A larger history of the United States of America to the close of president ...

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Preface

IT IS said by Mr. Conway that Carlyle could never quite forgive Shakespeare for not having written a history of England ; and it would seem that every author, great or small, should do his share, first or last, towards elucidating his own country's annals, or at least making them attractive. Ever since my own humble contribution of this kind in the " Young Folks' History of the United States," I have been repeatedly urged by readers, and even by parents and teachers, to tell the story of the nation over again upon a much larger scale, but on the same general principles. This has now been done, after waiting long enough to make sure of a wholly fresh treatment instead of a mere amplification.

If the smaller book has met the popular demand, or if this work is destined to excite any similar interest, it grows mainly out of one fact — that the theme appears, and has always appeared to me more important, more varied, more picturesque, and more absorbingly interesting than any historic subject offered by the world beside. I know that in this I seem to oppose myself to some of the most cultivated minds among my fellow-countrymen. Hawthorne called American history only a scene of "commonplace prosperity;" Lowell pronounced the details of our early annals to be " essentially dry and unpoetic." Yet Hawthorne by his prose and Lowell by his poetry have vi PREFACE.

done much toward refuting their own charges; and it seems to me, at any rate, that an American author can render no better service than to take up just those despised details and see, by a fair test, whether any nation has better material to offer. Our profounder historical students are now adding enormously to the wealth of this kind of knowledge ; and it is the lighter but not always easier task of the literary man to reduce these accumulations into compact shape, select what is most characteristic, and make the result readable. If I have failed in doing this, the defect is not in my subject-matter but in my skill.

My thanks are especially due, among those learned masters of whom I have spoken, to my near neighbors and ever kind friends, Justin Winsor and Charles Deane; and also to a young kinsman who is already following in their laborious footsteps — Dr. Edward Channing, of Harvard University. I owe thanks to the Century Company for the liberty of reprinting, with the original illustrations, a chapter of this work which was first published in their magazine. I am also greatly indebted for the opportunity of photographing valuable portaits to Dr. John C. Warren and Mrs. Gardner Brewer, of Boston ; to Winslow Warren, Esq., of Dedham, Mass. ; to Hon. William C. Endicott, of Salem, Mass.; to Mrs. G. H. Pendleton, of Cincinnati; to J. G. Rosengarten, Esq., of Philadelphia; to Mrs. Fisher, of Alverthorpe, Germantown, Pa. ; to J. R. Bryan, Esq., of Fredericksburgh, Va. ; and to the city authorities of Boston. To my publishers I am indebted for most of the illustrations of the volume, and especially for what is, if I mistake not, by far the finest series of portraits of statesmen yet seen in any American book.

i

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE FIRST AMERICANS i

II. THE VISIT OF THE VIKINGS 27

I. The First Americans

IT happened to the writer more than once, during the late civil war, to sail up some great Southern river that was to all appearance unfurrowed by the keel of man. If it was not the entrance to a newly discovered continent, it might as well have been. No light -house threw its hospitable gleam across the dangerous bar, no floating buoys marked the intricacies of the channel ; the lights had been extinguished, the buoys removed, and the whole coast seemed to have gone back hundreds of years in time, reverting to its primeval and unexplored condition. There was commonly no sound except the light plash of waves or the ominous roll of heavy surf. Once only, I remember, when at anchor in a dense fog off St. Simon's Island, in Georgia, I heard a low continuous noise from the unseen distance, more wild and desolate than anything else in my memory can parallel. It came from within the vast girdle of mist, and seemed as if it might be the cry of lost souls out of some Inferno of Dante ; yet it was but the sound of innumerable sea-fowl ^.t the entrance of the outer bay. Amid such experiences I was for the first time enabled to picture to myself the American Continent as its first European visitor saw it.

