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MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES
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Major Problems in
American History
MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES
GENERAL EDITOR
THOMAS G. PATERSON
Major Problems in
American History
Volume I: To 1877
Documents and Essays
FOURTH EDITION
EDITED BY
ELIZABETH COBBS
Texas A&M University
EDWARD J. BLUM
San Diego State University
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Contents
P RE F A C E xvi
ABOUT THE AUTHORS xi x
I N T R O D U C T I O N : H O W T O R E A D P R I M A R Y AN D
S E C O N D A R Y SO U R C E S xx
Chapter 1 Old Worlds Make New Ones 1

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT 2
DOCUMENTS 3
1. The Iroquois Describe the Beginning of the World, n.d. 3
2. Native Americans Pay Tithes to the Aztecs, 1541–42 5
3. European Map-Makers Remake the World, 1595 6
4. The Portuguese Lament Military Losses in Western Africa,
1448 6
5. Christopher Columbus Details His First Encounters with Native
People, 1493 8
6. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun Relates an Aztec Chronicler’s
Account of the Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs, 1519 9
7. An Englishman Discusses Trading with Indians on the Atlantic
Coast, 1584 10
8. English Artist John White Depicts Indian Land Use, 1619 13
ESSAYS 14
Neal Salisbury The Indians’ Old World 14
Joyce Appleby The Europeans’ New World 22
FURTHER READING 29
vi
CONTENTS vii
Chapter 2 Colonial Settlements and Conflicts, 1600–1690 30

DOCUMENTS 31
1. Edward Waterhouse, a British Official, Recounts an Indian
Attack on Early Virginia Settlement, 1622 32
2. Indentured Servant Richard Frethorne Laments His Condition
in Virginia, 1623 33
3. Puritan Leader John Winthrop Provides a Model of Christian
Charity, 1630 34
4. Sugar Planters Transform Barbados, 1647–1650 35
5. Anne Bradstreet Discusses Her Children in the Colonies,
1656 38
6. A French Missionary Describes the Iroquois, 1659–1660 39
7. George Alsop, a Resident of Maryland, Argues That Servants in
Maryland Profit from Life in the Colonies, 1666 41
8. Tituba, a Servant-Slave in Salem, Massachusetts,
Answers Questions About the Devil, 1692 43
ESSAYS 45
James H. Merrell The Indians’ New World 45
Rachel B. Herrmann Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial
Jamestown 54
FURTHER READING 61
Chapter 3 British Colonial Development, 1690–1770 62

DOCUMENTS 63
1. An Englishman Recounts His Travels into Western Africa, 1623 64
2. Virginia’s Statutes Illustrate the Declining Status of African
American Slaves, 1660–1705 64
3. Southern Planter William Byrd Describes His Views Toward
Learning and His Slaves, 1709–1710 67
4. Enslaved Workers Cultivate Tobacco, 1738 68
5. Dr. Alexander Hamilton Depicts the Material Acquisitions
of Northern Colonists, 1744 69
6. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a German Immigrant, Portrays the
Difficulties of Immigration, 1750 70
7. Samson Occom (Mohegan) Gives a Short Narrative of His Life,
1768 72
viii CONTENTS
8. Adam Smith Analyzes the British Colonies in Terms

of the Wealth of Nations, 1776 74
ESSAYS 76
David D. Hall Worlds of Wonder in the Northern Colonies 76
T. H. Breen Worlds of Goods in the Northern Colonies 87
FURTHER READING 95
Chapter 4 The American Revolution 96

DOCUMENTS 97
1. Congress Condemns the Stamp Act, 1765 98
2. Pamphleteer Thomas Paine Advocates the “Common Sense” of
Independence, 1776 99
3. Abigail and John Adams Debate Women’s Rights, 1776 102
4. Mohawk Leader Joseph Brant Commits the Loyalty of His
People to Britain, 1776 104
5. A New Song Inspires Revolutionaries, 1776 105
6. African Americans Petition for Freedom, 1777 106
7. General Washington Argues for Greater Military Funding by
Portraying the Plight of Soldiers at Valley Forge, 1778 107
8. Venezuela Declares Independence, 1810 108
ESSAYS 109
Christopher Paul Magra Maritime Dimensions of the American
Revolution 110
David Armitage The Declaration of Independence in World
Context 115
FURTHER READING 121
Chapter 5 From Confederation to Constitution 122

DOCUMENTS 123
1. The Articles of Confederation Stress the Rights of
States, 1781 124
2. Cato, an African American, Pleads for the Abolition
of Slavery in Pennsylvania, 1781 125
3.The Iroquois and the United States Make the Treaty of
Fort Stanwix, 1784 126
CONTENTS ix
4. Slaveholders in Virginia Argue Against the Abolition

of Slavery, 1784–1785 127
5. Thomas Jefferson Proposes the Protection of Religious
Freedom in Virginia, 1786 127
6. Daniel Shays and Followers Declare Their Intent to Protect
Themselves Against “Tyranny,” 1787 129
7. The Federalist Papers Illustrate the Advantages of Ratification
of the Constitution, 1787–1788 130
8. France Devises a New Republican Calendar, 1793 133
ESSAYS 133
Alfred F. Young The Pressure of the People on the Framers
of the Constitution 134
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman Making an American Umpire in the
Presence of European Empires 141
FURTHER READING 147
Chapter 6 Nation Among Nations 148

DOCUMENTS 149
1. A Spanish Soldier Describes the Comanche Destruction of the
San Saba Mission in Texas, 1758 150
2. Republican Thomas Jefferson Celebrates the Virtue of the
Yeoman Farmer, 1785 151
3. Judith Sargent Murray Argues for the “Equality of the Sexes,”
1790 151
4. Federalist Alexander Hamilton Envisions a Developed American
Economy, 1791 153
5. A Cartoonist Attacks the Degenerate French Over the XYZ
Affair, 1798 155
6. Thomas Jefferson Advances the Power of the States, 1798 155
7. Chief Justice John Marshall Argues for the Primacy of the
Federal Government, 1803 157
8. Thomas Jefferson’s Supporters Sing of His Victory,
ca. 1801 158
ESSAYS 160
Pekka Hämäläinen The Comanche Empire 160
David Waldstreicher The Making of American Nationalism 170
FURTHER READING 176
x CONTENTS
Chapter 7 Foreign Policy, Western Movement, and Indian

Removal 178
DOCUMENTS 179
1. President George Washington Warns Against “Entangling
Alliances,” 1796 180
2. William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Enters into
Diplomacy with Native People, 1806 181
3. Iroquois Chief Red Jacket Decries the Day When Whites
Arrived, 1805 184
4. William Cullen Bryant Satirizes the Embargo Act, 1808 186
5. Shawnee Chief Tecumseh Recounts the Misdeeds of Whites
and Calls for Indian Unity, 1810 187
6. A Newspaper Reports on the Burning of Washington, D.C.,
1814 189
7. President James Monroe Declares That European Powers May
Not Interfere in the Americas, 1823 190
8. Francis Chardon Bemoans the Destruction of the Arikaras and
Mandans by Smallpox, 1837 191
ESSAYS 195
Alan Taylor The War of 1812 as a Borderland War 196
Emily Conroy-Krutz International Missions and Tenuous
Anglo-American Relations 203
FURTHER READING 210
Chapter 8 Market and Transportation Revolutions 211

DOCUMENTS 212
1. Slave Charles Ball Mourns the Growth of Cotton Culture and
“Sale Down the River,” c. 1800 213
2. President John Quincy Adams Urges Internal Improvements,
1825 214
3. A Family in Illinois Struggles with Marketing Their Crops,
1831 215
4. Harriet Hanson Robinson, a “Lowell Girl,” Describes Her
Labor in a Textile Mill, 1831 216
5. Mary Graham Describes Life on a Commercializing Farm,
1835–1844 218
CONTENTS xi
6. Author Charles Dickens Describes Travel on an Early Railroad

Train, 1842 220
7. A Guidebook Instructs Women on the Role of Mother,
1845 221
8. A Northern Advertisement Sells “Southerner Rights Segars,”
1859 222
ESSAYS 223
Nancy F. Cott The Market Revolution and the Changes in
Women’s Work 223
Daniel Walker Howe The Changes Wrought by Cotton,
Transportation, and Communication 231
FURTHER READING 239
Chapter 9 Nationalism and Sectionalism 240

DOCUMENTS 241
1. A New Song Endeavors to Put Andrew Jackson
in the White House, c. 1820s 242
2. Vice President John C. Calhoun Argues That Tariffs
Disadvantage the South, 1828 243
3. A Mexican General Describes the Borderland, 1828,
1829 245
4. Senator Daniel Webster Lays Out His Nationalist Vision,
1830 247
5. President Andrew Jackson Condemns the Rights of
“Nullification” and Secession, 1832 249
6. Lieutenant-Colonel José Enrique de la Peña Defends Mexico’s
Actions Against the Texans, 1836 251
7. Michel Chevelier, a French Visitor, Marvels at the Pageantry of
Politics, 1839 252
8. Frederick Douglass Addresses Texas and Slavery While
Speaking in Ireland, 1846 253
ESSAYS 258
Sean Wilentz The Rise of Andrew Jackson, the Annexation of
Texas, and the Perils and Possibilities of Nationalism and
Sectionalism 258
Susan-Mary Grant Northerners Begin to See “the South” as the
Problem 267
FURTHER READING 278
xii CONTENTS
Chapter 10 Reform and Religion 280

DOCUMENTS 281
1. Peter Cartwright, a Methodist Itinerant Preacher, Marvels at the
Power of Religious Revivals, 1801 282
2. A Journalist Describes a City Prophet and His Attacks on
Women, 1835 283
3. Angelina Grimké Appeals to Christian Women to Oppose
Slavery, 1836 285
4. James McCune Smith Applauds the British and French for
Ending of Slavery, 1838 286
5. Reformer Dorothea Dix Depicts the Horrible Conditions
Endured by the Mentally Ill, 1843 287
6. Joseph Smith Records a Revelation on Plural Marriage, 1843 289
7. The Seneca Falls Convention Declares Women’s Rights, 1848 289
8. Former Slave Sojourner Truth Links Women’s Rights to
Antislavery, 1851 291
ESSAYS 292
Nell Irvin Painter Religion as Inhibiting and Liberating: The
Complicated Case of Sojourner Truth 292
Caleb McDaniel Slavery, Sex, and Transatlantic Abolitionism 298
FURTHER READING 305
Chapter 11 Commercial Development and Immigration 306

DOCUMENTS 307
1. Alexis de Tocqueville Marvels at the Mobile Northern Society,
1831 308
2. Essayist Orestes Brownson Condemns the Plight of “Wage
Slaves,” 1840 310
3. Gustof Unonius, a Swedish Immigrant, Reflects on Life in the
United States, 1841–1842 312
4. New Yorker George Templeton Strong Berates the Immigrants
in His Midst, 1838–1857 313
5. John L. O’Sullivan, a Democratic Newspaperman, Defines
“Manifest Destiny,” 1845 314
6. Commodore Matthew C. Perry Receives Instructions for His
Expedition to Japan, 1852 315
7. A Magazine Author Reflects Upon the Impact of Gold and Silver
from California and Elsewhere in the World, 1852 317
CONTENTS xiii
8. Irish Americans Sing About Their Struggles and Successes,

c. 1860s 318
ESSAYS 319
Sven Beckert Concentrating Capital and Power in New York
City 320
Edward Dolnick The Hard Quest for Quick Riches in
California 327
FURTHER READING 333
Chapter 12 Agriculture and Slavery in the South 335

DOCUMENTS 336
1. A North Carolina Law Prohibits Teaching Slaves to Read or
Write, 1831 337
2. Ferdinand L. Steel Records Daily Life as a Yeoman,
1838–1841 337
3. Cotton Planter Bennett Barrow Describes Life in Louisiana,
1838, 1839, 1841 339
4. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern Doctor, Theorizes About the
Peculiar Diseases of Slaves, 1851 342
5. A Virginia Slave Woman Articulates Her Distress to Her
Enslaved Husband, 1852 344
6. Southern Author Daniel Hundley Robinson Depicts the White
Yeoman Farmer, 1860 344
7. Harriet Jacobs Deplores Her Risks in Being a Female Slave,
1861 345
8. Southerner Mary Chestnut Describes Her Hatred of Slavery
from a White Woman’s View, 1861 346
ESSAYS 348
Anthony E. Kaye The Neighborhoods and Intimate Lives of
Slaves 348
Susan Eva O’Donovan How Slaves Transformed Jails 354
FURTHER READING 363
Chapter 13 Toward Civil War 364

DOCUMENTS 365
1. J. Stoddard Johnston Answers “What Is a Yankee,” 1850 366
2. Reviewers Offer Differing Opinions About Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
1852 367
xiv CONTENTS
3. Axalla John Hoole, a Southerner, Depicts “Bleeding Kansas,”

1856 369
4. Senator Charles Sumner Addresses the “Crime Against Kansas,”
1856 370
5. Chief Justice Roger Taney Determines the Legal Status of
Slaves, 1857 372
6. Republican William Seward Warns of an Irrepressible Conflict,
1858 374
7. James Henry Hammond Praises King Cotton, 1858 375
8. Feuille du Commerce Eulogizes John Brown, January 21,
1860 377
9. Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted Depicts the Economic
Costs of Slavery, 1861 378
ESSAYS 379
Bruce Levine Why Northerners Voted for Abraham
Lincoln 379
Brian Schoen How Cotton Wove Together a Secession
Coalition 386
FURTHER READING 394
Chapter 14 The Civil War 395

