The Story of America

Essays on Origins

Jill Lepore

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400844555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

From celebrated writer Jill Lepore, a literary and political history of American origin stories In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories—from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address—to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type.Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression.From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.

1

HERE HE LYES

Buried somewhere under the marble floor of the largest church in London lie the remains of Captain John Smith, who died in 1631, at the age of fifty-one. On a brass plaque, his epitaph reads,

Here lyes one conquered, that hath conquered Kings,
Subdu'd large Territories, and done Things
Which to the world impossible would seem
But that the Truth is held in more esteem.

In other words: he wasn't a liar. Ah, but don't believe it. The year before he died, Smith published The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africke, and America, in which a discerning reader will learn to expect that when the captain, wearing full armor, has his stallion shot out from under him, he'll mount a dead man's horse before his own has hit the ground, and reload his musket while he's at it. Even his mishaps prove his valor: who could have survived so many sea-fights, shipwrecks, mutinies, deserted islands, musket wounds, betrayals, prisons, and gashes gotten while jousting, except a man whose coat-of-arms depicted the severed, turbaned heads of three Turkish army officers he defeated in back-to-back duels in Transylvania and whose motto—emblazoned on his shield—sounds like the title of a James Bond film set in Elizabethan England: vincere est vivere. To conquer is to live.¹

In 1631, while Smith lay on his deathbed, a Welsh clergyman named David Lloyd published The Legend of Captaine Jones, a lampoon of Smith's True Travels. A later edition includes, by way of preface, a spoof of Smith's well-known epitaph:

Tread softly (mortalls) ore the bones
Of the worlds wonder Captaine Jones:
Who told his glorious deeds to many,
But never was believ'd of any:
Posterity let this suffice,
He swore all's true, yet here he lyes.²

That Captain John Smith, even before he died, was widely believed to be a liar is of more than passing interest, especially since he was also, arguably, America's first historian. In True Travels, Smith claimed to have defeated armies, outwitted heathens, escaped pirates, hunted treasure, and wooed princesses—and all this on four continents, no less, including a little island in North America that would one day be known as the birthplace of the United States: Jamestown, Virginia.

“I am no Compiler by hearsay, but have beene a reall Actor,” John Smith wrote. He was an adventurer, and he was a historian. He recounted his adventures in Virginia not only in True Travels, but also, first, in a letter printed without his permission in 1608 as A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia; next, in an essay on the Virginia Indians published in 1612 as A Map of Virginia and bound with a longer account of the founding of Jamestown, The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia; and, once more, in The Generall Historie of Virginia, printed in 1624.

John Smith was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, in 1580. He left England at the age of sixteen “to learne the life of a Souldier.” He fought the Spanish in France and in the Netherlands, sailed to Scotland, and returned to England to live like a hermit in the woods, reading books and practicing to be a knight: “His studie was Machiavills Art of warre, and Marcus Aurelius; his exercise a good horse, with his lance and Ring.”³ In 1600, he crossed the Channel again. After adventures in France, including a duel near Mont-St.-Michel, he tried to sail from Marseilles to Italy but was thrown overboard. Rescued by pirates, he sailed the Mediterranean and learned to fight at sea. In 1601, he joined the Austrian army to fight the Turks in Hungary, mainly because he regretted having “seene so many Christians slaughter one another.” He was promoted to captain. Wounded in a battle near Bucharest, in which thirty thousand men died, Smith and a handful of survivors were captured and “sold for slaves, like beasts in a market place.” He was sent to Istanbul, to serve his owner's mistress. But she fell in love with him. Eventually, he escaped. After making his way through Russia and Poland, and fighting in Morocco, Smith returned to England in the winter of 1604–5.⁴ In December 1606, when he was twenty-six, he sailed to Virginia, with a fleet of three ships, the Godspeed, the Susan Constant, and the Discovery.

Smith had three Turks' heads on his shield, but he wasn't the only Jamestown adventurer to have traveled through the Ottoman Empire.⁵ William Strachey, who became secretary of the colony in 1609, had been in Istanbul in 1607. George Sandys, the colony's treasurer, had traveled, by camel, to Jerusalem and had written, at length, about the “Mahometan Religion.” To these men, the New World beckoned as but another battlefield for the Old World's religious wars; they went, mainly, to hunt for gold to fund wars to defeat Muslims in Europe.⁶

For much of the voyage to Virginia, Smith was confined below decks, in chains, accused of plotting a mutiny to “make himselfe king.” In May 1607, Smith and 104 other colonists settled on the banks of a river they named the James, in honor of their king, on land named after his predecessor, Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. On board ship they had carried a box containing a list of men appointed by the Virginia Company to govern the colony, “not to be opened, nor the governours knowne until they arrived in Virginia.”⁷ When at last the box was opened, it was revealed that Smith, still a prisoner, was on that list. On June 10, 1607, he was sworn as a member of the governing council.⁸ In September 1608, he was elected its president, effectively, Virginia's governor. By his telling, he was also its only hope.

