Rebellion, Persecution, or Both?

 

A review of Jill Lepore’s New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005)

                Jill Lepore’s New York Burning is about a little-known story in American colonial history. It is an amazing story that should be better known.  In the middle of 18^th century Manhattan, a generation before the American Revolution and a few decades after the Salem Witch trials, a different type of hysteria was taking place.  The belief of an organized slave rebellion that was going to lead to the burning of the city, the murder of the most the white populace, and the establishment of a black dominated new society to replace it.

                This led to the arrest over a hundred seventy people and later execution of over thirty people, often by burning at the stake.  Like with the Salem Witch Trials a lot of the accusations came from the few against the many.  Confessions that themselves were coerced.  As part of their conspiracy these rebels were going to install their leader, a white tavern keeper named John Hughson, as their King.  King John would then appoint the slave Caesar as his governor and declare Catholicism the new state religion.   

The fate of New York

      

“What those eighty-one New Yorkers confessed to was a plot dripping with plot, ripe to bursting with familiar characters and contrivances.  Smith delivered his speech in the very era in which the novel was born; not surprisingly, his argument echoed conventions established not only in early English novels but also in England’s vast store of quasi-fictional tales of rogues and pirates, whores, and mutinies, and ruthless gangs of highway robbers, as well as in growing literature of alarming reports from the colonies of rebellious slaves and bloodthirsty Indians.” (pg.10)

Trial, but not fair

One hand the plot seems like a downright bizarre fiction made up of over imaginative 18^th century white people.  Of course, the slave rebellion would have to be led by a white man, in their common world view there is no way a black man could have been their leader.  The recognizable fear of the rival Christian religion of Catholicism.  However, unlike the witch trials, which were absurd as witches are not real, slaves do not want to be slaves.   The idea that they will rebel is not a crazy conclusion to come up with in a society that practices slavery. 

“Plots to burn the metropolis flowed freely across the Atlantic, and up and down the seaboard.  When they were true, they were terrifying.  When they were delusions, they were droll.  In June 1738, New Yorkers received word that Jamaicans had been deluded by ‘a Discovery of a Plot concerted by the Negroes at Kingston, but by good Information, we find it to be no more than intended Meeting, to drink the Memory of an old Negro Felow, dead some time agoe, whom they used to call their King.’” (pg. 56)

brutal executions 

In modern times a slave rebellion is cheered not frowned upon.  So, for the modern readers we are curious to see if there was any truth here.  Was there steaming beneath the surface an actual attempt by the oppressed to overthrow their oppressors?  It is hard to say, it would not have been uncommon for there to be one. However, it would not have been anything like the disaster that we saw in New York. 

“If there was nothing else to be learned from the confession extracted in New York City in the spring and summer of 1741, there would be this: while slaves in Manhattan lived and worked alongside whites, they sought out other slaves, for news, for companionship, for love, and they found it, all over the city.  Forever conducting errands, fetching water, visiting friends and family scattered across the city, slaves circulated, even more than free whites, who lived in the same house as their husbands, wives, and children.” (pg. 149) 

                 Lepore’s main primary source is the writing of Daniel Horsmanden one of the main investigators into the conspiracy.  From him Lepore is able to piece together a narrative of an involving mystery.  Now I did enjoy this book better than her previous work on King Philip's War, however the narrative still goes down lots of rabbit holes that were not entirely relevant to the main event.  For example, I find Francis Williams the Jamaican scholar interesting but I am not sure that he had to do with the rest of the story.  The book is worth reading regardless.   

