This article is part of a series discussing competing perspectives on American history. Cross-reference to Chapters 1 and 2 of A Patriot’s History of the United States, and Chapters 1 through 3 of A People’s History of the United States. In this post we cover the discoveries and colonies of following 1492.
Compared to the “origin stories” of other great nations, America’s is quite recent. France, Britain, China, and Japan have centuries of history and culture to point to. Even younger European states like Germany and Italy have, to some extent, common culture and language that predated their political unification.
Because of this, the telling of American history begins with the actions and deeds of people from other countries—Christopher Columbus was Italian, Cortez and Pizarro Spanish. Even the first European settlers in North America were, at first, not Americans. Yet as our authors will make clear, having a view on America requires having something of a view on these events as well. Fortunately, neither Zinn nor Schweikert & Allen will let us down on this count.
In the popular imagination of U.S. history, this opening salvo of explorers and conquistadors from several nations eventually gives way to the Thirteen Colonies along the Atlantic coast. In the century-and-a-half from Jamestown to Lexington-Concord, these colonies, to some extent, developed distinctively from their British countrymen. Here, too, our authors find themselves on disputed ground.
“Discovering” “America”
Columbus, certainly, did not discover America in the sense of finding anything new for the first time. The Norsemen had beaten him to it by five centuries, and the continent was inhabited long before then.
Our authors take different lines on Columbus. Zinn, writing first, decries the blithe celebrations of Columbus Day, while Schweikert & Allen, two decades later, insist that the outrage that would in the establishment of Indigenous Peoples’ Day was taking things a bit far.
One suspects the truth ultimately rests in the middle. To Zinn, Columbus was intent upon finding gold (he was likely desperate to have something shiny to show his royal sponsors), and the native Arawak peoples were simply an impediment to be enslaved or disposed of. Patriot’s recognizes the explorer’s demand for gold, but emphasizes Columbus’ desire to convert the Arawaks peacefully to Christianity.
People’s cites Bartolomé de Las Casas, a priest who arrived in Hispaniola in 1508. In his contemporary writings he excoriates Columbus’ conduct, claiming that the previous fourteen years had claimed over three million Indian lives from “war, slavery, and the mines” on the island, amounting to clear genocide.
Patriot’s addresses the question head-on: “Did Columbus kill most of the Indians?” Schweikert & Allen point out that any death tolls are likely reliant on spurious estimates of 1491 population. Initial estimates were as high as 100 million, but more recent estimates have been as low as 1.8 million, and most such studies are prone to extremely wide confidence intervals—that is, we should not have much confidence in any of them. Estimates based on food carrying capacity of the land—based on the level of technology the natives possessed—result in an estimate of 20 million or less in 1491. These lower estimates, coupled with evidence of deteriorating native health and depopulation in the century pre-Columbus, suggest a lower death toll than the 55 million some historians cited. Besides, the vast majority of these were likely from disease, something for which no one with a 15th-century knowledge of immunology could be blamed. The concept of mutual responsibility for the exposure of others to infectious diseases was never widely considered until the COVID-19 pandemic—it is therefore the most blatant historicism to apply such a standard to people five hundred years ago.
Our authors agreed on the brutality of Aztec human sacrifice. Patriot’s cites a 1487 sacrificial spree in which a victim was slaughtered every four seconds, nonstop, for four days. Yet People’s insists that this cruelty “did not erase a certain innocence,” and paints Cortés’ expedition as another episode of disease and mass murder in pursuit of gold. Patriot’s emphasizes the hostility to the Aztecs among other tribes (like the Tlaxcala) brought on by their sacrifices, and the inflexibility of the social structure following the death of Montezuma, while the European tradition of civic virtue enabled the conquistadors to quickly replace any losses among their leaders.
With regard to the natives in North America, People’s paints them with a rose-colored brush, as a collection of societies that were far more egalitarian than their European counterparts, along political, gender, and economic lines. Zinn contrasts this with European nations where “2 percent of the population owned 95 percent of the land.” Yet this becomes a difficult comparison to make when considering the uniquely (at the time) European notion of private property, and does not address a critical question: were the European peasants materially worse off than their native counterparts?
Zinn has the last word on the subject. Referencing the common notion that the post-Columbus depopulations were a tragic but inevitable price to pay for “progress”, he challenges this very assumption. He takes issues with the premise that any deplorable event (he cites Hiroshima, Vietnam, and the Soviet subjugation of Hungary) is justified for any greater good, and he places the blame for such “quick disposals” upon “the middle and upper classes of the conquering and ‘advanced’ countries.” This is part of the theme of class struggle that runs through Zinn’s work, underscoring his book’s title.