DOCUMENTS 396
1. A White Virginian Argues Against Secession, 1861 397
2. The Detroit Soldiers’ Aid Society President Calls on Women to
Assist the War Effort, 1861 398
3. Cherokee Declare Their Support for the Confederacy,
1861 399
4. Margaret Junkin Preston Describes Southern Suffering in Her
Diary, 1862 400
5. President Abraham Lincoln Orders the Execution of 39 Dakotas
Involved in the 1862 Minnesota War 401
6. James Henry Gooding, an African American Soldier, Pleads for
Equal Treatment, 1863 403
7. Tally Simpson, a Confederate Soldier, Recounts the Battle of
Gettysburg, 1863 404
8. Two Artistic Representation of Emancipation, 1863,
1864 406
9. Karl Marx Applauds Abraham Lincoln, 1864 407
CONTENTS xv
10. Liberian Secretary of State Hilary Johnson Responds to

the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, 1866 408
ESSAYS 409
Drew Gilpin Faust The Good Death in the Civil War 409
David Williams The Hard Freedom of the Civil War 414
FURTHER READING 422
Chapter 15 Reconstruction 423

DOCUMENTS 425
1. William Howard Day, an African American Minister, Salutes
the Nation and a Monument to Abraham Lincoln, 1865 425
2. A Southern Songwriter Opposes Reconstruction,
c. 1860s 427
3. Louisiana Black Codes Reinstate Provisions of the Slave Era,
1865 428
4. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens Demands a Radical
Reconstruction, 1867 429
5. Thomas Nast Depicts Contrasting Views of Reconstruction,
1866, 1869 431
6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Questions Abolitionist Support for
Female Enfranchisement, 1868 432
7. Charlotte Forten Reflects on Teaching Among Southern
African Americans, 1863 433
8. Lucy McMillan, a Former Slave in South Carolina, Testifies
About White Violence, 1871 435
9. Francis Miles Finch Mourns and Celebrates Civil War Soldiers
from the South and North, 1867 436
ESSAYS 438
Douglas A. Blackmon Slavery by Another Name: The
Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War
to World War II 438
Edward J. Blum Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion,
and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 443
FURTHER READING 452
Preface
History is a matter of interpretation. Individual scholars rescue particular stories

from the hubbub of human experience, analyze patterns, and offer arguments
about how these events reflected or reshaped human society at a given moment.
This means that other historians might select different stories, perceive different
patterns, and arrive at contrasting interpretations of the same time period or even
the same event. All scholars use evidence, but the choice and interpretation of
evidence is to some extent an expression of professional judgment. History is not
separate from historians.
The goal of Major Problems in American History is to place meat on this bare
bones description of how the study of the past “works.” Like most instructors,
we want students to learn and remember important facts, yet we also want to
make clear that historians sometimes disagree on what is important. And, even
when historians agree on which facts are noteworthy, they often disagree on
what a certain piece of evidence signifies. For example, scholars agree fifty-six
men signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but they debate why these
colonists felt compelled to take that dramatic step—and others did not.
The two volumes that comprise this book bring together primary docu-
ments and secondary sources on the major debates in American history. The pri-
mary sources give students evidence to work with. They represent a mix of the
familiar and unfamiliar. Certain documents are a must in any compilation for a
survey course because they had a powerful, widely noted impact on American
history, such as Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776) or President Roosevelt’s first
inaugural address (1933). We have also selected pieces that evoke the personal
experiences of individuals, such as letters, sermons, speeches, political cartoons,
poems, and memoirs. There are accounts from European explorers, pioneer wo-
men on the frontier, immigrant workers, soldiers, eyewitnesses to the terrors of
World War I, and children in rebellion against their parents during the 1960s.
These documents often show conflicting points of view, from the “bottom
up,” the “top down,” and various layers in the middle.
xvi
PREFACE xvii
The secondary sources in these volumes fulfill a different goal. They expose
students to basic historical debates about each broad period. Sometimes we focus
on classic debates, combining very recent essays with seasoned pieces by eminent
historians who set the terms of discussion for an entire generation or more.
Other times we have selected essays that do not disagree openly—but show
that young scholars are sometimes of different minds about the most revealing
“way in” to a subject. Our purpose is to make contrasts as clear as possible for
students who are just learning to distinguish interpretation from fact, and discern
argument within description. In addition, the essays often make direct reference
to the primary documents. This allows students to examine how the historian
uses primary documents—fairly, or not. The students, therefore, can debate the
use of sources and the differing historical conclusions to which they lead.
Volume I, prepared by Edward J. Blum in collaboration with Elizabeth
Cobbs, begins with the collision of cultures in the late fifteenth century and
ends in the Reconstruction of the United States. This volume examines how
new worlds were made when Europeans, western Africans, and Native Ameri-
cans interacted. It proceeds to the birth of the United States, its growth and de-
velopment, and ultimately its fracture during the Civil War. Some of the main
themes include: the making and unmaking of a society based on slavery; com-
mercial development that included the emergence of cities, interlocking net-
works of trade, and early industrialization; the push for rights and inclusion
from groups that achieved them and from groups that did not.
This book follows the same general format as other volumes in the Major
Problems in American History series. Each chapter begins with a short introduction
that orients the student. Following this, we include a section called “Questions
to Think About” to help students focus their reading of the subsequent material.
Next come eight to ten primary documents, followed by two essays that high-
light contrasting interpretations. Headnotes at the start of the document and es-
say sections help readers identify key themes and debates. These headnotes also
show how documents relate to each other, and how the essays differ in perspec-
tive. Each chapter concludes with a brief “Further Reading” section to tempt
readers into further research. In addition, at the start of the volume, we give
suggestions on how to read sources and critically analyze their content, points
of view, and implications. This introduction encourages students to draw their
own conclusions and use evidence to back up their reasoning.
New to the Fourth Edition

The fourth edition makes several changes to previous editions. We have re-
tained many documents and essays that reviewers told us worked well in their
survey courses, but each chapter has also been updated to reflect the latest scho-
larship and replace excerpts that instructors found difficult to use. The biggest
change is the shift to “America in the world.” We have attempted to include at
least one document in every chapter that reflects globalization: the ways that
the perspectives of people in other parts of the world profoundly affected the
United States. Documents and essays in the fourth edition highlight the
xviii PREFACE
connections between American and world trends, consistent with recent initia-
tives in our profession to internationalize U.S. history.
All content is also available in MindTap, Cengage Learning’s fully online,
highly personalized learning experience. In MindTap, students will practice cri-
tical thinking skills relevant to each primary and secondary source in every chap-
ter. Learn more at www.cengage.com.
Acknowledgments
Many friends and colleagues have contributed to these volumes. In the fourth edi-
tion we particularly wish to thank John Putman and Andrew Wiese from San
Diego State University; Brian Balogh of the University of Virginia; Drew Cayton
at Miami University of Ohio; Mona Domosh of Dartmouth University; Rebecca
Goetz of Rice University; Paul Harvey of the University of Colorado, Colorado
Springs; Eric Hinderaker at University of Utah; Anthony Kaye of Penn State
University; Bruce Levine of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Phil
Morgan of Johns Hopkins; Maria Montoya of Princeton University; Bruce
Schulman of Boston University; Jason Scott Smith of the University of New
Mexico; James Stewart of Macalester College; Matthew Avery Sutton of
Washington State University; and Ben Wright of the University of Texas at
Dallas. We also wish to thank our students, who inspire and teach us.
For this edition, we received detailed and extremely helpful outside reviews
from Marc Abrams, Penn State University; Robert Bionaz, Chicago State
University; David Brodnax, Trinity Christian College; Cara Converse, Moorpark
College; Todd Estes, Oakland University; Peter Kuryla, Belmont University;
Bernard Maegi, Normandale Community College; Todd Michney, Tulane
University; Stephen Rockenbach, Virginia State University; and Robert Schultz,
Illinois Wesleyan University. Thomas G. Paterson, the editor of the Major
Problems series, provided sound advice. We are obliged to our editor at Cengage
Learning, Alison Levy, for her kind encouragement, insightful recommendations,
and help in a pinch.
The life of the mind is exceptionally fulfilling, but it is happiest when set
within the life of the family. We wish to express our deep gratitude to our
families, especially our children, to whom this book is dedicated.
E. C.
E. J. B.
About the Authors
Elizabeth Cobbs, Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in

American History at Texas A&M University, has won literary
prizes for both history and fiction. Her books include American
Umpire (2013), Broken Promises: A Novel of the Civil War (2011),
All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s (2000), and
The Rich Neighbor Policy (1992). She has served on the jury for
the Pulitzer Prize in History and on the Historical Advisory Com-
mittee of the U.S. State Department. She has received awards and fellowships
from the Fulbright Commission, Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, Organization of American States, and other distinguished institutions.
She presently holds a Research Fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover In-
stitution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Her essays have appeared in the New
York Times, Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, China Daily News,
Washington Independent, San Diego Union, and Reuters. Her current projects in-
clude a history of women soldiers in World War I and a novel on the life of
Alexander Hamilton.
Edward J. Blum is professor of history at the San Diego State

University. A scholar of religion and race, he is the co-author of
The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America
(2012) and the author of W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007)
and Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Na-
tionalism, 1865–1898 (2005). An award-winning author and tea-
cher, Blum is currently at work on a project that explores issues
of radical evil during the era of the Civil War.
xix
Introduction: How to Read
Primary and Secondary Sources
College study encompasses a number of subjects. Some disciplines, such as

mathematics, are aimed at establishing indisputable proofs. Students learn meth-
ods to discover the path to a correct answer. History is different. Unlike math, it
is focused much more on interpretation. Historians study and analyze sources to
construct arguments about the past. They generally understand there is no
“right” answer, even if some arguments are more reasonable than others. They
search less for absolute truth than for understanding. A historical imagination is
useful in creating these interpretations. People in the past thought and acted dif-
ferently than we do today. Their views of science, religion, the place of women
and men—to cite only a few examples—were not the same as our views. When
historians create an argument about the past, they must imagine a world unlike
the one we now inhabit. They must use empathy and suspend judgment to de-
velop understanding.
The “problems” in U.S. history on which this text focuses, then, are differ-
ent from math “problems.” They are a series of issues in the American past that
might be addressed, discussed, and debated, but not necessarily solved. This text
provides readers with two tools to grapple with these problems: primary and sec-
ondary sources. A primary source is a piece of evidence that has survived from the
period. Primary sources may include pictures, artifacts, music, and written texts.
They have survived in a number of ways. Archaeologists uncover shards of pot-
tery and other interesting trash when digging up lost civilizations; ethnologists
transcribe campfire stories; and economists numerically measure past behavior;
and historians generally scrutinize surviving written sources. This volume by
and large uses written texts, from political tracts to private letters to cartoons.
Some of the documents, however, are transcriptions, that is, texts written by
someone who noted what another person said. Sometimes the texts are memoirs,
in which a person recounts an event they personally experienced long before.
xx
INTRODUCTION xxi
On these occasions, you will see two dates: one that tells the year of the events,
and a second in parentheses that tells the year in which the memoir was written.
As historians, we must treat primary sources with caution. First of all, we
must consider whether a source is really from the period under consideration.
You might occasionally read stories in the newspaper about paintings that had
been attributed to famous artists but were later discovered to be frauds by an
unknown copyist. When the fraud is discovered, the painting’s value plummets.
The same is true of a primary source. A letter alleged to have been written by
George Washington clearly could not reveal his innermost thoughts if it was
forged in 1910. But we should also be aware of the opposite: not all pieces of
evidence have survived to the present. We might ask if there is a bias in the like-
lihood of one point of view surviving and another being lost. The experiences of
slaveholders, for example, were more commonly written and published than
those of slaves. Because slaves (and others, such as Native Americans) were rarely
given the opportunity to publish their thoughts, they have bequeathed fewer
sources and some that survived as transcriptions. As essential as transcriptions are
in reconstructing the past, as historians we must be critical of them, too. Did the
people writing down the spoken words accurately set them to paper or did they
edit them or inject their own thoughts? In the case of memoirs, how much
might current events affect memories of the past?
Once we consider the validity of sources and understand that some were
more likely to survive than others, another reason to critique sources is that
they are not “objective” portrayals of the past. By nature, they are points of
view. Like anyone in a society, the writer of each primary source provides us
with his or her viewpoint. It gives us a window through which to view the
world, complete with the biases and blind spots of the author. When we read
about the American Revolution, for example, we will see many different per-
spectives on the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence. Those
who opposed independence saw events very differently from those who sup-
ported the movement. We have often read about advocates of independence
who saw the British government as a threat to American freedom. They believed
the thirteen colonies would be better off as one independent nation. Americans
for generations have viewed this as a truly heroic episode. But others at the time
did not think that independence was the correct course. A substantial minority
opposed independence because they felt more secure in the British Empire.
Countless members of Indian nations were suspicious of the intentions of the
American “patriots” and remained loyal to the king. African American slaves
were often leery of the aims of their patriot owners. The fact that people had
different viewpoints allows us to grapple with multiple perspectives on the past.
When you are reading the documents in this volume, we urge you to look
at each one critically. We are certain that these are valid sources, not forgeries, so
your job is to ponder the implications of each document. Consider both the
document and its author. Who wrote or spoke the words in the document?
What was his or her reason for expressing those thoughts? Given the various
authors’ background and motivations, what were their perspectives and potential
biases? How did they see the world differently from the way others did? And,
xxii INTRODUCTION
why do you think these different perspectives existed? Whose viewpoint do you
agree with most? Why?
It is not too much to say that the student of history is like a detective who
seeks clues to reveal the lives and events of the past.
In addition to primary sources, each chapter in this volume contains two
essays that represent what we call a secondary source. A secondary source is so
named because it is one step removed from the primary source. Secondary
sources are the work of historians who have conducted painstaking research in
primary documents. These essays represent some of their findings about the past.
You will notice that the writers do not necessarily reach similar conclusions as
one another. On the contrary, they illustrate differing opinions about which
events were important, why they occurred, and how they affect us today.
Hence secondary sources, like primary sources, do not provide us with un-
contestable “truth,” even when based on verifiable facts. Rather, historians’ con-
clusions vary just as your ideas about the documents might differ from those of
someone else in your class. And they differ for a number of reasons. First, inter-
pretations are influenced by the sources on which they depend. Occasionally, a
historian might uncover a cache of primary sources heretofore unknown to other
scholars, and these new sources might shed new light on a topic. Here again
historians operate like detectives.
Second and more important, however, historians carry their own perspec-
tives to the research. As they read secondary sources, analyze primary texts, and
imagine the past, historians may develop arguments that differ in emphasis from
those developed by others. As they combine their analyses with their own per-
spectives, they create an argument to explain the past. Personal point of view and
even society’s dominant point of view may influence their thinking. If analyzing
sources resembles working as a detective, writing history is similar to being a
judge who attempts to construct the most consistent argument from the sources
and information at hand. And historians can be sure that those who oppose their
viewpoints will analyze their use of sources and the logic of their argument.
Those who might disagree with them—and that might include you—will criti-
cize them if they make errors of fact or logic.
The essays were selected for this text in part because they reflect differing
conclusions. For example, why did the United States intervene in World War
I? For decades, historians have given us a number of answers. Some have said
that Woodrow Wilson foolishly broke with a tradition of non-entanglement
dating back to George Washington. Others say that Wilson wisely recognized
that a changed world required changes in America’s international role. Or what
are we to make of the 1950s? Some historians have celebrated this period as a
flowering of American prosperity, unity, and democracy. Others have noted
that the franchise applied only to whites and that McCarthyism suppressed free-
dom of conscience and personal non-conformity. Or how do we now make
sense of the Vietnam War, nearly fifty years after the first American troops
landed? Was it “a terrible mistake” that undermined confidence in the United
States in the words of one of its architects, or was it, in President Ronald
Reagan’s words, a “noble cause”?
INTRODUCTION xxiii
An important question left unanswered in all of these chapters is what you