[Video is from the YouTube channel Raw American History]

BRAVE NEW WORLD

A review of Winston Churchill’s The New World (1956)

Part of the A History of the English-Speaking Peoples series

(Rating 4 of 5)

                Churchill’s first volume, The Birth of Britain, covers thousands of years.  This second volume covers only a little over two centuries.  What a few centuries it was!  The book begins with the rise of Henry VII and the Tudor dynasty and ends with the fall of James II in the Glorious Revolution.  In this volume the English monarchy rises to its highest of heights achieving near absolute power.  The three great Tudors Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I were magnificent monarchs whose power went unquestioned.  Their feeble replacements, the Stuarts, would struggle to hold onto what they had inherited and the monarchy would fall to its lowest states with one king being executed and another dismissed.   Churchill captures all with magnificent style.  As I noted earlier the best part about reading Churchill’s work is you get to see how a famous historical figure views other historical events. 

               

Henry VII

The book begins with the aftermath of the War the Roses.  With his new crown, King Henry VII, picks up the pieces of the short-lived York dynasty and sets the foundations of a powerful monarchy.  During his reign Henry gave the reputation of being a something of a miser, but doing this help stabilize his regime.  Churchill notes that although he was nice famous as some of his European cousins his achievements were no less impressive.

“His achievement was massive and durable.  He built his power amid the ruins and ashes of his predecessors.  He fiercely and carefully gathered what seemed in those days a vast reserve of liquid wealth.  He trained a body of efficient servants.  He magnified the Crown without losing the cooperation of the Commons.  He identified prosperity with monarchy.  Among the princes of Renaissance Europe he is not surpassing achievement in fame by Louis XI of France or Ferdinand of Spain.” (pg.20)

                

                   When any historian writes about King Henry VIII they all follow the same trap.  What you talk about?  Henry VIII had a lot of legitimate achievements during his reign.  He set the foundation that would lead England on the road to become a modern state.  Yet, we think of Henry is hard not to go over the six wives.  Only the first three are important those marriages and how they ended change the road England would be on forever.  Churchill does a good job covering the reign despite his limited space. (After all he still has over two centuries to cover with only a couple hundred pages to do it.)

“Henry’s rule saw many advances in the growth and character of the English state, but it is a hideous blot upon his record that the rain should be widely remembered for its executions.  Two Queens, two of the King’s chief Ministers, a saintly Bishop, numerous abbots, monks and many ordinary folk who dared to resist the Royal will were put to death.  Almost every member of the nobility in royal blood ran perished on the scaffold at Henry’s command.  Roman Catholic and Calvinist alike were burned for heresy and religious treason.  These persecutions, inflicted in solemn manner by officers of the law, perhaps in the presence of the Counsel or even the King himself, form a brutal sequel to the bright promise of the Renaissance.  The sufferings of devout men and women upon the faggots, the use of torture, and the savage penalties imposed for even paltry crimes, stand in repellent contrasts the enlightened principles of humanism.  Get his subjects to not turn from Henry in loathing.  He succeeded in maintaining order amid the turmoil in Europe without Army or police, and he imposed on England a discipline which was not attained elsewhere.  A century of religious wars went by without Englishmen taking up arms to fight their fellow-countrymen for their faith.  We must credit Henry’s reign with weighing the basis of sea-power, with a revival of Parliamentary institutions, with the giving of the English Bible to the people, and above all with strengthening a popular monarchy under which the seating generations worked together for the greatness of England while France and Germany were wracked with internal strife.” (pg. 66)

               

Queen Elizabeth I

                     Like any good English patriot Churchill has a warm spot for the year 1588 the defeat of Spanish Armada.  It was an important victory from England, they were only all half an island against the great imperial power.  Arguably, the threat the Spanish represented was a greater threat to England as a threat Churchill himself faced in his own time.  Despite his feelings he doesn’t go overboard with the legend, as fun as it would be to tell the story of the smashing of the great Spanish fleet he realizes history does not always work like that.  Nevertheless, it was crowning achievement for Queen Elizabeth I.

