American History - As Told By Merry
Part One - Wait, this isn’t India....
The history of the United States of America actually begins with India, believe it or not! Before the 1400s no one in Europe really had any clue that there was anything on the other side of that big ocean to the west. But Europeans had known that India was there for ages. They had set up trade routes a long, long time before. They had spent the last several hundred years (late 1000s through the 1300s) fighting wars that they called Crusades in the Holy Land to, among other things, protect the trade routes to India and China. Because trade with India was big business. A lot of money was being made. But the “over-land” route was increasingly dangerous. So at first various explorers tried to figure out a way to get to India by sea by going south, hugging the coast of Europe. That’s how they “discovered” Africa. They kept heading south, made it all the way down to the tip of Africa, ran into some problems with storms, eventually made it around, sailed up the east coast of Africa and made it across the Indian Ocean to India. Ta da! They’d reached their goal. A sea route to India.
But it was a total pain in the neck to get there.
So people started thinking that maybe, just maybe, they could get to India if they went straight west, right out into that great big ocean that nobody knew anything about.
Except for my ancestors, that is. My ancestors on my Mom’s side are from Sweden. The warrior class among those people used to be called Vikings. Way back in the year 1000 this guy named Leif Ericson, a Viking, decided to take a look at what was way over there in the huge ocean to the west that nobody knew anything about. So he and his buddies hopped in a couple boats and set sail. They found a great big rocky, icy, miserable “island” (it’s huge) and called it Greenland. But it’s next to impossible to live there. They also found a fantastic, lush, beautiful island full of springs and really fertile soil and called it Iceland. Um, yeah, the Vikings were good at confusing people. But Leif Ericson and his buddies kept going and eventually made it all the way to the continent of North America, somewhere in the Canada region. But nothing ever became of it. Only that Europeans had a vague idea that there really was something over there and that they wouldn’t fall off the end of the world if they went that way.
But back to these people who wanted to find a quicker way to get to India. The first guy who actually made it was an Italian guy who sailed under the flag of Spain named Christopher Columbus. He set sail in 1492 with three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and found land! Woo hoo! What he found was actually in Central America, not the future U.S. He hopped off his ship and said “Look! It’s India!” And sure enough, there were a bunch of relatively dark-skined people there who spoke a foreign language. So he called them “Indians”. Unfortunately, the name stuck. Unfortunately, they weren’t in India. Fortunately, they figured that out after a while.
Rewinding again. To my ancestors on my Dad’s side of the family. The ones who were wrongly called “Indians”. See, there were already people living in the place that Columbus, and then a series of other explorers, “discovered”. In fact, the land they found was filled with hundreds of nations of Native Americans of various tribes. My ancestors are from one tribe called the Cherokee. More about them later. The Native Americans had lived in the land for a really, really long time. No one really knows how long. But they had complex societies. Some of them were migratory hunters, some lived in established houses. But there were lots of them. When the Europeans first “discovered” these people they saw that they had a lot of nice stuff, particularly animal skins, and set up trade with them. But they didn’t send settlers yet. And then a strange thing happened. The Europeans brought all of their European germs to the new land they found. The Native Americans had no immunity to these germs at all. Huge amounts of them got sick and died. Even worse, the germs spread from one tribe to another to another, killing the people who had actually seen and made contact with the Europeans but also killing people who lived further and further inland to the west, people who had never even seen a European. So before the Spanish or the French or the Dutch or the English could ever even think of sending people to settle the land, build communities, and live there, before most of the Native American tribes ever even knew any “white men” had set foot on their continent, a huge percentage of the population died.
And then the Europeans started sending settlers.
What a lot of Americans don’t know or tend to forget about is that the first colony in what is now the United States was actually not an English colony. It was a Spanish colony, St. Augustine, set up in Florida in 1565. St. Augustine is still there. I’ve been there. Sort of. I used to live in Florida, further down the coast. There was a hurricane in 1995 and we were evacuated from the place I lived, Merritt Island. So my Dad, his wife, my older brother and I drove north and ended up spending the night in St. Augustine. Of course we found out later that the hurricane was stronger and caused more damage where we ended up than it was at home where we had been evacuated from. It was a mess. Rain came sideways!
But I digress....
