America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback

America’s Hidden HiTory a

Untold Tales of the First
Pilgrims, Fighting Women,
and Forgotten Founders Who
Shaped a
˜
ation
z

Kenneth C. Davis

In grateful memory of my father, Richard McShane Davis, for
those childhood camping trips to Lake Champlain, Valley Forge, and
Gettysburg that sparked my abiding passion for history.

Contents

a

Introduction
v
I Isabella’s Pigs
1

II Hannah’s Escape
37

III Washington’s Confession
81

IV Warren’s Toga
119

V Arnold’s Boot
161

VI Lafayette’s Sword
203

Acknowledgments
235

Notes
237

Bibliography
247

Index
261

About the Author

Other Books by Kenneth C. Davis

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

a

If you are of a certain age, the name Flip Wilson may mean something to you. After all, comedian Flip Wilson made history. During the early 1970s, the late comic became one of the first African American stars to host a hit television series. With his prime-time variety hour, Wilson helped put some of the color in color TV. But Flip Wilson might not be the first name you would expect to find in a book about America’s beginnings.

Here it is, though, because one of his signature routines was a sketch in which Wilson, bewigged, bejeweled, and fabulously be-decked in elaborate drag, played Spain’s Queen Isabella. The queen is pondering whether to give Columbus what he wants when the Italian sailor whispers something into the regal ear. Sashaying across the stage, Wilson’s Isabella exults in a triumphant falsetto, “Chris gonna find Ray Charles!”

And that, my friends, is what Columbus was really looking for when he sailed from Spain in 1492.

I relate this story because my historical sensibilities have admittedly been shaped by bits from Flip Wilson,
Laugh-In,
Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine, and
Mad
magazine, alongside such masterly historians | v \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
as William Manchester, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Thomas Fleming—and because I have always believed that history should be much more fun than most Americans believe it is. But fun doesn’t have to mean frivolous.

Take “Isabella’s Pigs,” the opening chapter of this book. If it were a movie, Johnny Depp might get the lead. If it were a video game, par-ents wouldn’t let their kids play. Spotlighting the Spanish conquest of Florida long before Jamestown and Plymouth were settled, it includes pirates, shipwrecks, lost treasure, cannibalism, torture, and numerous massacres, all topped off by feuding monarchs who put the current crop of royals to shame. And pigs.

It was, after all, the real Isabella who told Columbus to pack some pigs on his second voyage. Those pigs kept Spain’s conquistadors alive as they laid waste to the Americas—and the pigs also possibly introduced some of the diseases that wiped out whole native nations. So Isabella’s pigs may have played a leading role in the accidental discovery and conquest of the Americas and the decimation of millions of people—certainly one of history’s great unintended consequences.

Another of those world-changing accidents came when a brash, untrained young militia officer in colonial America led his men on a murderous raid that set off the first “world war” in history. That ambitious twentysomething was George Washington, and his first brush with battle was nearly his last. Young Washington’s deadly miscalculation not only altered history but also clearly helped forge the man who led America through the Revolution and became its first president.

It is those unintended consequences, particularly the ones that were overlooked or sanitized in gilding America’s great national myth—Columbus as intrepid discoverer, Pilgrims and Indians at a joyous feast, the Continental Congress as a colonial-era Kiwanis club—that lie at | vi \

the heart of this book. The stories that unfold in these six chapters, which span a period from the Spanish arrival in America to George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, were selected because each plays a central part in shaping the nation’s destiny and character and each, in some way, belies that American myth.

For the most part, these are tales that the textbooks left out. The picture they present is largely at odds with the safe, sterile version still provided by schoolbooks, teachers, and Hollywood. Those tidy tab-leaus are the ones preferred by politicians, preachers, and pundits who cling to the simple, whitewashed portrait of America’s past. If any of the harsher realities found their way into our schoolbooks, they were boiled down to a single bloodless line of text, or worse, to a monoto-nous list of dates and documents. In these stories, I’ve tried to flesh out that picture and set the record straight by unearthing some of the buried pieces of America’s “hidden history.”

