Introduction
The French historian Ernest Renan famously remarked in a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1888 that “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.” His reasoning was that “[T]he progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality” (Renan, 251, 2018). America’s colonial origins and legacy have invited any number of such strategic lapses in memory. Yet determining the circumstances of America’s birth shouldn’t be so contentious. That is, if we are to presume that the United States of America, unlike other nations, can be said to have been conceived intentionally, as Alexander Hamilton argued in The Federalist (Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, 1788), then its origins can be documented. In Federalist No. 1, Hamilton asked whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing government from reflection or choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”1
For Hamilton, the answer was that the American Constitution of 1787 marked the point of conception of nationhood. In making this case, he was occluding the violence of the recent and more distant past: the Revolutionary War that gave independence to the American colonies, and the wars waged by Anglo-American settlers against the indigenous peoples they encountered. This was the “force” left unaccounted for in Hamilton’s argument to replace the Articles of Confederation; and it is very much the type of “forgetting” Renan had in mind in his speech 100 years after the Constitution was ratified.
Of course, Renan was not directing his remarks to Americans. He was more interested in critiquing the nationalism evidenced on his side of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. But his words remain instructive about national identity – perhaps none more so than for Americans, who often pride themselves on a nationality of democratic virtue rather than one derived from blood. Yet, even when accepting the premise that the United States is a nation created by democratic thought, deciding where to trace the origins of national birth can be a tricky affair. Part of the magic of the Gettysburg Address lies in Abraham Lincoln’s leapfrogging over the Constitution (and its acceptance of slavery) to the Declaration of Independence. Those “four score and seven years ago” brought Lincoln’s 1863 audience to 1776 and Thomas Jefferson’s words – “All men are created equal.” The new birth of freedom Lincoln sought was to be a second iteration of liberty – with the difference being a liberty untainted by the scourge of slavery. As the historian Garry Wills has pointed out, the Declaration’s purity on the slave question made it a safe landing spot for Lincoln in reimagining America’s national origins (Wills, 1992).
But this is just the beginning of debates about the “true” origins of American national identity. It was another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued in his groundbreaking work Democracy in America (originally published in French in 1835) that American national origins go well beyond either its Constitution or Declaration. In fact, Tocqueville never bothered to mention the Declaration of Independence in his great work. How can this be?
As the political scientist James W. Ceaser has noted, Tocqueville was engaging in his own sleight of hand. Democracy in America leapfrogged not only the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, but also the entire history of the Enlightenment in American history (Ceaser, 2011). Instead, Tocqueville placed America’s political origins at the Puritan founding, seeing in its New England Protestant beginnings the seeds of democratic ideals to come. This choice contained another form of forgetting, however. In opting to begin what he called the “point of departure” for American national identity in New England, Tocqueville made a conscious choice to deemphasize the Virginian founding moment. This third strategic leapfrog saw in the Massachusetts Pilgrim landing at Plymouth in 1620 something of greater consequence than the “other” Pilgrim landing at Jamestown in 1607. Tocqueville was careful to explain his selection:
In the great Anglo-American family one can distinguish two principal offshoots that, up to the present, have grown without being entirely confused, one in the South, the other in the North. Virginia received the first English colony. The emigrants arrived there in 1607. Europe at that time was still singularly preoccupied with the idea that gold and silver mines made the wealth of peoples: a fatal idea that has more than impoverished the European nations that gave themselves to it and destroyed more men in America than have war and all bad laws together …. No noble thought, no immaterial scheme presided at the foundation of the new settlements. Hardly had the colony been created when they introduced slavery; that was the capital fact that was bound to exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the whole future of the South.
(Tocqueville, 30–31, 2000)
Thus, as Lincoln elected to choose the Declaration over the Constitution for his founding moment, so too did Tocqueville selectively advance one national narrative over another. The founders of Jamestown and the American South became subordinate to those of New England and the North – primarily on account of their vested interest in slavery. New England ideals were the ones Tocqueville chose to see as most influential. “The civilization of New England,” he wrote, in one of his more literary passages, “has been like those fires lit in the hills that, after having spread heat around them, still tinge the furthest reaches of the horizon with their light” (Tocqueville, 32).
New England exceptionalism thus became the first form of American exceptionalism. The choice to reject the Jamestown founding advanced a number of important ideas that still prevail in American political thought. The first is that the United States as a country has been fundamentally egalitarian in its ethos from the start – a point that the political scientist Rogers Smith among others, has sought to challenge (Smith, 1999). The second idea is that American slavery was essentially a southern rather than a national phenomenon. In choosing 1620 over 1607, Tocqueville’s founding premise marginalized the influence of slavery over national political development – and with it, its influence over American political thought. Finally, in rejecting Jamestown’s significance, in exchange for a “cleaner” version of national identity, we are left without the story of slavery and indentured servitude’s influence on early American history – and more fundamentally, the Anglo-American relationship with those indigenous tribes and nations they encountered.
