Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context

History without Borders: Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context

Alison Games?:

Historians of the United States possess an enduring fascination with the practice of their craft.’ Discussions about nationalism and multiculturalism have, in recent years, heightened the intensity with which historians debate the value and function of American history in the college curriculum. In the spring of 1994 two of the major journals €or Americanists yielded riches indeed for those concerned with teaching American history. In “Why the West Is Lost,” James A. Hijaya queried the structure of U. S. history classes which emphasize the eastern seaboard and the British colonies to the neglect of the rest of the continent.’John Higham, in “The Future of American History,” raised important questions about the continuing centrality of the history of the United States, and he urged colleagues to search for a cohesive and coherent national history.? Higham noted, however, that historians could similarly pursue a second approach to American history: they could “prepare to follow another subject beyond national lines, toward whatever periphery may help one define its center.” He also observed that American history was no longer told entirely as “a national story enclosed in a national arena.”‘ Higham’s eulogy for national histories, however, was unduly premature. While scholarly monographs may offer comparative or transatlantic interpretations of particular problems in

“Alison Games is assistant professor of history, Crinncll College, Grinnell, Iowa. 1 See, for example, Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of Interna- tional History,” and Michael McCerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational Histo- ry,”’ American Historic.al ReL’ieic, XCVl (October, 19911, 1031-67; and Eric Foner, ed., The Neut American History (Philadelphia, 1990). 1 James A. Hijaya, “Why the West Is Lost,” William curd Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., LI (April, 19941, 276-92. See also the many responses to Hijaya’s article in the Williani arid Mary Quarter/.v, 3rd ser., LI (October, 1994),717-55. .< John Higham, “The Future of American History,” The Journal ofAmerican Histwy, LXXX (March, 1994), 1289-1309. 4 Ihid., 1307, 1292. See also a similar observation in Ian K. Stccle. “Empire of Migrants and Consumers: Some Current Atlantic Approaches to the History of Colonial Virginia,” Virginia Mngnzinr <$History and Biography, XCIX (October, 19911, 489-512. Steele maintains that Atlantic approaches arc almost the reigning orthodoxy in early American history, but I would suggest he exaggerates the direction of colonial history: Atlantic dissertations and monographs are the exception, not the rule. 160 Indiana Magazine of History

American history, these interpretations have yet to transform textbooks or syllabi. This article explores the presence of national borders in the teaching and interpreting of American history and suggests that Americanists consider the value of shedding altogether the twin encumbrances of national identity and modern national borders in their conceptualization of the American past. Preoccupations with national identity and the rigidity with which historians cling to events within the borders of the United States seem particularly odd to those who study the colonial era. Historians interested in the destruction of old societies and the creation of new ones in the Americas are best served by considering the problems of new world societies in transnational contexts. The most valuable context for understanding events in the Americas is an Atlantic one; it was the meeting of people and pathogens from both sides of the Atlantic-from Europe, Africa, and the Americas -that helped dictate patterns and practices of settlement from Tierra del Fuego to Newfoundland.5 An appreciation of the Atlantic region as a coherent whole explains the particular configurations of cultures in the Americas more satisfactorily than do national histories, which obscure the extent to which processes of change were replicated in many parts of the Americas. The devotion to national histories, however, is pervasive in the teaching of U.S. history in the United States today. Symbolic of the neglect of the Atlantic context in US. history classes is the status of the Caribbean in history classes and texts. That a case even needs to be made for the inclusion of the Caribbean may seem startling to some, outrageous to others: Latin Americanists teaching in the United States automatically include the Caribbean in their survey classes. How it transpired that the Caribbean left North America and joined Latin America is an intriguing question which is closely related to the way in which Americanists center their courses on anachronistic national borders. This fact, combined with the non- participation of the British island colonies in the American Revolu- tion, resulted in the expulsion of the Caribbean from the history of the continent and the denial of the real cultural, economic, and political connections between the West Indies and North America. This article surveys the current place of Caribbean history in three different types of U.S. history courses: the US. history survey (which remains the bread-and-butter course for Americanists); the upper-level colonial survey; and the survey of the Revolutionary period. Discussion will then turn to the historiographic conventions which continue to exclude the Caribbean and will conclude by proposing an alternative approach to the study of colonial British

3 I am indebted to Alan Karras for numerous conversations about the value of studying the Atlantic world. See especially his introduction to Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, eds., Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492-1888 (London, 1992). History without Borders 161

America that might restore the Caribbean and the Atlantic world as a whole to the place their history merits. The focus here will be on the British West Indies in the colonial period, but the argument presented below for the inclusion of the Caribbean in North Ameri- can courses is intended to provoke similar debate among those in other fields and periods. Historians engaged in the teaching of North American history to American students confront the problem of teaching history to students who are seeking their own heritage. In the words of David Lowenthal, “History tells all who listen what supposedly happened, suggesting how things came to be as they are. Heritage passes on exclusive myths of origin and continuity, endowing a select group with power and prestige.”fiA critical examination of a distant past appeals to many students less than a search for answers to contemporary concerns. Jingoistic American college students have an interest in history that is at times genealogical. They are, with few exceptions, relentless Whig historians in that they would rather explore those aspects of the past that endured into the present than consider the paths not taken. Students feel little compunction in leaping across the centuries to announce that because a certain condition existed in the seventeenth century it offers an exact explanation of a contemporary problem. One student noted that the French introduction of alcohol to Indians in New France precisely explained the heavy rates of alcoholism on twentieth-century reser- vations in the Dakotas. Particular contexts mattered little. Indeed, by the same logic, students in introductory classes happily employ their modern stereotypes in their analysis of the past: one student who contended that all English people are and have always been “extremely snooty” found this observation to be a persuasive explanation for economic conditions in seventeenth-century Virginia. Even the most cynical student appraises any aspect of American history as a tale of progress. Who but a college student in search of her heritage could rewrite the Civil War as a great moment for the United States, as a celebration of nationhood?: The ease with which students reshape the information they learn in college classes to conform to their preconceptions about American history might fill

