The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America

Ronald Bayor

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231508407
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

All historians would agree that America is a nation of nations. But what does that mean in terms of the issues that have moved and shaped us as a people? Contemporary concerns such as bilingualism, incorporation/assimilation, dual identity, ethnic politics, quotas and affirmative action, residential segregation, and the volume of immigration resonate with a past that has confronted variations of these modern issues. The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America, written and compiled by a highly respected team of American historians under the editorship of Ronald Bayor, illuminates the myriad ways in which immigration, racial, and ethnic histories have shaped the contours of contemporary American society.

This invaluable resource documents all eras of the American past, including black–white interactions and the broad spectrum of American attitudes and reactions concerning Native Americans, Irish Catholics, Mexican Americans, Jewish Americans, and other groups. Each of the eight chronological chapters contains a survey essay, an annotated bibliography, and 20 to 30 related public and private primary source documents, including manifestos, speeches, court cases, letters, memoirs, and much more. From the 1655 petition of Jewish merchants regarding the admission of Jews to the New Netherlands colony to an interview with a Chinese American worker regarding a 1938 strike in San Francisco, documents are drawn from a variety of sources and allow students and others direct access to our past.

Selections include

? Powhatan to John Smith, 1609

? Thomas Jefferson—"Notes on the State of Virginia"

? Petition of the Trustees of Congregation Shearith Israel, 1811

? Bessie Conway or, The Irish Girl in America

? German Society in Chicago, Annual Report, 1857–1858.

? "Mark Twain's Salutation to the Century"

? W. E. B. DuBois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings"

? NAACP on Black Schoolteachers'Fight for Equal Pay

? Malcom X speech, 1964

? Hewy Newton interview and Black Panther Party platform

? Preamble—La Raza Unida Party

? Lee lacocca speech to Ethnic Heritage Council of the Pacific Northwest, 1984

? Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, 1990

? L.A. riot—from the Los Angeles Times, May 3, 15, 1992; Nov. 16, 19, 1992

? Asian American Political Alliance

? President Clinton's Commission on Race, Town Meeting, 1997

? Louis Farrakhan—"The Vision for the Million Man March"

CHAPTER 1

ETHNICITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH AMERICA, 1600–1700

CAROL BERKIN

THE ENGLISH COLONIES OF THE seventeenth century were notable for their diversity of population, religious institutions, and government structures, a diversity arising in large part from the variety of purposes and methods that spurred their creation. Unlike the Spanish and French governments, the English Crown steadfastly refused to finance colonization, relying instead on private citizens to take the risks involved in establishing outposts in the Americas. The Crown was willing to grant charters to companies and bestow huge tracts of land on favorites in the Court, but it was not willing to deplete the royal treasury or provide military support for colonization. Few private citizens rose to the challenge in the sixteenth century, for the dismal failure of Sir Walter Raleigh’s efforts at Roanoke Island, and Raleigh’s resulting bankruptcy dampened even the most patriotic zeal.

Dreams of an American empire did not entirely vanish, however. Indeed, they were enthusiastically revived in the early seventeenth century as English entrepreneurs learned to employ the principles of the joint-stock company to diminish individual risks. The Virginia Company’s success in planting the Jamestown settlement in 1607, coupled with the Stuart kings’ largesse in land grants, resulted in the creation of proprietary colonies, such as Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and colonies chartered to joint-stock companies, such as Massachusetts. But what the Crown saved in expenses it lost in the ability to establish uniformity. Each proprietor or joint-stock company could declare its own purposes and goals and establish its own institutions and regulations as long as they did not run contrary to the laws, trade regulations, and diplomatic policies of England. By the end of the century, the crescent of colonies that hugged the Atlantic Ocean on the North American mainland reflected the variety of motives and methods of their founders: some colonies had been established by religious sects seeking refuge, others came into existence for profit, and still others emerged as offshoots from older communities, created by land-hungry settlers or exiled religious deviants.

