Sarah's Thoughts
No Joy in Jamestown Today
This year, the city of Jamestown will be holding numerous celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of British settlement in America. Oh, wait. I forgot. The word “celebration” has been banned by the planning committee:
“You can’t celebrate an invasion,” Mary Wade, a member of Jamestown 2007 organizing committee, has stated. After all, Indian tribes “were pushed back off of their land, even killed. Whole tribes were annihilated. A lot of people carry that oral history with them, and that’s why they use the word ‘invasion,’ because it truly was an invasion, and I’m sure some of the Indian people will probably want to tell that as a part of the story of 400 years.”
So, instead of marking this great moment in history that would lead to the development of the world’s longest-lasting democracy with the pride and cheers it deserves, there needs to be a focus on how evil British folk were bent on genocide.
As a history teacher and a mother who plans to make civic education an important part of my home regardless of what goes on at school, I am beyond irritated at this politically correct, racked with guilt garbage. War, murder, slavery and other nasty things are an integral part of history. Every powerful nation throughout time has employed these tactics at some point. Is slavery right? Of course not! But that doesn’t mean we should rename every school that was built to honor the author of the Declaration of Independence. Should we celebrate that countless Native Americans were killed? No, the large-scale deaths by disease and violence are a sad part of our history. But, how many borders have changed and countries been formed by “invasions” such as Jamestown over the past 400 years. I don’t think the world map looks anything like the 1607 version. It sounds callous and I don’t mean it to be so, but I can’t think of a better way to phrase it — these things happen.
There are some historians who, understandably, aren’t thrilled with the revisionist approach to the events:
… since the advent of Jamestown provided what later became the United States with important introductions to Christian common law, a republican representative government, the first Protestant Christian worship service, and its first interracial marriage.
The settlers of Jamestown were not horrible people who came to a new land to plunder and lynch, as is now being alleged. They were the beginning of a movement that would create the United States of America. That’s a wonderful thing!
Exhibits about the plight of Native Americans and African Americans be should included among the events of the Jamestown anniversary. We need to know all aspects of our history. But, let’s not fail to CELEBRATE the positive developments that were set in motion by Jamestown.
March 30th, 2007 at 8:41 am
As a history PhD who specializes in the legal history of the American empire, I have to say that you are incorrect. The Jamestown settlers came with the intention of establishing British supremacy into North America and making a fast profit for their investors in the Virginia Company. To do so, they knew that they would have to “reduce to civility” the indigenous peoples. While they hoped that they could win the Powhatan over by love and trade (distinguishing themselves from the Spanish), they also stated early and often that they would destroy property and kill those who did not cooperate with them on their own terms. They were comfortable with the necessity of enslaving both Indians and Africans to gain a profit; servitude was a part of life in England and when shortfalls in the availability of indentured servants curtailed desired tobacco production (British Caribbean was the hot location to go work), they bought slaves from Africa as well as from New England Puritans (who were selling local Indians after the Pequot War in 1637). Indians who would not be subject to the English kings were to be exterminated (like wolves and other woodland pests) as soon as practicable. Their tone-deaf diplomatic initiatives came close to getting them all killed in the First and Second Anglo-Powhatan Wars. How one could perceive this as a benign encounter is beyond me.
Moreover, this was not a new pattern and should be understood in transatlantic perspective. Imperial visionaries like Richard Haklyut and actual settlers like John Smith had been deeply involved in other continental imperial wars — including the subjection of Ireland. If you read the last forty years of scholarly work (Nicholas Canny, Edmund Morgan, Kathy Brown, April Hatfield, Helen Rountree, Virginia Anderson, Ira Berlin, Karen Anderson…), I think you’ll see that what you call “revisionism” is amply supported in the documents that Englishmen left to describe their motives and behaviors. The idea that Jamestown’s councilors somehow instituted a republican government is completely absurd. So…this is a long way of saying that you really need to read more scholarly work about Jamestown before you go off half-cocked about what academic historians have concluded.
The thing is…what you call “wracked with guilt garbage” is actually what happened. The task before me, as a historian, is to provide context, to analyze how many contrary things (slavery/freedom, genocide/refuge, disenfranchisement/suffrage, dependency/independence, exclusion/inclusion, migration/borders) exist within our common past, and to help students understand how this confluence has come to shape our national politics, society, and identity.