6 David Lowenthal of University College London addressed this problem of history versus heritage in a letter published in Perspectiivs, XXXII (January, 1994), 17- 18. Lowenthal argues in this letter for the necessary distance of the historian from the time period under study: the historian, he observed, is always an outsider, a for- eigner to the past. This insistence by students on progress, almost regardless of any material covered in their survey classes, raises interesting questions about the tenacity of popular cultural icons. Michael Frisch observed that students in his survey classes at SUNY-Buffalo possessed a body of knowledge about American history almost entirely divorced from material they had actually learned in high school or college. He published his findings in an article entitled “American History and the Structures of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography,”Journal of Amer- ican History, LXXV (March, 1989). 1130-1155. 162 Indiana Magazine of History history instructors with despair but for one thing: the eagerness with which students make such connections shows us that they find important meaning in the patterns and stories of the past. In time, perhaps, the material we offer for their rumination might encroach on and alter their myths of an American past. The students’ genealogical perspective often results in an in- tense study of their country’s history. This involvement can be a mixed blessing: while it is appealing to teach a curious and engaged group of college students, the most frequently displayed conse- quence of their personal interest is an anachronistic and partisan absorption in the past. A professor at the University of Texas forbids his students to use the phrase “this great nation of ours” at any point over the course of the semester-and this is in undergraduate courses which never stray beyond the period of the Civil War. I do not, know a single Americanist who has not found his students using the first person plural pronoun to refer to colonists’ behavior in the period from 1763-1776, as in “why we dumped tea in Boston Har- bor,” or the British infringement on “OUT” rights. Although in this decade of new age beliefs one should never rule out the possibility of a student’s reincarnation, it seems nonetheless imperative that teachers of American history devise means to enable their students to shed their relentless parochialism, disengage themselves from the patriotic zeal that mars their critical approach to the past, and open themselves to the historical context in which events occurred. There are a number of solutions to this problem of partisan heritage versus detached history. One is to approach the history of the United States from a world history perspective, in which students are encouraged to appreciate the patterns of change that transcend modern national borders. This approach might help eliminate the narcissistic sense students have of American exceptionalism. But to include the world in a United States history survey is asking a lot of teachers already taxed to accommodate as many perspectives as possible in a single semester. Even integrating the various compo- nent parts of the Atlantic world in a responsible manner is a bur- den if the course description requires an instructor to bring students to the Civil War by semester’s end. A more viable alternative is to incorporate a relevant and significant neighboring region, one that merits inclusion by virtue of historical ties and regional proximity-the Caribbean. Culture, economy, politics, and trade drew the Caribbean and North America together historically. The British West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were hardly a sideshow to the history of the other British colonies, but, instead, the center of the action.” Not only were England’s wealthiest colonies in the Caribbean, but the most lucrative colony

The best comparative discussion of wealth in the British colonies is John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Econorny of British America, 1607-1 789 (1985; Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991). Histwy without Borders 163 of all in the western hemisphere lay in the Indies: Saint Domingue. Including the Caribbean in courses centered on the United States, then, restores the Caribbean colonies to the central place they deserve, and similarly contributes to the broader perspective so necessary in many U.S. history courses. What follows below is a general discussion of three different courses commonly taught in American colleges and universities. Discussions with colleagues, reviews of the most popular textbooks, and shared syllabi provide the evidence for this exploration of the current place of the Caribbean in courses on the United States.

Most colleges in the United States offer upper-level classes for undergraduates on the colonial and Revolutionary periods. These classes range in time periods and topics to reflect instructors' interests and areas of expertise. Courses on the colonial period might emphasize colonial British America, or might take a comparative approach to the different colonial cultures in North America. They might end in 1750 or continue through the Revolutionary war. Courses on the age of the American Revolution reflect less variation in chronology-they tend to cover the period from 1750 to 1800 or 1816. In the case of the colonial survey it is difficult to imagine a course on colonial North America that omits the Caribbean colonies. The Caribbean colonies were, after all, the most valuable in the nascent British empire, and every colony hoped to replicate the financial windfall first demonstrated by the sugar revolution in Barbados. Most colonial historians whose work emphasizes the mainland colonies appreciate the centrality, from the imperial perspective, ofthe island colonies." Nonetheless, in a talk in the fall of 1993 at the University of Iowa on the evolution of natural rights discourse in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, colonialist Timothy Breen dismissed the relevance of the eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies even as he worked to craft an Atlantic approach to his topic. Breen, a highly regarded scholar who has written widely on a variety of regions and periods in colonial Amer- ica, asserted that the island colonies were insignificant and had no settler societies, no press, no interest in a discussion on natural rights that was carried on in every other part of the British empire. When reminded of the rich literature on the British West Indies in the Revolutionary period and of the political behavior of the frus-