Lonely as the land may have seemed, those early voyagers always came upon the traces, ere long, of human occupants. Who were those men and women, what was their origin, what

RUINS OF THE PUEBLO PINTADO, their mode of life ? Every one who explores the mounds of the Ohio Valley, or gazes on the ruins of Yucatan, or looks into the wondrous narratives of the Spanish conquerors, must ask himself this question. Until within a few years there has seemed no answer to it. Facts have come in faster and faster, and every new fact has made the puzzle seem more hopeless, so long as no one could offer the solution. These various prehistoric races, so widely sundered, threw no light upon each other; they only deepened each other's darkness. Indians, Aztecs, Mayas, Mound -builders, seemed to have no common origin, no visible analogy of life or habits. The most skilful student was hardly in advance of the least skilful as to any real comprehension of the facts ; nor could this possibly be otherwise, so long as the clew to the labyrinth was not found. It is only some thirty years since it may be said to have been discovered; only some eight or ten years since it has been resolutely and persistently used. Let us see what results it has already yielded.

When in 1852 Lieutenant J. H. Simpson, of the United States army, gave to the world the first detailed description of the vast ruined pueblos of New Mexico, and of the other pueblos still occupied, he did not know that he was providing the means for rewriting all the picturesque tales of the early conquerors. All their legends of cisatlantic emperors and em-

PLAN OF THE PUEBLO PINTADO.

pires were to be read anew in the light of that one discovery. These romances had been told in good faith, or something as near it as the narrator knew, and the tales had passed from one to another, each building on what his predecessor had laid down. The accounts were accepted with little critical revision by modern writers ; they filled the attractive pages of Prescott ; even Hubert Bancroft did not greatly modify them; but the unshrinking light of a new theory was to raise questions as to them all. And with them were to be linked also Stephens's dreams of vast cities, once occupied by an immense population, and now remaining only as unexplored ruins amid the forests of Central America. The facts he saw were confirmed, but his impressions must be tested by a wholly new interpretation. And, after all, these various wonders were only to be exchanged for new marvels, as interesting as the old ones, and more intelligible and coherent.

From the publication of Lewis H. Morgan's remarkable essay, entitled " Montezuma's Dinner," in the North American Review for April, 1876, the new interpretation took a definite form. The vast accumulation of facts in regard to the early American races then began to be classified and simplified ; and with whatever difference of opinion as to details, the general opinion of scholars now inclines to the view which, when Morgan first urged it, was called startling and incredible. That view is still a theory, as Darwin's " origin of species " is still a theory; but Morgan's speculations, like Darwin's, have begun a new era for the science to which they relate. He holds that there never was a prehistoric American civilization, properly so called, but only an advanced and wonderfully skilful barbarism, or semi-civilization at the utmost. The aboriginal races, except perhaps the Eskimo, were essentially one in their social structure, he thinks, however varying in development. In his view there never was an Aztec or Maya empire, but only a league of free tribes, appointing their own chiefs, and accepting the same general modes of organization, based on consanguinity, that have prevailed among all the more advanced families of North American Indians. Montezuma was not an emperor, and had no palace, but he lived in the great communal dwelling of his tribe, where he was recognized and served as head. The forests of Yucatan held no vast cities — cities whose palaces remain, while the humble dwellings of the poor have perished — but only pueblo' towns, in whose great communal structures the rich and the poor alike dwelt. There are questions enough left unsolved in American archaeology, no doubt, but the solution of this part of the problem has now

RESTORATION OF THE PUEBLO HUNGO PAVIE.

been proposed in intelligible terms, at least; and it has been rapidly followed up by the accurate researches of Morgan and Putnam and Bandelier.

