A Small Lie

I am finding quite informative the book The Flag + The Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (2022) by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry. However, the authors repeat one lie that I’ve seen elsewhere.

In October 2020, shortly before losing his bid for re-election, then President Trump assembled a “1776 Commission” that included no professional historians, but was led by executives at the conservative Hilsdale College, as well as Charlie Kirk and other intellectual, politicians, and pundits. (46)

Almost all of this assertion is correct, but there are two errors. Hillsdale College is misspelled. The lie: there was one professional historian.

Victor Davis Hanson was on the commission and is a professional historian. His work on ancient Greece is highly regarded. I have read his book, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1994) and recommend it. Less good is Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Culture (2001). That book attempts to extend the insights of The Western Way of War, but departs significantly from reliance on primary sources. As it gets closer to our time, the narrative becomes more highly partisan and the sources less credible. See my “Carnage and Culture: An Overview” (2008) for more on this book.

The 1776 Commission had a single professional historian. Saying it did not is a lie. However, that historian has spent the past several decades creating right-wing propaganda. His credentials as a historian of American history are as weak as my credentials as a historian of ancient Greece. Hanson had no legitimate place on a commission concerned with US history. None of the other commission members did either.

Gorski and Perry correctly assess the political nature of Trump’s effort to put out a statement concerning US history, a statement that had multiple problems historically, not least that historians had almost nothing to do with creating it. But, they overstate their assertion with a lie.

Young's Cauldron

In early 1836, Ewing Young purchased a large iron cauldron from Courtney Walker. Walker had the job of disposing of the goods left behind by Nathaniel Wyeth's abandoned Columbia River enterprise. A successful ice merchant in New England, Wyeth had come west with dreams of making a fortune packing and shipping Pacific salmon for consumption outside the region. Along the way, Wyeth also sought profits from trapping for furs, brokering timber sales, and importing goods to Oregon from Hawaii and the east coast. Wyeth's Oregon enterprise failed to turn a profit so he liquidated his assets in the region and returned to the ice business. Meanwhile, Young had carried on successful trade between New Mexico and Missouri for more than a decade before working his way west to California, and from California driving a herd of horses into Oregon. Wyeth's cauldron had been shipped to Oregon for pickling salmon. Young originated from Tennessee and saw in the kettle potential for preparing sour mash that he could then distill into whiskey.

Oregon was not a wholly lawless frontier, but with joint occupation by the United States and by England, and with a small non-Indian population, enforcement authorities were far from prominent. United States law banned sale of liquor in Indian Country. The Hudson's Bay Company, England's presence in the region, understood that liquor sales to Indians had a deleterious effect on the fur trade--their business in the region. Young's plan to build a distillery provoked cooperation between HBC employees, American settlers, and missionaries that had recently arrived from the United States with the professed purpose of bringing Christian civilization to Oregon's Native population. The Oregon Temperance Society formed and started a petition drive to dissuade Young from manufacturing spirits.

Eliza Farnham's Millennial Vision

Two religious traditions are pervasive in American culture. The evangelical tradition is the spiritual; civil religion, the political. These two traditions interrelate in complex ways; sometimes in competition, they also draw power from and build one another. In Life in Prairie Land (1846) by Eliza W. Farnham these traditions interact to create a vision we might call evangelical nationalism.

Farnham ends Part I of her work with a narrative of spiritual renewal that provides a framework for understanding the millennial vision at the end of the book. She holds forth her sister as an exemplary moral character; to the extent that she follows this moral leadership, the book's structure conforms to the pattern of conversion narratives, albeit conversion as secular as it is religious.

The voice of Mary is presented as a sermon from her death bed; it is a testimonial of her life of faith. Mary reads her own life as a text:

Those were dark volumes to be opened by gay-hearted girls, that we learned to read during those seven years: gloomy commentaries on the world in which we were left to make our way to happiness or ruin.
Farnham, 148

In Mary's reading, the world is hostile, full of "tempters ... spreading their diabolical nets" (149). Her happiness results from having been blessed by God with a good mother, among other things. She testifies to the experience of God as a kind parent; it was her discovery that she could approach her "Maker as a tender father and friend" (150) who carried her through her trials. Mary characterizes her spiritual transformation as "newly awakened sentiment" (150), then turns to the climax of her sermon: evaluating Eliza Farnham's need for a similar experience.

