The Barbarous Years

January 4, 2013
Into the Wilderness
By CHARLES C. MANN, New York Times
THE BARBAROUS YEARS
The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
By Bernard Bailyn

Illustrated. 614 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

In theory, Bernard Bailyn should need no introduction. In actuality, the intellectual landscape is so fragmented that highly literate Americans may not know of this prolific Harvard historian, the recipient of two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, a National Humanities Medal and a Bancroft (the most important professional prize for American historians). Bailyn’s most influential work probably still is his “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” (1967), which forever changed views of our nation’s beginnings. But my favorite is “The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson” (1974), a superb portrait of the last royal governor of Massachusetts, a conscientious but obtuse public servant whose inability to grasp his subjects’ resentments led to his becoming the most hated man in the colonies.

Twenty-seven years ago, Bailyn released “The Peopling of British North America,” a terse “sketch” of a bigger project: an attempt to understand and recount “the westward trans-Atlantic movement of people” from Europe and Africa to the Americas. “One of the greatest events in recorded history,” Bailyn called it, with “consequences . . . beyond measure,” a vast migration that was “the foundation of American history.” At the same time, he issued the first volume of his project, “Voyagers to the West,” a study of the English who came to this land just before the Revolution. It won a Pulitzer.

Now comes “The Barbarous Years,” the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England’s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip’s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn’s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, “low and high born,” sought “to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before.” As the title indicates, the story is as grim as it is fascinating: a group portrait in tones of greed, desperation and brutality. In recent years conservative writers dismayed by historical revisionism have flooded stores with books extolling the character and sagacity of America’s founders. “The Barbarous Years” is not one of them.

“Death was everywhere,” Bailyn writes of Jamestown. The colony was a commercial enterprise, started by the Virginia Company with the sort of careful financial evaluation that in the more recent past was the hallmark of the dot-com boom. Once the colony’s backers discovered that Chesapeake Bay was, contrary to their initial belief, laden with neither gold and silver nor a passage to the Pacific, they tried everything they could think of to salvage their investment. Ship after ship of ill-equipped migrants — many of them abducted, many of them children — went out, each vessel intended to fulfill some new harebrained scheme: winemaking, silk-making, glassmaking. Each and every one failed, as did the Virginia Company, which went bankrupt in 1624. By then three-quarters or more of the Jamestown colonists had died, felled by starvation, disease, murder, wolves, Indian arrows and even cannibalism.

English people kept coming anyway, lured by a discovery that the Crown and company hated: tobacco. Hip, fun, disdained by stuffy authorities and wildly addictive, the smoking weed was an ideal consumer product. Thousands of migrants were willing to risk death for the chance to cash in on England’s squadrons of new nicotine junkies. The Chesapeake Bay became a barely governed swarm of semi-independent tobacco fiefs, owned by families, operated by squads of indentured servants, all squabbling with one another, Protestants against Catholics, English against other Europeans, everyone against Indians.

The Chesapeake Bay is the first and probably most familiar of the three regional histories that constitute the bulk of the book. The second concerns the mid-­Atlantic seaboard, “the Dutch farrago.” Initially even more commercial in intent than Jamestown, New Amsterdam and the other Dutch settlements were created, reluctantly, by the Dutch West India Company, which saw itself as a “supervising body, overseeing and profiting indirectly from the efforts of private investors who at their own risk would . . . populate the land.” The result, entirely predictable, was chaos. Unaware of and unconcerned about prior treaties or contracts, individuals spilled willy-nilly into the land, constantly setting up new ventures in ever more remote areas. When the company tried to assert control, the landowners lost out, and vice versa. “What served the one disserved the other, or so it seemed,” Bailyn writes. Rebellion was inevitable and constant.

In Europe, the Netherlands was a nation of immigrants, and its loosely controlled colonies became the same, “a miscellany of people from outside the Netherlands”: “Finns, Swedes, Walloons, Flemings, Frisians, Holsteiners, Danes, Germans and French Huguenots.” English religious zealots overrunning Long Island; Walloons trapping fur in Albany; Finns destroying the forest, slash-and-burn style — Bailyn seems to know them all, capturing the lives of each with the flick of a sentence, an informed summary of their homeland, an expertly chosen quotation.

A few hundred miles to the northeast was an equally noisy but vastly different tumult, New England, the third of Bailyn’s histories. A great majority of New Englanders in these years arrived in a rush, a small but purposeful exodus in the 1630s, fleeing Charles I’s stumble-footed suppression of religious dissension. (The outward pressure stopped in 1649, when Puritans took over England and killed the king.) Most of the migrants were Puritans, their leaders determined to exercise their newfound religious freedom by making sure that everybody else didn’t exercise too much of it. Unlike the other migrants, many New Englanders arrived in networks of interconnected families — and again, Bailyn seems to know them all, to the point where reading the book feels, from time to time, like being trapped at the dinner table of one of those genealogy-obsessed families in Southern Gothic novels.

