The Sum Of Our Dreams: A Concise

History Of America Louis P. Masur

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-sum-of-our-dreams-a-concise-history-of-america-l
ouis-p-masur/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin with Related

Documents 3rd Edition Louis P. Masur

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-autobiography-of-benjamin-
franklin-with-related-documents-3rd-edition-louis-p-masur/

A Concise History of U S Foreign Policy 4th Edition

Joyce P. Kaufman

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-concise-history-of-u-s-
foreign-policy-4th-edition-joyce-p-kaufman/

A Concise History of Germany Mary Fulbrook

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-concise-history-of-germany-
mary-fulbrook/

Warriors of Anatolia A Concise History of the Hittites

Trevor Bryce

https://textbookfull.com/product/warriors-of-anatolia-a-concise-
history-of-the-hittites-trevor-bryce/
Born in Blood and Fire A Concise History of Latin
America 4th ed 2016 John Charles Chasteen

https://textbookfull.com/product/born-in-blood-and-fire-a-
concise-history-of-latin-america-4th-ed-2016-john-charles-
chasteen/

The Treaty of Versailles : a concise history 1st

Edition Neiberg

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-treaty-of-versailles-a-
concise-history-1st-edition-neiberg/

A Concise History of Poland 3rd Edition Jerzy Lukowski

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-concise-history-of-poland-3rd-
edition-jerzy-lukowski/

A Concise History Of American Painting And Sculpture

Baigell

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-concise-history-of-american-
painting-and-sculpture-baigell/

A Concise History of History Global Historiography from

Antiquity to the Present Daniel Woolf

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-concise-history-of-history-
global-historiography-from-antiquity-to-the-present-daniel-woolf/
The Sum of Our Dreams
 Also by Louis P. Masur

Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion

Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union

The Civil War: A Concise History

Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen’s American Vision

The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America

Autumn Glory: Baseball’s First World Series

1831: Year of Eclipse

Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865
 The Sum
of Our Dreams
A CONCISE HISTORY OF AMERICA

Louis P. Masur


 
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Louis P. Masur 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-19-069257-5

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 To Jani
B en and R achel
Sophie and Garret t
and my grandson ,
Evan Saul Jaffe
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest
poem.
—Walt Whitman

American history is longer, larger, more various, more

beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever
said about it.
—James Baldwin
 C O NT E N T S

List of Images xiii

Prologue: “Land of Hope and Dreams” xv

Chapter 1: To Plant and to Conquer 1

Virginia and Southern Colonies 1
Massachusetts and New England Colonies 8
New York and Middle Colonies 15
Native Americans 18
Seven Years’ War 23

Chapter 2: If Men Were Angels 29

Revolution 30
Constitution 35
Political Parties 40
War of 1812 46
Missouri Compromise 52

Chapter 3: Empire of Liberty 57

Nullification 57
Revival 63
Removal 68
Mexican-American War 72
Westward the Course of Empire 77

Chapter 4: A Higher Law 83

Compromise of 1850 84
Abolition 88
Bleeding Kansas 93
Dred Scott 98
John Brown’s Raid 103

Chapter 5: Government of the People 108

Secession 109

ix
x Contents

Civil War 114

Emancipation 119
Home Fronts 124
Reconstruction 127

Chapter 6: Survival of the Fittest 135

Corruption 136
Competition 140
Cooperation 146
Frontiers 150
Imperialism 155

Chapter 7: Land of Promise 161

Immigration 161
Progressivism 167
Segregation 172
Socialism 177
World War I 181

Chapter 8: This New Battle 187

Prohibition 187
Depression 194
Dust Bowl 198
New Deal 202
World War II 207

Chapter 9: Blowin’ in the Wind 215

Consumerism 215
Cold War 221
Civil Rights 227
Counterculture 234
Vietnam War 239

chapter 10: Government Is the Problem 246

Watergate 247
The Great Inflation 252
New Right 257
New Democrats 262
New World Order 267

chapter 11: The Change That We Seek 274

War on Terror 275
Globalization 282
Contents xi

Vote for Change 286

Social Media 291
American Ideals 296

Epilogue: “Let America Be America Again” 304

Acknowledgments 307

Notes 309

Further Reading 333

Index 341
 L I S T O F I M AG ES

John White, Watercolor of Indian Man and Woman Eating (1585–1586). British
Museum. 3
Theodore de Bry, “Their Sitting at Meate” (1590). John Carter Brown Library. 4
A View of the Savannah (1734). Library of Congress. 8
The Figure of the Indians’ Fort or Palizado in New England (1638). Library of
Congress. 14
A New Map of North America, Shewing the Advantages Obtained Therein to England by the
Peace (1764). Library of Congress. 26
Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre (1770). American Antiquarian Society. 31
Congressional Pugilists (1798). Library of Congress. 44
A Boxing Match (1813). Library of Congress. 50
King Andrew the First (ca. 1833). Library of Congress. 62
Camp Meeting (ca. 1829). Library of Congress. 64
Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (mural study, 1861).
Smithsonian American Art Museum. 81
Effects of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850). Library of Congress. 90
Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Free Soiler (1856). Library of Congress. 95
Reynolds Political Map (1856). Library of Congress. 103
Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Harvest of Death (1863). Library of Congress. 117
The Scourged Back (ca. 1863). Library of Congress. 122

xiii
xiv List of Images

Thomas Nast, “This Is a White Man’s Government,” Harper’s Weekly (1868). Library
of Congress. 132
Thomas Nast, “Who Stole the Peoples Money?” Harper’s Weekly (1871). Library of
Congress. 139
Edward Curtis, Chief Joseph (ca. 1903). Library of Congress. 154
“School Begins,” Puck (1899). Library of Congress. 158
Jacob Riis, Home of an Italian Ragpicker (1894). Museum of the City of
New York. 166
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday (ca. 1936). Library of Congress. 175
James Montgomery Flagg, I Want You (1917). Library of Congress. 183
George Bellows, Billy Sunday (1923). National Portrait Gallery. 190
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother (1936). Library of Congress. 201
Joe Rosenthal, American Marines Raising American Flag on Mount Suribachi
(1945). Library of Congress. 212
Frank Martin, Family Time (1958). Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 217
Charles Moore, Selma to Montgomery (1965). Briscoe Center for American
History. 234
Nick Ut, Napalm Girl (1972). Nick Ut/Associated Press. 242
First Day of Gasoline Rationing (1979). Bettmann Archive/Getty Images. 251
Silence Equals Death (1987). New York Public Library. 261
Cruise Missiles, Desert Storm (1991). Associated Press. 272
September 11 Terrorist Attack (2001). Associated Press. 275
Hooded Man (2003). Associated Press. 281
Social Media (2019). Associated Press. 292
Electoral Map (2016). Associated Press. 299
 PROL O GU E : “ L A N D O F H O P E A ND D R EA MS”

