martes, 30 de julio de 2024

DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAS

 

  Karen Cronick

 

 

INDEX

  1. Introduction
    1. The centuries before and after the Enlightenment

                                                    i.     The history of the world

1.      What do we know about the past?

                                                   ii.     The glimpse of ideas of justice and peace

  1. Chapter I Cultural Heritages in the Americas
    1. First reflections

                                                    i.     Culture, past and present

1.      The conquests and edicts of the kings

2.      The constant European wars

    1. The Enlightenment

                                                    i.     The Enlightenment in England and France

                                                   ii.     The Enlightenment in Spain

    1. Colonialism

                                                    i.     Colonialism in Latin America

                                                   ii.     Independence in Latin America and Venezuela

    1. Democracy

                                                    i.     Democracy in England, France, and the United States of America

1.      Democracy in Spain

2.      Democracy in Latin America

    1. The Culture of Family and Community Life
    2. Final Thoughts
  1. Chapter 2 THE AMERICAN NINETEENTH CENTURY: WHAT IT LEFT US
    1. First Approaches
    2. Introduction

                                                    i.     The Complex American History

1.      The Enlightenment

a.      Tolerance

2.      The American Liberal Tradition

    1. "The Frontier" by James Fenimore Cooper

                                                    i.     Land tenure

                                                   ii.     The need to conserve forests and wildlife

                                                  iii.     Awareness of Race and Rank

                                                  iv.     The characters and genesis of the American character

    1. Two books: "The Pathfinders" and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

                                                    i.     Manifest Destiny

    1. The beginning of industrialization
    2. "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

                                                    i.     Slavery as a historical institution

                                                   ii.     The slave trade

                                                  iii.     Conscience

                                                  iv.     Final Thoughts on This Novel

    1. The Civil War

                                                    i.     War strategies

    1. The Conquest of the West
  1. FINAL THOUGHTS
    1. The abolition of slavery
    2. Social violence
    3. Migration
    4. In short, the nineteenth century
  2. REFERENCES

 

 

 

Introduction

It seems that four centuries is a long time. But in terms of the history of the world it is only a blink of an eye. Only a little more than four centuries ago people began to talk about the possibility of a representative democracy that was universal and inclusive, and that its laws would reflect the will of the population and not the whims of a king.

Four hundred years is nothing. Modern democracy is very, very new, seen from the perspective of world history. Roughly, we can say that we have historical information (brief and inaccurate) since the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago.  In percentages, these 400 years would represent only 8% of the known history of human beings, and this does not include the millions of prehistoric years that began in the Stone Age more than two million years ago, and continued with the Copper, Bronze and Iron ages.

In the eighteenth century something very important happened in western civilization: it was a historical moment in which thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Wilhelm Leibniz, Francis Bacon and John Locke and others applied the principles of rationality and empiricism to the understanding of the physical and social world, that is, they did not look for explanations in religious dogma as had been happening for the last 1700 years since ancient Greece.

They were accompanied in the next 200 years by the Englishman David Hume, the social and political thought of the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza, and the Frenchmen François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Emanuel Kant, Baron de Montesquieu, to name just a few of the new scientists and philosophers of the time. In France, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert devoted themselves to disseminating and analyzing new knowledge with the Encyclopédie, first published in 1750.

They began to reflect on self-determination, states governed by democratic laws, the freedom of individual people, the rights of man, the value of rational doubt and the scientific method. This period, which lasted two centuries, is called "the Enlightenment". The movement was rejected by many of the powerful, although some of the kings of that time defended -at least- the concept of scientific doubt. These ideas contributed to many events such as the colonial liberation movements in the Americas, and were the foundation for the drafting of the U.S. constitution. They inspired the French Revolution. The Enlightenment can be considered as the fundamental source of all the libertarian movements that have come after.

The social phenomena that led to the Enlightenment occurred gradually, and in these reflections, I will consider the role played by the brief, and somewhat limited democracies in Athens and Rome, the writings of St. Augustine, the translation of the surviving writings of Greece and Rome by the Moors in Andalusia, the Renaissance, the religious splits that produced by Protestantism, and other events. In what follows I will examine all this, and try to make sense of  the very slow chain of influences that finally ended with the eighteenth century’s cries of “freedom!”

I will talk about the emergence of the values of the Enlightenment and how they were received in the American continent. In the first chapter I will review the evolution of democracy based on the cultural heritage that Spain and England left in their colonies. In the second chapter, I will examine the conflicts that arose in the United States in the nineteenth century between the beginning of democracy, slavery, and the extermination of indigenous populations. These are historical trends that competed with each other and are still a matter of debate today.

I will briefly consider the history of power in Europe. I will consider, not only the sequence of events that led humanity to the Enlightenment, but the obstacles that this process had to face. Both factors are important because we still face similar tensions. I will then reflect on the historical development of the notions of freedom, democracy and peace in a world that has been dominated by military conquests and the absolute power of kings.

In these pages I will reflect on these events, based mainly on legends and historical novels, mixed with various, intertwined datelines referring to ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and both the colonization and the liberation of the American continents.

Culture is both inherited and created. We have access to its history through historical documents and analyses, legends, and in what Carl Jung (2016) called the “collective unconscious” which here we can interpret as unspoken and often unconscious concepts and memories. It would be a shared but implicit understanding of what we humans are and what we aspire to. It can help to explain why similar themes show up again and again in mythologies and legends around the world, why people follow the leaders they choose, and why symbols tend to repeat in successive chronicles.

Historical annals can be enriched by associating them with legends and fictional narrations. These literary works have important aesthetic value, but they also contain information about the intimate and largely unspoken sociological and psychological realities of the people they describe. In addition, they are legitimate sources of historical references, and permit the creation of a new dialogue between literature and history. As Blas Zubiría Mutis (2004) says, historical literature can fill some of the gaps in bygone consciousness that other sources cannot. There are relations between literature and history, and they often can capture the intimacy of past experience and its consciousness. Literature cannot replace historical analyses, but it can offer guidelines for understanding the subjectivity of the times it describes.

The historical account that I present here comes from many years of reading, and for this reason it has a somewhat personal approach. I have assured the accuracy of the dates on the Internet, but I have not cited all the many sources I have used. In a single paragraph there could be several sources of information, and I do not wish to overload the text. Most of the dates are known and do not raise doubts. In the event that they are debatable, I recognize it.

 

The centuries before and after the Enlightenment

The history of the world

David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) say that the first great human groups in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas were peaceful and self-governing peoples. Later these groups became conflictive and there were confrontations for the control of lands and resources. There has always been a longing for peace and self-determination, but for the history that we are able to know, these longings for serenity and justice have been formed only in reaction to constant wars and despotisms. The active and conscious search for freedom, democracy and shared well-being among the humans of this Earth has been very, very recent.

In the past there were some figures who promoted peace and love, such as Buddha and Christ; spiritual and religious leaders who founded creeds. However, political philosophy and the creation of institutions that promote peace and democracy have been delayed and sporadic.

The early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome faced many challenges due to the struggles between the kingdoms. In ancient Mesopotamia, the kingdoms of Sumer, Akkadia, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia competed with their neighbors. They developed war strategies and weapons, and organized powerful armies. They razed entire cities and towns.

The Old Testament (Note 1), which, in fact, represents millennia of Middle Eastern oral history, has long enumerations of conflicts in which the Israelites participated, sometimes as victims, sometimes as  the victorious, as when they occupied Canaan, in the struggles with the Midianites and the Philistines, and the capture of Jerusalem by Babylon. There is, however, a captivating story (Samuel I, Chapter 8) that relates how the people of Israel asked the priest Samuel to appoint a king for them. The Israelites had been nomads until then and were afraid of the surrounding empires. The wise old priest warned them that they would lose much of their autonomy if they accepted the authority of a king. He said that a king:

“… shall take your sons, and put them in his chariots, and in his horsemen, that they may run before his chariots (verse 11)... He will also set them to plow his fields (verse 12)..., He will also take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and kneaders (verse 13), and he will take your lands, your vineyards, and your good olive groves, and give them to his servants (verse 14).... And you shall cry that day because of your king whom you have chosen, but the Lord will not hear you in that day (verse 18)."

But the people persisted, despite Samuel's warnings about the misfortunes and wars that were to come. Eventually, the priest relented, and facilitated the search for this first monarch, who ended up being a young man named Saul. The story is interesting because it demonstrates a certain awareness among the ancient sages of the meaning of power and the privations that come when the authority of princes is accepted.

Much time later, the ancient Greeks and Romans attempted to establish governments governed by law and popular will (Note 2). Their ideals and projects only lasted a few centuries. Moreover, their libertarian aspirations were restricted for the benefit of their own citizens: while they talked about democracy at home, they founded colonies in Europe and Asia and kept slaves. Eventually, Alexander the Great of Macedonia ended all hope of democracy in Athens, and a bit later Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian (also called Augustus or Caesar Augustus) ended the Republic of Rome.

Centuries passed, and in medieval times power was expressed in various ways. The most common system was that of monarchies with their feudal lords. The king (or a queen) had almost total authority over the inhabitants of their domain. The monarch was supported by loyal lords who administered delimited territories called "fiefs". The power of the monarchs was absolute and generally hereditary. The economy of the fiefs was based on "vassalage" where the rest of the population consisted of farmers without any rights. 

Despite their power, monarchs faced challenges: there were numerous conflicts around this time that included struggles between kingdoms that would try to conquer neighbors and infighting by nobles, first to obtain their crowns, and then keep them. For example: Charlemagne, who was king of the Franks and the Lombards from 774, conquered a large part of Western Europe and ruled until his death in 814. Then his children disputed the inheritance.  Later, Otto, seated on the throne of Charlemagne, formed the Holy Roman Empire in 963.

William Shakespeare described the wars between England and France, and also the infighting between the ruling houses of England. In France and Italy there were also disputes between ambitious heirs and families vying for the throne. In Spain there were long centuries of struggles. The successive alliances between the Hispano-Gothic tribes (and later the Catholic monarchs), fought for centuries to eliminate the Moors who had invaded Iberia (in the 8th Century) and had then created their own cities and civilization in the peninsula. Other gran battles included the crusader wars that brought the Europeans to North Africa with the motive of "liberating" the Holy Land from the Muslims.

Those wars have left us with many stories of heroes and conquests, and only a few legends about peace and justice. There were some narratives of social justice, such as those of King Arthur of England with his round table of concord and Good King Wenceslas from Bohemia who gave food to the impoverished in his kingdom.

In medieval times everyone, even kings, owed obedience to the ecclesiastical power of the Church of Rome. This power was not based on the threat of armed retaliation, but rather on religious dominance, although at the time of the Crusades several military monastic orders developed, the best known being the Knights Templar. They developed so much power that they became a menace for the Papacy, and its members were executed.  

The Papacy was established in the fifth century. At the Lateran Council in 1059 the pope was recognized as the supreme authority of the Church. The papacy exercised enormous moral force and social control. The pope could excommunicate kings, princes, and common people, that is, turn them into pariahs in the eyes of the society of that time. And sometimes the punishments were more severe, including gruesome executions.

Religion has always had its dark side. From very ancient times, in Mesopotamia, in remote Greece and among the Hebrews there have been references, not only to an underworld where the blameworthy dead end up, but also to the devil and sin. Homer also related in The Odyssey how Ulysses saw some of the punishments suffered by the dead who had transgressed divine law. The Old Testament begins with the devil (the serpent), a sin (the apple of wisdom), and punishment (expulsion from Eden). The medieval church of Europe continued these traditions, and kings recognized and accepted the stability that came with fearing the supernatural. The fear of sin among believers forced them to recognize the existing hierarchies and obey their masters; The figures of the devil and hell were used as political resources to generate dread among the possibly disobedient and noncompliant. Examples abound: the churches of the time were adorned with "gargoyles", frightful figures that poured rainwater through the mouth or anus. Churches also displayed sculptures and paintings of the torments and tortures of hell to frighten the faithful. The portal of the abbey church in Santa Fe de Conques from the ninth century in France depicts the Last Judgment, and is known by those who make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The poem, "The Divine Comedy", with its descriptions of hell written by Dante Alighieri in 1320 is still part of universal literature. Hieronymus Bosch's 16th-century paintings of hell are well known.  In the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, there is an image of a deceased drunkard placed upside down as eternal punishment for his sins while he was alive. There were many, many examples of the medieval teaching of divine punishment for sinners.

On the other hand, there were some few thinkers in those medieval centuries who reflected on equanimity and benevolence; they appeared in the meditations of people such as St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) who, influenced by Aristotle and Cicero, spoke of the social justice that should be present in any government, and recognized a distinction between the kings’ scepter symbolizing profane power, and the papal ferula or the bishops’ crosier, that denotes religious authority.

After Augustine the world had to wait hundreds of years (Note 3) for there to be a movement in Europe that spoke seriously about the separation of church and state and the possibility of "freedom." It is time questioning called the Enlightenment.

In the two chapters that follow I will refer to this Enlightenment, its thinkers, and the ways in which their ideas were gradually incorporated into the first national constitutions in Europe and the Americas.

For there to be figures who promoted civic peace, it would be necessary to wait even longer, until the nineteenth century. To celebrate those who promote world peace, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish chemist of the nineteenth century, left his legacy to the promotion of both concord and science. In his life he had invented technologies for the use of dynamite and had made his fortune with the manufacture of weapons of war. When he died, he wanted to promote peace and sought to point out and honor people who had made important achievements to promote it.

 

What do we know about the past?

It is important to place libertarian thought within the framework of universal history in order to appreciate how recent and fragile it is. We have been able to learn something about the existence of our first ancestors through the objects they left, their cave paintings, the ruins of their first cities, monuments and even their own bones.  Now, with the technology of the last two centuries, these traces have given us a lot of information because we have tools such as radiocarbon dating and other equipment of modern archaeology.

Then came the written language with the Sumerians, perhaps in the fourth milenium b.C.  With the advent of "historical" traces, i.e., chronicles based on languages written on stone, clay tablets, papyrus paper, parchment, and more recently, modern paper, the past has been amplified and clarified. And even more recently, the Internet has become both a vast electronic library, and a source of much misinformation.

The written history begins with practical notes related to administrative records and catalogs of economic exchanges in the Middle East, ancient China, and Mesoamerica. The first writing systems that represented some kind of language quickly spread throughout a large part of the Middle East. (Pigna, n.d.).

The Greeks were the first to write coherently and extensively about their own history. The process was long. At first the stories were sung by poets, the aedos, who preserved their collective, oral memory, and only centuries later their stories and poems were transcribed. For example, historians generally place the events of the Trojan War in the twelfth century b.C., but the memories are fragile. The poets of the time memorized the stories they heard and reproduced them, or improvised on them, preserving them orally as "songs". Homer, who heard the songs of his time, composed his own poems about the past, especially the Iliad and the Odyssey, which became the most important historical works of Greece. Homer must have lived in the eighth century B.C., that is, four or five centuries after the events he describes. His poems were only preserved in writing three long centuries after his death, in the sixth century B.C. The works of Greek literature have come down to us thanks to their preservation in writing and the existence of the libraries of antiquity. Even so, many theatrical and philosophical works have been lost: even today we still mourn the burning of the library of Alexandria (Mark, September 2, 2009).

Throughout history, the only way to reproduce a document was by hand copies, and for this reason, each volume was a precious object. One of the greatest civilizational influences was the invention of the modern printing press with movable type made by Johannes Gutenberg around the year 1450, which allowed a faster dissemination of ideas.

For this reason, our knowledge of history has something of a precariousness. We know about kings, conquerors, armies, and empires through a few carefully kept documents.

 

The glimpse of ideas of justice and peace

The album of the human family is full of ideas of conflict and rivalries. They are all successive moments, but not linear, since conquests, massacres, cruel punishments, despots, the demands of cults and slavery have coexisted alongside people’s longing for justice and peace and liberating thought. This coexistence endures: in democracies after the eighteenth century, they still had slavery and practiced massacres of indigenous peoples in their territories. All these motives and reasons are still found together in the same villages in a sort of collective unconscious, and people fight each other over them. Cultures contain the germ of their changes, but they also carry resistance to reforms. We will talk about these contradictions in the following pages, especially in relation to the American continents.

In general, our knowledge has to do with wars and conquests, we learn about war heroes and conquerors. It is a cultural heritage that teaches us with great clarity what aggressive strategies are like. We remember wars accurately, and we can name many conquerors such as Cyrus II the Great, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila, Genghis Khan, Hernan Cortés, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. We label them as destroyers or beneficent builders of empires of power according to our cultural and ideological loyalties, and we react with joy or anger when we hear them named.