If anything, I’d say you’re selling the US far too short when you want to minimize the more bleak and tragic aspects of the past. Let me explain this in another way. Wanting to skip over the downer aspects of the past is like wanting Christianity to be all Christmas and no Good Friday. No Good Friday, no transcendant Easter. It’s all part of the story, all necessary for the proper understanding of the faith. You seem to think that the history profession has turned into Mel Gibson, relentlessly focusing on the scourging and the shaming and the blood. I’d say that we’re actually trying to explain why Easter is really REALLY marvelous.
Things don’t happen. People act. If part of developing civic engagement is developing critical thinking skills and moral discernment, stuffing students full of the “big happy” isn’t going to help them understand the complexities of the past or prepare them well for the future. It makes them think that all social and political problems are of recent coinage — perpetuating a crippling false nostalgia in which everything was so much better as some distant point — and robs them of the hope that they can create a better and more just society through dealing with challenges.
Why would any teacher want to do that to a classroom of kids?
March 30th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Bridgett — I don’t see how anything you wrote (and there’s a lot of it!) counters anything in my original post. I indicated that there were negative consequences to the Jamestown settlement and those parts of our history need to be acknowledged and studied. I hardly see the past through rose-colored glasses. I simply believe we have gone too far in wanting to erase any positive contributions made by the residents of Jamestown and the colonists who followed. Why can’t we celebrate the good as well as atone for the bad and the ugly?
I never wrote that the leaders of Jamestown established a fantastic republican government. But, the arrival of the British on our soil did mark the first step in creating what became our amazing form of government.
Where did I “go off half-cocked about what academic historians have concluded”?
I would never advocate teaching kids only about the “big happy”. There is a terrible lack of critical thinking in our classrooms. Our students should have to analyze historical documents, as well as scholars’ research, and be required to justify their own conclusions. Kids need to know about the settlers’ intentions to convert the natives by force if needed and the plague of disease that riddled the Native American population. We also need to discuss the horrific practice of slavery and how it impacted our country’s development. But, I also don’t see myself standing in front of group of fourth graders and saying, “Today we are going to learn about how white people came over here in a boat and invaded the coast. They killed millions of people and destroyed a peaceful culture. For homework, you will write five reasons that white people from England are evil.”
History is not black and white. We do not have to cast one group of people as complete villans in order to acknowledge the pain of others. Let’s examine all sides of history instead of requiring a scapegoat. What were the positive and negative consequences of Jamestown? What was its legacy in history?
I am also well-read and have a graduate education, but I don’t feel the need to list my degrees as justification for my opinion. Why did you include a long list of scholarly work in your second paragraph? Should I be impressed? I can list historians and scholars, too! You remind me of the ponytail guy in Good Will Hunting who tries to impress people by spouting off a bunch of names and theories that he has memorized from the works of others.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:51 am
No, Sarah. I was attempting to provide you and your readers with a current bibliography on Jamestown and the early Chesapeake that would help you (and others) learn more about a subject that you want to talk about and appear to care about but which you don’t currently know much about. You positioned yourself as ” a history teacher and a mother who plans to make civic education an important part of my home regardless of what goes on at school.” I responded by positioning myself in kind professionally speaking, though I left my kid out of it.
March 30th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Bridget, you lost me when you used the word empire in your first sentence.
March 30th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
It appears that history today concludes that whoever comes out on the winning, or occupying, side of any conflict is eventually labeled the “evil ones”. In my limited education, it seems that all residents of an area took it from someone else. One’s historic point of view is derived from where they start and stop in this chain of events. In the Jamestown chain, who did the current local indians of the time kick out, enslave, kill??
April 1st, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Bridgett,
“Imperial visionaries like Richard Haklyut and actual settlers like John Smith had been deeply involved in other continental imperial wars — including the subjection of Ireland.”
Don’t you mean the ‘civilsation’ of Ireland?
Seriously, I don’t disagree with your historical analysis. My concern is that there is a strong tone of moral judgement to your analysis. By today’s standards, we may abhore many of the acts of the English colonists or any other people or individuals. We may even deride them for the contradictions in their acts in contrast to the values of their culture or their own statements. To jugde them by your standards requires that you start from the position that there is a shared set of moral absolutes knowable to them as well as us. Is that your position?