A good example ofthe efforts on the part of colonialists who specialize in particular regions to incorporate all rcgions of thc British colonial world ciin be found in Jack P. Grernc and tJ. R. Pole, eds., Colotirnl British Arnc>rica: Essays in the New History ofthe Early Mocfoti Ern (Raltimorc. 1984 I. Grcene and Pole's collection, regarded as the equivalent of the colonialist's Bible by graduate students in thc field, contains historiographic cssays on particular problems in colonial history. Each essayist was charged to include all parts of the colonial world: some were more suc- cessful than others. 164 Indiana Magazine of History trated revolutionaries of the island colonies, Breen seemed both perplexed and indifferent. Older studies of creole society in Jamaica and recent studies of active participation by West Indian planters in different aspects of political and economic activity at the time of the Revolution in both England and the islands had little resonance with him.“’ Graduate students at Iowa informed me a month after the talk, despite their having read Jack P. Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness (which argues for the inclusion of all parts of England’s Atlantic empire), that Breen was altogether correct in his dismissal of West Indian society.” The graduate students’ facile adherence to the reigning conventions of colonial and Revolutionary historiography, despite the weight of Greene’s evidence to the contrary, stemmed in part from a concerted effort to ignore the Caribbean: one student confessed that he was so convinced beforehand of the insignificance of the West Indies that he had not even bothered to read the chapters in Greene’s book which addressed the reGon, nor, indeed, could he fathom the logic behind Greene’s inclusion of Ireland. Given this confusion at the upper levels of the profession, the myopia that plagues the bulk of Americanists, while disappointing, should not be particularly surprising. In this context it should again come as no surprise that a colonial textbook might omit the Caribbean colonies. A textbook entitled Colonial America recently arrived, uninvited, at my college mailbox. Author Jerome Reich felt no compunction about exploring only the mainland colonies or reducing the colonial period to a long rehearsal for revolution.12 A second text, Ronald P. Dufour’s Colonial America, devotes four and one-half pages to the British in the Caribbean.’’’Both texts do explore the colonizing activities of other European powers, with

10 Edward Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford, England, 1971);Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, “The Stamp Act Cri- sis in the British Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., LI (April, 19941, 203-26, and “The Politics of the Leeward Islands, 1763-1783” (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1988); Selwyn H. H. Carrington, “West Indian Opposition to British Policy: Barbadian Politics, 1774-1782,” Journal of Caribbean History, XVII ( 1982), 26-49; Carrington, “The American Revolution and the British West Indies’ Economy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XVII (Spring, 1987). 823-50; Car- rington, The British West Indies during the American Revolution: A Study in Colo- nial Economy and Politics (Providence, R.I., 1988). 11 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). Greene’s book explores the British Atlantic world, including Ireland, the West Indies, and the Atlantic colony of Bermuda. 12 This text is Jerome Reich, Colonial America (3rd edition, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1994).The index has one reference to Barbados and, remarkably, no references to Jamaica. Ronald P. Dufour, Colonial America (St.Paul, Minn., 1994). Dufour’s text, it should be noted, concludes with a chapter titled “Empires Collide” and leaves colonial America in 1763. Unlike Reich’s textbook, then, Dufour accords the colonial period an integrity and interest that is not dependent on the outcome of the colonial wars of independence. History with out Borders 165 attention paid to Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch settlement. In each case, however, the other powers are included to set the stage for English settlement on the mainland, and little attention is given to the sustained interactions (whether economic, cultural, diplomatic, or military) between different imperial societies. Other likely texts to be assigned in a colonial survey were similarly lacking in discussion of the Caribbean colonies and even of the Atlantic context so crucial to understanding the evolution of early America. Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s Ma-jol-Prohl(~tns in American Colonial History, part of a new D.C. Heath college text series of books containing documents and articles, offers a wide variety of sources covering the first European encounter with the Americas (in this case, Eric the Red) and going chronologically through the mid-eighteenth century. In this otherwise comprehensive account of a breadth of colonial experiences, including the perspectives of women, slaves, Native Americans, political leaders, mendicants, evangelical preachers, and subsistence farmers, the absence of attention to the Caribbean colonies is striking. Kupperman herself has recently published a prize-winning book on one English colony in the West Indies, yet a perusal of her seven-page table of contents to the Major Problems book reveals nothing on the island colonies and only a single offering on Spanish Florida.“ One colonial text makes a more forceful case for a continuing focus on the mainland. Now in its fourth edition, Stanley Katz, John Murrin, and Douglas Greenburg’s Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, a book designed for undergraduate colonial courses, stands as a reasonable litmus test of the interests of its editors (and publisher). The first edition (1971)con- tained no articles that could be considered Atlantic in scope: all twenty-two essays concerned events in the thirteen mainland colonies. The second edition (1976)dropped ten of the original essays to make room for more attention to the different people of early America but offered no conceptual shift in the organization of the volume. The third edition (1983)added essays overall and made welcome additions in providing greater context for English colonization: contributions by J. H. Parry on the demographic collapse of the Indian populations of the Americas, by Nicholas Canny on the English colonization of Ireland, and by Winthrop Jordan on the origins of slavery filled noticeable lacunae in the earlier volumes, but these essays remained the sole perspectives on life outside the mainland colonies. The fourth edition (1993) expelled Canny and Parry, replaced them with Alfred Crosby’s “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” integrated

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I I Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Ma,ior Proh/f>rtl.Sin Atncricwrz Colotlinl Histor? (Lexington, Mass,, 199.3). Kupperman recently published Proi~ideticcIslnnd, IWU-1641: The Ofhvr Puritan Colony iCamhridgc. England. 1993). 166 Indiana Magazine of History new and interesting literature on slavery, gender, and Indians, and included one clearly transatlantic article on the Great Awakening. If the Katz, Murrin, and Greenburg collection is to stand as a guide to the direction of early American history, then the results seem to be strongly in favor of greater attention to race and ethnicity on the mainland alone, but even this admirable collection shows little effort to incorporate anything approaching a systematically transatlantic approach. The Caribbean has yet to make an appearance.lS The survey of texts above reveals that despite the logic of including the Caribbean colonies, either as a way of examining the wealthiest English colonies or as a means of exploring imperial con- flicts and cultural encounters in microcosm, discussion of the Caribbean in the courses where it is most likely to be found is vir- tually nonexistent. A course on the American Revolution similarly cries out for attention to the experience of English colonists in the West Indies and Canada. Any responsible Revolution class should incorporate the perspectives of Loyalists and residents of all parts of the British empire. The inclusion of colonies that did not join the Revolutionary enterprise offers students an understanding of the ways in which individuals made choices and faced constraints on their behavior in the Revolutionary era. An appreciation of the limitations on revolutionary thought and behavior clarifies the nature and meaning of the break with Britain on the part of the thirteen mainland colonies. New and interesting scholarship on the Caribbean is accessible to integrate all parts of the empire without returning to the anglocentric approach of the imperial school.16The imperial school was itself a nineteenth-century reaction to parochial national histories, and it found one of its most expressive spokesmen in Charles McLean Andrews. Despite the apparent advantages of considering all parts of the Revolution, a survey of the books most likely to be assigned as general texts in a Revolution class reveals an exclusive emphasis on the mainland colonies. Indeed, the Loyalists who represented 20 percent of the mainland population are lucky to receive any attention at all. Edward Countryman’s The American Revolution, a likely text because of its brevity, contains not one ref-