“The English had not lost a single ship, and scarcely 100 men.  But their captains were disappointed.  For the last thirty years they believe themselves superior to their opponents.  They had now found themselves fighting a much bigger fleet than they had imagined the Spaniards could put the sea.  Their own ships have been sparingly equipped.  Their ammunition had run short at a critical moment.  The gunnery of the merchant vessels had proved poor and half the enemy’s fleet had got away.  There were no postings; they record their dissatisfactions.
“But to the English people as a whole the defeat of the Armada came as a miracle.  For 30 years the shadow of Spanish power had darkened the political scene.  A wave of religious emotion filled men’s minds.  One of the metals strike to commemorate the victory bears the inscription ‘Afflavit Deus et dissipantur’—‘ God blue and they were scattered.’” (pg. 102)

               

Spanish Armada 

As England was getting to its feet the world the Europeans knew was expanding.  The voyages of Columbus opened up to new continents that the people did not know existed.  This created opportunity for the Europeans to create colonies. For certain English subjects it represented the opportunity to begin the world anew.  For those who are proud of their Englishness but found England unbearable due to whatever corruption they viewed as inexcusable, such as the Puritans they no longer had to hang out in Holland.  They now had the opportunity to build their own version of England in the form of a colony.  In his previous work the English-speaking peoples they were just one people confined to one island, now they were many expanding across the globe.  It was this phenomenon that Churchill gives the books title.

                The first half of the book covers the English monarchy at its highest; in the second half we could see it at its lowest.  Queen Elizabeth I died without heir.  The crown of England passes to the King of Scotland.  King James VI becomes King James I and moved from Edinburgh to London.  Churchill had some fun poking fun at this joke of a dynasty in his last volume.  As the Stuarts come to England they do not get any smarter.  Churchill portrays these sovereigns as being out of touch with reality and not up to the task of governing England.

King James I

“James and his Parliaments grew more and more out of sympathy as the years went by.  The Tudors have been discrete in their use of the Royal Prerogative and had never put forward any general theory of government, but James saw himself as a schoolmaster of the whole island.” (pg. 120)

                Despite his flaws, I personally have some sympathy for King Charles I and it appears in the book that Churchill does as well.  I have always found Cromwell to be an utter hypocrite and his regime to be more tyrannical than any king ever dreamed of being.  While reading this book it seems Winston Churchill was of the same opinion.

King Charles I

Oliver Cromwell

“We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides end of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams.  It was the triumph of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England has ever willed or ever wished.  Long years in unceasing irritations were required to reverse it.  Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy in part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to autocracy of the sword.  The harsh, terrific, lightning – charged being, whose erratic, opportunist, self- centered course is laid bare upon the annals, was now master, in the next 12 years of the record of well – meant, puzzled plungings and surgings.” (pg. 212)

                Earlier in this book we see King Henry VIII sending everyone and anyone including his own ministers and two of his queens to the scaffold to have their heads cut off.  In a completely different turn of events a King of England is sent to his death in the very manner that his predecessor had imposed onto others.  Yet this King, who many fought against him under the banner of fighting against tyranny, would be viewed as a martyr for liberty.

“A strange destiny had engulfed this King of England.  None had resisted with more untimely stubbornness the movement of his age.  He had been in his heyday the convinced opponent of all we now call our Parliamentary liberties.  Yet as misfortunes crowd upon him he increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of England.  His mistakes and wrong deeds had arisen not so much for personal cravings for arbitrary power as from the conception of kingship to which she was born it was along with the settled custom of the land.  In the end he stood against the Army which had destroyed all Parliamentary government, it was about to plunge England into a tyranny at once more irresistible and more petty than any seen before or since.” (pg. 216)

After the fall of the protectorate, Churchill tells the story of how the monarchy was restored.  The king in exile, Charles II, was simply invited back by his people and not retuning at the head of conquering army.  For a Stuart, King Charles II was not that bad of a ruler.  He was fairly competent, unlike his younger brother, the Duke of York, who would succeed him as king, ruling as James II.  Despite his historical importance Churchill tells the story of the Glorious Revolution very quickly.  I expected it would be more detailed considering the involvement of his famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.

