History of the United States from 986 to 1905

Front matter

STUART S FIRST PORTRAIT OF WASHINGTON

[From the original, painted in 1795 and now in the possession of Charles Henry Hart, Philadelphia]

HISTORY OF THE

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The First Americans . i

II. When the Vikings Came 25

II II

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PLAN OF NECHECOLEE HOUSE come constantly before us. The Pueblo Indians, like other tribes, hold their lands in comm'on. The traveller Stephens saw near the ruins of Uxmal the food of a hundred laboring-men 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 in general 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 a most laborious investigation, Bandelier— in the Twelfth Report of the Peabody Institute — came 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 apparently 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 most archaeologists now accept it— much 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, 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. A much-quoted American writer finds it necessary to explain even the works of the Mound-builders in a similar way. J. W. Foster thinks it clear that "the condition of society among the Mound-builders was not that of freemen, or, in other words, 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

FORTIFIED VILLAGE OF MOUND-BUILDERS, GROUND-PLAN • 14 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 the mounds 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 further 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 compare Professor F. W. Putnam's groimd-plan of a fortified village of the Mound-builders on Spring Creek, in Tennessee, 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 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 of Neuwied; in other respects the two villages are almost duplicates. 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 been made which links their works

IS on the other side with the New Mexican pueblos. Morgan prepared a conjectural restoration of the High Bank mounds in Ross County, Ohio, on the morgan's "high bank pueblo 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 Morgan therefore baptized the settlement anew with the name of "High Bank Pueblo." A mere glance at his restoration will show how 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 — are properly to be called civilized. It is a matter of definition; 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

i6 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 obsidian 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 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 (RelacioJt de las Cosas de Yucatan), wi^itten 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, later gave reasons for thinking the whole so-called alphabet a Spanish fabrication. The very question of the alphabet remains, therefore, still unproved, while Tylor, one of the highest authorities 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 s 17 cannot quite say that either the Aztecs or the Mayas were civilized.

To sum up the modern theory, a 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.

Blgns. Phonetic value.

14. 15.

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19. 20.

23. 24.

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UE LA.NDA S MAVA Al l8 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 for the most part 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.

What is now its strength, and what its weakness? Its strength is that of a strong, simple, intelligible working hypothesis — not merely the best that has been offered, but the first. What is its weakness? This only, that, like many a promising theory in the natural sciences, it still leaves some facts to be fully accounted for.

Morgan, with all his great merits, had not always the moderation which gives such peculiar value to the works of Darwin; he was not always willing to distinguish between what was firm ground and what was insecure. In order to make his theory appear consistent, he had to ignore many difficulties and settle many points in an off-hand manner, and there is something almost exasperating in the positiveness with which he sometimes assumed as proved that which was only probable. Grant all his analogies of the gens and the communal dwelhng, the fact still is that in studying the Central American remains we find ourselves dealing with a race who had got beyond mere household architecture, and were rising to the sphere of art, so that their attempts in this respect must enter into our estimate. In studying them from this point of view, we encounter new difficulties which Morgan wholly ignores, and which later investigators have not as yet satisfactorily explained. The tales of the Spanish conquerors are scarcely harder to accept than the assumption that all the artistic decoration of the Yucatan edifices was lavished upon communal houses, built only to be densely packed with Indians "in the Middle Status of Barbarism," as Morgan calls them. That a statue like that of Chaac-Mol, discovered by Dr. Le Plongeon at Chichen-Itza, should have been produced by a race not differing in descent or essential habits from the northern Iroquois seems simply incredible.

Consider the difference. In Central America we find the remains of a race which had begun to busy itself with the very highest department of art — the delineation of the human figure; and which had attained to grace and vigor, if not yet to beauty, in this direction. The stately stone heads of Yucatan; the arch and spirited features depicted on the Maya incense-burners; the fine face carved in sandstone, brought from Topila, and now in possession of the New York Historical Society — these indicate a sphere of development utterly beyond that of those northern Indians whose utmost achievement consists in some graceful vase like that found in Burlington, Vermont, and now preserved by the university there.

It is safer to leave the question where it was left by another deceased American archceologist scarcely less eminent than Morgan, and not less courageous, but far more gentle and more guarded — Samuel Foster Haven, of Worcester, Massachusetts, the accomplished librarian of the American Antiquarian Society : ' ' Mr. Morgan has grasped some of the problems of aboriginal character and habits with a firm and vigorous hand, but is far from being entitled to claim that he has discovered the entire secret of prehistoric life on this continent."

