The Republic of Nature
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The Republic of Nature

An Environmental History of the United States

Mark Fiege

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The Republic of Nature

An Environmental History of the United States

Mark Fiege

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About This Book

In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light. Among the historical moments revisited here, a revolutionary nation arises from its environment and struggles to reconcile the diversity of its people with the claim that nature is the source of liberty. Abraham Lincoln, an unlettered citizen from the countryside, steers the Union through a moment of extreme peril, guided by his clear-eyed vision of nature's capacity for improvement. In Topeka, Kansas, transformations of land and life prompt a lawsuit that culminates in the momentous civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education. By focusing on materials and processes intrinsic to all things and by highlighting the nature of the United States, Fiege recovers the forgotten and overlooked ground on which so much history has unfolded. In these pages, the nation's birth and development, pain and sorrow, ideals and enduring promise come to life as never before, making a once-familiar past seem new. The Republic of Nature points to a startlingly different version of history that calls on readers to reconnect with fundamental forces that shaped the American experience. For more information, visit the author's website: http://republicofnature.com/

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Year
2012
ISBN
9780295804149

ONE

SATAN IN THE LAND

Nature, the Supernatural, and Disorder in Colonial New England
THE AFFLICTION BEGAN WITH A mysterious swelling in his foot. Perhaps he was walking home from the hayfield when he felt the stiffness, or perhaps it was when he stood up from the supper table. Perhaps, too, he noticed it in the morning when he tried to put on his shoe. Much to Benjamin Abbott's dismay, the swollen foot was only a prelude to an agonizing “sickness and misery” that would carry him “almost to death's door.” A pain soon developed in his side, followed by a boil that yielded “several gallons of corruption” when Dr. Prescott lanced it. Two more sores then appeared in his groin. Imagine the pustules throbbing, the sting of the physician's razor, and the stink that rose from the drippings. The ordeal went on for weeks, until Benjamin, exhausted, felt himself near the end.1
While Benjamin struggled with his sores, his wife, Sarah, noticed “strange and unusual things” in his cattle. Some of the animals wandered out of the forest “with their tongues hanging out of their mouths in a strange and affrighting manner.” A few died “strangely and suddenly,” for no apparent “natural reason.” Most alarming of all was the pregnant cow. Her water broke prematurely, the amniotic fluid draining in anticipation of a birth that did not occur until some two weeks later. The calf came into the world unscathed, as far as Sarah could tell, but the cow expired “strangely.”2
Benjamin and Sarah Abbott were not alone in their experience of painful and baffling events. Other residents of colonial Andover, Massachusetts, likewise endured odd ailments or looked on helplessly while livestock fell ill and died. Not only did Allen Toothaker's deep, nagging war wound refuse to heal, but several of his cattle fell sick and perished within a matter of days: first a three-year-old heifer, then a yearling, next a mature cow, and finally another yearling. Toothaker was mystified and knew of no “natural causes” that might have brought about their deaths. Samuel Preston suffered peculiar losses of prized livestock, too. A “very lusty” cow died “in a strange manner,” on her back, hooves thrust into the air. Later, another fine, healthy cow, “well kept with English hay,” abruptly grew ill, lay down as if to sleep, and expired.3
Something frightening was happening in Andover, and it threatened the social and agricultural order that the Abbotts, their neighbors, and other English colonists had labored mightily to create and uphold. Some seventy years before, in 1620, the first of them had arrived on New England's rocky shore, intent on remaking the land and themselves. They would transform a savage environment into a stable, wealthy landscape of churches, solid homes, fertile fields, and pastures filled with lowing cattle. In the process, they would purify themselves and create tight-knit communities in which each person knew his or her place and obeyed God's will. It was their special mission, an “errand into the wilderness,” as one of their ministers called it, the success of which would ensure their redemption and the world's.4 But building and maintaining an orderly society and landscape would be more easily imagined than achieved. The very nature of the place, including the nature of the colonists' bodies, would prove too unstable for them to realize the control and security they desired. Striving for God's grace, they and their descendants—the Abbotts and many others—would know sores, pus, pain, strange births, dead cattle, paralyzing fear, and worse.