I found this book to be a great summary of two chaotic and messy centuries in the history of Great Britain.  It tells a story of a powerful dynasty that rises and dies off, a Scottish dynasty which unifies the kingdoms, and a civil war that tore the nations apart.  It is a brief and great read.

PIRATE REPUBLIC

A review of Collin Woodard’s The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (2007)

(Rating 5 of 5)

A small disclaimer: I actually had the opportunity to meet Mr. Woodard at the Maine Festival of the Book a few years back.  While there, I ran into him as he was on the way out.  I would have missed him entirely if he hadn’t noticed the fact that one of the two books I was carrying was one of his.  Woodard then stopped me and asked me if I was looking to get those signed.  When I told I was, he then told me that ‘Tony’ (author of a book I will be reviewing next) had left but he would gladly sign the other one.  It was an interesting forty seconds to say the least.  So if you think this is a biased review it might be.  However if you read it for yourself I think you will agree that it is an interesting book.

            What this book covers is the Golden Age of Pirates that took place in the first half of the eighteenth century.  During this time a group of pirates gained enough power in the Caribbean after the colonial governments there practically collapsed and pirate ships roamed almost unopposed.  They had been inspired by the example of Henry Avery, the first modern pirate who helped establish the principals that the pirates would come to live by.  What Avery started was the idea of ‘sailor reform’ where the shares of profit was more evenly distributed, decisions made more democratically, and leaders could be held accountable to their crews.

Blackbeard's Flag

            Pirates have been glorified in our culture.  Reading this book it is easy to see why.  The pirates did some nasty things but the people fighting them were hardly any better.  The European navies and merchants sold slaves, had crew that were literally kidnap victims who were treated as slaves, and acted in ways that were not honorable.  The situation with the British Navy of this time period kind of reminds me of problems with prohibition agents in the 20s and drug enforcement officers in present time.

            Avery disappeared from historical record and is believed to have lived a reasonable long—for late seventeenth-early eighteenth century standards—and comfortable retirement.  Most of his imitators who followed in his footsteps would not be so fortunate.  They would die young by hanging or going out in battle. 

            The book covers many of the post-Avery pirates, such as the ruthless Charles Vane, Sam Bellamy an early pirate commodore, and of course Edward Thatch more popularly known as ‘Blackbeard.’ Blackbeard is by far the most famous of all the pirates of anytime period.  The funny thing was prior to reading this book the only exposure I had to Blackbeard was in that silly Disney movie about his ghost and Ian McShane’s portrayal of him in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  The later film shows Blackbeard still alive in 1750 sailing in the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which was decades after his ship was wrecked and Blackbeard himself had died.  The real one was more impressive despite the lack of superpowers that he displayed in the movies.  

          
           What I found the most surprising while reading this book was the politics of the pirates themselves.  These pirates not only tried to change how ships were run, but they had very strong opinions on who the King of England was supposed to be.  Almost every single pirate was an outright Jacobite, who regarded the present king, George I, as impostor who needed to be over thrown.

            Speaking on Jacobitism, there was one little passage in this book that I took a point with:

“Queen Anne had died, childless, in August of 1714.  Under normal circumstances, the crown would have passed to her half-brother, James Stuart, the next in the line of dynastic succession, a situation that, to thinking of many at the time, was ordained by God himself.” (pg. 101)

            Okay ‘under normal circumstances’ King James III would have received notice of the death of his sister, the Princess Anne, and would have been very sad that in twelfth year of his reign he was now devoid of siblings.  To Jacobites, Queen Anne may have been a Stuart but she and her sister Mary were just as much usurpers as William III and the Hanoverians who followed Anne.  I am sure Woodard was trying to simplify a complicated topic and did not have the space to go into things like the Glorious Revolution, but still false is false. 

            This is great a tale the sea of the sea.  I am so glad that I had finished it in time for the new Starz series Black Sails.  Reading this book before hand made the series more enjoyable.  This is a book I would highly recommend to anyone who wanted to know about the real pirates of the Caribbean.

