HISTORY

OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

CHAPTER I

THE NEW WORLD

THE AWAKENING OF EUROPE

Until the

MERICA is the child of Europe. discoverers and explorers from the maritime nations of western Europe began to come to the shores of these continents, more than four hundred years ago, the vast regions now occupied by the United States, the British Dominion of Canada, and the LatinAmerican republics of Mexico, Central and South America were a wilderness of tribes of copper-colored barbarians or savages, whose ancestors had crossed by Bering Strait from northeastern Asia to Alaska, we know not how many centuries before, and had slowly spread southward and eastward to Patagonia and Labrador. These American Indians (or "Amerinds, to use the cable-code name by which scholars distinguish them from the inhabitants of the country of India) showed great diversity of character and attainments, due to differences in climate, soil, food, building material, and the activities necessary to preserve life. The Mayas of Yucatan, the Incas of Peru, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Hopis of New Mexico, the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Island, and the Iroquois of central New York furnish examples of Indian tribes who had learned to construct quite elaborate calendars and temples, to weave

beautiful rugs and baskets, to bake pottery, to build houses of clay or of cedar beams, shaped with stone implements and ornamented with huge carved totem poles, to devise rude political institutions, and to raise crops of beans, pumpkins, and Indian corn. Other tribes were sunk in bestial savagery, sheltering themselves from wind and snow behind piles of brushwood, wallowing in the southern mud like hogs, eating roots, grass, snakes, and lizards, and dying by thousands from the ravages of the beasts and the diseases against which they were powerless to protect themselves. Nowhere had they risen above the stage of barbarism. It was for the European settlers to introduce civilization into the New World. They brought hither not only tools for the conquest of the wilderness, such as firearms, iron implements for building and farming, horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, wheat and barley, vegetables and fruits, but also the forms of government, the religion, the books, and the languages of the Old World. For the ethnologist the American Indians have been a picturesque object of study; for the government, since the days of the earliest settlers, they have been an obstruction to be removed, by methods often unnecessarily cruel, from the path of civilization. They have contributed almost nothing to the making of America. The New World was a virgin continent for the European discoverers and their descendants, to make of it what they would.

2. The Middle Ages. To understand why and how this task was begun, therefore, it is necessary to know something of the conditions of life and of the currents of ideas which prevailed in western Europe some four and a half centuries ago. That was the time known to scholars as the age of the Renaissance, or "the new birth." Perhaps it would be better to call it a new awakening, for Europe had been not dead but sleeping, and the awakening was not a sudden start but a gradual stirring attended by a good deal of drowsiness and yawning. For five or six hundred years after the great Roman Empire had gone to pieces and its place in western Europe had been taken by the rude tribes of barbarian invaders from beyond the Rhine and the Danube, civilization was threatened with extinction.

Europe was passing through the Dark Ages. The political authority, the legal institutions, the commercial industry, the art and letters of the ancient world, were lost. The sap of creative energy ceased to flow. Life became dull, stagnant, and precarious. The strong built castles and filled the land with their incessant petty feudal wars and raids, while the stolid peasants or serfs lived in miserable hovels on their lord's domain and got a bare subsistence from the cultivation of their strip of the manor land. Such little learning as there was betook itself to the monasteries. The Church alone, with the fall of the political power of the Roman Empire, struggled to preserve a sense of unity, a show of authority, and a modicum of peace in western Europe. But it was a well-nigh hopeless task. The cement had fallen out of the structure of European society, leaving it to crumble into thousands of little baronial or ecclesiastical estates, without cultural or commercial contact beyond the borders of their immediate neighbors. Thirteen recorded plagues swept over the filthy, unsanitary hovels and halls of Europe in the tenth century, carrying away unnumbered thousands by scurvy, influenza, and leprosy.

3. The Crusades. Toward the close of the eleventh century, however, events occurred which were to stir Europe from her lethargy. Ever since the rapid conquests of the Mohammedan armies in the seventh century, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, including the holy city of Jerusalem, had been in the hands of the Arabs, an enlightened people who respected the Christian religion and permitted the pilgrims from Europe to visit the Holy Sepulcher, or grave of Christ, unmolested. But now the cruel race of Seljuk Turks coming down from the north ousted the Arabs from control. They barred the Christian pilgrims from the holy places and made war on the Eastern emperor, conquering his vast province of Asia Minor and threatening his capital of Constantinople. The emperor appealed to the Pope for aid and the Pope appealed to the lords and knights of Europe to cease slaughtering their fellow Christians in feudal warfare and join for the rescue of the Holy Sepulcher from the Turks. The response to the Pope's impassioned plea

at the Council of Clermont in 1095 was enthusiastic. With the cry "God wills it," the soldiers of Europe sewed the emblem of the cross on the breasts of their tunics and started on the holy Crusades, or wars of the Cross. For a century and a half armies of crusaders, led by knights, nobles, and even kings and emperors, marched across Europe and Asia Minor, to establish Christian kingdoms in Syria. As military expeditions, however, the Crusades failed. Jerusalem, twice captured and recaptured, was finally lost to the Turks (1244), who retained their possession of the Holy Sepulcher until General Allenby's triumphal entry into Jerusalem in 1918. In spite of the failure of their purpose the effect of the Crusades on western Europe was enormous. They provided the new contact necessary to stimulate social and economic activity. They revealed a new civilization, superior in many respects to the stagnant feudalism of the Middle Ages. The wealth of Asia, which had been unknown to the West since the days of the Roman Empire, was again discovered. The Damascus steel and linen ("damask"), the Egyptian glass and cotton, the gold and gems and rugs and spices of Asia began to find their way to Europe to encourage new tastes. Moreover, many knights and lords had mortgaged their lands to raise crusading armies and had returned impoverished or had not returned at all. The Pope had freed debtors and had pardoned criminals who assumed the cross. The old feudal order or disorder was changed. Serfs found themselves without a master and with opportunity beckoning them to become artisans or traders in the newly forming towns. Slowly a new order of society, neither nobles nor serfs, but a middle class, or bourgeoisie, began to develop, which in time was to amass riches by commerce and manufacture and to contend with kings for power.

4. The Far East. When the Crusades, which had revealed the Near East, were beginning to peter out in the thirteenth century, the far-distant Orient was brought into the vision of Europe. Eastern Asia came to meet eastern Europe. The great Tatar conqueror Genghis Khan (died 1227) and his successors extended their empire westward from Mongolia to the borders of the