I have said that all this new view of the problem dates from our knowledge of the Pueblo or Village Indians of New Mexico. What is a pueblo? It is an Indian town, of organization and aspect so peculiar that it can best be explained by minute descriptions. Let us begin with the older examples, now in ruins. Mr. Bandelier has lately examined for the American Archsological Institute a ruined building at Pecos, in New Mexico, which he claims to be the largest aboriginal structure of stone within the limits of the United States. It has a circuit of 1480 feet, is five stories high, and once in-

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

eluded by calculation 500 separate rooms. This is simply a ruined pueblo.. This composite dwelling once sheltered the inhabitants of a whole Indian town. Pueblo Bonito, on the Rio Chacos, described by Lieutenant Simpson, and more lately by Dr. W. H. Jackson, is 1716 feet in circuit; it included 641 rooms, and could have housed, it is estimated, 3000 Indians. A stone pueblo on the Animas River, lately visited and described by Mr. L. H. Morgan, had more than 400 rooms — and such instances could easily be multiplied. As a rule, each of these buildings constituted a village — a single vast house built on three sides of a court. The stories rose in successive terraces, each narrower than the one beneath, and each approachable only by ladders, there being no sign of any internal means of ascent from story to story. The outer walls were built usually of thin slabs of gray sandstone, laid

with the greatest precision and accuracy, often with no signs of mortar, the intervals being filled with stones of the minutest thinness, so that the whole ruin appears in the distance, according to Simpson, "like a magnificent piece of . mosaic - work."

These pueblos were practically impregnable to all uncivilized warfare, and they differ only in material, not in the essentials of their structure, from the adobe pueblos occupied by the Village Indians of to-day.

The first impression made by the adobe pueblos now inhabited is quite different from that produced by these great stone structures, yet the internal arrangement is almost precisely the same. As you cross, for instance, the green meadows of the Rio Grande, you see rising abruptly before you, like a colossal

SvOFk

PLAN OF HUNGO PAVIE.

ant-hill, a great drab mound, with broken lines that suggest roofs at the top. As you draw nearer, you see before you solid walls or banks of the same drab hue, perforated here and there by small openings. These walls are in tiers — tiers of terraces —each spreading out flat at the top, and a few feet wide, with a higher one behind it, and another behind that, until in some cases they are five stories high. Strips of what seems latticework stand on these terraces, slanted, tilted, propped irregularly here and there ; they also are of a drab color, " as if walls, roofs, ladders, all had been run, wet mud, into a fretted mould, baked, and turned out like some freaky confectioner's device made of opaque, light brown cough candy." At intervals upon these terraces, or on the ground near the base of the walls, there stand low oval mounds of the same baked drab mud, shaped like the half of an egg-shell, with an aperture left in the small end. Then there are on the roof, lifted a few feet above them, little thatches of brush, ragged and unfinished, like the first rough platform of twigs and mud which the robin constructs for her nest. Closer inspection shows that the tiers and terraces are the stories and roofs of the houses; the holes are doors and windows opening into rooms under the terraced roofs; the strips of lattice -work are ladders, these being the only means of going from one terrace to another; the little oval mounds are ovens; and the bits of thatch are arbors on the roofs. In the pueblo of San Juan — as recently portrayed by Mrs. Helen Jackson, of whose graphic description the above is but an abstract — there are four or five of these large terraced buildings, with a small open plaza or court between. When this lady visited the scene, upon a festal day, this plaza was filled with Indians and Mexicans, and the terraces were all covered with them, dressed for the most part in blankets of the gayest colors, relieved against the drab adobe walls or against, a brilliant blue sky. This group of strange structures, .thus tenanted and thus adorned, is an inhabited pueblo.

Sometimes, as at Taos, the separate dwellings or cells of the building are so crowded together as to resemble, in the words of Bandelier, " an extraordinarily large honey-comb." The same

THE NORTH PUEBLO OF TAOS, is the case with that of Zuni, both these pueblos being now inhabited, and the latter, which is the larger, giving shelter to fifteen hundred Indians, Others again, like that of Acoma, are so protected by their situation that this close aggregation of cells is not necessary; and the little tenements are simply placed side by side like houses in a block, the whole being perched on a cliff three hundred and fifty feet high, accessible only by a single row of steps cut in the rock. Sometimes the whole structure is in a cleft of a rock, yet even there it is essentially a pueblo, with the same terraces and the same ladders, so far as there is room. Sometimes we find the main pueblo, ruined or inhabited, beneath the cliff, and the citadel of refuge in a position almost inaccessible among the rocks above. Many of these masses of building are now occupied, more are in ruins. Each shelters, or may have sheltered, hundreds of inhabitants, and the existing Village Indians probably represent for us not merely the race, but the mode of living of those who built every one of these great structures. If we wish to know what was the America which Cortez invaded, we must look for it in the light of these recent investigations.