A MERICA WAS MADE FOR DREAMING. It offered escape

and it offered opportunity. For some who colonized it, this
New Found Land promised religious freedom. For others, it
afforded ownership of property and, eventually, slaves. Conquest was
part of the enterprise right from the start. Only a few of those who
arrived in the early days of settlement saw the indigenous population
as having any rights, and warfare marked the first centuries as surely
as disease. Over time, a common purpose emerged, sturdy enough
to declare independence and create a new form of government. The
United States became a land of dreams.
A Frenchman was among the first to examine the conditions
that allowed Americans to forge a collective identity. J. Hector St.
John de Crèvecoeur, a soldier and adventurer, arrived in New York in
1759 and farmed a parcel of land in Orange County, New York, near
Goshen. His book Letters from an American Farmer (1782) made him
a minor celebrity. Crèvecoeur asked a question that has resonated
across time: “What, then, is the American, this new man?” His answer
stressed equality and the possibility of enrichment. “The rich and the
poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe,”
he declared. The immigrant “looks around and sees many a pros-
perous person who but a few years before was as poor as himself.” In
America, anyone could succeed.1
In time, these elements formed part of what we now refer to
as the American Dream. The phrase is credited to James Truslow
Adams, a banker turned historian with no relation to the presidential

xv
xvi Prologue

Adamses, who used the term repeatedly in his book The Epic of
America, published in 1931 during the Depression. Adams defined it
as “the dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens
of every rank.” Whether that dream is obtainable, and how access to
it has changed over time, is the central theme of American history.2
Equal opportunity—“for all our citizens”—lies at the core of
the American Dream, and it is linked to other fundamental princi-
ples such as freedom and democracy. These words have also been
fraught and contested across generations. Americans have invoked
them time and again during wrangles over domestic reforms and
foreign involvement and, once, in the Civil War, on actual battlefields.
Celebrated for their “individualism” (a word coined by another
Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville), Americans have continuously
debated the place of government in their lives. Whether invoking
Abraham Lincoln’s “Government of the People” or Ronald Reagan’s
“Government Is the Problem,” citizens have fought over what it is
they want their government to do, and not do, over how dreams can
best be achieved and who should achieve them.
The struggles over these American ideals ground this history
of the United States. An earlier example of the genre, Allan Nevins
and Henry Steele Commager’s A Pocket History of the United States, was
first published during World War II. Revised and expanded editions
in the decades that followed sold more than two million copies. One
reader in particular illustrates the potential impact of such a work.
On tour in Europe in 1981, Bruce Springsteen, who had dropped out
of community college to pursue his rock ’n’ roll dream, announced
from a stage in Rotterdam that in reading A Pocket History of the United
States “I found out where I came from and how I ended up where
I was and how easy it is to be a victim of things you don’t even know
exist.”
Thirty years later, Springsteen was promoting an album
featuring a song called “Land of Hope and Dreams.” His life’s work,
he said, had been about “judging the distance between American re-
ality and the American dream.”3
Judging that distance also informs this book. To do so means
narrating the central developments and dramas of American his-
tory. Each chapter covers a distinct period of time and is divided
into five sections that address some of the key events of the times.
For example, the era of the 1920s–1940s is separated into sections
on Prohibition, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, and
World War II. Treating any of these topics in fewer than ten pages
means streamlining them. My objective is not to overwhelm readers
Prologue xvii

but to engage them. My goal is to provide a foundation of knowledge

on which readers can base further exploration of American history.
This book is about the sum of our dreams, not their conclusion.
All histories have a point of view and readers would be right to
be curious about mine. I have been teaching American history for
more than three decades and thinking about writing a one-volume
narrative of the United States—and about how to address all of it, the
reprehensible and the redemptive—for nearly as long. Some readers
may dislike my emphasis on the underside of American history—
racism, violence, and corruption. Other readers may wince at my
unabashed admiration for the American experiment—freedom, de-
mocracy, and opportunity. I hope all can agree that Americans need
to learn more about their nation’s history.
The title of this book comes from a speech Barack Obama
delivered in 2007 in Bettendorf, Iowa. A candidate for president,
Obama emphasized what united Americans, not what divided them.
Americans, he said, “share a faith in simple dreams. A job with wages
that can support a family. Health care that we can count on and af-
ford. A retirement that is dignified and secure. Education and op-
portunity for our kids. Common hopes. American dreams.” They
inspired his grandparents, and his father-in-law, and his mother.
Visions of a better life for ourselves, and even better lives for our
children, went to the heart of them. As he concluded his speech,
he rose to his theme: “every American has the right to pursue their
dreams. . . . America is the sum of our dreams.”4
Plural, not singular. The many, not the one. Difference, not
unanimity. This is the American story, one that has featured clashes
between groups with divergent dreams as often as it has forged agree-
ment on shared ones. Arguments about the role of government or
the meaning of freedom expose major fault lines and at times the
tremors have convulsed the nation. “America is a constant work in
progress,” Obama said on March 7, 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of
the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march. Lincoln understood
that as well. What he proclaimed at the start of the Civil War holds
true throughout American history: “the struggle of today, is not alto-
gether for today—it is for a vast future also.”5
 CHAPTER 1

To Plant and to Conquer

I N THE BEGINNING, AMERICA OFFERED a vision. In

Inducements Toward the Liking of the Voyage Intended Towards Virginia
(1585), Richard Hayklut the Elder, a member of Parliament who
promoted English colonization of North America, provided these
reasons for settlement: “To plant Christian religion. To trafficke. To
conquer. Or, to doe all three.” Some colonists came for faith; others
to seek fortune. For many, North America offered escape from per-
secution, prison, or poverty. The land they settled was far from unin-
habited, and they knew it. In 1600, millions of people lived between
the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. But Europeans dis-
counted indigenous peoples in their idea of America as virgin land, a
wilderness onto which one could project anything. “In the beginning
all the world was America,” wrote John Locke in 1689. During the sev-
enteenth century, approximately 160,000 English people traveled to
the British mainland colonies in often harrowing journeys across the
Atlantic that could last two to four months. It would take time, but
eventually these colonists would transform themselves from British
subjects into Americans.1

Virginia and Southern Colonies

In 1585, John White, a London illustrator, joined an expedition to
establish an English colony in America. White’s purpose was nei-
ther evangelical nor commercial. It was artistic, even anthropolog-
ical. White was commissioned to “draw to life” the inhabitants he

