A Short History of the United States

Preface

I HAVE tried to tell in a few pages the tale of a nation. The history of the United States covers little more than a hundred years. The history of the American colonies from the hour of the earliest English settlement adds not quite two centuries more to the record. Yet another hundred years backward and the New World was unknown. Only four hundred years lie between the first voyage of Columbus and the second Presidency of Grover Cleveland. There are gaps in our knowledge of the history of Egypt greater than this, ruined spaces in the table of its lines of kings, beads dropped unheeded from its chaplet of wars and conquests and wonders. Yet no four centuries in the world's story are more momentous than America's ; no single century can surpass the century of the United States. The history of the United States, of the American Colonies cannot be too well known, too deeply studied.

It is the history of the growth of HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES civilisation under conditions new to humanity, of the greatest effort for freedom, the greatest experiment in democracy ever made by men. If it taught nothing — and it can teach the historical student almost everything — it still would charm with the fascination of romance. The pages of America's chronicle are adventurous as an epic, splendid with heroic deeds, crowded with heroic figures. The Human Comedy, the Human Tragedy find a great stage and great players. This small book is no more than the key to the noble picture, the outline map to the vast continent. It directs attention to some famous names and some famous places in the hope of quickening interest towards a wider knowledge. If it does so much it will serve an honourable end. CONTENTS

Chapter I The Old World And The New About

the year one thousand of the Christian era, the civilisation of the Eastern Hemisphere was troubled with a superstitious fear. Men believed that the end of the world was at hand, believed that the span of the earth's career was ten centuries ; and, believing this, all Christendom went in fear and trembling. Yet it seems certain that in this very season of agony, a handful of European adventurers, with no thought for the threatened doom of the old world, set sail upon an unknown sea to find a new world. The story of this adventure lives in the Saga of the Red Erik, and the Saga of the Red Erik sur vives in the Flateyar-bok and the Hauks-bok, two precious possessions of Icelandic literature. Over the story told in the Saga of the Red Erik, scholars disputed and scholars will dispute. But it seems easy to believe, and hard to disbelieve, that sailors from Iceland found their way to the shores of Green land before the modern world was a thousand years old, and that the modern world had not long out grown its tenth century when other sailors from Iceland made their way farther south.

Leif Erik son, the son of the Red Erik, found a land which he called Wineland the Good, and some of the wisest of modern historians believe, with show of A reason, that Wineland the Good was situated on the shore of Rhode Island. Leif and his companions fought with strange natives whom they called Skraelings, and who correspond in important and curious particulars with North American Indians. Leif and his companions found many things in Wineland the Good which were to be found in New England long afterwards — foxes and bears, salmon and halibut, abundance of eider ducks, and abundance of wild grapes. It seems difficult to doubt that Leif Erikson found his way to the coast of North America, probably to that part of the coast which is now called Massachusetts Bay, and possibly to that part of the coast which lies between Cape Cod and Cape Ann.

Among the many legends of the Iroquois nation there is one which is known as the legend of the Stonish Giants. The origin of the story is unknown, but it tells of mighty men whom the Indians encoun tered at a remote period of their history. These giants were fabled to be clothed in a clothing that was impenetrable to the Indian spears and the Indian arrows. There is an extant Iroquois drawing which represents three savage chiefs running desperately for their lives from two pursuing giants many times larger than the flying Indians. The course of the giants is in no way checked by the showers of arrows which the Indians are directing against them. The giants appear to be enveloped in some singular kind of panoply which covers every part of them, save, apparently, their faces. Students of this picture ask if these seemingly mail-clad men could have been the Vikings who are said to have discovered America many centuries before Cabot.

If the story of Wineland the Good is to be accepted, it need scarcely be surprising that the memory of the Northmen should persist as long within the memory of the Red Men as the memory of the Skraelings persisted in the memory of the descendants of the Red Erik and of Leif. At least we learn from the Sagas that the Northmen came again and again, fierce men and fiercer women who first traded with the natives and then quarrelled with them, and gave and took blows bloodily, and carried back a strange and undying story to the halls and the hearths of Iceland. Lovers of the Wine land story have striven time and again to discover definite proofs of the residence of the Northmen on the continent. There was a mill at Newport long cherished by the romantic as a Viking fortress, until it was proved to be a last century reproduction of a mill near Leamington, in England, a reproduction erected by Governor Arnold late in the seventeenth century.