think is the correct interpretation. In the end, you might not agree completely
with any of the essayists. In fact, you might wish to create your own argument
that uses primary sources found here and elsewhere and that accepts parts of one
essay and parts of another. Once you do this, you become a historian, a person
who attempts to analyze texts critically, and is personally engaged with the topic.
If that occurs, this volume is a success.
When we discuss the discipline of history with people, we typically get one
of two responses. The first is something like “I hated history in school.” The
other is something like “history was my favorite subject.” Invariably the people
who hated history cite all the boring facts that they had to memorize. Those
who loved history remember a teacher or professor who brought the subject
alive by imaginatively invoking the past.
As we have tried to indicate in this short overview, history is not about
memorizing boring facts but rather an active enterprise of thought and interpre-
tation. Historians are not rote learners. Instead, historians are detectives and
judges, people who investigate, interpret, and reimagine what happened. They
study the past to understand the world in which we live today. Facts are impor-
tant, but they are building blocks in a larger enterprise of interpretation.
In sum, our intent is to show how primary and secondary sources can aid
you in understanding and interpreting major problems in the American past.
We also aim to keep that group of people who hate history as small as possible
and enlarge that group who embrace history with passion. Frankly, the latter are
more fun.
CHAPTER 1
Old Worlds Make New Ones
Tisquantum, a member of the Patuxet nation, lived a life that exemplifies the intricate
connections among native peoples, European colonists, systems of labor, and new move-
ments of people, languages, goods, and microbes. In 1605, he was kidnapped by an En-
glishman who was exploring the coasts of Canada and New England and was carried to
England. There, he learned the English language. He eventually returned to America on
another voyage of exploration in 1614, and was kidnapped again and taken to southern
Spain. His abductors intended to sell him into slavery, but he was rescued by Catholic
friars, with whom he lived until 1618. He returned once again to the New England coast,
only to discover that his entire nation had been destroyed by disease some years before.
Shortly after his return, he met a group of English colonists who called themselves Pilgrims;
they were astounded when he spoke to them in English. He befriended the Pilgrims and
taught them how to survive in the American wilderness—he was a participant in the first
“thanksgiving”—and he became their trading partner. In late 1622, Tisquantum, whom
we know today as Squanto, contracted what the English called “Indian fever” and died.
Tisquantum’s life, as remarkable as it was, illustrates many of the experiences of native
people following contact with Europeans: travel, disease, war, enslavement, cultural ex-
change, and trade.
Tisquantum lived in a changing world, just as western Europeans and western Afri-
cans of the time did. Never static or uniform, these three broad cultures—Native Ameri-
can, western European, and western African—had profound internal differences that
shifted over time. The Aztec empire, located in what is today Mexico, was characterized
by its military power. It was at the peak of its strength when its people first encountered
Europeans. The English, alternatively, were primarily rural, occupied an extraordinarily
small piece of land, and were not only weak on the world stage, but also among Euro-
pean peoples.
Beginning with the landfall of Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1492, the
course of world history changed dramatically. During the centuries that followed, people
from Europe, the Americas, and Africa together would create a “new world.” The trade
for West African slaves by Portuguese explorers predated Columbus’s voyages, and Afri-
cans would play a dynamic role in this new world. This creation involved both an interac-
tion between peoples of striking differences and a brutality of remarkable proportions.
1
2 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Perhaps at no other time did people with such different worldviews and social practices meet.
Indians, West Africans, and Europeans differed not only in perceptions of physical appear-
ance but also in such matters as work roles between women and men, notions of private
property, religious belief and organizations, and governmental structures. Some of the new
arrivals simply observed these differences, whereas others used them to justify conflict and
savagery.
The earliest European explorers were interested in gaining riches in the Americas
and from Africa. They were concerned with carrying their Christian faiths too. Once
they realized the abundance of wealth that the Americas offered and the absence of Chris-
tianity, the Europeans sought to amass the wealth and convert religiously the Native
Americans. Spanish conquistadors, for example, conquered the Aztec empire in 1519
and gained untold riches from it. Catholic priests and friars set about missionizing the
local people. Soon, native people found themselves enslaved to provide labor for burgeon-
ing mines and sometimes forced to bow to new gods. Between 1545 and 1660, over
seven million pounds of silver were extracted from American lands by slaves for the Span-
ish empire. As other European states recognized the economic possibilities, they too
searched for land, slaves, and riches. France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and England
all attempted to build empires. These empires came into conflict with one another and
in contact with indigenous peoples. This contact between Americans, Africans, and Eur-
opeans often resulted in conflict and war. The results, whether peaceably or forcefully,
were always dramatic change.
Perhaps even more important than overt conflict was a mysterious and hidden ex-
change of disease. As native people were exposed to an array of diseases, ranging from
smallpox to influenza, with which they had had little prior contact, they suffered epidemics
that weakened their societies and therefore their ability to contest additional European in-
cursions. Like Squanto, the native people became traders, but they also became slaves and
victims of strange, new diseases. Their home, in effect, had become a new world for them as
well as for western Europeans and Africans.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT

Were encounters among Native Americans, western Europeans, and western
Africans defined primarily by contact, confusion, or conquest? Was the first
encounter a break from older interactions or was it part of general interactions
among different people groups? In what ways did Europeans of different
nationalities treat Indians? What differences did Europeans focus upon be-
tween themselves, Indians, and western Africans? What role did violence
play in creating the new world? Should humans be held accountable for the
activities of nonhumans, such as in the case of microbes that lead to disease
and death?
OLD WORLDS MAKE NEW ONES 3
DOCUMENTS
The initial interactions among Indians, Africans, and Europeans involved a
strange combination of terror and wonder for all those involved. Before Eur-
opeans arrived, Native American societies had been in significant flux. Docu-
ment 1 is an origins tale from the Iroquois, where they relate how they were
first made as a people. Pay attention to how this narrative is similar to and di-
vergent from other creation stories with which you are familiar. Document 2
depicts how the Aztecs demanded and received gifts, such as feathers, clothing,
and precious metals, from local peoples they had subjugated. Engagement with
North and South America transformed how Europeans viewed the world and
themselves. An image of the innovative mapmaker Gerardus Mercator is docu-
ment 3. In this case, European engagement with Africa and the Americas not
only compelled new visual renderings of maps and globes, but also signaled the
ability of humans to be larger than the globe itself—to stand symbolically
where only God had before. Decades before Columbus sailed, a Portuguese
writer (document 4) chronicles one of the first expeditions to obtain slaves from
West Africa. In document 5, Christopher Columbus recounts his first meeting
with the people in the Caribbean and his sense of the economic possibility of
the Indies. In its description of the Indians, his letter betrays an odd blending of
tenderness and a brutal assessment of their potential uses. In document 6, a Spanish
priest, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, describes the conquest of the Aztecs by
Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Economic and material trade was routine among
the various groups, and document 7 details the give-and-take of trading.
Document 8 is an engraving based on a drawing from the 1580s. It shows a
Secotan village on the outer banks of North Carolina. Notice how the Secotan
organized space for housing, agriculture, and religious ceremonies.
1. The Iroquois Describe the Beginning of the World, n.d.

In the Sky-World there was a man who had a wife, and the wife was expecting a
child. The woman became hungry for all kinds of strange delicacies, as women
do when they are with child. She kept her husband busy almost to distraction
finding delicious things for her to eat….
The woman decided that she wanted some bark from one of the roots of the
Great Tree—perhaps as a food or as a medicine, we don’t know. She told her
husband this. He didn’t like the idea. He knew it was wrong. But she insisted,
and he gave in. So he dug a hole among the roots of this great sky tree, and he
bared some of its roots. But the floor of the Sky-World wasn’t very thick, and he
broke a hole through it. He was terrified, for he had never expected to find
empty space underneath the world.
From “The World on the Turtle’s Back,” as seen in The Great Tree and the Longhouse: The Culture of the Iroquois by
Hazel W. Hertzberg.
But his wife was filled with curiosity. He wouldn’t get any of the roots for
her, so she set out to do it herself. She bent over and she looked down, and she
saw the ocean far below. She leaned down and stuck her head through the hole
and looked all around. No one knows just what happened next. Some say she
slipped. Some say that her husband, fed up with all the demands she had made
on him, pushed her.
So she fell through the hole. As she fell, she frantically grabbed at its
edges, but her hands slipped. However, between her fingers there clung bits
of things that were growing on the floor of the Sky-World and bits of the root
tips of the Great Tree. And so she began to fall toward the great ocean far
below….
The great sea turtle came and agreed to receive her on his back. The birds
placed her gently on the shell of the turtle, and now the turtle floated about on
the huge ocean with the woman safely on his back….
One day… a man appeared. No one knows for sure who this man was. He
had something to do with the gods above. Perhaps he was the West Wind. As
the girl looked at him, she was filled with terror, and amazement, and warmth,
and she fainted dead away. As she lay on the ground, the man reached into his
quiver, and he took out two arrows, one sharp and one blunt, and he laid them
across the body of the girl, and quietly went away.
When the girl awoke from her faint, she and her mother continued to walk
around the earth. After a while, they knew that the girl was to bear a child. They
did not know it, but the girl was to bear twins.
Within the girl’s body, the twins began to argue and quarrel with one an-
other. There could be no peace between them.
These two brothers, as they grew up, represented two ways of the world
which are in all people. The Indians did not call these the right and the wrong.
They called them the straight mind and the crooked mind, the upright man and
the devious man, the right and the left.
The twins had creative powers. They took clay and modeled it into animals,
and they gave these animals life. And in this they contended with one another.
The right-handed twin made the deer, and the left-handed twin made the
mountain lion which kills the deer. But the right-handed twin knew there
would always be more deer than mountain lions.
And the right-handed twin made berries and fruits of other kinds for his
creatures to live on. The left-handed twin made briars and poison ivy, and the
poisonous plants like the baneberry and the dogberry, and the suicide root with
which people kill themselves when they go out of their minds. And the left-
handed twin made medicines, for good and for evil, for doctoring and for
witchcraft.
2. Native Americans Pay Tithes to the

