Constitution, 177 184 Carrer The Confederation and th Spain, though recently an enemy of Britain, was openly unfriendly to the new fiepublic. i: controlled the mouth of the all-important Mississippi, down which the pioneers of Tennessee and Keniticky were forced to float their produce. In i784 Spain ciosed the river to American commerce, threatening the West with strangulation, Spain likewise claimed a large area north of the Gulf of Mexico, including a part of West Florida, granted to the United States by the British in 1783. At Natchez, on disputed soil, it held an important fort. It also schemed with the neighboring Indian grievously antagonized by the rapacious land policies of Georgia and North Carolina, to hem in the Ameri- cans east of the Appalachians. Spain and Bi ATLANTIC OCEAN a wo i Binh inuence Spaish influence teh for on US. so Map 9.3 Main Centers of Spanish and British Influence After 1783 This map shows graphically that the United States in 1783 achieved complete indepen- dence in name only, particularly in the area west of the Appalachian Mountains. Not until twenty years had passed did the new Republic, with the purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803, eliminate foreign influence from the east bank of the Mississippi River. Much of Florida remained in Spanish hands until the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 (see p. 265-267). Q interactive Map 1790 gether, radiating their influence out among resentfut Indian tribes, prevented America from exercising ef. fective contro! ver avout half of its total territory (see Map 9.3) Even France, America’s comrade-in-arms, cooled off now that it had humbled Britain. The French de. manded the repayment of money loaned during the war and restricted trade with their bustling West Indies and other ports. Pirates of the North African states, including the arrogant Dey of Algiers, were ravaging America’s Medi- terranean commerce and enslaving Yankee sailors. The British purchased protection for their own subjects, and as colonists the Americans had enjoyed this shield But as an independent nation, the United States was too weak to fight and too poor to bribe. A few Yankee shippers engaged in the Mediterranean trade with forged British protection papers, but not all were so bold or so lucky. John Jay, secretary for foreign affairs, derived some hollow satisfaction from these insults. He hoped they would at least humiliate the American people into framing a new government at home that would be strong enough to command respect abroad, IK ‘The Horrid Specter of Anarchy Economic storm clouds continued to loom in the mic: 1780s. The requisition system of raising money was breaking down; some of the states refused to pay any- thing, while complaining bitterly about the tyranny of “King Congress.” Interest on the public debt was piling up at home, and the nation’s credit was evaporating abroad. Individual states were getting out of hand. Quarrels over boundaries generated numerous minor pitched battles. Some of the states were levying duties on goods from their neighbors; New York, for example, taxed firewood from Connecticut and cabbages from New Jersey. A number of the states were again starting t0 grind out depreciated paper currency, and a few of them had passed laws sanctioning the semiworthless “rag money.” As a contemporary rhymester put Bankrupts their creditors with rage pursue; No stop, no mercy from the debtor crew. Analarming uprising, known as Shays's Rebellion, flared up in western Massachusetts in 1786. Imp‘ erished backcountry farmers, many of them Revol- tionary War veterans, were losing their farms through mortgage foreclosures and tax delinquencies. Led bySpanish Armada, thc i defeat oti undertake the colonization of the Nev. Wool ‘and ‘There is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia; the inland whereof is found of late to be so sweet and wholesome aclimate, so rich and abundant in silver mines, a better and richer country than Mexico itself. If it shall please the Almighty to stir up Her Majesty's heart to continue with : transporting one or two thousand of her people, she shall by God's assistance, in short space, increase her dominions, enrich her coffers, and reduce many pagans to the faith of Christ. The rout of the Spanish Armada marked the begin- ning of the end of Spanish imperial dreams, though Spain's New World empire would not fully collapse for three more centuries. Within a few decades, the Span- ish Netherlands (Holland) would secure its indepen- dence, and much of the Spanish Caribbean would slip from Spain's grasp. Bloated by Peruvian and Mexican silver and cockily convinced of its own invincibility, Spain