American history reviews
A few people have asked about the early American history reviews I wrote as part of the compulsory AH grad class I took a few years ago. The class actually turned out to be very good indeed, and the reviews were part of a reading journal we had to keep and hand in at the end of the course that were required to be of a publishable standard.
The first few are of relevance to those who might want to research Age of Sail or Angelverse fics, so I've included them below. If nothing else, they include some starting points on the research. The two requirements for the reviews were: to cover two articles per topic and to do so with a hard limit of 500 words per topic.
MIGRATION
James Horn, 'Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century', in Tate and Ammerman (ed.s), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, University of North Carolina Press (1979).
Mildred Campbell, 'Social Origins of Some Early Americans', in James M. Smith (ed.) Seventeenth Century America, University of North Carolina Press (1959).
James Horn analysed the details of 829 indentured servants - those whose place of origin and occupation are known - from the 5,000 that emigrated to the Chesapeake between 1654 and 1686. The majority of servants came from an agricultural background, were aged 15-24 and were single. Men tended to outnumber women - the ratio in the London emigrants in 1635 was six men to every woman, and even towards the end of the century, the ratio of London and Liverpool was two and a half to one. Horn stated that this was because men had greater labour potential than women in fieldwork. Most female servants emigrated when they were at or below marrying age; their occupations are difficult to ascertain as few had their recorded, most simply described as spinsters.
In the latter parts of the article, Horn analysed the backgrounds of the emigrants prior to their leaving England. He found that the majority of Bristol and Liverpool emigrants were from or near to the cities themselves, and that only half of all the emigrants were from the countryside, at a time when four fifths of the population was rural. Horn also investigated the servants who gave London as their place of origin, and found that they had moved to the city often only a few months before setting sail. The conditions of London at the time were harsh, and could have encouraged emigration. Combined with a slowly growing inclination towards geographical and occupational mobility from the gradual transformation of arable to pasture land, Horn concluded that this would have made the young emigrants much more receptive to the idea of leaving England altogether - it would have been yet another move in search of work.
Mildred Campbell's article was written twenty years before Horn's, using much the same information - the lists of indentured servants leaving London and Bristol between 1654 and 1686. Campbell speaks of more than 11,000 servants setting sail, however, as opposed to Horn's 5,000; presumably, this is because Campbell's figures include all of the established colonies, rather than just the Chesapeake region.
Campbell first stresses the importance of social mobility in Tudor and Stuart England, before pointing out that, although the few gentry that crossed over had importance disproportionate to their numbers, most people emigrating were in fact from the "middling classes" - farmers and artisans. They were young (18-24) and usually unmarried - especially the women, many of whom set out with the explicit intention of acquiring a husband. The men, conversely, set out in search of land, inevitably intending to acquire a wife along the way. Campbell stresses the importance of land to those early settlers, as it signified security and success. She points out the non-conformity of the "middling classes", placing a particular emphasis on religion.
Campbell's article is clearly written and, although obviously parts of it are now in dispute, the "middling classes" is still an appropriate term to use when talking of those early settlers.
THE EARLY SOUTHERN COLONIES
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 'Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown', Journal of American History, Vol. 66, Issue 1. (June 1979).
Russell R. Menard, 'From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland', William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 30, Issue 1, Chesapeake Society. (Jan. 1973).
Karen Kupperman's major argument is that there are direct parallels between the conditions experienced by the Jamestown settlers and by prisoners in the Korean War, which explain the strange lethargy and apathy experienced by both groups. Both groups of men, she says, were imprisoned in a small area, underemployed and had major uncertainties about their immediate future.
The medical reasons she cites for this "give-up-itis" are malnutrition and disease. The Jamestown settlers had a diet of mainly maize, which usually resulted in pellagra, as well as scurvy. This left the sufferers anorexic, apathetic, pale - all of which were seen in the Virginians - and also had a loss of motor function, which explains the lethargy experienced by many. This and protein-calorie malnutrition lowered resistance to infection, and, as such, the Chesapeake colonists suffered from endemic malaria and chronic diarrhoea.
Kupperman maintained that the physical factors and the psychological causes - the isolation and despair - reinforced each other. Her unusual perspective was supported by heavy physical evidence from many doctors (for the Korean War PoWs) and eye-witnesses (for the settlers). Equal focus on death in the Korean War camps was thus needed, but this was directly related to the title of the article and as such not in itself useful to our course. There was also not a great deal of evidence supporting her theories on the psychological causes, although that is, perhaps, to be expected, considering the difficulty in recording such things.