{Video is from a Smithsonian Documentary}

 

PRIMARY CONFLICT

A review of Fred Anderson's Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in North America (2000)

(Rating 5 of 5)

As I explained in my last few posts, a short while ago, I decided to do a straight reading up on the history of my country. Not by a series of biographies or of any particular event; but a simple march through the ages exploring all the eras of the United States of America. The biggest challenge is to find books that try their best to explore from multiple perspectives in order to avoid just one narrow view, without at the same time surrendering a general narrative that is both readable and enjoyable. After finishing Jill Lepore’s book on King Phillip’s War, I decided to move on to Fred Anderson’s book covering what we in America call the French and Indian War. The book looks at the major actors in the British and French Empires, and the Iroquois Confederacy and how this conflict changed them from top to bottom.

Like many wars, especially European Wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the conflict covered in this work is known by two names. Anglo-American colonials tended to name their wars after their kings and queens. The colonists had named the War of Austrian Succession,'King George's War', and created a problem because King George II was still on the throne. They needed a new name for the conflict that Europe would call the Seven-Years' War. The name the Anglo-American colonists came up with was: 'the French and Indian War'.



(Royal Rivals: The King of Great Britain vs. the King of France)

Fred Anderson’s reason for producing this book is that the place we historians assign the French and Indian War in the historical narrative, he argues, is as the simple prologue of the American Revolutionary War. With this book, Anderson brings the America's most forgotten and—arguably—most important war, to the forefront to be study on its own terms and not as the inevitable beginning of a different conflict. Prior to this war, the two great colonial powers in North America were the British and French Empires. These empires were populated by colonists who were strongly identified with their imperial connections and a powerful Native American Nation in the Iroquois Confederacy that was able to provide a buffer and power broker between the two powers. After this conflict the French would be vanquished and the British would be left with an empire that was most ungovernable and the Iroquois would be set on the beginning of their fall from power.


(North America before the war)

When I was in college, I, who had always been a history buff, felt I had strong understanding of World War II. Then in my Western Civilization II class with Parker Albee, we spent some time going over World War I. I remember thinking—as if a light had gone off in my head—'I understand why World War II happened better now.' Prior, all I had known of World War I had been some of its aftermath that helped lead to World War II, but nothing in real strong detail. I now view World War I and World War II almost as the different chapters in the same historic event. Having read this book I feel the same way about my understanding of the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War, as I did with my earlier reevaluations on World War I and World War II. I realize that this may sound the opposite of Anderson’s intentions; however, I want to stress that reading this book you understand the French and Indian War as its own event but it still increases your understanding of the American Revolution.

One of the biggest things that stood out in my mind while reading this book was how some of the politics that led to the American Revolution against Britain during the late 1760s and 1770s were foreshadowed by the early events of the French and Indian War. The Earl of Loudoun, who was the commander in chief of the British armies in America, made several attempts to command the colonial governors and legislatures as if they were his colonels. His actions and the massive attempts to resist them by the colonial Anglo-Americans strongly resembled what was to come a decade later. Fortunately for the British cause in this war, William Pitt, who was a strong believer in the colonial subjects British rights, relived Loudoun of his command and set the colonial relations to rights.


(The Earl of Loudoun, a commander who left a lot to be desired.)


