American History Revised (29 page)

Why religion first and foremost? Because the colonies’ first experiment with religion had been extensive—and disastrous. There had been no separation of church and state, in fact just the opposite. Every colony had its own official religion. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut were Congregational; Rhode Island was Baptist (although other Protestant sects were still welcome); New York and New Jersey were Dutch Reformed; Delaware was Lutheran; Pennsylvania was Quaker; Maryland was Catholic; and Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were Anglican (Episcopal).

Anybody emigrating to America would have been well advised to check just where the boat was going. Interlopers and infidels were not welcome. Twelve of the thirteen colonies, for example, had strident anti-Quaker laws. When Puritan Massachusetts banished several Quakers and they tried to return to Boston, it hanged them.

1790
So said Alexander Hamilton, meaning that America was essentially an Anglo-Saxon nation. For one of our Founding Fathers to say this, so soon after a bitter six-year war with the British, may strike people as a bit bizarre. Hardly. “Let us remember,” said the American-born Nancy Astor, a member of the British Parliament in the 1930s, “that the American War of Independence was fought by British Americans against a German king and a reactionary prime minister for British ideals.”

Americans have long believed that the United States has been unique because of its democracy. This is wrong. While the United States was the first country to break free from its mother country and declare independence, many Latin American countries soon followed. Today all of these countries are liberated, most of them have free “democratic” elections (even if the president acts high-handedly), press freedom is limited, and corruption is commonplace.

What set America apart from other emerging nations was its heritage of British laws and institutions. This should be no surprise: before the American Revolution, the colonies and England were together for almost 170 years. Capitalism, property rights, respect for the individual, due process of law, trial by jury, and right of representative assembly all came from immigrants from England. Mercantile transactions, insurance policies, and credit instruments subject to English law became the basis of American commercial activity. When Hamilton said, “We think in English,” he was referring to British common law, rooted in religious principles, and concepts of “Natural Law,” which held that a person is endowed by his Creator with a right to life, liberty, and property, and that individual rights are derived from a Higher Power—not from the government.

In Hamilton’s view—he was a financier, after all—freedom depended on the security of one’s property. He wasn’t the only one who thought this way; joining him were Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Adams. Said John Adams, “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”

The key to property was not owning or inheriting it like an aristocrat, but doing something with it. Benjamin Franklin, who spent fourteen years of his life in London—his favorite years—said, “People do not enquire concerning a Stranger,
What IS he?
, but
What can he DO?”
People were expected to improve themselves. Same for property: property rights were sacrosanct but not absolute. The British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued that only “by adding labour to things found in a state of nature” could people “exercise a maker’s right that entitled them to articles, including fields.” According to the British concept of property rights, squatters and beneficiaries of government
land grants must improve the land in order to claim it in perpetuity and enjoy the full protection of due process. In 1844 newspaper editor Horace Greeley made his famous exhortation, “Go West, young man.” Less well known is the rest of the sentence: “and grow up with the country.” In other words, do something with it, improve it. The American Homestead Act of 1862 was very specific that free land from the government could only be earned by making improvements. In time this concept of improvement expanded to intellectual rights, the source of many trade disputes and legal battles today. Even U.S. patent law draws directly from British concepts of commerce. Also owing a great debt to the British is the limited-liability company, originated by the Dutch in the 1600s and refined by the British in the 1800s, that formed the basis of capitalism. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University president and Nobel Prize laureate, “equated the invention of the limited liability corporation with that of steam locomotion and electricity.”

By the later nineteenth century America had started to become a world power. In 1898 Prince Otto von Bismarck was asked the decisive factor in modern history. He replied, “The fact that the North Americans speak English.”

Said John Hay, U.S. secretary of state, “The one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England.” He wasn’t talking about a peace between two nations, any more than was George Bernard Shaw in his glib quote, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” The basis of common language is shared values, in this case such values being separation of church and state, separation of government powers, free speech, personal freedom, abhorrence of bribery and corruption, and encouragement of capitalism and the private sector. Years later, Winston Churchill (who had an American mother) talked frequently about America and England having “a special relationship.”
*
But it wasn’t a relationship of siblings who speak the same language or fight the same war; it went deeper than that, to the point of recognizing contradictions. In pamphlets issued to the British people when 1.3 million American soldiers started arriving in England in 1942, the British Army Bureau of Current Affairs emphasized, “Americans are not Englishmen who are different, but foreigners who are rather like us.”

Today English is the world language, understood by 25 percent of the planet. It is the preferred language of computers (invented in America), the Internet (invented by the U.S. military), and the World Wide Web (invented by an Englishman, now living in America). It is the
standard language of international airlines. It is even endorsed by the UN: in 1977 when the
Voyager
I rocket launched a probe into outer space in search of extraterrestrial life, it carried a welcome from the head of the UN—in English.

There is a basic explanation for this permanence. Says one British philologist:

1816
In 1807, Gouverneur Morris, U.S. ambassador to France and writer of the final draft of the Constitution, returned to his landed estate in New York. Never one lacking for ladies, he shocked his friends by settling down and getting married in 1809, at the age of fifty-seven. His choice of a wife, moreover, was even more startling: Nancy Randolph, a young Virginia girl who had been seduced by a brother-in-law and accused of murdering her baby, saved from hanging only by the eloquence of Patrick Henry and his fellow member of the legal “dream team,” future chief justice John Marshall. To make ends meet, she was running a boardinghouse in New York City when she was suddenly swooped up and transformed into a lady of one of America’s largest manors. But the marriage was a happy one, and upon his death in 1816, Gouverneur Morris left behind one of the most marvelous testimonials of a man’s love for a woman. His will stated that she was to receive an ample income for life, and that if she remarried the income should be doubled.
*

1880
Until recently, very few black Americans cared about Africa. If anything, they wanted to forget it. When emancipated blacks after the Civil War chose their last names, they chose American names like Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson—not African names.

The three most influential blacks in American history had definite views as to their real home. “No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward the colored people of this country,” wrote Frederick Douglass in 1880,
“than that which makes Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk, and denies us the rights of citizenship.” Added W. E. B. Du Bois, “Neither my father nor my father’s father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for it.”

“The Negro is an American,” said Martin Luther King Jr., many years later. “We know nothing of Africa.”

Neither, for that matter, did the early black slaves who first came to America—other than their local villages. The irony of the Afro-American identity movement on college campuses today is its severe misreading of history. The Africa they claim would be greeted with a quizzical look by their great-great-great-grandfathers. Were the two generations to get together for dinner, one suspects neither would understand what the other was talking about.

The African continent, since 1400, had been the world center for slavery, with African kings selling slaves to the Middle East and, to a lesser degree, Europe. In northern and northeastern Africa, Islamic wars led to much bloodshed and selling of prisoners for booty. By selling off the male members of a defeated tribe into slavery, the victorious tribe could be better assured of security.

A trading network of African middlemen developed, to meet the availability and demand for slaves. When the demand from America created a large new market, European and American ship captains found coastal African chiefs ready and willing to supply slaves by raiding the interior and bringing back prisoners for sale. Because of the enormous demand, it was not easy: ship captains would take anywhere from one hundred to two hundred days scouring the coast for traders who had enough slaves to fill up the ship. The trading system was a well-organized network of agents and rules: the African coastal traders had to pay tribute to their local king based on the number of bodies seized from the interior. When America ceased to be a market after the 1860s, African trade continued serving other markets in northern Africa and the Middle East.