1
2 The Sum of Our Dreams

encountered. He landed at Roanoke Island, in present-day North

Carolina, and completed dozens of watercolors of Algonquin people.
After White returned to England, Sir Walter Raleigh (who
held a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth to explore and colonize
non-Christian lands) asked him to organize another expedition and
named him governor. Supplies began to dwindle for the more than
one hundred colonists, and conflict with native tribes put the enter-
prise at risk. White sailed for England to gather supplies, but on his
return five years later, delayed because of conflict with Spain and the
defeat of the Spanish Armada, no sign was left of the settlement.
White’s original watercolors became the basis for engravings by
Theodore de Bry that accompanied the illustrated edition of Thomas
Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,
published in 1590. A mathematician and navigation expert, Harriot
had been central to Raleigh’s colonization plans. A comparison of
a White watercolor and de Bry’s engraving illustrates the vision of
America presented in the promotional literature that sought to per-
suade Englishmen to migrate. White’s original is a plain, unadorned
drawing that shows two Algonquians squatting before a plate of deer
meat they are eating. In de Bry’s version, the Algonquins have been
Europeanized. The man is muscular and the woman enticing. They
no longer squat, as White had observed, but sit in European fashion.
The simple meal has been transformed into a feast with water gourd,
fish, maize, and a clam or scallop shell. A horizon line has been
added: Here is a vast land of plenitude.
In 1607, the Virginia Company, with a charter from King James
(Elizabeth had died in 1603), celebrated as some 104 settlers landed
at Jamestown peninsula and established the first permanent English
settlement in North America. (Spain established the first perma-
nent European settlement along the Atlantic coast at St. Augustine,
in what is now Florida, in 1565; the French founded Quebec in
1608. The histories of New Spain and New France follow their own
trajectories; the focus here is only on English colonization). They
were all men—gentlemen and laborers. The following year, the first
women arrived, wives of husbands already settled as well as servants
and maids.
It is remarkable that the settlement survived. Drought, famine,
and disease killed many, as did hostilities with the Powhatan. Matters
improved for a brief period when Captain John Smith arranged
for trade with the Indians, but in 1609 he returned to England for
treatment of injuries caused by a gunpowder explosion and the
Powhatans, threatened by the arrival of hundreds of new settlers,
To Plant and to Conquer 3

Figure 1.1 John White, Watercolor of Indian Man and Woman Eating (1585–1586). British
Museum.

cut off trade and laid siege. Having chosen a poor location for an
English colonial outpost, only 60 of 300 colonists survived the winter
of 1609–1610. Although the arrival of supply ships saved Jamestown,
still it seemed colonists preferred not to work or plant. “He that will
not work shall not eat,” John Smith had admonished. In May 1611,
a new governor observed that the people were at “their daily and
usuall works, bowling in the streets.”2
The story that Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan,
intervened to save John Smith is almost certainly an invention created
by the captain. Colonists kidnapped her in 1613. She converted to
Christianity and in 1614 married John Rolfe, a tobacco planter. The
plant may have saved the settlement from disease, famine, sloth,
and Indian incursions. Rolfe experimented with tobacco seeds and
the settlers soon found a product that smoked “pleasant, sweet and
strong,” and also could compete in English markets with tobacco
from Spain. The cash crop came to dominate the economy and
over the next century spread across Virginia. In need of labor for
4 The Sum of Our Dreams

Figure 1.2 Theodore de Bry, “Their Sitting at Meate” (1590). John Carter Brown Library.

the explosive growth of tobacco planting, a legal grant of land to

settlers, known as a headright, offered colonists who paid their own
way fifty acres of land. Wealthy individuals would amass vast tracts by
paying the way of the poor. Tobacco led to the creation of port towns
where warehouses stored the hogsheads of tobacco ready for ship-
ment across the Atlantic.3
Tobacco cultivation required labor. Indentured servants, who
agreed to work for four to seven years in return for passage, food,
clothing, and shelter, filled the need at first. Between 1630 and 1680,
To Plant and to Conquer 5

three-quarters of the immigrants to Virginia (more than 50,000

people, mostly men) were indentured servants. Virginia’s elites grew
increasingly anxious over the behavior of servants and those who
had been released from their indentures. The General Assembly
convened in 1619 “to establish one equal and uniform government
over all Virginia” and regulated servants’ freedom and movement.
In time, they even passed an act “against fornication.” The assembly
also tried to legislate against mistreatment of servants.
Over the course of the seventeenth century, servitude for whites
coexisted with slavery for Africans and eventually disappeared. An
English privateer brought the first Africans to Virginia in 1619, and
colonists most likely treated them as indentured servants. In 1650,
some 300 Africans lived in Virginia. While slavery was not yet codified
into law, it is clear that African and European servants were treated
differently and some African servants were considered slaves. Starting
in the 1660s, the assembly passed slave laws that addressed “whether
children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave
or free” (children would follow the mother’s status), and declared
that baptism “doth not alter the condition of the person as to his
bondage.”4
Colonists embraced slavery for a variety of reasons: a decline
in the number of available indentured servants; the success of
European entrepreneurs using slave labor to produce sugar in the
Caribbean; the expansion of labor-intensive tobacco growth; and a
belief in racial superiority. An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,
passed by the General Assembly in 1705, provided that all nonwhites
and non-Christians brought into the country (except for Turks and
Moors) “shall be accounted and be slaves.” The act also provided for
harsh punishment for slaves who committed crimes or ran away. In
his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), Robert Beverly, clerk of
the House of Burgesses, made clear the new reality: “Slaves are the
Negroes, and their Posterity follow . . . the condition of the Mother.”
By 1750, slaves from West Africa constituted more than 40 percent
of the population in Virginia.5
The transition to racial slavery served another purpose: It
helped unify wealthy and poor whites. As the colony grew in the
1660s and 1670s, and settlers moved west toward the Piedmont, the
area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains,
they sought protection from Governor William Berkeley and allies
in the East. The governor, however, refused to battle the Indians
on behalf of the poor farmers and frontiersmen. Nathaniel Bacon,
a wealthy Cambridge-educated planter, had arrived in Virginia in
6 The Sum of Our Dreams