War has been the great vehicle of human culture: recorded history. This thirst for conquest did not lead to peace but to the need to repel other invaders. We have cultivated a dichotomy of "us" versus "them" and we have a long and latent fear of the "other". Kings have used this fear to stay in power and to expand their own area of influence. Their armies have also served to suppress uprisings in their own territories. War has been an important factor in the creation of states throughout history.

Even so, the longing for peace is also ancient. Its spokesmen are usually neither emperors nor generals. They are usually found among poets and artists. For example, "The Trojan Women" is a play that the Greek Euripides wrote in 415 B.C. in Athens. It describes the sufferings of survivors of the Trojan war when their city was torn apart by a coalition of Greek armies in the twelfth century B.C. Euripides reflects on that tragedy in which everyone, winners and vanquished, have lost equally (Euripides, 415/n/f).

Historical attempts to achieve governments that represent the will of the inhabitants have been scarce. The most famous occurred in Athens in ancient Greece under Solon. Solon of Athens (638-558 BC) was a legislator and political philosopher who ruled Athens at the end of the sixth century BC. His great contribution was the creation of a constitution that gave rise to the idea of self-government ruled by laws, (which excluded those who were not citizens, that is, the poor, women, slaves and foreigners). Despite the exclusions, it was a great experience that allowed its participants to have a political voice and to speak for the first time about "freedom". It is clear that the democracy of Athens was not infallible: the conviction and death of Socrates is an example of this weakness, but at the very least, its citizens could go to the public assemblies and vote. This aspiration sadly ended with the conquest of Athens by Alexander the Great.

There was another historical experiment with self-government with the foundation of the Roman Republic that began in 509 BC. When the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was overthrown. This experiment also ended with the installation of a despot in 27 AD when Caesar Augustus Octavian was recognized as emperor.

Civilization has had to wait until the beginning of the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century A.D. to truly speak of self-government. In the following chapters I will reflect on this civilizational birth.

To speak formally of the ethical regulation of war humanity would have to wait longer. The first attempt occurred during Venezuela’s war of Independence in 1820 with the Treaty for the Regulation of War (El Tratado de Regularización de la Guerra). It was written by José Antonio de Sucre, and was the first document to address human rights in wartime. It happened almost a half a century before the Treaty of Ginebra in 1864.

It was not until after World War II in 1945 that the United Nations was founded, and a year later the International Court of Justice was inaugurated in The Hague, Belgium, in a transnational attempt to control the cruelty of war conflagrations. Also, in the second half of the twentieth century, a multiplicity of national and international organizations with jurisdictional power, and non-governmental organizations, emerged whose mission has been to reduce violence, and in general, alleviate human suffering. Europe finally managed to eliminate wars on its own territory with several treaties initiated after World War II, culminating in the European Union, which was officially inaugurated with the Maastricht Treaty on 1st. of November 1993. For the first time in history, for a period of more than 70 years, there have been no wars in the area now known as European Union.

However, these organizations and treaties have not eliminated wars elsewhere. At the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century, wars have continued with equal ferocity in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza. Controlling the use of lethal weapons to solve international problems is an unfinished task.

The longing for coexistence among nations is also part of our cultural heritage. There is no doubt that the world is moving towards an awareness of social justice and peace, but this progress is difficult and there is no guarantee of success.

In what follows I will talk about the civilizational conflicts in the American continent. First, I consider the historical and cultural reasons that influenced the different possibilities of building viable democracies in the countries that emerged from the colonies of Spain and England. In the second chapter, I will examine the coexistence of democracy, slavery, and the extermination of native populations in the United States. 

My main source of ideas and information for the following stories has been literature in the form of fiction, poems, plays, or biographies. In each chapter I describe this method, but in general I think that these sources provide a more intimate and more sensitive perspective than academic histories.

The past does not remain in the past. Even if people avoid talking about the painful incidents, they have lived thorough, these experiences are still there in a kind of social and cultural subconscious. Our mostly silent social memory has been approached from different perspectives: Émile Durkheim (Durkheim, 1960) has proposed a collective consciousness as a set of shared beliefs that operate as a unifying force or influence within society. Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci, 1998) refers to an ideological hegemony that helps to bring together workers according to their class consciousness.  For his part, Carl Gustav Jung (Jung, 2016) examines what he calls a collective unconscious, that is, an individual mental structure, which has archetypes and "shadows" which influence people, often without their awareness. Other approaches that postulate shared belief systems are: Wundt's Ethnopsychology (Titchener, 1899), Mead's Symbolic Interactionism (1982) and Moscovici's social representations (Jodelet, 1984).

Nicolopoulou and Weintraub (October, 1998) point out with respect to Durkheim's ideas on representations, that:

"... These are two types of representation, but with two different underlying conceptions of what is significant about the phenomenon of representation. In the first case, a crucial characteristic of representations is that they are "internal" to the mind. In the second case, one of the defining keys is that ... a representation is public, or intersubjective (p. 5).

I have inserted some endnotes in the text which I indicate with successive numbers in parentheses (Note x).

 

Notes

Note 1.  The Christian Bible, with its old and new testaments, is an time-honored, ancestral document which has emerged from oral histories of very long tradition. It is an important resource that has, in addition to its elements of dogma that encompass the three great monotheistic religions, an important part of our heritage and memory.

The Old Testament brings together oral histories and legends, such as the great prehistoric flood of the Earth, which also appear in various legends such as that of Gilgamesh, in which the god Enlil decided to destroy the world with a great flood. Ea, another god, warned a man called Utnapishtim, and told him to build a boat so that he could save himself (Dimri, 6/14/21). The coexistence of this legend with the story of Noah and his Arc has two possible roots: a) multiple versions of a true event, or b) the interdependence of ancient oral and poetic traditions.

In the Old Testament there are references to reigns and kings, migrations, episodes of domination and slavery, dietary rules, rules of conduct, poems about faith and love, theories about the beginning of humanity and law, a story about the elimination of human sacrifice and much more. With regard to the last issue, the parallel between the rescue of Isaac by the hand of God and what happened in ancient Greece with Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, is interesting. In Euripides' "Iphigenia in Aulis" version, she is sacrificed so that her father's army can set sail for Troy. But there are other versions in which the goddess Artemis saves her at the last moment (Euripides (414-412 B.C./n.d).  

Note 2. As we said before, democracy began in Athens in the sixth century B.C. but Alexander destroyed it in the fourth century B.C., that is, it lasted four centuries. The Roman Republic lasted from 509 BC to 27 BC following a series of civil wars after the death of Julius Caesar, when Emperor Augustus assumed power.

Note 3. There were some attempts to establish republics employing various versions of the Roman model, such as the Republic of Florence in Italy, which was founded in the year 1115, when the Florentines formed a republic after the death of the Marchioness Matilda. The Republic lasted with some difficulties until the coup d'état of Cosimo de' Medici in 1434. Again, there were clashes and in 1527 the Florentines finally expelled the Medici, and Florence regained control of the city-state. After several conflicts, the republic finally ceased to exist in 1569. (Academia Lab, 2024).

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

Cultural Heritages in the Americas

 

 First reflections

We ask: Why have the countries, born of the Iberian colonies, not been able to create stable democracies? I propose that the culture they inherited from Europe has an important role to play in the possibility of forging lasting and just solutions to their administrative needs. The traditional possibilities and limitations expressed in the customs, practices and fables in the different European countries created the conditions for the emergence of their colonies and then for the nations that later appeared. In these pages I will reflect on these events, based mainly on legends and historical novels, mixed with various, intertwined datelines referring to ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and both the colonization and the liberation of the American continents.

Culture, past and present

Culture is in constant formation; therefore, it is permanently new, although the shared memory of what has already been done always has its influence. Peoples, countries and communities alike have traditions, narratives and documents, and they build their present and future on them. Perhaps the past influences us in in these five ways: a) the memory of the solutions – successful or not – of individuals, families and communities, b) the annals of territorial conquest, c) legislation, which includes the edicts of kings, ecclesiastical instances, and laws that emanate from parliamentary debates, and e) the imagery of civil debates that comes from books,  plays and music.

This essay reviews above all this last line of influences. In these pages I am going to talk about the heritage that comes to us in legends, historical novels and documents, mainly from England, France, Spain, Latin America (especially Venezuela) and the United States. I compare these influences with each other, in order to examine the effects of European cultures on their colonies. I will consider the shared memory of minority individuals and groups at the end.

The conquests and edicts of the kings

The culture of Latin America descends from the Spanish and the Portuguese, from traditions that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. We can compare them with the ones that England passed on to its own colonies, and thus reflect on the different paths taken later by the diverse European colonial possessions in the Americas, and the countries that were born from them.

The English colonies were influenced by libertarian legends such as King Arthur's round table in the fifth century (which meant the protection of the underprivileged -chivalry-) and the equality between the king and his nobles), the moral legend of Robin Hood in the thirteenth century (a libertarian outlaw who stole from the rich to help the poor),  the Magna Carta (a guarantee granted by King John of England to English nobles in the thirteenth century guaranteeing them respect for their lives and property) and William Shakespeare's theatrical reflections on the power of royalty and its limits (especially those of Macbeth -1623/s/f- and Richard III -1591/s/f). (Note 1)

England and France confronted the priests of Rome on several occasions, especially when King Henry VIII of England created the Anglican Church in 1534, and King Henry IV of France (the first of the Bourbons) contributed to a precarious reconciliation between Catholics and Huguenots. The kings' motives for acting in this way had little to do with a new understanding of religious tolerance, but their actions later mediated their people's attitudes about the possibility of pluralism of faiths, and endured. This tendency towards tolerance appears in Shakespeare's play, "The Merchant of Venice", in the character of Shylock, a Jew that the author was able to look at from various perspectives. At one point this look becomes compassionate when Shylock says:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?” ( Act III, scene i).

 Shylock ends this speech by saying that the similarity between Jews and Christians extends also to their shared thirst for revenge. But Shakespeare has created a clear affinity between ethnic groups that at this time were marked by their differences and sectarianism.

When the time came for an opening to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the philosophers of England and France welcomed it – with some misgivings and resistance. Spain, on the other hand, was left with the medieval structures of a closed monarchy and Catholicism.

The Spanish tradition did not break away from the church of Rome until the twentieth century. Their kingdoms were formed in the warlike environment of the reconquest of the Moors, the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition. Political and religious repression has been used as a strategy: the powerful have always used it to secure and maintain their authority and power. In Spain, what began during the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs in response to the need to pacify the reconquered Moorish domains in the lands of Andalusia, ended up becoming the Inquisition (Note 2).

Since the Moors (Note 3) invaded the peninsula in 711, they created a kingdom in Al-Andalus, proclaiming in 929 as the Caliphate of Cordoba, which, over time, became a brilliant center of cultural production and interaction (Note 4). In fact, it was through the translations of the scientific and philosophical works of the ancient Greeks and Romans, made in collaboration between the Arabs, Jews and Christians in this kingdom, that the European world had access to them (Brasa Días, n.d.).  (Note 5).

There were constant military encounters in the Iberian Peninsula for the domination of the territory from the beginning of the Middle Ages; Christian legend tells how the Apostle Saint James left his crypt in Galicia in the year 844 mounted on a beautiful white horse to defend Christians against those they considered usurpers. In the Cathedral of Santiago Compostela you can still see sculptures of the saint trampling on the Moors with his steed.  

Then the poem of El Cid Campeador characterized these struggles: in the eleventh century El Cid is described as a hero, but our reactions today would represent him as a mercenary who steals for himself the riches of his adversaries. El Cid is in the purest tradition of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar who conquered and confiscated the treasures of the vanquished for their own benefit and that of their king. The poem reads:

 “... the Minaya flag reached Alcalá

and from there upwards they turn with the gain,

by Henares up and by Guadalajara.

 How many are your big gains,

much booty of sheep and cattle,

and of clothing, and of other ample riches.

Upright comes the banner of Minaya,

no one dares to assault his rearguard..."

“The song  of my Cid” (El cantar de Mío Cid), more or less in 1200/s/f, Anonymous. Lines 477 to 481, My translation)

The efforts of the Christians to conquer the south of the peninsula were finally successful in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus arrived in the American "Indies". The Iberian Peninsula was at sporadic war with the Moors for eight centuries until the capture of Granada. And the same year the Spanish monarchs defeated the Moors, the subjugation of the New World began. They used the same strategies of conquest that they employed in the peninsula along with the expropriation of wealth.

It was at the end of the struggles against the Moors that the Christian church in Spain (along with Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon), found it necessary to secure the loyalties of the new subjects in their kingdom, and to purify the faith of what they considered to be Muslim and Jewish heresies. By the end of the fourteenth century in Seville, Cordoba, Valencia and Barcelona thousands of Jews and Moors had been forcibly converted to Christianity or murdered. This repression also had racial and ethnic features, since it was considered that the Jews belonged to a different race from that of the natives of the peninsula (the Celts, the Visigoths, and the Hispano-Roman descendants of the north of the peninsula).   The repression finally materialized with the decisive use of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century.  By the 16th century this institution also tried and killed Protestants and Catholics whose beliefs were considered unorthodox, such as those sympathetic to the beliefs of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The constant European wars

In other European countries such as France and England there were also conflicts between Christians and Muslims in the "crusades" from the eleventh century to rescue the "Holy Land". But these places were far away, and the knights and their companions had to travel for a long time to get there. The motivation for them originated in Rome among the ecclesiastical hierarchy and was not a local incentive. There were a series of nine religious wars between 1096 and 1291 to "liberate" the "Holy Land" for Christendom. The kingdoms in of England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and elsewhere in Europe participated, and it sometimes happened that the kings who participated saw, upon returning, that their kingdoms had been usurped, as in the case of Richard the Lionhearted of England.

War has been a way of life. Kings have always fought each other, appropriating the lands and goods of their neighbors since the beginning of history (Note 6). Europeans have fought many times.  The English, French, Italians and Spaniards have fought from the beginning the Franco-Merovingian dynasty (since the middle of the fifth century) to dominate the others. Centuries later, William, the Conqueror of Normandy invaded England in 1066. It was the last successful invasion of the islands, but the battles between the English and the French did not cease: they were well characterized by William Shakespeare in his historical plays on the lives of the kings of England. They are examples of the constant eagerness for invasion and occupation by the royal houses. In Shakespeare's play Edward III, the king of England proclaims his arrogant decision to invade France to the envoy of the king of that country (Note 7):

 

"...Lorraine, return this answer to your Lord:

I propose to visit him as he requests;

But how? Not servilely disposed to bend,

But like a conqueror to make him bow.."

 

In another play Shakespeare describes how Henry V encourages his English forces to fight against the army of France (Shakespeare, 2, n.d.). He describes them as a "band of brothers," to characterize them as a small number of heroic and righteous warriors, who share a noble cause and fraternity. At the same time, the poet makes it clear in his work that it is a patrimonial invasion to increase Henry’s own territory.

There were wars that lasted thirty and a hundred years. The enemies were defined by their nationality, by their loyalty to the royal houses of the time, and also, later, by the different religious adherences within Christianity with the beginning of Protestantism from the sixteenth century. War has arguably been the most formative influence on human culture.

The feudal system of the Christian kingdoms was a theocentric and hierarchical world. Religious submission was a reflection of the lower classes' acceptance of earthly authority. Wars, carried out by feudal lords, were justified in the name of loyalties to the royal houses and religion. This culture of blind loyalty and obedience came to America with the conquest, and then took hold with colonialism.  But it arrived fragmented, by means of multiple "conquerors", each with his own project of domination, who, although nominally loyal to the king with whom they identified, were scattered throughout the American continents. 

The Enlightenment

One cannot refer to the Enlightenment without first referring to medieval universities. The first in Europe was founded in Bologna in 1088 and Oxford, England, began in about 1096. The Sorbonne University in Paris was founded around the year 1150. Salamanca in Spain appeared in 1218. They developed from the monastic and episcopal schools in order to offer advanced studies under teachers of great excellence.  They were precursors and representatives of the Renaissance in Europe that was emerging at the end of the thirteenth century, fully manifesting itself in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

In the Renaissance humanism was born. Beginning in the 14th Century, during the decline of the Middle Ages, scholars and artists discovered Greek and Roman learning and values, largely because of translations made by Morish scholars in what is now Spain. Painters and sculptures realized that human beauty includes both its spirit and its body.  In addition, by the end of the 15th Century a new world was discovered across the sea, with new civilizations and vast lands to be colonized. The Copernican view of the universe was understood to be more accurate than Ptolemaic astronomy. Feudal economies gave way to commerce. New inventions like gunpowder and the printing press began to change warfare and culture.