had overreached itself, sowing the seeds of its own decline. England's victory over the Spanish Armada also marked a red-letter day in American history. It damp- ened Spain's fighting spirit and helped ensure Eng- land’s naval dominance in the North Antic. Itstarted England on its way to becoming master of the world oceans—a fact of enormous importance to the Ameri- can people. Indeed England now had manyofthe characteristics that Spain displayed on the eve of its colonizing adventure a century earlier: a strong, unified national state under a pop- ular monarch; a measure of religious Unity after a protracted struggle be- tween Protestants and Catholics; and @ vibrant sense of nationalism and national destiny. Awondrous flowering of the Eng- lish national spirit bloomed in the ‘Name, Reign ts Henry Vil, 1485-1509 Henry VILL, 1509-1547 Edward VI, 1547-1553 “Bloody” Mary, 1553-1558 Elizabeth I, 1558-1603 23 England Prepares for Coton Sir Walter Ralegh (Raleigh) (c. 1552-1616), 1588 A dashing courtier who was one of Queen Elizabeth's favorites for his wit, good looks, and courtly manners, he launched important colonizing failures in the New World. For this portrait, Raleigh presented himself as the queen's devoted servant, wearing her colors of black and white and her emblem of « pear! in his left ear. After seducing (and secretly marrying) one of Queen Elizabeth's maids of honor, he fell out of favor but continued his colonial ventures in the hopes of challenging Catholic Spain's dominance in the Americas. He was ultimately beheaded for treason. Table 2.1 The Tudor Rulers of England* Relation to America Cabot voyages, 1497, 1498 English Reformation began Strong Protestant tendencies Catholie reaction Break with Roman Catholic Church final; Drake; Spanish Armada defeated “See Table 3.1 p.35, fora continuation ofthe table, LL616 —Crapren25 America Moves to the City, 1865-1900 of Harvard College and embarked upon a lengthy reer of educational statesmanship. AS a sign of the sec- ularizing times, Eliot changed Harvard's motto from Christo et Feclesiae (For Christ and Church) to Veritas (Truth). Medical schools and medical science after the Civil War were prospering, Despite the enormous sale of pat ent medicines and so-called Indian remedies—"good for man or beast"—the new scientific gains were re flected in improved public health. Revolutionary dis- coveries abroad, such as those of the French scientist Louis Pasteur and the English physician Joseph Lister left their imprint on America." The popularity of heavy whiskers waned as the century ended: such hairy adornments were now coming to be regarded as germ, traps. As a result of new health-promoting precautions, including campaigns against public spitting, life ex pectancy at birth was measurably increased. One of America’s most brilliant intellectuals, the slight and sickly William James (1842-1910), served for thirty-five years on the Harvard faculty. Through his numerous writings, he made a deep mark on many fields. His Principles of Psychology (1890) helped to es tablish the modern discipiine of behavioral psychology. In The Will to Believe (1897) and Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he explored the philosophy and psychology of religion. In his most famous work, Prag- ‘matism (1907), he pronounced America’s greatest con- tribution to the history of philosophy the concept of pragmatism—that the truth of an idea was to be tested, above all, by its practical consequences (see “Makers of America: Pioneering Pragmatists,” pp, 618-619). IK The Appeal of the Press Books continued to be a major source of edification and enjoyment, for both juveniles and adults. Best sellers of the 1880s were generally old favorites like David Cop- perfield and Ivanhoe. Well-stocked public libraries—the poor person's university—were making encouraging progress, espe- cially in Boston and New York. The magnificent Library of Congress building, which opened its doors in 1897, provided thirteen acres of floor space in the largest and costliest edifice of its kind in the world. A new era was inaugurated by the generous gifts of Andrew Carnegie. This openhanded Scotsman, book-starved “From Pasteur came the word pasteurize; from Lister came Listerine. i IMANIY PAPER Fa Aen | The “Penny Press” ‘The Chicago Daily News was but one of several cheap, mass- circulation newspapers that flourished in the new urban environment of Gilded Age America. : HL ES in his youth, contributed $60 million for the construe tion of nearly 1700 public libraries all over the country, with an additional 750 scattered around the English speaking world from Great Britain to New Zealand. 