The transition from her reading of her own experience to reading the experience of her sister employs the disarming pronoun "they".

Most young persons think their enjoyment of life will be diminished by an allegiance to the laws of christianity, but I think they are in error. Mine was infinitely increased! I wished everyone to feel as I did.
Farnham, 150

Turning then to a more personal evaluation of Farnham's need, she describes the views of her sister as those of an atheist, but in a manner that releases Farnham from full responsibility. Farnham is presented in her youth as having been changed passively by life in a "moral wilderness ... away from everything but the tyranny of a selfish, passionate woman ... [and] that woman an Atheist" (150). Having escaped this woman, however, Eliza began "to seek the education and mental culture which should have been the work of earlier years" (151).

The second half of the sermon is a defense of the American West as an Eden, with a landscape that is always feminine. But in this Eden life is hard because of unregenerate man:

I feel that the responsibility of my early death rests on human beings ... [whose] repeated transgressions of His law have placed it out of my reach to be happy and useful.
Farnham, 157

Following the death of sister Mary and her sermon was the death also of the Farnham child and attempts at consolation by the pastor. From books lent by the pastor, Farnham, "found nothing of the peace and resignation which I had often seen others manifest under similar afflictions" (167). Even so, she experienced an awakening of her spirit, "a new set of faculties was called into action" (167).

The consolation to which her sister testified was now hers. Mary's sermon forms part of the text of the conversion narrative of Eliza Farnham, and Mary's experience becomes descriptive of Farnham's experience. Farnham, however, occupies a marginal place within the evangelical tradition. Hers is not the testimony of repentance from sin and salvation in Christ.

But the comfort which I found was no miraculous shining forth of anything external to myself; it was no overflowing fountain which poured itself out, independent of my own state of mind; such as many seem to have found, but simply a more exalted action of some powers which I had always possessed, and a partial subduing of others. ... I found no power superior to my own mind.
Farnham, 168

Her consolation was not one of personal redemption; it was the feeling "that there were infinite love and infinite pity in the divine Mind" (168). Theologically, she is much more in tune with Ralph Waldo Emerson than with traditional evangelical piety; in contrast to Emerson, however, she emphasizes affections and feminine virtues.

Life in Prairie Land as a whole forms a larger conversion narrative theologically compatible with Emerson's "Nature" (1836). The entirety of Eliza Farnham's experience in the West culminates in a religious vision of nationalist expansion in the final chapter. In reading this experience, Eliza again follows the lead of her sister Mary.

Farnham surveys the history of settlement in the West, identifying five distinct groups of inhabitants, and assessing the moral relationship of each to the land. In her mind the pattern is one of moral progression culminating in a society "free from want, from oppression, from ignorance, from fear" (268)!

Originally inhabiting the prairie was a group that Farnham encountered only through traces: she describes Indians through burial grounds and legends. Within Edenic nature lived the noble savage who simply vanishes when the land comes under cultivation. Their successors, the first EuroAmerican settlers, had much in common with the Indians. Coming from Kentucky and Virginia, these settlers had lived with, fought with, and married Indians. White in color, they were primitive in nature, according to Farnham. They applied "only partial industry" (266) to cultivation of the land.

These first settlers were pushed out by a more industrious group. These built loftier cabins and added fences and barns. This group was characterized by constant industry and determination to reap the potential of the land. However, when the land began to become crowded, they moved on, settling other regions. They sold their lots to Yankees.

The fourth group of inhabitants becomes the "permanent population" (267). They replace the cabins with "stately houses" (267). From their stock emerge the fifth and final group: inhabitants of the future. These are not new immigrants; they are those whose cultivation of the land is reciprocated in the awakening of their moral faculties by the sublime features of the land.