RUINED PUEBLO t

No trace now remains of the so-called city of Mexico, as Cortez saw it; but we know, in a vague way, how it compared with the pueblos that still exist. The clew to a comparison is as follows: There prevailed in the sixteenth century a legend that seven bishops had once sailed west fiom Portugal, and founded seven cities in America. Cabeza de Vaca, after his wanderings in the interior of America in 1536, brought back an account of large and semi -civilized communities dwelling in palaces ; and it was thought that these might be identified with the cities founded by the bishops. They were seen again by Fray Marco de Niza in 1539, and by Coronado in 1540, and were by them mentioned as " the seven cities of Cibola." Coronado fully describes the " great houses of stone," " with ladders instead of stairs," thus identifying them unmistakably with the still existing pueblos. Whether they were the seven pueblos of the Zuiiis, or those of the Moquis in Arizona, is as yet unsettled; but it is pretty certain that they were identical with the one or the other; and as Fray Marco declared them to be in his day "more considerable than Mexico," we have something like a standard of comparison. Such great communal houses, which could shelter a whole Spanish army within their walls, could seem nothing else than palaces to those wholly unused to the social organization which they represented. The explorers reasoned, just as students reasoned for three centuries longer, that structures so vast could only have been erected by despotism. They saw an empire where there was no empire ; they supposed themselves in presence of a feudalism like their own; all their descriptions were cast in the mould of this feudalism, and the mould remained unbroken until the civilized world, within thirty years, rediscovered the pueblos.

Again, so long as the Pueblo Indians were unknown to us, there appeared an impassable gap between the roving Indians of the North and the more advanced race that Cortez con-

THE FIRST AMERICANS. II

quered. Yet writers had long since pointed out the seeming extravagance of the Spanish descriptions, the exaggeration of their statistics. In the celebrated Spanish narrative of Montezuma's banquet, Bernal Diaz, writing thirty years after the event, describes four women as bringing water to their chief — an occurrence not at all improbable. In the account by Herrera, written still later, the four have increased to twenty. According to Diaz, Montezuma had 200 of his nobility on guard in the palace; Cortez expands them to 600, and Herrera to 3000. Zuazo, describing the pueblo or town of Mexico in 152 1, attributed to it 60,000 inhabitants, and the "anonymous conqueror" who was with Cortez wrote the same. This estimate Morgan believes to have been twice too large; but Gomara and Peter Martyr transformed the inhabitants into houses — the estimate which Prescott follows — while Torquemada, cited by Clavigero, goes still further, and writes 120,000 houses. Supposing that, as seems probable, the Mexican houses were of the communal type, holding fifty or a hundred persons each, we have an original population of perhaps 30,000 swollen to 6,000,000. These facts illustrate the extravagances of statement to which the study of the New Mexican pueblos has put an end. This study has led us to abate much of the exaggeration with which the ancient Mexican society has been treated, and on the other hand to do justice to the more advanced among the tribes of Northern Indians. The consequence is that the two types appear less unlike each other than was formerly supposed.

Let us compare the habits of the Pueblo Indians with those of more northern tribes. Lewis and Clarke thus describe a village of the Chopunish, or Nez Perces, on the Columbia River :

" The village of Tunnachemootoolt is in fact only a single house 150 feet long, built after the Chopunish fashion with sticks, straw, and dried grass. It contains twenty-four fires.

about double that number of families, and might perhaps muster one hundred fighting men."