1674, and was almost immediately appointed to the Governor’s

Council. Ignoring the governor, a kinsman through marriage, Bacon
organized an attack on the frontier tribes. On July 30, 1676, he is-
sued a Declaration of the People of Virginia that condemned the
governor as corrupt, denounced excessive taxation, and demanded
protection against “many invasions, robberies, and murders com-
mitted upon us.” The outraged rebels—poor whites and blacks who
had found common cause—even attacked Jamestown. Berkeley fled
for safety. The rebellion came to an end only with Bacon’s sudden
death from the “Bloodie flux,” probably dysentery. Berkeley hanged
twenty-three rebels for treason. The prospect of such biracial coop-
eration caused social elites as much anxiety as anything and served
as another factor in the codifying of slavery.6
Slavery’s entrenchment came even more quickly in neigh-
boring Maryland. Established in 1632, Maryland was founded by
Cecil Calvert as a refuge for British Catholics in an age of religious
persecution. The colony was named after King Charles’s wife, Queen
Henrietta Maria, who was Catholic. More Protestants than Catholics,
however, settled the colony, and Anglicans battled Catholics for con-
trol of government. In 1649, the Maryland Assembly passed the
Maryland Toleration Act to allow Catholics to practice their religion.
After the execution of King Charles in that same year and the out-
break of the English Civil War, however, the law was revoked. With
the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic King James II
was deposed, Protestants gained complete control of Maryland and
banned Catholic worship.
Both Catholics and Protestants participated in tobacco cultiva-
tion, and Maryland, like neighboring Virginia, moved swiftly from
indentured servants to enslaved Africans. The first slaves arrived at
St. Mary’s City in 1642. In 1664, the assembly passed an act that estab-
lished that all slaves would serve for life. Conversion to Christianity
would not free them. The white population of Maryland grew from
25,000 in 1700 to 100,000 in 1750, by which point there were more
than 40,000 slaves in the colony. The assembly also passed a law that
barred masters from freeing their slaves. Some of the enslaved tried
to escape, and the assembly issued various laws for tracking down
and punishing recaptured runaway slaves.
North and South Carolina grew more slowly than Virginia and
Maryland. They began as a single entity, the Province of Carolina,
which was run by proprietors who held a charter from Charles II.
Religious and political battles roiled north and south (in Cary’s re-
bellion in 1711 the governor, Thomas Cary, refused to relinquish
To Plant and to Conquer 7

his position to British administrator Edward Hyde), and in 1712

they divided into distinct territories and eventually became sepa-
rate royal colonies. By 1750, North Carolina had a white population
of 53,000 and a black population of nearly 20,000, whereas South
Carolina claimed 25,000 whites and 39,000 blacks. The presence
of a black majority in South Carolina would shape politics there
and elsewhere for decades to come. Rice was to South Carolina as
tobacco was to Virginia, and planters relied on slaves for their know-
ledge of rice cultivation, which was commonplace in West Africa.
Charleston, therefore, became the port of entry for hundreds of
thousands of enslaved West Africans.
As elsewhere in the South, east-west divisions in the Carolinas
formed as coastal planters owned slaves and upcountry Appalachian
subsistence farmers did not. Differences of religion, wealth, and
education, not to mention geography, separated those in the
backcountry from those on the coast, though fear of Indians and
blacks kept their interests united. In 1739, a slave rebellion near
the Stono River led to the killing of more than forty whites and
burning of plantations. The captured slaves were executed and
the colonists mounted their severed heads on pikes as a warning
to others.
Unlike Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, Georgia’s
founding was based on the vision of one man, James Oglethorpe, a
Member of Parliament and a social reformer. In 1732, Oglethorpe
won a charter for a new colony with the idea of providing an alterna-
tive to the horrors of debtor prison. Led by Oglethorpe, some forty
English families established a settlement near present-day Savannah.
Oglethorpe’s vision did not include rum or slavery, and he had the
trustees ban both. “If we allow slaves,” he wrote, “we act against the
very Principles by which we associated together, which was to relieve
the distressed.” Over time, self-interest overcame principle as settlers
believed that slave labor would make the fledgling colony more suc-
cessful. In 1751, the House of Commons adopted new legislation that
permitted slavery in Georgia. White South Carolinian slaveholders
flooded into the region, and between 1750 and 1775 Georgia’s slave
population expanded from 500 to some 18,000. Oglethorpe did not
witness the turn to slavery. Following a series of military campaigns
against the Spanish, who sought to invade the English colonies,
Oglethorpe had left Georgia for good and returned to England in
1743. He lived until 1785, long enough to meet with John Adams,
minister to the Court of St. James for the newly founded republic,
and express his “great esteem and regard for America.”7
8 The Sum of Our Dreams

Figure 1.3 A View of the Savannah (1734). Library of Congress.

Massachusetts and New England Colonies

The immigrants we call “Pilgrims” broke from the Anglican Church
completely, were persecuted for their practices, and, as separatists,
traveled first to Holland before embarking on a journey to America in
1620 aboard the Mayflower. The Puritans (a term of derision first used
in the 1560s and applied to Pilgrims as well) also wanted a reformed
and purified church and migrated by the hundreds in 1630, and
in the thousands in the following decade. Pilgrim Plymouth Colony
and Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, their differences always more
abstract than real, merged in 1691.
Aboard the Mayflower, which took sixty-six days to cross the
Atlantic and carried just over one hundred passengers, forty-one
men signed a compact and agreed to “Covenant and Combine our-
selves together into a Civil Body Politic.” One of the signers, William
Bradford, would serve as governor and first historian of Plymouth.
Tragically, his wife, Dorothy, fell overboard and drowned while the
men were still exploring the area for a place to settle. By the summer
To Plant and to Conquer 9

of 1621, more than half the settlers had perished. Bradford’s story,
as told in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), extolled the courage and
faith of the Pilgrim fathers who crossed a vast ocean and entered
a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild
men” and out of it created a covenanted community. That “deso-
late wilderness” was a result of Plymouth being depopulated by
epidemic disease among the Indians (perhaps leptospirosis, a disease
caused by contamination from rodents that arrived on European
ships). Those “wild men,” the Wampanoag, helped the settlers sur-
vive. With the aid of Squanto, an Indian who spoke some English
because he had been abducted in 1614 by a trader and spent time
in England, the groups agreed to a formal treaty of mutual aid and
defense. Squanto lived among the settlers and taught them how to
grow corn. He proved indispensable to Bradford, who recorded
Squanto’s death in 1622 as a “great loss.”8
While Bradford led Plymouth colony, John Winthrop, an
affluent lawyer, led Massachusetts Bay Colony. The seal of the
Massachusetts Bay Company, which financed the colony, showed an
Indian holding an arrow pointed down and saying, “come over and
help us.” In 1630, Winthrop delivered a lay sermon on the Arbella
to the colonists titled “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Winthrop
appealed to the need for community and selflessness: “We must bear
one another’s burdens. We must not look only on our own things,
but also on the things of our brethren.” The stakes for New England
were high: “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with
our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to with-
draw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word
through the world.” City on a hill: visible but exposed, exceptional
but isolated. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama
would each invoke the phrase to define the American experiment.9
All communities of faith face the dilemma of how to deal with
the unfaithful. Bradford discovered that Reverend John Lyford had
been writing letters back to England that undermined the separatist
movement, those who had broken away completely from the Church
of England, and that the reason Lyford had first come to Plymouth
was because he had “defiled” a congregant before her marriage.
Trembling at the “deceitfulness and desperate wickedness of man’s
heart,” Bradford banished Lyford, who settled in Virginia.10
Lyford was a reprobate. Thomas Morton might as well have
been a heathen. He arrived in 1624, rejected the religious strictures
of Plymouth, and started his own community, called Merrymount.
10 The Sum of Our Dreams