These future inhabitants will learn to read the land, and their experience upon it, as Farnham outlines. In her view, the land itself contains

so much to stimulate the nobler faculties and gratify the senses; so much that is calculated to induce a high state of physical development and fine perceptions of the beautiful, the grand, and the true.
Farnham, 268

As Eliza Farnham bids farewell to the prairie, she echoes her sister in greeting the millennium. Nature in the West, according to Mary, is "in her loveliest and benignest aspect" (54). In contemplating the mystery of the irresistible charm of the land, she concludes:

It is the mystery of the mighty Future which lies before a country possessing resources like ours. To bear a part in developing this, seems to me equally calculated to stimulate and gratify our noblest powers.
Farnham, 55

Evangelical concern for the future enables Farnham to publish her narrative. Her writing, often accepted by historians as a primary source concerning the settlement of the West, is as much prescriptive as descriptive. The text is a document of the ideology of manifest destiny at the very moment when that term was coming into being.

President Polk and the National Honor

Few United States presidents were as avowedly expressionistic as President James Knox Polk. During his administration (1845-1849) more land was added to the nation than during that of any predecessor save Thomas Jefferson. Only the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Alaska were greater territorial gains than those made by Polk. He added California, the Territories of Oregon and New Mexico (embracing the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest), and concluded the annexation of Texas.

Prominent in Polk's rhetoric of expansion is language concerning national honor and destiny. Indeed, it was one of his supporters, John L. O'Sullivan, who coined the expression "manifest destiny."* At crucial points in his communications to Congress, Polk's arguments rely upon imprecise vocabulary: adjectives such as patriotic, just, honorable, and noble abound--often in their noun forms. He opened his inaugural address, for example, by describing the Presidency as "the most honorable and most responsible office on earth"; his "countrymen ... [h]onored [him] with this distinguished consideration" (Richardson, 2223)** Similarly, in his first annual message to Congress he articulated his objections to the British proposal to settle the boundary issue in Oregon:

The British proposition of compromise, which would make the Columbia the line south of 49°, with a trifling addition of detached territory to the United States north of that river, and would leave on the British side two-thirds of the whole Oregon Territory, including the free navigation of the Columbia and all the valuable harbors on the Pacific, can never for a moment be entertained by the United States without an abandonment of their just and clear territorial rights, their own self-respect, and the national honor. (Richardson, 2247-48)

Asserting these "clear territorial rights" was his principal goal as President.

Polk explained the United States' claims with respect to those of European nations in terms which echo the Monroe Doctrine:

it should be distinctly announced to the world as our settled policy that no future European colony or dominion shall with our consent be planted or established on any part of the North American continent. (Ricardson, 2249)

This policy of reserving to the United States exclusive rights of expansion in North America is based on "the principle that the people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny" (Richardson, 2248).

Such language could seem anti-imperialistic, supporting the rights of all peoples to choose their own forms of government; but Polk intends it to be more narrowly construed. Such rights only belong to members of an enlightened, civilized society with republican institutions. Indigenous peoples, as European law asserts, have their title to land extinguished to make way for civilization. Even the Cherokee, the most exemplary of the "civilized tribes", "have not yet advanced to such a state of civilization as to dispense with the guardian care and control of the Government of the United States" (Richardson, 2280). Consequently, disputes between different factions of Cherokee require the paternal intervention of the federal government for resolution. However, Polk's attempts to resolve these disputes by negotiating a new treaty overlooks the fact that it is the refusal of certain members of the tribe to sacrifice their nation's political sovereignty in a treaty with the United States that created the factionalism in the first place.

In his policies towards tribal peoples Polk followed the pattern established by his mentor, Andrew Jackson. Indian tribes were removed from their homelands to Indian Territory where they would be out of the way of white settlers. In his first annual address, Polk described the relations between the United States and the several tribes as "favorable".

Our relations with the Indian tribes are of a favorable character. The policy of removing them to a country designed for their permanent residence west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of the organized States and Territories, is better appreciated by them than it was a few years ago, while education is now attended to and the habits of civilized life are gaining ground among them. (Richardson, 2261)

Those tribal members who most fully assimilate, while they must live in that territory designated for Indians, will be accorded a measure of respect and political autonomy. John Ross, for example, representing "what is termed the government party of the Cherokees" (Richardson, 2309) has his opinions transmitted by President Polk to Congress.

Native Americans (as they would be called later) are not the "natives of this land" who may determine their own destiny in Polk's messages. Rather, it is necessary to "cultivate amicable relations" with the tribes beyond the Rocky Mountains because "care and protection ... is due from the Government in that distant region" (Richardson, 2246). Polk claims in his inaugural address that "[o]ur title to the country of Oregon is 'clear and unquestionable'" (Richardson, 2231). This title is strengthened by America's most patriotic citizens: settlers of western lands.