The State’s refusal to be responsible for the founding of the colonies also meant that key institutions were weak, or absent, in the formal and informal development of these communities. For example, the absence of Anglican church control or organized missionary activity contrasted sharply with the role the Catholic church played in both the French and Spanish colonial world. There was a noticeable lack of uniformity of religious practices, governmental structures, or Indian and land policies, and clearly there was no grand design for settlement. When, late in the century, the king attempted to rationalize and centralize the mainland empire, his efforts met with considerable resistance. The Dominion of New England, which united the colonies of New England, New York, and New Jersey under one governor, was the first American casualty of the Glorious Revolution. Before the debacle of the Dominion—and for several decades after—the English colonies continued to evolve in highly individualistic ways.

Regional distinctions did emerge, however, not only in economies and labor systems, but in patterns of ethnic and racial diversity. All regions were biracial in the early seventeenth century, for Indian populations remained within the borders of each colony. By the end of the century, small concentrations of African servants and slaves suggested a new pattern of triracial colonies, especially in the Chesapeake and Lower South. Throughout the century, the New England colonies remained ethnically more homogeneous than other regions. Massachusetts, for example, openly discouraged and even outlawed non-Puritan settlers, although by the end of the century, its transformation into a royal colony opened up settlement to Anglicans as well. The shortage of available land in New England, already a problem by the end of the century, would discourage the waves of immigrants from Ireland and Germany that would fill the backcountries of the middle and southern colonies in the next century. To the south, the Chesapeake was largely an English society, but one marked by the presence of Catholics as well as Protestants and by small communities of radical dissenting sects. The Lower South, still in its early phases of settlement in 1700, would not see its influx of Scots-Irish, Irish, and German settlers until the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were, by comparison, notably heterogeneous, in part because of the non-English origins of the first three and in part because of liberal immigration or land policies that did not discriminate based on religion or national origins. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the ethnic diversity of the middle colonies was the most striking regional anomaly.

ENGLISH COLONISTS AND INDIANS

Conquest, conflict, migration, and acculturation were historical realities among the peoples East of the Mississippi long before the arrival of European and English colonists. Indeed, the social and political map of Native American societies was no more static or stable than the map of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Northeast, two massive alliances had, for centuries, shaped the realities of political and cultural life among local communities, pitting the Hurons, Algonquins, Abenakis, Micmacs, Ottawas, and several smaller tribes against the powerful Iroquois Confederacy that was based in New York. In what the English would call Virginia, a confederation of Algonquianspeaking tribes known as the Powhatans dominated local cultures, commanding tribute and military loyalties from a widening circle of villages. By the time John Smith arrived in Jamestown, the Powhatan had forced into its political sphere of control some thirty different Indian peoples. To the south, descendants of Siouan-speaking migrants, who had journeyed over the mountains centuries before Columbus journeyed to the Americas, created communities linked by a common culture but politically independent of one another. Like the Hurons to the north or the subjects of the Powhatans in the Chesapeake, these Siouan descendants had long experience with the aggression of would be conquerors, for Mississippians, intent on seizing territory and compelling political submission, had followed the Siouan groups eastward. Viewed from a global perspective, Europe and North America seemed to be experiencing similar patterns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: shifting boundaries, migration prompted by aggression or by flight from aggression, refugee societies regrouping, and acculturation to the communities that gave them safe haven or to those who conquered them. For the Finns, for the Walloons, for the Irish, the tales of cultural conflict told by the Huron, the Mannahoacs, and the Stuckanocks would be familiar ones.

Many decades before English adventurers and their servants came to Jamestown or Separatist pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Native Americans had felt the devastation that contact with Europeans would bring to their world. Not the sword, but disease proved the most effective weapon of destruction: an epidemiological disaster of immeasurable proportions swept away Native populations, as smallpox, measles, and other illnesses to which Indians enjoyed no immunities traveled rapidly throughout the Americas following contact with the Europeans. Historians now estimate that millions of Indians died in the centuries before English settlement began.