15 Stanley Katz, Colonial America: Essays in Politics und Social Deuelopment (Boston, 1971; 2nd ed., 1976); Katz and John Murrin, Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development (3rd ed., New York, 1983); Katz, Murrin, and Dou- glas Greenburg, Colonial America (4th ed, New York, 1993). The only other book I have seen on colleagues’ syllabi frequently enough to serve as a text for a colonial class is Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (3rd ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1992). As the title suggests, Nash is not concerned in this book with the complete experience of British expansion in the Americas. Nonethe- less, Nash does talk, at least in passing, about the island colonies, and his book does provide a broad context for understanding the competition of cultures in North America. 16 See especially Carrington, “West Indian Opposition to British Policy”; and O’Shaughnessy, “The Stamp Act Crisis in the British Caribbean.” History without Borders 167 erence to any of the Caribbean or Canadian colonies. Kobert Mid- dlekauff's immense The Glorious Cause: The Anierican Revolutiorz, 176<3-1789does discuss briefly thc Revolution that wasn't.'. None of these books, and few of the syllabi made available to me, attempt to place the American Revolution in the context of an age of revolution in the Atlantic world. In history courses centered on colonial and Revolutionary America, the case for the Caribbean is strong, and thus the n' b sence of material is disturbing. The biggest problem in ascertaining the place of Caribbean history or an Atlantic context in U.S. history courses lies in the traditional two-part introductory American history survey. I will address below the typical first half of the U.S. history survey which covers the period f'rom 1607 to 1865 or 1877, a finishing date denoting either the end of'the Civil War or the end of radical Reconstruction. Teaching a history course about a country which did not exist for a large portion of'the time covered, of course, poses a vexing problem, which most teachers and textbooks resolve by focusing only on the thirteen mainland colonies who joined to fight against England. The starting date itself signals the anglocentric perspective of the survey class, which in most schools com- mences with the founding of Jamestown. This approach centers on the experience of the thirteen mainland colonies and explores the creation of'the United States in an east-west trajectory. Such a perspective implies that the English invented colonization from scratch: without an appreciation of' the earlier and simultaneous colonial eff'orts of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and France, college students in American universities have little perspective in which to place English colonial ef'f'orts. The anglocentric, Atlantic seaboard approach to the survey class, furthermore, contributes to Americans' archaic misconception of' the bulk of North America as empty land waiting for settlement. Inclusion of the Caribbean and the circum-Caribbean might help students to appreciate the nexus of variables shaping settlement, the enduring patterns of licit and illicit trade between rival powers, the varieties of coerced servitude, and the alternatives to English colonial behavior on the mainland that, in the deterministic view of college students, are foregone con- clusions. Given the importance of the Caribbean, it is somewhat discour- aging that so little attention seems to be paid to the region. An informal survey of seven U.S. history textbooks yielded depressing results for the current place of Caribbean history in the U.S. history survey. In the obligatory first chapter on pre-Columbian Ameri-

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1; Edward Countryman, Thv Anirricoti 1it.cdutrorr 1 Nrw York. 19x5 I: Robert Middlekauff, Thr Gloriorrs Cause (New York, 1982). Richard Brown's Mqjor I'roh- lems in the Era offheAntoican Herdutiori, 1760-17.01 (Lexington. Mass., 1992) omits the West Indies altogether. 168 Indiana Magazine of History ca i north and south) and the Spanish empire, early Spanish forays in the Caribbean gain brief recognition. Most textbooks mention Barbados in order to provide context for the settlement of the Car- olinas and the swift hold of slavery in the lower south. Barbados might similarly appear in references to sugar. Finally, the Caribbean colonies make a third appearance in the most inclusive of textbooks with the events of the Revolutionary era.'' These references, though, are generally made in passing: rare is the textbook that will spare a page or more to address the experience of any part of the Caribbean. As long as survey classes exist as celebrations of the existence of the United States (and the titles of the textbooks make apparent this laudatory aspect of the survey class), and as long as some Americanists teach the survey in order to produce citizens, there is little hope for broadening the perspective of either teacher or student. Only a complete reconceptualization of the function of the survey will overcome these biases. For example, given the difficulty of teaching a history class about a country which does not yet exist, perhaps the United States survey course could be reconfigured as a study of the contest of cultures in North America: an exploration of French, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Native American interactions in North America and the Caribbean would provide a context for explaining later political and social developments in North America at least as sufficient as the traditional thirteen colonies approach. Ideally, however, I would propose a course not on the United States alone but on the Atlantic world as a whole, at least for the period through the age of Revolution.