It is to the enterprise and perseverance of the hardy pioneers of the West, who penetrate the wilderness with their families, suffer the dangers, the privations, and hardships attending the settlement of a new country, and prepare the way for the body of emigrants who in the course of a few years usually follow them, that we are in a great degree indebted for the rapid extension and aggrandizement of our country. (Richardson, 2259)

These men, at the time of his inaugural, are "Preparing to perfect that title [to Oregon] by occupying it with their wives and children" (Richardson, 2231).

But this territorial "aggrandizement" is not a war of conquest. Rather, the structure of the United States as a "confederation of independent States," Polk suggests, assures that its "Government can not be otherwise than pacific" (Richardson, 2230). Even so, it was Polk who led the United States into war with Mexico. He said that this war should have been unnecessary because Mexico, like the United States, had been a European colony that cast off the rule of Europe to form a Republic. The republican government in Mexico proved weaker than that in the United States; under the military leadership of Santa Anna, Mexico pursued a course "of seizure and confiscation of the property of our citizens, the violation of their persons, and the insults to our flag" (Richardson, 2324). This list of Mexico's violations appears repeatedly in Polk's writing leading up to the war with Mexico, as well as in his retrospective comments as peace negotiations progressed. The order varies, but "violation of their persons" never comes first.

Polk prefers abstractions to specific terminology. Although his annual messages are filled with specific numbers listing desired appropriations, his arguments rest on language to which it was difficult to object. War was necessary because Mexico was not "restrained by the laws which regulate the conduct of civilized nations" (Richardson, 2324). Once war broke out, it was Polk's expressed "desire to terminate ... the existing war with Mexico by a peace just and honorable to both parties." The major obstacle to peace, indeed the true cause of the war, was "adjustment of a boundary between the two Republics which shall prove satisfactory and convenient to both" (Richardson, 2309).

Early in Polk's administration, he issued a presidential order mourning the death of Andrew Jackson. In the order George Bancroft, acting Secretary of War, memorialized Jackson as the nation's "most illustrious citizen ... Child of a forest region and a settler of the wilderness ... Crowned with glory in war, in his whole career as a statesman he showed himself the friend and lover of peace" (Richardson, 2234). As his mentor, Polk pursued "pacific" policies which resulted in such territorial gains that in his farewell address he could declare the frontier of the United States to be at its geographical center.



*See Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (1963).

**James D. Richardson, comp., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 4, part 3 (1911). Available since 2004 through Project Gutenberg.

Laying Claim to Sacred Land

In 1938, as often before and after, Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, offered a reading of the significance of the four U.S. Presidents whose images were being carved into granite. He explained,

Jefferson appears on Mount Rushmore because he drew the Declaration of Independence; Washington, because he was the great presiding officer in shaping the Constitution; Lincoln, because it was Lincoln and no other than Lincoln, whose mind and heart, and finally life, determined that we should continue as a common family of states and in union forever. Roosevelt is joined with the others because he completed the dream of Columbus, opened the way to the East, [and] joined the waters of the great East and West seas. (Dean,* 56)

An entirely different view was offered in 1970 by Lehman Brightman, cofounder of United Native Americans. Brightman and others in his group had joined John Trudell, representing the United Tribes of Alcatraz, several members of the American Indian Movement, including Russell Means, and some Lakota elders for a protest at Mount Rushmore. The protest was planned as an assertion of the Sioux claim to the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, as recognized in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Means reported his memories of Brightman's speech in his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread (1995). According to Means,

Lee explained that George Washington had become famous as an Indian killer during the French and Indian War. He had risen quickly through the militia ranks by butchering Indian communities and burning the bones. ... Lee spoke of Thomas Jefferson, who more than once had proposed the annihilation of the Indian race to "cleanse" the Americas ... Abraham Lincoln ... signed an order to execute thirty-eight Indians for the so-called Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. ... Finally, Lee spoke about Teddy Roosevelt, the biggest thief ever to occupy the White House. Roosevelt violated scores of treaties, and illegally nationalized more Indian land than any president, before or since. (167-68)

There are many ever-changing variations of Borglum's celebratory tale, and of Brightman's iconoclastic narrative. Borglum's view reflects a tradition in historical scholarship, but which remains dominant in the histories consumed by tourists. Brightman's view, on the other hand, provokes memories not yet emergent in histories of the nation. These divergent views of the figures carved into Mount Rushmore express fundamental conflicts in the meanings of America as a nation.