The Abbotts and their Andover compatriots no doubt struggled to account for their misfortunes. They might have blamed their illnesses on the climate or on imbalances in the bodily substances they called humors. Observing their sick and dying animals, they might have guessed that poisonous plants were responsible. They might have wondered, too, if the hand of God was evident in such events, that the Lord was punishing them for their sins. But in the end, the Abbotts and other community members attributed their problems to no such causes. Instead, they focused their suspicions on a neighbor.
They had never held Martha Carrier in high regard. The daughter of a well-to-do local family, Martha probably lost her good reputation when, as a young woman, she conceived a child out of wedlock with a Welsh servant named Thomas Carrier. After Martha and Thomas married in 1674, they moved to the nearby community of Billerica, but around 1690, they and their children returned, impoverished, to Andover. The community did not welcome them, and the selectmen warned the family out of town. For some reason, perhaps Martha's familial ties, Andover then reconsidered and granted Thomas a small piece of land. But the Carriers' standing, especially Martha's, continued to fall. She and several of her children contracted smallpox, and although officials quarantined the family, the disease spread, eventually killing at least ten people, among them four of Martha's own relatives. Her contentiousness further alienated her from her Andover neighbors, and their anger and resentment deepened.5
In this climate, minor differences and petty insults took on sinister implications. Andover had granted to Benjamin Abbott a piece of undeveloped land near the small portion owned by Martha's husband. Benjamin and his wife were a relatively young couple, both about thirty years old, and if they were to remain in the agricultural community, they needed property with which to sustain themselves. It is lost to history precisely why Martha objected to Benjamin's acquisition. Perhaps the parcel had forage, wood, or water that she and her family had used and which would now be closed to them. Perhaps she and Thomas had hoped that they, not Benjamin, would get the land from the town. Perhaps, as Allan Toothaker stated, Martha did not want anyone living so close to the Carrier house. For whatever reason, she evidently felt aggrieved toward Benjamin Abbott and, according to him and Toothaker, directed her malice at him. She would stick to him as the bark stuck to the tree, she said; she would hold his nose to the grindstone.6 Soon after that, Benjamin's foot began to swell, his side to ache, and his cattle to suffer their strange afflictions.
While Benjamin writhed, events elsewhere in town magnified the sense that Martha, her husband, and their children might be more than just troublesome people. Martha was Toothaker's aunt, and perhaps the very closeness of their relationship exacerbated the hostility between them. Toothaker developed “some difference” with Richard Carrier, Martha's son and Toothaker's cousin, which led to a scuffle between the two men. During the fight, Toothaker went down on his back, unable to move. When he gave up and conceded that Richard was “the best man,” he saw Martha rise from his chest, as if she had been sitting on him. By the time he scrambled to his feet, she had disappeared. Later, she taunted him that his war wound would never heal, and during their bickering she sometimes clapped her hands at him and said that he “should get nothing by it.” It was after one of these altercations that Toothaker's cattle began to die. And it was after Samuel Preston's own arguments with Martha that his livestock collapsed and expired. You have lost a cow, Martha told Preston one day, and it will not be long before you will lose another.7
To the people of Andover, the sequence of events was no mere coincidence. There seemed to be a direct connection between Martha Carrier's reappearance in town, her clashes with extended family and neighbors, and a series of strange illnesses and deaths. Colonial Englishmen and -women knew that invisible forces were at work beneath the surface of things and that malevolent beings could use those forces to hurt, maim, and kill. Sickness, sores, freakish births, faltering cattle, and other disturbances were not events that simply happened. They were the outward, material manifestations of metaphysical troubles within. Benjamin and Sarah Abbott, Allen Toothaker, Samuel Preston, and other Andover inhabitants could draw but one conclusion. Martha Carrier was no mere angry, contentious, spiteful woman. She was a witch.
