The Shocking Savagery of Americaโs Early History
Bernard Bailyn, one of our greatest historians, shines his light on the nationโs Dark Ages
Itโs all a bit of a blur, isnโt it?โThat little-remembered centuryโ1600 to 1700โthat began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, thatโs not right, is it?โI said it was a blur
Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published another one of his epoch-making grand narrative syntheses, The Barbarous Years, casting a light on the darkness, filling in the blank canvas with what heโs gleaned from what seems like every last scrap of crumbling diary page, every surviving chattel slave receipt and shipโs passenger manifest of the living and dead, every fearful sermon about the Antichrist that survived in the blackened embers of the burned-out churches.
Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread tortureโdo you really know what being โflayed aliveโ means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilizationโor in Bailynโs evocative phrase, the fragile โintegument of civilityโโthat would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. Itโs a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called โthe blood-dimmed tide,โ the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call โgenocidal,โ the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.
โIn truth, I didnโt think anyone sat around erasing it,โ Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvardโs Widener Library. Heโs a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.
โNobody sat around erasing this history,โ he says in an even tone, โbut itโs forgotten.โ
โConveniently?โ I ask.
โYes,โ he agrees. โLook at the โpeacefulโ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, โThe stinkโ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.โ
Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.
โThe ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,โ Bailyn says. โThe butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.โ
Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.
The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailynโs explanation of the European settlersโ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europeโand the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.
โThe savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the regionโs collective memoryโ were driven by โelemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environmentโfears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which Godโs children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.โ
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