American Experiment (3 page)

At this time, all the land west of the Mississippi—and hence the Indians occupying it—lay under the dominion of Spain. The French had once owned much of the plains to the immediate west of the Mississippi, and the Russians had infiltrated down the Pacific coast, so that to varying degrees the Indians felt the impact of three European cultures. Closest to Spanish influence were the theocratic Pueblos of present-day New Mexico and Arizona, including the Hopi clinging to the crests of high mesas and the Rio Grande Pueblos with their adobe houses. In the northwest, stretching up to present-day British Columbia and Alaska, the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and other tribes typically lived off fishing, hunting, and berrying. Residing in plank houses, they fashioned totem poles as family crests and maintained a class system consisting of chiefs, commoners, and slaves. These northwestern people, backed up against precipitous mountain ranges, felt close to the sea. “When the tide is out,” said the Nootka, “the table is set.”

The great expanse of land running from the plateau of Idaho and
Montana through the plains to the prairie region of the upper midwest was occupied by a variety of tribes that one day would become famous: the Blackfeet, Crows, Sioux, and Cheyenne of the plains, and the Pawnees, Osage, and Illinois of the prairies. The more eastern of these peoples farmed and lived in permanent villages, from which they might hunt buffalo. The farther west a tribe lived, the more likely it was to be nomadic, dependent on horses for travel, buffalo for meat, and tipis for shelter. Plains Indians had a reputation for being warlike.

Yet the first Americans defied generalization. Some, like the Kwakiutl, had sharply defined classes based on ostentatious possession of wealth; others, like the Zuñi, did not. Some were religious and others not, and the religions embraced an enormous variety of gods, priests, rites, practices, and forms of magic. Many, though not all, were creative in crafts, art, and music. Their personalities and cultures varied widely. One scholar has differentiated among the controversial Pueblos, the egocentric northwest coast men, the manly-hearted plains people, the aggressive but insecure Iroquois.

Indians had no common speech. When Europeans arrived with their own dozen or so languages, American Indians were speaking in at least two thousand separate tongues. Few Indians of one speech could understand that of others; the languages were mutually unintelligible. Within four centuries, at least half of those languages would be extinct—in part because the tongues carrying them were to be silenced for good.

The plight of the first Americans in the east was far different, in the 1780s, from that of the Indians in the central and western regions. The hand of the Spanish in the great west, and of the French in the Mississippi Valley, had been relatively light; they were mainly explorers and trappers, soldiers, missionaries. The seaboard settlers had come to settle and to stay—often on the tribal lands of the Indians. Almost from the start, a civil war had existed between native and new Americans—a civil war less of arms than of disease. Two little islands told the story. “When the English first settled Martha’s Vineyard in 1642,” Howard Zinn writes, “the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by 1764, only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.”

By 1790, most of the Indians on tideland and piedmont had died or been killed off or confined to reservations. In Maine, a small village of Penobscots lay on the edge of the unmapped wilderness between the white settlements and British Canada. Except for the Herring Ponds and Wampanoags, still largely undisturbed on Cape Cod, only a handful of
purebloods remained from the tribes of southern New England. New Jersey and South Carolina also maintained reservations for a few hundred red people, while just over a thousand Delawares, Munsees, and Sopoones held the north branch of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

Pioneers in most states had driven the Indians away from the edge of the frontier, but in New York a famous confederation still stood between the white communities and the unvanquished western tribes. The six Iroquois nations—Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras—had been powerful allies of the British for more than a century. Chiefs like Joseph Brant moved with assurance in both white and Native societies; he met with noblemen and dined off crystal in his own fine mansion, yet donned the traditional deerskin mantle to lead his people against the rebelling Americans. But many of the rank-and-file Iroquois suffered for their loyalty to the Crown. When British defeat brought the burning of their frame houses and orchards, many fled to Canada. By 1790 only four thousand of these tribesmen remained within the United States.

Beyond the Iroquois lived the Great Lakes tribes: Miamis, Wyandots, Shawnees, and a dozen others. These forest Indians resembled the natives whom the first colonists encountered upon the Atlantic shore almost two hundred years earlier. They dwelt in substantial houses of bark and plastered straw set upon a framework of poles. While the women tended fields of corn and pumpkins, the men hunted deer for the larder, and beaver to trade for guns, axes, and trinkets. The civil war between white and Native Americans burned fiercely as these red warriors exchanged depredations and murders with the struggling settlements on the north bank of the Ohio. The Indians received British aid, but the white Americans had more devastating allies—disease and whiskey.

While the forest tribes of the north slowed the white advance, the five southern nations seemed capable of halting it altogether. Years of desultory warfare between northern and southern Indians had left a no-man’s-land between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers into which white settlers moved in force during the 1780s, but in the rich lands between the Mississippi and the Altamaha the power of the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles remained unbroken. The United States government recognized the strength of these southern tribes. To the Cherokees, Congress promised that they might “send a deputy of their own choice, whenever they think fit, to Congress,” an offer tantamount to statehood under the Articles of Confederation. Congress also deferred to the Creek-Seminole confederacy, whose six thousand warriors constituted the largest standing army in North America outside of the Spanish Empire.
These braves could hardly doubt their ability to protect their land against the white men advancing from the east.

The population center of the United States in 1790 lay twenty-three miles east of Baltimore. Of the four million persons in the original thirteen states at this time, the vast majority lived on farms within a hundred miles or so of the Atlantic. The population of the country towns was remarkably uniform, running typically between one and three thousand souls, for farming imposed its own restrictions on numbers. A few seeming metropolises did exist—Philadelphia with 42,000 inhabitants, New York with 33,000, Boston 18,000, and Charleston 16,000. But 95 percent of the people dwelt in towns with fewer than 2,500 persons.

