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Review title: America, spread your golden wings
"Sail on freedom's wind across the sky", continues this inspiring refrain from the American Adventure show at Disney World's Epcot theme park in Orlando. This 30-minute retelling of American history always leaves me humming that line for days afterward. In the interest of time and place--no one comes to the Happiest Place on Earth for a lesson in geographical history--it also compresses out of its story much of the much of the true story of the journey of that American eagle across the sky from sea to shining sea to a Continental America. That history lesson comes in the excellent but more sobering form of the second volume of D. W. Meinig's The Shaping of America ( Volume 1 carried the story from its European roots to the establishment of the new American government of the 13 Eastern seaboard colonies as of 1800) which takes us through the rapid and massive expansion of states and territories to the west and south through the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, and the violent expulsion of native Americans and expropriation of their lands in the first half of the 1800s.
Meining is writing a massive account of how geography (the land, water, and natural features, and the people who occupy and move across them) shaped the history, politics, language, transportation, infrastructure, and the cultural and religious beliefs of the people of America. He uses historical narrative to drive the story, data and maps to place the story in geographic context, and theoretical analysis to make sense of and provide applications to the broader abstract forces at work so we can understand and compare them across time and place. This may seem like a dry academic exercise (indeed my used edition was a university textbook in an earlier life based on the still-attached stickers encouraging the student to return rental textbooks during finals week) but any student or reader interested in American history will find that history and interest broadened and deepened by Meinig's approach and writing skill. There is much to learn about how America spread its wings and expanded its scope to the edges of the continent, which can deepen the reader's appreciation of the tenacity and temerity of the men and women who did it, while at the same time opening the reader's eyes to the danger and damage those same adventurers inflicted on the land and peoples as they did it, damage that reverberates down to this year's headlines.
One of the key lenses through which Meinig makes sense of our history is that of America as a federation of states (these--plural--United States), a national government (the--singular--United States), and an empire (the United States as America, the continent). While manifest destiny was claimed by many 19th century leaders for this American expansion not just western but outward in every direction (p. 169, p. 427), Meinig points out that there is no geographic or natural logic that made the sea-to-sea outcome inevitable, and indeed, he includes two "might-have-been" maps of a Lesser and a Greater United States based on possible outcomes of historic events that shaped the country. (see p. 211-218). These truly "American" events also shaped the other inhabitants of the continent to our north ("as yet feeble and unfocused" Canada taking shape as a nation based on a "determination not to be American", p. 57), south (Mexico fighting to retain its territory against encroaching colonies from the north and east as well as the US military during the Mexican War), and coastal waters (Cuba viewed by many US politicians as a potential slave state, and Alaska purchased from Russia to remove another potential European influence on the American continent).
Of course, as we know and as Meinig documented well in Volume 1, the land over which America spread its golden wings was neither empty nor "free" for the taking. In this volume, beginning with the push of European settlers into the Ohio Valley and the western woods of Georgia, Meinig documents the consistent and persistent approach to native encounters as "awash in deceit and cynicism, regarded by many--probably most--Americans as simply an expedient to pry the Indians out of their Eastern lands and shove them out of sight."
Imperial mistreatment of Native Americans would be consistent through time, geography, and tribe as Meinig retells the tragic murder, forced migration, and ignorant merging of cultures and tribes of native Americans into marginal western reservations. This last effect is easily overlooked:
Indeed I made the same mistake in my recent review of News of the World, an excellent novel about the attempt to return a young German girl from her native captors to her surviving European relatives in post Civil War Texas. When I referenced the four-way cultural clash of "Hispanics, white settlers, newly-freed blacks, and still-unconquered native Americans", I failed to recognize the sometimes volatile mixture of several distinct tribes in that region documented by Meinig arising out of natural rivalries and new forced neighbors due to American removal policies. The understanding provided by Meinig enhanced my appreciation for the storytelling of the novel and the movie based on it, increased my desire to see the movie again, and will hopefully heighten my awareness of my own blind assumptions about culture and race in the future.
Given the eventual outcome of history, the what-is that did happen, the largest section of this volume is given over to the description of the great westward movement of the cultural, economic, and geopolitical precedents from the original 13 states. Meinig describes four distinct cultures following roughly latitude lines: New England with missionary intent and zeal to the upper midwest, Midlands (primarily Pennsylvania and New York) with germanic practicality to the central midwest, Upland South from Virginia and North Carolina with backwoods individualism to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, and the Cotton Belt with patriarchal plantation slave-production to the humid regions of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi. As each of these peoples populated the land first west and north of the Ohio River and then west of the great Mississippi, Meinig devotes chapters to the new patterns of emerging cities, agriculture and industry, and territorial boundaries and governments. Ultimately such a mass movement becomes a story of transportation from rivers to canals to roads to rail to telegraph. It is a story of failed attempts at national policy and investment defaulting to commercial and speculative investment that benefited individuals, peoples, cities, and regions differentially but over time achieved something like a national system. (p. 349)
One of the most important factors blocking national transportation systems and government support for them was the growing divide between free and slave states, the corrosive influence of slavery growing in scope and intensity as states and territories expanded west. Indeed, that tension between federation and nation was raised to fighting words by southern leaders intent on keeping their black slaves in chains:
The attempted compromises--pairing admission of free and slave states, searching for latitudinal compromises that instead hardened boundaries--leading up to the final split in 1861 only succeeded in building on the tension between federation (were states free to leave?) and nation that Washington, Jefferson, and others acknowledged at our founding (p. 461-475). When the split finally came, it wasn't merely a north/south, Yankee/Fireater split, as Meinig illustrates in another of his insightful maps on p. 488, but a series of fracture lines driven by the existence, acceptance, and importance of slavery to the regions, economies, and cultures of these now disunited states.
Meinig explicitly avoids conclusions on the causes and objectives of the American Civil War, focusing instead on the geopolitical factors and outcomes. But when he writes "If the objective of the war was not only to deny secession but to abolish slavery as an archaic labor system unsuitable to a modern state and a cripplingly divisive problem in national politics" (p. 519), he has perhaps inadvertently exposed the fracture line that still divides America today. In the aftermath of the war, the victorious Union army and politicians were only interested in reuniting the states (to "deny secession") and reestablishing business and life as usual (to abolish an "archaic labor system"), with little concern from the Northern white population for what to do to help millions of now-free former slaves live under their new circumstances and with no expectation of treating them as equals under the law, while the defeated southerners violent intent was to reestablish physical and legal control over the blacks in their midst with as little differentiation from slavery as possible. Neither side of the white majority culture and political parties, save a few radical abolitionists and small sects of devout Christians, were ready and willing to state the objective of abolishing slavery as a moral stain on American government and history, and a mortal sin against God and humanity that must be faced, with forgiveness begged, mercy given, and equality established. Despite the marginal improvements since reconstruction and Jim Crow through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the stain of that objective unfaced rears its ugly head today as black lives still don't matter and still-empowered white racism tries to block black voters, discount their votes, or gerrymander them into insignificant voting ghettos. We had come out of the Civil War as a politically singular nation, the United States of America, with deeply divided cultures we were then and now unable and unwilling to reconcile.
So America the nation did spread its wings over America the continent and it is indeed a dramatic history. That it is a history of dynamic success as a political experiment, an economic miracle, and a cultural creation that changed the world is not diminished by understanding the excellent geographical perspective provided by Meinig. Learning more about the land, water, and peoples underneath freedom's wind will deepen the reader's appreciation of the history and of the need for humility to become better Americans and better humans.
"Sail on freedom's wind across the sky", continues this inspiring refrain from the American Adventure show at Disney World's Epcot theme park in Orlando. This 30-minute retelling of American history always leaves me humming that line for days afterward. In the interest of time and place--no one comes to the Happiest Place on Earth for a lesson in geographical history--it also compresses out of its story much of the much of the true story of the journey of that American eagle across the sky from sea to shining sea to a Continental America. That history lesson comes in the excellent but more sobering form of the second volume of D. W. Meinig's The Shaping of America ( Volume 1 carried the story from its European roots to the establishment of the new American government of the 13 Eastern seaboard colonies as of 1800) which takes us through the rapid and massive expansion of states and territories to the west and south through the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, and the violent expulsion of native Americans and expropriation of their lands in the first half of the 1800s.
Meining is writing a massive account of how geography (the land, water, and natural features, and the people who occupy and move across them) shaped the history, politics, language, transportation, infrastructure, and the cultural and religious beliefs of the people of America. He uses historical narrative to drive the story, data and maps to place the story in geographic context, and theoretical analysis to make sense of and provide applications to the broader abstract forces at work so we can understand and compare them across time and place. This may seem like a dry academic exercise (indeed my used edition was a university textbook in an earlier life based on the still-attached stickers encouraging the student to return rental textbooks during finals week) but any student or reader interested in American history will find that history and interest broadened and deepened by Meinig's approach and writing skill. There is much to learn about how America spread its wings and expanded its scope to the edges of the continent, which can deepen the reader's appreciation of the tenacity and temerity of the men and women who did it, while at the same time opening the reader's eyes to the danger and damage those same adventurers inflicted on the land and peoples as they did it, damage that reverberates down to this year's headlines.
One of the key lenses through which Meinig makes sense of our history is that of America as a federation of states (these--plural--United States), a national government (the--singular--United States), and an empire (the United States as America, the continent). While manifest destiny was claimed by many 19th century leaders for this American expansion not just western but outward in every direction (p. 169, p. 427), Meinig points out that there is no geographic or natural logic that made the sea-to-sea outcome inevitable, and indeed, he includes two "might-have-been" maps of a Lesser and a Greater United States based on possible outcomes of historic events that shaped the country. (see p. 211-218). These truly "American" events also shaped the other inhabitants of the continent to our north ("as yet feeble and unfocused" Canada taking shape as a nation based on a "determination not to be American", p. 57), south (Mexico fighting to retain its territory against encroaching colonies from the north and east as well as the US military during the Mexican War), and coastal waters (Cuba viewed by many US politicians as a potential slave state, and Alaska purchased from Russia to remove another potential European influence on the American continent).
Of course, as we know and as Meinig documented well in Volume 1, the land over which America spread its golden wings was neither empty nor "free" for the taking. In this volume, beginning with the push of European settlers into the Ohio Valley and the western woods of Georgia, Meinig documents the consistent and persistent approach to native encounters as "awash in deceit and cynicism, regarded by many--probably most--Americans as simply an expedient to pry the Indians out of their Eastern lands and shove them out of sight."
But there is no reason to doubt that some public officials and concerned citizens were deeply committed to the official rationale: removal as an act of rescue, resettlement as an impetus for cultural change, the whole project a national attempt at a kind of geographical social engineering. That the Indians formally agreed to all these provisions, actually requested and specified many of the tools and teachers they were to be supplied with, must not be taken as representing general agreement within any one tribe or nation as to the desirability, direction, or pace of culture change. Here the benign language of treaties masks the ambivalence and factionalism, the pain and despair of captive peoples under relentless pressures to make themselves into something that seemed to contradict all that they had ever been. (p. 100)
Imperial mistreatment of Native Americans would be consistent through time, geography, and tribe as Meinig retells the tragic murder, forced migration, and ignorant merging of cultures and tribes of native Americans into marginal western reservations. This last effect is easily overlooked:
American Whites commonly assumed that any two or more Indian tribes could and should, whenever appropriate to larger purposes, easily cooperate, amalgamate, fuse into some larger body, or dissolve into individual family units. This assumption rested on a widespread belief that all Indian tribes were basically alike, that they had no real history, that they were not really “nations” in any European sense. (p. 180)
Indeed I made the same mistake in my recent review of News of the World, an excellent novel about the attempt to return a young German girl from her native captors to her surviving European relatives in post Civil War Texas. When I referenced the four-way cultural clash of "Hispanics, white settlers, newly-freed blacks, and still-unconquered native Americans", I failed to recognize the sometimes volatile mixture of several distinct tribes in that region documented by Meinig arising out of natural rivalries and new forced neighbors due to American removal policies. The understanding provided by Meinig enhanced my appreciation for the storytelling of the novel and the movie based on it, increased my desire to see the movie again, and will hopefully heighten my awareness of my own blind assumptions about culture and race in the future.
Given the eventual outcome of history, the what-is that did happen, the largest section of this volume is given over to the description of the great westward movement of the cultural, economic, and geopolitical precedents from the original 13 states. Meinig describes four distinct cultures following roughly latitude lines: New England with missionary intent and zeal to the upper midwest, Midlands (primarily Pennsylvania and New York) with germanic practicality to the central midwest, Upland South from Virginia and North Carolina with backwoods individualism to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, and the Cotton Belt with patriarchal plantation slave-production to the humid regions of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi. As each of these peoples populated the land first west and north of the Ohio River and then west of the great Mississippi, Meinig devotes chapters to the new patterns of emerging cities, agriculture and industry, and territorial boundaries and governments. Ultimately such a mass movement becomes a story of transportation from rivers to canals to roads to rail to telegraph. It is a story of failed attempts at national policy and investment defaulting to commercial and speculative investment that benefited individuals, peoples, cities, and regions differentially but over time achieved something like a national system. (p. 349)
One of the most important factors blocking national transportation systems and government support for them was the growing divide between free and slave states, the corrosive influence of slavery growing in scope and intensity as states and territories expanded west. Indeed, that tension between federation and nation was raised to fighting words by southern leaders intent on keeping their black slaves in chains:
A few years later, in a debate over the funding of "national" roads, Senator Smith of South Carolina warned against this "insidious word": "the term National was a new word that had crept into our political vocabulary," he said, but "it was a term unknown to the origin and theory of our Government"; indeed, it had been specifically expunged from the draft of the Constitution. (p. 399)
The attempted compromises--pairing admission of free and slave states, searching for latitudinal compromises that instead hardened boundaries--leading up to the final split in 1861 only succeeded in building on the tension between federation (were states free to leave?) and nation that Washington, Jefferson, and others acknowledged at our founding (p. 461-475). When the split finally came, it wasn't merely a north/south, Yankee/Fireater split, as Meinig illustrates in another of his insightful maps on p. 488, but a series of fracture lines driven by the existence, acceptance, and importance of slavery to the regions, economies, and cultures of these now disunited states.
Meinig explicitly avoids conclusions on the causes and objectives of the American Civil War, focusing instead on the geopolitical factors and outcomes. But when he writes "If the objective of the war was not only to deny secession but to abolish slavery as an archaic labor system unsuitable to a modern state and a cripplingly divisive problem in national politics" (p. 519), he has perhaps inadvertently exposed the fracture line that still divides America today. In the aftermath of the war, the victorious Union army and politicians were only interested in reuniting the states (to "deny secession") and reestablishing business and life as usual (to abolish an "archaic labor system"), with little concern from the Northern white population for what to do to help millions of now-free former slaves live under their new circumstances and with no expectation of treating them as equals under the law, while the defeated southerners violent intent was to reestablish physical and legal control over the blacks in their midst with as little differentiation from slavery as possible. Neither side of the white majority culture and political parties, save a few radical abolitionists and small sects of devout Christians, were ready and willing to state the objective of abolishing slavery as a moral stain on American government and history, and a mortal sin against God and humanity that must be faced, with forgiveness begged, mercy given, and equality established. Despite the marginal improvements since reconstruction and Jim Crow through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the stain of that objective unfaced rears its ugly head today as black lives still don't matter and still-empowered white racism tries to block black voters, discount their votes, or gerrymander them into insignificant voting ghettos. We had come out of the Civil War as a politically singular nation, the United States of America, with deeply divided cultures we were then and now unable and unwilling to reconcile.
So America the nation did spread its wings over America the continent and it is indeed a dramatic history. That it is a history of dynamic success as a political experiment, an economic miracle, and a cultural creation that changed the world is not diminished by understanding the excellent geographical perspective provided by Meinig. Learning more about the land, water, and peoples underneath freedom's wind will deepen the reader's appreciation of the history and of the need for humility to become better Americans and better humans.