Martha Carrier's conflict with her Andover neighbors was part of a famous episode of witchcraft that swept Essex County, Massachusetts, during the early 1690s and eventually centered on the community of Salem. The story of Salem witchcraft, like stories of similar incidents in colonial history, has fascinated Americans. Mysterious tales of occult practices and supernatural events, and the high drama of neighbors and families torn apart in a downward spiral of accusations, counteraccusations, and executions, have long appealed to a popular curiosity about the nation's early history. Scholars, too, have sustained a long-term interest in the topic. Studying a colonial community in a moment of crisis has enabled them to gain insights into the social and cultural dynamics of the time.8 The story of Martha Carrier, however, suggests that there was a side to this iconic American event that scholars and popular audiences alike have largely overlooked: witchcraft was a function of the colonists' experience of bodies, disease, land, and other biophysical things generally known as nature.
Integral to the English settlement of North America was the widespread belief that intangible, invisible, supernatural forces affected the material world. On the grandest scale, New Englanders believed in providence, the idea that God directed the movement of people and things toward a predetermined end. The colonists recognized that they had free will and that they might appeal to God through prayer. They also knew that Satan was engaged in a titanic struggle against God and could shape earthly things. But ultimately God was in charge and knew what the outcome of events would be. Far below that cosmic level, in daily life, colonists believed in the power of magic. Ritual incantations and other practices, they thought, enabled people to influence the future. Although many ordinary colonists saw magic as a means of curing illness and accomplishing other good deeds, Puritan officials asserted that it was evil, if not satanic.
The colonists shared their belief in a supernatural world with American Indians, Africans, and others. Indeed, all peoples in North America understood in their distinctive ways that a range of immaterial powers and possibilities inhered in the physical reality they co-inhabited. Whether called God, manitou, Satan, or some other name, intangible but awesome forces coursed through all natural things. The English typically condemned Indian magic and manitou as savage and diabolical but nonetheless believed in their power. Indians might not have approved of the English God, but they could not dismiss his ability to alter the course of their lives. To speak of natural things was, for all people, to imply—at the very least—the presence and power of the supernatural.
The Puritan colonists recognized that their spiritual purpose was manifested in the order they imposed on their society and the land they inhabited. They had migrated from an island nation wracked by war, demographic upheaval, and environmental change. Their errand into the American wilderness gave them a chance to try again. They organized their lives according to the Order of Creation, the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy in which authority and power extended from God downward, through men, women, and children, to nonhuman nature on the bottom. They arranged their landscape according to a similar, although horizontal, scale of values. Churches, homes, and towns, their most sacrosanct spaces, formed the spiritual center of their geography; next came barns, fenced fields and pastures, common land, and the environment beyond. Building a controlled, orderly society and landscape—a new England—was deeply satisfying to the Puritan colonists; right living was a manifestation of God's grace and a promise of the great reward that waited on the other side of death.
Yet New Englanders were an exceedingly anxious and fearful people, because the order they tried so hard to impose was difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in a biophysical environment in which nothing was stable. Indian peoples—“savages” in their eyes—and French Catholics competed with them for land and resources. Nature itself challenged them: extreme temperatures, droughts, storms, and insects destroyed their crops, wolves preyed on their livestock, and diseases felled them and their animals. Compounding these external threats were problems internal to their communities. The “natural increase” of livestock and the growth of human numbers placed enormous ecological stress on pastures and fields, provoking conflicts among neighbors and families. Even the nature of their individual bodies, which aged and sometimes unexpectedly died, upset the desired order. Women in particular were a problem for patriarchal Puritans. As bearers and nurturers of children, women were at the center of colonial civilization. Yet women sometimes did things that threatened the Order of Creation. In some cases, the very nature of their bodies disturbed the Puritan quest for control.9