*Robert J. Dean, Living Granite: the Story of Borglum and the Mount Rushmore Memorial (1949).

Education for Virtue

My evening history class ends at 10:00pm. After the short drive home, I need to read for a few minutes before I can fall asleep. Last night, I read from Plato's Laws. In this ancient text (perhaps 350 B.C.), Plato discusses the nature of virtue and the purpose of education.

Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love. Call this "education," and I, at any rate, think you would be giving it its proper name.
Plato, Laws, 653b-c

This passage immediately reminded me of a text that I had planned to review in preparation for my upcoming lecture next week regarding the development of Indian boarding schools in the late-nineteenth century. The language in Plato appears to be reflected in a speech given by Thomas Jefferson Morgan when he was Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889-1893). Morgan's speech is called "Plea for the Papoose"; he attempts to imagine the needs and interests of Native American Indian babies, and to speak for them.

Early in "Plea for the Papoose," Morgan speaks out against the racial ideology of his day with a statement that all children have the same possibilities for personal growth, limited only by culture, not some inherent racial defect (as some argued).

All human babies inherit human natures, and the development of these inherent powers is a matter of culture, subject to the conditions of environment. The pretty, innocent papoose has in itself the potency of a painted savage, prowling like a beast of prey, or the possibilities of a sweet and gentle womanhood or a noble and useful manhood.
Morgan, "Plea for the Papoose," in Americanizing the American Indians, edited by Francis Paul Prucha, 242.

Planning "Rescue"

Later in the speech, Morgan presents a plan for rescuing Indian children from what he portrays as the debilitating effects of Indian culture. Some critics have used the term legally sanctioned kidnapping to describe the policies that he advocated—the development of federal Indian boarding schools was a central component. In this section, his language echoes Plato's Laws.

If they grow up on Indian reservations removed from civilization, without advantages of any kind, surrounded by barbarians, trained from childhood to love the unlovely and to rejoice in the unclean; associating all their highest ideals of manhood and womanhood with fathers who are degraded and mothers who are debased, their ideas of human life will, of necessity, be deformed, their characters be warped, and their lives distorted. They can no more avoid this than the leopard can change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin. The only possible way in which they can be saved from the awful doom that hangs over them is for the strong arm of the Nation to reach out, take them in their infancy and place them in its fostering schools; surrounding them with an atmosphere of civilization, maturing them in all that is good, and developing them into men and women instead of allowing them to grow up as barbarians and savages.
Morgan, in Prucha, 243.

From our vantage point more than a century later, it is easy to judge Morgan's language as racist. Such judgment, however, anticipates questions regarding how commonsense notions in our day will be judged by our descendants a century from now. Some of those that did not share Morgan's views believed that Indian children were incapable of education. He stood against these contemporaries as an advocate for Indian equality. He was part of a group of Christian reformers who sought to render United States laws and policies more humanizing than they had been.


Full citations
Plato. The Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. London: Penguin Books, 1970.
Prucha, Francis Paul, editor. Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the "Friends of the Indian" 1880-1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978 [1973].

Fundamental Questions: Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s majestic A History of the American People (1997) purports to address three fundamental questions. These questions concern expiation of national sins, the balance of moral ideals and practical needs, and a sense of national mission. Rooted in these questions are fundamental assumptions.

Expiation of Sins

Johnson assumes that taking possession of the North American continent proceeded through injustice to its indigenous inhabitants. He also assumes that American self-sufficiency was rendered possible through the suffering of enslaved labor. These assumptions are well-supported historical generalizations, although some balk at their expression. In a dissenting opinion, for example, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist deployed the moniker “revisionist history” as a pejorative description of specific allegations of injustice towards the Lakota and other Native peoples of the northern Plains.