Looking west, people living along the Atlantic coast in the 1780s saw a fragmented and vulnerable America. Somewhere beyond the Appalachians lay a small fringe of frontier dwellers and new settlers in a land that might still be coveted by Britain or France or some other European power. Beyond the Mississippi stretched a great unexplored territory claimed by the Spanish king. Sticking out from the southeast was Florida—not merely claimed but possessed by Spain—and between Georgia and Florida lay almost impassable swamps. The northern boundary of Maine was in dispute with Britain. Of the country’s 820,000 square miles, less than a third was settled. Western Pennsylvania and New York were wilderness.

Americans were united by common fears of Indians and foreigners, shared rural needs and environments, memories of the Revolution, a powerful belief in independence and liberty—but little else. Of the four million, about 750,000 were black, and of these, 700,000 were slaves and the rest “free.” Slavery had been largely abolished in the North during and after the Revolutionary period, but many indentured servants were in a state of virtual, if temporary, bondage. A full-bodied caste system existed in the South, with black slaves at the bottom of the steeply graded pyramid. Americans were not yet drawn together by a common experience of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Nor were Americans, though overwhelmingly Protestant, drawn together by a common religious view. In 1775, Congregationalists were estimated to number around 575,000 souls, Anglicans 500,000, Presbyterians 410,000, the German churches 200,000, Dutch Reformed 75,000, Baptists and Roman Catholics 25,000 each, Methodists 5,000, and Jews 2,000. From the start the colonies had been alive with religious controversies, doctrinal disputes, sectarian splits and secessions, revivalism
and evangelism, the importation of new creeds and dogmas from Europe, along with their carriers—alive also with rationalistic, deistic, and atheistic counterattacks on religion. Roman Catholics early gained a foothold in Maryland and elsewhere, but could not win their political and religious rights against the overpowering Protestant majority. Only one force united all these believers, disbelievers, mystics, pietists, schismatics, dissenters, establishmentarians and disestablishmentarians: a belief in religious liberty.

The long Atlantic coastal plain, with its multitude of rivers and swamps, tended to keep Americans apart, and transport hardly made up for it. In 1790 many sections of the country had no real roads at all; what might be shown on maps as highways were often little more than bridle paths or blazed trails. Stagecoaches and heavy wagons could travel only on highways connecting major cities. A few roads—notably the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky—penetrated the mountain barriers to the west. Bostonians had just completed in the late 1780s a great engineering feat in the Charles River Bridge, then the longest in the world. But many rivers and most streams had no bridges at all and had to be forded.

Setting out on a journey, a man carried not “American” currency but the most common coin, the Spanish “milled dollar” or “piece of eight.” Or he might possess English pounds and pence, or French guineas, or Portuguese johannes or “joes.” Visiting Virginia, he would be wise to acquire paper notes called “tobacco money”—public warehouse receipts for the tobacco placed there. Everywhere the traveler’s paper banknotes would be regarded with suspicion. If he wanted to feel at home away from home, his best resort might be either the local church or the tavern. The latter—named perhaps the Bag o’ Nails or the Goat and Compass or the Silent Woman—would serve familiar grog, and a lot of it. Americans loved to drink. An estimated four million gallons of rum, brandy, and strong spirits was imported in 1787, along with a million gallons of wine and three million gallons of molasses, for making rum—all aside from the fruits of local vineyards.

Cutting across all the differences and divisions was the most fundamental of all—that between North and South. The two areas diverged in climate, farm economy, and social system, and in dependence on slaves. The ties between Charleston and London and between Boston and London were closer than those between Charleston and Boston. “I am not a Virginian but an American,” Patrick Henry had declaimed when the Revolution broke out. But he was always a Southerner.

Americans had saving graces—a sense of humor, a degree of tolerance,
a love of song. They delighted in their tall stories, practical jokes, high jinks. When Congregationalist John Thayer returned from Rome a converted Roman Catholic and held a mass in Boston, the local Protestants did not chase him out of town; rather, they were so curious about the ceremony that they bought tickets to attend. And everywhere Americans expressed their joys and sorrows in song.

In the mission of San Carlos, near Monterey, a mass might be said outdoors under bells swinging from a beam, or a young man might sing to his sweetheart in an adobe hut, under a thatched roof:

Lo que digo de hoy en día,

Lo que digo le sostengo,

Yo no vengo a ver si puedo,

Yo no vengo a ver si puedo,

Yo no vengo a ver si puedo,

Sino porque puedo, vengo!

On the banks of the upper Missouri, an Omaha chief, leading a peace delegation to the neighboring Sioux, celebrated his mission in verse:

Shub’dhe adhinhe ondonba i ga ho…

Shub’dhe adhinhe ondonba i ga ho…

Shaonzhinga ha, dhadhu anonzhin ondonba ga, he…

Wakonda hidheg’dhon be dho he…dhoe.

On a northern river a French-born voyageur, paddling back with his furs and dreaming of the old Norman homestead, drowsily hummed:

Fringue, fringue sur la rivière, Fringue, fringue sur l’aviron.

In his Virginia mansion a tobacco planter stood by the window and sang an old Scots ballad:

Oh! send Laurie Gordon hame,

And the lad I daurna name;

Though his back be at the Wa’,

Here’s to him that’s far awa’.

In Salem the congregation hymned from the old
Bay Psalm Book:

The earth Jehovahs is,

And the fullness of it:

The habitable world, & they

That thereupon doe sit.…

From the slave quarters of a South Carolina plantation came the deep, throaty lament:

De night is dark, de day is long,

And we are far from home.

Weep, my brudders, weep!

A MAP

of the

UNITED STATES
of
AMERICA

As fettled by the Peace of
1783.