Russell Menard focused on a much smaller topic by comparison - the social progress of the 275 servants that reached Maryland before 1642. He chose to focus on the 158 that he has definite proof became freemen and could thus progress in society. Up until 1660, he stated, the progress of most (145 out of 158) stopped with a small plantation. Seventy-five of them sat on a jury, attended an Assembly session or filled an office. Of course, there were those who did not advance with the rest of their fellows, but they were few by comparison - only fourteen of those 158 died without land, and only sixteen lived for more than ten years after earning their freedom without directly participating in government.
In the 1660s, the population increase in the colonies meant that a new elite had formed from the literate gentry that had arrived. Menard maintained that this resulted in tenancy being no longer transitory but permanent. This was brought to a head in 1670 with the disenfranchisement of freemen without 50 acres or land or estates worth £40.
THE FOUNDING AND SETTLEMENT OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND
John Demos, 'Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony', William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Volume 22, Issue 2. (Apr. 1965).
Philip J. Greven, Jr, 'Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachusetts', William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Volume 23, Issue 2. (Apr. 1966).
John Demos attempted to refute the stereotypical view of the New England colonies as static communities by showing extensive evidence that the majority of the people can and did move around, and that the process of expansion resulted in the scattering of families. The reason he gives for this is that the Plymouth settlers were "predisposed" towards seeing land as a sign of wealth, and that as the population rose, families had no choice but to look elsewhere for this important acquisition. This population rise - a doubling every fifteen years - was due to immigration and to the high birth and low infant mortality rates enjoyed by the Plymouth settlers. Demos focuses on roughly 2,000 out of a total population of 25,000-50,000 in the period 1620-91, which appears to be a sensible number. He also admits to a possible selective bias in his findings - for example, a man living to 90 would be much more likely to leave behind records to be studied than one living to 30 years of age - but maintains that this would not have affected the overall results.
The majority of his other conclusions focus on marriage and the family. The children were heavily dispersed: between a third and a half of all children grew up in a household other than that of their parents. In focusing on individual examples, however, it is difficult to see how these cases compared to the rest of the children of Plymouth Colony. Additionally, it is difficult to see what the main thrust of the article is, as it appears to focus on a number of different points - literally, a collection of notes on life.
In contrast, Greven's main argument is quite plain: the perseverance of patriarchal authority in Andover, Massachusetts, through either the bequeathing or the denial of land to the younger generation. Greven ties in the high average rate of marriage for the second-generation settlers to the reluctance of the first generation parents to part with their land. Their longevity, and the majority's refusal to give their sons land until relatively late in their lives - thus allowing them to support a wife and family - meant that the second generation continued to be dependant on their parents long after it would be expected. Indeed, the age of "adulthood", Greven says, "marked by marriage and the establishment of another family, was often 24 or later." The reason for this is the shortage of labour in the colony. To guarantee a ready of supply of labour, fathers took pains to ensure that their authority did not cease with their son's marriage, often allowing the newly wedded couple to live on parental plots, but not handing over the deeds to the land until later. This prevented the dispersion of the community experienced by the Plymouth settlers. Greven concludes that the reason the first generation was so reluctant to relinquish control over their children was because the law of the land was partible inheritance instead of primogeniture. They succeeded in keeping the community together: more than four fifths of the second-generation sons spent their entire lives in Andover.
RED AND BLACK IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY
Russell R. Menard, 'The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties', William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 32, Issue 1, (January 1975).
James Axtell, 'The White Indians of Colonial America', William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 32, Issue 1, (January 1975).
Russell Menard used probate inventories in the absence of census materials to study 1,618 slaves from Calvert, Charles, Prince George's and St Mary's counties in Maryland. However, this study was only of the period 1658-1710. During the remaining years he set out to study - 1711-1730 - he examined the records of 1,569 slaves, all of whom were either in Charles and Prince George's counties. This immediately raises the possibility that perhaps those two counties had demographics that differed from the rest of the colony; indeed, Menard himself raised this possibility. He dismissed it, however, by stating that he compared his results to the 1755 census findings and found a reasonable degree of agreement between those results and his own findings.
