The Fabric of America Read Free

enough space for everyone, natives and newcomers alike. But then he added another that specifically answered any would-be colonist’s doubts about title to his American land. “If this be not a sufficient reason for such tender consciences,” he wrote offhandedly, “for a copper knife and a few toys as beads and hatchets, [the Indians] will sell you a whole country; and for a small matter their houses and the ground they dwell upon.”
    On the Southampton dockside, as John Winthrop’s company of settlers were about to depart for Massachusetts Bay in 1630, the Puritan preacher John Cotton preached an entire sermon on their divine right to the land, assuring them, “Where there is a vacant place, there is liberty for the sons of Adam or Noah to come and inhabit, though they neither buy it nor ask their leaves.” And Winthrop himself reinforced the message by pointing out that the few indigenous inhabitants had no real claim to the land, at least by the standards of English owners, whose property was exactly surveyed, neatly hedged in, and well grazed. “As for the Natives in new England,” he argued, “they inclose no Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to prove [their title to] the Land by … and Soe if we leave them sufficient for their use, wee may lawfully take the rest.”
    There was, however, a more violent method of acquiring land. In Jamestown, the colonists had originally been guided by John Smith into buying the land from the Powhatan confederation, but relations deteriorated as the colony became better established. In March 1622 the confederation turned on the colonists in outlying villages and massacred more than 350 of them, almost a third of the colony’s population. The Virginians’ reaction, after the first horrifed shock had passed, was unexpected—a desire not just for revenge, but for something more.
    â€œOur hands which before were tied with gentleness and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Sauvages,” wrote one colonist in a pamphlet entitled
The Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in Time of Peace and League, treacherously executed by the native infidels upon the English
, “So that we … may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us, whereby we shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious mattacke into the victorious sword … and possessing the fruits of others’ labours.”
    The principle that conquest in a just war gave a country legitimate possession of enemy territory was universally accepted, and for almost a century afterward force became the principal means in New England and the South for acquiring fresh territory. By the early 1700s, the Powhatan confederation and other Algonquian-language nations around the Chesapeake Bay had been almost obliterated by a combination of outright violence and disease. Then the Piedmont territory occupied by the Tuscarora and Yamasee was cleared as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains after a series of campaigns thatlasted from 1711 through 1716. In New England, the 1637 Pequot War and the greater destruction of King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676 achieved the same end.
    Dispossessing the original inhabitants was not enough. English law also required the land to be within the area specified by the royal charters. “No colony hath any right to dispose of any lands conquered from the natives,” ran a royal decree in the 1660s, “unless both the cause of the conquest be just and the land lye within the bound which the king by his charter hath given it.” Thus the vague phrases so confidently used in London had to be given an exact reality in America soil. But even then one more step was required by English common law. To convert the newly acquired territory into individual parcels of lawful property that had a value and could be