I think the Court today rejects that conclusion largely on the basis of a view of the settlement of the American West which is not universally shared. There were undoubtedly greed, cupidity, and other less-than-admirable tactics employed by the Government … but the Indians did not lack their share of villainy either. It seems to me quite unfair to judge by the light of “revisionist” historians or the mores of another era actions that were taken under pressure of time more than a century ago.
U.S. v. Sioux Nation 448 U. S. 371, at 435

More recently, Michael Medved has suggested that there was little out of the ordinary in the American institution of slavery, expiating the sins (as Johnson would have it) by noting that all have sinned. Medved’s distortions are well enough exposed by Timothy Burke that there is no need to rehash them here.

The point is that such exceptions as Rehnquist and Medved stem from a handful of ideologues that cling to a peculiar conservatism; these do not negate Johnson’s assumption in his first question. Has the United States “expiated its organic sins” (3)?

Moral Ideals and Practical Realities

Johnson’s first question, he suggests, logically leads to the second. Has the United States found the correct mix of “ideals and altruism” with “acquisitiveness and ambition” (3)? Despite origins in “sin,” the United States is steeped in the eighteenth century ideals of liberty and equality. It is true that it was formed by merchants and planters that intended their government to protect property and commerce. Competing self-interest was the necessary “hidden hand” behind healthy economic growth, according to a leading theory of the day. But, did the society created by these American colonials become one in which “righteousness has the edge over the needful self-interest” (3)?

Johnson seems to suggest that if the balance is right, the sins of dispossession and slavery are expiated.

Sense of Mission

The third question ties together the first two. Has the “republic of the people,” rooted in “an other worldly ‘City on a Hill’,” proven “to be a model for the entire planet” (3)? The notion of racism as a national sin reveals a secular application of religious themes. The third question reveals the heart of this trope. From its origins in Puritan New England, as expressed by Cotton Mather (quoted in “From Chiasmus to Columbus”) and his predecessors, the sense of divine mission became secularized.

The Puritan settlers that debarked from the Arbella in 1630 began in congregation as hearers of John Winthrop’s seminal sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In this sermon, Winthrop referenced Matthew 5:14 in a line that has become one of the most frequently repeated sentiments in American rhetoric. The twin notions that America is an example to the world, and that God is the protector of this nation get invoked with regularity in public discourse. An old book sitting on my shelf explains the theme.

Every President, from George Washington to Lyndon B. Johnson, has included in his inaugural address one or more references to his and the nation’s dependence upon God. These statements have become the documented and lasting records of the religious expressions of our presidents.
Benjamin Weiss, God in American History, 47.

Johnson was President when Weiss published his book in 1966, but subsequent Presidents have not deviated from the pattern. Some, to be certain, sound more like preachers than others. Historiann pointed out in reply to my article “A City on Hill” in January that Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech must be remembered in this context.

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
Reagan, “Farewell Address”

Of course, Winthrop was a Puritan, not one of the early Pilgrims that came ten years earlier. One benefit of living through the Eighties with a keen ear and a sense of the past is freedom from all expectations that President Reagan would ever be correct in his summary of historical particulars. Nevertheless, the larger sentiments he expressed were shared by enough shakers and movers that the erroneous details are insignificant.

Despite the omnipresence of God in such rhetoric, the question Johnson asks assumes that this sense of mission became secular. It has not become thus without considerable resistance from true believers, so some confusion remains. Earlier in his address, Reagan emphasized the core values.

Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.
Reagan, “Farewell Address”

One gets the impression from Paul Johnson’s beginning that his final answers to all three questions are affirmative.

“A City on a Hill”

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
Matthew 5:14-16

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when he shall make us a praise and glory that me shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” 1630

Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.
Barack Obama, “The Audacity of Hope,” Democratic National Convention 2004

The lives of hundreds of thousands of America's sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world.
Mitt Romney, “Faith in America,” George Bush Presidential Library 2007

The notion that the United States has been blessed for an exceptional purpose as a redeemer nation (see Ernest Lee Tuveson’s book) runs deep. Presidents, Presidential Candidates, and many politicians routinely end speeches, “may God richly bless the United States of America,” or similar sentences. It should not be considered insignificant, therefore, that three conservative histories of the United States deploy language from Matthew 5:14 in chapter titles. The first chapter of A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen is titled “The City on the Hill, 1492-1707.” William J. Bennett gives the title “A City Upon a Hill (1607-1765)” to the second chapter in America: The Last Best Hope. Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People begins with “‘A City on a Hill’ Colonial America, 1580-1750.”