Then Europe discovered reason. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Enlightenment was born; it was a remarkable and astonishing libertarian movement in which widespread questioning of the blind loyalties of medieval times began. They inquired about science and what they called "freedom". Voltaire in his Dictionary said simply: "You are free to act when you have the power to act" (Voltaire (n.d.). But he also said, true freedom also requires a "free will." This presupposes that the actor has coherent reasons to act, and a part of the Enlightenment was dedicated to clarifying the possibility of forming them. In the seventeenth century this questioning became a movement in which philosophers discussed the different possibilities of civil government, the rights of citizens, and the nature of science. It was to be important later in the English colonies, but not so much in the Spanish ones.

 

The Enlightenment in England and France

It is fundamentally characterized by a complete trust in reason. The Enlightenment began in England with the empiricism of David Hume and John Locke with respect to philosophy, and Isaac Newton with his inquiries into the physical world. In France the editors of the Encyclopedia (from 1751 to 1765) included Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Toussaint, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, among others. Some of these thinkers had to flee France, at least temporarily, but they found shelter and safety in Switzerland, and among the "Enlightened Despots". (Note 8) The spirit underlying these publications was a belief in the capacity of rationality to overcome superstitions and to lay the foundations for a more just and coherent world. They questioned beliefs about the physical world, but also the power structures of their time, and began to envision a world of shared power in which the authority of kings and the church was controlled by the popular will.

The Enlightenment in Spain

Beliefs were always objects of surveillance and suspicion by the Spanish Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Inquisition began in France and Italy in the 12th-century of France to combat religious deviation, but it lasted longer in Spain. In 1756 the works of authors such as Montesquieu were banned, as they were considered heretical, and then the Encyclopedia was also banned. Voltaire and Rousseau were frowned upon, although there was some diffusion of these works by publishers. Even universal education was frowned upon among the clergy and the monarchy: it was not until 1782 that the Inquisition allowed the reading of the Bible in Spanish, even though Martin Luther had already published it in German more than two centuries earlier in 1534.

Colonialism

Colonialism throughout the Americas was characterized by great cruelty, both in the north and in the south of the "new" continents. In the north in the colonies of England there was a philosophically discordant ethical process: on the one hand, it meant the almost absolute massacre of the native population together with the introduction of slavery (Note 9). On the other hand, and contradictorily, it meant the desire to break away from England, and in the 18th century, this aspiration was accompanied egalitarian values. These included ideas of a union of free states, associated with each other by ideals of constitutional and legislative equality, and self-determination.

There had already been early exercises of political autonomy in the states of Virginia and New England. In 1619 Governor George Yeardley in Jamestown instituted a bicameral legislature that included the participation of affluent settlers, for the purpose of deciding on the legal and commercial affairs of the area. In another antecedent of modern democracy, the "Pilgrims" signed an agreement, the Mayflower Covenant, in which they agreed to live in harmony under the leaders they themselves would select. As a result, they formulated both civil and military laws and agreements (Britannica, 7/9/23).  Although these agreements occurred in the context of England's power over its American colonies, and although these legal structures excluded blacks, the indigenous population, and women in general, they constituted an ideological first step towards the creation of a democracy in the United States.

 

 Colonialism in Latin America

With respect to colonialism in Latin America, we are going to focus above all on Venezuelan society, although there is a lot of similarity in all the South American colonies. Venezuela, a captaincy since the 18th century, was organized according to the different social classes of settlers. The native population was subordinated or suppressed, and African slaves began to be imported for hard work in the fields but were powerless. The Spaniards and their descendants, at first tried to maintain a certain genetic "purity". They assumed a certain level of nobility and maintained positions of command.

In Venezuela, from colonial times until the beginning of the twentieth century, castes based on race were recognized and formed criteria for discrimination. There was even an elaborate vocabulary to point out racial and class nuances: there were three basic classes of non-Spanish people: a) those of white descent, but with mixed genetic heritage, b) Indigenous people, and c) blacks. In a more elaborate classification system, the peninsular whites, on the other hand, were Spaniards who had almost total power of command. The Creole whites were the children of the conquistadors, born in Venezuela. The whites on the shore came from Spain, but they lacked great fortune. They were merchants, artisans and professionals.

They, then, discriminated against those who could not claim the honor of being totally white, and these non-white classes became more intricately classified.: the pardos were people of mixed race and tended to occupy minor and salaried functions. The mestizos had white fathers and Indian mothers. Mulattoes were a mix of white fathers and black mothers. The Zambos were children of Indians and blacks. The Indians were of the original population, and the blacks, brought from Africa, were almost all slaves until their emancipation in 1854, under the presidency of José Gregorio Monagas.

In Venezuela, discrimination against strata based on race lasted until the twentieth century, when it suddenly ceased to have the importance it did before. It is unclear why this change happened in the country, and racial categories still have social importance in other Latin countries. However, even in the decade of the 30’s of the twentieth century, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz classifies citizens according to their race in his book “Democratic Caesarism” ("El Cesarismo Democrático", 1929).

After the death of President Gómez on December 17, 1935, Venezuela became a country characterized by ample values of inclusion and acceptance.

Over time, different racial groups began to mix in South America, but those who could claim the purest European ancestry had greater status. From the 18th century on Venezuela was just a captaincy, not a viceroyship as were the wealthier territories that now form Peru, Colombia and Mexico.  The captaincy lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth century when the independence movements began.  The ruling class was made up of the Spaniards, who were a minority. They were landowners, crown merchants, and political and ecclesiastical officials. The captaincy did not have much economic importance for the Spanish crown because it lacked the metals that Mexico or Peru had, but it did have agricultural possibilities, especially for the production of cocoa, sugar cane, and tobacco.

I found much of this description of Venezuelan colonialism in Francisco Herrera Luque’s book "Los Amos del Valle" (“The Masters of the Valley”, 26/04/2013).  He described Venezuelan colonial life, inventing a probable description of the time, and using both real and fictional characters. He described some of the life-styles of the families with the most important surnames of the time, that is, those with the most prestigious ancestry in the Caracas Valley, but most of the characters and narratives were born solely from the author's imaginative pen.

Although they are inventions, Herrera gives us an intimate, possible and probable vision of the brutal times of the conquest of Venezuela and colonialism. The veracity of this work is limited to a conceivable description of an era, and gains in comprehensive richness what it misses in accuracy. The "masters" controlled everything at will. Without appealing to any particular corpus of law, the characters mostly -and vaguely- based their decisions on supposed edicts emitted by the Spanish king. In the book the masters amass their fortunes, and have absolute jurisdiction over the lives and deaths of their servants, vassals, servants, and slaves. The general population was powerless, and had no recourse to protect itself except by submitting to their masters’ will.

Independence in Latin America and Venezuela

In the wars of colonial independence in Latin America, the Enlightenment marked the speeches of its leaders somewhat, but Spain's spirit of absolutism sealed a largely authoritarian outcome for this process. There was no gesture among the emancipators like that of George Washington who returned to his estate after winning a successful war (Note 10).

The Viceroyalty regions of New Spain included Mexico, and lands in the south-west of the present-day United States, the Antilles, the Central American territories, and the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay). It encompassed the Falkland Islands, the Viceroyalty of Peru (Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama, Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay) and the captaincy of Venezuela. It also covered many of the Caribbean islands (Enciclopedia Humanidades, n.d.). All these territories rose up against Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century and obtained their independence between 1820 and 1830. In all cases there were fierce battles and enormous destruction of infrastructure. Brazil, on the other hand, negotiated its freedom from Portugal without war.

The wars of independence in Latin America against Spain were led by their generals, not by established governments; in Chile it was Bernardo O'Higgins, in Argentina it was José de San Martín.  In Venezuela the war lasted from 1810 to 1823, under the command of Simon Bolivar (whose complete name was Simon José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Ponte y Palacios Blanco). Bolívar was a military figure and a politician who was fundamental to much of Latin America’s independence from Spain. He commanded forces in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, and had an influence on the independence processes of Peru and Bolivia. After the wars there were complex transformations, both in terms of how power was distributed in each liberated country, and in the appearance of new possibilities for political structures. Bolivar died, however, and his plan for a “Greater Colombia” could not be carried out.

After independence, most of the new countries suffered years of civil war, uprisings against nascent authorities, and a legacy of repressive leaders.  In fact, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz (1929) considered that even the struggles for independence in Venezuela had the characteristics of a civil war.

Mexico declared independence in 1821, but there were many impediments to its liberation, and it was only in 1836 that Spain finally recognized the country’s autonomy. Then there were years of internal struggles. The dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz was costly both socially and economically. In 1910 the Mexican Revolution broke out. Its duration is unclear, but it persisted for at least ten years. All these conflicts left the country outside the capital city in great poverty. The novelist Juan Rulfo described all this in his novels "Pedro Páramo" (n.d.) and "Llano en Llamas" (n.d.) in which desolate lands, peasants in total helplessness and social conditions of futile and arbitrary violence predominated. Rulfo describes almost uninhabited villages among the rubbish of the old and ruined latifundia, now without their powerful owners, destroyed by the battles of independence and revolution. He tells us about this abandonment and loneliness in "Llano en Llamas" (p. 5-6, My translation):

"And with all that, and with everything, and the fact that the green hills down there were better, people were leaving. They did not go to the Zapotlán side, but to this other direction, where the wind is full of the smell of the oaks and the noise of the mountain arrives every now and then. They went quietly, without saying anything or fighting with anyone.... The thing is... no one came back here. I was waiting. But no one returned. First, I took care of their houses; I patched up the roofs and put branches in the holes in their walls; but seeing that they were slow to return, I left them in peace. Only the rainstorms never stopped coming in the middle of the year, and those winds that blow in February and blow your blanket all the time. From time to time, too, the crows came; flying very low and squawking loudly as if they thought they were in some uninhabited place."

In Chile and Venezuela the latifundia were weakened but remained intact until the middle of the twentieth century. They are well described in the novels like “Of love and of shadow” (“De amor y de sombra”, 1984), Eva Luna (1987) and “The house of spirits” (“La casa de los espíritus”,  1982/n.d.) by the Chilean author Isabel Allende, and in Venezuela, in the novel "Doña Bárbara" by Rómulo Gallegos (1929). These are stories that could describe Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and many Latin American countries of those times. In Gallegos' book, however, there is an encounter between cultures. On one hand he portrays the Venezuelan plains, with its prejudices, violence and the indisputable power of big landowners. This last aspect is personified by the title character, Bárbara de Aragón y Guzmán. She rides the prairies together with her teams of stockmen, swears the same way they do, and is capable of great and sudden ferocity. This culture of the central savannahs is described -as are so many semi-abandoned, rural areas- as complex cultural spaces. Beyond the savagery there is also a deep attachment to the land and family, and a particular sense of honor and courageousness.  In Gallegos’ novel this enclosed world comes into contact suddenly with urban civilization and awareness of the greater world when a young man, Santos Luzardo, returns to his family's hacienda, Altamira, after finishing his law studies in Caracas. The confrontation between the two world-views represents a Latin American historical moment of great political and philosophical significance. It is interesting that, in the end, Santos decides not to return to Caracas. He stays there, marries Mrs. Barbara´s daughter, and takes over the management of Altamira. But Mrs. Barbara has to leave.

Venezuela was also left desolate after the war of independence. However, with the liberation movements, the notion of law began to appear. In Venezuela, even though successive caudillos would rule the country until 1938.

Democracy

Democracy is not new, nor was it born with the European Enlightenment. According to David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), there were forms of self-government in prehistoric times. In fact, the tradition of collective decisions to determine the projects and lifestyles of the first groupings – and even the first cities – was probably the norm in prehistory. We attribute the formal concept of democracy to Athens in the sixth century B.C., where forms of self-government alternated with the sporadic emergence of tyrants. Modern democracy, which found its prototype in these experiments, had its beginning in the rule of Solon in the sixth century B.C, and ended with the conquest of Athens by Alexander the Macedonian two centuries later.

Democracy in England, France, and the United States of America

In order to appreciate the contrasts that the Enlightenment produced in the world, it is important to review Europe´s wide-ranging historical traditions. Democracy in England was a slow process in which the power of kings gradually decreased, and that of the House of Lords and House of Commons increased, along with the figure of the prime minister. We have already mentioned the Magna Carta in 1215, the first document that limited the power of a king, in this case that of King John and his successors. Then, by a series of subsequent laws, Britain became in the nineteenth century a full democracy, but without a constitution.

In France, the revolution in the eighteenth century did not produce a true republic, it only succeeded in temporarily eliminating the royal house of the Bourbons. Then, in just a very few years, imperial royalty returned with Napoleon. The Second Republic began in 1848 and lasted only until 1852. Despite its short existence, there were some reforms during this time, such as male suffrage and the definitive abolition of slavery. The Third Republic began in 1870, but ended with the German invasion in 1940. The French Fourth Republic developed between 1946 and 1958. It was only in 1958 that the Fifth Republic, the current regime, was inaugurated. However, the ideals of self-determination influenced French thought and imagery since its revolution.

In the United States of America, democracy was born with the approval of the Constitution of 1787, and although it has not been replaced, it has been amended 27 times; the first ten amendments constitute the Bill of Rights. In these adjustments, the fundamental attributes of all citizens are stipulated. At first the idea of universal suffrage was restricted: only white men could vote. In 1870, almost a hundred years later, all men, regardless of their racial status, came to be recognized as citizens with the power of suffrage:

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude– XV).

Women gained the right to vote in 1920.

Democracy in Spain

The First Spanish Republic did not even last two years, from February 11, 1873, until December 29, 1874, when the Bourbon monarchy was established. This short year allowed male citizens to live in secularism, and a government governed by civic principles. 

Almost 60 years later, the Second Republic began, after the fall of the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, on April 14, 1931. It lasted until April 1, 1939, until the end of the Civil War, when it gave way to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.  The republic only lasted eight years. These were times of anxiety and war, which coincided with the growth of fascism in Germany and the beginning of the Second World War. In the 1940s, this military dictatorship was consolidated through the political and economic repression of opponents. Thousands of people went into exile into France and many ended up in Nazi or Spanish concentration camps. These times were captured by its poets such as Antonio Machado and novelists such as Javier Cercas.

Machado died in exile before the end of the war in Colliour, France. His poem "Proverbios y Cantares" (“Proverbs and songs”, published in 1902, in the book Alma) collects the feelings of exile and uncertainty about the future. Here is the last stanza of his original poem (Machado, 1917/ n.d., Note 10)

 

There is already a Spaniard who wants

to live and to live, begins,

between one dying Spain

and another Spain that yawns.

Little Spaniard who’s coming

God keep the world for you.

one of the two Spains

will freeze your heart.”

 

In his novel “Soldiers of Salamis” (“Soldados de Salamina”, 2001) Javier Cercas describes the experiences of a fascist soldier, Sánchez Meza, during the Spanish civil war. The novel opens with a scene at the end of the war, a description of a mass shooting carried out by the Republicans in Catalonia, just before they escaped from Spain into France. In this incident, the republican militiamen released their fascist prisoners with the aim of murdering them all. It was a war marked by hatred and atrocities on both sides of the conflict. What Cercas describes was an encounter between an anonymous militiaman and Sánchez, a Francoist soldier, in which a human gaze prevents an execution:

“… It was a mass shooting, probably chaotic, because the war was already lost and the Republicans were fleeing in disarray through the Pyrenees, so I don't think they knew that they were shooting one of the founders of the Falange….  My father kept at home the jacket and pants with which he was shot, he showed them to me many times, maybe they are still around; his pants were full of holes, because the bullets only grazed him and he took advantage of the confusion of the moment to run to hide in the forest. From there, sheltered in a hole. He heard the barking of dogs and the gunshots and the voices of the militiamen, who were looking for him knowing that they could not waste much time looking for him, because the Francoists were hot on their heels. At some point my father heard a noise of branches behind him, turned around and saw a militiaman looking at him. Then there was a cry: "Is he out there?" My father said that the militiaman stared at him for a few seconds and then, without taking his eyes off him, shouted: "There's no one around here!", turned around and left.... [Sanchez] spent several days sheltering in the forest, eating what he found or what was given to him in the farmhouses. He did not know the area, and his glasses had also been broken, so that he could hardly see; … he always said that he would not have survived if he had not found some boys from a nearby town, Cornellá de Terri it was called -or is called-, some boys who protected him and fed him until the nationals arrived." (p. 5-6).

