Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (12 page)

My Dear Brother,

You are carried into the Land of the Canadiens for your good. God has called you to glorify Him in that land. Your patience, your constancy, your Resignation under your vast Affliction, bring more glory to Him, than ye best Activity in any other Serviceableness. You visit Heaven with prayers, and are visited of Heaven with comfort, Our prayers unite with yours. You are continually and affectionately remembered in ye prayers of New England. The faithful, throughout ye country, remember you, publickly, privately, Secretly.

Williams was a minister in the colonial village of Deerfield in western Massachusetts. During a February 1704 raid by the French and their Indian allies, some forty-eight men, women, and children were massacred. The raid’s purpose was to take Williams hostage and exchange him for a French prisoner then being held in Boston by the British. Williams was eventually “redeemed” after negotiations. But his seven-year-old daughter, Eunice, remained with her Indian captors. To the great horror of her Puritan family, Eunice joined the Indians, embraced the Catholicism they had learned from the French Jesuits, and took a Mohawk husband.

Must Read:
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
by John Demos.

What was the Great Awakening?

Another, more benevolent outpouring of religious fervor swept the middle colonies, New England, and the rest of the colonies in the 1740s. A wave of fundamental, orthodox Protestantism that touched every colony, the Great Awakening was largely created by two powerful, charismatic evangelists who—without benefit of television crusades and religious theme parks—would have put the likes of such modern “televangelists” as Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Oral Roberts to shame.

American-born Jonathan Edwards, pastor of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts, became famous for his fire-and-brimstone, pit-of-hell sermons, which provoked near hysteria in his listeners. Edwards was responding to a softening of religious attitudes that had been occurring throughout the colonies. As the colonies prospered, attention had turned from observing the Sabbath to such earthly pursuits as real estate, slave trading, the rum business, and other profitable worldly enterprises. In the most famous of his sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards likened his sinning listeners to a spider hung over a flame. When his popularity and influence later waned, Edwards became a missionary to the Indians and was later appointed president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but died before taking office.

(Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr, would later attend the school that had been cofounded by Aaron Burr Sr. Among Burr’s classmates was a young Virginian, James Madison.)

George Whitefield, an Oxford-trained Anglican minister, was one of those influenced by Edwards. An orator of legendary ability, Whitefield attracted thousands to his outdoor meetings. His emotionally charged sermons chastised his listeners and then brought the promise of salvation. Even Benjamin Franklin, no model of piety, was moved by Whitefield and commented on how he transformed all who heard him. But Edwards and Whitefield’s influence went beyond religion. Their ardent followers tended to be lower or middle class, with little education or influence. The wealthy, powerful elite of America, its new ruling class, preferred traditional worship, and the differences between these factions threatened to turn radical.

Although the Awakening eventually ran its course, it did have a considerable long-term impact on America. In a practical sense, the split among the various factions encouraged the founding of several new colleges, including Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth. In political terms, the divisions the Awakening had created contributed to a new spirit of toleration and secularism. The old-guard Puritans no longer held complete control over church and political matters. New religious forces forced the loosening of ties between church and state throughout the colonies, a new secular spirit that would become embedded in the Constitution.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

A
NDREW
H
AMILTON,
in defense of Zenger, August 1735:

It is an old and wise caution, that when our neighbor’s house is on fire, we ought to take care of our own. For tho’, blessed be God, I live in a government where liberty is well understood, and freely enjoy’d; yet experience has shown us all that bad precedent in one government is soon set up for an authority in another; and therefore I cannot but think it mine, and every honest man’s duty that . . . we ought at the same time to be upon our guard against power, wherever we apprehend that it may affect ourselves or our fellow-subjects. . . .

I should think it my duty, if required, to go to the utmost part of the land, where my service could be of any use in assisting to quench the flame of prosecutions upon informations, set on foot by the government, to deprive a people of their right to remonstrating (and complaining too) of the arbitrary attempts of men in power.

What was John Peter Zenger on trial for?

In 1732, a wealthy landowner, Lewis Morris, founded the
New York Weekly Journal
. Like others before and since, the
Journal
contributed to a grand American newspaper tradition, not by reporting the news, but by axgrinding and mudslinging at a political opponent. In this case the target was New York governor William Cosby and his allies, among them the prominent merchant James DeLancey.

A German-born printer, John Peter Zenger, was hired to edit and produce the paper, but editorial policy was in the hands of a Morris ally, attorney James Alexander. The
Journal
’s front page usually offered a polemic on the right of the people to be critical of rulers. But what Governor Cosby found intolerable were the back-page “advertisements,” thinly veiled attacks in which the governor was likened to a monkey and his supporters to spaniels. Cosby shut down the paper, charged Zenger with seditious libel, and had him jailed for ten months.

In the trial that followed, Zenger’s attorney, the Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton (no relation to the more famous Alexander Hamilton), contended that the articles in question were truthful and therefore not libelous. Although the judges ruled Hamilton’s argument out of order, the jury was swayed. Hamilton’s defense carried the day and Zenger was acquitted. Of the jury, Hamilton later said, “You have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves that to which Nature and the Laws of our country have given us a Right—The Liberty—both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power by speaking and writing Truth.”