In contrast to these conservative histories, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States narrates the colonial era in chapters titled “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” “Drawing the Color Line,” and “persons of Mean and Vile Condition.” Likewise, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen offers no biblical phrases in the early chapter titles, rather “Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-Making,” “1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus,” “The Truth about the First Thanksgiving,” and “Red Eyes.”

From Chiasmus to Columbus

Chiasmus to Columbus

Lewis and Clark did not bring the West into U.S. history, they brought the United States into western history.
Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark, 2003

We did not come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.
Luis Valdez, Aztlan, 1972

Where does American history begin? The term American history more often than not refers to the history of the United States, rather than to all of North America, let alone the Americas—something about which my teenage son was ranting last night: “What about Canada, Mexico, and South America? Isn't Canada part of America?” Even when writers are concerned with this sort of semantic precision, they do not produce a national story of American history that begins with the Declaration of Independence. Rather, the beginning gets pushed back in time, nearly always creating a long story of colonization that culminates in revolution. Nation building begins after the revolution.

The story often begins with Columbus and Indians. It might begin with Columbus setting sail, or with Indians greeting him when he lands. American history sometimes begins with the precursors to Columbus, such as the Norse and their lost colony of Vineland or Prince Henry the Navigator’s orchestration of discoveries along the coast of Africa. It also could begin with the origins of human life in America, as in The Oxford History of the American People (1965) by Samuel Eliot Morison.

Morison concluded that people began crossing into America from Asia “prior to 10,000 B.C.” (8) on the basis of archeology. Scientists since Morison’s day have pushed back the dates of this migration, some as far back as 50,000 years. Morison expressed skepticism regarding whether the first migrants were indeed the ancestors of modern American Indians, or whether their ancestors displaced earlier peoples. These questions have gained new currency since 1996 when a couple of young men tripped over a skull on the banks of the Columbia River while trying to sneak into the hydroplane races; their discovery of bones led to the arrival of forensic archaeologist James Chatters on the scene. Chatters’s Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans (2001) is one among many texts reassessing human life in early America, and the controversies generated by such study. Chatters is one among those now offering the view that so-called Kennewick Man is more closely related to the Ainu than to American Indians.

The Bering land-bridge hypothesis did not originate in archeology, as that science was still far in the future when José de Acosta wrote Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). Acosta concerned himself with universal history as a theologian. His work “accorded with the 1537 declaration of Pope Paul III that Indians were human, hence descendants of Noah,” as I wrote in “Native Americans: An Overview,” Encyclopedia of American Studies (2001).

American history could begin with speculative accounts of migrations through a land-bridge, and with alternate theories of water routes. Such narratives would need to delve into the science of archeology and related disciplines, such as methods of garnering evidence of human migrations from comparative linguistics. On the other hand, American history could begin with Native stories of origins as Vine Deloria, Jr. recommends in Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995). As Colin Calloway points out in the epigraph above, there was a long history of peoples in America before European-American settlers arrived. History as we have come to know it finds its structure and plot in European metanarratives—the rise of civilization,—but an accurate account of the American past need not conform always to these imported structures.

Bereshit

The very remote history of all nations is disfigured with fable, and gives but little encouragement to distant enquiry, and laborious researches. … From the most exact observations I could make in the long time I traded among the Indian Americans, I was forced to believe them lineally descended from the Israelites, either while they were a maritime power, or soon after the general captivity; the latter however is the most probable.
James Adair, The History of the American Indians, 1775

Many writers past and present have stressed American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is a light to the world, the world’s best hope. Despite such quasi-religious assumptions, or even explicitly religious arguments, these writers do not write their stories with the sort of language found in the B'reshit or Bərêšîth, the first of the books of the Torah. Even if they started in such a manner, we are unlikely to find such sentences as these:

In the beginning of American history, the land was occupied. As Europeans began to arrive, lands and peoples were transformed; nations vanished and new nations were born.