 It is a novel that tells many stories, but mainly it talks about a bloody war between two Spanish factions, punctuated by a moment of humanity. On the one hand, the republicans wanted to defend their democracy, but this defense also implied a lot of hatred, against the church which supported Franco, against monarchism and against the old structures of power. On the other hand, the Falangists, defending a tradition that they little understood, had also mounted a relentless mission of extermination against everything and everybody that stood in their way.

After the Second World War, Franco remained in power until 1975, when he finally died. King Juan Carlos I of Bourbon, who had been appointed six years earlier by Franco as his successor, was proclaimed king, and against what would have been Franco's wishes, he supported the creation of a democracy. A year later there were general elections and the beginning of the democracy that still governs Spain.

 

Democracy in Latin America

The birth of democracies in Latin America is very similar to that of Spain. One of the main motivations of the wars of independence was the desire to undo the economic restrictions that the "mother country" imposed on its colonies, but there were also people who, educated in Europe, and knowledgeable about the Enlightenment, wanted to form governments based on the principle of law and some form of political self-management.

This desire was realized in Venezuela for the first time with the elaboration of the Constitution of 1811. Although this first document was reworked many times due to cyclical armed rebellions, its mere existence indicates an important desire to achieve institutionalism in the country. In this first document, the Catholic Church was recognized as the official religion. Only men who owned property could participate in the elections, and they could only elect representatives who, in turn, could choose the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the senators and the triumvirate in charge of the Executive Power. This constitution lasted only eight years.

A new Constitution was written by Simón Bolívar in 1823. It distinguished between "active" citizens (with the right to vote) and passive citizens (without the right to vote), although all were recognized as having certain attributes of citizenship. It recognized the right to be tried before the law in the case of crime, and free expression and thought. Moreover, although it did not explicitly prohibit slavery, it stated that no man could be the property of another.

After the liberation of Venezuela from Spain, and the dissolution of Gran Colombia, liberal ideals were lost in political turmoil.  The country was dominated by regional caudillos until the early twentieth century. Even so, the beginning of the new century was marked by dictatorships that Vallenilla Lanz described as necessary and pacifying. In an apology for the unrestricted power of the dictatorships of Cipriano Castro and later, Juan Vicente Gómez, Vallenilla proposed in his book, “Democratic Cesarship” ("El Cesarismo Democrático") that the figure of the necessary gendarme was obligatory for the pacification of the country. This appreciation of history was challenged by novelists such as José Rafael Pocaterra (1936/1997) and Federico Vegas (2005).

In the three volumes of José Rafael Pocaterra's book, “A Venezuelan’s memories of decadence” ("Memorias de un Venezolano de la Decadencia", 1936), the author describes the prisons of the dictators Castro and Gómez. Eduardo Santos, who wrote the prologue for the first volume published by Monte Ávila, has achieved an excellent appreciation of the work:

"The first volume begins with May 23, 1899... and ends in 1908, with the author's release from the dungeon of San Carlos, where he had been imprisoned since 1907. This is... the history of Castro in power, … the domination of Andean barbarism in its first stage. The second volume is the story of Gómez... until December 1919, when the author was again imprisoned... as a conspirator. The third volume... Continues... with the period of 'General Gómez'... [and] it contains the picture of the incredible evils and cruelties of the Andean barbarism in its prisons....  Gómez and his gang are worse than the most atrocious bandits in living memory.... This Andean barbarism, so long and so bloody... and so stupid... you can build bridges and roads... and erect buildings and monuments, and put on a masquerade of public works and material progress…  [I]it was just Gomez´ imbecile way of justifying himself before the world…; but... the stability of this regime will not absolve it of its crimes against humanity and against God in the abyss of its prisons... (Eduardo Santos López, prologue, 1928).

In another example, Federico Vegas’ book "Falke" (2005) gives us another category of historical reflections. Based on some brief reflections written by his uncle, Vegas has elaborated a fabricated story about a true incident at the end of the 1920’s in Venezuela.  It was an armed incursion in 1929 organized by General Román Delgado Chalbaud, whose objective was to overthrow Gomez’s dictatorship. The author imagines conversations and certain relationships of friendship and love, but almost all the characters really existed. He describes a group of young intellectuals, mostly Venezuelans, and residents of European countries, none of whom had military training, who arrived on the shores of Cumaná in Venezuela on a ship (called Falke). From there they intended to overthrow the dictator. The total failure of this adventure sealed Gómez's stay in power until his death in 1935. But the desire for change endured and in the same year of Gómez's death, General Eleazar López Contreras began to organize a transition to a more participative government.

He was followed in the presidency by another general, Isaías Medina Angarita, who was appointed by the congress. Finally, in 1948 the first general elections in the history of the country were celebrated, in which Rómulo Gallegos Freire (the author of “Mrs. Barbara and other novels) was elected; he was the first president elected by universal vote, and although there was a coup d'état against him just months later, his peaceful rise to power marked a moment of great significance for possibility of democracy in the country.

The Culture of Family and Community Life

It is curious that two novels that combined stories of the Latin American family of the twentieth century with the political influence of culture focus largely on women. Are; Isabel Allende's book, "La Casa de los Espíritus" (about Chile), and Ligia Mujica de Tovar's, "La Rotunda" (about Venezuela). Many of the characters' problems come from their feminine condition in a patriarchal society; They face well-known constraints: disadvantaged education, the requirement of virginity before marriage, the rejection experienced by single mothers, and the hardships and demands related to the need to sustain their family’s economy without help. And related to these difficulties is social tolerance for men's infidelity. The women in these books are both victims and heroines who confront and overcome these adversities.

But Mujica's book does not stop at the transformations these people manage to survive; at the same time, it reviews a century of social upheavals. The characters’ lives are touched and disrupted by the ambitions of rulers who in each era exercise power, from General Joaquín Crespo until the end of the twentieth century, passing through a brief time of liberal democracy that began with Rómulo Betancourt’s overthrow of the dictator Marcos Perez-Jimenez.

In Mujica de Tovar's book, the voices of immigrants in Venezuela, Antonio and Mercedes, open this fabric. With their courage and dedication, they lay the fundamental threads of a long history. Later their descendants challenge the prejudices of their time during Gomez’ dictatorship. One of the author's contributions in this book is to explore how social and political situations influence children’s socialization. It shows us that the successive conjunctures of repression or opportunities, created by differing regimes, are not inconsequential. They persist in the people who grow up in them and are passed on, semi-hidden, to their own children.

 

 

Final Thoughts on this chapter

The past exists in the present, as a memory resource, but also as a Jungian shadow (Note 11). And as a shadow, the only way to confront it is through reflections, almost psychoanalytical ones. Who does not vote when there is an opportunity? As a general rule, abstention in legitimate elections implies a substratum of mistrust, that is, doubts about the final usefulness of political and social debate. There is uncertainty in these cases about the role of individual citizen and their ability to influence collective well-being. There is an implicit desire in nonparticipation that has to do with the need for stability, even if it is malignant, and sometimes a wish to be part of a dominant group.

In this small reflection I have used literary works to delve into history. Novels and plays evidently do not provide us with rigorous historical analysis. Rather, they open generous speculations about lived experiences, individual perspectives, and concrete views that place us in the middle of the habits, joys, and sorrows of the characters portrayed in them. They put us there. For this reason, this kind of exploration opens doors to a more direct understanding of past lives, and the legacies we have inherited. It is, perhaps, an exploration of the Jungian shadow.

With our tour of cultural differences in Europe and the Americas, we can see how history shapes the present. England and France had an unstable relationship with power and their subjects repeatedly questioned it. On the other hand, for Spain, absolutism was an extremely useful instrument for the reigning houses to ensure their own survival and discourage controversy.

In the sixteenth century, Étienne de la Boétie (2016) wrote the "Discourse on voluntary servitude" in which he advanced several reasons for people’s submission to doctrine. The first is the habit, that is, the habits learned in childhood of obeying, first one’s parents and then one’s sovereign.  Another reason mentioned by Boétie is that kings have known how to associate themselves with the gods. Their vassals, equating the jurisdiction of the deity with that of the sovereign, obey both, because they do not see the differences. Kings surround themselves with acolytes and other persons who benefit from their loyalty, and thus ensure their permanence on the throne.

Tolerance of difference (in ethnicity, religion, political adherence, and so on) is the enemy of autocracy. And war is the most effective vehicle for achieving uniformity of thought. In what we have reviewed, we have seen how France, England and Spain have used war since the beginning of their histories. Conquest, with its associated practice of seizing neighbors’ lands and their goods, has been an accepted way of life – and has even been considered laudable – and the conquistadors have entered history as heroes.

However, other models began to loom, especially in England. The knights of King Arthur's Round Table practiced chivalry and protected the underdog. The nobels consider each other equals, without ranks. This is a model “from the top”, that is, from the viewpoint of the ruling class. The model developed by Robin Hood was “from the bottom”, and was not only opposed to King John's greed, but proposed the need for general wealth distribution.  These legends are still valid: many children there still know these stories. And then, with the advent of the Enlightenment, the ideals of equality before the law and social justice began to create new ways of looking at power.

In Spain, on the other hand, absolutism lasted a long time without question.

These different ways of looking at the world that influenced the American colonies, and they continue to shape the types of government that are established in the countries that were formed from them.

 

Endnotes

Note 1. The possible historical existence of Arthur's kingdom would be located in the fifth century; the legends were written ten centuries later, at the end of the fifteenth century by Sir Thomas Malory, and the tale long precedes its transcription. The king and his nobles sat around a "round table" that symbolized their equality in power. The king was just one more of the royal court.

Robin Hood was the model of the righteous bandit, who redistributes wealth by stealing from the rich to give to the poor (National Geographic (n.d).

The barons of England forced King John to sign "The Magna Carta" on June 15, 1215 to limit his arbitrary acts. This was a historical basis for limiting the central power of kings.

Note 2: The Inquisition was not a Spanish creation, although it survived longer in this country. It was created in 1184 in France, to combat the heresy of the Cathars, and was later used to suppress any non-Catholic cult. In 1553 it was used to punish "witches" throughout Europe, and Protestant Christians emulated these aggressions. For example, in Geneva, in this year the Calvinists burned alive the Aragonese theologian, doctor and humanist Michael Servetus.

Note 3: The word "Moor" comes from Roman times to refer to the population of North Africa.

Note 4: "The Spanish reconquest came only in 1492, so for seven centuries a cultural swarm of Muslims, Jews and Christians flourished there. Great libraries, palaces and mosques made Andalusia – Granada, Seville and Cordoba, but also Toledo – a region whose cities shone on a par with Baghdad or Damascus. In Toledo, under the monarchy of Alfonso the Wise, of Christian origin, a school of translators was promoted, inaugurated by Archbishop D. Raymundo de Sauxetat (1126-1152), a fact that multiplied the crossover of knowledge" whose mission would be to translate into Latin the works of Arab philosophers and Greek thinkers already translated and glossed in Arabic. Toledo thus became a "link between East and West", and occupied, for more than a century, a pre-eminent position among Europeans.... (Brasa Días, n.d.). (Forgotten Languages (1/7/2015).

Note 5: Toledo had been conquered in 1085. By 1126 the Christians of Toledo were enthusiastic supporters of the Moorish regime. It was precisely at this time that Archbishop D. Raymundo de Sauxetat (1126-1152) inaugurated in Toledo the school of translators whose mission would be to translate into Latin the works of Arab philosophers and Greek thinkers already translated and glossed in Arabic. Toledo thus became a link between East and West, and occupied, for more than a century, a pre-eminent position in Europe (Brasa Días, n.d.).

Note 6: Taken from: Timelines (n.d.):

1296 - 1st G. Independence of Scotland: First Scottish War of Independence (1296–1328). Result: Scottish victory. (Scotland, England)

1337-1453 - Hundred Years' War: War between England and France in which other European kingdoms were involved.

1346/08/26 - Battle of Crécy zzz

1429 - Joan of Arc: Joan of Arc liberates Orléans

1517 - Luther's Reformation

1545 - Trento: Concilio de Trento

1566-1648 - G. 80 years: War between the Netherlands and the Spanish Empire

1579 - Siege of Maastricht: The Spanish besiege and take the city of Maastricht

1618 - G. 30 years: 30 Years' War

1642 - English G. Civ.: English Civil Wars between Royalist and Parliamentarian supporters.

1701 - Suc. Spanish: War of the Spanish Succession

1715 - Utrecht: Treaty of Utrecht

- 1733 - Suc. Polish: War of the Polish Succession

1739 - G. Seat: War of the Seat

1740 - Suc. Austrian: War of the Austrian Succession

1756 - G. 7 Years: Seven Years' War

1775 - Indep. USA: War of Independence of the United States

1802/03/25 - Amiens: Treaty of Amiens

1810-1833 - Indep. Latin America: Spanish-American Independence

1815/06/18 - Waterloo: Batalla de Waterloo

1853 - Crimea: Crimean War

1866/06/14 - Austro-Prussia: Austrio-Prussian War

1912 - G. Balcanes

1914 - World War I: World War I

1919/06/28 - Versailles: Treaty of Versailles

1939 - World War II: World War II

1954 – Algeria: War of Independence of Algeria from France.

1991-2001 - Yugoslavia

(The names are modern. It refers to the areas that later became these countries.)

Note 7: Complete Parliament, taken from Act I, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's "Edward III". (n.d.). 

“See, how occasion laughs me in the face!”:

No sooner minded to prepare for France,

But straight I am invited,—nay, with threats,

Upon a penalty, enjoined to come:

Twere but a childish part to say him nay.—

Lorrain, return this answer to thy Lord:

I mean to visit him as he requests;

But how? Not servilely disposed to bend,

But like a conqueror to make him bow.

His lame unpolished shifts are come to light;

And truth hath pulled the vizard from his face,

That set a gloss upon his arrogance.”

 

Note 8: "’Enlightened despotism’, also called benevolent despotism, eighteenth-century form of government in which absolute monarchs implemented legal, social, and educational reforms inspired by the Enlightenment. Among the most prominent enlightened despots were Frederick II (the Great), Peter I (the Great), Catherine II (the Great), Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II. They generally instituted administrative reforms, religious tolerance, and economic development, but they did not propose reforms that would undermine their sovereignty or disrupt the social order" (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia, 30-10-2023).

Note 9: Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of indigenous people in the United States are difficult to achieve, however, Deneven (1992) places it in the range of 8–112 million individuals. It is currently 4.8 million (American Demography, 2023). In "The Last of the Mohicans", which is part of The Leatherstocking Tales (#2) written by James Fenimore Cooper, the author describes battles between British and French settlers with indigenous tribes, and also battles between the different tribes. The novel ends with almost all the protagonists dead, and a tragic omen for them, says the old patriarch Tamenund: "The pale-faces are already the rulers of the Earth, and the time of the red-man has not come again..." This old man feels that he has lived too long because he has been able to witness the extinction of an entire group of people. (Chapter 33).

Note 10: The last stanza of Antonio Machado’s poem, Proverbs and Songs, in the original Spanish.

“Ya hay un español que quiere

vivir y a vivir empieza,

entre una España que muere

y otra España que bosteza.

 

Españolito que vienes

al mundo te guarde Dios.

una de las dos Españas

ha de helarte el corazón.

 

Note 11: According to Carl Jung, the shadow archetype can be considered as an unconscious aspect of the personality that is rejected by the conscious self. For an individual, these aspects are suppressed, but remain latent. The same is true on a cultural level, but it becomes a collective phenomenon.

 

 

Chapter 2

NORTH AMERICAS NINETEENTH CENTURY: WHAT IT LEFT US.

The traces of the Conquest of the American West according to novels and writings

 

First Approaches

The Americas of the nineteenth century left a decisive foundation for us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What happened at that time left obligatory paths for the descendants of the inhabitants of both continents at that time, both in their styles of government and in how they were to live their lives. Especially in the United States there was a contradictory confluence of the four principles of:

(a) the Constitution and its amendments,

(b) slavery and its abolition,

c) the brutality of the near-extermination of the indigenous population, and

d) the strength of the millions of immigrants who moved westwards, sometimes on foot, and who settled throughout the national territory.

All this has left psychological, social and legal traces. It has left social remnants that are still visible in the country, and still influence the formation of attitudes and ways in which today's citizens understand themselves and others.  It was a century that abolished slavery, thus questioning and changing millennia of involuntary servitude, and contradictorily, it was also responsible for one of the largest massacres in history with respect to the original inhabitants of these territories.