The ratio of men to women in the slave population was weighted heavily in favour of the men; something which was also true for the white population for much the same reason: the need for labour. As the decades progressed and the number of slaves increased, they were gradually assigned jobs away from the fields and began to live in close proximity to other slaves, something the scattered nature of plantations had previously made difficult. These findings are not surprising; what is unusual is the small number of children early on in the period studied, when by 1755 the children outnumbered the adults. Menard attributed this to a lengthening of the reproductive lives of the women slaves, commenting on the irony that, as slavery became more entrenched in Maryland society, the high concentration of slaves allowed social links to be formed, making life more bearable.
Axtell's article explores the question of why colonists captured by the Indians did not wish to be parted from their captors. The colonists found that their recovered comrades would have to be kept under guard to prevent them returning to the Indians, and that communication was a real problem, especially with the younger children. Axtell's analysis of the charm of the Indian way of life is thorough, but suffers from being dependant on first person accounts of the events. What appears suspect in his analysis is that the Indian way of life is more or less all that he focuses on. The first person accounts he cites are overwhelmingly full of praise for the Indians, and the few accounts that recount more harrowing experiences are dismissed as exaggeration. This undermines that otherwise sound analysis he makes of the charming inculcation of the captives into their adoptive society, and the reasons for their ready acceptance of a new way of life. The young age of the 'adopted' captives is one possible reason for this, but Axtell himself points out that this does not explain the lack of attachment Indian children felt when they had been taken in by colonists in return. It would have been interesting to explore the 'push' factors of the colonists' way of life, as well as the 'pull' factors in the Indians' existence. The approach adopted by Axtell makes for a very one-sided article.
THE COMING OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Edward Countryman, 'British Challenge, Elite Response', The American Revolution, (Macmillan, 1991).
Colin Bonwick, 'The Coming of the Revolution', The American Revolution, (New York, 1985).
Countryman's article suffers from a tendency to narrate the events, taking things in chronological order. The reader is 'talked through' the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties and the Tea Act - Countryman calls them "the major mileposts" that caused the American Revolution. It is only in the second section of the article that he moves from listing the importance of the various Acts passed to analysing why the Americans reacted to them in the way they did. He attributes this to three sources - the European tradition of 'virtue' (independence, strength, courage and public spirit), the English common law whereby all Englishmen had certain inalienably rights, and, lastly, the upheaval experienced by English society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This all resulted, Countryman says, in the American writers regarding the world as "an unending struggle between liberty and its enemies."
The political and authorial careers of several American writers are taken into context -Dulany, Dickinson and Jefferson being the main focus of Countryman's article. The article looks at the American view of the Seven Years' War - that they had accepted British aid against a common enemy, but this did not mean that they submitted to British sovereignty. The article focuses on the causes of the American Revolution, as seen through the eyes of American political writers. It is thus useful in researching what these writers believed and said, but it does not comment on how these views were accepted, or indeed whether they had any effect at all. It tends to look towards the far past in justifying the political choices made by the participants, but it does not breach the subject of how these choices, once made, affected the approach of the Revolution.
Bonwick, in contrast, preferred to ignore the majority of political rhetoric indulged in at the time and focuses on the economic and social causes of the Revolution, blaming cyclical recessions, a greater concentration of wealth and a tendency towards outbreaks of violence which tended to support rather than defy formal law and were thus tolerated. The violence, Bonwick says, was eclipsed by the "emergency of a popular religious and intellectual culture that challenged the hegemony of the elite." The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s and the growth of Calvinist Protestantism threatened the existing social order, allowing rebellions against the elite and "intensifying ecclesiastical factionalism." Despite all this, however, "no true sense of class solidarity emerged." In the second, third and fourth sections of the article, Bonwick recounts the familiar tale of the offensive Acts, concluding that the turbulence of American society and the growing independence of the lower and middle class contributed heavily towards the start of the Revolution.
The article adopts a pragmatic air when dealing with many of the writings of the period, but it, too, suffers from an excess of narrative, which may perhaps be a problem with most writing on this topic. The need to recount the sequence of offensive Acts and their repeal is obvious, but it nonetheless slows both articles down considerably.
THOMAS PAINE, COMMON SENSE
Thomas Paine, 'Thoughts on the present State of American Affairs', Common Sense, (Penguin 1986), pp. 81-100.