This represents a communal household of nearly five hundred people, and another great house of the same race (Nechecolees) was still larger, being 226 feet in length. The houses of the Iroquois were 100 feet long. The Creeks, the Mandans, the Sacs, the Mohaves, and other tribes lived in a similar communal way, several related families in each house, living, and eat-

HODENOSOTE. OR LONG HOUSE OF THE >"g '" COmmOU. All ttieSC

IROQUOIS. built their houses of perisha-

ble materials ; some arranged them for defence, others did not, but all the structures bear a certain analogy to each other, and even, when carefully considered, to the pueblos of New Mexico.

Compare, for instance, a ground -plan of one of the Chopunish houses among the Nechecolees with that of an Iroquois house and with a New Mexican pueblo, and cme is struck with the resemblance. All these houses seem obviously adapted to a communal life, and

traces of this practice, vary- rn I I I j I [ 1 I | | | insf in different places, come r : , ; 1 ; , 1 1 I 1 1 1

coitantly before us. The ' I 'll ' ' '

Pueblo Indians hold their i-lan of iroquois house.

lands in common. The traveller Stephens saw near the ruins of Uxmal the food of a hundred laboring-men plan of nechecolee house.

prepared at one hut, and

each family sending for its own portion — "a procession of women and children, each carrying a smoking bowl of hot broth, all coming down the same path, and dispersing among the huts." But this description might easily be paralleled among Northern tribes. I will not dwell on the complex laws of descent and relationship, which are so elaborately described by Morgan in his "Ancient Society," and which appear to have prevailed among all the aboriginal clans. The essential result of all these various observations is this, that whatever degree of barbarism or semi-civilization was attained by any of the early American races, it was everywhere based on similar ways of living; it never resembled feudalism, but came much nearer to communism ; it was the condition of a people substantially free, whose labor was voluntary, and whose chiefs were of their own choosing. After the most laborious investigation ever made into the subject, Bandelier — in the twelfth report of the Peabody Institute — comes to the conclusion that "the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans was a military democracy, originally based upon communism in living." And if this was true even in the seemingly powerful and highly organized races of Mexico, it was certainly true of every North American tribe.

If we accept this conclusion — and the present tendency of archaeologists is to accept it — the greater part of what has been written about prehistoric American civilization proves to have been too hastily said. Tylor, for instance, after visiting the pyramid of Cholula, twenty-five years ago, laid it down as an axiom: "Such buildings as these can only be raised under peculiar social conditions. The ruler must be a despotic sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner of the country and the people." He did not sufficiently consider that this is the first and easiest way to explain all great structures representing vast labor.

H

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

An American writer finds it necessary to explain even the works of the Mound - builders in a similar way. Mr. Foster thinks it clear that "the condition of society among the Mound - builders was not that of freemen, or, in other words, thfwich dMch i about S9 (t fron A to B fORTIFIED VILLAGE OF MOUND-BUILDERS, GROUND-PLAN.

that the State possessed absolute power over the lives and fortunes of its subjects." But the theory of despotism is no more needed to explain a mound or a pueblo than to justify the existence of the " Long Houses " of the Iroquois. Even the less civilized types of the aboriginal American race had learned how to unite in erecting their communal dwellings; and surely the higher the grade the greater the power.

The Mound-builders were formerly regarded as a race so remote from the present Indian tribes that there could be nothing in common between them, yet all recent inquiries tend to diminish this distance. Many Indian tribes have built burial mounds for their dead. Squier, after the publication of his great work on the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, made an exploration of those of Western New York, and found, contrary to all his preconceived opinions, that these last must have been made by the Iroquois. Some of the most elaborate series of works, as those at Marietta and Circleville, Ohio, have yielded from their deepest recesses articles of European manufacture, showing an origin not farther back than the historic period. Spanish swords and blue glass beads have been found in the mounds of Georgia and Florida. But we need not go so far as this to observe the analogies of structure. If we look at Professor Putnam's ground-plan of a fortified village of the Mound-builders on Spring Creek, in Tennessee, and comipare it with a similar plan of a Mandan village as given by Prince Maximilian of Neuwied in 1843, we find their arrangement to be essentially the same. Each is on a promontory protected by the bend of a stream ; each is surrounded by an embankment fortified mandan village. which was once, in all probability, surmounted by a palisade. Within this embankment were the houses, distributed more irregularly in Putnam's plan, more formally and conventionally in that of the Prince lb HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

of Neuwied; in other respects the two villages are almost duplicates. To see how they may have looked when occupied, we may compare them with a representation of a village of the Onondagas, attacked by Champlain in 1615. This