The reasons posed above for the inclusion of the West Indies in U.S. courses have the unfortunate effect of making the Caribbean seem like a sideshow, a corrective to American provincialism. In fact, the intellectual reasons for including the Caribbean are far more compelling than the pedagogical motives might be. Any discussion of British America that omits the West Indies renders incomplete the portrayal of the British Atlantic world in the early modern period, and a parallel argument could be made for Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and French America. A variety of circumstances in the historiography of early America have contributed to the ease with which the Caribbean is eliminated from North Amer- ican studies.

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18 I surveyed Paul Boyer, et al., The Enduring Vision (2nd ed., Lexington, Mass., 1993); Irwin Unger, These United States (5th ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1992); Winthrop Jordan and Leon Litwack, The United States (7th ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 19911;John Mack Farragher, Out of Many (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1994); James West Davidson, et al., Nation ofNations (2nd ed. New York, 1994);Mary Beth Norton, et al., A People & A Nation (4th ed., Boston, 1994); and George Brown Tin- dall and David E. Shi, America:A Narrative History (3rd ed., New York, 1992). History without Borders 169

What makes the task of integration seem particularly daunting is, in part, the regional approach historians employ in analyzing the colonial period. Anachronistic national and regional borders have created pedagogical and scholarly conventions that stand in opposition to the vital economic, political, and cultural ties across the ocean, from colony to colony, and among different European powers. A study of the people involved in colonial ventures, as opposed to the specific sites of those ventures, brings this point home forcefully. Those who ventured from England to the Americas did not see the colonial world in simple regional dichotomies. By looking at people, not just places, it is possible to see a very different Atlantic sphere from that depicted in U.S. history courses, a sphere in which participants in colonial experiments moved with surprising alacrity from region to region, and one in which the Caribbean can be restored to its rightful place in an appreciation of early modern Anglo-America. A regional emphasis is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the study of early American history. Historians write monographs on single towns, counties, or colonies and, more important- ly, they use these regions as the primary lens through which to interpret early America. Seventeenth-century colonial British America has been divided into four distinct areas of settlement by scholars: New England, the Chesapeake, the Middle Colonies, and the Caribbean. New England was distinguished by its settlement in a period of twelve years, from 1630 to 1642, by nuclear families who established stable political and religious institutions soon after their arrival. The Chesapeake and the Caribbean, on the other hand, witnessed much greater political and demographic instability as primarily young, male emigrant populations sought viable export crops to market overseas. The Caribbean colonies, with the introduction of sugar, developed into elaborate plantation societies with large slave populations, monoculture, and a small planter elite. The Middle Colonies were characterized by heterogeneity: these colonies have often been heralded as models of pluralist American society with their welter of religious groups, their variety of European populations, and their standards of toleration. In monographs and articles, historians of early America generally focus on one of these regions.I9 Regional analysis, which has even fostered a few attempts at synthesis, offers rich, detailed, evocative examinations of the different regions of colonial North America. Where these interpretations fall apart, however, is in delineating the origins of regional differ-

19 See in particular Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling ofBritish North Arnrrica: An Introduction (New York, 19861, and Voyagers to thr West: A Passage in the PiJopling ofAmerica on the Eue ofthe Reuolution (New York, 1986); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989); and Greene, Pursuits of Happiness. 170 Indiana Magazine of History ences. One example, admittedly atypical, will make this point clear. In his cultural interpretation of the origins of American society, David Hackett Fischer has divided colonial America into four different regions: New England, the Chesapeake, the Middle Colonies, and the backcountry. Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, explores twenty-four different cate- gories of folkways (“the normative structures of values, customs, and meanings that exist in any culture”).”’These folkways include patterns of childrearing, childnaming, costume, housebuilding, speech, and understandings of liberty. Fischer traces twenty-four different folkways in these four different regions to four corre- sponding regions in England. New England culture, that is, was shaped entirely by the culture of East Anglia; Chesapeake society was determined by the folkways of southern and western England, and so on. Fischer’s colonists transported intact, along with their miscellaneous assortment of personal possessions, the folk practices of a particular region and had no difficulty at all in exactly reproducing their culture in a new and vastly unfamiliar land already inhabited by an indigenous population and soon to be peo- pled as well by Africans and other non-English Europeans. In Fis- cher’s world, all attributes of colonial society were defined by local practices in England. His colonial societies do not evolve, they do not adapt, they simply parallel English society. The regional focus has spawned another characteristic of early American historiography: the puzzling inconsistency with which colonialists explore divergences and convergences between colonies and metropole in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo- American world. Those historians who study the seventeenth century draw on the regional schemes mentioned above to delineate the vast divergences between different regions of the British Atlantic world. Colonialists call repeated attention to the remark- able diversity of British colonization efforts as English men and women cultivated their plantations of religion and plantations of trade. Historians who study the eighteenth century, perhaps in their eagerness to account for the union of the thirteen mainland colonies at the time of the American Revolution, emphasize the convergences between the different regions of the Atlantic world. A variety of models have been put forth to consider the eighteenth- century evolution of the British colonies, and it is particularly in the search for an emerging and distinctive colonial identity that the British West Indies and Canada have confounded historians. The great irony is that at the very time British colonists fought a Revo- lution, they are perceived by historians as most English, while in the century in which most colonists were in fact English by birth, History without Borders 171 their differences are emphasized more than their similarities. This type of analysis is unnecessarily complicated and cumbersome. What I would like to offer below is an exploration of these two related problems in the study of early American history by focusing on the first century of British colonization in the Atlantic, a time when participants who were primarily English by birth moved with ease from one regon of colonial America to another. Drawing on a collective biography of five thousand voyagers who traveled from London to all the English colonies in 1635, I propose below some new ways of considering the first English Atlantic forays through the eyes of participants, who demonstrated through their actions an appreciation of the opportunities and integrity of the Atlantic world and who saw, as historians so rarely do today, the clear connections between the Caribbean colonies and the mainland colonies. Over the course of the year 1635, these travelers left the port of London on fifty-four different ships for the colonies of Bar- bados, St. Itts, the holdings of the Providence Company (Provi- dence Island, Henrietta, and Tortuga), Nevis, Antigua, Bermuda, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth. When they reached their destinations, those who survived scat- tered again over the course of three decades to other, new regions of the colonial world-the Bahamas, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, the Carolinas, and Jamaica. Their names and ages were recorded by clerks at the port of London, and the experiences of these individuals have been traced in colonial records on both sides of the Atlantic. In their repeated journeys from colony to colony and from colony to metropole, many of these voyagers sig- naled an understanding of a unified colonial world that offered myriad compelling opportunities of different sorts, whether the pursuit of piety or the quest for riches and status. The vignettes presented below are intended to represent the experiences of some of these travelers, and to suggest broader themes of colonial development in the early modern period.2’