The first ENGLISH colony was started in about 1585 in a place called Roanoake, which is in Virginia. A bunch of people were sent there to try to establish a colony for England. Only they weren’t successful. In fact, they all disappeared. No one to this day knows what happened to them. They might have all died, but there is no evidence of that. Another theory is that they were all either kidnapped by a nearby Native American tribe and assimilated with them. No one knows.
So the English tried again. They sent a bunch of settlers back to Virginia, but this time they settled in a place they called Jamestown in 1607. Here’s where my ancestors come into the story again. Because one of my ancestors, a man named Jonathan Lax, was a carpenter at the original Jamestown settlement! And this time the people didn’t disappear. They were actually really successful. I’ve been to the original Jamestown settlement too. It’s really tiny. But pretty cool at the same time. Gradually the folks there thrived and spread and started to settle all through the area known as Virginia. I’ll get back to them in a second….
Meanwhile, back in England....
So for a long time England was a Catholic country. Everyone in Europe was a Catholic country. The Catholic church pretty much controlled everyone and everything from when years were counted with three digits. But then this guy named Martin Luther came along and said “Enough is enough! Stupid corrupt Catholic church!” And he started a new religious movement, Protestantism. Several decades later in England, King Henry VIII was having serious trouble with the Catholic church, he wanted to divorce his wife so he could marry his mistress, and he saw this handy Protestantism movement and decided to convert himself and his whole country to it so that he could grant his own divorce. But later, when he died, his daughter, Queen Mary, converted the country back to Catholicism. After she died her sister, Queen Elizabeth I, converted the country back to Protestantism. But she did it in such a way that it was OK for Catholics to stick around in England. Well, the really, really Protestant people, the Puritans, thought that was a terrible, terrible idea. They heard about this great big new land way across the ocean to the west and said, “That’s it! We’re out of here! You can’t persecute us anymore!” So the first group hopped on a ship called the Mayflower and sailed across the ocean, landing in a place they called Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620. I've been there too. They have a lot of neat gift shops and an area set up exactly like the original settlement. Very cool. Anyhow, when the Puritans (sometimes called Pilgrims) got there it was cold and nasty, but their colony succeeded and spread out through all of the area that is now called New England.
So there was New England in the north and Virginia in the south. If you think that the United States is basically all one country, well, you’re right and you’re wrong. Just like India is all one country ... but a lot of very different states with different histories and different people and different ways of looking at things, and not everyone likes each other or gets along. So it is the United States and so it always has been from day one. Because you see, the people who settled in the different colonies were very different kinds of people. In the North you had people from upper-middle class societies who came to America looking for religious freedom. They came over with their whole families, were a little snobby, had strict rules, and were very, very religious. In the South, Virginia and further south as time went on, the land was extremely fertile. Anything and everything would grow with very little effort. Including this awesome new plant called tobacco whose leaves you could dry and smoke ... and sell in Europe for a LOT of feakin’ money. Two types of people came to the South. First there were the rich entrepreneurs who came, bought land, stayed for a few years, made a lot of money, then went home to England. Second there were the dirt-poor people who came to do all the work of farming for the rich people. They were very often uneducated, poor, often people who had been in prison for one crime or another who were shipped to America because prisons in England were too crowded. Exactly the opposite kind of people from the ones who settled in New England. But even they got rich, and a lot of them were able to buy their freedom and then become landowners on their own.
But with all this fertile land and all this stuff growing, and with all the people back in Europe just DYING to buy it all, tobacco, cotton, sugar, etc., there just weren’t enough people to work the land. At first they tried turning the Native Americans into slaves. But the Native Americans knew the land better and either escaped or died. They also tried shipping in more white people from Europe. But those people were allowed to be free after 7 years of work. Only a temporary solution. Once they were freed they bought land and then ended up in the same position of needing workers for their land that their former masters had been in. So finally someone had very possibly the worst idea in American history. Because at some point when people were trying to sail down the coast of Africa to get to India they discovered that there were a LOT of black men and women in Africa and they were VERY strong and hardy and could work very hard without dying of over-work. So they started shipping them to America. In the cruelest, most inhumane ways possible. But because Africans looked so different and spoke languages no one knew and dressed in what they considered primitive clothing, the white people thought they were stupid, no better than animals, and not really people at all. So they made them into slaves and never planned to give them their freedom.