Far from being the first Europeans to settle on land that would one day become the United States, the English were Johnny-come-latelies. The Spanish settled at San Augustine, Florida, in 1565; by 1607, they were building Santa Fe. In 1975, Yale historian Edmund Morgan famously dubbed Jamestown a “fiasco”: “Measured by any of the objectives announced for it,” Morgan reckoned, “the colony failed.” The English landed, and “for the next ten years they seem to have made nearly every possible mistake and some that seem almost impossible.”They chose a poor site: on the banks of a brackish river. They had a lousy plan: build a fort, and look for gold. They brought the wrong kind of settlers: idle and indolent English gentlemen, who spent their time bowling in the streets. (Smith counted one carpenter, two blacksmiths, and a flock of footmen; the rest of the settlers he wrote off as “Gentlemen, Tradesmen, Servingmen, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoyle a Commonwealth, than either begin one, or but helpe to maintaine one.”) They made enemies easily: especially the Powhatan Indians, even though they relied on them for food, having harvested little of their own. Mostly, they died. Except for the year Smith was in charge, from the fall of 1608 to the fall of 1609, when he told its half-dead men, “he who does not worke, shall not eat,” they starved.⁹ It wasn't the land that was the problem. “Had we beene in Paradice it selfe (with those governours),” Smith complained, “it would not have beene much better.”¹⁰ After October 1609, when Smith returned to England (ostensibly, to recover from an injury but, really, he was more or less kicked out), Jamestown went to hell. In the winter of 1609–10 alone, five hundred colonists were reduced to sixty. A hair-raising account of those months, written by the colony's lieutenant governor, George Percy, the eighth son of the earl of Northumberland, paints this scene: “many, through extreme hunger, have run out of their naked beds being so lean that they looked like anatomies, crying out, we are starved, we are starved.” In the end, they ate each other. Percy writes, “one of our Colline murdered his wife Ripped the Childe outt of her woambe and threwe it into the River and after Chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food.” Telling the story of the husband showering his wife with salt, another settler wondered: “Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado'd, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.”¹¹

“An American dream was born on the banks of the James River,” insisted Jamestown archaeologist, William M. Kelso, in Jamestown: The Buried Truth.¹² Kelso's book was published in 2007, Jamestown's four hundredth anniversary: America's birthday. Elizabeth the second turned up at Jamestown for the festivities—concerts, reenactments, exhibits, and more—and bookshops stocked up on confetti-laced books, including a Library of America edition of Smith's writings, wrapped in its signature red-white-and-blue ribbon.

Kelso was writing within a tradition of Jamestown boosters who triumph in the colony's eventual success. By the 1620s, in spite of a mortality rate that remained as high as 75 or 80 percent, the Virginia economy was booming. Hence, the American dream: arrive empty-handed, work hard, and get rich.

Just as cock-eyed, anachronistic, and overblown is a debunking tradition that damns Jamestown as the birthplace of the American nightmare: with corporate funding from wealthy investors (the Virginia Company), steal somebody else's land (the Powhatans') and reap huge profits by planting and harvesting an addictive drug (tobacco, whose sales were responsible for the boom), while exploiting your labor force (indigent Britons and, after 1619, enslaved Africans).

American dream or American nightmare, the bare facts about Jamestown can be dressed up and pressed into the service of either of these narratives. And they have been. One abolitionist, writing in 1857—Jamestown's 250th anniversary—argued that Americans ought to ignore 1607 and instead pay attention to the divided nation's twin, Cain-and-Abel, founding moments: the Pilgrims' 1620 landing in Plymouth and the arrival of the first Africans to Jamestown in 1619. “Here are the two ideas, Liberty and Slavery—planted at about the same time, in the virgin soil of the new continent; the one in the North, the other in the South. They are deadly foes. Which shall conquer?” To antebellum Northerners, Jamestown set in motion forces that would lead to Civil War. To organizers of Jamestown four hundredth anniversary, what started in their town was America itself.

For a very long time, the question that animated every history of Jamestown was the very one that most troubled John Smith: “howe it came to passe there was no better successe.”¹³ In other words, why did things go so badly? The debate over that question, in the 1970s and 1980s, in the shadow of Vietnam, was one of the most vigorous in all of early American historical scholarship, at least as vigorous as, and more important than, the earlier and continuing argument over the causes of the witchcraft outbreak in Salem in 1692, a debate that has never really crawled out from under the shadow of McCarthyism. The too-many-gentlemen theory is pretty compelling—in Smith's shorthand, “miserable is that Land, where more are idle then well imployed”—but for years historians marshaled evidence in support of a range of provocative explanations, from salt poisoning and contaminated wells to the Little Ice Age and an epidemic of apathy and, finally, to the colonists' sheer, stubborn preference for planting tobacco, to sell, instead of corn, to eat.¹⁴ But during Jamestown's four hundredth anniversary, historians turned this unanswered question upside down, asking, not why Jamestown at first failed but why, in the end, did it succeed? Thus did the Jamestown quadricentennial snatch victory from the jaws of a man who ate his wife.