(William Pitt, the Great Commoner)

“By mid-December 1757, Pitt knew that if the American assemblies were to be transformed from centers of resistance into sources of men and money, he would have to reverse entirely the course of colonial policy. Instead of treating the colonies like subordinate jurisdictions and requiring them to finance the war effort by forced contributions to a common fund, Pitt resolved to treat them like allies, offering subsidies to encourage their assemblies to aid in the conquest of New France. Rather than continuing to demand that civil authority, in the persons of colonial governors and legislatures, submit to military power in the person of His Majesty's commander in chief, Pitt resolved to withhold from Loudoun's successor direct authority over the provinces. In the future, as always in the past, the governors would receive their instructions directly from the secretary of state for the Southern Department. By this new grant (or more properly, restoration) of autonomy to the provinces, by offering inducements to cooperation rather than by seeking to compel union among them, Pitt hoped to create a patriotic enthusiasm that had not been much in evidence since 1756.”p.214

In this book Anderson masterfully moves his readers from one military theater on the frontiers North America to another on continental Europe, he also cross-cuts from one political scene to another. While reading this book, the reader will go from the court of King George II to the assemblies of the American colonies, to military headquarters of Fredrick the Great, to the Massachusetts colonial militia. Yet it never becomes confusing making the reader feel out of place, Anderson's narrative flows smoothly from one event and theater to another without missing a beat.

I highly recommend this work to anyone it is really exceptional book. Fred Anderson takes a highly difficult and at times confusing subject and lays it out rather neatly making it easy for his readers to understand this war that had so much impact on the modern world.

{Video from the PBS documentary The War that Made America.}

NEVER-ENDING CONFLICT

A review of Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War And The Origins of American Identity (1999)

(Rating 3 of 5)

In my last post I described how a short while ago, I decided to do a straight reading up on the history of my country. Not by a series of biographies or of any particular event; but a simple march through the ages exploring all the eras of the United States of America. The first challenge is to find books that try their best to explore from multiple perspectives avoiding just one narrow view, without at the same time surrendering a general narrative that is both readable and enjoyable. The second challenge is determining where to start. I suppose I could start at the American Revolution or all the way back to Mesopotamia. I finally decided to start with A History of England by Clayton and David Roberts. After getting done with the mother county I moved on to this book by Jill Leopre, generally because of Leopre’s reputation of exploring history with memory. Her book deals with early English colonists and how they related to and fought with Native American tribes. Lepore’s dealing with both points of view (colonist and Native) during the colonial era surrounding the events leading up to, during, and aftermath of King Phillip’s War.

Jill Lepore's book is about one of earliest wars in American history and how the conflict would shape the identity of both sides involved. Lepore writes of colonists that left England for the purpose of religious separatism yet are always concerned about losing their Englishness due to the Natives' presence, and also the Native tribes willingness to explore this relationship while it benefited them balanced with their concern about losing their tribal and cultural identity due to the presence of the English. This fear of loss of identity would be one of the primary reasons for the conflict that ironically would change the culture of both dramatically, making the English 'Americans' and the various tribes 'Indians'.


(Philip A.K.A. Metacom)

Lepore's work is very academic in tone and a very difficult narrative to at times follow. Each chapter has about a page and a half of narrative and the rest is analysis. I found the most interesting parts of the book to be the introduction, preface, and final chapter. Those sections contained fascinating insights to how war is interpreted down the generations.

“Clearly, literacy is not an uncomplicated tool, like a pen or a printing press. Instead literacy is bound, as it was for New England's Indians, by the conditions under which it is acquired; in this case at great cost. To become literate, seventeenth-century Indians had first to make a graduated succession of cultural concessions—adopting English ways and English dress, living in towns, learning to speak English, converting to Christianity. But these very concessions made them vulnerable. Neither English nor Indian, assimilated Indians were scorned by both groups and even were subject to attack. Because the acquisition of literacy, and especially English-language literacy, was one of last steps on the road to assimilation, Indians who could read and write placed themselves in a particularly perilous, if at the same time a powerful position, caught between two worlds but fully accepted by neither.” p.27

I would recommend this book to advanced readers who would like an introduction into one of America's least understood conflicts, but I think the causal readers would best be served by looking somewhere else because this book does border on the technical side. Nevertheless, this work does a great job at exploring the conflict from many angles and explaining the context for which the war was fought.

{Video from the PBS series We Shall Remain, Jill Lepore herself is interviewed.}