How England Won the New World
Henry Kissinger called history “the memory of the states.” This is a description that People’s cites and vehemently disagrees with. Thus, of our two sources, Patriot’s provides far more comprehensive accounts of each colony’s origin, and how England, rather than Spain or France, came to colonize North America in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Patriot’s cites a factors to explain the eventual success of the English colonies. While People’s accuses the Spanish gold-seekers of representing the worst type of capitalists, the economic philosophy of capitalism was still 250 years from being introduced. Instead, Spain was governed by a mercantilist system, in which wealth seen as a zero-sum game measured by gold bullion. Because of this, the vast hoards the conquistadors brought back to Spain just sat there in vaults (and a bit was intercepted en route by Francis Drake and others). France, laying claims to land in modern-day Canada, devoted more attention to fur trading and resource harvesting than settling—resulting in English colonists outnumbering the French six to one by 1700.
The English, meanwhile, benefitted from a handful of advantages. The joint-stock company (precursor to the modern publicly-listed corporation) allowed investors to limit their liability to the amount they invested—enabling risky ventures to find funding without individual investors needing to bear excessive risks themselves. The local congregational governance structure of many Protestant churches introduced both an appetite and experience in communities directing their own local affairs. And the scarcity of labor supported long-established precedents of property rights (although southern colonies would eventually seek another solution to labor shortage: slavery). These three factors: basic modern market finance, local church governance, and property rights, echo three of the key factors that Patriot’s lays out in its opening pages.
Patriot’s gives an account of the origins of every colony—Maryland as a haven for Catholic English, Pennsylvania as a private experiment in religious tolerance, Georgia as a penal colony to buffer Spanish Florida, New York as a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam, etc. But Schweikert & Allen focus most of their attention in two places: Virginia, and New England.
Virginia was first, with settlers founding Jamestown in 1607. The colony was initially a private corporate venture staffed by “gentleman adventurers” who failed to earn what it took to feed them. As one hard winter led to another, the colony abandoned the communal economy model it had started with. In the depths of the “Starving Time” of 1609-10, the settlers nearly abandoned the colony entirely, but were met by a ship bringing supplies as they departed, and decided to stick it out. It’s interesting to wonder just how different subsequent history might have been had the Jamestown colony failed.
The New England colonies, meanwhile, were founded by separatist Puritans, who had fled England for The Netherlands a decade before. Granted a charter by the Virginia Company to a piece of land at the mouth of the Hudson (where New York City is today), they missed the spot by several hundred miles and reached land at Cape Cod Bay. Determining to settle there anyway, they composed the Mayflower Compact—both to establish principles of representative government, and to declare their loyalty to the King despite violating their original charter. In similar fashion as at Jamestown, the Pilgrims had pooled their resources, and, also in similar fashion, they quickly abandoned the communal model on pain of starvation. This came too late for half the Pilgrims, who died in the first winter. But the following harvest was plentiful. Prosperity eluded the original Pilgrims, however; most new colonists to New England chose a spot further west on Massachusetts Bay. Populated as they were by stringent Puritans, the New England colonies were marked by cycles of religious dissention and divisions, with new colonies like Rhode Island often founded by resultant outcasts.
When James II (last of the Stuarts) became King in 1685, he recalled the charters of all the colonies north of Pennsylvania, and determined to centralize them in a Dominion of New England. He appointed a royal governor to execute these changes, and his chosen man dismissed colonial legislatures and forbade local town meetings. This went over as well as the Stamp Act would, sparking revolts throughout the colonies. As the Glorious Revolution ended in James II being deposed and replaced, the colonists arrested his appointee and sent him packing back to England. I found this an interesting tale, almost like a “dry-run” of the eventual American Revolution.
Among the reorganizations that followed the Glorious Revolution were a host of powers granted by the new King to Parliament—including making the House of Commons the source of all revenue bills (the “power of the purse”). This found echo in many colonial governments as well, and is still in place today in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Despite the relative backwardness of America (something Tocqueville predicted would be a lasting feature of democracies), the colonies placed a peculiar emphasis on university education. By the time of the Revolution, at least nine universities had been established (relative to two in England), with emphases on both theological and practical subjects. From the beginning, American science was focused upon practice and application, not theory and abstraction. As Patriot’s put it, “Americans wanted the kind of science that would heat their homes and improve their eyesight,” and Benjamin Franklin was the most eminent example of the practical applications of natural science.
The precedent of colonial misadministration at the hands of royal governors, coupled with the tradition of religious independence linked with local self-government, engrained in the American character a contempt for centralized authority. Exacerbating this, the trade policies within the British Empire were meant to favor the people in Britain, not her subjects abroad. The Board of Trade essentially governed all commerce between Britain and her American colonies. While People’s decries the plight of the poor colonists, and mentions occasional protests at the prices set by the rich colonial merchants, Patriot’s insists that these merchants did not set prices—they were themselves on the losing end of a game rigged in Britain.
