American Heroes (4 page)

For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore more clothes, and said more prayers (their owners were supposed to convert them). Peter Martyr could rejoice that “so many thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes flocke.” But these were sheep prepared for slaughter. If we may believe Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican who spent many years among them, they were tortured, burned, and fed to the dogs by their masters. They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not fit to live, and they stopped living. From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492, there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. In 1542, according to Las Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa. The people of the golden age had been exterminated.

Why? What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the first chapter of American history an atrocity story? Bartolomé de Las Casas, who watched it happen had a simple answer, greed: “The cause why the Spanishe have destroyed such an infinitie of soules, hath been onely, that they have helde it for their last scope and marke to gette golde.” The answer is true enough. But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed. There is very little reason to suppose that if the English or French had been first on the scene the results would have been different. Enslavement, torture, and murder on a large scale, not to mention catastrophic epidemics, have often accompanied Western occupation of countries inhabited by people lacking in Christianity, civility, and guns. In most cases the cause may be identified as greed. Perhaps we can begin to understand not only Spanish greed but Western greed in general, not only this first atrocity story of American history but a number of later, less spectacular atrocities, if we look at the victims through the eyes of the victors.

As I have already mentioned, from the moment they set foot on Española, the Spaniards noted that the Indians were surprisingly unattached to the things of this world. They were content to eat almost anything that happened to come along, including spiders, lizards, and worms. But by Spanish standards they ate very little of anything. They spun and wove a little cotton, but preferred to go naked. Even their houses were flimsy, temporary structures. Because they had no desire to acquire or keep anything for which they felt no present need, they were generous beyond belief; and, without the covetousness or acquisitiveness attendant upon worldly appetites, they seemed able to live together happily and peacefully, unassisted by the restraints of government.

The Indians' austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture. The Greeks and Romans had constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The man who would imitate Christ had to deny himself, give his all to the poor, love his neighbor as himself, curb his natural appetites, and set his heart on God alone. The monastic life was an organized effort to live this way. The Indians, and especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. They had also attained an impressive freedom. Plato had emphasized again and again that freedom was to be reached by restraining one's needs, and the Arawaks had done just that. According to Peter Martyr, who sometimes despaired of his own countrymen's debilitating self-indulgence, the Indians' “contentation with the benefites of nature doth playnly declare that men may lead a free and happye life without tables, table clothes, carpettes, napkins, and towels, with suche other innumerable….” Europeans would do well to learn from these children of nature, who scorned superfluities, he said, “as hindrances of their sweete libertie.”

But even as they admired the Indians' simplicity, the Europeans were troubled by it, troubled and offended. Innocence never fails to offend, never fails to invite attack, and the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Their freedom from acquisitive instincts was delightful to behold but disturbingly effortless. Without the help of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization. The fury with which the Spaniards assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans' cherished assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.

The affront went deep, and the cruelty and greed it provoked were symptoms of a conflict that has lasted in one form or another to the present day and can end only when the West has achieved what is now known as “modernization” of the entire world. The life of the Arawaks, for all its admirable simplicity and austerity, was incompatible with the kind of existence that Europeans, for all their praise of self-denial, thought right. The self-denial that civilized Christians were supposed to practice did not eventuate in nakedness. Christians might deny themselves silks and velvets, but they must not deny themselves clothes; they might embrace poverty but not idleness; they might fast, but they must not neglect to work for bread. Europeans, while telling themselves to curb their appetites, had organized a civilization that required them to extract from nature a greater abundance of goods than the Arawaks cared to have.

The Arawaks were actually skilled agriculturists; with a minimum of labor, they made their island support an enormous population, and with their apparent intelligence, they could certainly have produced more food, more clothing, better shelters. But their needs were small, and they wanted no more than they needed. They preferred to spend their days in what seemed to the European mere play and idleness. When European confronted Indian, then, friction could scarcely have failed to develop.

We must, of course, remember that European production in the fifteenth century was nowhere near as efficient as it has since become. By modern standards Europeans of Columbus's time lived an unorganized and ineffective life. Indeed, the upper classes, when they were not busy fighting holy wars, aspired to a way of life that required no more work than an Arawak would do. But by comparison with the Arawaks, fifteenth-century Europeans made spectacularly high demands, if not on themselves, at least on those who stood in the lower ranks of society. They had developed ideas about work that were wholly incompatible with the seeming fecklessness of the Arawaks of Española. Behind the Spanish assault on the Indians lay a conviction that men must work, if not for themselves then for their betters, in the interests of civility and Christianity. It was this conviction that allowed Peter Martyr to hymn the Indians' asceticism and love of liberty but then go on to censure them because the object of both virtues was mere “play and idleness.” For the same reason Columbus could admire the Indians even while he made plans to enslave them.