Colonists engaged in sexual relations with Algonquin women and

spent time in drunken revelry and merriment. Come May 1, they
would hold a party and erect an eighty-foot maypole. Morton’s
actions scandalized the Pilgrims. Bradford denounced them as dis-
solute and profane, “the beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.”
Morton was repeatedly banished, but he kept returning and was
arrested each time. While awaiting trial in Boston for sedition, his
health deteriorated. He was granted clemency and died in 1647.11
Morton was a religious outsider. Massachusetts Bay Puritans
also faced controversy over religious orthodoxy from insiders, from
members of the community. As Calvinists, all Puritans believed in
predestination, original sin, and innate depravity, but they disagreed
over how one was saved. The Covenant of Grace held that only
God’s grace, a mystical experience of the spirit, granted salvation.
Conduct and effort did not matter. Believing that moral behavior
was a sign of salvation inched toward a Covenant of Works. This was
Anne Hutchinson’s critique of the clergy when she arrived in 1634
with her husband and ten children (her oldest son arrived the year
before).
Hutchinson had followed her minister John Cotton to Boston,
and she soon developed a following of her own for weekly meetings
held in her home. Hutchinson denounced the clergy for offering a
doctrine of works. She insisted that outward signs of behavior bore
no relation to salvation, a proposition that scandalized orthodox min-
isters, who charged that Hutchinson was an Antinomian, someone
who believed that faith alone assured salvation. That a woman would
dare to preach only added to the clergy’s hostility. She was tried for
defaming the ministers. John Winthrop condemned the meetings
she held as a “thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God, nor
fitting for your sex.” Hutchinson refused to give way. “Now having
seen him which is invisible, I fear not what man can do unto me,”
she testified.
The General Court found her guilty and banished her.
Hutchinson resettled in Providence Plantations, begun only a few
years earlier by Roger Williams, another heterodox thinker who had
left Massachusetts in 1636 and founded Rhode Island and organized
the first Baptist Church in America. In his many writings, Williams
argued for separation of church and state and, in The Bloody Tenant
of Persecution for Conscience Sake (1644), used the phrase “wall of sep-
aration.” He also defended Indian rights to their land, arguing that
the King could not deed what was not his to give, and he admired the
way Narragansett tribes lived.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER XI.
IN WHICH PHIL MAKES A CRINGLE, AND VISITS
THE CROSS-TREES.
At eight bells, or four in the morning, the port watch was relieved, and
I was permitted to sleep till half past seven, which is breakfast time on
board ship. We did not sit down at a table, with plates, knives, forks,
and spoons, but formed a circle around a kid of corned beef and a
pan of crackers. The bill of fare was salt junk and hard tack. The
starboard watch, which had been on deck from eight till twelve, and
from four till eight, were allowed to sleep in during the forenoon; but
after dinner all hands were required to be on deck, and to work on
sails, rigging, and chafing-gear.
"Phil Farringford, able seaman!" shouted the mate, who was busy
setting the men at work.
"Here, sir," I replied. "But I don't pretend to be an able seaman."
"Don't deny it any more. You are on the shipping articles as such, and
draw wages as an able seaman."
"I don't draw any wages, sir," I replied. "I have received no advance,
and I only agreed to work my passage to Palermo."
"I hope you will work your passage to Palermo; but I don't believe you
will in this vessel," chuckled he.
"That was all I agreed to do, sir."
"I don't care what you agreed to do. We go by the papers on board
ship. Do you see that sail?" he continued, pointing to a topsail which
lay on the deck.
"Yes, sir."
"I want you to work a cringle into this corner," he added, picking up
the part of the sail indicated.
"Ay, ay, sir."
"Make it so as to hold this thimble," said he, handing me an iron ring
with concave outer edges. "Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir," I replied.
I could see the malice twinkling in his eye, as he walked away, and
left me to perform the difficult job. Fortunately I knew what a cringle
was, and I had even worked one upon the leech-line of a sail
belonging to my yacht. But I never had done such a piece of work as
that now required of me, and I felt that I was caught. Still I did not give
it up. I saw some of the seamen grinning as though they enjoyed my
chagrin. I had put a cringle upon the gaff-topsail of the Ella
Gracewood, and there was no reason why I should not do the same
job on a larger scalp. I knew most of the knots in common use—could
make a short splice, an eye splice, and a Flemish eye.
I took the short piece of rope of which I was to make the cringle, and
proceeded to calculate the details of the work. I found a cringle in
another sail, and using this as a pattern, I went at the job in good
earnest. I watched the other hands, and used the marlin-spike and
slush, as I saw them do it. Having a mechanical head, I soon satisfied
myself that I was on the right track; and then Jack Sanderson
contrived to get near me. He gave me a few hints which helped me
very much, and within a reasonable time my cringle was finished.
"It's well done, Phil. I believe you are an able seaman, after all," said
Jack.
"No; I am not."
"No sailor could have done that job any better. Can you make an eye
splice?"
"I can; and a short splice."
"Can you make a long splice?"
"I never did; but I think I could. I owned a yacht for a year and a half,
and I used to do most of the work on her rigging."
"You'll do," laughed Jack, as Mr. Waterford came on deck.
I glanced at the chief mate as he walked forward. I thought he looked
ugly and worried about something.
"Have you made that cringle, Phil?" said he, feeling uneasily in his
pockets.
"Yes, sir," I replied, exhibiting my work.
"Who did that?"
"I did, sir."
"You lie!" exclaimed he, with an oath. "Somebody did it for you."
"No, sir; I did it all myself."
"Who helped him, Mr. York?" asked Waterford, turning to the second
mate.
"No one, sir; he did it himself."
"Has any one seen a key lying about the deck?" demanded the mate,
suddenly changing the topic.
No one answered him, and no one appeared to have found a key
about the deck. He had just discovered the loss of his key, and I
concluded that it was this circumstance which made him ugly.
"I have lost the key of my trunk," added Waterford. "Has any one
found it?"
No one had, and so there was no answer.
"Why don't you say something?"
"I haven't found any key, sir," replied Jack Sanderson; and so said a
dozen others.
The mate set all hands to searching about the deck for the key. I
looked with the others, but I had not the least hope of finding it. No
one else was any more successful, and the search on deck was
abandoned. The mate went into the cabin again, and the men
continued their work. The second mate gave me another job to do,
but as it was simpler than the first, I succeeded very well. In fact, I
began to think myself that I was an able seaman. Just before eight
bells, Waterford came on deck again, looking tenfold more ugly than
before. I concluded that he had opened his trunk, and discovered the
loss of a portion of his gold, or rather the loss of that portion which
belonged to me.
"Where's the key of your trunk, Phil?" demanded he.
"In my pocket, sir."
"Give it to me," he added, sternly.
"Am I not allowed to keep the key of my own trunk, sir?"
"None of your impudence. I believe you have liquor in your trunk, and
I shall examine it again."