Aztecs, 1541–42
The Art Archive/National Anthropological Museum Mexico/Gianni Dagli Orti
Tithes paid to Aztecs by the peoples they conquered; feathers, jade, bags of cochineal,
from modern copy of Codex Mendoza, c. 1541-52. National Anthropological
Museum Mexico.
3. European Map-Makers Remake the World, 1595
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZ62-110344]
Gerhard Mercator, half-length portrait, facing left, holding compass and globe, at age 62.
Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C.
4. The Portuguese Lament Military Losses

in Western Africa, 1448
… And when the ship had been provisioned, they made their voyage straight to
Cape Verde, whereat in the past year they had captured the two Guineas of
whom we have spoken in another place, and thence they passed on to the Cape
of Masts….
“Of how Alvaro Fernandez returned again to the land of the Negroes…,” in Documents Illustrative of the History of the
Slave Trade to America, ed., Elizabeth Donnan (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 1: 39–41.
And so journeying along the sea coast, in a few days they went on shore
again, and came upon a village, and its inhabitants issued forth like men who
showed they had a will to defend their houses, and among them came one
armed with a good buckler and an assegai [spear] in his hand. And Alvaro Fernandez
seeing him, and judging him to be the leader of the band, went stoutly at him, and
gave him such a great wound with his lance that he fell down dead, and then he
took from him his shield and assegai; and these he brought home to the Infant along
with some other things, as will be related further on.
Now the Guineas, perceiving that man to be dead, paused from their fighting,
and it appeared to our men to be neither the time nor the place to withdraw them
from that fear. But rather they returned to their ship and on the next day landed a
little way distant from there, where they espied some of the wives of those Guineas
walking. And it seemeth that they were going nigh to a creek collecting shell-fish,
and they captured one of them, who would be as much as thirty years of age, with a
son of hers who would be of about two, and also a young girl of fourteen years, who
had well-formed limbs and also a favorable presence for a Guinea; but the strength of
the woman was much to be marvelled at, for not one of the three men who came
upon her but would have had a great labour in attempting to get her to the boat.
And so one of our men, seeing the delay they were making, during which it might
be that some of the dwellers of the land would come upon them, conceived it well
to take her son from her and to carry him to the boat; and love of the child com-
pelled the mother to follow after it, without great pressure on the part of the two
who were bringing her. From this place they went on further for a certain distance
until they lighted upon a river, into which they entered with the boat, and in
some houses that they found they captured a woman, and after they had brought
her to the caravel, they returned once more to the river, intending to journey
higher up in order to try and make some good booty. And as they were pursuing
their voyage thus, there came upon them four or five boats of Guineas prepared
like men who would defend their land, and our men in the boat were not desir-
ous to try a combat with them, seeing the great advantage their enemies had,
and especially because they feared the great peril that lay in the poison with
which they shot … their boat came so near that one of those Guineas made a
shot at it and happened to hit Alvaro Fernandez with an arrow in the leg. But
since he had already been warned of its poison, he drew out that arrow very
quickly and had the wound washed with urine and olive oil, and then anointed
it very well … and it pleased God that it availed him, although his health was in
very troublous case, for during certain days he was in the very act of passing
away from life. The others on the caravel, although they saw their captain thus
wounded, desisted not from voyaging forward along that coast until they arrived
at a narrow strip of sand stretching in front of a great bay, and here they put out
their boat and went inside to see what kind of land they would find; and when
they were in sight of the beach they saw coming toward them full 120 Guineas,
some with shields and assegais, others with bows. And as soon as they came near
the water these began to play and dance like men far removed from any sorrow;
but our men in the boat, wishful to escape from the invitation to that festival,
returned to their ship.
5. Christopher Columbus Details His First Encounters

with Native People, 1493
Sir,
As I know that you will have pleasure of the great victory which our Lord
hath given me in my voyage, I write you this, by which you shall know that in
[thirty-three] days I passed over to the Indies with the fleet which the most
illustrious King and Queen, our Lords, gave me: where I found very many
islands peopled with inhabitants beyond number. And, of them all, I have
taken possession for their Highnesses…. Spañola is a marvel; the mountains
and hills, and plains, and fields, and land, so beautiful and rich for planting
and sowing, for breeding cattle of all sorts, for building of towns and villages.
There could be no believing, without seeing, such harbours as are here, as well
as the many and great rivers, and excellent waters, most of which contain gold.
In the trees and fruits and plants, there are great differences from those of
Juana [Cuba]. In [La Spañola], there are many spiceries, and great mines of
gold and other metals. The people of this island, and of all the others that
I have found and seen, or not seen, all go naked, men and women, just as
their mothers bring them forth; although some women cover a single place
with the leaf of a plant, or a cotton something which they make for that pur-
pose. They have no iron or steel, nor any weapons; nor are they fit thereunto;
not because they be not a well-formed people and of fair stature, but that they
are most wondrously timorous. They have no other weapons than the stems of
reeds in their seeding state, on the end of which they fix little sharpened
stakes. Even these, they dare not use…. It is true that since they have become
more assured, and are losing that terror, they are artless and generous with
what they have, to such a degree as no one would believe but him who had
seen it. Of anything they have, if it be asked for, they never say no, but do
rather invite the person to accept it, and show as much lovingness as though
they would give their hearts. And whether it be a thing of value, or one of
little worth, they are straightways content with whatsoever trifle of whatsoever
kind may be given them in return for it…. I gave gratuitously a thousand use-
ful things that I carried, in order that they may conceive affection, and further-
more may be made Christians; for they are inclined to the love and service of
their Highnesses and of all the Castilian nation, and they strive to combine in
giving us things which they have in abundance, and of which we are in need.
And they knew no sect, nor idolatry; save that they all believe that power and
goodness are in the sky, and they believed very firmly that I, with these ships
and crew, came from the sky; and in such opinion they received me at every
place where I landed…. They are men of very subtle wit, who navigate all
those seas, and who give a marvellously good account of everything…. As
Spanish Letter of Columbus to Luis de Sant’ Angel, Escribano de Racion of the Kingdom of Aragon, Dated 15 February 1493,
Reprinted in Facsimile, Translated and Edited from the Unique Copy of the Original Edition (London: 1891), 22–27. (Translator
unknown; reprinted in 1891 from a copy in the possession of Bernard Quaritch.) This document can also be found in
America Firsthand, ed. Robert Marcus and David Burner (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Bedford Books, 1989), 3–8.
I have already said, they are the most timorous creatures there are in the
world, so that the men who remain there are alone sufficient to destroy all
that land, and the island is without personal danger for them if they know
how to behave themselves. It seems to me that in all those islands, the men
are all content with a single wife; and to their chief or king they give as
many as twenty. The women, it appears to me, do more work than the
men. Nor have I been able to learn whether they held personal property, for
it seemed to me that whatever one had, they all took share of, especially of
eatable things. Down to the present, I have not found in those islands any
monstrous men, as many expected, but on the contrary all the people are
very comely; nor are they black like those in Guinea, but have flowing hair;
and they are not begotten where there is an excessive violence of the rays of
the sun…. Since thus our Redeemer has given to our most illustrious King
and Queen, and to their famous kingdoms, this victory in so high a matter,
Christendom should take gladness therein and make great festivals, and give
solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity for the great exaltation they shall have by
the conversion of so many peoples to our holy faith; and next for the temporal
benefit which will bring hither refreshment and profit, not only to Spain, but
to all Christians. This briefly, in accordance with the facts. Dated, on the cara-
vel, off the Canary Islands, the 15 February of the year 1493.
At your command,
THE ADMIRAL.
6. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun Relates an Aztec Chronicler’s

Account of the Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs, 1519
[As Cortés and his army approached Tenochtitlán, the people of the city] rose in
tumult, alarmed as if by an earthquake, as if there were a constant reeling of the
face of the earth.
Shocked, terrified, Moctezuma himself wept in the distress he felt for his
city. Everyone was in terror; everyone was astounded, afflicted. Many huddled
in groups, wept in foreboding for their own fates and those of their friends.
Others, dejected, hung their heads. Some groups exchanged tearful greetings;
others tried mutual encouragement. Fathers would run their hands over their
small boys’ hair and, smoothing it, say, “Woe, my beloved sons! How can
what we fear be happening in your time?” Mothers, too: “My beloved sons,
how can you live through what is in store for you?” …
The iron of [the Spaniards’] lances … glistened from afar; the shimmer of
their swords was as of a sinuous water course. Their iron breast and back pieces,
their helmets clanked. Some came completely encased in iron—as if turned to
iron…. And ahead of them … ran their dogs, panting, with foam continually
dripping from their muzzles….
From an anonymous Aztec chronicler in Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, General History of Things in New Spain (1582).
Moctezuma’s own property was then brought out … precious things

like necklaces with pendants, arm bands tufted with quetzal feathers, golden arm
bands, bracelets, golden anklets with shells, rulers’ turquoise diadems, turquoise
nose rods; no end of treasure. They took all, seized everything for themselves …
[In 1520, the Spanish occupied Tenochtitlán, took Moctezuma hostage, and
finally strangled him. Then] they charged the crowd with their iron lances and
hacked us with their iron swords. They slashed the backs of some…. They hacked
at the shoulders of others, splitting their bodies open…. The blood of the young
warriors ran like water; it gathered in pools…. And the Spaniards began to hunt
them out of the administrative buildings, dragging out and killing anyone they
could find … even starting to take those buildings to pieces as they searched.…
[Later] there came a great sickness, a pestilence, the smallpox. It … spread
over the people with great destruction of men. It caused great misery…. The
brave Mexican warriors were indeed weakened by it. It was after all this had
happened that the Spaniards came back.
7. An Englishman Discusses Trading with Indians

on the Atlantic Coast, 1584
After thankes given to God for our safe arrivall thither, we manned our boats,
and went to view the land next adjoyning, and “to take possession of the same,
in the right of the Queenes most excellent Majestie, as rightfull Queene, and
Princesse of the same, and after delivered the same over to your use, according
to her Majesties grant, and letters patents, under her Highnesse great Seale.…
We remained by the side of this Island two whole dayes before we saw any
people of the Countrey: the third day we espied one small boate rowing
towardes us having in it three persons: this boat came to the Island side, foure
harquebuz-shot from our shippes, and there two of the people remaining, the
third came along the shoreside towards us, and wee being then all within boord,
he walked up and downe upon the point of the land next unto us: then the
Master and the Pilot of the Admirall, Simon Ferdinando, and the Captaine Philip
Amadas, my selfe, and others rowed to the land, whose comming this fellow
attended, never making any shewe of feare or doubt. And after he had spoken
of many things not understood by us, we brought him with his owne good lik-
ing, aboord the ships, and gave him a shirt, a hat & some other things, and made
him taste of our wine, and our meat, which he liked very wel: and after having
viewed both barks, he departed, and went to his owne boat againe, which hee
had left in a little Cove or Creeke adjoyning: assoone as hee was two bow shoot
into the water, he fell to fishing, and in lesse then halfe an houre, he had laden
his boate as deepe, as it could swimme, with which hee came againe to the point
of the lande, and there he devided his fish into two parts, pointing one part to
Richard Hakluyt, The Portable Hakluyt’s Voyages: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English
Nation (New York: Viking, [1967, 1965]).
the ship, and the other to the pinnesse: which, after he had (as much as he
might) requited the former benefites received, departed out of our sight.
The next day there came unto us divers boates, and in one of them the
Kings brother, accompanied with fortie or fiftie men, very handsome and goodly
people, and in their behaviour as mannerly and civill as any of Europe. His name
was Granganimeo, and the king is called Wingina, the countrey Wingandacoa,
and now by her Majestie Virginia.… When he came to the place, his servants
spread a long matte upon the ground, on which he sate downe, and at the other
ende of the matte foure others of his companie did the like, the rest of his men
stood round about him, somewhat a farre off: when we came to the shore to
him with our weapons, hee never mooved from his place, nor any of the other
foure, nor never mistrusted any harme to be offred from us, but sitting still he
beckoned us to come and sit by him, which we performed: and being set hee
made all signes of joy and welcome, striking on his head and his breast and after-
wardes on ours, to shewe wee were all one, smiling and making shewe the best
he could of all love, and familiaritie. After hee had made a long speech unto us,
wee presented him with divers things, which hee received very joyfully, and
thankefully. None of the company durst speake one worde all the time: onely
the foure which were at the other ende, spake one in the others eare very softly.
The King is greatly obeyed, and his brothers and children reverenced: the
King himselfe in person was at our being there, sore wounded in a fight which
hee had with the King of the next countrey, called Wingina, and was shot in
two places through the body, and once cleane through the thigh, but yet he
recovered: by reason whereof and for that hee lay at the chiefe towne of the
countrey, being sixe dayes journey off, we saw him not at all.
After we had presented this his brother with such things as we thought he
liked, wee likewise gave somewhat to the other that sat with him on the
matte: but presently he arose and tooke all from them and put it into his
owne basket, making signes and tokens, that all things ought to bee delivered
unto him, and the rest were but his servants, and followers. A day or two after
this, we fell to trading with them, exchanging some things that we had, for
Chamoys, Buffe, and Deere skinnes: when we shewed him all our packet of
merchandize, of all things that he sawe, a bright tinne dish most pleased him,
which hee presently tooke up and clapt it before his breast, and after made a
hole in the brimme thereof and hung it about his necke, making signes that it
would defende him against his enemies arrowes: for those people maintaine a
deadly and terrible warre, with the people and King adjoyning. We exchanged
our tinne dish for twentie skinnes, woorth twentie Crownes, or twentie
Nobles: and a copper kettle for fiftie skins woorth fifty Crownes. They offered
us good exchange for our hatchets, and axes, and for knives, and would have
given any thing for swordes: but we would not depart with any. After two or
three dayes the Kings brother came aboord the shippes, and dranke wine, and
eat of our meat and of our bread, and liked exceedingly thereof: and after a
few dayes over passed, he brought his wife with him to the ships, his daughter
and two or three children: his wife was very well favoured, of meane stature,
and very bash full: shee had on her backe a long cloake of leather, with the
furre side next to her body, and before her a piece of the same: about her
forehead shee had a bande of white Corall, and so had her husband many times:
in her eares shee had bracelets of pearles hanging downe to her middle, (whereof
we delivered your worship a little bracelet) and those were of the bignes of good
pease. The rest of her women of the better sort had pendants of copper hanging in
either eare, and some of the children of the kings brother and other noble men,
have five or sixe in either eare: he himselfe had upon his head a broad plate of
golde, or copper, for being unpolished we knew not what mettal it should be,
neither would he by any meanes suffer us to take it off his head, but feeling it, it
would bow very easily. His apparell was as his wives, onely the women weare
their haire long on both sides, and the men but on one. They are of colour
yellowish, and their haire black for the most part, and yet we saw children that
had very fine aburne, and chestnut coloured haire.…
He was very just of his promise: for many times we delivered him mer-
chandize upon his word, but ever he came within the day and performed his
promise. He sent us every day a brase or two of fat Bucks, Conies, Hares, Fish
the best of the world. He sent us divers kindes of fruites, Melons, Walnuts,
Cucumbers, Gourdes, Pease, and divers rootes, and fruites very excellent
good, and of their Countrey corne, which is very white, faire and well tasted,
and groweth three times in five moneths: in May they sow, in July they reape,
in June they sow, in August they reape: in July they sow, in September they
reape: onely they cast the corne into the ground, breaking a little of the soft
turfe with a wodden mattock, or pickeaxe: our selves prooved the soile, and
put some of our Pease in the ground, and in tenne dayes they were of four-
teene ynches high: they have also Beanes very faire of divers colours and won-
derfull plentie: some growing naturally, and some in their gardens, and so have
they both wheat and oates.…
We were entertained with all love and kindnesse, and with as much bountie
(after their maner) as they could possibly devise. We found the people most gen-
tle, loving, and faithful, voide of all guile and treason, and such as live after the
maner of the golden age. The people onely care howe to defend themselves
from the cold in their short winter, and to feed themselves with such meat as
the soile affoordeth: there meate is very well sodden and they make broth very
sweet and savorie: their vessels are earthen pots, very large, white and sweete,
their dishes are wodden platters of sweet timber: within the place where they
feede was their lodging, and within that their Idoll, which they worship, of
whome they speake incredible things.…
They wondred marvelously when we were amongst them at the whitenes of
our skins, ever coveting to touch our breasts, and to view the same. Besides they
had our ships in marvelous admiration, & all things els were so strange unto
them, as it appeared that none of them had ever seene the like. When we dis-
charged any piece, were it but an hargubuz, they would tremble thereat for very
feare, and for the strangenesse of the same: for the weapons which themselves
use are bowes and arrowes: the arrowes are but of small canes, headed with a
sharpe shell or tooth of a fish sufficient ynough to kill a naked man. Their
swordes be of wood hardened: likewise they use wooden breast plates for their
defence. They have besides a kinde of club, in the end whereof they fasten the
sharpe hornes of a stagge, or other beast. When they goe to warres they cary
about with them their idol, of whom they aske counsel, as the Romans were
woont of the Oracle of Apollo. They sing songs as they march towardes the
battell in stead of drummes and trumpets: their warres are very cruell and bloody,
by reason whereof, and of their civill dissentions which have happened of late
yeeres amongst them, the people are marvelously wasted, and in some places
the countrey left desolate.…
And so contenting our selves with this service at this time, which wee hope
hereafter to inlarge, as occasion and assistance shalbe given, we resolved to leave
the countrey, and to apply our selves to returne for England, which we did ac-
cordingly, and arrived safely in the West of England about the middest of
September.
We brought home also two of the Savages being lustie men, whose names
were Wanchese and Manteo.
8. English Artist John White Depicts Indian

