HUCKSTERS & HYPERBOLE

To Europeans intellectuals of the eighteenth century,  America was a battleground of ideas; the war between Nature and civilization.And its proponents did not mince words.  Respected academics like Comte de Buffon reported that domesticated animals imported from Europe as well as mammals common to both Europe and America had degenerated (i.e., were smaller)  in the New World. He also regarded the Native Americans as a degenerated variety of humans:

“In the savage, the organs of generation are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female. Though nimbler than the European, because more accustomed to running, his strength is not so great. His sensations are less acute; and yet he is more timid and cowardly. He has no vivacity, no activity of mind.”

Rochambeau at Yorktown. Couder

Rochambeau at Yorktown. Couder

Nevertheless, nature was coming into her own at last. Even Voltaire could not resist her. Did not ”Candide” end with the observation ”we must cultivate our garden”?.Now romanticism was challenging the claims of rationalism, or what was called rationalism was in some measure pseudo-science with little factual basis. America was the prize exhibit. The controversy over the New World  was part of the larger issue dividing romanticism and rationalism. The Enlightenment, which exalted order, classification, and common sense, looked with suspicion on an America that was wild, impetuous, and disorderly; on animals that were strange and exotic and did not readily fit into the great chain of being; on vast shaggy forests, rivers that were like lakes, and lakes that were like oceans; on savages who were primitive but claimed to be noble; on societies that did not acknowledge order and degree.

''In the 1650s, the powerful Mohawk tribe convinced the Iroquois  to shift their attacks toward the French settlements themselves. (Two tribes of the confederacy, the Oneida and Onondaga, had previously traded with the French.) They conducted withering raids on isolated farms. Hundreds of French families were killed or captured. These prisoners might be adopted into an Iroquois family, or they might be ritually tortured and killed.''

''In the 1650s, the powerful Mohawk tribe convinced the Iroquois to shift their attacks toward the French settlements themselves. (Two tribes of the confederacy, the Oneida and Onondaga, had previously traded with the French.) They conducted withering raids on isolated farms. Hundreds of French families were killed or captured. These prisoners might be adopted into an Iroquois family, or they might be ritually tortured and killed.''

But the romantics saw a different America, and America where the savage was indeed noble, where the landscape was no longer wild or primitive but had been tamed into a pastoral stage setting, where the inhabitants were simple, virtuous and wise. They were ready, like the dashing Irish exile Lord Fitzgerald, to cast their lot with the Indians; like Albert Gallatin to abandon Geneva for the wilds of Pennsylvania; like Crevecoeur to find happiness in tilling the soil of some frontier farm. There were so many of these refugees from civilization, living in the woods of Maine, or wandering along the Ohio frontier painting the hundreds of birds of that rich country or setting up a utopia in some American wilderness.


John White. 1585. ''Upon arrival, the Englishmen explored the coastline and built a small fort on the island of Roanoke. White depicted the native people and their way of life in a series of spectacular watercolors of the Indians and their villages of Pomeiooc, Secotan, and Roanoke. He also produced stunning drawings of local animals and plants, portraying for the first time many species native to the New World. ''

John White. 1585. ''Upon arrival, the Englishmen explored the coastline and built a small fort on the island of Roanoke. White depicted the native people and their way of life in a series of spectacular watercolors of the Indians and their villages of Pomeiooc, Secotan, and Roanoke. He also produced stunning drawings of local animals and plants, portraying for the first time many species native to the New World. ''

America was involved in still another controversy besides that between nature and civilization, and romanticism and rationalism. It was deeply involved in the controversy between the physiocrats, who believed that nature was the only proper source of wealth, and the mercantilists. Mercantilism was irretrievably committed to world-wide trade, commerce, cities, manufatures, colonies, empire, and of course war. It drained the New World of precious metals that played hob with the economy of the Old. It caught up thousands of virtuous young men and sent them off to distant continents to waste away their lives fighting for trivial causes in futile wars or trading in some obscure factory for useless luxuries, joined in unholy union with some dark-hued stranger.

''Paul Kane’s circa 1851-1856 painting depicts two Plains Indians on horseback hunting a buffalo. The introduction of horses by Spanish settlers changed the way Plains Indians hunted, allowing them to overtake buffalo by speed.''

''Paul Kane’s circa 1851-1856 painting depicts two Plains Indians on horseback hunting a buffalo. The introduction of horses by Spanish settlers changed the way Plains Indians hunted, allowing them to overtake buffalo by speed.''