Certainly, many immigrants chose their destinations with care. It was no accident that those of Puritan inclinations emigrated to New England, Bermuda, or Providence Island in the 1630s. But even these godly planters debated their chosen destination: New England has too long been regarded as the single destination for Puritan exiles, many of whom also sought sanctuary in the Caribbean and Bermuda. All three regions promised pious homes, and colony officers were acutely aware of the competition for souls.

21 The discussion below is drawn from material unearthed in my dissertation, “Venturers, Vagrants, and Vessels of Glory: Migration from England to the Colonies under Charles I” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992). The dissertation provides full documentation and references for the stories told below and the larger quantitative patterns of movement in the Atlantic world. 172 Indiana Magazine of History

The Providence Company labored in 1635 to entice “some godly familyes” destined for New England and proposed special privileges for such families. A more concerted campaign was launched in 1638 to persuade Puritan divine Ezekial Rogers to journey to the island colony with his congregation. Rogers ultimately settled in New England.” Bermudians, similarly, lamented the choices of their Puritan friends who preferred New England. Bermuda governor Roger Wood made this point forcefully in 1634, when he sadly observed the flight of people from England to New England: he felt that these people would be better served in Bermuda, “where they should find a loving people a sweet and holesome clymate but no psecuton.”’.’ But too many immigrants knew too little about their destinations to make the conscious decisions about where their “type” might belong. The stories of three servants who traveled overseas seem particularly revealing on this point. Indentured servitude brought most people to the colonial world in the first part of the seventeenth century; probably as much as 75 percent of the total number of immigrants to the British colonies traveled as servants whose time would be purchased by men and women in the new world. As the examples attest, these servants chose and attained their colonial destinations in rather haphazard ways. In the fall of 1635 a twenty-year-old woman named Barbara Rolfe journeyed to New England on board the Hopewell. The circumstances of her voyage become clear in a legal suit filed by Bar- bara’s father, George Rolfe, against the Hopewell’s captain, Thomas Babb. According to Babb’s response to the suit, Barbara’s father approached Babb about Barbara, whoo the said complt by noe fare meanes that hee could use could possiblie pswade to live in a civil1 and orderely course of lyfe, but contrary to his fatherly admonitions and persuasions did runne on in a coarse of disobedience both to the extreame griefe and discreditt of him the said complt; and hee the said complt said hee much feared if shee should continue heere in this kingdome that shee the said Barbara would come to some further mischiefe. . . Rolfe had persuaded Babb to take Barbara to New England with him, for which Rolfe agreed to provide Barbara with all necessities for the voyage and to pay Babb the same sum for her passage that other travelers paid. Rolfe’s wife, furthermore, agreed that the Rolfes would compensate Babb for all other expenses incurred on the voyage. George Rolfe gave Babb twenty shillings in partial pay- ment for the passage, with four pounds more due to Babb within a

1) Committee held for the Providence Island Company, February 20, 163415, March 1, 163718, Colonial Office Records (CO) 12412, p. 194, p. 319 (Public Record Office, Kew. England). 2’ Roger Wood to brother B--, 1634, Roger Wood’s letterbook, Bermuda Colonial Records, Fragment F, letter 57 (Bermuda Archives, Hamilton, Bermuda). History without Borders 173 month. Babb, for his part, promised Barbara he would find her “some good place” upon her arrival in New England. Apparently, however, the attributes that had spurred Rolfe to exile his daughter to the colonies continued to plague Barbara on board ship, for Cap- tain Babb reported that “her carriage in her passage to Newe Eng- land, and att her furst arivall there was soe eivell” that Babb was forced to provide for her himself for two months because no one else would have her. Finally, Babb left Barbara with a Mr. Trelawney, a merchant of Plymouth, England, who was active in settling the Massachusetts Colony fringe region of Maine. The people of Mas- sachusetts, “seeing the loose behavior of the said Barbara inforced . . . [Mr. Trelawneyl . . . to carry the said Barbara out of their pat- tent.” Trelawney took Barbara thirty leagues away, and that is the last we hear of her.LJ Barbara Rolfe’s reason for migrating to New England had nothing to do with the Puritan nature of the re@on, and the very images that define New England in the historical imagination probably were the factors that contributed to her discomfort there. A second servant’s migration to the colonies similarly challenges the ease with which historians distinguish between regions. In 1634 a young man named John Wise traveled to London “for better fortune” and ended up on board the John and Catherine, which was bound for Barbados. As Wise was but “a country lad,” who “was deceived and most violently brought on board,” his cousin William Hudson peti- tioned for his release. The voyage to Barbados, Hudson claimed, “will not be only the heartbreaking of his parents, but utter ruin for the lad. . . .” In answer to his cousin’s petition to the Commission- ers for the Admiralty and Navy, Wise was removed from the John and Catherine but not deterred from his interest in Britain’s Atlantic colonies: in 1635, Wise, joined this time by Hudson, traveled to Virginia.” A third servant, London teenager Thomas Goad, demonstrated even more powerfully the meaning of an Atlantic world to one adventurous youth. In July of 1635, Goad signed articles of apprenticeship to serve New England’s occasional governor, John Winthrop, Sr., for four years; three days later he entered his name in the London port register as a passenger on the Abigail, bound for New England. Goad could have reached his destination no earlier than late August, but soon left the colonies: by March of 1636, his kin in London knew he had left Massachusetts, apparently on a