The white people in the southern states also decided that the Native Americans weren’t real people and that they were no better than animals. Because they refused to dress like Europeans or live in houses or take up farming. They insisted on wearing animal skins, hunting, moving around when the weather changed, and worshiping strange gods. All except one tribe. The Cherokee! My ancestors. The Cherokee looked at the Europeans and said “OK, we get it. You’re like that. Well, we can live the same way, in houses, we can dress like you, and we can become farmers too. But we’ll do it better than you.” And they did. The Cherokee became very wealthy, sophisticated, land-owning people. And there was also a Cherokee man named Sequoia who took the language that the Cherokee spoke and made a written language, an alphabet, based on it. Sequoia is the only known individual in the history of the world to have come up with an alphabet all on his own. Most Americans don’t learn about this in school, which is a shame. The Cherokee Nation was granted it’s independence to live as it’s own nation within the boundaries of the emerging new country. But doom was on the horizon for them … which I’ll tell you about later....
So here’s the set-up. You have the slave-owning, really insanely rich, farmer-types in the South with a free-wheeling attitude, and the more austere, religious, innovative, intelligent-types in the North, building industries and universities. But there was a third group too, the people in the middle. These are the people who settled in what is now New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (where I live), Delaware, and Maryland. These states were unique. They all have very fertile land, like the South, but people came to them for religious freedom, like the North. Only instead of being super strict like the North, all of the different religions got a long pretty well and let each other be (in as much as anyone at that point in history let other religions just be). And unlike the South, they didn’t believe in owning slaves. We sort of had the best of both worlds. Maybe because they were between the other guys. Who, by the way, did NOT get along very well. But much, MUCH more about that later!
But keep in mind, through all this, with the people in the North, the people in the South, and the people in the middle … we were all still owned and operated by England. We were all separate colonies of the crown. Thirteen colonies working, thriving, growing, developing, doing a damned good job … making a lot of money and forcibly giving everything right back to England with no rights of our own. Sound familiar? Well, all that could only last for so long....
To be Continued....
The history of the United States of America actually begins with India, believe it or not! Before the 1400s no one in Europe really had any clue that there was anything on the other side of that big ocean to the west. But Europeans had known that India was there for ages. They had set up trade routes a long, long time before. They had spent the last several hundred years (late 1000s through the 1300s) fighting wars that they called Crusades in the Holy Land to, among other things, protect the trade routes to India and China. Because trade with India was big business. A lot of money was being made. But the “over-land” route was increasingly dangerous. So at first various explorers tried to figure out a way to get to India by sea by going south, hugging the coast of Europe. That’s how they “discovered” Africa. They kept heading south, made it all the way down to the tip of Africa, ran into some problems with storms, eventually made it around, sailed up the east coast of Africa and made it across the Indian Ocean to India. Ta da! They’d reached their goal. A sea route to India.
But it was a total pain in the neck to get there.
So people started thinking that maybe, just maybe, they could get to India if they went straight west, right out into that great big ocean that nobody knew anything about.
Except for my ancestors, that is. My ancestors on my Mom’s side are from Sweden. The warrior class among those people used to be called Vikings. Way back in the year 1000 this guy named Leif Ericson, a Viking, decided to take a look at what was way over there in the huge ocean to the west that nobody knew anything about. So he and his buddies hopped in a couple boats and set sail. They found a great big rocky, icy, miserable “island” (it’s huge) and called it Greenland. But it’s next to impossible to live there. They also found a fantastic, lush, beautiful island full of springs and really fertile soil and called it Iceland. Um, yeah, the Vikings were good at confusing people. But Leif Ericson and his buddies kept going and eventually made it all the way to the continent of North America, somewhere in the Canada region. But nothing ever became of it. Only that Europeans had a vague idea that there really was something over there and that they wouldn’t fall off the end of the world if they went that way.