But now suppose the modern theory to be accepted in its fulness. Let us agree, for the moment, with Morgan, that there was in America, when discovered, but one race of Indians besides the Eskimo — the Red Race. Still there lies behind us the problem, in whose solution science has hardly yet gained even a foothold. Whence did this race originate? Here we deliberately confuse ourselves a little by the word "discovery." When we speak of the discovery of America we always mean the arrival of Europeans, forgetting that there was possibly a time when Europe itself was first discovered by Asiatics, and that for those Asiatics it was almost as easy to discover America. All that is necessary, even at this day, to bring a Japanese junk to the Pacific coast of North America is that it should be blown out to sea and then lose its rudder; the first mishap has often happened, the second casualty has almost always followed, and the Gulf Stream of the Pacific, the Kuro Siwo, or "black stream," or "Japan current," has done the rest. Mr. Charles W. Brooks, of San Francisco, had a record of no less than a hundred such instances, and there is no reason why similar events should not have been occurring for centuries. Nor is it, indeed, needful to go so far as this for a means of communication. Bering Strait is but little wider than the English Channel, and it is as easy to make the passage from Asia to America as from France to England ; and indeed easier for half the year, when Bering Strait is frozen.

Besides all this, both geology and botany indicate that the separation between the two continents did not always exist. Dr. Asa Gray, our highest botanical authority, early pointed out the extraordinary identity between the Japanese flora and that of the northern United States, as indicating a period when the two continents were one. The colonization of America from Asia was thus practicable, at any rate, and that far more easily than any approach from the European side. The simple races on each side of Bering Strait, which now communicate with each other freely, may have done the same from very early times. They needed no consent of sovereigns to do it: they were not obliged to wait humbly in the antechamber of some king, suing for permission to discover for him another world. This we must recognize at the outset; but when it is granted, we are still upon the threshold. Concede that America is but an outlying Asia, it does not follow that America was peopled from Asia; the course of population may first have gone the other way. Or it may be that the human race had upon each continent an autochthonous or indigenous place, according as we prefer a hard Greek word or a hard Latin word to express the simple fact that a race comes into existence on a certain soil instead of migrating thither. Migrations, too, in plenty may in this case have come afterwards, and modified the type, giving to it that Asiatic or Mongoloid cast which is now acknowledged by almost all ethnologists.

How long may this process of itiigration and mingling have gone on upon the American continent? Who can tell? Sir John Lubbock says "not more than three thousand years." The late John Fiske concluded that there had been no appreciable communication between America and Asia for at least twenty thousand years. Plainly it is not so easy to fix a limit. To be sure, some evidences of antiquity that are well, established in Europe are as yet wanting in America, or at least imperfectly proved. In the French bone -caves there have been found unquestionable representations of the mammoth scratched on pieces of its own ivory, and exhibiting the shaggy hair and curved tusks that distinguish it from all other elephants. There is as yet no such direct and unequivocal evidence in America of the existence of man during the interglacial period. The alleged evidence fails to satisfy the more cautious archaeologists. The so-called "elephants' trunks" used in ornamentation on the Central American buildings offer only a vague and remote resemblance to the supposed originals. The "elephant pipe" dug up in Iowa, and preserved by the Davenport Academy of Sciences, does not quite command confidence as to its genuineness. The "Elephant Mound," described and figured in the Smithsonian Report for 1872, has a merely suggestive resemblance, like most of the mounds, to the objects whose name it bears. Lapham long since pointed out that the names of "Lizard Mound," "Serpent Mound," and the like, are usually based on very remote similarities; and Squier tells us of one mound which had been likened successively to a bird, a bow and arrow, and a man.

Other sources of^ evidence are scarcely more satisfactory. There is no doubt that mammoth bones have been found mingled with arrow-heads in some places, and with matting or pottery in others; but unhappily some doubt rests as yet on all these discoveries. It is in no case quite sure that the deposits had remained undisturbed as found, or that they had not been washed together by floods of water. Up to the present time the strongest argument in favor of the very early existence of man upon this continent is not to be found in such comparatively simple lines of evidence, but in the investigations of Dr. Abbott among primeval implements in New Jersey, or those of Professor J. D. Whitney among human remains in California. These and similar inquiries may yet conclusively establish the fact that the aboriginal American man was contemporary with the mammoth; in the mean time it is only possible, not quite proved.

Must we not admit that in our efforts to explain the origin of the first American man it is necessary to end, after all, with an interrogation mark?