The Spanish government was not unmindful of what was going on in its new lands across the sea and made periodic efforts to control the abuse of the Indians. It even authorized a few abortive experiments in setting the Indians free. But it could not condone a liberty that resulted in idleness. The only way to keep Indians at work, it seemed, was to make them work for Spaniards. In 1517 when a team of Jeronymite friars quizzed the oldest Spanish inhabitants of Española about the capacities and capabilities of the natives, there was unanimous agreement that the Arawaks were unwilling to work unless forced to. They must be made to work for Spain, as the Spanish government had proclaimed in 1513, “to prevent their living in idleness and to assure their learning to live and govern themselves like Christians.”

The Spanish determination that the Indians should not live in idleness was reinforced in Española by Columbus's expectations of the country he thought he had reached and by the similar expectations of other Spaniards. The true Indies were already geared to the European economy: merchants for centuries had been sending the products of European labor eastward to the Orient in exchange for spices and other treasures. Española in the role of Ophir was expected to yield its riches to Columbus as it had to Solomon. When it became evident that Española was not Ophir and that America was not the Indies but a new world, that whole new world had to be transformed. It had to be organized and exploited to produce the things expected of it.

Columbus's first method of exploiting Española, when the natives failed to produce what was expected of them, was crude: to ship the inhabitants to Spain as slaves was to make no more effective use of the island than the neighboring Caribs did in occasionally harvesting a crop of Arawaks to eat. To put them to work under their chieftains was far more productive. To give them at last to Spanish masters who could extract more work than the chieftains could was still more effective—except that the Arawaks died. Probably more died from other causes than from overwork, but it would be hard to say how much work was overwork for an Arawak. Work had not been an important part of human life in Española before Columbus.

That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less pejorative names for it. Call it the profit motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and everything that goes with it. Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks any more than the Spanish could. The story moves us, offends us, but perhaps the more so because we have to recognize ourselves not in the Arawaks but in Columbus and his followers.

The Spanish reaction to the Arawak was Western civilization's reaction to the barbarian: the Arawaks answered the Europeans' description of men, just as Balboa's tiger answered the description of a tiger, and being men they had to be made to live as men were supposed to live. But the Arawaks' view of man was something different, and they were unable to recognize themselves as men in the role in which the invaders cast them. They were offered civility in the shape of clothing that they did not want, in return for work that they did not wish to perform.

Civility and Christianity in the form of a cotton shirt and baptism were not adequate recompense for the liberty without which they had no will to live. They died not merely from cruelty, torture, murder, and disease but also, in the last analysis, because they could not be persuaded to fit the European conception of what they ought to be. Since they would not or could not accept the place assigned them in the Old World scheme for America, they had to give place to new men, African or European, who would make the country yield what was expected of it. The Arawaks of Española were the first to be pushed aside in this way but by no means the last. Although their story was only a small early incident in the Europeans' total transformation of the Western Hemisphere, and ultimately of the world, it epitomized that transformation. It was indeed the first chapter of American history, as we know it, the first chapter of
our
history.

—Previously unpublished

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO,
at a meeting of book collectors, I was brought up short by the remark of a man who valued books as most of us do. It was at Brown University's John Carter Brown Library, and one of the luminaries present was a gentleman, considerably older than I, whom I respected and revered but frequently quarreled with. We were both members of several historical societies at which I had read papers. At the conclusion of each of my talks, he had risen to denounce me for a young radical and had pointed out with characteristic vigor that my papers were full of the most utter nonsense. “I admire,” he used to say, “the thoroughness of Mr. Morgan's research, which is matched only by the absurdity of his conclusions.”

I don't think he thought I was a communist or an anarchist, but perhaps that I believed in free love or the New Deal or something on that scale of monstrosity. There had, nevertheless, grown up between us, at least I like to think there had, a certain affection and respect of the kind that may take place between people who recognize each other as opposites.

On this occasion I was in a happy position of neutrality. I had not delivered the paper, and consequently he did not feel obliged to denounce me. I therefore thought that this might be a rare opportunity for conversation in which we might find ourselves in agreement. I discovered him examining a case of books in which was displayed a particularly handsome copy of
Purchas his Pilgrims
(1625). He was intent on his examination of the book and made a fine figure as he bent over the case, for he had a leonine head of long white hair that contrasted dramatically with the dark woodwork. I stood beside him for a time in silence, and then ventured the only remark that I could think of and one that seemed thoroughly innocuous—namely, that this copy of
Purchas
was remarkably clean, looking as though it had just come off the press.