I gave him my key.
"Now, go up to the main cross-trees, and keep a lookout to windward
for any sail. If you see anything, hail the deck."
"Ay, ay, sir," I replied, moving forward.
"Where are you going?"
"After my coat, sir."
"Obey my order."
Instead of going to the forecastle, as I supposed he would, he went
aft, and then into the cabin. I took my coat from the berth where I had
left it. From the movements of the mate, I concluded that he was
going below to see if my key would fit his trunk, and thus determine
whether I had opened it or not. I deemed it prudent to take my
treasure from its hiding-place, and put it into my pocket, for I feared
that a search would be made during my absence. I had not been aloft
since I signed the shipping articles, though I had done so during my
first visit to the bark. I knew where the main cross-trees were, and I
was soon seated upon them, with my eyes turned to windward.
Of course I had not been sent aloft to keep a lookout for a sail to
windward. I was simply exiled to this lofty perch that I might be out of
the way while the mate searched for the gold in my trunk. I had no
objection to the cross-trees; on the contrary, I rather liked the idea of
being upon them. I should not have to answer any hard questions
during the examination.
Of the two events which occurred on the first day of my sea-life,
CRINGLE AND CROSS-TREE are the most prominent in my mind.
I sat upon the cross-trees with my arm around the weather main top-
gallant shrouds. I looked to windward occasionally, but I kept the run
of all that was transpiring on deck. I saw the mate go into the
forecastle, and I had no doubt he was looking for the fifteen hundred
dollars in gold which had first been in my trunk, then in his, and was
now in my coat pocket. If he was actually looking for the money, it
would be a difficult matter for me to conceal it; but I was determined
to throw it overboard rather than permit him to have and enjoy it. I
took the bag from my pocket, and considered what disposition I
should make of it.
"On the cross-trees!" shouted Waterford.
"Ay, ay, sir!" I replied.
"Come down!"
I might as well throw the gold into the sea, as go down with it in my
pocket. I jammed the bag in between the trestle-trees, and after
assuring myself that it was secure, I went down to the deck.
"Have you any liquor about you, Phil?" demanded the mate, as I
reported myself to him.
"No, sir; I never use liquor."
"Let me see," said he, proceeding, without ceremony, to search me,
which he did in a very thorough manner.
I knew what he was looking for, and I held still, patiently submitting to
the operation.
"On the cross-trees again," said he, savagely, when he had
completed the search.
"Ay, ay, sir," I replied, very willing to return, in order to satisfy myself
that the gold was still safe.
I confess that I did not feel half so much pleasure in the possession of
my money as I did before I lost it. I had very little hope of being able
to retain it, and I regarded it as a very uncertain treasure—more
uncertain even than earthly treasures usually are. I went up the main
rigging, and on reaching the cross-trees, I found the bag where I had
left it. For an hour I saw the mate going from place to place about the
deck; but I think he spent half the time in the quarters of the crew. I
put the bag in my pocket, and was soon ordered down. I went
immediately to the forecastle, and found the key of my trunk in the
key-hole. My clothes and everything else had been thoroughly
overhauled, and were in hopeless confusion; but my precious relics
were safe.
"Pass the word for Phil Farringford," said the second mate to a man
near the door of the house on deck.
"Here, sir," I responded.
"Mr. Waterford wants you."
I threw the bag of gold hastily into the trunk, and locked it. I found the
chief mate on the quarter-deck waiting for me.
"Why don't you come when I send for you?" said he, savagely.
"I did come; I am here, sir."
"It takes you a good while to come after you are called. You were in
my state-room last night, Phil?"
"You put me there, sir."
"I say you were there; no matter how you came there."
"I was, sir."
"Did you see my trunk?"
"I did, sir."
"Was it open?"
"It was not."
"But you opened it," said he, angrily, as he doubled up his fist and
shook it in my face with a horrid oath. "You stole fifteen hundred
dollars from that trunk, Phil."
"I had fifteen hundred dollars stolen from my trunk, on the Ohio
River."
"Did you? Well, it served you right."
"You don't seem to think so in your own case."
"None of your impudence, Phil. I say you stole fifteen hundred in gold
from my trunk."
"I said that I had been equally unfortunate on the Ohio River. Mine
was stolen by a fellow who called himself A. McGregor."
"Did you steal my money?" roared he, fiercely.
"No, sir; I did not steal your money."
"You lie! You did! What have you done with it?"
"I speak only the truth, sir."
It was the literal truth.
"Answer me; what have you done with my money?"
"I have none of your money, sir."
"You lie!"
And with that he hit me over the head with a wooden belaying-pin,
and the blow brought me senseless to the deck.
The Mate strikes a heavy blow.
 CHAPTER XII.
IN WHICH PHIL ASCERTAINS THE DESTINATION
OF THE MICHIGAN.
When my senses came back to me I was lying in my bunk in the
forecastle. Old Jack Sanderson was rubbing my head with spirits.
"How do you feel, Phil?" asked the old salt, tenderly.
"My head!" was all the reply I could make, for everything seemed to
be whirling around, and to be as unsteady as the rolling ocean itself.
"He gave you a hard crack, my lad; but he didn't kill you."
"He might as well," I replied, tightly closing my eyes in my efforts to
steady the scene around me.
"Not a bit of it, Phil, lad. One live man's worth half a dozen dead
ones any time. You'll feel better by and by."
"I feel better now," I added, as things began to be a little more
substantial. "The mate means to kill me, I believe, before he has
done with me."
"He didn't make anything by that crack he gave you. We're rough in
for'ad here, Phil, but we know what's right. The men all like you, Phil.
They say you are smart, and that the mate is down on you. They are
all on your side, every one of 'em, even to the second mate, though
he daresn't say so."
"I am very much obliged to them for their good will; but I'm afraid
they can't help me much while Mr. Waterford is down upon me."
"Perhaps they can, my lad. At any rate, that crack the mate gave you
made you more than a dozen friends. We sailors always go for the
bottom dog."
"I feel better now; I believe I will get up," I added, thinking of my
money, and wondering whether Waterford had examined my trunk
again while I lay senseless in my bunk.
"No, lad; don't get up yet. Keep quiet. I've wasted half a pint of good
spirits on your head."
"Where did you get it?"
"Captain Farraday gave it to me. When he saw what the mate had
done, he was a little scared, and sent me to take care of you. He
gave me a glass of rum to wash your head in. Now lay still, and I will
get another. If you take it inside, it will balance you right—keep you
on an even keel."
He took the glass and disappeared before I could protest against his
proposed treatment; but presently he returned with the tumbler half
full of rum.
"Take a little of this, my lad," said he.
"No, I thank you; I don't need it. I feel much better, and that would
only go into my head, and make me dizzy."
He urged the point very earnestly, but I persisted in my refusal to
touch the vile stuff; the smell of it on my head was enough, and more
than enough, for me.
"It will do you good," Jack insisted.
"Excuse me; I do not need it."
"Well, if you really mean so, I won't say another word about it. But it
is a pity to have it wasted."
"You can return it to the captain."
"That would be worse than wasting it, Phil," he added, as he poured