II

THE American antiquarians of the middle of the nineteenth century had a great disHke to anything vague or legendary, and they used to rejoice that there was nothing of that sort about the discovery of America. The history of other parts of the world, they said, might begin in myth and tradition, but here at least was firm ground, a definite starting - point, plain outlines, and no vague and shadowy romance. Yet they were destined to be disappointed, and it may be that nothing has been lost, after all. Our low American shores would look tame and uninteresting but for the cloud and mist which are perpetually trailing in varied beauty above them, giving a constant play of purple light and pale shadow, and making them deserve the name given to such shores by the old Norse legends, "Wonderstrands." It is the same, perhaps, with our early history. It may be fitting that the legends of the Northmen should come in, despite all the resistance of antiquarians, to supply just that indistinct and vague element which is needed for picturesqueness. At any rate, whether we like it or not, the legends are here.

I can well remember, as a boy, the excitement produced among Harvard College professors when the ponderous volume called Antiquitates AmericancB, containing the Norse legends of "Yinland," with the translations of Professor Rafn, made its appearance on the library table. For the first time the claim was openly made that there had been European visitors to this continent before Columbus. The historians shrank from the innovation : it spoiled their comfort. Indeed, George Bancroft would hardly allude to the subject, and set aside the legends, using a most inappropriate phrase, as "mythological." And it so happened, as will appear by-and-by, that when the claim was first made it was encumbered with some very poor arguments. Nevertheless, the main story was not permanently hurt by these weak points. Its truth has never been successfully impeached; at any rate, we cannot deal completely with American history unless we give some place to the Norse legends. Picturesque and romantic in themselves, they concert^ men in whom we have every reason to be interested. These Northmen, or Vikings, were not a far-away people with whom we have nothing in common, but they really belonged to the self -same race of men with 'most of ourselves. They were, perhaps, the actual ancestors of some living Americans, and kinsfolk to the majority. Men of the same race conquered England, and were known as Saxons; then conquered France, and were known as Normans; and finally crossed over from France and conquered England again. These Norse Vikings were, like most of us, Scandinavians, and so were really closer to us in blood and in language than was the great Columbus.

What were the ways and manners of these Vikings? We must remember at the outset that their name implies nothing of royalty. They were simply the dwellers on a vik, or bay. They were, in other words, the sea-side population of the Scandinavian peninsula, the only part of Europe which then sent forth a race of sea-rovers. They resembled in some respects the Algerine corsairs of a later period, but, unlike the Algerines, they were conquerors as well as pirates, and were ready to found settlements whereever they went. Nor were the Vikings yet Christians, for their life became more peaceful from the time when Christianity came among them. In the prime of their heathenism they were the terror of Europe. They carried their forays along the whole coast. They entered the ports of England, and touched at the islands on the Scottish coast. They sailed up French rivers, and Charlemagne, the ruler of western Europe, was said to have wept at seeing their dark ships. They reached the Mediterranean, and formed out of their own number the famous Varangian guard of the later Greek emperors, the guard which is described by Walter Scott in Count Robert of Paris. They reached Africa, which they called "Saracens' Land," and there took eighty castles. All their booty they sent back to Norway, and this wealth included not only what they took from enemies, but what they had from the very courts they served; for it was the practice at Constantinople, when an emperor died, for the Norse guard to go through the palaces and take whatever they could hold in their hands. To this day Greek and Arabic gold coins and chains may be found in the houses of the Norwegian peasants, or seen in the museums of Christiania and Copenhagen.

Such were the Vikings, and it is needless to say that with such practices they were in perpetual turmoil at home, and needed a strong hand to keep the peace among them. Sometimes a king would make a foray among his own people, as recorded in this extract from the Heimskringla, or Kings of Norway, written by Snorri Sturleson, and translated by Laing:

"King Harald heard that the Vikings, who were in the West Sea in winter, plundered far and wide in the middle part of Norway, and therefore every summer he made an expedition to search the isles and outskerries [outlying rocks] on the coast. Wheresoever the Vikings heard of him they all took to flight, and most of them out into the open ocean. At last the king grew weary of this work, and therefore one summer he sailed with his fleet right out into the West Sea. First he came to Shetland, and he slew all the Vikings who could not save themselves by flight. Then King Harald sailed southward to 'the Orkney Islands, and cleared them all of Vikings. Thereafter he proceeded to the Hebrides, plundered there, and slew many Vikings who formerly had had men-at-arms under them. Many a battle was fought, and King Harald was always victorious. He then plundered far and wide in Scotland itself, and had a battle there."