ED ONONDAGA VILLAGE.

wood -cut is reproduced from one in the "Documentary History of New York." It is clear that the Mound-builders had much in common with those well-known tribes of Indians the Mandans and Onondagas, in their way of placing and protecting their houses ; and another comparison has lately been made which links their works on the other side with the New Mexican pueblos. Mr. Morgan has caused to be prepared a conjectural restoration of the High Bank mounds in Ross County, Ohio, on the theory that in that instance the houses of the inhabitants were " Long Houses " in structure, and were built for defensive purposes on top of the embankment. This makes the villages into pueblos, and Mr. Morgan therefore baptizes the settlement anew with the name of " High Bank Pueblo." A mere glance at his restoration will show how

MORGAN'S HIGH BANK PUEBLO.

much there was in common between the various types of what he calls the aboriginal American race.

It remains to be considered whether the very highest forms of this race — the Aztecs and the Mayas — were properly to be called civilized. It is a matter of definitions ; it depends upon what we regard as constituting civilization. Here was a people whose development ' showed strange contradictions. The ancient Mexicans were skilled in horticulture, yet had no beasts of burden and no milk, although the ox and buffalo were within easy reach. They were a trading people, and used money, but had apparently no system of weighing. They used stone tools so sharp that Cortez found barbers shaving with razors of obi8

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

sidian in the public squares ; they worked in gold and copper, yet they had not learned to make iron tools from the masses of that metal which lay, almost pure, in the form of aerolites, in their midst. They could observe eclipses and make a calendar, yet it is still doubtful whether they had what is properly to be

I.

Signs.

Phonetic value.

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Signs.

Phonetic value.

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Phonetic value.

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DIEGO DE LANDA'S MAYA ALPHABET.

called an alphabet. It is certain that they had a method of picture-writing, not apparently removed in kind from the sort of pictorial mnemonics practised by many tribes of Indians at the present day; and all definite efforts to extract more than this from it have thus far failed. Brasseur de Bourbourg believed that he had found in 1863, in the library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, a manuscript key to the phonetic alphabet of the Mayas. It was attached to an unpublished description of Yucatan (" Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan "), written by Diego de Landa, one of the early Spanish bishops of that country. Amid the general attention of "Americanists," Brasseur de Bourbourg tried his skill upon one of the few Maya manuscripts, but with little success; and Dr. Valentini, with labored analysis, has lately given his reasons for thinking the whole so-called alphabet a Spanish fabrication. The very question of the alphabet remains, therefore, still unproved, while Tylor, the highest living authority on anthropology, considers it essential to the claim of civilization that a nation should have a written language. Tried by this highest standard, therefore, we cannot yet say that either the Aztecs or the Mayas were civilized.

To sum up the modern theory, the key to the whole aboriginal American society is given in the pueblos of New Mexico, representing the communal household. This household is still to be seen at its lowest point in the lodges of the roving Indians of the North, and it produced, when carried to its highest point, all the art and architecture of Uxmal, and all the so-called civilization which the Spanish conquerors admired, exaggerated, and overthrew. The mysterious mounds of the Ohio Valley were erected only that they might give to their builders the advantages possessed without labor by those who dwelt upon the high table -lands of New Mexico. The great ruined edifices in the valley of the Chacos are the same in kind with the ruined " palaces " of Yucatan. All these — lodges, palaces, and pueblos alike — are but the communal dwellings of one great aboriginal race, of uncertain origin and history, .varying greatly in grade of development, but one in institutions, in society, and in blood. This is the modern theory, a theory which has given a new impulse to all investigation and all thought upon this subject, but one which the lamented death of its originator leaves only half developed, after all, so that it must be mentioned as a theory still.