As we mentioned before, our primary source in these reflections comes from novels by well-known authors. In fiction, almost all the characters are the product of the imagination of their authors, but the descriptions of the protagonists’ living conditions reflect a reality that cannot be found in historical texts based on verifiable facts. It is the rescue of an intimate imaginary, very similar to the idea of Gadamer (1960/2000) who speaks of the fusion of the horizons of knowledge of historical texts. Blas Zubiría-Mutis (2004) refers more directly to analyses based on literature, saying that, it avoids neglecting life’s the daily drama “that flesh and blood beings live in the historical becoming”.

In this chapter I mainly consider the following books: "The Frontier" by James Fenimore Cooper, "The Pathfinders" by Allan W. Eckert, "Bury My Heart in Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown, "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane,  the poem "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell, and "In America" by Susan Sontag. There are some minor references to other novels.

 



Introduction

It can be said that collective representations can include a certain sense about what is true or false, and that it can discriminate what things should not be said. It may also include a vague awareness of what needs to be forgotten. But this is not necessarily the case. Nocolopoulou and Weintraub elaborate it like this: "The same is true for... moral codes and forms of moral discourse, than for conflicting ideologies..." (p. 6).

The collective conscience is also a collective memory. People have not only their own memories, but also the traces of written culture and the family collections of their parents and grandparents, who in turn had memories that, in many cases, were passed on to the next generations as stories, chronicles and evocations of remote experiences, and which have been interpreted and reinterpreted to help their descendants understand the world in which they live. These memories can have very different contents according to the social group to which each person belongs.

In the pages that follow, I will review some of the history of the United States of the nineteenth century. I describe very different movements, attitudes and ways of living, and they shed light on the intimacy of life at that time. What these works have left us are the most diverse representations of what the country has been. These interpretations filter upwards, like the water of the wetlands, from what has happened until now, to nurture and irrigate current reality.

People still debate about the murky events of the past; they also deny them. These darker moments tend to opaque the greatest achievement of the 18th and 19th centuries: the creation of a real and incarnate democracy inspired by the European Enlightenment. These contradictions manifest themselves in a complex mixture of unease and hope.

 

The Complexity of  American History

The "conquest of the West", which took place in the nineteenth century in the United States, was a complex historical event, marked by four incoherent trends. On the one hand, at the end of the eighteenth century the country had just assumed the values of the Enlightenment (freedom, rule by law based on a constitution and tolerance). On the other hand, there were still two atrocious situations: it was legal to sell and buy human beings (Note 1), and the country's army was carrying out the systematic massacre of indigenous tribes in its territory. The migration of millions of Europeans and other peoples to the new territories was one of the most important human relocations in the history of the world.

The Enlightenment

I have already considered how the philosophers of the Enlightenment followed in the footsteps of ancient Greece and Rome. I have also pointed out that they were not the first to think of systems in which citizens could share power and be consulted in the process of making political decisions that affected them. For David Graeber and David Wengrow (Graeber, Wengrow, 2021), the first humans lived in complex and decentralized governments for millennia.

It would take many millenniums for there to be a real questioning of absolute power and a new appreciation of the potential that reason has to solve human problems. Truly, the Greeks explored the power of reasoning, and the early Romans learned from Greek philosophy. But then the fall of Athens and the Roman Republic led to the need to cling to the idea of personal salvation offered by Christianity. We have seen how the use of reason in the Middle Ages did not die completely: there was Scholasticism, which found a voice in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. It resorted – in part – to reason to understand the world. Aquinas divided the sources of truth into Aristotelian reasoning, on the one hand, and Christian revelation, on the other. But after the Renaissance and the ruptures caused by Protestantism, a door was opened for reason to be used to understand both the physical and social worlds. For the Renaissance it was not so much the content of thought, but the method used to think, and this method was notably found in the sciences and mathematics. The Enlightenment was born out of a method, and the ideas it produced led to the concepts of freedom, tolerance, and the law as a human product to ensure their happiness and general well-being.

The Enlightenment was a historical, philosophical and literary event; in the seventeenth century. Thinkers from several European countries, especially France and England, began to question traditional power structures. The main values of this movement were "reason," a rule of law, and "freedom," themes that arose from reflections on the nature of human happiness and the power structures we create. They began to think about the competence of reasoned thought and nature ideal governments. In these efforts they employed neither religious inspiration nor adherence to a prince or a government, but methods of reflection and investigation.

The Enlightenment was born as a response to millennia of absolutism, and one of its main themes was the need for tolerance. For ages, intolerance had been an instrument used by the powerful to maintain dominance. In the Roman Empire, the political advantages of a single cult were known and all “new” religions were fought viciously. But when in 380 A.D. the Roman Emperor Theodosius I declared, in the Edict of Thessalonica, that Nicene Christianity was the official religion of the Empire, he was not referring to the Christian morality of love; rather he simply initiated a new era of control with a new cult. Over time this church became known as the church of Catholicism.

The emergence of Protestantism centuries later also had political motives – in addition to the obvious questioning for reasons of conscience. If religious tolerance was one of the pillars of Enlightenment thought, at first the acceptance of religions other than the Church of Rome was not an ethical position; its historical reasons arose from political expediency. In England, Anglicanism was born out of a challenge made by King Henry VIII to the power of the Roman church. In France the acceptance of the Huguenots was traumatic, and included both the massacre of "the night of Saint Bartholomew" and the French wars of religion. The third of these wars ended with the peace treaty of Saint-Germain, with the idea of achieving some coexistence between the sects. This effort did not achieve its goal, and finally, with the accession of Henry IV to the French throne, (this king who was formerly the Huguenot Henry III), the decree of the Edict of Nantes (1598) was achieved which recognized Catholicism as the religion of the State, and also promoted attempts at a reconciliation with the Huguenots. This measure also did not produce peace because later, King Henry himself was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic.

Changes were slow. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were born from the openings that the Renaissance had made, where artists dared to admire "man" as an aesthetic object, capable of thinking, rather than condemning him for having been born of medieval sin, and the designs of innovators such as Leonardo da Vinci opened up great aesthetic possibilities and technological efficiency (especially military).

By the eighteenth century there was greater economic well-being in Europe, partly due to colonialism, with the arrival of new wealth and food products such as potatoes.  Although internal hostilities between European kings continued, their governments’ military efforts were somewhat diluted due to demands of their overseas conflicts. In addition, the industrial revolution was beginning with inventions such as the steam engine, and the mechanical seeding invented by Jethro Tull. Europeans were still the subjects of despotic kings, but science, which was so useful for the development of new technologies, ceded some of its method of systematic doubt to philosophy.

 

Tolerance: The idea of religious tolerance began to spread to the coexistence of different political ideas, and to imagine that these differences could be reconciled through debates, and not by the repressive exercise of royal power.

Civil rights guarantees had several historical sources prior to the Enlightenment. We have seen how they can be traced back to the English Magna Carta (Note 2) in which the nobles of the court demanded from King John limits to absolute power. Then in the act of Habeas Corpus in 1679, and then in the Petition of Right in 1689, when English citizens began to enjoy certain rights. The awareness of these historical milestones influenced the libertarian aspirations of the English colonies.

The primary influence for the political changes of the eighteenth century, which included the North American War of Independence and the French Revolution, was always the Enlightenment. René Descartes (1596-1650), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), John Locke (1632-1704), and Voltaire (1694-1778) were some of the most prominent writers. Ideas such as tolerance, equality, constitutional government, and church-state separation were widely debated issues in Europe at this time.

Tolerance was one of the primary values. Pedro Bravo Gala says in his book on "The Letter of Tolerance" by John Locke:

“… if the Second Essay on Civil Government dealt a severe blow to absolutist despotism, the Charter on Tolerance meant the definitive condemnation, on the theoretical level, of intolerance. …. The consecration of religious freedom and freedom of conscience as a political right have historically been linked to the process of constitution of the liberal democratic State.... (p 10).

John Locke himself (1690/2018), in Letters of Tolerance, said:

"The State is, in my opinion, a society of men constituted solely to preserve and promote their civil goods. What I call civil goods are life, liberty, bodily health, freedom from pain..." (p. 14)

It has not been easy to put tolerance into practice. Even in the 21st century, an international tribunal in The Hague is needed to deal with cases of human rights violations, which are often rooted in intolerance. In the nineteenth century, the reality of a constitutional government in the United States based on equality was incompatible with the practices of slavery and the massacre of the Native Americans. Likewise, incompatible ideologies and practices emerged from the French Revolution: the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" of 1798 was accompanied a few years later by the guillotine. Both are symbols of the same movement, although the second, a repressive mechanism of political control, was not new.

France's Declaration of Human Rights has served as a model for multiple subsequent declarations, national and international, including the "Declaration of Human Rights" adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

 

The American Liberal Tradition

In the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson employed the ideas of the Enlightenment, when he began the prologue to the Declaration of Independence of the United States from England with these words: "All men are created equal...Later, the Anglo-American tradition of legal guarantees and constitutional stipulations resonated in the French Revolution: "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" was a proclamation of its primary objectives. The idea of American democracy brought two ideas together. The first had to do with the notion of individual guarantees, based on the constitution and legal acts. The other came from the idea of reason that should be the guide of human behavior.

It is interesting to review the life of George Washington (Note 3); He is an historical figure of great relevance, both for his beliefs and achievements, as well as for his contradictions. He was not an intellectual and did not write about the themes of the Enlightenment as Thomas Jefferson did, although some of the vocabulary of this movement appeared in his speeches. His opinions and motivations emerged from a deep humanist ethic and his own observations about society and life. In his first inaugural address upon assuming the presidency in 1789, he asked for God's blessing to:

"...to consecrate the liberties and happiness of the citizens of the United States, [under] a government instituted by themselves..." and he asked that: "the foundation of our national policy should follow the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the pre-eminence of a free government..." (Navrachna University, n.d.).

Washington was born in 1732 and died in 1799 at Mount Vernon. He grew up in an environment of personal wealth based on agriculture, and both his parents and himself owned extensive lands and slaves to tend to them.  Growing up, he devoted himself to country life, military life, and then to the politics of the new American nation.

Despite his opposition to the institution of slavery, he could not do without it personally, given the extent of his properties. He can be criticized, since he could have lived more modestly, but he preferred to stay in a range of power and influence. He said, "This kind of trafficking is in opposition to my principles" (Graff and Nevins, 2-19-2024).  But in the end, he treated both his slaves and his sharecroppers with dignity, tending to their requirements for food, clothing, and even had a doctor to attend to their health needs. He did not want to sell his slaves so as not to separate the families, and at the time of his own death he ordered that they all be freed after the death of his spouse, Martha Dandridge of Washington.

His early military experiences were related to confrontations with the French in Ohio and Pennsylvania. At this time, he was an officer in the British Army. Their involvement in independence began with communications sent to Patrick Henry and George Mason protesting British taxes in 1768. At first, he supported peaceful solutions.  Then, in 1774 he participated in the Continental Congress that considered the possibility of demanding, by military means, greater respect from England, but he still did not speak of independence. He then said:

"I will raise up a thousand men, pay for their sustenance at my expense, and march with them for the relief of Boston."   He defended "those rights and privileges which are essential to the happiness of every free State, and without which life, liberty, and property become insecure" (Graff and Nevins, 2/19/2024).

He began training volunteers in Virginia. By 1775 the army was a revolutionary. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Washington's army struggled, and he and his men fought in very poor conditions. He did not have great tactical skills, but in the end, helped by the French, in 1778, they began to gain ground, and in 1781 the Americans defeated the British militarily. In 1782 the British accepted American independence, and the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.

The contradictions of George Washington’s era could not be resolved in his lifetime, but he contributed to the creation of a more just political structure. Its causes indelibly marked the following centuries.

In the following section, I cite several novels and works of literature (Note 4). The first is, "The Pioneers"; which is a historical short story written by James Fenimore Cooper (1/1-1823/8-2000). It is the first of five novels by this author that are known as the "Leatherstocking Tales".

 

Endnotes; introduction

Note 1.  Slavery was abolished on December 18, 1865 with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Note 2. The Magna Carta is an agreement of rights agreed between King John of England and a group of rebellious barons at Runnymede, on 15 June 1215. It was later modified, but it remains a historical landmark.

Note 3. George Washington has been compared to the Roman Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who returned to his fields and plow after suppressing an uprising, rejecting the honor of being dictator of Rome. Washington also returned to private life after being the first constitutional president of the United States.

Note 4. To cite the works in this chapter, in some cases I have employed online text versions of Guttenberg, as in the cases of James Fenimore Cooper (1/1-1823/8-2000), Eckert (2002/nf), and Stowe (1-1-1852/28-10-2021). These texts are not divided into pages, therefore, when I have quoted them I have limited myself to mentioning the chapters from which they come.      

 

 

 

The Frontier by James Fenimore Cooper

I begin my journey of the "conquest of the west" with a novel written by James Fenimore Cooper, "Frontier." It is set on the East Coast of the United States, and represents the beginning of the historical and cultural process of the great 19th century migration from east to west. In "Frontier", I have tried to identify the place, the values, the aspirations and the personalities of the time.

In that century in the United States there were great confrontations, important achievements and at the same time, actions of sad ethical heritage: slavery was eliminated, and the Civil War was won, but on the other, the indigenous population was almost completely eliminated. American history is full of contradictions, and they continue to loom, influencing the present.

In "Frontier", J.F. Cooper develops several themes that are of interest to our reflections. The story is set in New England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Perhaps the most salient theme of the story is the problem of land tenure in the sense of private property. It was, at the time of writing the story, still a "new" territory, and unlike in Europe, immigrants could occupy plots of land by simply settling there. They were, in fact, called “settlers”. This has to do with several sub-themes such as: a) the expulsion of the original aborigines, b) the distribution of plots among immigrants and the demands regarding the justice of this distribution and c) the creation of new social hierarchies.

There are other themes to consider: for example, Cooper explores the need to conserve forests and wildlife in the face of the exploitation of new inhabitants. Race awareness and the social importance of people's ancestral origin can also be mentioned.  Another issue has to do with the genesis of American character diversity. A final issue is the influence of religion in the area.

Land tenure

Cooper's story begins in 1793; it is set in an area similar to that of Cooperstown, New York, a town where his father had extensive domains and where the author lived from a young age. The tale takes place in the fictional town of Templeton in Otsego County. Although the characters are invented, they point to well-known personality types of the time.

The theme of land ownership runs throughout the novel. Cooper talks about the "dominions" of the original European settlers, and then how they displaced the American Indians. The main character, Judge Temple, is the largest landowner, and his extensive possessions cause distrust among other characters. Sometimes these apprehensions were due to the restrictions that private property signify (you cannot hunt deer freely on it because it is not yours). It also had to do with a perception of injustice (in these new states, equality and freedom were important values).

Cooper describes a "frontier" society in the state of New York, which was in rapid expansion. In the period he describes – which has a lapse of less than ten years – he says that the population "has spread over a space that covers five degrees of latitude and seven degrees of longitude" (Introduction), meaning European immigrants and some African slaves.

Cooper says that it was "a beautiful region, from which the Indians had been 'removed'”, (Introduction) although their tribes were still in evidence in the names of the areas, towns and cities there. Today, the memory of Indigenous populations survives in many U.S. geographic designations. As Michale Hoper (9/2/24) points out, more than half of the names in all 50 states have indigenous origins. (Note 1)

 

The need to conserve forests and wildlife

Another theme that runs through the novel is the conflict that arises from the use of these domains. One of Cooper's main themes is the struggle between the need to protect the virgin forests, and the needs and concerns of the settlers. Some of the book’s characters think that these resources should exist freely for everyone’s use, and that everybody should be able to harvest the trees and hunt the animals without concern for conservation and sustainability. Others, including the main character, Judge Temple, worry about the need to protect these resources. As much of the land has been privatized (and Temple is the most important owner), limits have been placed on the right of non-owners to hunt deer on it, although these limits are still not fully respected. All the men know how to shoot their rifles and hunt, and they forage in the forests, even though there are sources of meat on the farms.

