美国简史03Growth and Empire.docx

1、美国简史03Growth and EmpireA Biography of AmericaProgram 3: Growth and EmpireDonald L. Miller with Pauline Maier and Virginia ScharffIntroduction Miller: The American colonies in the 1700s. The best poor mans country in the world. Maier: Sure theres a notion that this is a country where people can do be

2、tter than their parents did. Miller: Unless you were a slave. Scharff : “What manner of man is this American?” Well, he might be a woman, right? He might be a slave. She might be a slave. Miller: Today on A Biography of America, the slaves middle passage. Franklins Philadelphia. All part of Americas

3、 Growth and Empire. The American Character Miller: Not long after America declared its independence, a Frenchman living in this country asked a question weve never stopped asking: “What then is the American, this new man?” To Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, author of Letters from an American Farmer,

4、America was a place where peoples of all nations, in his words, “are melted into a new race.” In America, he wrote, there are “no great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratic families, no kings, no bishops, no great refinements of luxury. The ri

5、ch and poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.” The vast American wilderness had shaped a new man, freer and more self-reliant than the average European. Though Benjamin Franklin had reservations about racial mixing, he witnessed, and wrote about, the great changes that Cr

6、evecoeur celebrated. When Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the son of a candle-maker who had immigrated from England, the colonies were overwhelmingly English. By 1776, half of the colonial population south of New England was of non-English origin. And Franklin had seen the land, the abundance o

7、f it and its broad availability, shape many of the distinctively American attributes that Crevecouer described. Franklin himself was the embodiment of this freer, more expansive society, a lowborn apprentice printer who went on to become an American luminary. To admiring Europeans, he was the quinte

8、ssential American, Crevecoeurs New Man. Yet unlike Crevecoeur, Franklin didnt see the New World environment creating a homogeneous American culture, with common beliefs and social values. No two colonies, he insisted, were alike. They had different laws, interests, religions, governments, and manner

9、s. America was a society, to him, of distinct regions. Franklin was right, but so was Crevecoeur. The colonists were becoming more American even as sectional differences within the colonies widened. But it was more complex than that. Colonists of English origin were becoming more American without lo

10、sing their strong attachment to England. That cultural ambivalence, that pride in being both an English subject and an American comes through in a letter Franklin wrote in 1776 to an old friend in England. “The breach between you and us grows wider and more difficult to heal,” he wrote with great sa

11、dness. But then he declared, with the pride of the American he had clearly become, “Britain without us can grow no stronger. Without her, we shall become a tenfold greater and mightier People.” No American could have said that in 1700. That Franklin could in 1776 revealed the tremendous changes his

12、country had undergone in the intervening years.Colonial Population Flourishes When John Winthrop died in the middle of the 17th century, there were two principal regions in the mainland colonies: New England and the Chesapeake. A century later, there were two additional ones: the Middle Atlantic col

13、onies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New Jersey, as well as Delaware; and the Lower Southern colonies of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. The key characteristic of this colonial society was growth: a phenomenal increase in wealth and people. In Ben Franklins day, America experienced it

14、s first population explosion. In 1700, approximately 250,000 Europeans and African-Americans lived in the colonies. By 1775, that number had risen to two and half million. The people of the American colonies multiplied more rapidly than almost any other society in recorded history. And these colonis

15、ts far out-numbered the French and Spanish colonists of North America. By the time of the American Revolution, the Spanish border settlements of Florida and New Mexico were thinly populated outposts of empire. The largest of the two, New Mexico, had only about 20,000 settlers. New France, or Canada,

16、 at the same time had over 70,000 people. These numbers tell who would control the continent. This population boom was fed by two sources: natural increase (Franklin himself was one of 17 children), and immigration. English people continued to pour in, but new people came from all over Europe, and c

17、hiefly from Germany, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Yet the largest group of migrants in the 18th century were Africans, about 278,000 of them. The movement of Africans to the Americas was the largest forced migration in world history.The Slave Trade In the four centuries of the slave trade, slaver