Land Use, 1619
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZC4-5267]
Algonquian village on the Pamlico River estuary showing

Native structures, agriculture, and spiritual life.
ESSAYS
For centuries, historians have discussed the first engagements among Europeans,
western Africans, and North and South Americans. Some scholars have won-
dered how the Spanish and Portuguese so easily defeated powerful indigenous
empires. Others have tried to reckon with how much Native American societies
were changed. The following essays question our assumptions about these mo-
mentous years. In the first, Neal Salisbury observes that the arrival of Europeans
and Africans may not have altered indigenous life as much as previously assumed.
Long before 1492, Native Americans had dealt with diversities of peoples, places,
languages, and objects. They had made war, made peace, and crafted new alli-
ances over time. Without doubt, Europeans posed a new and potent presence,
but to claim that their advent altered everything may minimize the complexities
of Native American history. The second essay, by Joyce Appleby, fixates on how
the Americas helped create new worlds of imagination for Europeans. She sug-
gests that before 1492, Europeans were an uncurious people whose minds had
been circumscribed by the Catholic Church. New land masses, people, animals,
and materials pushed them to reconsider the world. Studying the natural envi-
ronment rose in prominence and radically transformed the West.
The Indians’ Old World

NEAL SALISBURY
Scholars in history, anthropology, archaeology, and other disciplines have turned
increasingly over the past two decades to the study of native peoples during the
colonial period of North American history. The new work in Indian history has
altered the way we think about the beginning of American history and about the
era of European colonization. Historians now recognize that Europeans arrived,
not in a virgin land, but in one that was teeming with several million people.
Beyond filling in some of the vast blanks left by previous generations’ overlook-
ing of Indians, much of this scholarship makes clear that Indians are integral to
the history of colonial North America. In short, surveys of recent textbooks and
of scholarly titles suggest that Native Americans are well on their way to being
“mainstreamed” by colonial historians.
Substantive as this reorientation is, it remains limited. Beyond the problems
inherent in representing Indian/non-Indian interactions during the colonial era
lies the challenge of contextualizing the era itself. Despite opening chapters and
lectures that survey the continent’s native peoples and cultures, most historians
continue to represent American history as having been set in motion by the ar-
rival of European explorers and colonizers. They have yet to recognize the exis-
tence of a North American—as opposed to English or European—background
for colonial history, much less to consider the implications of such a background
Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 53, No. 3. Reprinted by permission of William and Mary Quarterly.
for understanding the three centuries following Columbus’s landfall. Yet a grow-
ing body of scholarship by archaeologists, linguists, and students of Native Amer-
ican expressive traditions recognizes 1492 not as a beginning but as a single
moment in a long history utterly detached from that of Europe….
… [I]ndigenous North Americans exhibited a remarkable range of lan-
guages, economies, political systems, beliefs, and material cultures. But this range
was less the result of their isolation from one another than of the widely varying
natural and social environments with which Indians had interacted over millen-
nia. What recent scholars of pre-colonial North America have found even more
striking, given this diversity, is the extent to which native peoples’ histories inter-
sected one another.
At the heart of these intersections was exchange. By exchange is meant not
only the trading of material goods but also exchanges across community lines of
marriage partners, resources, labor, ideas, techniques, and religious practices.
Longer-distance exchanges frequently crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries
as well and ranged from casual encounters to widespread alliances and networks
that were economic, political, and religious. For both individuals and communi-
ties, exchanges sealed social and political relationships. Rather than accumulate
material wealth endlessly, those who acquired it gave it away, thereby earning
prestige and placing obligations on others to reciprocate appropriately. And as
we shall see, many goods were not given away to others in this world but
were buried with individuals to accompany them to another….
By the twelfth century, agricultural production had spread over much of the
Eastern Woodlands as well as to more of the Southwest. In both regions, …. more
complex societies were emerging to dominate widespread exchange networks. In
the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast, the sudden primacy of maize horticulture
is marked archaeologically in a variety of ways—food remains, pollen profiles, stud-
ies of human bone (showing that maize accounted for 50 percent of people’s diets),
and in material culture by a proliferation of chert hoes, shell-tempered pottery for
storing and cooking, and pits for storing surplus crops. These developments were
accompanied by the rise of what archaeologists term “Mississippian” societies, con-
sisting of fortified political and ceremonial centers and outlying villages. The centers
were built around open plazas featuring platform burial mounds, temples, and elab-
orate residences for elite families. Evidence from burials makes clear the wide social
gulf that separated commoners from elites. Whereas the former were buried in sim-
ple graves with a few personal possessions, the latter were interred in the temples or
plazas along with many more, and more elaborate, goods such as copper ornaments,
massive sheets of shell, and ceremonial weapons. Skeletal evidence indicates that
elites ate more meat, were taller, performed less strenuous physical activity, and
were less prone to illness and accident than commoners….
The largest, most complex Mississippian center was Cahokia, located not far
from the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, near modern East St.
Louis, Illinois, in the rich floodplain known as American Bottoms. By the
twelfth century, Cahokia probably numbered 20,000 people and contained
over 120 mounds within a five-square-mile area…. One key to Cahokia’s rise
was its combination of rich soil and nearby wooded uplands, enabling inhabitants
to produce surplus crops while providing an abundance and diversity of wild