But back to these people who wanted to find a quicker way to get to India. The first guy who actually made it was an Italian guy who sailed under the flag of Spain named Christopher Columbus. He set sail in 1492 with three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and found land! Woo hoo! What he found was actually in Central America, not the future U.S. He hopped off his ship and said “Look! It’s India!” And sure enough, there were a bunch of relatively dark-skined people there who spoke a foreign language. So he called them “Indians”. Unfortunately, the name stuck. Unfortunately, they weren’t in India. Fortunately, they figured that out after a while.
Rewinding again. To my ancestors on my Dad’s side of the family. The ones who were wrongly called “Indians”. See, there were already people living in the place that Columbus, and then a series of other explorers, “discovered”. In fact, the land they found was filled with hundreds of nations of Native Americans of various tribes. My ancestors are from one tribe called the Cherokee. More about them later. The Native Americans had lived in the land for a really, really long time. No one really knows how long. But they had complex societies. Some of them were migratory hunters, some lived in established houses. But there were lots of them. When the Europeans first “discovered” these people they saw that they had a lot of nice stuff, particularly animal skins, and set up trade with them. But they didn’t send settlers yet. And then a strange thing happened. The Europeans brought all of their European germs to the new land they found. The Native Americans had no immunity to these germs at all. Huge amounts of them got sick and died. Even worse, the germs spread from one tribe to another to another, killing the people who had actually seen and made contact with the Europeans but also killing people who lived further and further inland to the west, people who had never even seen a European. So before the Spanish or the French or the Dutch or the English could ever even think of sending people to settle the land, build communities, and live there, before most of the Native American tribes ever even knew any “white men” had set foot on their continent, a huge percentage of the population died.
And then the Europeans started sending settlers.
What a lot of Americans don’t know or tend to forget about is that the first colony in what is now the United States was actually not an English colony. It was a Spanish colony, St. Augustine, set up in Florida in 1565. St. Augustine is still there. I’ve been there. Sort of. I used to live in Florida, further down the coast. There was a hurricane in 1995 and we were evacuated from the place I lived, Merritt Island. So my Dad, his wife, my older brother and I drove north and ended up spending the night in St. Augustine. Of course we found out later that the hurricane was stronger and caused more damage where we ended up than it was at home where we had been evacuated from. It was a mess. Rain came sideways!
But I digress....
The first ENGLISH colony was started in about 1585 in a place called Roanoake, which is in Virginia. A bunch of people were sent there to try to establish a colony for England. Only they weren’t successful. In fact, they all disappeared. No one to this day knows what happened to them. They might have all died, but there is no evidence of that. Another theory is that they were all either kidnapped by a nearby Native American tribe and assimilated with them. No one knows.
So the English tried again. They sent a bunch of settlers back to Virginia, but this time they settled in a place they called Jamestown in 1607. Here’s where my ancestors come into the story again. Because one of my ancestors, a man named Jonathan Lax, was a carpenter at the original Jamestown settlement! And this time the people didn’t disappear. They were actually really successful. I’ve been to the original Jamestown settlement too. It’s really tiny. But pretty cool at the same time. Gradually the folks there thrived and spread and started to settle all through the area known as Virginia. I’ll get back to them in a second….
Meanwhile, back in England....
So for a long time England was a Catholic country. Everyone in Europe was a Catholic country. The Catholic church pretty much controlled everyone and everything from when years were counted with three digits. But then this guy named Martin Luther came along and said “Enough is enough! Stupid corrupt Catholic church!” And he started a new religious movement, Protestantism. Several decades later in England, King Henry VIII was having serious trouble with the Catholic church, he wanted to divorce his wife so he could marry his mistress, and he saw this handy Protestantism movement and decided to convert himself and his whole country to it so that he could grant his own divorce. But later, when he died, his daughter, Queen Mary, converted the country back to Catholicism. After she died her sister, Queen Elizabeth I, converted the country back to Protestantism. But she did it in such a way that it was OK for Catholics to stick around in England. Well, the really, really Protestant people, the Puritans, thought that was a terrible, terrible idea. They heard about this great big new land way across the ocean to the west and said, “That’s it! We’re out of here! You can’t persecute us anymore!” So the first group hopped on a ship called the Mayflower and sailed across the ocean, landing in a place they called Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620. I've been there too. They have a lot of neat gift shops and an area set up exactly like the original settlement. Very cool. Anyhow, when the Puritans (sometimes called Pilgrims) got there it was cold and nasty, but their colony succeeded and spread out through all of the area that is now called New England.