it down his own throat.
Perhaps this was the use he intended to make of the rum from the
first; but I must do him the justice to say that he had conscientiously
used the first glass he had obtained upon my head, judging from the
condition of my hair. It must have been a great temptation to him.
"Has the mate been here since he knocked me down?" I asked.
"No; he hasn't been near you. He has a bad temper—that man. But
what's the matter with him, lad? Why is he down upon you?"
"It would be a long story, Jack; but I will tell you all about it some
time."
"He says you stole his money."
"I did not steal his money."
"Nobody believes you did."
"I feel better now, and I will get up," I added, suiting the action to the
word.
"Let's see your head, my lad."
The old sailor examined the bump on the side of my head, which
was quite sore, but was nothing serious. The blow had stunned me,
and left me with an aching head; but I had received harder knocks
than this one, and I was not disposed to magnify its effects. Jack left
me, and I had an opportunity to look into my trunk. The bag of gold
was safe, as I had left it. I returned it to the hiding-place where I had
first put it, deeming this more secure than my trunk. I hoped the
breeze had blown over, and I went on deck. The motley crew treated
me very kindly when I made my appearance, and expressed their
sympathy with me. In fact, the instincts of a crew always lead them
to take sides against the officer.
It was the second dog watch, and the mate was not on deck. I ate
my supper with the crew; and at eight bells, the port watch, to which I
belonged, came on duty. We had made an arrangement among
ourselves for the tricks at the wheel; and Gorro, a Spaniard, took the
first turn. The weather, which had thus far been very favorable, now
gave indications of a change. The wind came on squally and heavy,
and at four bells, when the captain came on deck, he ordered the
light sails to be furled.
"Lay aloft, Phil, and furl the main royal," said the mate. "Welsh, the
fore royal."
"Ay, ay, sir," I replied.
I hastened up the main-rigging, my head still shaking from the effects
of the blow I had received. The bark was rolling heavily in the sea,
and the violent gusts of wind made her very unsteady. Not a sail had
been disturbed since we left New York harbor. I had never done any
work aloft, and had never even seen a royal furled. Fortunately the
night was dark, and the mate could not see in what manner I did my
work. But I had learned my lesson, so far as it could be learned by
word of mouth.
The royal yard, on such a night as that, was a perilous place for an
inexperienced hand; but I was not to be daunted by any danger. The
halyard was let go, and the sail clewed up. I made up the bunt, and
passed the gasket around the sail. Probably every part of the job
was not done in a thoroughly seaman-like manner; but the sail was
secure, and the mate did not go aloft to see how it was done. When
the royal was furled, I went down, passing the two men who had
been sent up to furl the main top-gallant sail. I paused on the cross-
trees to rest myself a little, and to look out upon the white-capped
billows of the dark ocean.
I had just furled a royal, and I felt like a sailor; I should have felt more
like one if my head had not snapped so violently. The mast to which I
clung was swaying up and down, as the bark rolled in the billows,
and I felt that I had really entered upon the sea swashes of a sailor.
The wind increased in fury every moment; and though the furling of
the light sails eased the vessel for a time, she soon labored heavily
again. Two men were required at the wheel, and the swash of the
sea came over the bulwarks in tons. At eight bells all hands were
called. The courses had been hauled up, and now a reef was put in
the fore and main topsails. But the bark still held her course to the
south-east. It was a rough night, and all hands remained on deck till
eight bells in the morning, when the weather began to moderate. I
was wet to the skin, and shivered with cold. I had not been allowed
to close my eyes, and I felt that the life of a sailor, even without a
brutal mate, was a severe one.
When the gale subsided, the port watch had the deck, and it was not
till after breakfast that I could get a nap. I slept my four hours; but in
the afternoon all hands were required to work upon rigging and
chafing-gear, as though they had had their regular sleep the night
before. Mr. Waterford was uglier than ever, for he had been on duty
with the crew. He sent me with a green hand to slush down the fore-
top mast—a kind of work which, by the courtesies of the service,
should not be imposed upon an able seaman, as he chose to regard
me. I did not complain, but did the job faithfully.
I will not detail the trials and hardships to which I was subjected by
the malice of the mate. Three weeks passed by, and we saw nothing
of the Straits of Gibraltar. By this time, through a very severe
experience, I had learned my duty. I knew every rope in the ship;
and, if I was not an able seaman, I could do nearly everything that
was required of one. Mr. Waterford had not again assaulted me with
a weapon, but he had labored to make me as uncomfortable as
possible. I saw very little of Captain Farraday, for the reason that he
was drunk in the cabin the greater portion of the time. The two
passengers, both of whom were Spaniards, came on deck every
day; but I think that neither of them ever stepped forward of the
mainmast.
There had been a great deal of discussion among the more
intelligent men of the crew in regard to the destination of the bark.
We could not see how she was ever to make the Straits of Gibraltar
by heading to the south-east. The bark was a very fast sailer, and
though she had encountered two gales, she had generally had
favorable weather. I insisted that we were at least a thousand miles
south of the latitude of the straits. The intense heat of the sun, when
the wind was light, as well as his more vertical position, satisfied me
on this point.
"Land ho!" shouted a sailor aloft, one morning.
"Where away?" called the mate.
"Broad on the lee bow."
The cry produced an intense excitement on board, and all hands
were on the lookout for the land. I could distinctly see it—a lofty
promontory. The announcement was immediately followed by an
order to keep the bark one point more to the southward, so that we
obtained no nearer view of the land.
"You are a scholar, Phil. What land was that?" asked old Jack
Sanderson, when we happened to be together.
"I don't know; but I have an idea what it is."
"Well what's your idea, my lad?"
"I think it is one of the Cape Verde Islands."
"On the coast of Africa?"
"Yes."
"You don't mean it?"
"I do; you wouldn't believe me when I said we were a thousand miles
south of the straits."
"Well, where are we bound? That's the question."
"I don't know."
"We all shipped for Palermo, and up the Mediterranean. I don't
understand it."
"Nor I; but the mate is wicked enough to do anything. I am satisfied
we are not bound to Palermo."
The whole crew were soon engaged in the discussion. The Spanish
and Portuguese sailors laughed, and looked wise; others didn't care
where we were bound; but the half dozen Americans were really
troubled at the situation.
"Don't grumble," said Martino, the Spaniard. "We make gran fortune
out of this cruise."
"How?" demanded Sanderson.
"No importa," chuckled the Spaniard. "Make gran pile of money on
this cruise."
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you know where we are bound?" added Grego, a Portuguese.
"No."
"You may know now; you must know soon. We are bound to the
coast of Africa, for a cargo of niggers," laughed Grego.
I believed it.
 CHAPTER XIII.
IN WHICH PHIL GOES AFT, WITH OTHERS OF
THE CREW, AND THEN GOES FORWARD.