food sources along with ample supplies of wood for fuel and construction. A
second key was its location, affording access to the great river systems of the
North American interior.
Cahokia had the most elaborate social structure yet seen in North America.
Laborers used stone and wooden spades to dig soil from “borrow pits” (at least
nineteen have been identified by archaeologists), which they carried in wooden
buckets to mounds and palisades often more than half a mile away. The volume
and concentration of craft activity in shell, copper, clay, and other materials, both
local and imported, suggests that specialized artisans provided the material foun-
dation for Cahokia’s exchange ties with other peoples. Although most Cahokians
were buried in mass graves outside the palisades, their rulers were given special
treatment. At a prominent location in Mound 72, the largest of Cahokia’s plat-
form mounds, a man had been buried atop a platform of shell beads. Accompa-
nying him were several group burials: fifty young women, aged 18 to 23, four
men, and three men and three women, all encased in uncommonly large
amounts of exotic materials. As with the Natchez Indians observed by the French
in Louisiana, Cahokians appear to have sacrificed individuals to accompany their
leaders in the afterlife. Cahokia was surrounded by nine smaller mound centers
and several dozen villages from which it obtained much of its food and through
which it conducted its waterborne commerce with other Mississippian centers in
the Midwest and Southeast….
At the outset of the twelfth century, the center of production and exchange
in the Southwest was in the basin of the San Juan River at Chaco Canyon in
New Mexico, where Anasazi culture achieved its most elaborate expression. A
twelve-mile stretch of the canyon and its rim held twelve large planned towns
on the north side and 200 to 350 apparently unplanned villages on the south.
The total population was probably about 15,000. The towns consisted of 200
or more contiguous, multistoried rooms, along with numerous kivas (under-
ground ceremonial areas), constructed of veneered masonry walls and log beams
imported from upland areas nearly fifty miles distant. The rooms surrounded a
central plaza with a great kiva. Villages typically had ten to twenty rooms that
were decidedly smaller than those in the towns. Nearly all of Chaco Canyon’s
turquoise, shell, and other ornaments and virtually everything imported from
Mesoamerica are found in the towns rather than the villages. Whether the goods
were considered communal property or were the possessions of elites is uncer-
tain, but either way the towns clearly had primacy. Villages buried their dead
near their residences, whereas town burial grounds were apparently located at
greater distances, although only a very few of what must have been thousands
of town burials have been located by archaeologists. Finally, and of particular
importance in the arid environment of the region, the towns were located at
the mouths of side canyons where they controlled the collection and distribution
of water run-off….
The canyon was the core of an extensive network of at least seventy towns
or “outliers,” as they are termed in the archaeological literature, and 5,300 vil-
lages located as far as sixty miles from the canyon…. Facilitating the movement
of people and goods through this network was a system of roads radiating out-
ward from the canyon in perfectly straight lines, turning into stairways or foot-
holds rather than circumventing cliffs and other obstacles….
When Europeans reached North America …. the continent’s demographic
and political map was in a state of profound flux. A major factor was the collapse
of the great centers at Cahokia and Chaco Canyon and elsewhere in the Mid-
west and Southwest. Although there were significant differences between these
highly centralized societies, each ran up against the capacity of the land or other
resources to sustain it….
Such combinations of continuity and change, persistence and adaptability,
arose from concrete historical experiences rather than a timeless tradition. The
remainder of this [essay] indicates some of the ways that both the deeply rooted
imperatives of reciprocity and exchange and the recent legacies of competition
and upheaval informed North American history as Europeans began to make
their presence felt.
Discussion of the transition from pre- to postcontact times must begin with
the sixteenth century, when Indians and Europeans met and interacted in a variety
of settings. When not slighting the era altogether, historians have viewed it as one
of discovery or exploration, citing the achievements of notable Europeans in either
anticipating or failing to anticipate the successful colonial enterprises of the seven-
teenth century. Recently, however, a number of scholars have been integrating
information from European accounts with the findings of archaeologists to pro-
duce a much fuller picture of this critical period in North American history.
The Southeast was the scene of the most formidable attempts at colonization
during the sixteenth century, primarily by Spain. Yet in spite of several expedi-
tions to the interior and the undertaking of an ambitious colonizing and mission-
ary effort, extending from St. Augustine over much of the Florida peninsula and
north to Chesapeake Bay, the Spanish retained no permanent settlements be-
yond St. Augustine itself at the end of the century. Nevertheless, their explorers
and missionaries opened the way for the spread of smallpox and other epidemic
diseases over much of the area south of the Chesapeake and east of the
Mississippi….
As in the Southeast, Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth-century Southwest
launched several ambitious military and missionary efforts, hoping to extend
New Spain’s domain northward and to discover additional sources of wealth.
The best-documented encounters of Spanish with Pueblos—most notably those
of Coronado’s expedition (1540–1542)—ended in violence and failure for the
Spanish who, despite vows to proceed peacefully, violated Pueblo norms of re-
ciprocity by insisting on excessive tribute or outright submission. In addition, the
Spanish had acquired notoriety among the Pueblos as purveyors of epidemic dis-
eases, religious missions, and slaving expeditions inflicted on Indians to the south,
in what is now northern Mexico.
The Spanish also affected patterns of exchange throughout the Southwest.
Indians resisting the spread of Spanish rule to northern Mexico stole horses and
other livestock, some of which they traded to neighbors. By the end of the six-
teenth century, a few Indians on the periphery of the Southwest were riding
Another random document with
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his trial for burglary and murder. Mr. George was quite a notable
cracksman in his day, which was one pretty remote from ours in
everything but the conservatism of the law. He was ‘housebreaker’ in
the indictment; he was arrested by the Tombland patrol; and he was
carried to court in a ‘chair,’ attended by a party of the City Guard.
“George, says the story, was an elegant figure of a man, and not
at all regardless of the modes. Dark blue coat with brass buttons,
fancy vest, black satin breeches, white silk stockings, hair full
dressed and a brooch in his bosom—that was how he appeared
before his judges.
“The facts were simple enough. On a night of November, a shot
and a screech had been heard in Mr. Browbody’s house in Unthank,
a ward of the city; an entrance had been made through a window,
opportunely open, by the Watch as opportunely handy, and the
housebreaker had been discovered, a warm pistol in his hand,
standing over the body of old Nicholas, who lay dead on the floor
with his head blown in.
“The burglar was found standing, I say, like as in a stupor; the
room was old Browbody’s study; the door from it into the passage
was open, and outside was discovered the body of a girl, Miss Ellen,
lying, as it were, in a dead faint. There you have the situation dashed
in broad; and pretty complete, you’ll agree, for circumstantial
evidence.”
“Wait, my friend,” began Brindley, putting up a fat pompous hand.
“Circumstantial, I think you said?”
“Yes, I said it,” answered the Deputy Clerk coolly; “and if you’ll
listen, you’ll understand—perhaps. I said the girl was in a faint, as it
were, for, as a matter of fact, she never came out of it for seven
months.”
He leant back, thumbing the ashes into his pipe, and took no heed
while the murmurs of incredulity buzzed and died down.
“Not for seven months,” he repeated, then. “They called it a
cataleptic trance, induced by fright and shock upon witnessing the
deed; and they postponed the trial, waiting for this material witness
to recover. But when at last the doctors certified that they could put
no period to a condition which might, after all, end fatally without real
consciousness ever returning, they decided to try Mr. Hussey; and
he was tried and condemned to be hanged.”
“What! he made no defence?” said a junior contemptuously.
“Well, sir, can you suggest one?” asked the other civilly.
“Suicide, of course.”
“With the pistol there in the burglar’s own hand?”
“Well, he made none, you say.”
“No, I don’t say it. He declared it was ridiculous attempting a
defence, while he lacked his one essential witness to confirm it. He
protested only that the lady would vindicate him if she could speak.”
“O, of course!”
“Yes, of course; and of course you say it. But he spoke the truth,
sir, for all that, as you’ll see.
“He was lodged in Norwich Jail, biding the finish. But, before the
hangman could get him—that time, at least—he managed to break
out, damaging a warder by the way. The dogs of the law were let
loose, naturally; but, while they were in full cry, Mr. Hussey, if you’ll
believe me, walks into a local attorney’s office with Miss Ellen on his
arm.”
Brindley turned in his chair, and gave a little condescending laugh.
“Incredible, ain’t it?” said the Deputy Clerk. “But listen, now, to the
affidavits of the pair, and judge for yourselves. We’ll take Miss Ellen’s
first, plain as I can make it:—
“ ‘I confess,’ says she, ‘to a romantic attachment to this same
picturesque magsman, Mr. Hussey. He came my way—never mind
how—and I fell in love with him. He made an assignation to visit me
in my guardian’s house, and I saw that a window was left open for
him to enter by. My guardian had latterly been in a very odd,
depressed state. I think he was troubled about business matters. On
the night of the assignation, by the irony of fate, his madness came
to a head. He was of such methodical habits by nature, and so
unerringly punctual in his hour for going to bed, that I had not
hesitated to appoint my beau to meet me in his study, which was
both remotest from his bedroom, and very accessible from without.
But, to my confusion and terror, I heard him on this night, instead of
retiring as usual, start pacing to and fro in the parlour underneath. I
listened, helpless and aghast, expecting every moment to hear him
enter his study and discover my lover, who must surely by now be
awaiting me there. And at length I did hear him actually cross the
passage to it with hurried steps. Half demented, dreading anything
and everything, I rushed down the stairs, and reached his room door
just in time to see him put a pistol to his head and fire. With the flash
and report, I fell as if dead, and remember nothing more till the voice
of my beloved seemed to call upon me to rise from the tomb—when I
opened my eyes, and saw Hussey standing above me.’
“Now for Mr. Hussey’s statement:—
“ ‘I had an assignation with a young lady,’ says he, ‘on the night of
so-and-so. A window was to be left open for me in Unthank. I had no
intent whatever to commit a felony. I came to appointment, and had
only one moment entered when I heard rapid footsteps outside, and
a man, with a desperate look on him, hurried into the room, snatched
a pistol from a drawer, put it to his head, and, before I could stop
him, fired. I swear that, so far from killing him, I tried to prevent him
killing himself. I jumped, even as he fell, and tore the pistol from his
hand. Simultaneous with his deed, I heard a scream outside. Still
holding the weapon, I went to the door, and saw the form of her I had
come to visit lying in that trance from which she has but now
recovered. As I stood stupefied, the Watch entered and took me.
From that time I knew that, lacking her evidence, it was hopeless to
attempt to clear myself. After sentence I broke prison, rushed
straight to her house, found her lying there, and called out upon her
to wake and help me. She answered at once, stirring and coming out
of her trance. I know no more than that she did; and there is the
whole truth.’ ”
The Deputy Clerk stopped. No one spoke.
“Now, gentlemen,” said he, “I don’t ask you to pronounce upon
those affidavits. In the upshot the law accepted them, admitting a
miscarriage of justice. What I ask your verdict on is this: Could the
law, after quashing its own conviction, hold the man responsible for
any act committed by him during, and as the direct result of, that
wrongful imprisonment?”
This started the ball, and for minutes it was tossed back and forth.
Presently the tumult subsided, and Brindley spoke authoritatively for
the rest—
“Certainly it could, and for any violence committed in the act.
Provocation may extenuate, but it don’t justify. Prison-breaking, per
se, is an offence against the law; so’s being found without any visible
means of subsistence, though your pocket may just have been
picked of its last penny. Any concessions in these respects would
benefit the rogue without helping the community. I won’t say that if
he hadn’t, by assaulting the warder, put himself out of court——”
“That was where he wanted to put himself,” interrupted the Deputy
Clerk. It was certain that he was deplorably flippant.
Brindley waved the impertinence by.
“The offence was an offence in outlawry,” he said.
“But how could it be,” protested the Clerk, “since, by the law’s own
admission, he was wrongfully convicted? If he hadn’t been, he
couldn’t have hurt the warder. If you strike me first, mayn’t I hit you
back? I tell you, the law acknowledged that it was in the wrong.”
“Not at all. It acknowledged that the man was in the right.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“O, my friend! I see you haven’t got the rudiments. Hussey was a
prisoner; a criminal is a prisoner; ergo, Hussey was a criminal.”
“But he was a prisoner in error!”
“And the law might very properly pardon him that; but not his
violence in asserting it.”
The Deputy Clerk shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.
“Well, it was all the same in the end,” said he; “for it hanged him
for pointing out its error to it, and so spoiled a very pretty romance.
The lady accompanied him to the scaffold, and afterwards died mad.
Sic itur ad astra. I will cap your syllogism, sir. An ass has long ears;
the law has long ears; ergo, the law is an ass.”
“Young man,” said Brindley, with more good humour than I
expected, “you have missed your vocation. Take my advice, and go
to writing for the comic papers.”
“What!” cried the Deputy Clerk. “Haven’t I been a law reporter all
my life!”
THE FIVE INSIDES
I’ll example you with thievery.—“Timon of Athens.”
The dear old lady was ninety, and it was always Christmas in the
sweet winter of her face. With the pink in her cheeks and the white of
her hair, she came straight from the eighteenth century in which she
was born. They were not more at odds with nature than are the hips
and the traveller’s joy in a withered hedge; and if at one time they
paid to art, why it was a charitable gift to a poor dependent—nothing
more, I’ll swear.
People are fond of testing links with the past. This sound old
chatelaine had played trick-track, and dined at four o’clock. She had
eaten battalia pie with “Lear” sauce, and had drunk orgeat in Bond
Street. She had seen Blücher, the tough old “Vorwärts,” brought to
bay in Hyde Park by a flying column of Amazons, and surrendering
himself to an onslaught of kisses. She had seen Mr. Consul
Brummell arrested by bailiffs in the streets of Caen, on a debt of so
many hundreds of francs for so many bottles of vernis de Guiton,
which was nothing less than an adorable boot-polish. She had heard
the demon horns of newspaper boys shrill out the Little Corporal’s
escape from Elba. She had sipped Roman punch, maybe;—I trust
she had never taken snuff. She had—but why multiply instances?
Born in 1790, she had taken just her little share in, and drawn her full
interest of, the history, social and political, of all those years,
fourscore and ten, which filled the interval between then and now.
Once upon a time she had entered a hackney-coach; and, lo!
before her journey was done, it was a railway coach, moving ever
swifter and swifter, and its passengers succeeding one another with
an ever more furious energy of hurry-scurry. Among the rest I got in,
and straight fell into talk, and in love, with this traveller who had
come from so far and from scenes so foreign to my knowledge. She
was as sweet and instructive as an old diary brought from a bureau,
smelling of rose-leaves and cedar-wood. She was merry, too, and
wont to laugh at my wholly illusory attachment to an age which was
already as dead as the moon when I was born. But she humoured
me; though she complained that her feminine reminiscences were
sweetmeats to a man.
“You should talk with William keeper,” she said. “He holds on to the
past by a very practical link indeed.”
It was snowy weather up at the Hall—the very moral of another
winter (so I was told) when His Majesty’s frigate “Caledonia” came
into Portsmouth to be paid off, and Commander Playfair sent
express to his young wife up in the Hampshire hills that she might
expect him early on the following morning. He did not come in the
morning, nor in the afternoon, nor, indeed, until late in the evening,
when—as Fortune was generous—he arrived just at the turn of the
supper, when the snow outside the kitchen windows below was
thawing itself, in delirious emulation of the melting processes going
on within, into a rusty gravy.
“You see,” said Madam, “it was not the etiquette, when a ship was
paid off, for any officer to quit the port until the pennant was struck,
which the cook, as the last officer, had to see done. And the cook
had gone ashore and got tipsy; and there the poor souls must bide
till he could be found. Poor Henry—and poor little me! But it came
right. Tout vient à qui sait attendre. We had woodcocks for supper. It
was just such a winter as this—the snow, the sky, the very day. Will
you take your gun, and get me a woodcock, sir? and we will keep the
anniversary, and you shall toast, in a bottle of the Madeira, the old
French rhyme.”
I had this rhyme in my ears as I went off for my woodcock—
Le bécasseau est de fort bon manger,

Duquel la chair resueille l’appetit.
Il est oyseau passager et petit:
Est par son goust fait des vins bien juger.
I had it in my ears, and more and more despairingly, as I sought