We see from the last sentence that King Harald himself was but a stronger Viking, and that, after driving away other plunderers, he did their work for himself. Such were all the Norsemen of the period ; they were daring, generous, open - handed. They called gold in their mythology "the serpent's bed," and called a man who was liberal in giving "a hater of the serpent's bed," because such a man parts with gold as with a thing he hates. But they were cruel, treacherous, unscrupulous. Harald, when he commanded the emperor's body-guard at Constantinople and was associated with Greek troops, always left his allies to fight for themselves and be defeated, and only fought where his Norsemen could fight alone and get all the glory. While seeming to defend the Emperor Michael, he enticed him into his power and put out his eyes. The Norse chronicles never condemn such things; there is never a voice in favor of peace or mercy; but they assume, as a matter of course, that a leader will be foremost in attack and last in retreat. In case of need he must give his life for his men. There is no finer touch in Homer than is found in one of the sagas which purport to describe the Norse voyages to Vinland. It must be remembered, in order to understand it, that the Northmen believed that certain seas were infested with the teredo, or ship-worm, and that vessels in those seas were in the very greatest danger.

" Bjarni Grimalfson was driven with his ship into the Irish Ocean, and they came into a worm-sea, and straightway began the ship to sink under them. They had a boat which was smeared with seal oil, for the sea- worms do not attack that. They went into the boat, and then saw that it could not hold them all. Then said Bjarni: 'Since the boat cannot give room to more than the half of our men, it is my counsel that lots should be drawn for those to go in*the boat, for it shall not be according to rank.' This thought they all so high-minded an offer that no one would speak against it. They then did so that lots were drawn, and it fell upon Bjarni to go in the boat, and the half of the men with him, for the boat had not room for more. But when they had gotten into the boat, then said an Icelandic man who was in the ship, and had come with Bjarni from Iceland, ' Dost thou intend, Bjarni, to separate from me here ?' Bjarni answered, 'So it turns out.' Then said the other, 'Very different was thy promise to my father when I went with thee from Iceland than thus to abandon me, for thou saidst that we should both share the same fate.' Bjarni replied: ' It shall not be thus. Go thou down into the boat, and I will go up into the ship, since I see that thou art so

HISTORY OF THE UNITED S T A T !<: S

desirous to live.' Then went Bjarni up into the ship, but this man down into the boat, and after that continued they their voyage until they came to Dublin, in Ireland, and told there these things. But it is most people's belief that Bjarni and his companions were lost in the worm-sea, for nothing was heard of them since that time."

Centuries have passed since the ships of the Vikings floated on the water, and yet we know, almost as if they had been launched yesterday, their model and their build. They are found delineated on rocks in Norway, and their remains have been dug up from beneath the ground. One of them was unearthed from a mound of blue clay at Gokstad, or Sandefjord, in Norway, at a point now half a mile from the sea; and it had plainly been used as the burial-place of its owner. The sepulchral chamber in which the body of the Viking had been deposited was built amidships, being tentlike in shape, and made of logs placed side by side, leaning against a ridge-pole. In this chamber were found human bones, the bones of a little dog, the bones and feathers of a peacock, some fis]|-hooks, and several bronze and lead ornaments for belts and harness. Round about the ship were found the bones of nine or ten horses and dogs, which had probably been sacrificed at the time of the burial. The vessel was seventy-seven feet eleven inches at the greatest length, and sixteen feet eleven inches at the 'greatest width, and from the top of the keel to the gunwale amidships she was five feet nine inches deep. She had twenty ribs, and would draw less than four feet of water. She was clinker-built; that is, had plates slightly overlapped, like the shingles on the side of a house. The planks and timbers of the frame were fastened together with withes made of roots, but the oaken boards of the side were united by iron rivets firmly chnched. The bow and stem were similar in shape, and must have risen high out of water, but were so broken that it was impossible to tell how they originally ended. The keel was deep, and made of thick oak beams, and there was no trace of any metallic sheathing; but an iron anchor was found almost rusted to pieces. There was no deck, and the seats for rowers had been taken (^ut. The oars were twenty feet long, and the oarholes, sixteen on each side, had slits sloping towards the stern to allow the blades of the oars to be put through from inside.

The most peculiar thing ^bout the ship was the rudder, which was on the starboard or right side, this side being originally called "steerboard" from this circumstance. The rudder was like a large oar, with long blade and short handle, and was attached, not to the side of the boat, but to the end of a conical piece of wood which projected almost a foot from the side of the vessel, and almost two feet from the stern. This piece of wood was bored down its length, and no doubt a rope passing through it secured the rudder to the ship's side. It was steered by a tiller attached to the handle, and perhaps also by a rope fastened to the blade. As a whole, this disinterred vessel proved to be anything but the rude and primitive craft which might have been expected; it was neatly built and well preserved, constructed on what a sailor would call beautiful lines, and eminently fitted for sea service. Many such vessels may be found depicted on the celebrated Bayeux tapestry; and the peculiar position of the rudder explains the treaty mentioned in the Heimskringla, giving to Norway all lands lying west of Scotland between which and the main-land a vessel could pass with her rudder shipped.