Cooper describes some animal-killing sports. There is a moment when the author describes a competition that consists of shooting at a tied-up turkey; the bird is a small target because only its head is visible (Chapter 17), and there is a certain distance between the animal and the "athletes". This rough competition arouses great enthusiasm among them. At another point, in Chapter 22, the townsmen enter the mountains and shoot uncontrollably—and without even aiming their rifles—at a flock of pigeons flying over them, killing far more birds than they can consume. They do it for the pleasure of killing. The author describes the scene: "Among the athletes was Billy Kirby, who, armed with an old musket, charged and, without even looking into the air, fired and screamed while his victims fell even on his own person." Natty, the character most linked to the love of the land, says in this chapter: "It would have been better to only kill those they want to eat, without wasting their powder and lead, than to be shooting at God's creatures in such a shameful way."

As a sign of this moderation, he picks up a single bird and takes it away, from the hundreds that lie on the ground. 

 

Race and Rank Awareness

The inhabitants of the area that Cooper describes, experienced rapid changes in status and economic influence. In principle, even the poorest could satisfy their hunger because there was the possibility of hunting for meat. In general, the poor used their physical strength; if they were women, they tended the houses of the wealthiest people, and if they were men, they would to cut firewood, build houses and transport goods. Those with modest financial means could open a shop. The "professionals" of medicine or law were often self-taught or self-proclaimed as specialists. In fact, Justice Temple himself had no known diplomas, and often the villagers preferred to consult with the indigenous shaman than with Dr. Elnathan Todd, the village physician. It also happened that some of the people who had arrived with generous economic means were, after a while, in poverty, and, on the contrary, the poor could rise to abundance. This is a feature of the expanding society of the United States in the nineteenth century, and the phenomenon of social ascendance (and fall) can still be appreciated.

The village of Templeton consisted of about fifty buildings of very varied styles. The construction material was usually wood, sometimes painted, and they were organized according to a more or less urban design.

There were some slaves, but they were not frequent. Due to widespread social disapproval of slavery in this community, they were sometimes released after a few years. The owners had an obligation to teach them to read and write before the age of 18. In the end, they were all released in 1826 – before the Civil War – and after the events narrated in this novel. The Quaker community that lived there never had slaves and condemned the practice. (Note 2)

The characters and genesis of the American character

Its characters are:

"...The great proprietor who resides on his land, and who gives his name to his property instead of receiving it from his property, as in Europe, .... The physician with his theory, rather obtained than corrected by experiments on the human constitution; the pious, self-sacrificing, industrious and poorly paid missionary; … [the] lawyer of bad repute, with his counterweight, brother by profession, of better origin and of better character; the indolent, haggling and envious salesman..., the plausible carpenter, ..." (Introduction).

In general, the characters knew how to read and write. They read a local newspaper and talked about the events. They are all people of autonomous character, with defined personalities, and their bonds are of cautious, mutual respect, all depending on the rank of each person, with the slaves located at the bottom of the hierarchies.  Almost all of them are of European origin in the first, second or third generation. The relations between the immigrants and the few Indians who remain in the area are varied: they are considered "savages", but there are moments of respect for them.

One of the central characters, Nathaniel ("Natty" Bumppo, also known as Leather-stocking), is a hunter and a patriot of the Revolution, a friend of the Indians and respected by Judge Temple. He loves nature and opposes the habits of those who harm the forests. Natty represents the border between institutional and natural law.

Judge Marmaduke Temple is a cautious innovator; He is a natural leader and capable of empathy despite his strict interpretation of the law. It could be said that he is prudent, honorable and dignified. He cares about nature and shares many of Natty's views. He represents those immigrants who view the new lands with respect and even love, but who have an important commitment to a society governed by law.

There are various versions of Protestant religions, including the Religious Society of Friends (or the Quakers). Judge Temple is a descendant of this congregation, although at the time of this novel, he practices a non-denominational form of his faith. Distinct Christian religious loyalties abound, not including Catholics. Due to the Quaker influence, there are few slaves. But there is race consciousness, and whites consider themselves superior. In fact, at the end of the novel, when Judge Temple's daughter ends up marrying a character whose "racial purity" has been questioned, the author finds it important to clarify that the groom, in fact, is the descendant of a respected European.

These are themes that can still be appreciated in the culture of the United States. There is still the esteem in which the independent – and sometimes rude – individual is held, along with group loyalty.  A fondness for firearms, a love of violent sports, and an exclusive awareness of racial identity also endure. But at the same time, people engage in frequent ethical questioning on issues as diverse as respect for the law, the preservation of the environment and social inclusion.

Endnotes: Frontier

Note 1 Some indigenous names left in geographic locations in the United States:

- Alabama – Derived from the Alabama tribe, a Muskogean-speaking people.

- Alaska – Derived from the Aleutian word "alaxsxaq" or "agunalaksh," meaning "the continent" or "great land."

- Arizona – Derived from the O'odham word "Alĭ ṣonak", meaning "small spring" or "place of the small spring".

- Arkansas - Derived from the French interpretation of the name given to the Quapaw people, a tribe living along the Arkansas River.

- Connecticut – Derived from the Mohegan-Pequot word "quinatucquet," meaning "long tidal river" or "beside the long tidal river."

- Delaware - Named after Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman, but influenced by the Lenape tribe living in the area.

- Illinois – Derived from the French interpretation of the name given to the Illiniwek people, a confederation of Native American tribes.

- Iowa – Derived from the Dakota Sioux word "ayúxba," meaning "sleepy" or "beautiful land."

- Kansas – Derived from the Kansa tribe, also known as the Kaw people.

- Kentucky – Derived from the Wyandot or Iroquois word "kenhtà:ke", meaning "meadow" or "prairie".

- Massachusetts – Derived from the Wampanoag tribe language, meaning "on the big hill," or near the hills.

-. Michigan – Derived from the Ojibwa word "mishigamaa," meaning "big water" or "great lake."

- Minnesota – Derived from the Dakota Sioux word "mnisota," meaning "clear blue water" or "sky-tinged water."

- Mississippi – Derived from the Ojibwa word "misi-ziibi," meaning "great river" or "gathering of waters."

- Missouri - Named after the Missouri tribe, a Siouan-speaking people.

- Nebraska – Derived from the Omaha-Ponca word "ni brásge," meaning "flat water" or "wide river."

- North Dakota – Derived from the Dakota Sioux word "dakȟóta", meaning "friend" or "ally".

- Ohio – Derived from the Iroquois word "ohiːyo," meaning "great river" or "good river."

- Oklahoma – Derived from the Choctaw words "okla" meaning "people" and "humma" meaning "red", together they mean "red people" or "red man".

- Oregon – Derived from the Spanish interpretation of the name given to the Columbia River by local Native American tribes.

- South Dakota – Derived from the Sioux word "dakȟóta", meaning "friend" or "ally".

- Tennessee - Named after the Cherokee village of Tanasi.

Texas - Derived from the Caddo word "teysha" or "taysha," meaning "friend" or "allies."

- Utah – Derived from the Ute tribe, a Numic-speaking people.

- Wisconsin – Derived from the Ojibwa word "wiskonsin," meaning "beaver place" or "gathering of waters."

 

Note 2.       "The liberation of the slaves in New York was gradual. When public opinion began to favor it, then the custom began of buying a slave and keeping them for only six or eight years, on condition that he be freed at the end of this time. Then a law dictated that everyone should be released after an indicated date, men at 20 years of age and women at twenty-five years of age. Later a law dictated that the owner should be obliged to teach his servants to read and write before they were eighteen years old, and finally, it was ordered that all those who were still in submission should be released without further preconditions in the year 1826, that is, after the publication of this tale. The Quakers never had slaves" (footnote, chapter 4).

 

Two books: "The Pathfinders" and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

Manifest Destiny

Immigrants came from all over the world, mainly from Europe. They came by the millions, welcome in a sprawling land.  The term "manifest destiny" referred to the territorial expansion of the country before and after the Civil War. The spread of cotton farms in the South, and the seizure of the Ohio Territory area in 1803 was followed by the Louisiana Territory Purchase in the same year. President Andrew Jackson invaded Florida, formerly a colony of Spain, in 1818. Texas was annexed to the country in 1845 after the War between the United States and Mexico, but before the end of the Civil War in 1865.  

The term "Manifest Destiny" first appeared in 1845 in articles written by John O'Sullivan, and referred to the desirability of annexing Texas. He described this determination as "The right... to expand and possess the totality of the continent that Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of freedom and self-government that has been entrusted to us" (Heider and Heider, 4-3-2024).

Allan W. Eckert's novel, "The Conquerors" offers us a multiple perspective on the conquest of the territories that were to become the Midwestern states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. The conflicts date from the time of colonial settlements to the end of the nineteenth century. As a result of the draconian "Indian Removal Act" of 1830, the U.S. government was able to force the migration of tribal members from east to the west of the Mississippi river, to an area that later became the state of Oklahoma. In the end, the tribes were forced to live only on reservations.

But the novel concentrates on the years around the war of 1812. The author reviews the actions of both the British military and later those of the French and the Americans. It also recognizes some of the leaders of indigenous nations in these wars. The Indo-American leader Pontiac is a tragic hero who fights for a cause he cannot win and he knows it. Pontiac (whose name in the Odawa tradition was Obwaandi'eyaag), was a war-chief in the Great Lakes area, allied at first with the French in their fight against the British. He then fought against the U.S army (Pueblos Originarios, (n.d.). These are events that occurred before the waves of Europeans that began to populate these regions, but the objective of these conflicts on the part of the United States was to leave these territories free for the settlement of the migrants who were arriving.

Around the same time the United States purchased "the Louisiana Territories" from France in 1803. This included large tracts on both sides of the Mississippi River and consisted of most of the land in the Mississippi River drainage basin, approximately 828,000 square miles (2,140,000 km2), located in the central part of the states that had not yet been established. Before selling these lands France militarily controlled only the southern ends of these lands, but for the United States this meant the international right to continue conquering the lands of the Indians for itself. (Wikipedia (n.d.).

On the other hand, the book, "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown is not fiction. It is a story based largely on notes taken in meetings between the councils of the different Indian tribes with representatives of the U.S. government. The author has also cited publications made at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century (Note 1). The book is the result of carefully explored and chronologically organized research according to the confrontations between the indigenous populations of the West and the U.S. armed forces.

It is not easy to read. It is a long tragedy. One reads this book knowing that the territorial dispute could have been handled differently. But Europe brought a long tradition in which regional disagreements were resolved at the point of a saber (or rifle). The conquered rarely attempted to negotiate solutions acceptable to all involved: the winners eliminated the losers, or transformed them into labor for the new occupants of the confiscated territories. Brown describes the first reactions of the whites when they encounter the Indians:

"So docile, so peaceful, are these people," Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain, "that I swear to Your Majesties that there is no better nation in the world. They love their neighbor as themselves, and their speech is always sweet and gentle, and accompanied by a smile; and although it is true that they walk naked, their manners are decorous and praiseworthy." All this, of course, was taken as a sign of weakness, if not paganism, and Columbus being a righteous European was convinced that these people should be used "to work, to sow and to do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways". Over the next four centuries (1492-1890) several million Europeans and their descendants undertook the task of imposing their ways on the people of the New World" (p 8).

In his preface, the author delimits the time and social environment of his work:

"... 1860 and 1890, the period covered by this book....  was a time of incredible violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, unbridled exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. In that time, the culture and civilization of the American Indians were destroyed, and from that time arose virtually all the great myths of the American West: tales of fur traders, mountaineers, steamship pilots, gold prospectors, card players, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, prostitutes, missionaries, local schoolteachers, and settlers. Only once in a while was the voice of an Indian heard, and most of the time it was recorded by the pen of a white man. The Indian was the dark menace of myths..." (Introduction, p. 6)

In the first chapter the author cites a quote from Tecumseh (Note 2), a leader of the Shawanee tribe. It is the first of many references in the book in which indigenous leaders express their disappointment and sadness with the treatment they received from European immigrants, and their sense of loss and their anger.

"Where are the Pequot today? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other tribes of our people? They have vanished before the greed and oppression of the white man, like snow before a summer sun. Will we allow ourselves to be destroyed in turn without a fight, will we renounce our homes, our homeland bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the tombs of our dead and all that is dear and sacred to us? I know you'll cry with me: "Never! Never!" —TECUMSEH OF THE SHAWNEES (p. 8)

Throughout the book this type of quote is repeated. A solution other than the total surrender of the indigenous survivors to the country's military power was never achieved. While it is true that there were clashes between civilian immigrants and Amerindians, most of the conflicts resulted from a consistent policy of military conquest. The tribes of the Midwest called the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) "Sharp Knife" because of his cruelty in his dealings with the Indians. In the end they were confined to reservations, on the worst lands, and without citizenship rights.

Endnotes

 Note 1. Here are examples taken from his long list of references:

Bryant, Charles S., and A. B. Murch. A History of the Great Massacre by the Sioux Indians in Minnesota. Cincinnati, 1864.

Campbell, C. E. “Down Among the Red Men.” Kansas State Historical Society, Collections, Vol. XVII, 1928, pp. 623–91.

Historical Society, 1961. Carrington, Frances C. My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearny Massacre. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1911. Carrington, H. B. The Indian Question. Boston, 1909.

Note 2. In the U.S. state of Michigan, Tecumseh is a city in Lenawee County near the Raisin River. Likewise, the name of the state comes from the Mohican tribe.

 

 

The beginning of industrialization

"Life in the iron mills" by Rebecca Harding is a story probably set in the state of Virginia in the first half of the nineteenth century (originally published in 1861); it is a fictionalized version of the author's observations and experiences in her town of Wheeling where factories were the way of life. It describes the truncated and ruined lives of workers in the companies of the time before there was a minimum of labor protection. It is a novel reminiscent of Charles Dickens.

This book focuses on the human destruction that characterized the early years of unbridled production, and asks about the causes of constant punishment in the lives of workers. It has echoes of the Calvinist ethic of spiritual salvation, but its aspirations for freedom are centered on the expected labor reform from government agencies. The idea of individual responsibility yields to a collective claim for social justice. The novel ends in a tragedy for the main character who has had no way to demand his rights given the lack of a system of labor guarantees, and therefore seeks them personally and illegally. 

ENDNOTES: Industrialization

Note 1. I have used Nasrulla Mambrol's article as a reference in these reflections.

 

 

 

Uncle Tom's Cabin

 Slavery as an historical institution

Slavery is one of the oldest labor structures. In civilizations such as the Persians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, China, and India, there are very archaic references to it, usually linked to war events. Evidence of this servitude can be found in the Code of Hammurabi (from the region of Mesopotamia, drawn up in the 2nd century BC), the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy (Note 1), and in Spanish chronicles of the Inca civilization, among others.  In most of the ancient world, slaves were a part of the expected spoils of war: it was normal for prisoners to end up as their captors’ unwilling workers. Aristotle approved of the use of slavery in Athens, and in Sparta a form of feudalism (called illotism) was practiced that closely resembled slavery. Then, in the Roman Empire and throughout the feudal history of Europe, those who had the means to do so continued to practice the subjugation and submission of people for involuntary servitude.

In the end, in the nineteenth century it was abolished in the United States in 1863 with the Act of Manumission of Abraham Lincoln, and in most European states in 1890 by means of the Brussels Conference Act. In 1948, article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, which stipulates that it is inconsistent with the principle of universal human rights. (Note 2)

Thus, its use in the American colonies was a continuation of a very old practice. What distinguished it in the English colonies were perhaps two factors:

(a) its large scope and its broad integration with the cotton farming model in the southern colonies;

b) the emergence in the North of groups and individuals who began to oppose it in the name of a new morality associated with the European Enlightenment and religious convictions such as those of the Quakers. (Note 3)

The British colonies, territories that would later become the United States, were divided economically into the North and South. In the South, the cotton economy was based on slave labor, but the North was industrializing. Farms were small, often restricted to the work done by the owners of the plots, all members of the same family. In addition, there were groups such as the Quakers who were strong opponents of involuntary labor. Gradually, after their independence from England, the northern states banned it; in 1846 New Jersey was the last northern state to eradicate it.

In her book "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Harriet Beecher Stowe explores American slavery in the 19th century. It is the story of several white families, both from the South and the North who have mixed opinions about it. In some cases, those who defend the practice support not only slavery but also the right to mistreatment.

Despite having a basically humanist stance, Stowe’s character Augustine St. Clare associates the treatment of slaveholders with the way English industrialists treated their employees in their factories. He says that there can be no high civilization without the submission of the lower classes. But he recognized that in the South of the United States the dehumanization was worse: according to St. Clare, the mere fact of living with slaves, as happened on the plantations, meant that the slaveholders had to become morally hardened. He says: "The capitalists and aristocrats of England cannot feel as we do, because they do not mix with the class they degrade…. They are in our homes; they are our children's companions..." (Chapter 12). He says that white children, who are raised with slaves, and who play with them, have to learn not to love them.