the coverts and dead ferns and icy reed-wrecked pools, and flushed
not the little oyseau passager of my gallantry’s desires. But at last, in
a silent coomb, when my feet were frozen, and my fingers like
bundles of newly-pulled red radishes, William keeper came upon me,
and I confided my abortive wishes and sorrows to his velveteen
bosom.
He smiled, warm soul, like a grate.
“Will’ee go up to feyther’s yonder, sir,” said he; “and sit by the fire,
and leave the woodcock to me? The old man’ll be proud to entertain
ye.”
“I will go,” I said meanly. “But tell me first, William, what is your
very practical link with the past?”
He thought the frost had got into my blood; but when I had
explained, he grinned again knowingly.
“ ’Tain’t me my lady meant, sir,” he said. “ ’Tis old feyther, and his
story of how the mail coach was robbed.”
The cottage hung up on the side of the coomb, leaning its back to
an ash wood, and digging its toes well into the slope to keep itself
from pitching into the brook below. There were kennels under the
faggot stacks, a horse-shoe on the door, red light behind the
windows. It looked a very cosy corner after the white austerity of the
woods. William led me to it, and introducing me and my errand to his
father, left the two of us together by the fire.
It was a strange old shell of a man, russet and smooth yet in the
face; but his breath would sometimes rattle in him to show how dried
was the kernel within. Still his brown eye was glossy, and his voice
full and shrewd; and in that voice, speaking straight and clear out of
the past, and in an accent yet more of the roads than of the woods,
he told me presently the story of the great mail robbery.
“It ruined and it made me, sir,” said he; “for the Captain, hearing as
how the company had sacked me for neglect of duty, and knowing
something of my character, swore I’d been used damnably, and that
he’d back his opinion by making me his gamekeeper. And he did
that; and here I be, waiting confident for him to check my accounts
when I jine him across the river.”
He pointed to a dusky corner. There hung on the wall an ancient
key-bugle, and an old, old napless beaver hat, with a faded gold
band about it.
“I was twenty-five when I put they up there, and that was in the
year ’14; and not me nor no one else has fingered them since.
Because why? Because it was like as if my past laid in a tomb
underneath, and they was the sign that I held by it without shame or
desire of concealment.
“In those days I was guard to the ‘Globe’ coach, that run between
London and Brighton. We made the journey in eight hours, from the
‘Bull and Mouth’ in Aldersgate to the ‘New Inn’ in North Street—or
t’other way about; and we never stopped but for changes, or to put
down and take up. Sich was our orders, and nothing in reason to find
fault with ’em, until they come to hold us responsible to something
besides time. Then the trouble began.
“Now, sir, as you may know, the coachman’s seat was over the
fore-boot, and, being holler underneath, was often used as a box for
special parcels. So it happened that this box was hired of the owners
by Messrs. Black, South, and Co., the big Brighthelmstone bankers,
in order to ship their notes and cash, whenever they’d the mind to,
between London and the seaside, and so escape the risks and
expense of a private mail. The valiables would be slid and locked in
—coachman being in his place—with a private key; and George he’d
nothing to do but keep his fat calves snug to the door, till someun at
the other end came with a duplicate key to unlock it and claim the
property. Very well—and very well it worked till the fifteenth of
December in the year eighteen hundred and thirteen, on which day
our responsibility touched the handsome figure—so I was to learn—
of £4000 in Brighton Union bank notes, besides cash and securities.
“It was rare cold weather, much as it is now, save that the snow
was shallower by a matter of two inches, and no more bind in it than
dry sand. We was advertised to start from the ‘Bull’ at nine; and
there was booked six insides and five out. At ten minutes to the hour
up walks a couple of Messrs. Pinnick and Waghorn’s clerks from the
borough, with the cash box in whity-brown paper, looking as innocent
as a babby in a Holland pinifore. George he comes out of the
shades, like a jolly Corsican ghost, a viping of his mouth; the box is
slung up and fastened in; coachman climbs to his perch, and the five
outsides follow-my-leader arter him to theirs, where they swaddle
’emselves into their wraps strait-veskit-vise, and settin’ as miserable
as if they was waitin’ to have a tooth drawed. Not much harm there,
you’ll say—one box-seat, two behind, two with me in the dickey—all
packed tight, and none too close for observation. Well, sir, we’ll hear
about it.
“Out of the six insides, all taken, there was three already in place:
a gentleman, very short and fierce, and snarling at everything;
gentleman’s lady, pretty as paint, but a white timidious body;
gentleman’s young-gentleman, in ducks and spencer and a cap like
a concertina with the spring gone. So far so good, you’ll say again,
and no connexion with any other party, and leastways of all with the
insides as was yet wanting, and which the fierce gentleman was
blowin’ the lights out of for bein’ late.
“ ‘Guard,’ says he, goin’ on outrageous, while the lady and the
young gentleman cuddled together scared-like in a corner, ‘who are
these people who stop the whole service while they look in the shop-
vinders? If you’re for starting a minute after the stroke,’ says he,
‘dash my buttons,’ he says, ‘but I’ll raise all hell to have you
cashiered!’
“ ‘All right, sir,’ I says. ‘I knows my business better’n you can tell it
me—’ and just as I spoke, a hackney kerridge come rumbling into
the yard, and drew up anigh us.
“ ‘Globe?’ says a jolly, fat-faced man, sticking his head out of it. ‘All
right, Cato—’ and down jumps a black servant, in livery, that was on
the box, and opens the door.
“The fat man he tumbled out—for all the world like a sheetful of
washing a wallopin’ downstairs—Cato he got in, and between them
they helped from the hackney and across to the coach as rickety a
old figure as ever I see. He were all shawls and wraprascal. He’d
blue spectacles to his eyes, a travellin’ cap pulled down on ’em, his
mouth covered in; and the only evidence of flesh to be seen in the
whole of his carcass, was a nose the colour of a hyster. He shuffled
painful, too, as they held him up under the arms, and he groaned
and muttered to himself all the time he were changing.
“Now, sir, you may suppose the snarling gentleman didn’t make
the best of what he see; and he broke out just as they was a-hauling
the invalid in, wanting to know very sarcastic if they hadn’t mistook
the ‘Globe’ for a hearse. But the fat man he accepted him as good-
humoured as could be.
“ ‘It’s nothing affectionate, sir,’ says he. ‘Only paralysis, which ain’t
catching. The gentleman won’t trouble you.’
“ ‘Not for my place,’ says the fierce gentleman, bristling up like a
dog. ‘Damme, sir, not for my place. O, I can see very well what his
nose is a-pinting to, and damme if it isn’t as monstrous a piece of
coolness as ever I expeerunced. These seats, sir, are the nat’ral
perkisite of a considerate punctiality, and if your friend objects to
travelling with his back to the ’orses——’
“ ‘Now, now,’ says the fat man—‘nothing of the sort. You don’t mind
sitting with your back to the ’orses, do you, nunky?”
“ ‘Eh,’ says the old man, ’usky-like, and starting a bit forward—‘No,
no, no, no, no, no, no—’ and he sunk into the front cushions, while
Cato and the fat ’un dispodged him to his comfort.
“ ‘Time, gentlemen!’ says I.
“ ‘Wait a bit’ says snarler. ‘It can’t never be—why, surely, it can’t
never be that the sixth inside is took for a blackamoor?’
“ ‘Alfred,’ says the lady, half veeping: ‘pray let things be. It’s only as
far as Cuckfield we’re goin’, arter all.’
“ ‘A poor argiment, my dear,’ says he, ‘in favour of suffering forty
miles of a sulphurious devil.’
“ ‘Pray control yourself, sir,’ says the fat man, still very ekable.
‘We’ve booked three places, for two, just to be comfortable. Our
servant rides outside.’
“Well, that settled it; and in another minute we was off. I laughed a
bit to myself as I swung up; but I hadn’t a thought of suspicion. What
do you say, sir? Would you have? Why, no, of course not—no more
than if you was a Lyons Mail. There was the five o’ them packed in
there, and one on the roof behind the coachman—three divisions of
a party as couldn’t have seemed more unconnected with one
another, or more cat and dog at that. Yet, would you believe it, every
one of them six had his place in the robbery that follered as carefully
set for him as a figure in a sum.
“As for me, sir, I done my duty; and what more could be expected
of me? At every stage I tuk a general look round, to see as things
were snug and nat’ral; and at Croydon, fust out, I observed as how
the invalid were a’ready nodding in a corner, and the other two gents
settled to their ‘Mornin’ Postses.’
“Beyond Croydon the cold begun to take the outsides bitter; and
the nigger got into a vay of drummin’ with his feet so aggerawacious,
that at last George he lost his temper with him and told him to shut
up. Well, he shut up that, and started scrapin’ instead; and he went
on scrapin’ till the fierce gentleman exploded out of the vinder below
fit to bust the springs.
“ ‘Who’s that?’ roars he—‘the blackamoor? Damme!’ he roars, ‘if
you aren’t wus nor a badger in more ways than one,’ he roars.
“ ‘All right, boss,’ says the nigger, grinning and lookin’ down. ‘Feet
warm at last, boss,’ and he stopped his shufflin’ and begun to sing.
“Now, sir, a sudden thought—I won’t go so far as to call it a
suspicion—sent me, next stop, to examine unostentatious-like the
neighbourhood of them great boots. But all were sound there, and
the man sittin’ well tucked into his wraps. It wasn’t like, of course,
that he could a’ kicked the panels of the box in without George
knowin’ somethin’ about it. And he didn’t want to neither; for he’d
finished his part of the business a’ready. So he just sat and smiled at
me as amiable as Billy Vaters.
“Well, we went on without a hitch; and at Cuckfield the three back
insides turned out into the snow, and went for a bespoke po’-chaise
that was waitin’ for ’em there. But, afore he got in, the fierce
gentleman swung round and come blazin’ back to the vinder.
“ ‘My compliments, sir,’ says he, ‘at parting; and, if it should come
to the vorst,’ he says, ‘I’d advise you to lay your friend pretty far
under to his last sleep,’ he says, ‘or his snores’ll wake the dead.’
“ ‘Hush,’ says the fat ’un. ‘It’s the drowndin’ spirit in him comin’ up
to blow like a vale.’
“ ‘Is it?’ says the fierce gentleman. ‘Then it’s my opinion that the
outsides ought to be warned afore he gives his last heave——’ and
he went off snortin’ like a tornader.
“The fat man shook his head when he were gone. His mildness,
having sich a figger, was amazing. He sat with his arm and shoulder
for a bolster to old paralysis, who was certainly going on in style.
“ ‘Now, sir,’ says I, ‘the whole blessed inside is yourn till the end of
the journey.’
“ ‘Thank you, guard,’ says he; ‘but I won’t disturb my friend, and
we’ll stay as we are, thank you.’
“I got up then, and on we went—last stage, sir, through Clayton,
over the downs, whipping through Pyecombe and Patcham, swish
through Preston turnpike, and so into East Street, where we’d scarce
entered, when there come sich a hullabaloo from underneath as if
the devil, riding on the springs, had got his tail jammed in the brake.
Up I jumps, and up jumps the blackamoor, screeching and clawing at
George, so as he a’most dropped the ribbins.
“ ‘Eh, boss!’ he yelled. ‘De old man—down dere!—damn bad!’
“George he pulled up; and I thought he’d a bust, till I climbed over
and loosened his neckercher, and let it all out. Then down we got—
nigger and I, and one or two of the passengers—and looked in.
‘What the thunder’s up?’ says I. The fat man were goin’ on awful,
sobbin’, and hiccupin’, and holding on to old paralysis, as were sunk
back in the corner.
“ ‘I’m afraid he’s dyin’,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid he’s dyin’! O, why did I
ever give way to him, and let him come!’
“Well, we all stood pretty foolish, not knowing what to say or do,
when his great tricklin’ face come round like a leg o’ mutton on a spit,
and, seein’ the nigger, bust into hystrikes.
“ ‘O, Cato!’ he roars; ‘O Cato, O Cato! Sich a loss if he goes!’ he
roars. ‘Run on by a short cut, Cato,’ he says, ‘and see if you can find
a doctor agen our drawin’ up at the “New Inn.” ’
“That seemed to us all a good idea, though, to be sure, there was
no cut shorter than the straight road we was in. But anyhow, before
we could re’lise it, the nigger was off like a arrer; and one of the
gentlemen offered to keep the fat man company. But that he wouldn’t
listen to.
“ ‘If he should come round,’ he said, ‘the shock of a stranger might
send him off agen. No, no,’ he said: ‘leave me alone with my dying
friend, and drive on as quick as ever you can.’
“It were only a matter of minutes; but afore we’d been drawed up
half of one afore the inn, a crowd was gathered round the coach
door.
“ ‘Is he back?’ says the fat man—‘Is Cato come back with a
doctor? No, I won’t have him touched or moved till a doctor’s seen
him.’
“Then all at once he was up and out, rampageous.
“ ‘Where is he?’ he shrieks. ‘I can’t vait no longer—I’m goin’ mad—
I’ll find one myself’—and, afore you could say Jack Robinson, he
was off. I never see sich a figger run so. He fair melted away. But the
crowd was too interested in the corpse to follow him.
“Well, sir, he didn’t come back with a doctor, and no more did
Cato. And the corpse may have sat there ten minutes, and none
daring to go into it, when a sawbones, a-comin’ down the street on
his own account, was appealed to by the landlord for a verdict, seein’
as how by this time the whole traffic was blocked. He got in, and so
did I; and he bent over the body spread back with its wraps agen the
corner.
“ ‘My God!’ I whispers—‘there’s no breath comin’ from him. Is he
dead, sir?’
“The sawbones he rose up very dry and cool.
“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘there ain’t no breath comin’ from him, nor there
never will. It ain’t in natur’ to expect it from a waxworks.’
“Sir, I tell you I looked at him and just felt my heart as it might be a
snail that someun had dropped a pinch of salt on.
“ ‘Waxworks!’ I says, gaspin’. ‘Why, the man spoke and groaned!’
“ ‘Or was it the gentleman you was tellin’ me of as did it for him?’
says the sawbones, still as dry as cracknels.
“Then I took one jump and pounced on the thing, and caught it up;
—and I no sooner ’ad it in my ’ands, than I knew it were a dummy—
nothing more nor less. But what I felt at that was nothin’ to the shock
my pullin’ it away give me—for there, behind where it had set, was a
’ole, big enough for a boy to pass, cut right through the cushions and
panels into the fore boot; and the instant I see it, ‘O,’ I says, ‘the
mail’s been robbed!’ ”
The old man, who had worked himself up to a state of practised
excitement, paused a dramatic moment at this point, until I put the
question he expected.
“And it had been?”
“And it had been,” he said, pursing his lips, and nodding darkly. “In
the vinter of ’13, sir—the cleverest thing ever planned. It made a rare
stir; but the ’ole truth was never known till years arterwards, when
one o’ the gang (it was the boy as had been, now growed up) were
took on another charge, and confessed to this one. The fat man
were a ventriloquist, you see. That, and to secure the ’ole six insides
to themselves while seemin’ strangers was the cream of the job.
They cut into the boot soon arter we was clear of London, and
passed the boy through with a saw and centre-bit t’other side o’
Croydon. He set to—the young limb, with his pretty innocent ducks!
—tuk a piece clean out of the roof just under the driver’s seat, and
brought down the cash-box; while Mr. Blackamoor Cato kep’ up his
dance overhead to drown the noise of the saw. The box was opened
and emptied, and put back in the boot where it was found; and the
swag, for fear of accidents, was all tuk away at Cuckfield.”
He came to an end. I was aware of William gamekeeper, the
younger, standing silent at the door, with a couple of speckled
auburn trophies in his hand. The fire leapt and fluttered. I rose with a
sigh—then with a smile.
“Thank you, William,” I said gratefully, as I took the woodcock.
“How plump they are; and how I love these links with the past.”
THE JADE BUTTON
The little story I am about to tell will meet, I have no doubt, with a
good deal of incredulity, not to say derision. Very well; there is the
subject of it himself to testify. If you can put an end to him by any
lethal process known to man, I will acknowledge myself misinformed,
and attend your last moments on the scaffold.
Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John