I believed that the Michigan was bound to the coast of Africa for a
cargo of slaves. The boatman who had tried to assist me to escape
had said as much to me, though I did not understand it at the time.
Captain Farraday declared that he should make his fortune on this
voyage; and Waterford was desperate enough to do anything. The
bark was certainly ten or twelve hundred miles south of her proper
latitude if she was bound up the Mediterranean.
If there was anything in the world which I regarded as more horrible
and wicked than anything else, it was the slave trade. At the time of
which I write, in spite of the vigilance of the British and American
cruisers on the African coast, several vessels had been successful in
running cargoes of negroes to Cuba. The profits of the trade were so
enormous that large wages could be paid to crews, and the vessel
sacrificed at the end. It was evident to me that the Spanish and
Portuguese seamen on board had been shipped for a slave voyage,
or they would not have known the destination of the bark. We had
often heard them talking together in their own language; but, as none
of the crew understood it, their secret was safe till they or the officers
chose to divulge it.
"What do you say to that, Jack?" asked Dick Baxter, as several of
the American sailors met in the forecastle.
"I believe it, Dick," replied the old salt.
"There is no doubt of it," I added; and I felt as though I stood on the
brink of despair.
"Grant it's true, what can we do about it?" continued Dick.
"Nothing," replied Jack.
"But it's piracy."
"Worse than piracy. I would rather be hung for murder than for
stealing niggers."
"Can't we do something?" I inquired, anxiously.
"What can we do against a set of cutthroats like the mate?" growled
Jack.
"We may do anything we can," added Dick. "It isn't a lawful voyage,
and we can't be compelled to do duty. We shipped for Palermo, not
to steal niggers."
I was glad to hear even two of my shipmates speak in this decided
manner. They abhorred the slave trade, like true American sailors;
and I hoped that more of the crew would be actuated by the same
feelings of humanity.
"This business is piracy, and every man engaged in it is liable to be
hanged," I added.
"But no one ever was hung," added Dick.
"So much the worse; they ought to have been," said Jack. "What can
we do?"
"I'll tell you what we can do, to make a beginning. Let us ascertain
first who are opposed to the business," I suggested.
"The Portuguese are in the scrape," replied Dick.
"And the Spaniards," said Jack.
"There are only five of them," I continued. "How is it with the second
mate?"
"I don't know; but we will soon find out who the pirates are."
We separated to obtain the facts. At eight bells in the evening, when
the port watch went on duty, we had canvassed the crew. There
were twenty-five persons on board, of whom eighteen were men
before the mast. The captain, two mates, the cook and cabin
steward, and two passengers, formed the rest of the number. Only
the five Spanish and Portuguese sailors among the crew were
committed to the nefarious scheme. The captain, the chief mate, and
the two passengers made nine who were actually engaged in the
conspiracy. Of the remaining sixteen, eight, including the second
mate, were opposed to a slave voyage on any terms, and would
rather die than take part in the scheme. The other eight were in
doubt, but most of them objected to the deception which had been
practised upon them.
The bark went along on her course for a couple of days longer,
during which time the conspiracy was constantly under discussion.
Those of us who had decided views on the subject did our best to
convince the doubtful ones of the peril and wickedness of the
enterprise. We brought five of them to say that they would join us in
a remonstrance to the officers.
"That's the talk; we will go to work peaceably," said Jack Sanderson.
"Now's our time," added Dick Baxter. "All hands are on deck, and we
may as well form a line, and state the case. Who shall speak for us?"
"Jack Sanderson," I suggested.
"I'm no lawyer," replied the old salt, modestly.
"We don't need any lawyer. You are the oldest man, and will do the
job best," I insisted.
"Agreed!" added several.
Without giving the spokesman time to consider his speech, we
collected our forces, comprising twelve men, and walked aft as far as
the mainmast, with old Jack at the head of the procession. The
captain, the mate, and the two passengers were smoking their cigars
on the quarter-deck; but their attention was immediately arrested by
the appearance of the twelve seamen.
"What's the matter now?" demanded Waterford, stepping forward to
the mainmast, where we had halted. "Do you want plum duff every
day in the week?"
"No, sir; we don't find any fault with our grub," answered Jack, taking
off his hat; and the rest of us followed his example, so as to be
entirely respectful.
"What do you want, then?"
"I beg your pardon, sir; but we all shipped for Palermo, and up the
Mediterranean; and we don't think we shall make that port on this
tack."
"You are more than half right," added the mate, with an oath, as he
glanced at the captain and the two passengers.
"If you please, sir, we would like to know where the bark is bound,"
continued Jack, scraping his foot upon the deck, as he made his
most respectful bow.
"She is bound to put a lot of money in your pockets, my lads."
"Thank you, sir; but where shall we fetch up?"
"No matter about that, now. I'll tell you all about it in a few days,"
replied Waterford, more gently than I had heard him speak since I
came on board. "If you want plum duff for dinner every day, you shall
have it. Here, doctor!" he shouted to the cook. "Give all hands plum
duff every day."
"Thank you, sir," Jack proceeded, with another scrape and bow.
"Plum duff is good; but we would like to know where the bark is
bound."
"Bound for a port where you will make more money than you ever
saw before, my lads. By the way, boys, we are going to serve out
grog in this bark three times a day after this, and we will begin now."
My heart sank within me, for I was afraid that the virtue of Sanderson
and Baxter would not be proof against the seductions of rum. They
were good men when sober; I knew that they were little better than
demons when drunk.
"Don't let him buy you off with liquor and plum duff," I whispered, with
my heart in my throat.
"We don't object to the grog, your honor; but we would like to know
something more about the voyage," replied Jack, mildly.
"Steward!" shouted the mate.
"Here, sir," replied this official.
"Splice the main brace, all round. Give every man half a tumbler full,
and let Sanderson have Phil's share; he belongs to the temperance
society, and never splices the main brace," laughed the mate, as
though he thought himself inexpressibly funny.
"Don't let him pull wool over your eyes, Jack," I whispered, turning
my back to the mate.
"Thank your honor, kindly," continued Sanderson, whose heart
seemed to be won by the rum.
"I know how to warm the heart of an old sailor," added Waterford,
glancing at his companions on the quarter-deck.
"If you please, sir, some of the men think the bark is going a slaving,"
persisted Jack.
"Do they? What put that into their heads?"
"We all think we are bound down the coast of Africa."
"Well, don't you like the idea?" laughed the mate.
"No, sir; we do not," responded Jack, so decidedly that my courage
rose a little.
"You don't? That's because you don't understand it."
"We think we understand the business well enough, sir."
"Don't you want to make five hundred or a thousand dollars out of a
three months' cruise?"
"Not slaving, sir," answered Jack, with another scrape of his foot,
and a low bow.
"Come, let's splice the main brace, and we will talk it over another
time," said the mate, as the cabin steward appeared with a pitcher of
rum.