This catastrophic “exchange” between Europeans and Indians might best be personalized in the life of Squanto, the Wampanoag Indian who befriended the radical Separatist sect known as the Pilgrims and negotiated the treaty with his tribe that insured the survival of their refugee English community at Plymouth in the 1620s. Several years before the Pilgrims set sail for America aboard the Mayflower, Squanto had been taken prisoner by English fishermen sailing the coast of Massachusetts. He remained in English society, learning the language and absorbing the culture, for some three years before returning to his homeland. Here he discovered that his exile had protected him from an epidemic that destroyed his entire village at Patuxet. This outbreak had reached far beyond Patuxet, of course; of the twenty thousand Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts, fewer than 10 percent remained when Squanto returned to America. Ironically, the Pilgrims’ settlement of Plymouth was built upon the remains of Squanto’s Patuxet.

Despite the devastation wrought by disease, the Indian societies of the Eastern coast did not immediately fall under the control of the European colonizers. Indeed, as historians now understand, negotiation and compromise marked the earliest years of contact between French, Dutch, and English authorities and the local Indians. A “middle ground,” a cultural space contributed to by both Indian and white colonists, emerged, allowing the two worlds some possibility of understanding and cooperation. Although each society was interpreted through the prism of the observing culture, some genuine communication was nevertheless made possible; on the middle ground, a compromise of language, belief systems, political structures, and patterns of physical and emotional intimacy evolved. If the French were more flexible than the English or Dutch, even these more ethnocentric nationals made efforts to engage in commercial exchange, political alliance, and social interaction throughout the century.

The English brought to the “middle ground” a firm sense of their cultural superiority. Their assumptions about Indians varied greatly, with some seventeenth-century observers recording glowing accounts of the nobility and simplicity of tribal life and others detailing the heathen savagery of the indigenous population. The romantic notion of the “Noble Savage” thus existed side by side with the contemptuous judgment that Indians were uncivilized, without religion or culture. The assumed character of the Indian often depended on the English colonists’ vision of themselves. Thus, among the Puritan colonists, who saw the hand of God directing their settlement, Indians appeared as Satanic obstacles to their mission rather than as proper objects for missionary zeal. The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania, committed to a belief that all people shared God’s grace, demonstrated their religious convictions by efforts to treat Native Americans in an egalitarian fashion. In both cases, the prism through which the Indian was seen was self-referential.

No matter what their assumptions or stereotypes, most of the early settlers recognized that their survival depended upon a basic exchange of supplies and knowledge with local Indians. In Jamestown to the south and Plymouth to the north, the willingness of Native Americans to share corn and other foodstuffs as well as information on how to grow these crops made the difference between starvation and sustenance in the early years. In New Netherland, and later in New York, a thriving trade in beaver pelts and other furs secured most of the profits that Europeans wrested from their Hudson River colony. And, in alliances formed with Indian tribes, the English and Dutch found the safety from hostile attack by European rivals and their Indian allies critical to their communities’ survival. To varying degrees, Indians who negotiated the “middle ground” acquired the fruits of European technology: weapons, iron and copper utensils, and woolens. Exchanges of a less concrete or tangible nature altered both white and Indian life as new theologies, modes of production, notions of property, and ideas of social organization passed between colonists and natives.

The creation of the middle ground did not, however, insure peace between Native Americans and European colonists. In the English colonies in particular, the settlers’ relentless expansionist impulse eventually brought them into conflict with local Indians. As English populations grew, the willingness to negotiate and compromise diminished. Even when disputes arose between English communities, nearby Indians were likely to suffer the consequences. For example, in New England in the late 1630s, an intense rivalry between Massachusetts land developers and the expanding Connecticut settlements proved harmful to the nearby Pequots. Rather than initiating a damaging int...