30. THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

THE TWO AMERICAS

Feudal America.  At the time of the founding of English America (the beginning of the 1600s) most of European society was governed by a handful of individuals – individuals usually born to that position and thus a position not easily open to even the most ambitious social climbers from the lower classes.  Kings, emperors, princes, dukes, barons, and even bishops – drawn from society's "first families" – lorded it over the rest of society.  This ruling class "owned" everything: the land, the fields, the rivers, the forests – and virtually everything located there. 

This hierarchical or "feudal" social setup was morally justified a number of different ways, though usually by explaining that the very powers of Heaven (God himself) had demanded this exact arrangement.  Thus the rest of the population outside the ranks of this ruling elite was forced to stay "in its place" – under the threat of everything from imprisonment or execution, to even the ultimate threat, Eternal Hell, awaiting those who failed to live according to the supposedly God-ordained and long-established rules of such a society – rules dating as far back as 800 years, when Charlemagne put this social order in place.

When at the beginning of the 1500s the Spanish were to "discover" America and then move to bring the New World of America under the Spanish social order, quite naturally this same feudal social order was established there to secure Spanish territorial claims in America.  Spanish America belonged to the Spanish King, whose lands in America (as in Spain itself) were governed politically through the agencies of royally-appointed governors, who in turn were supported by a handful of wealthy first families dominating life locally from their manorial estates or haciendas.  And the very hierarchical Spanish (Catholic) Christian Church, governed from Spain by bishops and archbishops, was placed alongside this political structure in order to confirm the moral foundations of this quite typical feudal social order.

When the English, a century later, finally got into the act in establishing the colony of Virginia, a social model was put in place there similar to the one in Spanish America. The English who dared to take up life in America (those who survived the high death rate in doing so) were motivated the same way as the young Spanish conquistadores (conquerors) had been.  They came to America hoping to gain social status as gentry and thus membership in the ranks of society's ruling elite – through ownership of quite readily-available American property (simply grabbed from the local Indian population).  The more property owned by an individual or family, the higher the social status or social rank.

Some of the earlier arrivals to Virginia went on to achieve quite high social status – such as the Byrd family, which came to own 180,000 acres in Virginia ... and a quite fancy manor or plantation home to house the family. Thus a Virginia aristocracy, functioning much like the feudal aristocracy back home in England, came into being. 

For those who came later to Virginia, they did so as indentured workers, to work the land of this Virginia aristocracy for the number of years of their indenture (typically seven years) until they were given a small amount of land and some tools to start out life on their own.  But very quickly the truly valuable land was grabbed up by the earliest arrivals, and those who came later found little opportunity to duplicate this rise in status through expanded land ownership.  Thus a society of poor Whites began to grow up within this Virginia feudal order.

Ultimately, when a revolt against this unfair distribution of the wealth and social privilege of Virginia occurred, the Virginia aristocracy found it safer to switch from the program of indenture to the institution of African slavery in order to protect and sustain this feudal system.  The Africans, brought to enslavement through defeat in tribal wars back in Africa, were carried off to America, where as a broken-spirited people, they proved to be more compliant to the harsh disciplines of the Virginia feudal order.

Puritan America.  But the English who came a generation later to the lands north of Virginia, to "New England," came under a very different set of social circumstances, shaped by a very different set of social ideals and social norms.  They were religious idealists, inspired by their strong Christian belief that they should live as a people as close as possible to the standards of the first century Christian community, as clearly outlined in character in the Christian New Testament.  They came to America not just for their own benefit, but with the belief that by striving to live "Biblically," they would serve God well by living as a social example (as Israel of old was supposed to have done, but failed to do so) giving "Light to the Nations," showing the way for others around the world to achieve the same glorious life that a fatherly God himself had wanted for all his human creation.  In America, they would establish a "City on a Hill," there for all the world to see how to live successfully God's way (which had little in common with the feudal way practiced widely not only in Europe but through much of the rest of the world as well). 

Hooker and Puritan families setting up a community in Connecticut - 1636

Thus what Puritan America offered the world was the living example of a society where all the people could live comfortably, proudly even – working together and sharing as equals, enjoying the blessings of social life on this basis of social equality.  Equality, not hierarchy, was what God wanted for his people – at least that is how the Biblical narrative reaching from the ancient Hebrews down to the formation of the first century Christian church explained things.

According to these Puritans, Christian society was intended to be a community built on a deep sense of interpersonal connections shared equally among the community members themselves.  God was not looking for a well-planned organization – a society organized and directed by a privileged group of "enlightened" individuals who had authorized themselves to do the thinking for and managing of the very dependent multitude of the others making up the society.

The Puritan understanding of Godly society of course required the people themselves to take up the responsibilities of self-government, a social mindset cultivated from a child's very early age onward through the careful mentoring on the part of an older generation of parents, teachers and pastors, individuals who themselves had been carefully raised to adulthood through this same process of socially (that is, morally) disciplined development.

In this, the family was of paramount importance – because the family was the key source of the earliest and most enduring of a person's social instruction, social instruction that would shape and guide profoundly the social-moral character of each new rising generation.

True, even in its sense of basic equality, Puritan New England certainly had its leaders, those who exercised certain supervisory powers over the life of Puritan society.  But these men did not constitute a social group set apart from and above the rest. They were members of the same social order as the rest of the members of society – and elected on a regular and recurring basis out of that same social order to represent those people in the councils of social policy-making.  They did not dictate that policy to those same people but consulted with them regularly on the basis of town meetings.

This was in fact democracy, the self-rule of the common members of society, guided in that self-rule by the moral instructions of the Christian religion.  It was indeed true "Christian democracy" that got America up and running – at least in New England and the Middle Colonies.

Deadly conflict between the two social types.  Consequently, two very different societies were set out from the very early years of the English colonization of America.

And ultimately, in the mid-1800s, these two societies would fall into the deadliest war America has ever fought, a brutal war to see which path America was to move down in order to go forward into its future.  It was a reckoning that the participants themselves understood that God had called them to.  The "City on the Hill," as Founding Father Winthrop called this new society, needed to shine forth in glory, not in cruel social blemish arising from the shameful institution of African slavery.

Ultimately a lot of American boys went to their deaths over this issue (something often overlooked in today's recitation about the anti-Black racism that supposedly accompanies naturally the matter of being a White American) ... some 600,000+ young men killed and another million wounded in this battle for the soul of America – more than those killed and wounded in America's other battles from the War of Independence in the 1770s and 1780s to the Korean War in the 1950s.

And so it was also that Lincoln reminded America in his Second Inaugural Address (1865) that God's judgment weighed heavily on America.  It was critical for America to get things right with God.

Go on to the next section:  God and Man

  Miles H. Hodges