G2TT
1619 and all that  智库博客
时间:2019-08-30   作者: Giselle Donnelly  来源:American Enterprise Institute (United States)
Of all the mischiefs made by the New York Times’ 1619 project [alas, the podcast is one of the few non-subscription points of access to the reports], perhaps the greatest is its obscuring of pre-Revolutionary history. The Times is on to something by emphasizing that the Founding was, properly understood, a punctuation mark between what came before and what came afterward. In our current confusion, a deeper dive into the origins of the American experience is well warranted, but there’s much more to those origins than is dreamt of in the Times’ philosophy. One might better start the American tale in the 16th rather than the 17th century. Englishmen first attempted to colonize “Virginia” from 1585, looking first of all for a naval base from which to prey upon the annual flota de Indias that sailed from the Caribbean to Cadiz to refill the coffers of Philip II and made Spain an aspiring hegemon. The English were very late to come to the western hemisphere, but understood that their “liberties” as a nation and as Protestants depended on their ability to play a game of global great power. The Roanoke colony was not so much “lost” as abandoned, as the ships intended to resupply the effort were held back against the threat of Philip’s Gran Armada. This should remind us that the English presence in North America was a product of the Reformation, not the Enlightenment. The early Virginia colonies were the product of a passionate Protestantism engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Philip’s Counterreformation. In 1619, the climactic chapter in European wars of religion, the Thirty Years’ War, had opened with the elevation of Frederic V, the elector Palatine, to the monarchy of Bohemia. The newly-made king was also the husband of Elizabeth, daughter of England’s James I. Despite the Stuart dynasty’s distaste for the European struggle – and distrust of their subjects’ enthusiasms for it – a link was forged that forever chained what happened in the New World to the balance of power in the Old. Life in Jamestown, where the new Virginia colony was planted, in 1619 was also at risk. The settlement had survived for a decade, but not by much. Of the first 500 colonists, fewer than 100 survived the “starving time” of 1609-1610. That was immediately followed by a four-year war with the Powhatan confederacy, and a second and more brutal war came in 1622, initiated by a well-coordinated series of attacks on outlying farms that killed something between a quarter and a third of English settlers and drove many of the rest back to the malarial confines of Jamestown. It was not until the 1640s that Virginia was secure below the falls of the James River. To defeat the Powhatans and their allies was the brutal work of decades, where food supplies were the principal weapons and terror the tactics of both sides. In sum, the American experiment has always been a paradox of power and principle. What is surprising is not that it is scarred by the sins of man – chattel slavery on an industrial scale may be the worst but hardly the only or even the original sin – but that is has been healed – if incompletely – by empowering man’s better angels. A closer inspection of the deep roots of our political culture is not an occasion for shame, but rather for an appreciation at this exception to the uninterrupted woe of most human history. In our current confusion, a deeper dive into the origins of the American experience is well warranted, but there’s much more to those origins than is dreamt of in the New York Times’ philosophy.

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