There was a painted stone at Dighton which was fondly supposed to be a faithful pre sentation of a Norse expedition, but which is now accepted as a Red Indian painting of a Red Indian hunting-expedition. The 'Skeleton in Armour' of Longfellow's poem, found at Fall River, Massa chusetts, was certainly no Norse Viking, but pro bably a Red Indian. We cannot know what the Skraelings were ; or whether, indeed, they were the same as that copper coloured race whom later white sailors found on the continent, and whom these sailors called Indians, because they assumed that America was a part of India. The history of the Red Indian is lost in darkness, in which science gropes helplessly, and speculation entertains itself in vain. According to Agassiz, America, as far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. 'Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside ; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the far West.' There is no certain proof of the existence of man in the days when the mammoth and the mastodon roved over the American continent.

No sign of him remains as signs remain in prehistoric Europe. If he existed, he passed away with the strange beasts and birds of that dawn of time. People have imagined that in the infinite azure of antiquity the continent was populated with races akin to those of the South, people who built splendid cities, who honoured with gorgeous temples the fantastic gods they worshipped, who commanded a rude sculpture and some skill in metal-working, who were wealthy and learned in an amazing degree for the age in which they lived, an age in which the inhabitants of Europe dwelt in caves, and fought as the wild beasts fight, and scratched strange effigies of prehistoric beasts on fragments of bone for the benefit of latter-day museums. The mysterious pyramids that are found in North America have suggested racial associations with Egypt, with India, with Central America.

The mound-builders whose remains have long been the puzzle and passion of American archæologists were once thought to repre sent a different race from the Red Indian, though recent research has tended to lessen this belief. But all these speculations are mere conjecture. There is no positive historical evidence as to the origin of the native races of America. All we know is that through dim and lonely centuries the great pro cesses of Nature went on ; that the seasons followed their ordained course, and that for long before the White Man came, the Red Man fished the streams and hunted the forests, and wandered over the plains, and fought and was cruel to his enemies and content with his clan, and loved and died, and began the game of life all over again. The Red Man thought himself the lord of creation until his title was disputed by the strange creatures with pale faces who took him unawares, coming up stealthily out of the sunrise and the sea, to pen him in little corners of what had once been his illimitable kingdom.

These Indians, in the period in which they are known to the rest of the world, differ greatly in degree of savagery. Professor Fiske divides them into three principal divisions, as savage Indians, barbarous Indians, and half-civilised Indians. In the uncounted hundreds of years in which the Red Men had dwelt upon the American continent, differences of race had grown up. All the Red Men had in common the same copper-coloured skins, the same black eyes, the lank, black hair, the same almost hair less faces, and the same high cheek-bones. It would seem as if their languages were formed upon the same model and subjected to the same grammatical rules, and came therefore from the same stock. But the long lapses of time and the conditions incidental to life on a vast continent brought about marked differences of size, appearance, customs, manners, and dialects.

The savage Indians, such as the Athabaskans, Bannocks, and Apaches, were a nomad race, fishers and game-hunters and basket-weavers, careless of agriculture. They ranged to the west of Hudson Bay, and to the south between the Pacific and the Rocky Mountains to the north of Mexico. The barbarous Indians inhabited the regions east of the Rocky Mountains. They were fishers and hunters, too, but they had some rudimentary knowledge of agriculture, could raise maize or Indian corn, pumpkins, squashes, beans, tomatoes, sunflowers, and tobacco. They could make pottery, and instead of wandering about the world carrying wigwams with them, they lived in villages and made themselves large houses, lasting for several years. They had dogs of an inferior kind, but no cattle or domesti cated animals. They had strange social customs and strange religious beliefs.

All families descended from the same female ancestor formed a clan. The clan lived together in the same house, or group of houses and held all property in common, except weapons and personal ornaments. Each clan had a name, generally the name of an animal. That animal was sacred to that clan, and its image was the clan's totem, a kind of sanctified heraldic bearing. So many clans formed a tribe. All members of the tribe were equal and free in the most democratic sense. Each clan chose its own chief or sachem, and could depose him if he failed to give satisfaction. Each clan chose a certain number of war chiefs or generals. Questions affecting the clan were settled by the clan ; questions affecting the tribe in the council of the tribe composed of the sachems of the clans. These Indians had a fantastic religion, com posed of a mixture of ancestor-worship, with worship of the powers of Nature.

They were very brave, very hospitable in peace, and very merciless in war. They regarded fighting as the main reason for life, and no young man could hope to be married until he had killed many enemies and carried away their scalps. They put captives to death with cruel tortures. It was a point of honour with them to face torture with immovable composure, and to defy their tormentors to the last with taunts and insults. They were hospitable to those who needed hospitality ; they had almost a Greek sense of the rights and privileges of a guest ; their cruelty and ferocity were tempered by much that was admirable if not even amiable. These barbarous Indians were divided into three distinct races with distinct languages : the Maskoki, who spread over a vast field of territory in the South ; the Iroquois, of whom a few were in the South but the most in the North, in and about what is now New York state ; and lastly, the Algonquins, who covered the most country of all, as the remainder of the Continent east of the Mississippi formed their hunting ground.