Bailyn blows past many of the familiar Pilgrim stories Americans learn in school — the first Thanksgiving isn’t mentioned, for instance — to concentrate on disputes over religious doctrine, which were also disputes over political power. “A hothouse of holy rage,” New England had a relatively moderate leadership that was forever “under assault by radical dissenters, perfectionists of one sort or another.” New Englanders, too, were constantly accusing one another of — sometimes executing one another for — heinous crimes like Anabaptism, Antinomianism, Familism and, most heinous of all, Quakerism.

From the triple tumult, Bailyn argues, emerged disparate American cultures, each a distinct variant of its ancestors. New England became a place of pious villages, like English villages but also unlike them. Similarly, the madness of Jamestown spawned the “emergent Chesapeake gentry,” similar to the English gentry in some ways but different from them in ways that counted. And New York, too, was something new, a cultural multiplicity beyond anything even in the cosmopolitan Netherlands. And all were linked to the trade networks across the Atlantic — a novel phenomenon, and one that would lead, in time, to our own interconnected world.

Now we come to the part of the review where sentences begin with “But.” It is customary here to cite minor errors, which has the desirable side effect of highlighting the reviewer’s superior intellect. Unavoidable in a work of this scope, nits are there for the picking — Bailyn appears to give some credence to John Smith’s story about Pocahontas saving his life, for instance, though most anthropologists dismiss it out of hand. Here and there the numbers don’t add up, or institutions switch names without explanation. In point of fact, though, “The Barbarous Years” is an exceptionally careful and reliable work.

At the same time, I couldn’t understand Bailyn’s choice of subjects. For such a broad, comprehensive work, “The Barbarous Years” is oddly narrow. I was surprised to find that a book subtitled “The Peopling of British North America” never discusses Canada, perhaps because during this period it was French, not English. Nor is then-Spanish Florida treated, for (I imagine) the same reason. And I told myself that he included the Dutch, Swedes and Finns because England absorbed them. Reading the book, I mentally adjusted the title to something like “The Wave of Northern European Immigration on the Top Half of the Atlantic Seaboard, Not Counting Canada.”

But the question kept nagging. Bailyn devotes much of a fascinating chapter to the 200-odd Finns who ended up on the Delaware River. He even says (intriguingly, though without much evidence) that they initiated “a ‘frontier’ style of life that would spread across the continental borderlands for generations to come” — that is, the classic Daniel Boone look was actually Finnish. But Bailyn devotes almost no attention to a far more substantial migration, both in numbers and historical import: the approximately 5,000 Africans who had arrived by 1675. Today it is odd to encounter a book about the origins of American society that gives more space to the spats between Congregationalists and Presbyterians than the origins, motives and actions of Africans. (Possibly this is because so much of the relevant material is in Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch; just about all of Bailyn’s notes are from English-language sources.)

Equally puzzling, there is little discussion of the “conflict of civilizations” promised in the subtitle. After a well-wrought introduction about the original inhabitants of the East Coast, they almost disappear from the narrative, except as faceless offstage menaces. (Channeling Louis L’Amour, Bailyn twice refers to them as “marauding Indians.”) To be sure, he notes that the English feared and distrusted native peoples. But they also eagerly sought them as allies against the French and Spanish, made buckets of money trading with them and constantly quarreled with them over land. All sides incessantly interacted, and those interactions made native peoples, like Africans, participants in the creation of American society.

The Pequot War, which began in 1634 and convulsed New England for five years, is an example. The conflict was a straightforward struggle over money (the last profits of the declining fur trade) and land (the Connecticut River Valley, which has the region’s most productive soil). The powerful Pequots, who occupied much of the terrain and were long-term trading partners with the Dutch, fought an alliance of other Indian groups and the English colonies in Massachusetts. The English-Indian alliance won, massacring many of the Pequots and shipping out others to the West Indies as slaves. Puzzlingly, Bailyn treats this intercivilizational conflict as an episode in the battle among Puritans over Antinomianism (the heresy that faith alone can guarantee salvation, which negates the importance of civil and religious authority).

For decades, historians like Gary B. Nash, Alan Taylor, Daniel K. Richter and Gordon S. Wood have been arguing that, as Taylor wrote this year, colonial America was “an unprecedented mixing of African, European and Indian cultures.” “European and Indian worlds blurred at the edges,” Nash wrote in “Red, White and Black,” his history of early North America. “Africans and Europeans made a new world together.” Not so much, apparently, for Bailyn. It’s too bad. Bailyn’s gifts as a historical portraitist are prodigious. There are many, many pleasures in “The Barbarous Years.” But I wish he had chosen to paint a more complete picture.

Charles C. Mann is the author of “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.”