For a royal colony still forty years away from independence, that was pretty heady stuff. Though subjects of the English Crown, an American jury had demonstrated a stiff resolve that they did not feel duty-bound by English civil law. Just as important, Zenger’s trial and acquittal marked the first landmark in the tradition of a free press, a somewhat radical notion that became the law of the land as the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. There was a practical effect as well. In the immediate years ahead, that freedom would become an important weapon in the war of words that preceded the War for Independence.

AMERICAN VOICES

G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON,
describing his first night in the Wilderness in March 1748 (from
The Diaries of George Washington
):

We got our Supper and was lighted into a Room and not being so good a Woodsman as ye rest of my Company stripped myself very orderly and went into ye bed as they called it when to my Surprize I found it to be nothing but a Little Straw-Matted together without Sheets or anything else but only one thread Bear blanket with double its weight of Vermin such as Lice, Fleas &c. I was glad to get up (as soon as ye Light was carried from us) I put on my Cloths and lay as my Companions. Had we not been very tired I am sure we should not have slep’d much that night I made a Promise not to Sleep so from that time forward, chusing rather to sleep in ye open Air before a fire.

When they said, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite” in colonial America, they meant it, as seventeen-year-old George Washington discovered during his first foray into what was then the “wilderness” of colonial Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley. Besides showing what life was like in the “West” for young George, this passage also demonstrates that he, like many Americans of his day, was not well schooled in spelling and grammar, which often had tremendous local variations.

Who fought the French and Indian War?

No. It was not the French against the Indians.

At the end of the seventeenth century, North America was an extremely valuable piece of real estate, teeming with the beavers so prized by the hatmakers of Europe and claimed in part by the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish, as well as by the king of England. The people in Canada and America were pawns in a larger chess game. Between 1689 and the War for Independence, the major European powers engaged in a series of wars, usually fought under the guise of disputes over royal succession. In fact, they were wars of colonial expansion, fought for territory, raw materials, and new markets for exports.

In the first three of these, the colonists played supporting roles. Most of the fighting was limited to sporadic surprise attacks by one side or another, usually joined by their respective Indian allies. Colonial losses, especially in New England and Canada, were still heavy, and the costs of these wars created a serious inflation problem, particularly in Massachusetts, where paper money was printed for the first time to finance the fighting. By the time the first three wars had been played out, England and France were left standing as the two major contenders, and England had acquired a good portion of Canada from France. In the last of the four wars, however, these two rivals fought for absolute dominion over North America. And it was the French and Indian War that most shaped America’s destiny.

The conflict started inauspiciously enough for the Anglo-American cause when a young Virginian was dispatched by Virginia’s Governor Dinwiddie to the Pennsylvania backwoods in 1753 to tell the French that they were trespassing on Virginia’s territory. During an evening in which the French drank some brandy and the young Virginian did not, he learned that the French had no intentions of leaving the territory. With this important intelligence, the young Virginian spent a few difficult weeks returning to Virginia where he delivered his report. He wrote a small book,
The Journal of Major George Washington
, describing his adventure. All London soon agreed that the young author was a man of courage and intelligence.

Soon after, this inexperienced twenty-two-year-old son of a planter was made an officer and sent back with a militia force of 150 men and orders to build a fort. To his dismay, the new lieutenant colonel found the French already occupying a fort they called Duquesne (on the site of Pittsburgh). Though outnumbered, the young commander, along with some Indian allies, attacked a French party, took no prisoners, and hastily constructed a fort that was aptly named Necessity. Surrounded by French forces, he surrendered, and the French sent him packing back to Virginia, where he was still hailed a hero for taking on the sworn enemies of England. Without realizing, George Washington had ordered the shots that began the French and Indian War.

It was during that skirmish with the French that Washington had his first taste of battle and famously wrote his brother, Jack, “I can assure you. I heard Bullets whistling and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” When King George II heard this tale, he remarked, “He would not say so had he been used to hear many.”

How differently world history might have turned out had the French decided to do away with this green soldier when they had cause and opportunity! Instead, twenty-two years later, the French would again come to the aid of George Washington in his war of revolution against England.

Bad went to worse for the English and their colonial allies in the war’s early years. The 90,000 French in America, vastly outnumbered by 1.5 million English colonials, were better organized, were more experienced fighters, and had the most Indian allies. To the Indians, the French were the lesser of two evils; there were fewer French than English, and they seemed more interested in trading for beaver pelts than did the English, who were pushing the Indians off their lands. For many Indians, the war also provided an opportunity to repay years of English treachery. The Indians’ rage exploded in the viciousness of their attacks, which were met with equal savagery by the British. Scalp taking was a popular British tactic, and the British commander, General Edward Braddock, offered his Indian allies five pounds sterling for the scalp of a French soldier, one hundred pounds for that of a Jesuit missionary, and a grand prize of two hundred pounds for the hair of the powerful Delaware chieftain Shinngass.