It was, after all, the interlocking connection between slavery, English expansion, and the privileging of white settlement that made the presence of Native Americans untenable for the first English colonizers, and those to come. It is for this reason that we may more properly begin the story of the rise of American political thought in 1619, the year the first 20 Africans were brought to Jamestown as enslaved persons. This is not to idealize the African contribution to American history over others. On the contrary, it is to emphasize that neither New England nor Virginia can lay claim to any “pure” American founding. No such founding exists. We are closer to the mark to choose an intermediary moment – one that implicates race and the portent of Indian removal – for it is that feature that, despite heroic attempts to hide it, most illuminates the complex array of social, political, and economic bases that undergirded the earliest political thought of the colonial period. W.E.B. Du Bois was right to remind his readers in The Souls of Black Folks, “Before the Pilgrims landed we [blacks] were here” (Du Bois, 162, 1999). But before the arrival of either group, there was a rich and formidable world of indigenous life in North America. And any consideration of American political thought must abide this most basic of facts.
Indigenous History and the Myth of a New Eden
For readers who might not have been paying attention, F. Scott Fitzgerald ended his greatest novel by invoking the American republic and its origins. Describing the once bucolic surrounding areas of his protagonists’ home, Fitzgerald reminded his audience that The Great Gatsby is in fact about America and its deepest meaning. The word “republic” is a clumsy word for a literary work, but it somehow fit nicely into Fitzgerald’s closing argument – both stylistically and historically. The United States is a dream, perhaps an at times ugly or even misdirected dream, but a dream nonetheless. And the dream of America’s republic, like Gatsby’s vision of love, is one founded upon falsehoods and unattainable longings. So, for its evocation of a barren, Edenic land ready for conquest and to be “tamed,” it is worth returning to The Great Gatsby to consider the endurance of that most primordial of national myths – an empty continent – and to contemplate its historic value. Here is how Fitzgerald ends his novel:
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made the way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder …. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
(Fitzgerald, 180, 2004)
There are few passages in American literature as elegant or as stridently hagiographic as this one. In presenting to us the “old island,” the “fresh, green breast of the new world,” and “the vanished trees,” Fitzgerald is offering us an uninhabited, pristine, idyllic New York – truly an unbesmirched “continent.” It is moving and sweeping in its descriptiveness. And, it is a narrative that completely ignores the presence of millions of indigenous people who called this continent home.
There were people here.
As the historian William Cronon noted, there were somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 indigenous people living in New England alone around 1600. It took 100 years before the European population of New England reached this number in 1700 (Cronon, 42, 2003). Aside from encountering people, the first European settlers also encountered a land that had been clearly managed, cultivated, and transformed by human hands. As Charles Mann wrote in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus:
Constant burning of undergrowth [by Native Americans] increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both. Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by [Henry David] Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak.
(Mann, 286, 2011)
Indian influence on the environment also included the creation of “paths of indigenous fires,” allowing for a migratory trail of bison from New York to Georgia (Mann, 286). With the addition of a well-managed system of roads created by Native Americans that extended throughout the continent, America was hardly a “virgin” territory, a term more in keeping with the value system of European patriarchy than historical reality. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz concluded in her study, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “North America in 1492 was not a virgin wilderness but a network of Indigenous nations, people of the corn” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 30, 2014). This matters because the earliest forms of American political thought engage notions of a political community, property rights, and forms of exceptionalism that imagine the United States’ political formation as blessed by an enormous, largely uninhabited land, ready to be cultivated and populated by European hands.
Fitzgerald’s closing narrative in Gatsby is more about an aesthetics of the American imagination than an intentional misdirection of the nation’s founding. But it is tied to a long line of more egregious occlusions of indigenous history and colonial violence. In her study of whiteness, Valerie Babb notes the significance of Cotton Mather’s purposeful erasure of Native American history. As a highly influential theologian and Puritan thinker, Mather’s sermons and writings were a critical part of the formation of early American political thought. As Babb writes about Mather’s 1702 work, Magnalia Christi Americana:
Mather reiterated for a new generation the myth of Puritan pilgrims coming to the New World; but his flourishes began to racialize this enterprise, as evident in his description of a plague that decimated much of New England’s Native American population prior to English arrival.
(Babb, 64, 1998)
Here, Babb cites from the Magnalia:
Whereas the good Hand of God now brought [the English] to a Country wonderfully prepared for their Entertainment, by a sweeping Mortality that had lately been among the Natives …. The Indians in those Parts had newly, even about a Year or Two before, been visited with such a prodigious Pestilence; as carried away not a Tenth, but Nine Parts of Ten (yea, ’tis said Nineteen of Twenty) among them: So that the Woods were almost cleared of those pernicious Creatures to make Room for a better Growth.
(Babb, 64)
Such literary forms of ethnic cleansing became part and parcel of the earliest examples of American exceptionalism, marking America as uniquely situated for greatness. While Mather’s sermon “A Christian at His Calling” (1701) is often included in seminal texts in American political thought, his Magnalia speaks as forcefully to the emergent gospel of race as his Calling does to emergent American Protestantism. The two go hand-in-hand in their construction of a distinctively American ethos during the colonial era. As James A. Morone has written, “The Indians offered English colonists an irreducible, satanic other – perfect for defining the Christian community” (Morone, 74, 2003). The earliest colonial wars were waged in New England and Virginia against Native Americans who quickly fit into the emerging conception of racial groups developing in Europe. The term “race” itself first m...
