The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative U.S. History Textbook (Vol 1)

T h e A m e r i c a n Y aw p © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com The A meric a n Y aw p A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook vol. 1: to 1877 e di t e d by jose ph l. l ock e a n d be n w r igh t sta n f or d u n i v e r si t y pr e s s sta n f or d, c a l i f or n i a © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Some rights reserved. [[[Insert logo]]] This book is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0, Attribution- ShareAlike. This license permits commercial and non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Locke, Joseph L., editor. | Wright, Ben, editor. Title: The American yawp : a massively collaborative open U.S. history textbook / edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015206 (print) | LCCN 2018017638 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503608139 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503606715 | ISBN 9781503606715 (v. 1 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503606883(v. 2 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503608139(v. 1 :ebook) | ISBN 9781503608146(v. 2 :ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Textbooks. Classification: LCC E178.1 (ebook) | LCC E178.1.A493673 2019 (print) | DDC 973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015206 Typeset by Newgen in Sabon LT 11/15 Cover illustration: Detail from “Grand Democratic Free Soil Banner,” by N. Currier and John Plumbe Jr., 1848. Source: Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Yawp \yôp\ n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Walt Whitman, 1854 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Contents Preface ix 1. The New World 1 2. Colliding Cultures 28 3. British North America 54 4. Colonial Society 81 5. The American Revolution 109 6. A New Nation 143 7. The Early Republic 170 8. The Market Revolution 198 9. Democracy in America 227 10. Religion and Reform 253 11. The Cotton Revolution 283 12. Manifest Destiny 315 13. The Sectional Crisis 343 14. The Civil War 371 15. Reconstruction 402 Contributors 435 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Preface We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our cul- Civil rights march from Selma to ture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past Montgomery, is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 To understand who we are, we must Alabama, in therefore understand our history. 1965. Library of Congress. But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would we even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too com- plex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It must be something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past. Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from primary sources (material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpre- tations, and argue for their conclusions. History, then, is our ongoing conversation about the past. Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say, about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on slave plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com xP r ef ace leaders and dates of events may not change, but the weight we give them and the context with which we frame them invariably evolves. History is a conversation between the past and the present. To understand a global society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To understand the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, we must look beyond the elites who framed older textbooks and listen to the poor and disadvan- taged from all generations. But why study history in the first place? History can cultivate essential and relevant—or, in more utilitarian terms, “marketable”—skills: careful reading, creative thinking, and clear communication. Many are familiar with a famous quote of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”2 The role of history in shaping current events is more complicated than this quote implies, but Santayana was right in arguing that history offers important lessons. The historical sensibility yields perspective and context and broader aware- ness. It liberates us from our narrow experiences and pulls us into, in the words of historian Peter Stearns, “the laboratory of human experience.”3 Perhaps a better way to articulate the importance of studying history would be, “Those who fail to understand their history will fail to under- stand themselves.” Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective: it requires method, rigor, and perspective. The open nature of historical discourse does not mean that all arguments—and certainly not all “opinions”—about the past are equally valid. Some are simply wrong. And yet good historical questions will not always have easy answers. Asking “When did Chris- topher Columbus first sail across the Atlantic?” will tell us far less than “What inspired Columbus to attempt his voyage?” or “How did Native Americans interpret the arrival of Europeans?” Crafting answers to these questions reveals far greater insights into our history. But how can any textbook encapsulate American history? Should it organize around certain themes or surrender to the impossibility of syn- thesis and retreat toward generality? In the oft-cited lines of the Ameri- can poet Walt Whitman, we found as good an organizing principle as any other: “I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable,” he wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”4 Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. Here we find both chorus and cacophony together, as one. This textbook therefore offers the story of that barbaric, untranslatable American yawp by con- © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com P re f a c e x i structing a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it in- corporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that can strangle narratives of American history. We have produced The American Yawp to help guide students in their encounter with American history. The American Yawp is a col- laboratively built, open American history textbook designed for general readers and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic historians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely accessible online at www.AmericanYawp.com, and in addition to provid- ing a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with The American Yawp to publish a print edition. Furthermore, The Ameri- can Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are encouraged to help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page, available through AmericanYawp.com. The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to use it, download it, distribute it, and modify it as you see fit. The project is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the stan- dards of a “Free Cultural Work.” We are happy to share it and we hope you will do the same. Joseph Locke & Ben Wright, editors N o t e s t o p r e fac e 1. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1954), 73. 2. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress, Volume I (New York: Scribner, 1905), 284. 3. Peter N. Stearns, “Why Study History,” American Historical Associa- tion (July 11, 2008). https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha -history-and-archives/archives/why-study-history-(1998. 4. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: Rome, 1855), 55. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T h e A m e r i c a n Y aw p © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 1 The New World I. Introduction Europeans called the Americas “the New World.” But for the millions of Cahokia, as it may have appeared Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but. Humans have around 1150 CE. lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years. Dynamic and diverse, Painting by Mi- chael Hampshire they spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of distinct cul- for the Cahokia tures. Native Americans built settled communities and followed seasonal Mounds State migration patterns, maintained peace through alliances and warred with Historic Site. their neighbors, and developed self-sufficient economies and maintained vast trade networks. They cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual val- ues. Kinship ties knit their communities together. But the arrival of Eu- ropeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes—what scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange— bridged more than ten thousand years of geographic separation, inaugu- rated centuries of violence, unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had ever seen, and revolutionized the history of the world. It began one of the most consequential developments in all of human history and the first chapter in the long American yawp. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 2 Chap ter 1 II. The First Americans American history begins with the first Americans. But where do their stories start? Native Americans passed stories down through the millen- nia that tell of their creation and reveal the contours of indigenous belief. The Salinan people of present-day California, for example, tell of a bald eagle that formed the first man out of clay and the first woman out of a feather.1 According to a Lenape tradition, the earth was made when Sky Woman fell into a watery world and, with the help of muskrat and beaver, landed safely on a turtle’s back, thus creating Turtle Island, or North America. A Choctaw tradition locates southeastern peoples’ be- ginnings inside the great Mother Mound earthwork, Nunih Waya, in the lower Mississippi Valley.2 Nahua people trace their beginnings to the place of the Seven Caves, from which their ancestors emerged before they migrated to what is now central Mexico.3 America’s indigenous peo- ples have passed down many accounts of their origins, written and oral, which share creation and migration histories. Archaeologists and anthropologists, meanwhile, focus on migration histories. Studying artifacts, bones, and genetic signatures, these scholars have pieced together a narrative that claims that the Americas were once a “new world” for Native Americans as well. The last global ice age trapped much of the world’s water in enor- mous continental glaciers. Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois. With so much of the world’s water captured in these massive ice sheets, global sea levels were much lower, and a land bridge connected Asia and North America across the Bering Strait. Between twelve and twenty thousand years ago, Native ancestors crossed the ice, waters, and exposed lands between the continents of Asia and America. These mobile hunter-gatherers traveled in small bands, exploiting vegetable, animal, and marine resources into the Beringian tundra at the northwestern edge of North America. DNA evidence suggests that these ancestors paused— for perhaps fifteen thousand years—in the expansive region between Asia and America.4 Other ancestors crossed the seas and voyaged along the Pacific coast, traveling along riverways and settling where local ecosys- tems permitted.5 Glacial sheets receded around fourteen thousand years ago, opening a corridor to warmer climates and new resources. Some an- cestral communities migrated southward and eastward. Evidence found at Monte Verde, a site in modern-day Chile, suggests that human ac- tivity began there at least 14,500 years ago. Similar evidence hints at © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 3 human settlement in the Florida panhandle at the same time.6 On many points, archaeological and traditional knowledge sources converge: the dental, archaeological, linguistic, oral, ecological, and genetic evidence il- lustrates a great deal of diversity, with numerous groups settling and mi- grating over thousands of years, potentially from many different points of origin.7 Whether emerging from the earth, water, or sky; being made by a creator; or migrating to their homelands, modern Native American communities recount histories in America that date long before human memory. In the Northwest, Native groups exploited the great salmon-filled riv- ers. On the plains and prairie lands, hunting communities followed bison Prehistoric settle- herds and moved according to seasonal patterns. In mountains, prairies, ment in Warren deserts, and forests, the cultures and ways of life of paleo-era ancestors County, Missis- were as varied as the geography. These groups spoke hundreds of lan- sippi. Mural by Robert Dafford, guages and adopted distinct cultural practices. Rich and diverse diets fu- depicting the eled massive population growth across the continent. Kings Crossing archaeological Agriculture arose sometime between nine thousand and five thou- site as it may have sand years ago, almost simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemi- appeared in 1000 CE. Vicks- spheres. Mesoamericans in modern-day Mexico and Central America burg Riverfront relied on domesticated maize (corn) to develop the hemisphere’s first Murals. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 4 Chap ter 1 settled population around 1200 BCE.8 Corn was high in caloric content, easily dried and stored, and, in Mesoamerica’s warm and fertile Gulf Coast, could sometimes be harvested twice in a year. Corn—as well as other Mesoamerican crops—spread across North America and contin- ues to hold an important spiritual and cultural place in many Native communities. Agriculture flourished in the fertile river valleys between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, an area known as the Eastern Woodlands. There, three crops in particular—corn, beans, and squash, known as the Three Sisters—provided nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations. In Woodland areas from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast, Native communities managed their forest re- sources by burning underbrush to create vast parklike hunting grounds and to clear the ground for planting the Three Sisters. Many groups used shift- ing cultivation, in which farmers cut the forest, burned the undergrowth, and then planted seeds in the nutrient-rich ashes. When crop yields began to decline, farmers moved to another field and allowed the land to recover and the forest to regrow before again cutting the forest, burning the under- growth, and restarting the cycle. This technique was particularly useful in areas with difficult soil. But in the fertile regions of the Eastern Woodlands, Native American farmers engaged in permanent, intensive agriculture, using hand tools rather than European-style plows. The rich soil and use of hand tools enabled effective and sustainable farming practices, produc- ing high yields without overburdening the soil.9 Typically in Woodland communities, women practiced agriculture while men hunted and fished. Agriculture allowed for dramatic social change, but for some, it also may have accompanied a decline in health. Analysis of remains reveals that societies transitioning to agriculture often experienced weaker bones and teeth.10 But despite these possible declines, agriculture brought im- portant benefits. Farmers could produce more food than hunters, en- abling some members of the community to pursue other skills. Religious leaders, skilled soldiers, and artists could devote their energy to activities other than food production. North America’s indigenous peoples shared some broad traits. Spiri- tual practices, understandings of property, and kinship networks differed markedly from European arrangements. Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated their world and was both tangible and accessible. It could be appealed to and harnessed. Kinship bound most Native North © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 5 American people together. Most peoples lived in small communities tied by kinship networks. Many Native cultures understood ancestry as matri- lineal: family and clan identity proceeded along the female line, through mothers and daughters, rather than fathers and sons. Fathers, for in- stance, often joined mothers’ extended families, and sometimes even a mother’s brothers took a more direct role in child-raising than biological fathers. Therefore, mothers often wielded enormous influence at local levels, and men’s identities and influence often depended on their relation- ships to women. Native American culture, meanwhile, generally afforded greater sexual and marital freedom than European cultures. Women, for instance, often chose their husbands, and divorce often was a relatively simple and straightforward process. Moreover, most Native peoples’ no- tions of property rights differed markedly from those of Europeans. Na- tive Americans generally felt a personal ownership of tools, weapons, or other items that were actively used, and this same rule applied to land and crops. Groups and individuals exploited particular pieces of land and used violence or negotiation to exclude others. But the right to the use of land did not imply the right to its permanent possession. Native Americans had many ways of communicating, including graphic ones, and some of these artistic and communicative technologies are still used today. For example, Algonquian-speaking Ojibwes used birch-bark scrolls to record medical treatments, recipes, songs, stories, and more. Other Eastern Woodland peoples wove plant fibers, embroi- dered skins with porcupine quills, and modeled the earth to make sites of complex ceremonial meaning. On the Plains, artisans wove buffalo hair and painted on buffalo skins; in the Pacific Northwest weavers wove goat hair into soft textiles with particular patterns. Maya, Zapotec, and Nahua ancestors in Mesoamerica painted their histories on plant-derived textiles and carved them into stone. In the Andes, Inca recorders noted information in the form of knotted strings, or khipu.11 Two thousand years ago, some of the largest culture groups in North America were the Puebloan groups, centered in the current-day Greater Southwest (the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico), the Mississippian groups located along the Great River and its tributar- ies, and the Mesoamerican groups of the areas now known as central Mexico and the Yucatán. Previous developments in agricultural technol- ogy enabled the explosive growth of the large early societies, such as that at Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico, Cahokia along the Mississippi River, and in the desert oasis areas of the Greater Southwest. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 6 Chap ter 1 Native peoples Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico was home to ancestral in the Southwest began construct- Puebloan peoples between 900 and 1300 CE. As many as fifteen thou- ing these highly sand individuals lived in the Chaco Canyon complex in present-day New defensible cliff Mexico.12 Sophisticated agricultural practices, extensive trading net- dwellings in 1190 CE and continued works, and even the domestication of animals like turkeys allowed the expanding and population to swell. Massive residential structures, built from sandstone refurbishing them until 1260 CE blocks and lumber carried across great distances, housed hundreds of before abandon- Puebloan people. One building, Pueblo Bonito, stretched over two acres ing them around 1300 CE. Andreas and rose five stories. Its six hundred rooms were decorated with copper F. Borchert, Mesa bells, turquoise decorations, and bright macaws.13 Homes like those at Verde National Pueblo Bonito included a small dugout room, or kiva, which played an Park Cliff Palace. Wikimedia. Cre- important role in a variety of ceremonies and served as an important cen- ative Commons ter for Puebloan life and culture. Puebloan spirituality was tied both to Attribution- Share Alike 3.0 the earth and the heavens, as generations carefully charted the stars and Germany. designed homes in line with the path of the sun and moon.14 The Puebloan people of Chaco Canyon faced several ecological chal- lenges, including deforestation and overirrigation, which ultimately caused the community to collapse and its people to disperse to smaller settlements. An extreme fifty-year drought began in 1130. Shortly there- after, Chaco Canyon was deserted. New groups, including the Apache and Navajo, entered the vacated territory and adopted several Puebloan customs. The same drought that plagued the Pueblo also likely affected the Mississippian peoples of the American Midwest and South. The Mis- sissippians developed one of the largest civilizations north of modern- day Mexico. Roughly one thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located just east of modern-day St. Louis, peaked at a population of between ten thousand and thirty thousand. It rivaled contemporary European cities in size. No American city, in fact, would © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 7 match Cahokia’s peak population levels until after the American Revolu- tion. The city itself spanned two thousand acres and centered on Monks Mound, a large earthen hill that rose ten stories and was larger at its base than the pyramids of Egypt. As with many of the peoples who lived in the Woodlands, life and death in Cahokia were linked to the movement of the stars, sun, and moon, and their ceremonial earthwork structures reflect these important structuring forces. Cahokia was politically organized around chiefdoms, a hierarchical, clan-based system that gave leaders both secular and sacred authority. The size of the city and the extent of its influence suggest that the city relied on a number of lesser chiefdoms under the authority of a para- mount leader. Social stratification was partly preserved through frequent warfare. War captives were enslaved, and these captives formed an im- An artist’s render- portant part of the economy in the North American Southeast. Native ing of Cahokia as it may have American slavery was not based on holding people as property. Instead, appeared in 1150 Native Americans understood slaves as people who lacked kinship net- CE. Prepared by Bill Isminger and works. Slavery, then, was not always a permanent condition. Very often, Mark Esarey with a former slave could become a fully integrated member of the commu- artwork by Greg Harlin. From the nity. Adoption or marriage could enable a slave to enter a kinship net- Cahokia Mounds work and join the community. Slavery and captive trading became an State Historic Site. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 8 Chap ter 1 important way that many Native communities regrew and gained or maintained power. Around 1050, Cahokia experienced what one archaeologist has called a “big bang,” which included “a virtually instantaneous and per- vasive shift in all things political, social, and ideological.”15 The popula- tion grew almost 500 percent in only one generation, and new people groups were absorbed into the city and its supporting communities. By 1300, the once-powerful city had undergone a series of strains that led to collapse. Scholars previously pointed to ecological disaster or slow depopulation through emigration, but new research instead emphasizes mounting warfare, or internal political tensions. Environmental explana- tions suggest that population growth placed too great a burden on the ar- able land. Others suggest that the demand for fuel and building materials led to deforestation, erosion, and perhaps an extended drought. Recent evidence, including defensive stockades, suggests that political turmoil among the ruling elite and threats from external enemies may explain the end of the once-great civilization.16 North American communities were connected by kin, politics, and culture and sustained by long-distance trading routes. The Mississippi River served as an important trade artery, but all of the continent’s waterways were vital to transportation and communication. Cahokia became a key trading center partly because of its position near the Mis- sissippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. These rivers created networks that stretched from the Great Lakes to the American Southeast. Archaeolo- gists can identify materials, like seashells, that traveled over a thousand miles to reach the center of this civilization. At least 3,500 years ago, the community at what is now Poverty Point, Louisiana, had access to cop- per from present-day Canada and flint from modern-day Indiana. Sheets of mica found at the sacred Serpent Mound site near the Ohio River came from the Allegheny Mountains, and obsidian from nearby earthworks came from Mexico. Turquoise from the Greater Southwest was used at Teotihuacan 1200 years ago. In the Eastern Woodlands, many Native American societies lived in smaller, dispersed communities to take advantage of rich soils and abun- dant rivers and streams. The Lenapes, also known as Delawares, farmed the bottomlands throughout the Hudson and Delaware River watersheds in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Their hun- dreds of settlements, stretching from southern Massachusetts through Delaware, were loosely bound together by political, social, and spiritual connections. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 9 Dispersed and relatively independent, Lenape communities were bound together by oral histories, ceremonial traditions, consensus- based political organization, kinship networks, and a shared clan sys- tem. Kinship tied the various Lenape communities and clans together, and society was organized along matrilineal lines. Marriage occurred between clans, and a married man joined the clan of his wife. Lenape women wielded authority over marriages, households, and agricultural production and may even have played a significant part in determin- ing the selection of leaders, called sachems. Dispersed authority, small settlements, and kin-based organization contributed to the long-lasting stability and resilience of Lenape communities.17 One or more sachems governed Lenape communities by the consent of their people. Lenape sachems acquired their authority by demonstrating wisdom and expe- rience. This differed from the hierarchical organization of many Mis- sissippian cultures. Large gatherings did exist, however, as dispersed communities and their leaders gathered for ceremonial purposes or to make big decisions. Sachems spoke for their people in larger councils that included men, women, and elders. The Lenapes experienced oc- casional tensions with other indigenous groups like the Iroquois to the north or the Susquehannock to the south, but the lack of defensive for- tifications near Lenape communities convinced archaeologists that the Lenapes avoided large-scale warfare. The continued longevity of Lenape societies, which began centuries before European contact, was also due to their skills as farmers and fishers. Along with the Three Sisters, Lenape women planted tobacco, sunflowers, and gourds. They harvested fruits and nuts from trees and cultivated numerous medicinal plants, which they used with great pro- ficiency. The Lenapes organized their communities to take advantage of growing seasons and the migration patterns of animals and fowl that were a part of their diet. During planting and harvesting seasons, Le- napes gathered in larger groups to coordinate their labor and take ad- vantage of local abundance. As proficient fishers, they organized seasonal fish camps to net shellfish and catch shad. Lenapes wove nets, baskets, mats, and a variety of household materials from the rushes found along the streams, rivers, and coasts. They made their homes in some of the most fertile and abundant lands in the Eastern Woodlands and used their skills to create a stable and prosperous civilization. The first Dutch and Swedish settlers who encountered the Lenapes in the seventeenth century recognized Lenape prosperity and quickly sought their friendship. Their lives came to depend on it. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 10 Chap ter 1 In the Pacific Northwest, the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingits, Haidas, and hundreds of other peoples, speaking dozens of languages, thrived in a land with a moderate climate, lush forests, and many rivers. The peoples of this region depended on salmon for survival and valued it accord- ingly. Images of salmon decorated totem poles, baskets, canoes, oars, and other tools. The fish was treated with spiritual respect and its image represented prosperity, life, and renewal. Sustainable harvesting practices ensured the survival of salmon populations. The Coast Salish people and several others celebrated the First Salmon Ceremony when the first mi- grating salmon was spotted each season. Elders closely observed the size of the salmon run and delayed harvesting to ensure that a sufficient num- ber survived to spawn and return in the future.18 Men commonly used nets, hooks, and other small tools to capture salmon as they migrated upriver to spawn. Massive cedar canoes, as long as fifty feet and carry- ing as many as twenty men, also enabled extensive fishing expeditions in the Pacific Ocean, where skilled fishermen caught halibut, sturgeon, and other fish, sometimes hauling thousands of pounds in a single canoe.19 Food surpluses enabled significant population growth, and the Pa- cific Northwest became one of the most densely populated regions of North America. The combination of population density and surplus food created a unique social organization centered on elaborate feasts, called potlatches. These potlatches celebrated births and weddings and deter- mined social status. The party lasted for days and hosts demonstrated their wealth and power by entertaining guests with food, artwork, and performances. The more the hosts gave away, the more prestige and power they had within the group. Some men saved for decades to host an extravagant potlatch that would in turn give him greater respect and power within the community. Many peoples of the Pacific Northwest built elaborate plank houses out of the region’s abundant cedar trees. The five-hundred-foot-long Suquamish Oleman House (or Old Man House), for instance, rested on the banks of Puget Sound.20 Giant cedar trees were also carved and painted in the shape of animals or other figures to tell stories and ex- press identities. These totem poles became the most recognizable artistic form of the Pacific Northwest, but peoples also carved masks and other wooden items, such as hand drums and rattles, out of the region’s great trees. Despite commonalities, Native cultures varied greatly. The New World was marked by diversity and contrast. By the time Europeans were poised to cross the Atlantic, Native Americans spoke hundreds of lan- © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 11 guages and lived in keeping with the hemisphere’s many climates. Some Intricately carved masks, like the lived in cities, others in small bands. Some migrated seasonally; others Crooked Beak of settled permanently. All Native peoples had long histories and well- Heaven Mask, formed, unique cultures that developed over millennia. But the arrival of used natural elements such as Europeans changed everything. animals to repre- sent supernatural forces during cer- III. European Expansion emonial dances and festivals. Nineteenth- Scandinavian seafarers reached the New World long before Columbus. century brooked At their peak they sailed as far east as Constantinople and raided settle- beak of heaven ments as far south as North Africa. They established limited colonies in mask from the Kwakwaka’wakw. Iceland and Greenland and, around the year 1000, Leif Erikson reached Wikimedia. Cre- Newfoundland in present-day Canada. But the Norse colony failed. Cul- ative Commons Attribution 3.0 turally and geographically isolated, the Norse were driven back to the Unported. sea by some combination of limited resources, inhospitable weather, food shortages, and Native resistance. Then, centuries before Columbus, the Crusades linked Europe with the wealth, power, and knowledge of Asia. Europeans rediscovered or adopted Greek, Roman, and Muslim knowledge. The hemispheric dis- semination of goods and knowledge not only sparked the Renaissance © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 12 Chap ter 1 but fueled long-term European expansion. Asian goods flooded European markets, creating a demand for new commodities. This trade created vast new wealth, and Europeans battled one another for trade supremacy. European nation-states consolidated under the authority of powerful kings. A series of military conflicts between England and France—the Hundred Years’ War—accelerated nationalism and cultivated the finan- cial and military administration necessary to maintain nation-states. In Spain, the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile con- solidated the two most powerful kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. The Crusades had never ended in Iberia: the Spanish crown concluded cen- turies of intermittent warfare—the Reconquista—by expelling Muslim Moors and Iberian Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, just as Chris- topher Columbus sailed west. With new power, these new nations—and their newly empowered monarchs—yearned to access the wealth of Asia. Seafaring Italian traders commanded the Mediterranean and con- trolled trade with Asia. Spain and Portugal, at the edges of Europe, relied on middlemen and paid higher prices for Asian goods. They sought a more direct route. And so they looked to the Atlantic. Portugal invested heavily in exploration. From his estate on the Sagres Peninsula of Portu- gal, a rich sailing port, Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante Henry, Duke of Viseu) invested in research and technology and underwrote many technological breakthroughs. His investments bore fruit. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese sailors perfected the astrolabe, a tool to calculate lat- itude, and the caravel, a ship well suited for ocean exploration. Both were technological breakthroughs. The astrolabe allowed for precise naviga- tion, and the caravel, unlike more common vessels designed for trading on the relatively placid Mediterranean, was a rugged ship with a deep draft capable of making lengthy voyages on the open ocean and, equally important, carrying large amounts of cargo while doing so. Blending economic and religious motivations, the Portuguese estab- lished forts along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fifteenth century, inaugurating centuries of European colonization there. Portuguese trad- ing posts generated new profits that funded further trade and further colonization. Trading posts spread across the vast coastline of Africa, and by the end of the fifteenth century, Vasco da Gama leapfrogged his way around the coasts of Africa to reach India and other lucrative Asian markets. The vagaries of ocean currents and the limits of contemporary tech- nology forced Iberian sailors to sail west into the open sea before cutting back east to Africa. So doing, the Spanish and Portuguese stumbled on © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 13 several islands off the coast of Europe and Africa, including the Azores, Engraving of sixteenth-century the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands. They became training Lisbon from grounds for the later colonization of the Americas and saw the first large- Civitatis Orbis scale cultivation of sugar by enslaved laborers. Terrarum, The Cities of the Sugar was originally grown in Asia but became a popular, widely World, ed. Georg profitable luxury item consumed by the nobility of Europe. The Portu- Braun (Cologne: 1572). Wikimedia. guese began growing sugarcane along the Mediterranean, but sugar was a difficult crop. It required tropical temperatures, daily rainfall, unique soil conditions, and a fourteen-month growing season. But on the At- lantic islands, the Portuguese had found new land to support sugar pro- duction. New patterns of human and ecological destruction followed. Isolated from the mainlands of Europe and Africa for millennia, island natives—known as the Guanches—were enslaved or perished soon after Europeans arrived. Portugal’s would-be planters needed laborers to cul- tivate the difficult, labor-intensive crop. Portuguese merchants, who had recently established good relations with powerful African kingdoms such as Kongo, Ndongo, and Songhai, looked then to African slaves. Slav- ery had long existed among African societies. African leaders traded war captives—who by custom forfeited their freedom in battle—for Portu- guese guns, iron, and manufactured goods. From bases along the Atlantic coast, the largest in modern-day Nigeria, the Portuguese began purchas- ing slaves for export to the Atlantic islands to work the sugar fields. Thus were born the first great Atlantic plantations. Spain, too, stood on the cutting edge of maritime technology. Span- ish sailors had become masters of the caravels. As Portugal consolidated control over African trading networks and the circuitous eastbound sea route to Asia, Spain yearned for its own path to empire. Christopher © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 14 Chap ter 1 By the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established forts and colonies on islands and along the rim of the Atlantic Ocean; other major European countries soon followed. An anonymous cartographer created this map known as the Cantino Map, the earliest known map of European exploration in the New World, to depict these holdings and argue for the greatness of his native Portugal. Cantino planisphere (1502), Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy. Wikimedia. olumbus, a skilled Italian-born sailor who had studied under Portu- C guese navigators, promised just that opportunity. Educated Asians and Europeans of the fifteenth century knew the world was round. They also knew that while it was therefore technically possible to reach Asia by sailing west