Belmont hated Miss Belmont. And the visible token of this
antagonism was a button.
It was of jade stone, and it was a talisman. For three generations it
had been the mascot of the Belmont family, an heirloom, and
symbolizing in its shining disk a little local sun, as it were, of
prosperity. The last three head Belmonts had all been men of an
ample presence. The first of them, the original owner of the stone,
having assigned it a place in perpetuity at the bottom hole of his
waistcoat (as representing the centre of his system), his heirs were
careful to substantiate a tradition which meant so much to them in a
double sense.
Indeed, the button was as good as a blister. It seemed to draw its
wearer to a head in the prosperous part of him. It was set in gold,
artfully furnished at its back with a loop and hank, and made
transferable from waistcoat to waistcoat, that its possessor for the
time being might enjoy at all seasons its beneficent influence. In
broad or long cloth, in twill or flannel, by day and by night, the button
attended him, regulating indiscriminately his business and his
digestion. In such circumstances, it is plain that Death must have
been hard put to it to find a vulnerable place; and such was the fact.
It has often been said that a man’s soul is in his stomach; how, then,
could it get behind the button? Only by one of those unworthy
subterfuges, which, nevertheless, it does not disdain. The first
Belmont lived to ninety, and with such increasing portliness that, at
the last, a half-moon had to be cut, and perpetually enlarged, out of
the dining-room table to accommodate his presence. Practically, he
was eating his way through the board, with the prospect of emerging
at the other end, when, in rising from a particularly substantial repast
one night, he caught the button in the crack between the first slab
(almost devoured) and the second, wrenched it away, and was
immediately seized with apoplexy. He died; and the Destroyer, after
pursuing his heir to threescore years and ten, looking for the heel of
Achilles, as unworthily “got home” into him. He was lumbering down
Fleet Street one dog-day when, oppressed beyond endurance by the
heat, he wrenched open—in defiance of all canons of taste and
prudence—his waistcoat. The button—the button—was burst from its
bonds in the act, though, fortunately—for the next-of-kin—to be
caught by its hank in the owner’s watch-chain. But to the owner
himself the impulse was fatal. A prowling cutpurse, quick to the
chance, “let out” full on the old gentleman’s bow-window, quenching
its lights, so to speak, for ever; and then, having snatched the chain,
incontinently doubled into the arms of a constable. The property was
recovered—but for the heir; the second Belmont’s bellows having
been broken beyond mending.
The third met with as inglorious an end, and at a comparatively
early age; for the button—as a saving clause to whatever god had
thrown it down, for the fun of the thing, among men—was possessed
with a very devil of touchiness, and always instant to resent the least
fancied slight to its self-importance. Else had Tithonus been its
wearer to this day, as——but I won’t anticipate. The third Belmont,
then, in a fit of colossal forgetfulness, sent the button, in a white
waistcoat, to the wash. The calamity was detected forthwith, but not
in time to avert itself. After death, the doctor. Before the outraged
article could be restored to its owner and victim, he had died of a
rapid dropsy, and the button became the property of Mrs. John
Belmont, his relict and residuary legatee, who——
But, for the history of the button itself? Why, in brief, as it affected
the Belmont family, it was this. Mr. Adolphus Belmont had been
Consul at one of the five treaty ports of China about the troublous
years of 1840-42. During the short time that he held office, a certain
local mandarin, Elephoo Ting by name, was reported to Peking for
high treason, and honoured with an imperial ukase, or invitation to
forestall the headsman. There was no doubt, indeed, that Elephoo
Ting had been very strenuous, in public, in combating the intrusion of
the foreign devil, while inviting him, in private, to come on and hold
tight. There is no doubt, too, that in the result Elephoo and Adolphus
had made a profitable partnership of it in the matter of opium, and
that the mandarin had formed a very high, and even sentimental,
opinion of the business capacities of his young friend. Young, that is
to say, relatively, for Adolphus was already sixty-three when
appointed to his post. But, then, of the immemorial Ting’s age no
record actually existed. The oldest inhabitant of Ningpo knew him as
one knows the historic beech of one’s district. He had always been
there—bland, prosperous, enormous, a smooth bole of a man
radiating benevolence. And now at last he was to die. It seemed
impossible.
It was impossible, save on a condition. That he confided to his odd
partner and confidant, the English Consul, during a last interview. He
held a carving-knife in his hand.
“Shall I accept this signal favour of the imperial sun?” he said.
“Have you any choice?” asked the Consul gloomily. “The decree is
out; the soldiers surround your dwelling.”
Elephoo Ting laughed softly.
“Vain, vain all, unless I discard my talisman.” He produced the jade
button from his cap. “This,” he said, “I had from my father, when the
old man sickened at last of life, desiring to be an ancestor. It renders
who wears it, while he wears it, immortal; only it is jealous, jealous,
and stands upon its dignity. Shall I, too, part with it, and at a stroke
let in the light of ages?”
He saw the incredulity in his visitor’s face, and handed him the
carving-knife.
“Strike,” he said. “I bid thee.”
“You take the consequences?”
“All.”
With infinite cynicism, Mr. Belmont essayed to tickle, just to tickle,
the creature’s infatuation with the steel point. It bent, where it
touched, like paper. He thrust hard and ever harder, until at last he
was thrashing and slicing with the implement in a sort of frenzy of
horror. The mandarin stood apathetic, while the innocuous blade
swept and rustled about his huge bulk like a harmless feather. Then
said he, as the other desisted at length, unnerved and trembling: “Art
thou convinced?”
“I am convinced,” said the Consul.
Elephoo Ting handed him the button in exchange for the knife.
“Take and wear it,” he said, “for my sake, whom you have pleased
by outwitting, on the score of benefiting, two Governments. You have
the makings of a great mandarin in you; the button will do the rest.
Would you ever escape the too-soon satiety of this stodgy life, pass
it on, with these instructions which I shall give you, to your next-of-
kin. Be ever deferential to the button and considerate of its vanity, for
it is the fetish of a sensitive but undiscriminating spirit. So long as
you cherish it, you will prosper. But the least apparent slight to itself,
it will revenge, and promptly. As for me, I have an indigestion of the
world that I would cure.”
And with the words he too became an ancestor.
Then riches and bodily amplitude came to Adolphus Belmont, until
the earth groaned under his importance. He was a spanker, and after
him Richard Belmont was a spanker, and after him John Belmont
was a very spanker of spanks, even at thirty-two, when he
committed the last enormous indiscretion which brought him death
and his fortunes almost ruin. For the outrage to the button had been
so immeasurable that, not content with his obliteration, it must
manœuvre likewise to scatter the accumulations of fortune, which it
had brought him, by involving in a common ruin most of the concerns
in which that fortune was invested, so that his widow found herself
left, all in a moment, a comparatively poor woman.
And here Mrs. John Belmont comes in.
She was a little woman, of piquancy and resource, and a very
accomplished angler of men. She could count on her pink finger-tips
the ten most killing baits for vanity. And, having once recovered the
button, she set herself to conciliating it with a thousand pretty kisses
and attentions. It lived between the bosom of her frock and the ruff of
her dainty nightgown. Yet for a long time it sulked, refusing to be
coaxed into better than a tacit staying of its devastating hand. And so
matters stood when the Assembly ball was held.
Miss Emma Belmont and Mrs. John Belmont lived in the same
town, connexions, but apart. Their visits were visits of ceremony—
and dislike. Miss Emma was Mr. John’s sister, and had always highly
disapproved of his marriage with the “adventuress.” Her very name,
she thought, bordered on an impropriety! How could any “Inez”
dissociate herself from the tradition of cigarette-stained lips and
white eyeballs travelling behind a fan like little moons of coquetry?
This one, in fact, took no trouble to. Her reputation involved them in
a common scandal; and it was solely on this account, I think, that
she so resented her sister-in-law’s appropriation of the button. She
herself was devoted to good works, and utterly content in her
mission. She did not want the button; but, inasmuch as it was a
Belmont heirloom, and Mrs. John childless, she chose to symbolize
in it the bone of contention, and to use it as a convenient bar to
amenities which would, otherwise, have seemed to argue in her a
sympathy with a mode of life with which she could not too
emphatically wish to disconnect herself.
They met at the Assembly ball. Miss Belmont, though herself
involved in the financial ebb, had considered it her duty to respect so
respectable an occasion, and even to adorn it with a silk of such
inflexibility that (I tremble as I write it) one could imagine her slipping
out of it through a trap, like the vanishing lady, and leaving all
standing. Presently Mrs. John Belmont, with a wicked look, floated
up to her.
“You here, Inez!” exclaimed Miss Emma, affecting an amazement
which, unhappily, she could not feel.
The other flirted and simpered. When she smiled, one could detect
little threads drawn in the fine powder near the corners of her mouth.
There was no ensign of widowhood about her. She ruffled with little
gaudy downs and feathers, like a new-fledged bird of paradise.
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And I’ve brought Captain Naylor, who’s
been dining with me. Shall I introduce him to you?”
Miss Belmont’s sense of decorum left her speechless.
Inez, on the contrary, rippled out the most china-tinkling laugh.
“You dear old thing,” she tittered. “Don’t look so shocked. I knew
you’d be here to chaperon me, and——” She came a step closer.
“Yes, the button’s there, Emma. You may stare; but make up your
mind, I’m not going to part with it.”
Miss Belmont found herself, and responded quietly—
“I hope not indeed, Inez. I don’t ask or expect you. You might
multiply it to-night by a dozen, and only offend me less.”
Mrs. John laughed again, rather shrilly.
“O, fie!” she said. “Why, even you haven’t a high-necked dress,
you know.”
And then a very black and red man, in a jam-pot collar and with a
voice like a rook, came and claimed her.
“Haw, Mrs. Belmont! Aw—er, dance, I think.”
Miss Belmont, to save appearances, rigidly sat out the evening.
When at last she could endure no more, she had her fly called and
prepared to go home. She was about to get into it, when she
observed a familiar figure standing among the few midnight loafers
who had gathered without the shadow of the porch.
“Hurley!” she exclaimed.
The man, after a moment, slouched reluctantly forward, touching
his hat. He had once been her most favoured protégé—a rogue and
irreclaimable, whom she had persuaded, temporarily, from the devil’s
service to her own. He had returned to his master, but with a
reservation of respect for the practical Christian. Miss Belmont was
orthodox, but she had a way with sinners. She pitied and fed and
trusted them. She was a member of the Prisoners’ First Aid Society,
with a reverence for the law and a weakness for the lawless. Her aim
was to reconcile the two, to interpret, in a yearning charity, between
the policeman and the criminal, who at least, in the result, made a
common cause of honouring her. Inez asserted that, living, as she
did, very nervously alone on the outskirts of the town, she had
adopted this double method of propitiation for the sake of her own
security. But, then, Inez had a forked tongue, which you would never
have guessed from seeing the little scarlet tip of it caressing her lips.
Well, Miss Belmont had once coaxed Jim Hurley into being her
handy man, foreseeing his redemption in an innocent association
with flowers and the cult of the artless cabbage. He proved loyal to
her, gained her confidence, knew all about the button and other
matters of family moment. But the contiguity of the kitchen-garden

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Major Problems in American History -

Volume I: To 1877 4th Edition Elizabeth

Continued on inside back cover

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Documents and Essays

Australia • Brazil • Mexico • Singapore • United Kingdom • United States

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Chapter 1 Old Worlds Make New Ones 1

Chapter 2 Colonial Settlements and Conflicts, 1600–1690 30

Chapter 3 British Colonial Development, 1690–1770 62

8. Adam Smith Analyzes the British Colonies in Terms

Chapter 4 The American Revolution 96

Chapter 5 From Confederation to Constitution 122

4. Slaveholders in Virginia Argue Against the Abolition

Chapter 6 Nation Among Nations 148

Chapter 7 Foreign Policy, Western Movement, and Indian

Chapter 8 Market and Transportation Revolutions 211

6. Author Charles Dickens Describes Travel on an Early Railroad

Chapter 9 Nationalism and Sectionalism 240

Chapter 10 Reform and Religion 280

Chapter 11 Commercial Development and Immigration 306

8. Irish Americans Sing About Their Struggles and Successes,

Chapter 12 Agriculture and Slavery in the South 335

Chapter 13 Toward Civil War 364

3. Axalla John Hoole, a Southerner, Depicts “Bleeding Kansas,”

Chapter 14 The Civil War 395

10. Liberian Secretary of State Hilary Johnson Responds to

Chapter 15 Reconstruction 423

History is a matter of interpretation. Individual scholars rescue particular stories

New to the Fourth Edition

Elizabeth Cobbs, Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in

Edward J. Blum is professor of history at the San Diego State

College study encompasses a number of subjects. Some disciplines, such as

An important question left unanswered in all of these chapters is what you

Old Worlds Make New Ones

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT

1. The Iroquois Describe the Beginning of the World, n.d.

2. Native Americans Pay Tithes to the

The Art Archive/National Anthropological Museum Mexico/Gianni Dagli Orti

3. European Map-Makers Remake the World, 1595

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZ62-110344]

4. The Portuguese Lament Military Losses

5. Christopher Columbus Details His First Encounters

6. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun Relates an Aztec Chronicler’s

Moctezuma’s own property was then brought out … precious things

7. An Englishman Discusses Trading with Indians

8. English Artist John White Depicts Indian

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZC4-5267]

Algonquian village on the Pamlico River estuary showing

The Indians’ Old World

to produce surplus crops while providing an abundance and diversity of wild

Le bécasseau est de fort bon manger,

I had it in my ears, and more and more despairingly, as I sought

Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John

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