2.1 “The Answer of‘ Thomas Babb Marchange defdt to the Bill of Complt of George Rolfe Complt,” in CO 1/6, pp. 224-30 (Public Record Office, Kew, England). 26 Petition to the Admiralty and Navy, 1634, printed in Jennings Cropper Wise, Col. John Wise of England and Virginia (1617-1695) (Kichmond, Va., 19181, 29-30. This genealogical work is generally unreliable: Wise makes no effort to sort out the two John Wises listed in the London port register. The petition he cites, however, does seem to apply to the John Wise who traveled with William Hudson to Virginia in 1635. 174 Indiana Magazine of History ship bound for Spain, and lamented that Goad “did not prove a fit servant” for Winthrop.2G The experiences of Rolfe, Wise, and Goad suggest that there was a large population of people who were very confused about what it was they were doing in boarding ships for the colonies. There were certainly many less-confused people, educated men and women who read the numerous promotional pamphlets about the colonies, who corresponded with friends overseas, who interrogated returning travelers, who did as much research as one could do before venturing overseas, but even these more sophisticated travelers did not always stay in their first colonial destination. The willingness and frequency with which seventeenth-century men and women traveled throughout England’s nascent Atlantic empire comes as a surprise to some historians. The three-thousand- mile ocean journey separating England from the mainland colonies meant less, perhaps, to those making the voyages than it does to those reading about the voyages. There was an extensive process of reshuffling in the colonies that involved not only short-distance migration within a single colony or to an adjacent colony but required much more elaborately planned relocations from Virginia to the Carolinas, from Bermuda to the Bahamas, from New Eng- land to England, from Barbados to almost anywhere. Atlantic crossings themselves were uncomfortable endeavors. Voyages could last anywhere from six to fourteen weeks, depending on destination and winds. Simply leaving the shores of England proved difficult for many ships. Richard Mather, a prominent New England minister, recorded in his diary the efforts of his ship, the James, to leave England. The ship had been stranded in the Bristol harbor for six weeks while waiting for fair winds to depart, and the unfortunate passengers got violently seasick as the ship waited at anchor. When the wind seemed to blow in a favorable direction, Mather recorded, the captain and seamen were never available to sail the ship. When the James finally sailed, the wind turned, and the small convoy of New England-bound ships tacked and sailed around in the Channel while everyone on board got violently ill. The passengers went on shore three more times in England and savored the opportunity to walk along the coast. Other passengers in similar circumstances reported doing their laundry on shore and gathering berries. The James finally anchored off Nantasket, in New England, over two months after first attempting to leave Bristol.”

.. . -. .

“6 Articles of Apprenticeship, July 7, 1635, Allan B. Forbes, ed., The Winthrop Papers (5Vols., Boston, 1929-19471, 111, 207; Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop, Jr., March 1, 1635/6, ibid., 233; Lucy Downing to John Winthrop, Jr., March 8, 1635/6, ihid., 236-37; Francis Kirby to John Winthrop. Jr., May 7, 1636, ihid.,259. 2: Journal of Richard Mather, 1635 (Collections of the Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, No. 3; Boston, 1850), 9-13; Francis Higgmson to his friends in England, July 24, 1629, in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 2629-1638 (Amherst, Mass., 19761, 14-15. History with0u.t Borders 175

The servants who composed the majority of immigrants in the seventeenth century suffered particularly during Atlantic voyages. They often boarded ships with only the clothes on their backs. Undernourished, they were vulnerable to shipboard diseases. Thomas Rous described a gruesome voyage to Barbados in 1638. Rous’s letter captured the many problems in overseas travel: unscrupulous merchants who shortchanged their passengers, poor weather, lack of adequate clothing, contamination by passengers, and the initial diseases of the migrating population. Over 350 people set off for Barbados, a number originally thought viable because of the “great bulk” of the ship, “but,” as Rous reported, “such a sort of people and soe many of them togeather wth noe shift would soone grow nastye and infect one another having alsoe noe clothes must keep below in cold weather and soe taint themselves and the ship.” Two hundred people were sick at one time, Rous lamented, and the crew “have throwen overboard two and three in a day for many dayes togeather that in all we lost fourescoare of our people.” Even the wealthy were not protected: of the ten men in the “great cabin,” who had thought themselves better off, six had died after only three weeks at sea. In fact, the privileged men in the cabin died at a greater rate than did the people crowded together below deck.’n Despite the vast discomforts of Atlantic voyages, English men and women journeyed from colony to colony and from England to various colonies with surprising ease. Some segments of the population were disproportionately likely to move repeatedly. Ministers, for example, formed a significant population of what we might consider the frequent fliers of the seventeenth century. John Oxen- bridge offers a good example of such movement. Oxenbridge was a minister of Puritan leanings who traveled to Bermuda in 1635. Religious conflict on the island-Oxenbridge was considered an overzealous catechizer-led to the minister’s departure for England in 1641. Once there, he served on the board of the Somers Island Company and also served as a minister until he was silenced with the restoration of Charles I1 to the throne. Oxenbridge then moved in 1662 to Surinam, whose settlement he vigorously encouraged in a promotional pamphlet. With the Dutch possession of the colony, Oxenbridge moved on to Barbados in 1667 before finally moving in 1669 to Boston, Massachusetts, where he died five years later.’” Merchants and colonial planters traveled repeatedly as well. London merchants comprised anywhere between 5 and 10 percent of the population of travelers from England to the colonies in the early decades of settlement. These men voyaged to cement business