Thomas Paine, 'Of the Origin and Design of Government in General', Common Sense, (Penguin, 1986), pp. 65-71.
One of Paine's main points in "Thoughts on the present State of American Affairs" is that Britain did not defend America from "our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account." With this, Paine destroyed the last real argument loyalists might have used to justify Britain's behaviour, and in particular the Quartering Act. There is no reason, Paine says, for America to be made to look after troops and to pay for wars that are fought because of her association with Britain. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that those wars might not have been fought if that association was not there.
Rejecting Britain as the mother country of America, Paine then takes one step further and rejects the role of the British monarch as the father figure. He sets out his own model of government, much of which was actually incorporated into the model later adopted by the Americans. He advocates the forming of a Continental Conference to create a Continental Charter - what would later become the Constitution - and declares that "in America THE LAW IS KING." The crowning of the charter - a visual representation of the above statement - is a rather peculiar thought to end the section on, however, it does emphasise the point heavily and ensures that it remains at the forefront of the mind.
In the first section of Common Sense, Thomas Paine contrasts society with government. Society, Paine says, brings out the good in men, while government restrains the bad in them. A good government will mingle freely with the populace after their time in office had ended, as this would ensure that their behaviour towards their fellow men was just and fair. He goes on to point out the paradox of having three different bodies, all attempting to regulate each other and with the power to veto the others' decision. This is especially important because one of these 'bodies' is the king. Paine points out that a king who requires regulation and monitoring from his subjects cannot have been given his power from God; however, the constitution is partly based upon such a power existing.
That constitution, Paine continues, is the only reason that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in other countries - but it is not the constitution of the crown. It is the constitution of the people.
JACKSONIAN SOCIETY
Edward Pessen, 'The Less Than Egalitarian Society', Jacksonian America: Society, Personality and Politics, (The Dorsey Press, 1969).
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief, (Stanford, 1957), pp.1-17.
Edward Pessen initially appears to have written his article solely to disprove Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, as the majority of his arguments are in fact just the negatives of Tocqueville's admittedly occasionally flawed statements. He devotes several pages to what amounts to an attempted discrediting of Tocqueville, firstly as a visitor of whose humanness Pessen despairs of, declaring that visitors "were simply incapable [...] of writing objectively about Jacksonian society." Comments such as this, scattered throughout the piece, make the reader wonder why they should trust Pessen's objectivity any more than Tocqueville's.
There are some genuine criticisms of Tocqueville in the article, namely his inaccuracies and his lack of attention to detail. Pessen postulates that the classic assumption that America was on her way to becoming a classless society was incorrect, for the class structure had simply become more subtle and transparent, thus requiring greater attention to the nuances of social behaviour. He chooses instead to focus on the social mobility enjoyed in Jacksonian society, which for Pessen is a more important question than a discarding of the old visible social order. In any case, Jacksonian politicians did not remove these social divisions, Pessen argues, but simply convinced the populace that they gave rule to the common man. These strong statements are somewhat spoiled by one of Pessen's initial observations that, excepting the "unfortunate Negroes, the Indians and [...] the recently arrived Irish immigrants, Americans overwhelmingly belonged to the middle class." That may well be, but it does not exactly narrow anything down, nor make any allusions to any of the bold statements Pessen concludes his article with.
Marvin Meyers, on the other hand, makes the central thrust of his argument plain - that, until it was united and its principles defined in a war against the Monster Bank, Jacksonian Democracy was not that different from the Whig opposition. Both parties appealed to the middle class in roughly the same manner, excepting their approach to the Bank and paper money. The Jacksonian movement fed people's worries and the virulent hatred of the Bank and all it represented; the Whig party found itself in the unlikely role of champion of the hopes of the people, rather than a supporter of their doubts and fears. The Whig party wanted to support growth through risk in a laissez faire economy, whereas the Jacksonians opposed the power paper money gave to large corporations.
In his second essay, Meyers begins to look at why Jackson was elected, focusing on the appeal of his campaign message. Jackson spoke for and about the "real people" - once more, those members of the middle class, the skilled workers, those who produced goods rather than simply circulated money. He focused on old-fashioned "morals, habits and character", which appealed to the majority of the voting public. Meyers presents a convincing picture of Jackson as statesman and public speaker, however, there is little comment on the social circumstances (other than the economic state of affairs) that may help explain Jackson's appeal.