The Almanac of American History [antikvár]

INTRODUaiON "In the beginning," wrote John Locke in the Second Treatise on Civil Government, "all the world was America." Locke intended only a metaphor for the state of nature that preceded the establishment of civil society. But his metaphor evokes much more. It implies a way America was first seen from Europe—as a new beginning, a break in the long, sad continuities of history, a fresh chance for fallen humanity. The red men, the Native Americans, lived in something close to Locke's state of nature. Even whites in America were liberated, in part at least, from the deadweights of the past. They brought certain ideas and institutions from the older civilization, but transformed these in the hard experience of subduing a wilderness and pushing on to ever-receding frontiers. Other ideas and institutions, like feudalism, they simply left behind; and the absence of feudalism assured a separate political evolution in the new land. "The great advantage of the Americans," as Alexis de Toc-queville said in Democracy in America, "is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution, and that they are bom equal without becoming so." As early as 1782, while American commissioners in Paris were negotiating for British recognition of American independence, a French immigrant to Orange County, New York, propounded a question that still echoes today: "What then is the American, this new man?" They were a motley group, these white Americans, a "promiscuous breed," Hector de St. John de Crevecoeur, the American essayist, called them in his Letters from an American Farmer, composed of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, yet "melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." Crevecoeur went on to answer his own question: "He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and > manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles." Many nationalities joined in making the new society. But the British influence predominated, supplying the language, the law, the religion, the culture, the training in self-government, even the very political theory that led to the overthrow of British rule. Yet everything subtly altered after the transatlantic passage. Nor was the frontier the only agency of Americanization. The new land moved through a series of historic stages; or, to put it differently, history imposed a succession of overlapping tasks on the men and women who settled the new continent. Each task created its own agenda, its own set of priorities for the evolving nation. Each new agenda determined how the American people allocated their attention, their resources and their hopes during each historic stage. And each agenda further modified old ideas and institutions and, on occasion, invented new ones, thereby developing a distinctive American order of life. The first of these historic tasks was invasion and conquest. For North America was not an unpopulated wilderness. No one knows how many Indians there were when the white men first arrived. Estimates range from one to four million. They were widely scattered across the vast continent, mostly nomadic fragmented by tribe, language and ritual. But they were there, with cultures and identities of their own. The establishment of the white man in the new land meant the expulsion of the red man, as it also meant the unceasing adaptation of European ideas and institutions to American circumstance. This process of adaptation widened the American deviation from Europe, fostered impulses of separatism and thereby led on to the second historic task: the achievement of nationhood. In the last quarter of the 18th century, when travel and communication were slow and laborious, Americans faced the challenge of converting 13 colonies with local concerns and local loyalties into a democratic republic with national identity, national loyalty and a national govem-ment. Two great documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—crystallized the American creed, affirming that all men were created equal with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and defining the polity within which those rights were to be exercised. Years after, in the late 20th century, Americans watched Third World countries in an equivalent travail of nationhood. But the pursuit of national identity had been a good deal easier for Americans, blessed as they were by abundant natural resources, by a literate population, by a Calvinist work ethic, by antecedent traditions of self-government, by relative isolation from foreign aggression. Yet even with these advantages it required a bloody civil war before the travail was over. From the task of establishing nationhood Americans moved to the task of settling the continent. They relentlessly pressed their invasion of the wilderness until white America at last stretched from sea to sea over the smashed cultures and crushed bodies of the Native Americans. As white men moved farther, forever westward, they also began to confront the most glaring contradiction between the American creed and the American reality. This contradiction committed Americans to their next national task: the abolition of slavery, the destruction of the system by which one person owned another as private property. It took four years of savage fraternal war before that task was completed in a legal sense. A century and a quarter later it had not yet been completed in the fundament^ sense. The plight of racial minorities, though Americans have become infinitely more sensitive to that pUght in the last generation, remains a realm of inequality in a society allegedly dedicated to equal rights. After the Civil War the nation faced the task of industrializing an agricultural economy, transforming a predominantly rural society of farmers and planters into an increasingly urban (and in time suburban) so-