Colonial New Englanders understood their insecurity in spiritual, not just material, terms. Disorder might have various causes. Ultimately, God might be testing their faith or punishing them for their lapses. More immediately, colonists often interpreted disorder as evidence that a malign, demonic force was at work in the land. If Indians raided them, strange sicknesses and deaths beleaguered them, or a woman seemed out of place and out of control, then Satan must have infiltrated their defenses. And if Satan had slipped into their midst, then someone must have assisted him. That person must be a witch, and probably a woman like Martha Carrier.
The witchcraft crisis at Andover and nearby communities in the early 1690s marked the culmination of the colonists' decades-long struggle to create an orderly society and landscape in the New England wilderness. That story can be told in a series of episodes, each of which centers on the importance of nature and the supernatural to the people who inhabited New England. In every episode, the story gathers its dark energy from the colonists' troubled relationship to land, animals, diseases, bodies, and other biophysical things. Whether the threat to their control of these things was external or internal to their communities, they blamed the diabolical power of a man in black and the hideous creatures that had surrendered to his will. Eventually, at Andover and other towns, and in the person of Martha Carrier and other members of their communities, the colonists confronted for the last time the fatal consequences of their struggle. Decades of precarious existence on the fringe of empire had conditioned their outlook; their suspicion of Carrier was the direct outcome of their tumultuous past.10
GOD HAS CLEARED OUR TITLE TO THIS PLACE
The story of nature, the supernatural, and disorder in colonial New England begins long before Martha Carrier became the object of her neighbors' suspicions and scorn. Although its precise origins are lost in the shadows and silences of the past, perhaps a few places provide opportunities to pick up its strands and follow its course through early American history. One such place is near the mouth of Connecticut's Mystic River. The year is 1637, and although it is springtime, neither the fragrance of blossoms nor the music of birds caresses the senses. The atmosphere is acrid and dissonant. Fire, smoke, and screams warn of the horror unfolding in the village ahead.
Shortly after sunrise, English soldiers and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies surprised the fortified Pequot town. As men, women, and children ran from the burning lodges, the English slaughtered them. One attacker carried a halberd—a wooden shaft topped by a battle-ax, a hook, and a pike. Hefting the weapon, the soldier thrust it into the neck of a Pequot man, driving him to the ground. Despite the crippling, agonizing wound, the man remained alive and tried to withdraw the point from his body. “But this was very remarkable,” wrote colonial historian Edward Johnson, “one of [the Pequots] being wounded to death, and thrust through the neck with a halberd; yet after all, lying groaning upon the ground, he caught the halberd's spear in his hand, and wound it quite round.”11 To Indians and English alike, such mettle could not arise solely from ordinary human character and the physical body that contained it. It must have, as well, a supernatural origin.
A man's not dying when he should have was the sort of occurrence that Pequot and other Algonquian Indians attributed to manitou, a powerful force that permeated the world. It inhered in plants, stones, animals, and other parts of nature. And it was immanent in people, their bodies, and their artifacts. Any unusual, mysterious, or amazing behavior manifested it: a flash of creative insight, an act of extreme courage, a demonstration of towering rage, a show of phenomenal strength. People endowed with exceptional spiritual abilities—shamans—used ceremonies, incantations, and prayers to evoke and manipulate manitou, ensuring that its positive energy flowed through the community. One type of shaman, the powwow, tapped manitou to stimulate abundant crops and game, foretell the future, and heal the sick. Another type, the pniese, used it to make warriors strong. Perhaps the Pequot man with the halberd in his neck had acquired his power with the help of a pniese. Or perhaps he had gotten it on his own—perhaps he was one of those gifted people.12
Although the Pequot man's grit impressed the Puritans, they had a different explanation of its source. They certainly believed that Indians possessed supernatural abilities and used their powers for beneficial, not malevolent, purposes. The Puritans also recognized that manitou corresponded loosely to their own notion of the divine. But because they considered all magical practices to be diabolical in origin, manitou ultimately was evil. Even before the soldiers marched on the Pequot village, they had heard rumors that some Indi...

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