18、s transported an estimated 11 million Africans to North and South America, about 600,000 of them to British North America. Most slaves were captured in the African interior by raiding parties from more powerful tribes along the coast, and were taken on forced marches to coastal trading forts run by

19、Europeans. There they were inspected by ship captains in the holds of dungeons or in open pits. Those selected for transport were branded, chained together, and rowed out to awaiting slave ships, where they were packed below deck in spaces with no more breathing room than a coffin. Olaudah Equiano,

20、an Ibo tribesmen from what is now Nigeria, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was only 11 years old. And he lived to write an account of one of these slave ships. Under the deck, the groans of the dying, the screams of children who had fallen into open latrines, and the vile stench of vomit and fece

21、s combined to create what Equiano described as a scene of horror “almost inconceivable.” As Equianos ship headed for open sea, a great moan went up from the slaves, who feared they were being taken to the homelands of the bearded monsters to be boiled in water and eaten. As they reached the port of

22、destination, the surviving human cargo was prepared for sale. If slaves had been flogged, their open wounds were disguised by filling them with black tar. Some ship surgeons plugged the rectums of slaves with clumps of hemp fiber to prevent buyers from noticing the bloody discharges that indicated t

23、hey were dying from dysentery. Equiano was purchased in Charleston, South Carolina and taken to a tobacco farm in Virginia, there he was unable to communicate with his fellow slaves from other areas of Africa. He was part of the Africanization of the Chesapeake labor force. But had he not been resol

24、d to a visiting naval officer, and eventually freed, he might have married an African-American woman and been a member of the first generation of slaves in the North American Hemisphere to increase its size by procreation.Rice and Rebellion In the 18th century, a different type of slavery developed

25、in the lowland, coastal region extending from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to Georgia, an area whose ecology was unsuited to tobacco cultivation. South Carolina was the richest colony in this region. It had been first settled in the 1660s by land hungry emigrants from the crowded sugar islands of Barb

26、ados. Thirty years later, they found a profitable cash crop-rice. And rice shaped the lowland as strongly as tobacco shaped the Chesapeake. Rice made South Carolina the richest colony in mainland British North America-and the only one with a black majority. Rice cultivation was hard, human-killing w

27、ork; but greater oppression, ironically, produced greater autonomy for the slaves. Since tobacco required more constant care than rice, masters closely supervised slave labor. In the Carolina lowlands, masters stayed away from the rice fields, where the death rate from malaria was frightfully high.

28、The Carolina grandees, the richest elite in the colonies, built their magnificent plantation houses on high ground, far away from the rice ditches. In the malaria season they escaped to town houses in fashionable Charleston. Slaves died earlier in the Low Country than they did in Virginia and reprod

29、uced more slowly. So owners had to bring in fresh infusions of Africans, most of them males. These slaves were much more likely to rebel than American-born slaves were. In these sprawling agricultural factories, slaves didnt work in white-supervised gangs, as they did in Virginia. Instead, they were

30、 given daily tasks to perform under the supervision of black foremen, or drivers. The work was done at a killing pace, knee-deep in the thick muck, in mosquito- and snake-infested paddies. But when their tasks were completed, slaves returned to their separate living quarters, where they were free to

31、 hunt and fish, grow their own food, and live together as families in individual cabins. Living apart from masters who hardly knew them, they developed an autonomous culture that had its own cycle of African feasts and dances. They developed their own language, Gullah. And they also developed a cult

32、ure that was profoundly confrontational. Its not coincidental that colonial Americas largest slave rebellion, the Stono Uprising, occurred in South Carolina. In 1759, a group of freshly imported Angolans broke into a store on the Stono River, near Charleston, armed themselves, and headed toward Spanish Florida and freedom. Along the way they plundered plantations and killed about two dozen whites before being gunned down by a militia company. Although slave revolts were rare in mainland North America, as compared, say, to Brazil and the Caribbean, slaves resisted in every way possible,