“To call Jamestown a failure, let alone a disaster,” Kelso wrote, “is to over simplify.”¹⁵ Kelso's evidence for his claim was what he'd found: Jamestown Fort. Before Kelso came along, archaeologists had concluded that the remains of the fort the settlers built in the spring of 1607 had long since been washed away by the James River. Kelso was sure its foundation lay under ground, and not under water. Beginning in 1994, when he was hired as the head archaeologist of the Jamestown Recovery Project, Kelso oversaw the painstaking rediscovery of the fort's footprint, one of the most exciting finds, ever, in American historical archaeology. Within and around the fort's footprint, Kelso's team dug up not only human remains, palisade lines, and building foundations, but also a treasure of artifacts: beads, armor, pottery, and tools, each with a story to tell. The jawbone of a dog, with lead shot in it; a butchered turtle; thimbles; a suit of armor, thrown down a well, piece by piece; even a fancy silver “ear picker,” a kind of combination Q-Tip and toothpick. What story these artifacts tell is less clear (wouldn't it have been better to pack a few more hoes for the voyage, and not so many ear pickers?). Kelso argued that the archaeological record tilts toward proving that Jamestown's first settlers weren't nearly as hapless as John Smith made them out to be; after all, they built a very good fort, very quickly: “There is evidence that some of the immigrants worked hard.”¹⁶

“The truly remarkable thing about Jamestown is that it somehow survived,” the historian Karen Kupperman argued in 2007, in The Jamestown Project. Kupperman mainly measured the colony against both earlier and later English settlement efforts in North America, including Roanoke, England's first attempt to establish a foothold in the New World, on the outer shoals of what is now North Carolina. Settled in 1584, Roanoke was deserted three years later, and it's anyone's guess what happened to the ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children who were left behind when the governor, John White, sailed to England for help; when he returned, in 1590, they were gone. Compared to Roanoke, Kupperman pointed out, Jamestown is a stunner.

Kupperman's argument, that Jamestown wasn't really that bad, required her to explain why it looks so bad. Resolutely, she blamed the sources, “which consist largely of complaints, special pleading, and excuses sent by colonists back to their patrons in England.”¹⁷ They made everything sound worse than it was. And the devil of it is, some of these kvetchers were actually colorful writers, which, Kupperman warned, has led historians to make a fatal error: reading their accounts “to mine them for pithy quotes.”¹⁸ Again with the wife-eating man!

John Smith liked to blame whiners, too. “Ingenious verbalists,” he called those who came to Virginia, while he was in charge, only to find themselves shocked by what they saw, “because they found not English Cities, nor such faire houses, nor at their owne wishes any of their accustomed dainties, with feather beds, and downe pillows, Tavernes and alehouses.” Such men, he said, were those who would call Virginia, under his inspired leadership, “a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell.”¹⁹ But that was what Smith said about Virginia before he left. Only after he returned to England did he begin to see that what was going on in Jamestown was impossible to discover from so far away, investors having need of twisting the story this way and that, like so many corporate executives, in a world without a Securities and Exchange Commission (although by 1624 a royal commission had begun investigating the Virginia Company for mismanagement). No matter how many men ate their wives, Smith wearily concluded, reports in England would make “the Company here thinke all the world was Oatmeale there.”²⁰

The question of whether John Smith was a liar is inseparable from the question of whether Jamestown was a failure. They don't map onto one another exactly, but it usually works like this: if Smith told the truth, Jamestown was a disaster, except when he was in charge. It's possible to both believe Smith and see Jamestown as a success, but that requires quite a bit of squinting. Generally, if, like the Virginia Company, you'd like to think that everything in Jamestown was oatmeal, it helps if you are willing to say that Smith was either ill informed or stretching the truth, although, most often, those who discredit Smith aren't as gracious as that. Their assessments have a more of a liar-liar-pantaloons-on-fire quality. (As it happens, and for the record, they were: the injury that sent Smith back to England was a severe burn he sustained to his thighs and groin when his gunpowder bag, laying in his lap, caught the spark of a tobacco pipe and exploded.)²¹

This liar-disaster situation was a bind, and Smith knew it. He wrote, in 1616, that he fully expected to “live or die the slave of scorne and infamy.”²² And he did. As David Lloyd's Legend of Captaine Jones would have it, Smith made up most of what he wrote, or at least exaggerated, brazenly. Nevertheless, in the colonies, and especially in the early United States, The Legend of Captaine Jones was entirely forgotten and, despite lingering doubts about his credibility, Smith, no longer lampooned, became a romantic hero of the nineteenth-century American South, his exploits celebrated—and lavishly embroidered—in songs and on stage, in antebellum productions that implausibly but invariably paired him, romantically, with Pocahontas, who, only fourteen when Smith left Virginia, in 1609, had actually ...