As soon as I had spoken, he turned on me with eyes blazing and said yes, indeed it was, and he hoped that it would remain in that condition, unlike the books in the Harvard Library. “That's the tragic thing about the Harvard Library,” he said, “that fellow Jackson
*
lets those professors go in there and
read
those books any old time they have a mind to.”

I beat a hasty retreat. But it has often occurred to me since that my friend, who gave a great deal to the Harvard Library, the John Carter Brown, and many other libraries, was more right than he knew. He was a man who hated change in any form. And there is no more insidious instrument of change than a library in which professors or students or people in general are allowed to
read
the books.

In fact, in view of what books have done to change the world, it is strange that those who fear change have not succeeded in burning them all long since. The trouble with books is that people
will
read them. And when they do, they are bound to get new and dangerous ideas. Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work. And the ideas are not always benign. One thinks at once of Karl Marx, laboring through the musty volumes of the British Museum and emerging with those notions that turned the world upside down. Or the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—how much, one wonders, did its volumes contribute to the French Revolution?

But we need go no farther for examples than to your library or mine. First, I should like to say a little about the extraordinary way the Yale Library in the eighteenth century took command of the college, subverted the purposes for which it was founded, and transformed it into something utterly different (something, in my opinion, infinitely better, but I am not sure that the founders would agree).

Yale and the Yale Library were founded in 1701 by a group of Connecticut ministers who thought it was high time for the colony to have a college of its own. Connecticut Puritans had been talking about a college for years, for Puritanism was a bookish faith, and the Puritans thought that their leaders, whether in church or in state, ought to have a college education. In the seventeenth century Harvard had served the purpose, but Harvard was inconveniently located for Connecticut boys, and toward the end of the century uncomfortable rumors began to circulate about its orthodoxy. The Harvard faculty, it seemed, and notably the senior tutors, were reading the wrong kind of books and recommending them to the students, and everybody in Cambridge was getting fond of ideas that New Englanders were not supposed to be fond of.

The Puritans were not afraid of books. They had too much confidence in the rightness of their own views to worry about anyone's refuting them in print. And they were sure that neglect of reading was an invitation to that old deluder Satan, who might gain control of the souls of ignorant men. But if they were not afraid of books, the Puritans were afraid to let impressionable youth be taught by men who lacked the perspicacity to see that books by Anglicans were shallow and misleading, if not actually wicked. For it was Anglican books that the Harvard tutors had recommended—Anglican books that presumably espoused the insidious heresy known as Arminianism. Arminianism was the doctrine that man could help himself toward salvation. It implied that a man could alter God's eternal decrees and get to heaven on his own merits.

The Puritans, always prone to self-righteousness, were peculiarly susceptible to this heresy, and they were always on the alert for it. When they heard that it had penetrated Harvard, they became uneasy. Cotton Mather and Increase Mather tried their best to purge the college of it. When their efforts proved unsuccessful, they turned hopefully to the west, where Connecticut was at last roused to action. With the support of the Mathers and of other Bostonians who had been shocked by the turn of events at Harvard, Connecticut began a new college, dedicated to the preservation of both learning and orthodoxy.

It started at Killingworth, Connecticut, with two faculty members and not more than a dozen students. For the first six years there were no college buildings other than the rector's house. But there
was
a library.

The men who founded the college had realized that it might exist without buildings but not without a library, and they had contributed from their own private holdings enough volumes to get it started. It was not much of a library, consisting as it did of old dog-eared volumes that had come over with the first settlers and had already served two generations of ministers in Connecticut without generating new ideas in anybody. For thirteen years these books continued to serve, but in 1714 one of the well-wishers of the college arranged an extraordinary donation.

Jeremiah Dummer, a New England boy and a Harvard graduate, moved to England in 1708 and acted there as agent for the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Although his official duties did not require it, he also became an ardent propagandist and solicitor for both Harvard and Yale. Dummer recognized that what Yale needed more than anything else was books, and, since England was full of authors and patrons of authors, he undertook to persuade them to donate some of their favorite works to the college in the New World. There was an exotic attractiveness to the idea of planting civilization in the wilderness, and the English intellectuals were so moved by Dummer's appeal that no fewer than 180 of them contributed, including such leading figures as Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Sir Hans Sloane, and Richard Steele. They sent more than 500 volumes, of which the first shipment, packed in nine boxes, arrived in September 1714.

The unpacking of the crates must have been a moment of singular excitement and curiosity for students and faculty. Here was an enormous variety of riches: Newton, Locke, and Boyle, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Sherlock, Tillotson, Chillingworth, Stillingfleet—names that had hitherto meant nothing in Connecticut and not much in the rest of New England were suddenly present in the original. None of those who first opened the volumes and leafed through them could have recognized the full dimensions of what had happened. A century of English literature, science, philosophy, and theology was spread before them. It was as though a group of men today had studied nothing but the textbooks of a hundred years ago and were suddenly confronted for the first time with Darwin, Marx, Hegel, Freud, and Einstein, all at one blow.