2x Thomas Rous to Archibald Haye, Barbados, May 26, 1638, GD34/923/12, Hay Papers (Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh J. 2‘1 John Oxenbridge, A Sonsonable I’ropv.sitiot7 of Propagnting the C;(i.sprl by Christian Colonies in thr Continent vfCuinnn . . . (London, n.d.1 176 Indiana Magazine of History ties with colonial merchants and planters and to secure their own share of the colonial spoils. Planters in this period of English settlement were self-defined and were men who planted anything on any amount of land, however meager: a Barbadian who shared ten acres with another man and planted tobacco of such a poor quality that he would not smoke it himself, for example, was considered a planter. Large property holders journeyed back and forth to Eng- land to procure the servants whose labor guaranteed success in the colonies and to talk with those who represented their financial interests in London. In 1635, Virginia planter Christopher Boyes journeyed to London to procure servants for his tobacco plantation."" In that same year, Barbadian planter and occasional gover- nor Richard Peers traveled to England to consult the colony's proprietors. Some planters never abandoned their connections in London despite a lifetime of colonial residence. Virginia planter Bartholomew Hoskins, who first went to Virginia in the 1620s, maintained a home-and a wife-in London, although he remained in Virginia until his death in the 1640s.'" Another early colonial voyager, a Londoner named Barnaby Davis, first journeyed to New England in 1635 on behalf of a Lon- don colonial investor. Davis then embarked on a series of regional and overseas tours that exhausts even the most resilient reader. Having landed in Boston, Davis soon set out on foot for Connecticut to transact business at Windsor. The man he needed to talk to, however, had returned to England so the obliging and industrious Davis boarded another ship and set out with Captain Babb, the unfortunate sea captain who had brought Barbara Rolfe to the colonies. Back in London, Davis chased after the man he had missed in Connecticut only to be told, to his horror, that he had just missed him yet again. Davis set out again for Boston, and then on again to Connecticut where he found his prey and was given letters to deliver in England. Waylaid briefly to serve in the Pequot War, Davis finally reached England in 1637. In his regional travels, Davis apparently found New England to his liking, and returned with his wife and children to settle in the colonies.:'2 Not all movement, however, was back and forth across the Atlantic. Many colonists, like minister John Oxenbridge, moved repeatedly within the colonial world. William Vassal1 first migrated

30 See various depositions relating to the failed voyage of the Constance, Thomas Moore, John Digby v. John Thierry, December 15, 1653July3, 1637, Admi- ralty Records (HCA) 13/52 (Public Record Office, Chancery Lane, England). 31 See petition to House of Lords of Dorcas Hoskins, House of Lords, Maine Papers, Virginia Colonial Records Project reel 60 1 (Virginia State Library, Rich- mond). '31 The saga of Davis's travels appears in his petition to the Governor, Council, and Assistants, in the Notebook Kept by Thomas Lechford (Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. VII; Worcester, Mass., 18851, 367-70. Davis settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts. History without Borders 177 to New England in 1630. He soon returned to England but then in 1635, accompanied by his wife and five children, he traveled to New England again, residing first in the Massachusetts colony before moving quickly to Plymouth Colony. Vassall, a merchant, found himself embroiled in political and religious controversies in New England, and in 1648 he moved with most of his family to Barba- dos. Vassall’s migration to Barbados symbolized the aspirations of many Atlantic migrants who hoped similarly to benefit from the Barbados sugar revolution. Bermudians Severin Vicars and Martin Welman, who had lived on the island for twenty years, left Bermu- da in the 1640s to purchase land in Barbados and maintained resi- dences in both colonies. These men-ministers, planters, and merchants-rested at the top of the economic hierarchy in the colonies. Yet movement was not restricted to the wealthy. People of all ranks moved on: in fact, one could argue that economic misfortune was a major factor in determining a colonist’s decision to do so. Of the fifty travelers to Bermuda from London in 1635 for whom information survives 20 percent were actually returning home to Bermuda in that trip, while another 20 percent subsequently moved off the island to settle in England, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, and New Eng- land. What all this movement suggests is that the differences between regions that stand out so dramatically in descriptions of the colonial world were differences that contemporaries may have acknowledged, but they certainly were not distinctions that persuaded many English men and women that they could not enjoy equal access to the possible wealth in newly settled lands. Any approach to the colonial world which focuses on single regions within the diversity of British colonization efforts in the Atlantic over- looks the important ways in which the colonial world was composed not of isolated subcultures but of interlocking and overlapping com- munities. Furthermore, this movement makes clear the extent to which oceans were not barriers but, rather, bridges, in this forma- tive period of colonial development. The movement of colonial residents and visitors should serve as an important reminder to Americanists of the variables shaping new world societies, and it should above all serve as a caution to those who would let the regional dichotomies cherished in early American historiography blind them to the larger forces shaping settlement, colonization, and migration in the Atlantic basin. The colonial world was one characterized by movement across the Atlantic and between colonies. The circular tours these Atlantic migrants took of the colonial world reaffirmed their continuing ties to England and ensured frequent and meaningful contact with the values and expectations of metropolitan society. The Atlantic migrants, furthermore, symbolize the dynamic nature of the early 178 Zndiana Magazine of History colonial world and, in moving from colony to colony, suggest that we discard models of American development that emphasize the experience of any one region. From the perspective of the immigrants themselves, this was truly an Atlantic world in which many of those who were poor, desperate, or brave enough to cross the ocean once were undaunted by the prospect of subsequent migrations by land or sea. Teachers of American history should take their example to heart.