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The Shocking Truth of America’s Early History

Friday, December 18, 2015 17:49

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One of our greatest historians, shines his light on the United States Dark Ages

(Image: The “Peaceful” Pilgrims massacred the Pequots and destroyed their fort near Stonington, Connecticut, in 1637.)

It’s all a bit of a blur, isn’t it? That little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that’s not right, is it? I said it was a blur.

Bernard Bailyn, historian, publish The Barbarous Years which cast light on the darkness and fill-in some of the blanks of America’s early colonial years.Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture. Do you know what “flayed alive” means? It is when the skin is torn from the face and head and the “prisoner” is disemboweld while still alive. This was the practice of those early settlers that present-day history books depict as peaceful and pilgrims.

All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

“In truth, I didn’t think anyone sat around erasing it [history],” Bailyn tells.“Nobody sat around erasing this history,” he says in an even tone, “but it’s forgotten.”

“Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. William Bradford goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”