True happiness, the physiocrats maintained, was not to be found in colonies or in trade, in wealth or in luxury; true happiness was to be found in cultivating the soil, and true wealth as well. And where do you find such happiness except in America? There was still another thread in this tangled skein of argument about America, and doubtless it was the most important of all. To attack or to defend America was a way of criticizing the evils of government and economy and society in the Old World. It was a risky business, in that century of censorship and the Bastille and the Inquisition, to attacl king or law or Church head on; even a Buffon, even a Voltaire, even a Diderot, had to watch himself. But what could not be done directly might be done by indirection, by innuendo, and by contrast.


;tbnid=dPhk-rsr3HZ2XM:&tbnh=92&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3DKarl%2Bbodner%2Bindians%2Bhunting%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26tbs%3Disch:1">Buffalo Hunt. Carl Bodmer

Buffalo Hunt. Carl Bodmer

But for purposes of European argument, America was far better than any of these. It was not imaginary or abstract; it was real and tangible. If you wanted to attack the slave trade, you could attack slavery in America; if you wanted to hold up religion or the Church to scorn, what could be better than to recite the history of their misdeeds in America; if you wanted to prove that trade and commerce and colonies were all part of a violation of the natural order of things, there was America to prove your point. With America you could prove almost anything.

''Contemporary celebrations regarding the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown founding tend to ignore the fact that American history began well before the establishment of the first permanent English settlement.  Focusing upon 1607 as a beginning date for American history leaves out much of the American Indian experience and Spanish colonization in the Southwest.''

''Contemporary celebrations regarding the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown founding tend to ignore the fact that American history began well before the establishment of the first permanent English settlement. Focusing upon 1607 as a beginning date for American history leaves out much of the American Indian experience and Spanish colonization in the Southwest.''

By now the confusion was almost inextricable. By now it was clear that those who asked, was America a mistake? were not really talking about America; they were talking about the Old World, about nature and civilization, mercantilism and physiocracy, about the corruptions and misfortunes that afflicted their own societies. And when they did turn to America, they could never quite make up their minds which America it was they were writing about. Was it America before the coming of Columbus, an America abandoned to savagery? Was it America south of the Carribean, or perhaps north of the Great Lakes? an America of jungle and desert, or of mountains and frozen lakes. Or was it perhaps an imaginary America, a lost Atlantis, a Utopia, a second India, destined never to satisfy the hopes and longings of its inventors and its interpreters.

''William R. Leigh (1866-1955) “the Sagebrush Rembrandt,” started his career as an illustrator with the Colorado natural history museum''

''William R. Leigh (1866-1955) “the Sagebrush Rembrandt,” started his career as an illustrator with the Colorado natural history museum''

The debate entered a new and more acrimonious phase as it shifted from the broad argument of degeneracy to the specific arguments of corruption, from impotence to guilt and from nature to man. Buffon and Abbe Raynal had said all there was to say about nature in the New World, and the latter all there was about the sins of omission and commission of its native inhabitants and its conquerors. What was left for the critics and malcontents was variations on these familiar themes which lent an air of monotany over all the arguments, the same litanies.

''The governor John White sailed home for reinforcements and returned three years later to find the settlement methodically dismantled - showing no signs of chaos or struggle - with merely the word "Croatoan" etched into a post. There was no sign of any of the 91 men, 17 women and 11 children - including White's granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born on American soil.  Did the settlers assimilate into the supposed Croatoan tribe, perhaps the only people the English hadn't fallen out with? The Lost Colony Geneology and DNA Research Group is sifting the genes of modern North Americans for evidence.''

''The governor John White sailed home for reinforcements and returned three years later to find the settlement methodically dismantled - showing no signs of chaos or struggle - with merely the word "Croatoan" etched into a post. There was no sign of any of the 91 men, 17 women and 11 children - including White's granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born on American soil. Did the settlers assimilate into the supposed Croatoan tribe, perhaps the only people the English hadn't fallen out with? The Lost Colony Geneology and DNA Research Group is sifting the genes of modern North Americans for evidence.''

The conclusion as it turned out , was usually the point of departure. The discovery of America was a mistake and a tragedy. Consider the price of conquest. Twenty million dead, that was the figure most commonly given, whole islands and countries depopulated by murder, starvation and disease The great civilizations of the Incas and Aztecs wiped out. But it was not only the New World that suffered. The conquest of America depopulated the Old World as well, draining away the boldest and most enterprising of the young men. The populations of Spain and Portugal barely held their own throughout the eighteenth century. And it was not the colonizing enterprises that drained Europe of her population and her strength but the interminable wars into which the contest for the New World plunged almost every nation.

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