As for the half-civilised Indians, the third in Professor Fiske's division, they have almost no thing to do with the story of the United States. They are the Pueblo Indians, so called from the Pueblos or strongholds they build and dwell in. They dwelt in the mountainous country from New Mexico southward to Chili, and theirs was the vanished splendour of Aztec civilisation. After the Vikings abandoned their short-lived hold upon Wineland the Good, the Skraelings were left in undisputed lordship of the land. It is possible that, as the centuries waxed and waned, other mariners from Europe made their way— desperate fishermen from France, desperate fishermen from England — to catch cod off Newfoundland, off Labrador. We know little of these shadowy adventurers, less real and less interesting than the Vikings.

It is probable that they did not dream that they had looked upon the shores of a new world. Nearly five hundred years had come and gone since the comrades of Erik had descended on Wine land, when a Genoese seaman wrote a letter to an Italian sage. Since the days of Aristotle, even before the days of Aristotle, men of learning had busied themselves with speculations upon the formation of the earth on which they found themselves. Aristotle believed that it was globular ; so did the Arabs who studied Aristotle and his philosophy ; so did many of their philosophical successors in Europe. The Genoese sailor, merchant, adventurer, mapmaker, Christopher Columbus, lapped in the tranquillity of a happy married life upon a peaceful island, conceived the idea, based upon the globular shape of the earth, of sailing westward to the Indies.

One of the greatest of geographers then living was Paolo Toscanelli, the Florentine. Columbus wrote to him for his advice and counsel. Toscanelli sent him a long letter applauding his ' great and noble desire to go to the place where the spices grow,' and sending him a sailing chart of that part of the world as it existed in Toscanelli's knowledge, tempered by Toscanelli's imagination. The map has long been lost, but it has been restored easily and more than once from its description. It is, of course, a blank where the great continent, the unknown continent, lay. With the aid of this map, the ruddy, blue-eyed, whitehaired adventurer set out in 1492 on his first voyage towards immortality. It is scarcely a paradox to say that Columbus did not discover America. It is almost a paradox to assert that he did discover America.

Columbus never dreamed of discovering a new world. He went to his death without any idea that he had discovered a new world. When he set out on what Humboldt called his conquest of reflection, his hope was to find a new way from Europe towards the wealth of Asia. When in his first voyage he sighted the Bahama Islands, and made slight examination of Cuba and Hayti, he believed that he was in some part of Asia. When in his third voyage he sighted the coast of South America, near the mouth of the Orinoco, he still believed that he beheld an Asiatic shore. On his last voyage, made in desperate rivalry to Vasco da Gama's successful expedition to Hindostan, Columbus followed the coasts of Honduras and Veragua in the vain hope of finding a strait from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. The country which is some times called after him, Columbia, he never heard of, never dreamed of, never saw.

The two Cabots, John and Sebastian, father and son, Genoese in the service of Henry the Seventh of England, were the first navigators since the Northmen to be directly associated with North America. In 1497 and 1498 they came upon and explored parts of the American north coast. It is not quite certain that Sebastian Cabot deserves to share his father's glory. Indeed it does not matter. Henry Stevens's formula holds good : ' Sebastian Cabot minus John Cabot equals o.' At least John Cabot's work is unquestioned and unquestionable. In the same years Vincent Pinzon, one of Columbus's lieutenants, accompanied by a Florentine, named Amerigo Vespucci, led an expedition from Cadiz, reached and followed the Atlantic coast of North America, as far, probably, as Chesapeake Bay. Amerigo Vespucci afterwards entered the service of Portugal, and in 1501 he piloted an expedition of three ships which explored the Brazilian coast, and afterwards sailed south-east, until driven back by Antarctic cold and ice.

It was this voyage which revealed to astonished Europe the existence of the New World. Learned geographers proposed and agreed to give the new-found world the name of America, in honour of Amerigo, according Columbus's name to the islands which the Genoese had discovered. The name of America soon appeared on what is now known as South America in the maps of the time. When it became known that the American con tinents were one, the .name America was given to both of them, Northern and Southern alike. Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the next of the famous adventurers in the New World. Spurred by desire for gold, and the fabled tales of Indian chiefs, he climbed the Cordillera Mountains, and beheld the waters of an unknown sea. Balboa named this sea the South Sea. A few years later it was reached by water from the Atlantic for the first time by the Portuguese Fernao da Magalhaes who gave his name to the straits by which he reached the sea, which we call in his honour the Straits of Magellan.

