"The Columbian Mosaic in Colonial America" by James Axtell in Humanities (September/October 1991, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 12-18) We might well call America a Columbian mosaic because it was the Italian admiral who effectively bound together all of the world's continents with the shipping lanes of one continuous ocean sea. When Columbus bumped into America en route to Asia after a maritime apprenticeship in Europe and Africa, he made it likely-- indeed, inevitable--that the peoples of the world's insular continents would no longer live in splendid isolation but would soon become a single global village, due largely to European colonialism, technology, and communications. Although he never set foot on the North American continent, he was personally responsible for introducing Europeans to America and Americans--albeit in chains--to Europe. It was left to Nicolas de Ovando, his successor as governor of the Indies, to introduce African slaves in 1502, just as Columbus set sail on his fourth and final voyage. The paternity of triracial America is not in doubt; the only question is, how did the new American mosaic of 1790 come about? One short but hardly sweet answer, which is increasingly heard as we approach 1992, is that Columbus and his European successors found a "virgin" paradise of innocence and harmony and proceeded to rape the land, kill the natives, and pillage Africa to replace the American victims of their "genocide." There is, of course, some truth to that, but not enough to be morally useful or historically truthful. If we can take our itchy fingers off the trigger of moral outrage for a spell, we might be able to view the human phase of what is being called the Columbian Encounter less as an excuse for passing judgment than as a vehicle for understanding. For in the ideological climate of the 1990s, where our collective skin is paper-thin and intolerance has been raised to an art form, we stand in sore need of some critical distance from the irreparable problems of the past. Instead of picking through the bone heaps of history for skeletons to line the closets of our current nemeses, we might better cultivate a little disinterestedness toward both the failings and successes of our predecessors in hopes of taking courage and counsels of prudence from their struggles and solutions. Since their circumstances--their field of experiences, opportunities, and limitations--are never the same as ours, we cannot draw universal laws from their example, good or ill. We can only try to emulate their good example and to avoid their worst mistakes by paying close attention to the historical circumstances in which they acted, by recognizing that their time is not our time, and that we must be equally alert to the complexity and uniqueness of our own circumstances as we strive to thread a moral path through the present. Perhaps then we can recognize that the social mosaic of the 1790s, and that, although in one sense we cannot change the facts of history, we can, through a critical and disinterested examination of its causes, suggest a few ways to improve the personal and group relations we continue to fashion in the modern American mosaic. A test of our moral mettle and patience arises as soon as we begin to discuss the influx of Europeans or "white" people into monochromatic Indian America. On the simplest level, what do we call the process and the participants? Since all language is loaded with value judgments, it makes quite a difference whether we refer to the process as colonization, imperialism, settlement, emigration, or invasion. By the same token, were the newcomers imperialists, conquistadors, invaders, trespassers, and killers, or were they, on balance, only Europeans, whites, colonists, strangers, and settlers? If modern Indians ought to have their wishes respected as to the generic names by which historians refer to their native ancestors, surely the descendants of European colonists should be accorded the same courtesy (recognizing, of course, that there may be stylistic or other reasons for not fully granting either group's wishes). It has been one of the cardinal rules of the historical canon--one I see no reason to lay aside-- that the parties of the past deserve equal treatment from historians--equal respect and empathy but also equal criticism and justice. As judge, jury, prosecutor, and counsel for the defense of people who can no longer testify on their own behalf, the historian cannot be any less than impartial in his or her judicial review of the past. For that reason, I suggest, we should avoid language that is inflammatory or prejudicial to any historical person or party, which is not to say that, once we have proven our case, we may not call a spade a spade, an imperialist tool, or a killer of innocent worms. If we have presented the pertinent evidence on all sides of the issue with fairness and accuracy, our audience can make up their own minds about the judiciousness of our verdicts. How, then, did the face of America become so blanched when only three hundred years earlier it had been uniformly brown? The short answer is that Europeans emigrated in great numbers to the Americas and, when they got there, reproduced themselves with unprecedented success. But a somewhat fuller explanation must take account of regional and national variations. The first emigrants, of course, were Spanish, not merely the infamous conquistadors, whose bloody feats greatly belied their small numbers, but Catholic priests and missionaries, paper-pushing clerks and officials who manned the far-flung bureaucracy of empire, and ordinary settlers: peasants, artisans, merchants, and not a few hidalgos, largely from the cities and towns of central and southwestern Spain. Since permission to emigrate was royally regulated, "undesirables" such as Moors, Jews, gypsies, and those condemned by the Inquisition reached the New World only in small, furtive numbers. In the sixteenth century perhaps 240,000 Spaniards slipped into American ports. They were joined by 450,000 in the next century. The great majority was young men; only in the late sixteenth century did the proportion of women reach one-third. This meant that many men had to marry, or at least cohabit with, Indian women, which in turn gave rise to a large mestizo or mixed population. The relative unhealthiness of Latin America's subtropical islands and coasts also contributed to a slow and modest increase in Spanish population. When the mature population finally doubled by 1628, it had taken more than fifty years, and only half the increase was due to biology; the other half was contributed by emigrants from home. In sharp contrast to the Spanish were the French in Canada, which Voltaire dismissed as "a few acres of snow." In a century and a half, Mother France sent only 15,000 emigrants to the Laurentian colony, the majority of them against their will. Only five hundred paid their own way, many of them merchants eager to cash in on the fur and import trade. The rest were reluctant engages (indentured servants), soldiers, convicts (primarily salt smugglers), and filles du roi or "King's girls," sent to supply the colony's super-abundant, shorthanded, and lonely bachelors with wives. Not until 1710 were the Canadian genders balanced. But even in the seventeenth century, Canadiennes married young and produced often, doubling the population at least every thirty years. Fortunately for their Indian hosts and English neighbors, this high rate of natural increase was wasted on a minuscule base population. When Wolfe climbed to the Plains of Abraham in 1759, New France had fewer than 70,000 Frenchmen, a deficit of colonial population on the order of thirty-two to one. The biggest source of white faces in North America was Great Britain. In the seventeenth century she sent more than 150,000 of her sons and daughters to the mainland colonies and at least 350,000 more in the nest. In 1690, white people numbered around 194,000; a hundred years later they teemed at three million-plus. Emigration obviously accounted for some of this astounding growth. In the eighteenth century, 150,000 Scotch-Irish, 100,000 Germans (many of them "redemptioners" from the Palatinate), 50,000 British convicts, and 2,000 to 3,000 Sephardic Jews made their way to English lands of opportunity. But the proliferation of pale faces was predominantly a function of natural increase by which the colonial population doubled every twenty-five years, at that time the highest rate of increase known to demographers. After an initial period of so-called "gate mortality," when food shortages, new diseases, and climatic "seasoning" might exact a high toll, white couples in most of the English colonies began to produce an average of four children who lived to become parents themselves. The reasons for their success were mainly two: In the words of Ben Franklin, "marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe." Colonial women married at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, about four or five years sooner than their European sisters, and they remarried quickly if their helpmates died, both in part because men tended to outnumber women. When their children were born (at the normal European rate), fewer died in infancy and childhood (before the ages of one and ten, respectively), and fewer mothers died in childbed. Women continued to have babies every two years, in the absence of Catholic prohibitions (as in Latin America and Canada) and birth control. But American mothers were healthier and lived longer than European mothers, thanks to sparser settlements, larger farms, more fertile land, fuller larders of nutritious food, and less virulent diseases. They therefore produced larger, taller, and healthier families, who in turn did the same. The results of all this fecundity were impressive to imperial administrators, catastrophic for the Indians. The Powhatans of Virginia couldn't have been too alarmed by the initial wave of English settlers and soldiers because 80 percent of them died of their own ineptitude and disease. But by 1640 the pale-faced population had recovered from the deadly uprising of 1622 to reach some 10,000 largely through persistent supplies from England. By 1680 the contest for the colony had been decisively won by the tobacco-planting English, who now outnumbered the natives twenty to one. Massachusetts, the other pole of archetypal Anglo-America, grew even faster. From only 9,000 Puritans in 1640, the commonwealth of the cod grew to 150,000 within a century; Boston alone housed more than 15,000 people. But the fastest growing region, both by emigration and nature, was eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Between 1690 and 1790, "the best poor man's country" (as its fans liked to describe it) saw its white population increase thirty-eight-fold. On the eve of independence, Philadelphia was the largest and most diverse city in North America, filled with religious denominations, ethnic groups, and social strata of every imaginable stripe. The Iroquois and Delaware chiefs who came to be wooed to neutrality or the rebel cause in the imminent war cannot have failed to be daunted by its 25,000 crowded inhabitants. Yet numbers alone do not allow us to draw a moral bead on the early American story. We must not only know how many Europeans emigrated to--or invaded--Indian America but why. For without an understanding of their motives, we cannot treat them as moral agents with choices to make nor hold them accountable for the foreseen and foreseeable consequences of their actions. The one thing we can be sure of is that they came for a wide and usually mixed variety of reasons. At the beginning of the "Great Migration" to Massachusetts, even a Puritan promoter harbored no illusions about the exclusively or purity of the migrants' motives. "As it were absurd to conceive they have all one motive," wrote John White in The Planter's Plea, "so were it more ridiculous to imagine they have all one scope.... It may be private interests may prevail with some. One brother may draw over another, a son the father, and perhaps some man his inward acquaintance.... Necessity may press some, novelty draw on others, hopes of gain in time to come may prevail with a third sort." For many but by no means all settlers of New England, religion played a key role in their decision to uproot their families and move to America. But religious motives did not always guarantee health, sovereignty, or well-being of the American natives. Believers who wished simply to practice their own faiths without persecution, real or imagined, may be let off the hook, unless, of course, like the Puritans, their own intolerance and desire for a state monopoly led them to proscribe the natives' worship of their own gods. On the other hand, French nuns and missionaries were sent to Canada by visions of transforming the "pagan" wilderness into a New Jerusalem, where nomadic native souls "washed white in the blood of the lamb" would join good French Catholics to form "one people." New England missionaries not only reduced the native land-base by resettling the Indians in smaller, anglicized "praying towns" but inadvertently increased their neophytes' risk of contagious disease. In other words, good intentions alone are not sufficient to exempt historical actors from criticism, and history, unlike the law, has no statue of limitation. Other motives are equally hard to condemn wholesale. Can we blame ordinary European farmers, craftsmen, and merchants for wanting to forge a better life for their families, even if they wound up on land that once belonged to America's native inhabitants? The vast majority of immigrants hardly, if ever, saw the original owners, much less cheated or forced them from their land. Even male freeholders seldom knew about the backroom chicanery of their elected representatives who speculated with ill- gotten Indian lands. Much less could the voters control the machinations of imperial officials and army officers who wheeled and dealed for the same sort of native property. If we blame ordinary colonists for wanting lower taxes, less crowding, more land, higher wages, healthier climates, more and better food, and family harmony, we will have to include ourselves in the blame--and most of the human race, for that matter. Collective guilt of such magnitude doesn't seem very productive. On the other hand, immigrants were not only drawn to America but pushed out of Europe. Many shipped out because they were trying to run away from something: death sentences, debtor's sergeants. We may have little sympathy for those who chose to evade their civil responsibilities and the law, but what about the scrupulous avoiders of sin and immorality, who ran from drinking, gambling, and wanton women as if from the plague? Should we cut no slack for henpecked husbands who fled from shrews and harridans, or young women who could not wait an extra four or five years to marry and start a family? How hardened do we have to become to withhold our empathy from young servants who escaped abusive masters or young lovers kept apart by flinty or tightfisted patriarchs? If we want to take a hardnosed stance on the spoiling, illegitimate, or immoral character of white immigration, we would do better to focus on those who came solely to highjack America's wealth to Europe, often with the help, witting or unwitting, of its native owners and trustees, or those who carried war and destruction to Indian country, directly or indirectly in pursuit of geopolitical objectives of a European sort. Obviously it is easier to pillory the designers, and to some extent the agents, of military and economic imperialism than it is the run-of-the-mill emigrant who carried no conscious intent to defraud, harm, or dispossess anyone. Oppressive Spanish mine owners, freebooting pirates, absentee owners of West Indian sugar plantations, and fork-tongued traders who swindled Indians of their furs and skins with watered rum and false measures undoubtedly deserve our censure, mostly because they contravened the moral standards of their own day, less, perhaps, because those standards resemble our own. At the same time, we should recognize that to condemn every aggressive military, religious, or economic action in the past is to question some of the fundaments of Western society, past and present. If everything associated with mercantilism, capitalism, evangelical religion, and armed force is beyond the moral pale, we may find it difficult, if not impossible, to approach our past--or the histories of most of the world's cultures--with the requisite empathy, understanding, and disinterestedness. Another topic that requires an abundance of all three qualities but allows ample room for moral judgment is slavery. Nineteen percent of the population of the new United States was black, the result of a legal, culturally sanctioned, but heinous trade in African slaves. The slave trade was already ancient by the time America was brought into the European orbit in 1492. But the discovery of gold, the development of sugar plantations, and the founding of cities in Spanish and Portuguese America created a vast new market for the human chattels brought from the African interior by rival African kings, merchants, and war chiefs. Before independence, the Spanish alone transported 1.5 million blacks to their colonies, perhaps 200,000 before 1650. In the Caribbean the blacks replaced Indian laborers who had died in massive numbers from oppression, dislocation, and imported diseases. By the seventeenth century, the native populations of Mexico and coastal Peru were also seriously depleted, so black slaves were substituted as panners of gold (they died to easily in the damp of the mines), cutters of sugar cane, sailors, shipwrights, and particularly domestic servants in urban households. They did their work so well that by the eighteenth century the majority of blacks were free, especially the women and children of the cities who were manumitted by their owners at death or by purchase. In Canada the French preferred Indian slaves from the eastern Plains and Great Lakes called panis (after the Pawnees of modern- day Nebraska). In 125 years they imported only 1,132 Africans (fewer than ten a year), mostly as household servants in Quebec and Montreal. Since they were expensive and relatively rare, their lot was not onerous and, contrary to expectations, they adjusted to Canadian winters with little difficulty. But their brethren in French Louisiana had a much harder row to hoe, to judge from the mortality rates. Between 1719 and 1735, royal and company administrators imported some 7,000 Africans, mostly "Bambaras," or acculturated slave soldiers, from Senegal. Yet in 1735 only 3,400 remained to be counted. The same loss of life must have occurred during the next fifty years: More than 20,000 arrived, but the black population in 1785 was only 16,500. Even immigration could not keep pace with Louisiana's morbid climate and the physical demands of plantation labor. The English demand for black labor grew much more slowly than did the Spanish, largely because the supply of indentured servants from the British Isles was adequate until the late seventeenth century. With the renewal of tobacco prices in Europe and the development of rice culture in South Carolina, however, English planters in the tidewater and the piedmont alike had a need for hands that could not be fully met with white workmen, who in any event often proved troublesome to the colonial elite upon gaining their freedom. So the planter turned primarily to "seasoned" slaves from the West Indies to fill the gap. Thanks to an increase in the African traffic in colonial and British bottoms, the price of a strong male slave remained a bargain when amortized over a lifetime. But after 1720, demand for acculturated West Indian slaves outstripped the supply and 80 percent of the slaves for English plantations came directly from Africa. Black talent and energy were never equally distributed in time or space. In 1690, for example, both Maryland and Connecticut had white populations of 21,000, but the New England colony had only 200 blacks to Maryland's nearly 2,200. Overall, the English mainland colonies could count fewer than 17,000 blacks, or 8 percent of the intrusive population. A hundred years later, more than three-quarters of a million blacks had moved into Indian America with their white masters. After 1680 the proliferation of black faces was especially noticeable in the South from the Chesapeake to South Carolina. In 1680, Virginia was only 7 percent black, by 1720, 30 percent. The proportion of blacks in South Carolina went from 17 to 70 percent in the same forty years, making it the only mainland colony with a black majority. And that was just the beginning: Between 1730 and 1770, Anglo-America imported between 4,000 and 7,000 Africans a year. Strangely enough, even this influx did not amount to much on an international scale: Only 4.5 percent of the 10 million slaves who survived capture and horrendous "middle passage" to the New World were landed in the English mainland colonies. The vast majority went to the Caribbean, where their chances for living long were very slim, and to Latin America, where they were somewhat better. Although the condition of perpetual bondage was never easy, life on English farms and plantations--for economic more than humanitarian reasons--was tolerable enough to allow the black population to increase naturally as well as by constant infusions of new or "outlandish" Africans. Despite the uninvited presence of some four million Europeans and Africans, it could be argued--and was--that american in 1790 had plenty of elbow room for natives and strangers. Even if the natives had been at full, pre-Columbian strength, some said, a slight change in their economy would have freed up enough land for all the newcomers without any noticeable pinch. By giving up the wild, nomadic life of the hunter for the taming, sedentary life of the farmer, the Indians (by which was meant male Indians) would require only a fraction of their former real estate and could be happy to swap the residue to their white neighbors for the more valuable blessings of civilization, such as Christianity, short hair, and long pants. And if for some perverse reason they did not like the sound of foreign neighbors, they could always move west, beyond the Mississippi where the white man would never think of moving. But of course the natives were not at full strength in 1790, and their room for maneuvering was greatly circumscribed by nearly three hundred years of cultural crowding and numerical decline. In the South, where they were at their strongest, they had suffered a 72 percent drop in population since 1685, while the white settlers had multiplied twenty-one times and the blacks nearly eighteen. The hardest hit were natives of eastern South Carolina, who went from 10,000 to 300 in a century, a loss of 97 percent. The Natchez and other Indians of the lower Mississippi were not far behind at 90 percent: With a count of 4,000 they were actually experiencing a slight rebound from a nadir of 3,600 in 1760, but they had irretrievably lost 38,000 relatives since the seventeenth century. The Choctaws and Chickasaws, who had been able to play off the Louisiana French and the Carolina English before 1763, had lost only half their people, but the Cherokees, located closer to the English colonies, suffered a 75 percent decline. The story in New England, Pennsylvania, and Virginia was no different: Everywhere, the original owners of the thirteen colonies had been reduced to a fragile fraction of their former selves and an even smaller minority of the states' new citizens. How had this come about? Contemporaries who wishfully asserted that eastern America was big enough for everyone made one large, erroneous assumption about the Indian economy: They assumed that the natives were primarily hunters who chased wild game over the whole map. In fact, the Indians in the huge area claimed by the kings of England subsisted primarily on vegetables--corn, beans, and squash--cultivated by the women in the most fertile soils available. Among these three- season fields they live in semipermanent towns and villages ranging from several hundred to a couple of thousand inhabitants. Although the women provided 50 to 75 percent of the annual diet, native men did have to range far and wide for the rest. Until the men could be persuaded by white reason or necessity to obtain their protein from domestic cattle and pigs rather than fish and game, the natives were forced to guard their extensive hunting and fishing grounds as jealously as they defended their villages and fields. The advent of European farmers in search of those same cleared and fertile fields put them on a predestined collision course with the Indians. Initially, there was no question of sharing the best soils because in most areas the native population pressed hard against the carrying capacity of the environment and fully occupied most of the prime farmland. The issue that was to be decided over the next three centuries was whether one intrusive group of farmers (and land speculators) would replace another, indigenous group of farmers. How this was in fact done varied from colony to colony. But in general the English (and their reluctant black helpers) prevailed by out-reproducing the natives and causing their precipitous decline as independent people. The Indians could not reproduce themselves because their mortality rates far out-stripped their birth rates. The single greatest cause of native deaths was epidemic diseases imported from Europe without malice aforethought. In the so-called "virgin soil" populations of the Americas, European afflictions such as smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, and whooping cough--many of the childhood diseases--turned into adult killers because the natives had acquired no immunities to them. Ignorant of their causes, the Indians treated them like familiar ailments by immersing patients in a sweatlodge and then into the nearest body of cold water. If this did not kill them, lack of fire, water, and elementary nursing usually did, because in the absence of quarantine, virtually everyone contracted the disease at the same time. In a shipborne plague of 1616, for example, the natives of coastal New England "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses." "The livinge being ... not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites, and vermin to prey upon." One of the earliest English settlers compared the bone-strewn landscape to "a new found Golgotha." And that was before either Pilgrim or Puritan stepped off the boat. Throughout the colonies from the beginning of contact, Old World pathogens served as the shock troops of the European invasion, softening up the enemy before the battalions of busy farmers waded ashore. From the English standpoint, these were "preparative Stroakes" of divine providence. As a South Carolina governor put it so succinctly, "the Hand of God was eminently seen in thinning the Indians, to make room for the English." And thin them He--or the diseases--did. Smallpox was the worst scourge. In 1699 it swept away a whole nation in coastal South Carolina, "all [but] 5 or 6 which ran away and left their dead unburied, lying upon the ground for the vultures to devour." Forty years later the Cherokees were cut in half by a contagion "conveyed into Charlestown by the Guineamen," as James Adair called African slaves, "and soon after among them, by infected goods" carried on pack train by English traders. The Cherokee medicine men attributed the epidemic to a polluting outbreak of "unlawful copulation" by young marrieds who "violated their ancient laws of marriage ... in the night dews." Many of those who survived the onslaught killed themselves, not out of shame for their sacrilegious actions, but because they literally could not bear to live with the pockmarked faces they saw in their recently traded hand mirrors. The second major horseman of the Indian apocalypse was war and the dislocation, starvation, and exposure that accompanied it. Most of the Anglo-Indian wars were named after the Indians involved: the Powhatan Uprising--or Massacre--of 1622, the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675 (named for the Wanpanoage chief Metacomet, who was dubbed King Philip by the English), the Tuscarora War of 1711, the Yamasee War of 1715, the French and Indian War of 1754-63, and Pontiac's Rebellion of 1763. This should not surprise us because the victors have always written the histories and blamed the losers for instigating war in the first place. But in every so-called "Indian" war in colonial America, the warring Indians invariably reacted to European provocations, usurpations, or desecrations, arrogations much more specific and serious than mere trespassing on Indian soil. Because they were quickly outnumbered by the prolific and technologically superior newcomers, each warring tribe or confederacy had to have their collective back to the wall or their stoical patience exhausted before they would risk armed conflict. Their caution and forbearance were well placed, for once the aggressing colonists felt the sting of attack, they became in their own minds aggrieved victims with holy vengeance for their cause. Their retaliations were usually savage, if not particularly swift: Their lack of defensive preparation was predicated on their disbelief that anyone could doubt their innocence. So the Indians suffered doubly. To take but one example, of some 11,600 natives in southern New England in 1675, King Philip's War claimed almost 7,900 victims, or 68 percent of the belligerent population, in little more than a year: Perhaps 1,250 died in battle, 625 later died of wounds, 3,000 succumbed to exposure and disease, 1,000 were sold as slaves and transported out of the refugees from their native land. In every English colony, native people found themselves regarded as environmental impediments to colonial "improvement," not unlike awkwardly placed swamps or indiscriminating wolves. If the crowding of the English did not kill them through war of contagion, the colonists developed an arsenal of tactics to wrest the land from them or to dispirit them enough to move "voluntarily." One way was to incite "civil" war between rival tribes and to reward one side for producing Indian slaves, who were then sold to the West Indies, often for more biddable black slaves. Another was to play on the reasonable native regard for European trade goods, particularly cloth, metal tools, guns, and alcohol. By extending credit, the English traders got the Indians into deep debt, which could not be settled without selling real estate or hunting the local furbearing fauna to oblivion. But for effortless cunning, the third ploy took the cake. English farmers simply released their corn-loving cattle and swine into the natives' unfenced fields. The Indian plea on this score to the Maryland legislature in 1666 speaks eloquently for the plight of most coastal Algonquians in the seventeenth century. "Your hogs and Cattle injure Us, You come too near Us to live & drive Us from place to place," Mattagund complained matter-of- factly. "We can fly no farther; let us know where to live & how to be secured for the future from the Hogs & Cattle." But of course the honorable assemblymen of Maryland had nothing to say. Like their successors in the national Congress of 1790, they sat on their hands as Indian America was slowly but inexorably transmuted into a lopsided mosaic--predominantly white and significantly black, with only a fading margin and a few shrinking islands of native brown.