Stowe's different white characters represent opposing positions on slavery, to name a few:

a) Arthur, Emily Shelby and Augustine St. Clare who are southern slave owners, and they treat them well; despite this, Arthur Shelby sells the slave Tom to Mr. Haley, a cruel trader,

b) Ophelia St. Clare, Augustine's sister, opposes slavery, although she refuses personal contact with black people until she meets the girl Topsy, a slave she decides to raise in freedom,

c) Simon Legree, an evil master on a Louisiana plantation who buys Tom after Mr. Shelby sold him. He is a barbaric and repugnant character, who foments violence and hatred among his slaves and

d) the Quakers, a religious sect that not only rescues runaway slaves, but also seeks for them a sustainable refuge in the north, especially in Canada.

On the other hand, from the point of view of the enslaved, the author Stowe has created characters who wonder about universal law: who or what has the right to place one man above the others?

-Tom is a slave of strong religious feelings, faithful, obedient and without malice;

-his wife is Aunt Chloe remains on Mr. Shelby's estate after he sells Tom.

-Eliza escapes from slave hunters carrying her small son, jumping across large blocks of ice in the Ohio River in the winter.  

-George, her spouse, also flees and meets Eliza and their son in the free state of Ohio, but the couple has to continue to Canada because hunters are still chasing them in the north of the country (Note 4).

-Topsy is a slave girl who did not know her parents and has lacked the most basic formative and cultural influences until Mr. St. Clare buys her and gives her to her sister to raise her well.

In addition, Stowe asks about the psychological effects of slavery. Augustine St. Clare, a slave owner (but lukewarm questioner of the institution), recognizes the damage that the lack of freedom does to the slave, who becomes brutalized and depressed in his most basic capacities to think and act. But he says that something similar happens to the owners. The master likewise degrades himself because his position compels him to hate and inflict pain on other human beings.

Simon Legree, a character who in the literary tradition has come to represent evil in its most brutal form, is the most bestial slave owner in the entire novel. He is Uncle Tom's ultimate master, his executioner and his torturer: all this malice stems from his inability to tolerate fortitude and charity in another human being. He tries to brutalize Tom, and turn him into something similar to himself, but he can't. His only recourse is to physically destroy Tom.

 

The slave trade

Trafficking in enslaved persons, that is, the capture, sale, purchase and, in general, the commercialization of human beings has existed as much as involuntary labor itself. The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us:

"Enslaved people were taken from the Slavs and Iranians from ancient times [and the trade endured] until the nineteenth century... In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enslaved Africans were exchanged in the Caribbean for molasses, which was turned into rum in the American colonies and exchanged in Africa for more slaves." (Wallenfeldt, 29-2-20249). 

Stowe recounts several American scenarios in which this type of trade occurred, from a public auction to private sales. She describes the desperation of the people put up for sale, and the total depersonalization of the merchants. She describes one of these salesmen using the voice of Augustine St. Clare: he says that this state of hardening of the soul is something that can happen to anyone in those dehumanized environments:

"The merchant had reached that stage of perfection... lately, in which he had completely overcome all human weaknesses and prejudices. His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be taken, with the right effort and cultivation. The woman's wild look of absolute anguish and despair might have disturbed someone less experienced; But [the human trader] was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to those things too, my friend; … So the merchant only considered the mortal anguish he saw in those dark features, in those clenched hands, and in those suffocating breaths as necessary aspects of his trade…." (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Chapter 12).

Conscience

Conscience, seen as a moral elaboration of individual and social acts, is central to Stowe's novel. For many of her characters, it is something related to the dictates of religion. For others, scruples have no role as a mediator between their choices and actions, as their main criterion is simply their own financial and personal benefit. Augustine St. Clare, the slave owner I have already mentioned, is a man who identifies with the European Enlightenment, realizes this dichotomy and allows himself to classify the desirability of his options according to the moment.  He says:

"...All I want is for different things to be kept in different boxes. The whole fabric of society, both in Europe and in America, is composed of various things which will not stand up to the scrutiny of any ideal standard of morality. It is generally understood that men do not aspire to absolute right, but only to do it as well as the rest of the world. Now, when someone speaks... and he says that slavery is necessary for us, that we cannot live without it, that we would be beggars if we renounced it, and, of course, that we intend to hold on to it: this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth; and, if we can judge by their practice, the greater part of the world will agree with us..." (Stowe, Chapter 16).

Tom, the slave and central character of the novel, on the other hand, acts both on the basis of his religious ideas and on the basis of a deep sense of empathy: he feels the pain of others and the need to protect the people around him. At the end of the novel, when two slaves, owned by Simon Legree, named Emmeline and Cassy, organize a complex escape plan, Tom supports them to the point of losing his life. In the first stage of their evasion they hide, and Tom knows where they are. Legree, realizing that Tom has this information, demands that he reveal what he knows, and Tom refuses to do so. It does so to protect those who try to escape, a feeling of solidarity and deep affinity and compassion.

 

Final Thoughts on This Novel

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her novel in the 19th century, before the Civil War when slavery was still legal in the South of the United States. Her narrative is not only a profound critique from a humanist point of view, based on its effect on her characters, but also constitutes a tool to understand racism and vassalage today. Its protagonists debate the morality and usefulness of an economy based on the subjection of a large part of the population, and in their conversations, they describe a system that is radically opposed to the Constitution of the same country where they live, which was ratified on May 29, 1790.

In her portrayal, slavery is revealed as a highly economically profitable system, which destroys almost all the humans who live in it. The only salvation for the subdued is to try to evade their owners. And these, living with the effects of their own inhumanity, are fragmented and also break down in their capacity to love and live together.

At the end of the story, some of the slaves, now free, leave for Liberia, in an attempt to seek their identity and freedom in something they imagine as their mother-land. An online publication by National Geographic reads:

"On February 6, 1820, the first group of formerly enslaved people in the United States who resettled in Africa departed from New York. An organization called the American Colonization Society had been established, with funds from Congress, to return them to the American colony of Liberia in West Africa.... People believed that African Americans would experience greater freedom and opportunities "back" in Africa. However, there were problems. Although they were of African descent, many of these newly released people... had become accustomed [to the American way of life], which had little in common with Liberian communities.... Of those born in Africa, few had memories of their diverse peoples and the land from which they were taken. Still, Liberia was probably not their ancestral home....   Despite this, in the decades that followed, thousands of formerly enslaved people [decided to go] to Liberia. In 1847, it became the first African colony to gain independence as a nation" (Editores 2, n.d.).

It is ironic that these people, seeking freedom and rootedness, became settlers on a land that was not theirs. The people displaced by their arrival attacked them, after all this land was not theirs. In addition, the newcomers suffered from disease, hunger, and the weather. Many did survive and stayed. In the United States, most of the people released from slavery rejected the idea of returning to Africa. They had lived in the United States for generations. They wanted their freedom and equality. Frederick Douglass (Note 5) was one of the movement's most visible opponents.

Endnotes: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Note 1. In the Old Testament tells how the Israelites were sometimes sold as servants to other Israelites (Deuteronomy, 1512, NLT). But after seven years, these people had not only the right to be released, but also the right to receive some payment for the work done. The capture and use of war enemies was forbidden in the Old Testament. 

Note 2. In a Wikipedia post (n.d. 2) there is a timeline that refers to the slow manumission of slaves, from when Solon freed the subjugated Athenians in the fourth century B.C. to the United Nations Act in the twentieth century A.D. I deal with this subject in the Final Reflections of this book.

Note 3. "By 1789, five of the northern states had adopted policies to abolish slavery, at least gradually: Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (1783), Connecticut, and Rhode Island (1784). Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, when it was still independent, and when it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791 it was the first state to join without slavery. Thus, these state jurisdictions enacted the first abolition laws throughout the "New World".... [Regarding the new territories in the North] Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Iowa (1846), Wisconsin (1848), and Minnesota (1858) were all free states. (Wikipedia, (n.d. 1)

Note 4.  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850. It extended the scope of the institution of slavery to the northern states, claiming that refugees from slavery living there could be recaptured and returned to submission. The event motivated thousands of freedom seekers to take refuge in Canada. The act was repealed on June 28, 1864" (Henry-Dixon, 1-6-2021).

Note 5.   Frederick Douglass was an American writer. Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he escaped slavery and became a national leader of the abolitionist movement. (Trent, March 4, 2024). I discuss Douglass in more detail in the "Final Thoughts" of this book.



 

The Civil War

The North’s main goal in the civil war was the restitution of the "Union”, that is the formerly known borders of the United States. This also implied the incorporation of the Western territories that were in the process of conquest, or that were already integrated into the country, because Texas declared its adhesion to the Confederate States on March 2, 1861.

Underneath the question of the fracturing of the United States into two countries was problem of slavery’s legality; for almost all of the northern states abolition was the war’s main reason. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the "Emancipation Proclamation," that declared freedom for all slaves in the rebel states, and this referred to more than 3.5 million people.

There are several names used to refer to the American Civil War: it was a War between the "Union" (or the "North") and the "Confederacy" (or the "South"). There has long been controversy about the morality of involuntary servitude in the country, and I have been describing its effects, mostly in the section "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In this section I consider the war and its aftermath.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln, a well-known opponent of slavery, was elected president of the country. In response, seven Southern states seceded from the Union, thus forming a new country, the Confederacy, under the presidency of Jefferson Davis. In 1861 the army of this new political entity took Fort Sumter in the port of Charleston in South Carolina, thus giving the northern states reason to respond militarily.

There are many topics related to the Civil War in the United States (1861 – 1865). First, it was a war between “brothers” and there is evidence of fortuitous friendly contacts between (white) soldiers from the North and the South. Second, it was a war based on moral stances, especially with regard to everyone's attitude toward slavery, although there were also soldiers who were involved in the fight for other reasons, such as ideas of military glory, or the simple defense of their own home. Above all, in the South the importance of territorial defense was felt. Despite the recognition of the humanity shared between the bands, the strategy of total destruction of enemy lands was employed by the North against the South.

With regard to the essential brotherhood among soldiers, there are several examples in the literature. For example, in Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage" (1871/1-6-2022),  a "Union" soldier has brief contact with another young man from the South, in blind conversation in which neither can see the other’s face. They are hidden in the vegetation where a small stream runs between them. The Southerner tells him, "Yank, (Note 1)... You're a good boy." And the author continues: "This feeling, floating towards the young man in the still air, made him regret the war." (Chapter 1). This young character has not gone to fight for a cause; rather, he has a head full of ideas of ancient heroes and wants to be part of an adventure.

But, the main motive for the war was to end slavery in the United States. In fact, many soldiers went into battle singing Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic".

 “ln the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

 

War strategies

General Robert E. Lee was the highest military authority for the Southern Army. In his youth he was trained at the United States Military Academy and fought on the United States’ side in the war with Mexico, finishing with the rank of colonel. In 1861, with the beginning of the formation of the Confederate States, when seven states had already seceded from the Union, Abraham Lincoln offered the command of the northern army to Lee, but Lee refused. Already the Confederates were bombarding Fort Sumter, and Lee proclaimed that he would only bear arms again if it was in the defense of his home state. A few weeks later he was declared a general of the Confederate army.

Northern Army General William Tecumseh Sherman employed a "scorched earth" strategy over the South's infrastructure, most notably in the "Sherman March," destroying military targets, train lines, bridges, homes, crops, and other physical and economic systems in the South. He and General Ulysses S. Grant thought that one way to "break up the South" would be to not rely on supply lines for their troops, but rather, to "live off the land," that is, to collect from the enemy's estates and farms the food and other goods that their soldiers were going to need. They freed the slaves they found, but forced them to fight with the northern soldiers, many of whom did so with enthusiasm (Trudeau, 2008).

The war ended with Lee's surrender in the Appomattox Court House. In the end, the statistics were brutal, there was an estimated loss of 752,000 soldiers; this would be 2.5% of the population at the time, and the Office of Military Lost in Action reported that there were 68,162 unidentified soldiers in the period between 1865 and 1868 (These numbers do not include civilian deaths (Editors 4. n.d.).

President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, in Washington D.C., (Note 2) five days after Robert E. Lee and Ulysses D. Grant signed the surrender of the South. I will talk more about this tragedy in the next chapter when I consider Susan Sontag's book, “In America”. In the North, Lincoln was regarded as a martyr and a hero. His murder left an indelible mark on the history of the country. Millions of people accompanied his funeral procession by train from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, where his spouse, Mary Todd Lincoln, wanted to his grave to be.

It is a death that marked the memory of the country and was recorded in multiple ways in literature. Barrett and Miller (2005) have collected poems about this loss. Walt Whitman wrote the poem "O Captain! My Captain!" (n.d./1891) to honor the president, and reflects the generalized mourning that was felt in the North.

 

O Captain! My Captain!

WALT WHITMAN

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

     But O heart! heart! heart!

           O the bleeding drops of red,

               Where on the deck my Captain lies,

                    Fallen cold and dead.

 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For your bouquets and ribbon’s wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

     Here Captain! dear father!

          This arm beneath your head!

               It is some dream that on the deck,

                   You’ve fallen cold and dead.

 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip, the victor ship comes in with object won;

     Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

          But I with mournful tread,

               Walk the deck my Captain lies,

                   Fallen cold and dead.

 

By the end of the war, Lincoln had judicially pardoned all Confederate soldiers, and they were able to return home without further restrictions. There were attempts, in the Reconstruction process under Presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, to equalize Whites and Blacks in their civil rights, but these were met with hostility from Whites in the region. Reconstruction was initiated to repair the South that had been almost totally destroyed, and to supervise the granting of civil rights to the freed slaves.

Margaret Mitchell (1936) wrote a novel called "Gone with the Wind" about the times before and after the Civil War. Despite the romanticism, it narrates the intimate effects of the War on the population and their lives in the following years. She graphically portrays the destruction of the South. Above all, she demonstrates the lavish and carefree life of the hacienda owners in the "antebellum" times, when they were cared for by their slaves, and then describes how their world collapsed during and after the war. Her portrayal of slaves as happy and loyal is far from the reality of these times.

Mitchell describes how her main character, Scarlet O'hara, confronts the changes. She's been a spoiled, wealthy girl, but suddenly after the war she returns to her old mansion, Tara, and finds that although the U.S. military hadn't burned it down like they did her neighbors' houses, the situation was bleak. His mother had died, and his father had succumbed to the pain of his losses. His sisters were sick, and the slaves in the field were gone. There was no cotton left in the fields, and there was no food. Scarlet began working in the fields, doing the tasks that slaves used to do. Thus begins a long struggle for survival. Little by little the family's situation improves, but resentment was great, and most of the white male characters were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The reaction in the South to Reconstruction was hostile. The 19th-century Ku Klux Klan was originally organized as a social club by Confederate veterans. The organization quickly became a means for underground resistance to racial equality by Southern whites. Klansmen sought the restoration of white supremacy through intimidation and violence. Disguised with sheets to prevent "occupation" federal troops from identifying them, Klansmen whipped and killed freed blacks and their white supporters in night raids (Editors 1, 3-22-2024).

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, required states to protect the idea of equal rights among both races. However, when Rutherford B. Hayes became president in 1876, he set limits on the total reconstruction of the South. He withdrew the remaining federal troops, and signed the Compromise of 1877 that allowed Southern legislatures (whose members were all white men) the power to discriminate against the black population. This permitted the initiation of policies of segregation and repression in the form of "JimCrow" acts (Note 3).

 

 

Endnotes.

Note 1. "Yank" was a term used during the Civil War by Southerners to describe the people of the North.

Note 2.  Lincoln died a day later, on April 15, 1865.

Note 3. The JimCrow laws were initiated in the South after 1877 with the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes. They made racial segregation possible under the principle of "separate but equal". Places designated as "whites only" were always better. Schools, public transport, theatres, hotels and other places of public use were segregated. This discrimination would continue until the decade of the 70s in the twentieth century.

 

 

 

The Conquest of the West

 

 

   Come my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

    Pioneers! O pioneers! …

 

All the past we leave behind,

We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,

    Pioneers! O pioneers!...

 

  We primeval forests felling,

We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,

We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,

    Pioneers! O pioneers!...

 

All the pulses of the world,

Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,

Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,

    Pioneers! O pioneers!

 

Fragments of O! Pioneers, by Walt Whitman

 

"In America" by Susan Sontag is a novel that portrays the arrival of European migrants to the West at the end of the nineteenth century. The author traces the life of a Polish – and later American – actress, Helena Modjeska, who appears in the book as Maryna Zalewska. Sontag speaks in several voices, including her own. She begins by describing a social gathering that she attends. She goes to a party, but because she is the author, she observes them but can’t be seen. She stands there, almost just another character, as she looks at her protagonists, and thus knowing them, she introduces them, one by one, to us, the readers.

Then, in addition to the author's voice, her characters begin to speak; they speak sometimes for a moment, sometimes they do it for an entire chapter. The result is like the pixelated vision of a bee, all focused on a single and complex personality, Maryna Zalewska. She is the center of everything, of the lives of her family, her friends and her theater flatterers. She has the vanity of a star, which Sontag uses to create other characters. Throughout the novel they are reflected in the lantern that emanates from the actress, and they represent different aspects of the huge European migration to the United States. This diverse eye captures the movement of the book so well, that readers see not only the Polish and American lives of the characters, we also see how cultures move; they are changeable but resilient on two continents.

It all happened at a precise moment, at the end of the nineteenth century, in a remote fantasy of political independence for their original country, Poland’s liberty was not to be realized until after the First World War. Simultaneously, it was a fantasy that was materialized when the Americans began to build their own multifaceted vision of the world, after the conquest of the West. In the novel these different cultures drive the characters’ destinies.

They – at Maryna's insistence – decide to move all together to California, to form a utopian commune. They had all had read Charles Fourier, an author of several books on communes, and they all wanted to believe in a better world. Thus, the characters move to California, carrying their personalities on their backs like unescapable luggage. These people, formerly members of the European intellectual class, begin to clear weeds, sow, milk cows, cook, wash dishes and keep the accounts of an agricultural organization. After a few years they lose interest in the project, and the members slowly start leaving. Maryna returns to the theater, but she is already an American, and becomes a well-known and highly appreciated actress there. This book is of interest to our reflections on the nineteenth century in the United States because it represents the ideals of many of the people who took part in the western migration.

Sontag uses abundant quotations from well-known authors -Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dumas, Corneille, among others, making her characters recite fragments of plays at key moments in their own lives. The characters that accompany Maryna usually appear with their real names.

The last chapter is perhaps the best of the whole book. In it there is a monologue in the voice of Edwin Thomas Booth, a famous Shakespearean actor of that time, whom Sontag has sometimes put on the theatrical stage together with Maryna. Edwin Thomas was also, in real life, the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the man who murdered President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. In this final chapter of her novel, Sontag places Edwin Thomas in Maryna's dressing room, where he delivers a monologue as he becomes more and more drunk. Edwin mixes the sorrows of the characters he has played on the stage with his own heartaches. He mourns both the death of Lincoln (Edwin was a Northern abolitionist) and his brother (a Southerner who supported the Confederate States). He weeps for the whole country. Even though some of the characters he cites exist in dramas that happened centuries before, he makes them speak on behalf of that new nation, for example: "Shylock is in pain and for this reason he is very ... combustible..."

At another point he offers some appraisals of Hamlet's character that are so accurate that they amaze the reader:

"Hamlet reminds me of something in myself. Maybe because Hamlet is an actor, yes, Marina, that's all he is. He's acting. It seems to be one thing, and underneath that seeming, what's there? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The inky black shirt he wears in the second scene. That tenacious, showy mourning for his father. 'Everyone's father dies', as Gertrude reminds him, and right she is. Why seems it so particular with thee?  And Hamlet howls, he's howling, you know, ‘Seems, madam? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’. But he does know ‘seems’. He knows nothing else. That’s his problem. Hamlet would give anything, anything, not to be an actor, but he is condemned to it. Doomed to be an actor! He's waiting to break through seeming and performing, and just to be, but there is between appearance and performance, and just 'being', but there is nothing on the other side of seeming…. pp 373-371)."

Edwin also "seems" the characters he plays in the theater. The United States also "seemed". It was the result of many cultures wanting to become coherent and acting as though they were. The country has just come out of a war of secession and another of conquest with Mexico, it has been a slave owner, it has destroyed the original inhabitants of its territory, and at the same time, and in a discordant way, it constituted communes to promote social justice, and it spoke of democracy.

Sontag offers a generous and comprehensive commentary on the effects that societies have on people. In both Poland and the United States, freedom was talked about in an idealistic but impractical way. With great success, the "American" Maryna brings her own theater company to local towns and cities.  We understand that it is the voices that Maryna intones in characters such as Desdemona (Note 1), Ophelia (Note 2), Lady Anne Neville (Note 3) and Portia (Note 4) that interpret the vital themes of life, such as happiness, freedom, justice, mercy and even love.

 

Endnotes: In America The conquest of the West

Note 1. Desdemona: Female character in the play Othello.

Note 2.  Ophelia: Female character in the play Hamlet.

Note 3. Lady Anne Neville: Female character in the play Richard III.

Note 4. Portia: Female character in the play The Merchant of Venice.

 

 

FINAL THOUGHTS

In these two chapters I have reviewed some of the effects the Enlightenment had on the American continents. In the first, I reviewed the cultural heritages that facilitated the creation of democracies in the New World, and in the second, I reflected on the conflicts between the ideals of democracy on the one hand, and the effects of slavery and the demands of Manifest Destiny on the other. It is necessary to understand these bases in order to understand today's conflicts.

One issue that I have been developing has to do with ideological and economic conflicts. The aspirations that the Enlightenment left for a more rational and humanistic life collided with the realities imposed by a rapidly expanding economy. This is the struggle and the legacy that the nineteenth century left for the following centuries. The story comes with many parallel threads, some are cultural aspects that promote happiness and human well-being and others inhibit them. The ideals of the Enlightenment, and its reflections on the possibility of freedom and happiness, clashed all the time with a long-standing culture in which violence was the most common instrument, used both to produce wealth and to resolve conflicts.

The Enlightenment did not stop at examining the physical world and the possibilities of reason. It also gave birth to new theories about the mind and ethics. John Locke (1690/2013) considered that, at birth, the mind was a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper that is then filled with education and life experiences. Thus, people, according to him, were not born with evil and imperfection. This perspective clashed with the idea of Thomas Hobbes, whose approaches were closer to the Christian vision of the Middle Ages that considered that the human being was primarily aggressive and born in sin. Hobbes felt that this sinful being always would require supervision to maintain order.

The conflicting coincidence of these two visions of the world expressed different desires. On the one hand, there was the idea of creating a better world, and on the other was the obligation of the powerful to use their authority and their capacity for punishment to promote their own prosperity, norm, and discipline. This dichotomy runs through all the phenomena we have reviewed, from slavery to the violent seizure of the territories of the New World.

The abolition of slavery

This brings us back to the final abolition of slavery. I have been describing this institution, but it is still necessary in these last reflections to give a historical context to its abolition. Involuntary labor has always existed, evidenced from the earliest historical documents. It has definitely been part of the human conscience, but at the same time it is an economic structure that, once established, seemed indispensable.

There were three main kinds of this servitude:

1. -The first was the result of debts: when a person lacked the capacity to pay an obligation to somebody else, he could be forced by his creditor to work until the value of the commitment was paid, but this obligation ended with the payment.

The second consisted of the vassalage of the serfs, that is, the unfree peasants who, unlike slaves, could not be sold except together with the land to which they were "attached".

3. -A third type of servitude consisted of the total submission of persons considered as the "property of another"; Usually these people belonged to a nationality (or kingdom), class, or race distinct from that of their owners, and were often labeled as an expected part of the spoils of war or the trade of humans from one country or continent to another.

The first two types of serfdom have been abolished sporadically and temporarily in history, especially when serfs and their owners have shared the same cultural identity or citizenship. The laws of Solon in Athens, those of Rome in its republican era, or the limitations imposed in the Old Testament in the Book of Deuteronomy regulated these types of servitude. "Thus, the Roman reforms protected Roman citizens, the Athenian reforms protected Athenian citizens, and the rules of Deuteronomy guaranteed freedom to a Hebrew after a fixed duration of servitude)" (Editors 1, n.d.), but when the serf was of another nationality or race, there was no such protection. When Solon freed the slaves in Athens, he only freed the Athenians and not the Thracians, or the Scythians, the Cappadocians, or others who might have had foreign origins.

The liberation of slaves considered as "property" had to take a long time, but there has always been a collective sense of guilt in the world about it. There were several historic attempts to eliminate the slave trade, but the first nationwide liberation of all enslaved people was when Louis X of France issued a decree abolishing all slavery in his country in the year 1315. This decree reduced involuntary servitude in France, but it did not eliminate it completely, even within the country's own borders. Total abolition did not occur in France until 1848, five centuries later. Pope Paul III banned the enslavement of indigenous people in the American territories in 1537 and King Sebastian of Portugal did the same for the Portuguese territories in 1570. In 1772 slavery was declared "non-existent" in England and Wales. Some of the dates of the abolition of slavery of Africans in Latin America are: Ecuador in 1851, Argentina in 1853, Venezuela and Peru in 1854. In 1865 all forms of slavery (except to punish some crimes) were abolished in the United States with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, only 30 of the 36 states voted in favor of it. It was not until the 1926 Slavery Convention that this system of forced labor was abolished (in a more formal than practical sense) globally by the member states of the League of Nations. Even so, there are still today cases of involuntary servitude. (Most of the dates in this paragraph come from "Editors 1, n.d.)

This long collection of dates reveals something important: in the history of the world the abolition of slaves is a very recent achievement and there are many people in the world whose great-grandparents were not born free. For the United States, assuming a life expectancy of 50 years on average in the 19th century, we are talking about only a little less than five generations. The novelty of this achievement still leaves cracks through which the complex fabrics of social memory pass, and they sustain, paradoxically, both the desire for a rational and humanistic world, and the longing among some groups for the times when a human being could be the owner of others. (It is clear, in these longings, the dreamer imagines himself as the owner and not as the slave.) Mississippi is an example of this remembrance: it resisted for almost a century and a half, and only officially ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 2013 (Editors 1, n.d.). Today this nostalgia is expressed as racism and social exclusion.

Social violence

There is another loophole that needs to be examined: social violence and the emotional attachment that certain sectors have to the possession and use of firearms. I have referred to James Fenimore Cooper's description in "The Frontier" of several incidents in which characters fired their guns for the sheer pleasure of doing so, or in sports, or in situations similar to hunting. The use of weapons of all kinds in sports is also old. Fencing, bow and arrow competitions, even martial arts, have long histories. Also, the hunting of deer, birds, foxes, rabbits, and even tigers and lions is an activity that, was once related only to the search for food and protection; for thousands of years, it has also become a so-called sporting activity.  

But gun culture goes beyond sports. In ancient society, weapons were designed for specific purposes. There were spears, bows, slings, swords, catapults, and different forms of protection in the case of weapons of war. Soldiers had the most lethal and heaviest weapons, while peasants had light weapons that were designed for hunting and small-scale self-defense. With the beginning of the use of gunpowder and firearms, it was common for any peasant in the Americas to have his rifle and revolver. In these reflections I do not intend to make an exhaustive history of the development of weapons; rather I want to pose the situation in which, since the nineteenth century, it has become an informal norm that non-slaves could "walk around armed" as a way of being.

But there were reactions, almost from the beginning of English colonization. Once again, a contradiction is evident, between false freedom (which in this case is achieved by the possession of a personal weapon), and a rational world (in which human happiness is a goal). There were dozens of local laws and regulations to limit access to and use of firearms, demonstrating not only the population's eagerness to have access to them, but the relative success of efforts to control them.  Spitzer explains how it happened:

"... restrictions on the carrying of weapons... they were common in the Western territories in the nineteenth century, even in the "Wild West." ... Axiomatic expressions such as 'the weapons that won the West'... (are) exaggerated.... These characterizations ignore the central role of farmers, ranchers, miners, traders, businessmen, and other farmers on the western plains. The 'domestication' of the West was, in fact, an agricultural and commercial movement, attributable mainly to cattle ranchers and farmers, to cowboys who did not brandish weapons. In fact, the six-round revolver and rifle played a relatively minor role in the activities of these groups, including the cowboys" (Spitizer, 2017, p. 12).

Even in the violent towns of the Old West, such as Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and Wichita, tolerance of violent behavior soon ended. Most of the deaths were related to the struggles against the tribes that did not meekly accept the displacement from their ancestral lands that the army imposed on them.

 

 

Migration

Another topic, mass migration in the nineteenth century from Europe, opens up many topics for reflection. The first, and perhaps the biggest, is: what is American culture after all? It has been called a "cauldron" for mixing cultures and races, but this is a metaphor for a society that can become homogeneous, in which the different elements merge into a single thing.

Even if the mixture is not total, it could suggest a peaceful and harmonious amalgam. Then we can talk about multiculturalism, or a kaleidoscope where the components of the mixture are visible and are part of a total design, identifiable with their own qualities. This second metaphor refers to a cultural projection where there are distinguishable, sometimes bilingual, neighborhoods such as "Little Italy," "Chinatown," or the vast fields planted with tulips in Holland, Michigan.  Barton says in this regard in the summary of his seminar, "Becoming American: Immigration and Assimilation in Late 19th Century America":

"Let us think of the Creoles of the South and the Franco-Canadians of the North, who clung to French for so many generations and maintained, however feebly, spiritual and social contacts with the mother country; of the Germans with their Deutschthum, their Männerchore, Turnvereine and Schützenfeste; of the universally separated Jews; of the Irish, intensely nationalist; of the Germans of Pennsylvania; the indomitable Poles, and even more indomitable bohemians; of the 30,000 Belgians in Wisconsin, with their 'Belgian' language, a mixture of Walloon and Flemish welded together in reaction to a strange social environment" (Barton, n.d.).

It refers to different cultural identities that coexist in peace. In the nineteenth century these concentrations were notable, but each new wave of immigration inspired rejection. For example, the entry of large numbers of Italians at the end of the 19th century inspired resistance, which included anti-Catholic sentiments in a majority Protestant population. But, in the end, these European groups, although "different", were white, and they assimilated fairly quickly.  The problem arises when you add "black ghettoes" or Native American reservations, because their inhabitants don't have as much freedom to leave their cultural islands and "mix" with the general population.

African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians had more difficulty. As Eduardo Bonilla Silva (2003) said: "Blacks, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, etc., could not mix in the race. They could be used as wood to produce fire for the pot, but they could not be used as material to be melted in it."

However, since the nineteenth century there has been a certain assimilation of the rejected groups: the last biography of Frederick Douglass (1881/n.d.) tells a story of a certain coexistence. Douglass was born and raised as a black slave. He learned to read in secret and eventually escaped to the north (and at two times to England). He was active in the abolitionist movement and came to know personally, both Presidents Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, as well as personalities such as author Harriet Beecher Stowe. He became a member of the Board of Trustees of the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company, and was later elected president of the bank. He was criticized for his last biography because some readers felt he should have denounced slavery more vigorously. Certainly, in the last chapters he told how he began to assimilate to the values of a middle class without so many racial prejudices. In response to this criticism, I have to say that, although Douglass's assimilation distanced him a little from a staunch activism, it brought him closer to the humanist ideal of equality and cultural freedom proposed by the Enlightenment.

In the end, the ideal of democracy is dialogue in coexistence.  Pruit and Thomas say in the introduction to their handbook for peace facilitators:

"It is now generally accepted that a sustainable peace is one that empowers people, and helps them acquire skills and build institutions to manage their different and sometimes conflicting interests in a peaceful manner. Dialogue is universally recognized as the quintessential tool for addressing and, hopefully, resolving the differences, objective or subjective, that caused conflict in the first place.... Dialogue is defined as a democratic method aimed at resolving problems through mutual understanding and concessions, rather than the unilateral imposition of the views and interests of one of the parties. On the other hand, democracy as a system of government is a framework for an organized and continuous dialogue" (Pruit and Thomas, 2007).

 

In short, the nineteenth century

The American nineteenth century laid the foundations of American culture, both in its problematic aspects and in the elaboration of its greatest ideal: an enduring and functional democracy. I close these reflections with the idea that the history of a democracy is a process. The country has had almost the same constitutional structure for three centuries, and in this time, it has seen many conflicts: a civil war, two world wars, many minor wars, and several major challenges to its survival. These are all echoes that come reverberating from the times of our deepest historical memories, but the most recent and vociferous sounded very loudly in the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that there has been progress since then. If that century posed the problems, it also provided some of the instruments to be able to solve them.

 

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