For many, of course, it was simply too much to comprehend. To be handed a hundred years' work to do may not be an altogether pleasing experience. And it was a long time before the full effect of the new books was felt. But New England was never the same after their arrival, and we can see the leaven beginning to work at once.

We can see it, for example, in a boy who rode down from Windsor to enter college two years later. In his sophomore year he discovered John Locke's
Essay concerning Human Understanding.
By his own account, he found “more satisfaction and pleasure in studying it than the most greedy miser in gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasure.” This was Jonathan Edwards, who would probably have changed any world he lived in. But the starting point of the revolution that Edwards made in New England religion was that volume of Locke. He saw that New England theology, as he had learned it from his father's sermons at Windsor, would not stand before the new philosophy of John Locke.

He went on to recast the Calvinism of his father to fit the new philosophy, and the result was a wholly different theology, which came to be known in New England as the New Divinity. It won Edwards worldwide fame, and it split New England Puritanism wide open. It lost Edwards his pulpit at Northampton, and it won him the presidency of Princeton. A hundred years later people were still arguing hotly about what it meant.

It took Edwards a lifetime to work out his theology after reading Locke, but within eight years of their arrival the new books produced a more spectacular result in a different group of readers. One of these was Samuel Johnson, a Guilford boy. Johnson graduated from college the year before the books arrived; but alumni could use the library, and Johnson read avidly in the new books. As an undergraduate he had studied the old system of logic taught from books that the founding fathers of New England had brought with them. His college notebooks survive, filled with the complicated propositions that summed up the whole of human knowledge for the academic mind of the seventeenth century. At the end of one of these notebooks he has written, “And by next Thanksgiving, November 16, 1715, I was wholly changed to the New Learning.” By which he meant that he had been reading John Locke and had decided to forget everything he thought he knew before.

Johnson stayed on at the college as a tutor from 1716 to 1719, and then, the college having moved to New Haven, he took a position as the minister of the nearby West Haven Church. He could have had better jobs at a greater distance from New Haven, but he wanted to stay near those new books. The head of the college after its removal to New Haven was the Reverend Timothy Cutler, and he, too, spent his spare minutes in the library. Cutler and Johnson and another tutor, Daniel Browne, together with a number of the ministers of New Haven and the neighboring towns, formed a discussion group that met regularly in the library to talk over what they had been reading and to help each other master the new learning.

As they read and talked and read again, they found themselves warming to ideas that they recognized as dangerous, the very ideas that Yale had been founded in order to overcome. They were becoming Arminians, and they were finding the Anglican writers appallingly attractive. And so, like the good Puritans they were, they kept reading, confident, no doubt, that they would arrive at the correct, orthodox position in the end. Instead, they were carried farther from it. What was worse, they could not confine their new ideas to themselves. In the realm of ideas, it is difficult to lead a double life. Few men who care about ideas at all have the talent for hypocrisy—to say what they do not believe. Consequently, the new ideas began to leak out. By the spring of 1722, the rumor was going round that “Arminian books are cryed up in Yale College for Eloquence and Learning, and Calvinists despised for the contrary; and none have the courage to see it redressed.”

By September 1722 the rumor had grown to alarming proportions, but it is doubtful that anyone was quite prepared for what happened next. At the commencement ceremonies in that year, Rector Timothy Cutler closed his prayer with the words “And let all the people say Amen.” This must have made the audience gasp, for it was the form followed in the Anglican Church. The next day, as the trustees met in the library, Rector Cutler and six of his friends appeared at the scene of their crime and confessed: they had not only become Arminians but had all decided to join the Church of England and were going to leave for England at once to take orders.

The consternation would not have been greater if the president of an American college, at the height of the Cold War, had told his trustees that he and his faculty and a number of leading local citizens had been reading Karl Marx together, had decided to become communists, and were departing for Moscow to receive instructions. In just twenty-one years from the date of its founding, the Yale Library had completely subverted the purpose for which the college was established. The Yale trustees, of course, promptly fired Rector Cutler and Tutor Browne, and everyone tried to talk the converts out of their conversion. In the course of the next month, three were persuaded back to Puritanism. But Rector Cutler, Tutor Browne, Samuel Johnson, and James Wetmore, the pastor, now the former pastor, of North Haven, were adamant. The books in the library were more persuasive to them than anything their friends could say. They departed for England, where they were ordained as ministers of the Anglican Church and, with the exception of Browne, who died in England, returned to form the spearhead of a drive to convert the rest of New England to Anglicanism.