Magellan called this new sea the Pacific, and sailed boldly across its waters to his death by savage hands on the Philippine Islands. In the year of Balbao's discovery of the Pacific, the Spaniard, Juan Ponce de Leon, made the first attempt to found a colony within the present limits of the United States. Seeking for a kind of earthly paradise he found and named Florida. But his attempted settlement failed. He, too, a victim of savage hostility, died of his wounds in Cuba. The discovery that Cuba was an island, and its conquest, were the next steps in the story. They led in turn to the discovery and con quest of Mexico by Fernando Cortez and his com panions. The brave, cruel story of adventure and exploration runs on, glittering with fairy gold. In 1526 Lucas Vasquez d'Ayllon attempted to found a settlement on Chesapeake Bay, only to perish of fever with most of those who were with him.

The names of Panfilo de Narvaez, of Francisco de Coronado belong to the search for treasure beyond Mexico. The name of Hernando de Soto is asso ciated for ever with the Mississippi, by whose shores he died, and in whose waters his body was buried, that the Indians might not learn the folly of his assurances that the White Man was immortal. Our concern is not close with all this pompous pageant of adventurers. Bearded Vikings with winged helmets, misty yellow-faced Mongolians, Arabian sailors on the Sea of Darkness, possible or impossible Welsh princes, who may or may not leave descendants speaking a kind of Cymric speech, astounding Venetian brethren of magnificent imagina tion, white-haired, ruddy-faced Genoese pioneers, English Tudor mariners, gold-hunting hidalgos, polite pirates who may have known Gil Polo, amiable freebooters with the Diana of Montemayor in their sea-chests, eager, patient, strenuous Jesuits accepting the martyr's crown of Indian apostleship for the glory of the Lord, all this procession hurries by, a masque of splendid shadows, over the rough, raw continents, through the horrid woods, by the shores of undreamed-of, unbaptized seas, on the scarps of undreamed-of, undefeated mountains.

They pour from the East, along the pathway of the sun, into the new, the wonderful West, and so they vanish. Our concern is not with them. They seldom came to colonise, they seldom came to stay. They were, for the most part, but birds of passage. They came in search of wealth, in the service of great sovereigns, in the service of the church to save alive the souls of naked savages. For their own ends or the ends of others they risked their lives, buffeted the buffeting seas, tramped the trackless desert, risked the arrow and the tomahawk and the stake, like the brave, needy, reckless, earnest adventurers that they were. Those who came for gold had no nobler motive than gain. Those who came in the name of the Cross had no dream of building up a Commonwealth in the waste places of the heathen.

That antique spirit of colonisation, which sent argosy after argosy of the children of Hellas to create a greater Greece upon another soil, was denied to and was not desired by those who first furrowed the strange seas and trampled the strange soil of the New World. It is not amongst them or theirs that we must look for the men whose names stand at the beginning of the story of the United States. Before Soto fell asleep, or Coronado's enterprise came to nothing, the Spaniards had found European rivals in America. The French had made their appearance in the northern part of the country. In and 1535 the Frenchman, Jacques Cartier, ex plored the St. Lawrence. The ambition of Henry IV. of France to found a French Colonial Empire sent de Monts to make a settlement on the Bay of Fundy, and prompted Samuel de Champlain to found the town of Quebec and to discover Lakes Champlain and Huron.

These experiments were followed byfrequent, and for the most part disastrous, attempts to found colonies on the Florida and Carolina coasts. Priva tions, native wars, mutiny, and the merciless hostility of the Spaniards destroyed these colonies. But by this time a third race of colonists had made their appearance upon the scene of the New World. The English gentlemen adventurers of the Elizabethan age were slave-dealers, privateers, almost pirates, always splendid fighters. Hawkins, Drake, Gilbert, and Raleigh busied themselves in harassing the Spaniards, planning colonies, eager to make the most of the New World and the new opportunities. From the dawn of the seventeenth century adventurers of all kinds were hot to follow in the wake of the vessels of Drake. The voyages of Bartholomew Gosnold, of Martin Pring, and of George Weymouth to the New World, and their return with valuable cargoes and glowing tales, prepared the way for the formation of the first permanent English colony in the New World.