from Europe—thereby avoiding Italian or Portuguese middlemen—the earth’s vast size would doom even the greatest caravels to starvation and thirst long before they ever reached their destination. But Columbus underestimated the size of the globe by a full two thirds and therefore believed it was possible. After unsuccessfully shopping his proposed expedition in several European courts, he con- vinced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to provide him three small ships, which set sail in 1492. Columbus was both confoundingly wrong about the size of the earth and spectacularly lucky that two large continents lurked in his path. On October 12, 1492, after two months at sea, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María and their ninety men landed in the modern-day Bahamas. The indigenous Arawaks, or Taíno, populated the Caribbean islands. They fished and grew corn, yams, and cassava. Columbus described them as innocents. “They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor the sins of murder or theft,” he reported to the Spanish crown. “Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people.... They love their neighbors as themselves, and their speech is © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 15 the sweetest and gentlest in the world, and always with a smile.” But Co- lumbus had come for wealth and he could find little. The Arawaks, how- ever, wore small gold ornaments. Columbus left thirty-nine Spaniards at a military fort on Hispaniola to find and secure the source of the gold while he returned to Spain, with a dozen captured and branded Arawaks. Columbus arrived to great acclaim and quickly worked to outfit a return voyage. Spain’s New World motives were clear from the beginning. If outfitted for a return voyage, Columbus promised the Spanish crown gold and slaves. Columbus reported, “With fifty men they can all be sub- jugated and made to do what is required of them.”21 Columbus was outfitted with seventeen ships and over one thousand men to return to the West Indies (Columbus made four voyages to the New World). Still believing he had landed in the East Indies, he promised to reward Isabella and Ferdinand’s investment. But when material wealth proved slow in coming, the Spanish embarked on a vicious campaign to extract every possible ounce of wealth from the Caribbean. The Spanish decimated the Arawaks. Bartolomé de Las Casas traveled to the New World in 1502 and later wrote, “I saw with these Eyes of mine the Span- iards for no other reason, but only to gratify their bloody mindedness, cut off the Hands, Noses, and Ears, both of Indians and Indianesses.”22 When the enslaved Indians exhausted the islands’ meager gold reserves, the Spaniards forced them to labor on their huge new estates, the enco- miendas. Las Casas described European barbarities in cruel detail. By presuming the natives had no humanity, the Spaniards utterly abandoned theirs. Casual violence and dehumanizing exploitation ravaged the Ar- awaks. The Indian population collapsed. Within a few generations the whole island of Hispaniola had been depopulated and a whole people exterminated. Historians’ estimates of the island’s pre-contact popula- tion range from fewer than one million to as many as eight million (Las Casas estimated it at three million). In a few short years, they were gone. “Who in future generations will believe this?” Las Casas wondered. “I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.” Despite the diversity of Native populations and the existence of sev- eral strong empires, Native Americans were wholly unprepared for the arrival of Europeans. Biology magnified European cruelties. Cut off from the Old World, its domesticated animals, and its immunological his- tory, Native Americans lived free from the terrible diseases that ravaged populations in Asia, Europe and Africa. But their blessing now became a curse. Native Americans lacked the immunities that Europeans and Africans had developed over centuries of deadly epidemics, and so when © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 16 Chap ter 1 Europeans arrived, carrying smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles, and hepatitis, plagues decimated Native communities.23 Many died in war and slavery, but millions died in epidemics. All told, in fact, some scholars estimate that as much as 90 percent of the population of the Americas perished within the first century and a half of European contact.24 Though ravaged by disease and warfare, Native Americans forged middle grounds, resisted with violence, accommodated and adapted to the challenges of colonialism, and continued to shape the patterns of life throughout the New World for hundreds of years. But the Europeans kept coming. IV. Spanish Exploration and Conquest As news of the Spanish conquest spread, wealth-hungry Spaniards poured into the New World seeking land, gold, and titles. A New World empire spread from Spain’s Caribbean foothold. Motives were plain: said one soldier, “we came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.”25 Mercenaries joined the conquest and raced to capture the human and material wealth of the New World. The Spanish managed labor relations through a legal system known as the encomienda, an exploitive feudal arrangement in which Spain tied Indian laborers to vast estates. In the encomienda, the Spanish crown granted a person not only land but a specified number of natives as well. Encomenderos brutalized their laborers. After Bartolomé de Las Casas published his incendiary account of Spanish abuses (The Destruction of the Indies), Spanish authorities abolished the encomienda in 1542 and replaced it with the repartimiento. Intended as a milder system, the repar- timiento nevertheless replicated many of the abuses of the older system, and the rapacious exploitation of the Native population continued as Spain spread its empire over the Americas. As Spain’s New World empire expanded, Spanish conquerors met the massive empires of Central and South America, civilizations that dwarfed anything found in North America. In Central America the Maya built massive temples, sustained large populations, and constructed a complex and long-lasting civilization with a written language, advanced mathemat- ics, and stunningly accurate calendars. But Maya civilization, although it had not disappeared, nevertheless collapsed before European arrival, likely because of droughts and unsustainable agricultural practices. But © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 17 the eclipse of the Maya only heralded the later rise of the most powerful El Castillo (pyra- mid of Kukulcán) Native civilization ever seen in the Western Hemisphere: the Aztecs. in Chichén Itzá. Militaristic migrants from northern Mexico, the Aztecs moved south Photograph by into the Valley of Mexico, conquered their way to dominance, and built Daniel Schwen. Wikimedia. Cre- the largest empire in the New World. When the Spaniards arrived in ative Commons Mexico they found a sprawling civilization centered around Tenochti- Attribution- Share Alike 4.0 tlán, an awe-inspiring city built on a series of natural and man-made International. islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, located today within modern-day Mexico City. Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325, rivaled the world’s largest cities in size and grandeur. Much of the city was built on large artificial islands called chinampas, which the Aztecs constructed by dredging mud and rich sediment from the bottom of the lake and depositing it over time to form new landscapes. A massive pyramid temple, the Templo Mayor, was located at the city center (its ruins can still be found in the center of Mexico City). When the Spaniards arrived, they could scarcely believe what they saw: 70,000 buildings, housing perhaps 200,000–250,000 people, all built on a lake and connected by causeways and canals. Ber- nal Díaz del Castillo, a Spanish soldier, later recalled, “When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments.... Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?... I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”26 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 18 Chap ter 1 From their island city the Aztecs dominated an enormous swath of central and southern Mesoamerica. They ruled their empire through a decentralized network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute— including everything from the most basic items, such as corn, beans, and other foodstuffs, to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold—and provided troops for the empire. But unrest festered beneath the Aztecs’ imperial power, and European conquerors lusted after its vast wealth. Hernán Cortés, an ambitious, thirty-four-year-old Spaniard who had won riches in the conquest of Cuba, organized an invasion of Mexico in 1519. Sailing with six hundred men, horses, and cannon, he landed on the coast of Mexico. Relying on a Native translator, whom he called Doña Marina, and whom Mexican folklore denounces as La Malinche, Cortés gathered information and allies in preparation for conquest. Through intrigue, brutality, and the exploitation of endemic political divisions, he enlisted the aid of thousands of Native allies, defeated Spanish rivals, and This sixteenth- marched on Tenochtitlán. century map of Tenochtit- Aztec dominance rested on fragile foundations and many of the re- lán shows the gion’s semi-independent city-states yearned to break from Aztec rule. aesthetic beauty and advanced in- Nearby