So there was New England in the north and Virginia in the south. If you think that the United States is basically all one country, well, you’re right and you’re wrong. Just like India is all one country ... but a lot of very different states with different histories and different people and different ways of looking at things, and not everyone likes each other or gets along. So it is the United States and so it always has been from day one. Because you see, the people who settled in the different colonies were very different kinds of people. In the North you had people from upper-middle class societies who came to America looking for religious freedom. They came over with their whole families, were a little snobby, had strict rules, and were very, very religious. In the South, Virginia and further south as time went on, the land was extremely fertile. Anything and everything would grow with very little effort. Including this awesome new plant called tobacco whose leaves you could dry and smoke ... and sell in Europe for a LOT of feakin’ money. Two types of people came to the South. First there were the rich entrepreneurs who came, bought land, stayed for a few years, made a lot of money, then went home to England. Second there were the dirt-poor people who came to do all the work of farming for the rich people. They were very often uneducated, poor, often people who had been in prison for one crime or another who were shipped to America because prisons in England were too crowded. Exactly the opposite kind of people from the ones who settled in New England. But even they got rich, and a lot of them were able to buy their freedom and then become landowners on their own.
But with all this fertile land and all this stuff growing, and with all the people back in Europe just DYING to buy it all, tobacco, cotton, sugar, etc., there just weren’t enough people to work the land. At first they tried turning the Native Americans into slaves. But the Native Americans knew the land better and either escaped or died. They also tried shipping in more white people from Europe. But those people were allowed to be free after 7 years of work. Only a temporary solution. Once they were freed they bought land and then ended up in the same position of needing workers for their land that their former masters had been in. So finally someone had very possibly the worst idea in American history. Because at some point when people were trying to sail down the coast of Africa to get to India they discovered that there were a LOT of black men and women in Africa and they were VERY strong and hardy and could work very hard without dying of over-work. So they started shipping them to America. In the cruelest, most inhumane ways possible. But because Africans looked so different and spoke languages no one knew and dressed in what they considered primitive clothing, the white people thought they were stupid, no better than animals, and not really people at all. So they made them into slaves and never planned to give them their freedom.
The white people in the southern states also decided that the Native Americans weren’t real people and that they were no better than animals. Because they refused to dress like Europeans or live in houses or take up farming. They insisted on wearing animal skins, hunting, moving around when the weather changed, and worshiping strange gods. All except one tribe. The Cherokee! My ancestors. The Cherokee looked at the Europeans and said “OK, we get it. You’re like that. Well, we can live the same way, in houses, we can dress like you, and we can become farmers too. But we’ll do it better than you.” And they did. The Cherokee became very wealthy, sophisticated, land-owning people. And there was also a Cherokee man named Sequoia who took the language that the Cherokee spoke and made a written language, an alphabet, based on it. Sequoia is the only known individual in the history of the world to have come up with an alphabet all on his own. Most Americans don’t learn about this in school, which is a shame. The Cherokee Nation was granted it’s independence to live as it’s own nation within the boundaries of the emerging new country. But doom was on the horizon for them … which I’ll tell you about later....
So here’s the set-up. You have the slave-owning, really insanely rich, farmer-types in the South with a free-wheeling attitude, and the more austere, religious, innovative, intelligent-types in the North, building industries and universities. But there was a third group too, the people in the middle. These are the people who settled in what is now New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (where I live), Delaware, and Maryland. These states were unique. They all have very fertile land, like the South, but people came to them for religious freedom, like the North. Only instead of being super strict like the North, all of the different religions got a long pretty well and let each other be (in as much as anyone at that point in history let other religions just be). And unlike the South, they didn’t believe in owning slaves. We sort of had the best of both worlds. Maybe because they were between the other guys. Who, by the way, did NOT get along very well. But much, MUCH more about that later!
But keep in mind, through all this, with the people in the North, the people in the South, and the people in the middle … we were all still owned and operated by England. We were all separate colonies of the crown. Thirteen colonies working, thriving, growing, developing, doing a damned good job … making a lot of money and forcibly giving everything right back to England with no rights of our own. Sound familiar? Well, all that could only last for so long....
To be Continued....