The early English colonies were no better successes than the early Spanish or the early French. The story of Roanoke Island is one of the saddest and the strangest in the history of colonisation. But with the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the ruin of Spain's power at sea, Englishmen found themselves free to found colonies in America in comparative peace. When Raleigh fell under King James's displeasure, his charter to colonise in America was taken away from him and conferred instead upon an association known to history and to the world as the Virginia Company. It was so called because the name ' Virginia,' from the virgin queen, had been given in courtier spirit to all the territory in America which was claimed by England. The members of the com pany fell into two divisions — members who resided in or near London, and members who resided in or near Plymouth.

Virginia, from the Cape Fear River to the Bay of Fundy, was divided between them, with the exception of an intervening belt of territory from the thirty-eighth to the forty-first degree of latitude. This was to be left open to whichever of the two sub-companies of London or Plymouth should be quickest to colonise it. The Plymouth sub-company fitted out an expedition to the coast of Maine in 1607, but the severity of the winter, the hostility of the natives, and the absence of gold discouraged the would-be colonists, and they made haste to return home in the spring of 1608, leaving no permanent trace of their experiment behind them. On the 19th of December 1606 three ships, the Good Speed, the Discovery, and the Sitsan Constant, sailed for the Thames, Westward Ho. The three ships carried an odd mixture of men who were sailing for Virginia with dreams of gold and glory hum ming in their heated brains.

They represented the London Company. They were the first to turn to the New World under the authority of the New Charter. The New Charter laid down certain very definite rules and regulations for the governing of any colony established by the company. The supremacy of the Church of England and of the King of England were to be maintained. Equity and land tenure were to be the same as in England. Any laws passed by the colonists were subject to the approval of the monarch. On paper in fact the colonists had little or no power to administer their own affairs ; these were to be administered according to the wisdom of the English Solomon. It is pro bable that the men who made up the ships' companies of the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Good Speed cared extremely little for the conditions under which they might be permitted to found a colony.

The fact that they carried with them no women and no children, and that out of their number of one hundred and forty-three only twelve were labourers, proves that they had no serious, at least no immediate, thoughts of colonisation. Most of the voyagers were of the kind known as gentlemen adventurers, men always eager to get money, men always ready to fight, courageous, greedy, scorning to work with their hands, and wholly inexperienced in the rude business of building up a settlement. Such artisans as went with the expedition were rather of a kind suited to conditions of ease and even of luxury than to the encampment of the explorer and the trials of the pioneer. We read of jewellers, of gold refiners, and of a perfumer. Altogether they were a queer set. With the exception of the commander of the little fleet, Christopher Newport, a sailor of repute, there was only one man worth naming in the whole ex pedition, Captain John Smith.

Captain John Smith had lived a wild, adventurous life. He had served in the Dutch wars. He had fought for Hungary against the Turks. He had been captured and sold as a slave in Constantinople. He had killed his taskmaster and made his escape. He had fought the Moors in Morocco. He was the sort of man made for a rough country and a rough life, an adventurer, a fighter, a toiler, a man with kindness in his heart, and much of honour in his tough composition. He was much too good for the gang he was thrown with, men who did not under stand him, who were jealous of him. When they landed in Chesapeake Bay in April 1607, they were at first for giving Smith no share in the government of the new colony. But by the time that they had named the James River after their king, and chosen a foolish site for their town, Jamestown, on its shores, they began to find that the aid of Smith was essential to their enterprise.

He did help them stoutly and steadfastly, and it was while working in their service that he met the strangest and most famous of all his adventures. While he was exploring the river Chickahominy he was captured by Indians, who were about to put him to death when he was rescued by the sudden intervention of Pocahontas, the daughter of the chief Powhatan. Pocahontas was a child of twelve. Smith it seems had won her heart during his captivity by making toys for her, and she returned his kindness by begging Powhatan to spare his life. The chief relented ; Smith was set at liberty and allowed to return to the English settlement. Years after Pocahontas was captured by the English and taken to Jamestown, where a young Englishman, John Rolfe, fell in love with her, married her, and took her to England.

She was made much of in England. She was about to return with Rolfe to Jamestown when she was seized with a fatal disease, and died and was buried far from James River and old Powhatan and the people of her tribe. The Virginian colonists knew very bitter fortunes. Disaster after disaster beat them to the dust. Instead of gold and glory they had only famine and fever. They had none of the arts of colonisation. Helpless at first, they soon became hopeless. Their only good man, John Smith, did all he could for them, but in the end he returned to England, disabled by a severe accident. Then the despairing adventurers were about to give up the settlement altogether, and were only prevented by the opportune arrival of Lord Delaware with three ships of provisions and supplies. Delaware was the newly appointed governor, and his first act was to kneel on James town beach and thank God that he had come in time to save Virginia.