kingdoms, including the Tarascans to the north and the remains frastructure of this of Maya city-states on the Yucatán peninsula, chafed at Aztec power. great Aztec city. Map, c. 1524. Through persuasion, and maybe because some Aztecs thought Cor- Wikimedia. tés was the god Quetzalcoatl, the Spaniards entered Tenochtitlán peace- © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 19 fully. Cortés then captured the emperor Montezuma and used him to gain control of the Aztecs’ gold and silver reserves and their network of mines. Eventually, the Aztecs revolted. Montezuma was branded a trai- tor, and uprising ignited the city. Montezuma was killed along with a third of Cortés’s men in la noche triste, the “night of sorrows.” The Span- ish fought through thousands of indigenous insurgents and across canals to flee the city, where they regrouped, enlisted more Native allies, cap- tured Spanish reinforcements, and, in 1521, besieged the island city. The Spaniards’ eighty-five-day siege cut off food and fresh water. Smallpox ravaged the city. One Spanish observer said it “spread over the people as great destruction. Some it covered on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it.... They could not move; they could not stir.”27 Cortés, the Spaniards, and The Spanish relied on indigenous allies to defeat the Aztecs. The Tlaxcala were among the most important Spanish allies in their conquest. This nineteenth-century re-creation of a sixteenth-century drawing depicts Tlaxcalan warriors fighting alongside Spanish soldiers against the Aztecs. Wikimedia. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 20 Chap ter 1 their Native allies then sacked the city. The temples were plundered and fifteen thousand died. After two years of conflict, a million-person-strong empire was toppled by disease, dissension, and a thousand European conquerors. Farther south, along the Andes Mountains in South America, the Quechuas, or Incas, managed a vast mountain empire. From their capital of Cuzco in the Andean highlands, through conquest and negotiation, the Incas built an empire that stretched around the western half of the South American continent from present day Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina. They cut terraces into the sides of mountains to farm fertile soil, and by the 1400s they managed a thousand miles of Andean roads that tied together perhaps twelve million people. But like the Aztecs, un- rest between the Incas and conquered groups created tensions and left the empire vulnerable to invaders. Smallpox spread in advance of Span- ish conquerors and hit the Incan empire in 1525. Epidemics ravaged the population, cutting the empire’s population in half and killing the Incan emperor Huayna Capac and many members of his family. A bloody war of succession ensued. Inspired by Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, Francisco Pizarro moved south and found an empire torn by chaos. With 168 men, he deceived Incan rulers and took control of the empire and seized the capital city, Cuzco, in 1533. Disease, conquest, and slavery ravaged the remnants of the Incan empire. After the conquests of Mexico and Peru, Spain settled into their new empire. A vast administrative hierarchy governed the new holdings: royal appointees oversaw an enormous territory of landed estates, and Indian laborers and administrators regulated the extraction of gold and silver and oversaw their transport across the Atlantic in Spanish galleons. Meanwhile Spanish migrants poured into the New World. During the sixteenth century alone, 225,000 migrated, and 750,000 came during the entire three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Spaniards, often single, young, and male, emigrated for the various promises of land, wealth, and social advancement. Laborers, craftsmen, soldiers, clerks, and priests all crossed the Atlantic in large numbers. Indians, however, always out- numbered the Spanish, and the Spaniards, by both necessity and design, incorporated Native Americans into colonial life. This incorporation did not mean equality, however. An elaborate racial hierarchy marked Spanish life in the New World. Regularized in the mid-1600s but rooted in medieval practices, the Sistema de Castas organized individuals into various racial groups based on their supposed “purity of blood.” Elaborate classifications became © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 21 Casta paintings illustrated the varying degrees of intermixture between colonial subjects, defining them for Spanish officials. Unknown artist, Las Castas, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepot- zotlan, Mexico. Wikimedia. almost prerequisites for social and political advancement in Spanish colo- nial society. Peninsulares—Iberian-born Spaniards, or españoles—occu- pied the highest levels of administration and acquired the greatest estates. Their descendants, New World-born Spaniards, or criollos, occupied the next rung and rivaled the peninsulares for wealth and opportunity. Mestizos—a term used to describe those of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage—followed. Like the French later in North America, the Spanish tolerated and sometimes even supported interracial marriage. There were simply too few Spanish women in the New World to support the natural growth of a purely Spanish population. The Catholic Church endorsed inter- racial marriage as a moral bulwark against bastardy and rape. By 1600, mestizos made up a large portion of the colonial population.28 By the early 1700s, more than one third of all marriages bridged the Spanish- Indian divide. Separated by wealth and influence from the peninsulares and criollos, mestizos typically occupied a middling social position in Spanish New World society. They were not quite Indios, or Indians, but their lack of limpieza de sangre, or “pure blood,” removed them from the privileges of full-blooded Spaniards. Spanish fathers of sufficient wealth © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 22 Chap ter 1 and influence might shield their mestizo children from racial prejudice, and a number of wealthy mestizos married españoles to “whiten” their family lines, but more often mestizos were confined to a middle station in the Spanish New World. Slaves and Indians occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Many manipulated the Sistema de Casas to gain advantages for them- selves and their children. Mestizo mothers, for instance, might insist that their mestizo daughters were actually castizas, or quarter-Indians, who, if they married a Spaniard, could, in the eyes of the law, produce “pure” criollo children entitled to the full rights and opportunities of Spanish cit- izens. But “passing” was an option only for the few. Instead, the massive Native populations within Spain’s New World Empire ensured a level of cultural and racial mixture—or mestizaje—unparalleled in British North America. Spanish North America wrought a hybrid culture that was nei- ther fully Spanish nor fully Indian. The Spanish not only built Mexico City atop Tenochtitlán, but food, language, and families were also con- structed on indigenous foundations. In 1531, a poor Indian named Juan Diego reported that he was visited by the Virgin Mary, who came as Our Lady of Guadalupe is perhaps the most culturally important and extensively reproduced Mexican- Catholic image. In the iconic depiction, Mary stands atop the tilma (peasant cloak) of Juan Diego, on which according to his story appeared the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Throughout Mexican history, the story and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been a unifying national symbol. Mexican retablo of Our Lady of Guadalupe, nineteenth century, in El Paso Museum of Art. Wikimedia. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 23 a dark-skinned Nahuatl-speaking Indian.29 Reports of miracles spread across Mexico and the Virgen de Guadalupe became a national icon for a new mestizo society. From Mexico, Spain expanded northward. Lured by the promises of gold and another Tenochtitlán, Spanish expeditions scoured North America for another wealthy Indian empire. Huge expeditions, resem- bling vast moving communities, composed of hundreds of soldiers, set- tlers, priests, and slaves, with enormous numbers of livestock, moved across the continent. Juan Ponce de León, the conqueror of Puerto Rico, landed in Florida in 1513 in search of wealth and slaves. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca joined the Narváez expedition to Florida a decade later but was shipwrecked and forced to embark on a remarkable multiyear odyssey across the Gulf of Mexico and Texas into Mexico. Pedro Mené- ndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and it remains the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the present-day United States. But without the rich gold and silver mines of Mexico, the plantation- friendly climate of the Caribbean, or the exploitive potential of large In- dian empires, North America offered little incentive for Spanish officials. Still, Spanish expeditions combed North America. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado pillaged his way across the Southwest. Hernando de Soto tor- tured and raped and enslaved his way across the Southeast. Soon Spain had footholds—however tenuous—across much of the continent. V. Conclusion The “discovery” of America unleashed horrors. Europeans embarked on a debauching path of death and destructive exploitation that unleashed murder and greed and slavery. But disease was deadlier than any weapon in the European arsenal. It unleashed death on a scale never before seen in human history. Estimates of the population of pre-Columbian Amer- ica range wildly. Some argue for as much as 100 million, some as low as 2 million. In 1983, Henry Dobyns put the number at 18 million. What- ever the precise estimates, nearly all scholars tell of the utter devasta- tion wrought by European disease. Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years following European contact, 95 percent of Native Americans perished.30 (At its worst, Europe’s Black Death peaked at death rates of 25 to 33 percent. Nothing else in history rivals the American demographic disaster.) A ten-thousand-year history of disease hit the New World in an © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 24 Chap ter 1 instant. Smallpox, typhus, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles: pandemics ravaged populations up and down the continents. Wave after wave of disease crashed relentlessly. Disease flung whole communities into chaos. Others it destroyed completely. Disease was only the most terrible in a cross-hemispheric exchange of violence, culture, trade, and peoples—the so-called Columbian Exchange—that followed in Columbus’s wake. Global diets, for instance, were transformed. The Americas’ calorie-rich crops revolutionized Old World agriculture and spawned a worldwide population boom. Many modern associations between food and geography are but products of the Columbian Exchange: potatoes in Ireland, tomatoes in Italy, chocolate in Switzerland, peppers in Thailand, and oranges in Florida are all manifes- tations of the new global exchange. Europeans, for their part, introduced their domesticated animals to the New World. Pigs ran rampant through the Americas, transforming the landscape as they spread throughout both continents. Horses spread as well, transforming the Native American cul- tures who adapted to the newly introduced animal. Partly from trade, partly from the remnants of failed European expeditions, and partly from theft, Indians acquired horses and transformed Native American life in the vast North American plains. The Europeans’ arrival bridged two worlds and ten thousand years of history largely separated from each other since the closing of the Bering Strait. Both sides of the world had been transformed. And neither would ever again be the same. VI. Reference Material This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, with content contribu- tions by L. D. Burnett, Michelle Cassidy, D. Andrew Johnson, Joseph Locke, Dawn Marsh, Christen Mucher, Cameron Shriver, Ben Wright, and Garrett Wright. Recommended citation: L. D. Burnett et al., “The New World,” in The Amer- ican Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). Notes to Ch a p ter 1 1. A. L. Kroeber, ed., University of California Publications: American Ar- chaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 10 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1911–1914), 191–192. 2. James F. Barnett Jr., Mississippi’s American Indians (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 90. 3. Edward W. Osowski, Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 25. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 25 4. David J. Meltzer, First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age Amer- ica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 170. 5. Knut R. Fladmark, “Routes: Alternate Migration Corridors for Early Man in North America,” American Antiquity 44, no. 1 (1979): 55–69. 6. Jessi J. Halligan et al., “Pre-Clovis Occupation 14,550 Years Ago at the Page-Ladson Site, Florida, and the People of the Americas,” Science Advances 2, no. 5 (May 13, 2016). 7. Tom D. Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 8. Richard A. Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 25. 9. Jane Mt. Pleasant, “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America,” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 374–412. 10. Richard H. Steckel, “Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America: The Skeletal Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 19–21. 11. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 12. Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1992), 217. 13. H. Wolcott Toll, “Making and Breaking Pots in the Chaco World,” American Antiquity 66, no. 1 (January 2001): 65. 14. Anna Sofaer, “The Primary Architecture of the Chacoan Culture: A Cos- mological Expression,” in Anasazi Architecture and American Design, ed. Baker H. Morrow and V. B. Price (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 15. Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, eds., Cahokia: Domina- tion and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 31. 16. Thomas E. Emerson, “An Introduction to Cahokia 2002: Diversity, Complexity, and History,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 137–139. 17. Amy Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7–30. 18. Erna Gunther, “An Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony,” American Anthropologist 28, no. 4 (October–December 1926): 605–617. 19. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedi- tion, Vol. 6 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), https://www.loc.gov/ exhibits/lewisandclark/transcript68.html. 20. Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 126. 21. Clements R. Markham, ed. and trans., The Journal of Christopher Co- lumbus (During His First Voyage), and Documents Relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 73, 135, 41. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 26 Chap ter 1 22. Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the In- dies... (1552; Project Gutenberg, 2007), 147. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks /20321, accessed June 11, 2018. 23. Dean R. Snow, “Microchronology and Demographic Evidence Relating to the Size of Pre-Columbian North American Indian Populations,” Science 268, no. 5217 (June 16, 1995): 1601. 24. Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Random House, 1988), 195. 25. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 53. 26. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517– 1521, trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 190–191. 27. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1970). 28. Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 27. 29. Stafford Poole, C. M., Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. 30. Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Ten- nessee Press, 1983). R e c o mm e n d e d R e a din g Alt, Susan, ed. Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010. Bruhns, Karen Olsen. Ancient South America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Claasen, Cheryl, and Rosemary A. Joyce, eds. Women in Prehistory: North Amer- ica and Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492– 1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Conse- quences of 1492. New York: Praeger, 2003. Dewar, Elaine. Bones. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Dye, David. War Paths, Peace Paths: An Archaeology of Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009. Fenn, Elizabeth A. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Man- dan People. New York: Hill and Wang, 2014. Jablonski, Nina G. The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795, 2nd ed. Nor- man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d 27 Kehoe, Alice Beck. America Before the European Invasions. New York: Rout- ledge, 2002. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Books, 1992. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Meltzer, David J. First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Mt. Pleasant, Jane. “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America.” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 374–412. Oswalt, Wendell H. This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native North Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: Penguin, 2010. Pringle, Heather. In Search of Ancient North America: An Archaeological Jour- ney to Forgotten Cultures. New York: Wiley, 1996. Reséndez, Andrés. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2004. Scarry, C. Margaret. Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands. Gaines- ville: University Press of Florida, 1993. Schwartz, Stuart B. Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2000. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. New York: Random House, 1988. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 2 Colliding Cultures I. Introduction The Columbian Exchange transformed both sides of the Atlantic, but Theodor de Bry, Negotiating Peace with dramatically disparate outcomes. New diseases wiped out entire civ- with the Indians, ilizations in the Americas, while newly imported nutrient-rich foodstuffs 1634. Virginia enabled a European population boom. Spain benefited most immediately Historical Society. as the wealth of the Aztec and Incan Empires strengthened the Spanish monarchy. Spain used its new riches to gain an advantage over other European nations, but this advantage was soon contested. Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England all raced to the New World, eager to match the gains of the Spanish. Native peoples greeted the new visitors with responses ranging from welcoming cooperation to aggressive violence, but the ravages of disease and the possibility of new trading relationships enabled Europeans to create settlements all along the western rim of the Atlantic world. New empires would emerge from © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com C ol l i di ng Cu l t u r e s 29 these tenuous beginnings, and by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain would lose its privileged position to its rivals. An age of coloniza- tion had begun and, with it, a great collision of cultures commenced. II. Spanish America Spain extended its reach in the Americas after reaping the benefits of its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. Expeditions slowly began combing the continent and bringing Europeans into the modern-day United States in the hopes of establishing religious and eco- nomic dominance in a new territory. Juan Ponce de León arrived in the area named La Florida in 1513. He found between 150,000 and 300,000 Native Americans. But then two and a half centuries of contact with European and African peoples— whether through war, slave raids, or, most dramatically, foreign disease—decimated Florida’s indigenous population. European explor- ers, meanwhile, had hoped to find great wealth in Florida, but reality never aligned with their imaginations. 1513 Atlantic In the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers fought fre- map from carto grapher Martin quently with Florida’s Native peoples as well as with other Europeans. In Waldseemuller. the 1560s Spain expelled French Protestants, called Huguenots, from the Wikimedia. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 3 0 cha pter 2 area near modern-day Jacksonville in northeast Florida. In 1586 English privateer Sir Francis Drake burned the wooden settlement of St. Augus- tine. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Spain’s reach in Florida extended from the mouth of the St. Johns River south to the environs of St. Augustine—an area of roughly 1,000 square miles. The Spaniards at- tempted to duplicate methods for establishing control used previously in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Andes. The Crown granted missionaries the right to live among Timucua and Guale villagers in the late 1500s and early 1600s and encouraged settlement through the encomienda system (grants of Indian labor).1 In the 1630s, the mission system extended into the Apalachee district in the Florida panhandle. The Apalachee, one of the most powerful tribes in Florida at the time of contact, claimed the territory from the modern Florida-Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico. Apalachee farmers grew an abundance of corn and other crops. Indian traders carried surplus products east along the Camino Real (the royal road) that connected the western anchor of the mission system with St. Augustine. Spanish settlers drove cattle eastward across the St. Johns River and established ranches as far west as Apalachee. Still, Spain held Florida tenuously. Farther west, in 1598, Juan de Oñate led four hundred settlers, sol- diers, and missionaries from Mexico into New Mexico. The Spanish Southwest had brutal beginnings. When Oñate sacked the Pueblo city of Acoma, the “sky city,” the Spaniards slaughtered nearly half of its roughly 1,500 inhabitants, including women and children. Oñate or- dered one foot cut off every surviving male over age fifteen, and he en- slaved the remaining women and children.2 Santa Fe, the first permanent European settlement in the Southwest, was established in 1610. Few Spaniards relocated to the Southwest be- cause of the distance from Mexico City and the dry and hostile environ- ment. Thus, the Spanish never achieved a commanding presence in the region. By 1680, only about three thousand colonists called Spanish New Mexico home.3 There, they traded with and exploited the local Puebloan peoples. The region’s Puebloan population had plummeted from as many as sixty thousand in 1600 to about seventeen thousand in 1680.4 Spain shifted strategies after the military expeditions wove their way through the southern and western half of North America. Missions be- came the engine of colonization in North America. Missionaries, most of whom were members of the Franciscan religious order, provided Spain with an advance guard in North America. Catholicism had always justi- © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com C ol l i di ng Cu l t u r e s 31 fied Spanish conquest, and colonization always carried religious impera- tives. By the early seventeenth century, Spanish friars had established dozens of missions along the Rio Grande and in California. III. Spain’s Rivals Emerge While Spain plundered the New World, unrest plagued Europe. The Ref- ormation threw England and France, the two European powers capable of contesting Spain, into turmoil. Long and expensive conflicts drained time, resources, and lives. Millions died from religious violence in France alone. As the violence diminished in Europe, however, religious and po- litical rivalries continued in the New World. The Spanish exploitation of New Spain’s riches inspired European monarchs to invest in exploration and conquest. Reports of Spanish atrocities spread throughout Europe and provided a humanitarian justi- fication for European colonization. An English reprint of the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas bore the sensational title “Popery Truly Display’d The earliest plan in its Bloody Colours: Or, a Faithful Narrative of the Horrid and Unex- of New Am- sterdam (now ampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manners of Cruelties that Hell and Manhattan), Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish.” An English writer 1660. Wikimedia. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 3 2 cha pter 2 explained that the Indians “were simple and plain men, and lived without great labour,” but in their lust for gold the Spaniards “forced the people (that were not used to labour) to stand all the daie in the hot sun gather- ing gold in the sand of the rivers. By this means a great number of them (not used to such pains) died, and a great number of them (seeing them- selves brought from so quiet a life to such misery and slavery) of despera- tion killed themselves. And many would not marry, because they would not have their children slaves to the Spaniards.”5 The Spanish accused their critics of fostering a “Black Legend.” The Black Legend drew on religious differences and political rivalries. Spain had successful conquests in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands and left many in those na- tions yearning to break free from Spanish influence. English writers argued that Spanish barbarities were foiling a tremendous opportunity for the expansion of Christianity across the globe and that a benevolent conquest of the New World by non-Spanish monarchies offered the surest salvation of the New World’s pagan masses. With these religious justifications, and with obvious economic motives, Spain’s rivals arrived in the New World. The F r e nch The French crown subsidized exploration in the early sixteenth century. Early French explorers sought a fabled Northwest Passage, a mythical waterway passing through the North American continent to Asia. De- spite the wealth of the New World, Asia’s riches still beckoned to Eu- ropeans. Canada’s St. Lawrence River appeared to be such a passage, stretching deep into the continent and into the Great Lakes. French colo- nial possessions centered on these bodies of water (and, later, down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans). French colonization developed through investment from private trad- ing companies. Traders established Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia) in 1603 and launched trading expeditions that stretched down the Atlantic coast as far as Cape Cod. The needs of the fur trade set the future pat- tern of French colonization. Founded in 1608 under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain, Quebec provided the foothold for what would become New France. French fur traders placed a higher value on co operating with the Indians than on establishing a successful French co- lonial footprint. Asserting dominance in the region could have been to their own detriment, as it might have compromised their access to skilled Indian trappers, and therefore wealth. Few Frenchmen traveled to the New World to settle permanently. In fact, few traveled at all. Many per- © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com C ol l i di ng Cu l t u r e s 33 secuted French Protestants (Huguenots) sought to emigrate after France This depiction of New Orleans criminalized Protestantism in 1685, but all non-Catholics were forbidden in 1726 when it in New France.6 was an eight- The French preference for trade over permanent settlement fostered year-old French frontier settle- more cooperative and mutually beneficial relationships with Native ment. Jean-Pierre Americans than was typical among the Spanish and English. Perhaps Lassus, Veüe et Perspective de la eager to debunk the anti-Catholic elements of the Black Legend, the Nouvelle Orleans, French worked to cultivate cooperation with Indians. Jesuit missionar- 1726, Centre des archives d’outre- ies, for instance, adopted different conversion strategies than the Spanish mer, France. Franciscans. Spanish missionaries brought Indians into enclosed mis- Wikimedia. sions, whereas Jesuits more often lived with or alongside Indian groups. Many French fur traders married Indian women.7 The offspring of Indian women and French men were so common in New France that

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