Some of these episodes were chosen because they reveal unfamiliar details about familiar events, such as the battles of Lexington and Concord. And some uncover the unknown side of very well-known people, as in the rise and fall of a young American hero whose ego and greed wreaked havoc, turning him into America’s greatest villain: Benedict Arnold. Others were chosen because they include “fulcrum moments” in which America’s future was tipped in a new direction.

Such a shift came when a British assassination plot aimed at a trio of Boston’s leading patriots went awry. Had the plan—detailed in “Warren’s Toga”—succeeded, the course of the Revolution might have been completely altered.

These stories also highlight what novelist Graham Greene called “the human factor.” Textbook writers rarely explore such human motivations as ambition and avarice, loyalty and betrayal, duty and honor, | vii \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
courage and cowardice. They prefer to leave pride and prejudice to the novelists. But these stories fascinate because they plumb the flesh and blood behind the marble statues or the faces on our currency. The three Puritan women depicted in “Hannah’s Escape” never made it onto any of our money. But the courage and resilience they displayed speaks loudly of a harsh colonial environment far removed from the traditional Thanksgiving Day idyll.

Most importantly, all of these stories continue to reverberate in our world. And that is the real point of telling them—and of teaching history—in the first place. We have been conditioned, by television and now the Internet, to look at history in short bursts. These disjointed bits and pieces rarely seem to have much connection to the present. But of course they do; as Shakespeare put it, “The past is prologue.”

The great conflict engulfing the Western world and elements of Islam is the most immediate and pressing example of history’s long, slow ripples. It returns us to Isabella’s triumphant “Chris gonna find Ray Charles.” To most Americans, 1492 means only one thing: “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” But that is only one part of the story of that year. A dynamic, extraordinary woman in a man’s world, Queen Isabella also set in motion two other events in 1492 that remain fulcrum moments for our times: the forced conversion or exile of Spain’s Jews and the culmination of
la reconquista
—the Reconquest—in which Spanish armies defeated the last remnant of the Moors, the North African Muslims who had invaded and then occupied the Iberian peninsula for centuries.

So why does that matter? The bombers who struck Madrid’s commuter railroads with murderous force on March 11, 2004, saw their attack as long-deferred vengeance for 1492. Their hope for an Islamic Reconquest of Spain was not some radical religious fantasy but has a | viii \

long, bitter history. It animates their jihad. And yes, some people’s historical memories are much longer than others.

History’s ripples also wash over current American political debates.

At a time when Hispanic Americans constitute the fastest-growing de-mographic group in America, the country found itself in the midst of a white-hot controversy that mushroomed over “broken borders,” immigration reform, and establishing English as America’s “official language.” In fact, Spanish has been spoken in a good part of America far longer than English has. No, that is not an argument for or against any official language in America. It is simply a historical reality, much overlooked.

The proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting squarely in the center of this story is religion, or more precisely, centuries of blood shed over beliefs. The degree to which religious conflict has driven America’s history is a central theme threading through this book. Several of its stories illuminate one of history’s most fundamental lessons: people fear what they don’t understand—or what is different. That fear moves in tandem with the arrogant superiority that comes from the notion of possessing the exclusive “truth.” This volatile mixture of fearful ignorance and righteous certitude allows one group to demonize and dehumanize another. And once you have accomplished that, it is much easier to hang people as heretics, burn them at the stake—or in ovens—and fly jetliners into their buildings. Could any story be more relevant to our times?

What ultimately ties all of these stories together is one of history’s pivotal themes—getting and keeping power. Whether it is the power of faith or force, the power of ideas or ideology, the power of propaganda or persuasion, these stories reveal how power has changed hands in American history. And all too often, this American history, | ix \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
to quote Thomas Hobbes from a slightly different context, is a tale of “continual fear and danger of violent death.”