Aside from such unequal trade policies, Britain treated the American colonies with what Patriot’s calls a “benign neglect”, until the Seven Years’ War (called the French & Indian War in America) erupted. The end result of this war (started, incidentally, by an expedition on the frontier led by young George Washington) was an emphatic British victory, with territorial gains from Canada to India at France’s expense. However, the ensuing war debts incurred by Britain would result in further changes in how London viewed the economic relationship.
Slavery & Class in the Colonies
Where Patriot’s focuses more on the historical evolution of the colonies, People’s devotes nearly two entire chapters to the plights of African slaves and European poor in the North American colonies—making strong claims about each that warrant examination.
On one hand, People’s suggests that slavery was incentivized by race from the first slave ship that arrived at Jamestown in 1619. Zinn cites the colony’s failure to grow its own food as a likely reason to turn to slave labor, and quotes historians that imply the feelings of the inadequacy that the English settlers must have had as they suffered from want. This claim appears incompatible with one Zinn makes a few pages later, that the English declared “total war” on the local natives the very same year. A decade removed from the worst of the starving time, and now ready to fight the Powhatan confederation instead of treat with them, it appears questionable that the demand for slaves had anything to do with requiring labor to ward off food shortages.
Indentured servants were, to our minds, not slaves. British subjects would agree to settle in Virginia, paying for the cost of their passage with several years of their labor. This amounted to slavery with an expiration date, and Patriot’s points out that many of these indentured servants referred to themselves as slaves—which suggests that hereditary, race-based slavery did not exist in the beginning, at least de jure. In practice, People’s cites that black and white “servants” were listed separately from the beginning, and that any minor offence was sufficient to have years tacked on to one’s indenture—regardless of race. Further, black servants were not given arms to defend against Indian attacks, while white servants were.
Muddying the picture even more, Patriot’s mentions 100,000 Irish “servants” shipped to the New World under the 5-year dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, contrasted with the annual slave cargo from Africa of only 7,000. On the Caribbean island of Barbados in 1641, over 80% of the ~25,000 slaves were white Europeans. This suggests an unclear beginning that may require treating the concepts of race and involuntary servitude as separate concerns that gradually merged into hereditary racial slavery.
Our authors agree on some possible explanations for any inherent racism felt by the English—both suggest that Christian imagery glorifying the color white and denigrating the color black likely played a role. Yet Patriot’s cites free blacks in Virginia owning white slaves as late as 1670.
Eventually, slavery morphed into what would become the “Peculiar Institution”—hereditary black slavery. Patriot’s does not provide much explanation for how exactly this took place, other than a gradually evolving of colonial attitudes toward black servants. By contrast, People’s, which places emphasis on the injustice suffered both by black slaves and poor-but-free whites, insists that the “color line” served a dreadful purpose: to prevent the oppressed classes of both races from uniting against the wealthy that determined the social order. As Marx considered religion the “opiate of the masses”, Zinn suggests that racism had similar institutional origins in the colonies.
This is further explained by People’s reference to over 250 rebellions of at least ten slaves, while Patriot’s insists rebellions were the exception rather than the rule. This is ultimately subjective, and requires some view on how frequent rebellions must be as a proportion of the slave population in order to be considered either “rule” or “exception”.
To People’s, many of the poor whites, whether free or not, had more in common with the slaves than with the wealthy—citing a letter that insists “Whoever is well off in Europe better remain there,” that America was far less inviting or pleasant than Europe. Similar complaints are still made about the U.S. today, but the net immigration flows in the same direction as it did 300 years ago—supporting Patriot’s image of America as a land of greater opportunity and upward mobility than was available in Europe. People’s sees colonial America, through a class-struggle lens, as a place where 80% of freed white servants were likely to spend their lives in varying degrees of wretchedness and hopelessness, with only 20% ever prospering. This appears to set a limit to upward mobility—but what proportion of people must achieve greater wealth in order for society to be considered upwardly mobile? The required business acumen, intelligence, and capacity for hard labor surely make the fair number less than 100%, even if 20% is low. By contrast, the powers that be granted vast tracts of land and other favors to their wealthy friends, resulting in a feudal-like distribution of land ownership. While Patriot’s limits any discussion of economic unfairness to the unequal relationship with Britain, People’s places the blame squarely on the rich—on both sides of the Atlantic. Schweikart’s background as a historian of finance and Zinn’s background of activism likely reinforce their respective views—and we therefore ought not expect them to agree on this point.
Due to the broad swath of material (nearly three centuries) covered under this period, there was plenty of scope for our authors to focus on different themes and factors. To our analysis, this should only serve as further evidence of their diverging views. In our next post, we will cover the American Revolution, from the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War to Washington’s inauguration.
One thought on “One Country, Two Histories, Part 2: Columbus to Colonies”
Comments are closed.