white people on these shores; to illustrate both the initial generosity and the lurking enmity of Indians. But the more likely story suggests just the opposite: that the people of Roanoke joined the people all around them; that they shed their separateness like a useless cloak; that they were not lost, but found.
Drake's effort at Roanoke was not the last attempt at a multiracial society of free men in the New World. The New England Puritans, too, for example, had to contend with an alternative vision, one rather more comic than the events of 1585–1590. The Pilgrims, or earliest New World Puritans, sometimes styled Separatists, had rebelled against what they saw as the mistaken course of the Protestant Reformation in England. The English church and state looked upon the Separatists poorly, and oppressed them. The tiny group removed to Holland for sanctuary, but after little more than a decade found the going too hard. As William Bradford, who led the first Pilgrims to New England aboard the Mayflower in 1620, later described it, the founding generation had been growing old in Holland, and feeble, "so as it was not only probably thought, but apparently seen, that within a few years they would be in danger to scatter, by necessities pressing them, or sinke under their burdens, or both." Meanwhile some among their children had begun to stray, even to marry non-Separatists: They were being "drawne away by evill examples into extravagante and dangerous courses, getting ye raines off their necks, and departing from their parents . . . These, and some other like reasons, moved them [the Pilgrims] to undertake this resolution of their removall . . . The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitfull and fitt for habitation, being devoyd of all civill inhabitants, where there are only salvage and brutish men, which range up and downe, little otherwise than ye wild beasts of the same."
Ten years after the Mayflower, preaching to a shipload of Puritans prior to their debarkation in Boston, John Winthrop famously expressed their dream: "the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his owne people and will commaund a blessing upon us in all our wayes, soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome power goodnes and truthe then formerly wee have beene acquainted with, wee shall finde that the God of Israeli is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England."
Bradford and Winthrop were obsessed with enemies. New World Puritanism was not an easy creed; it suppressed individual freedoms to a degree considered extreme, even perverse, at the time; and the desperate colonists believed themselves trailed by the Devil, who, as Bradford wrote, "may carrie a greater spite against the churches of Christ and ye gospell here, by how much ye more they endeavor to preserve holyness and puritie amongst them, and strictly punisheth the contrary." The seemingly inexhaustible cargo of fear that the Puritans carried across the ocean extended to the Indians, who haunted their imaginations—"ye salvage people," Bradford called them, "who are cruell, barbarous, and most trecherous, being more furious in their rage, and merciless where they overcome; not being contente only to kill, and take away life, but delight to tormente men in ye most bloodie manner." The Pilgrims, as Bradford knew, might not have survived without Indian assistance—he acknowledged the help of Squanto, particularly, in showing where to plant corn and how to fish—yet such knowledge somehow did not change the way he described the tribes he met.
Into this tense and unforgiving social situation ambled the louche figure of Thomas Morton, possibly an attorney and undeniably a bad poet, who arrived in 1622 to pursue the fur trade. The majority of seventeenth-century white New Englanders were not religiously motivated Puritans—just as most of the Mayflower passengers were not Pilgrims—and this may be doubly said of Morton. No less an opportunist than Francis Drake, he quickly sensed his chance to perform acts of liberation by means of, in this case, a biracial community. Morton had come over with a Captain Wollaston, who, like some others at the time, was a person of station in England with high hopes for American adventure. Wollaston settled just north of Plymouth with a few other gentleman companions and a horde of servants. His hopes were quickly dashed, and he left for Virginia with servants to sell. From Virginia, Wollaston wrote back to his partner Rasdall asking that more servants be sent. Rasdall agreed, then departed New England, leaving one Fitcher as his lieutenant.
Here Bradford picks up the story: "this Morton abovesaid, haveing more craft than honestie . . . in ye others absence, watches an opportunitie . . . and gott some strong drinck and other junkets, and made them a feast; and after they were merrie, he began to tell them, would give them good counsell. You see (saith he) that many of your fellows are carried to Virginia; and if you stay till this Rasdall return, you will also be carried away and sold for slaves with ye rest. Therefore I would advise you to thruste out this Lieutenant Fitcher; and I, having a parte in the plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociates; so may you be free from service, and we will converse, trade, plante, and live together as equalls, and supporte and protecte one another, or to like effecte. This counsell was easily received; so they tooke opportunity, and thrust Lieutenant Fitcher out a dores."
This was, in Bradford's view, not a happy development. Even within his own minuscule community there were doubters; and other white colonists presented many threats, secular and religious, to Puritan power. However, the simple existence of Morton's rough democracy might not have been a danger worth eliminating. While Puritans did participate in the trading of humans, it was not among their central concerns, and they would not have cared much if Morton wanted to interfere with Captain Wollaston's property rights in his servants. What seems to have touched the Separatists off were Morton's close relations with Indians; his strong belief, frequently stated, that Puritanism was ridiculous; his fondness for, indeed advocacy of, heavy drinking; and, related to these three, his erection, in 1628, of a maypole. Morton and his friends, according to Bradford, then devoted themselves to "drinking and dancing aboute it many days together, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practises. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye madd Bacchanalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetrie) composed sundry rimes and verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, and others to ye detraction and scandall of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll May-polle. They changed allso the name of their place, and in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it Merrie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever."