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1 DRAFT CHAPTER – PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE the Ongoing DRAFT CHAPTER – PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE The Ongoing Afterlife of Captain John Smith Richard Welsh, 2013 John Smith’s memory has degenerated into a slideshow of mythic images. His distance in time – 150 years before George Washington – and short career on the continent, his lack of prideful descendants, and his de facto excommunication by the early masters of Virginia, have all had their effects. The first generations of Virginians were also less inclined to publish histories of any sort, than their New England cousins who generated a rich stream of sermons, histories, and other documents in their intensely self-examining quest for spiritual and moral improvement, and sense of mission for the future. But this is only part of the story. The more revealing part, for understanding the processes of history, is that Smith in his afterlife took on the same role as Smith living: an exemplar of successful republican principles, and a lightning rod for controversy whenever conflict over those principles got stormy. His name and adventures became a tool, which four centuries of ill-use have worn down pretty badly. Sometimes the myths were cartoonish simplifications of the reality. At other times, his republican credentials were used to the fully opposite purpose, transmuting him into an image of his gentleman-opponents to glorify the new gentry of the plantation slavery system. Typical of the first, is his famous anti-aristocratic admonition that “he who will not work, will not eat.” This demand was indeed a crucial feature of Smith’s leadership in Virginia and message back in England; but popular usage, cartoon-like, has falsified the meaning by attributing the idea to Smith himself, thus ripping both it and him out of the larger anti-oligarchic movement that had already embraced this Puritan-highlighted command of St. Paul’s. The second, more nefarious myth, is the romantic goo that sticks to Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas. Disney Studios might have added the modern “meta-narrative” disease of self- referential flippancy in 1995, but could hardly pervert reality more than the romance-mills of the previous two centuries had already. One of the more sober versions: John Smith, the fearless captain Of the mighty days of old, With the beard and swarthy forehead, And the bearing free and bold! Our own dear Pocahontas! The Virgin Queen of the West – With the heart of a Christian hero In a timid maiden’s breast! You have heard the moving story Of the days of long ago, How the tender girlish bosom Shrunk not from the deadly blow; 1 How the valiant son of England, In the woodland drear and wild, Was saved from the savage war-club By the courage of a child. And now in the light of glory The noble figures stand – The founder of Virginia, And the pride of the Southern land!1 Both types of falsehood have perpetuated the stereotype that Smith was a founding hero of “Virginia,” whereas “New England” was created by “Puritans” or “Pilgrims” – when Smith, and his networks, Puritan and otherwise, were parents and godparents to both, and both were strands of the same fabric prior to the general, though not universal, destruction of republican impulses in the southern slave economy. Not surprisingly, this particular falsehood – of Smith the “Southerner” or “Cavalier” – loomed large in the buildup to the U.S. Civil War, and for decades thereafter. Let us now effect the good man’s real rescue; for he can still do us good service. Smith in the later seventeenth century In his lifetime, Smith faced repeated brushoffs and sneers by his political and social “betters”; an abortive legal frameup; near-execution; public mockery; and one or two possible assassination attempts. He could also claim the loyalty of his former fellow soldiers, seamen, and colonists; widespread respect for his military accomplishments; and the sustained friendship and support of Puritan and high-level literary and scientific networks over the last two decades of his life, which afforded him working and living quarters, publishing collaboration and patronage, and public commendations in his defense. But in England these faded in time, especially as official attitudes towards colonization itself degenerated into imperial exploitation (as with the Navigation Acts beginning 1651), and as his friends and promoters died out. Even in his life, the high-praise reviews that introduced his later books were, nearly to a one, of a defensive form: don’t worry, your worthy achievements and wonderful proposals will outlive the pervasive malice. In America they did. In England, it was mainly the slanders that lived on. Typical of his enemies were the more highborn of his fellow council members in Virginia, George Percy and Edward Maria Wingfield. It was Percy, younger brother to the imprisoned (and quite different) ninth Earl of Northumberland, who simply had to “keep a continual and daily table for gentlemen of fashion” at early Jamestown while the colony went hungry. In his own “True Relation” of the colony’s early history, written in part to justify his fatally incompetent leadership (and distaste at subordination to Smith), Percy wrote Smith off as “an ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow, attempting to take all men’s authorities from them.” Wingfield, scion of another old aristocratic family intermarried with the noble Veres, 1 From “A Dream of the Cavaliers,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for January, 1861, quoted by Abrams (Abrams, Pilgrims and Pocahontas, 233–34. 2 made clear that “though we were equal here” (in Virginia), “if he were in England I should think scorn his name should be my companion.”2 The tar that stuck longest, however, was the cynical slur that Smith's exploits were all made up – that he was simply a stereotypical braggart soldier. Along these lines, a verse parody of his career saw print, shortly before his death in 1631, entitled “The Legend of Captain Jones,”3 running to seventy pages of doggerel, and republished many times over the next few decades. (This may have been the trigger that prompted his friends to urge writing of his autobiography.) A generation later, Thomas Fuller included Smith in his 1662 The History of the Worthies of England, a common anecdotal source for later historians of much early biography (very entertaining, and abundantly fictitious). No favors done here, as Fuller made the line official, “such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men above belief, to some beyond truth”; and most suspicious because “he alone is herald to proclaim and publish them” (if one ignored the multiple printed sources). Smith’s memory was further trivialized in 1684, as his now storybook-like heroic combats were woven into jolly banquet festivities, to extoll the virtues of the “Ancient and Renowned Families of Smiths.” This was on the occasion of a London Lord Mayor’s Pageant, the incumbent being a Smith. The frivolity could have been countered by an honest and well researched biography that was written the following year, but this was left in Latin, and never published until the manuscript’s rediscovery and translation into English in 1957, nearly 300 years later.4 It was different in America, though not always better. Initially, Smith’s memory not only remained, but grew, embedding itself in American understanding of the deepening political and cultural rift with the not very loving mother country. That memory was resurrected, and significantly amplified, by native Virginian Robert Beverley, in his History and Present State of Virginia, published in London in 1705. 1705: Smith revived to oppose British imperial policy Beverley was a leading political figure in the colony, whose father, Major Robert Beverley, had been instrumental both in defeating the internal danger of the 1676 Bacon Rebellion, and in resisting the related attempts of the restored Stuart monarchy to suppress the republican impulses and economic development of Virginia along with all the other English colonies. The elder Beverley had eventually achieved the backhand honor of being forbidden from holding public office by order of King James II, though his supporters in Virginia found ways to circumvent this.5 2 Percy, True Relation, 8189.; Wingfield, “A Discourse of Virginia per Edward Maria Wingfield.” 189, 199. This appears to be the correct reading of the somewhat garbled text, when comparing the two paraphrases of the incident that Wingfield reports. 3 [CITE Legend of Capt Jones] 4 Wharton, The Life of John Smith, English Soldier. 5 CITE [probably Lemay, Bio or other or both] 3 The younger Robert Beverley, like his father, was a leading member of the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s legislative assembly, holding its office of clerk, along with other colonial government positions. He wrote his popular book on a trip to England, where he had sailed in 1703, nominally to appeal a legal decision, but clearly travelling with another agenda as well. This was a particularly heated moment of confrontation for control over the government of newly reigning Queen Anne. Anne had come to the throne in 1702, after the deaths of her sister, Queen Mary II, and Mary’s husband King William III (William of Orange, the Dutch beneficiary of England’s 1688 “Glorious Revolution”). The battle had been joined, between the ascendant “Venetian party” associated with John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and his ally Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, and their republican opponents led by Secretary of State Robert Harley, and writer Jonathan Swift, both allies of philosopher-scientist-statesman Gottfried Leibniz. (Friends of Leibniz were also instrumental in recruiting German settlers to William Penn’s American colony.) It was a battle that spanned the Atlantic, and included as an important element the fundamental question of colonial policy: economic development, or imperial exploitation of an enforced, quasi-feudal backwardness? An even more critical mission to England, of related purpose, had concluded just eleven years prior to Beverley’s trip, when Increase Mather returned to Massachusetts after four years of intense and only partly successful wrangling for a new charter for that commonwealth.
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