We do find frequent efforts to draw upon Hebrew scriptures in order to frame the American story of the past. James Adair’s view that American Indians were descended from Israel neither found adherents in his day nor in ours unless we consider the impact of Joseph Smith imbibing the idea, and then promoting it through his sacred text. On the other hand, Cotton Mather’s expression of the Puritan colony as a “New English Israel” has produced many proselytes. In Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather expressed his sense of the purpose of the colony of New England: a sense of mission akin to that uttered in 1630 by John Winthrop as he drew upon Matthew 5:14 for his sermon to the recently arrived Puritans that soon would overwhelm the Separatists whom had arrived on the Mayflower. Mather wrote:

This at last is the Spot of Earth, which the God of Heaven Spied out for the Seat of such Evangelical, and Ecclesiastical, and very remarkable Transactions, as require to be made an History; here ‘twas that our Blessed Jesus intended a Resting-place, must I say? Or only an Hiding-place for those Reformed CHURCHES, which have given him a little Accomplishment of his Eternal Father’s Promise unto him; to be; we hope, yet further accomplished, of having the utmost Parts of the Earth for his Possession?
Mather, Magnalia, 122-123, emphasis in original

The Sense of Mission

Rush Limbaugh interviewed Larry Schweikart, author of A Patriot’s History and published the interview in The Limbaugh Letter (March 2005). This interview is reprinted in the updated version of A Patriot’s History. Limbaugh asked Schweikart about his view of American exceptionalism. Speaking for himself and for co-author Michael Allen, Schweikart was clear: “We believe that America was a city set on a hill” (xv). He continues by asserting that all of the English colonies, except Jamestown, were religious colonies. His central point is that the U.S. has “a Judeo-Christian basis. We [the U.S.] embrace private property rights, and we are a democratic republic” (xvi). We are to understand that God did the setting.

The first sentence of the narrative in A Patriot’s History reflects this bias. “God, glory, and gold—not necessarily in that order—took post-Renaissance Europeans to parts of the globe that they had never before seen” (1). From there the first two pages of narrative give an account of the influence of Marco Polo, ancient trade routes to Cathay, and developments in technology: the Arabs’ astrolabe, Viking hull construction, and sternpost rudders from the Baltic coast. They note also the growth of European monarchies, mercantilism, and the rift between Protestants and Catholics “that reinforced national concerns” (2). After a brief timeline of twenty-one events from the four voyages of Columbus to the Salem witch hunts, they resume the narrative with three paragraphs concerning Prince Henry of Portugal.

In contrast to A Patriot’s History, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History opens with a description of the actions of Natives: “Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat” (1). Zinn goes on to emphasize Native hospitality and “belief in sharing,” suggesting “[t]hese traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance” (1). He also mentions Marco Polo and the silks and spices of Asia, as well as political developments of monarchies. He offers less preliminary context to the voyage of Columbus, but does mention the relative distribution of wealth in Spain, “2 percent of the population … owned 95 percent of the land” (2).

Both books begin with the voyages of Columbus, and each constructs this story in a manner consistent with the authors’ overall purpose. Schweikart and Allen labor to promote a Judeo-Christian based sense of national mission; Zinn aims to highlight racial and class inequalities, as well as “fugitive moments of compassion” (11) from which we might craft our future.

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Thanksgiving in America

Roasting Fowl

There are many traditions that Americans will celebrate. Most are rooted in myth, but even these myths are rooted in history. A letter by Edward Winslow offers the best description of the feast celebrated by Pilgrims and Indians together that is memorialized in most people's image of the original event.

"Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoit with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deer which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governor and upon the Captain and others."
Edward Winslow to _?_ 11 Dec 1621. As quoted in William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, notes by Samuel Eliot Morison, 1952.

There was a long process leading to the memory of this event as a holiday.

A Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln dated 3 October 1863, set forth a holiday the last Thursday of November. Two years earlier he had given government employees a holiday, 28 November 1861.

Prior to Lincoln's proclamation, George Washington declared 26 November 1789 as "A Day of Publick Thanksgiving and Prayer" in a decree signed 3 October 1789.

Before Washington, the Charlestown, Massachusetts town Council on 20 June 1676 set aside 29 June of the same year as "a day of Solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God."

The modern American holiday reflects a continuity that goes back to Lincoln's proclamation, although the roots are deeper.


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