8) 1900 there were about nine thousand free circulating libraries in America, each with at least three hundred books. Roaring newspaper presses, spurred by the i vention of the Linotype in 1885, more than kept pace with the demands of a word-hungry public. But the heavy investment in machinery and plant was a companied by a growing fear of offending adveries, and subscribers. Bare-knuckle editorials were, oa increasing degree, being supplanted by featureartcks and noncontroversial syndicated material. The day slashing journalistic giants like Horace Greeley v5 passing. Sensationalism, at the same time, was captutss the public taste. The semiliterate immigrant, comlies and Protestants alike. Acquainted with every president from Johnson to Harding, he employed his liberal sympathies to assist the American labor movement. By 1890 the variety-loving Americans could choose from 150 religious denominations, 2 of them brand- new, One was the band-playing Salvation Army, whose soldiers without swords invaded America from England in 1879 and established a beachhead on the country’s strect corners. Appealing frankly to the cown-and- outers, the boldly named Salvation Army did much practical good, especially with free soup. ‘The other important new faith was the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science), founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 after she had suffered much ill health. Preaching that the true practice of Christi heals sickness, she set forth her views in a book entitled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), which sold an amazing 400,000 copies before her death. Afertile field for converts was found in America’s hui ried, nerve-racked, and urbanized civilization, towhich Eddy held out the hope of relief from discords and dis- eases through prayer as taught by Christian Science. By the time she died in 1910, she had founded an influen- tial church that embraced several hundred thousand devoted worshipers. Urbanites also participated in a new kind of religious-affiliated organization, the Young Men's and Women’s Christian Associations. The YMCA and the YWCA, established in the United States before the Civil War, grew by leaps and bounds. Combining physical and other kinds of education with religious instruction, the “Y's” appeared in virtually every major ‘American city by the end of the nineteenth century. * Darwin Disrupts the Churches The old-time religion received many blows from mod- em trends, including a booming sale of books on comparative religion and on historical criticism as ap- plied to the Bible. Most unsettling of all were the writ ings of the English naturalist Charles Darwin. In lucid prose he set forth the sensational theory that higher forms of life had slowly evolved from lower forms, through a process of random biological mutation and adaptation. Though not the first scientist to propose an evo- uionary hypothesis, Darwin broke new ground with his idea of “natural selection.” Nature, in his view, The Impact of Darwin's ideas 611 blindly selected organisms for survival or death based on random, inheritable variations thai they happened (0 possess. Some traits conferred advantages in the struggle for life, and hence better odds of passing them along to offspring. By providing a material explana- tion for the evolutionary process, Darwin's theory ex plicitly rejected the “dogma of special creations,” which ascribed the design of each fixed species to divine agency. Darwin's radical ideas evoked the wrath of scien- tists and laymen alike. Many zoologists, like Harvard's Louis Agassiz, held fast to the old doctrine of “special creations.” By 1875, however, the majority of scientists in America and elsewhere had embraced the theory of organic evolution, though not all endorsed natural se- lection as its agent. Many preferred an alternative mechanism proposed earlier by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that traits acquired during the course of an individual's life could shape the future genetic development of a species. Lamarckians briefly tamed the unsettling Darwinian view of chance mutation and competitive inheritance, but Darwin's version would become scientific orthodoxy by the 1920s. Clergymen and theologians responded to Darwin's theory in several ways. At first most believers joined scientists in rejecting his ideas outright. After 1875, by which time most natural scientists had embraced evo- lution, the religious community split into two camps. A conservative minority stood firmly behind the Scrip- ture as the infallible Word of God, and they condemned what they thought was the “bestial hypothesis” of the Darwinians. Their rejection of scientific consensus