The True Story of Roanoke

Part the last of our short series on the lost colony of Roanoke brings us to what really happened to the English colonists, men, women, and children, who had disappeared from the fledgling Roanoke colony in 1589. Again, we’re indebted to James Horn’s fantastic book A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America for the facts herein.

We get our first clues from John Smith, the man who had his finger in every pie of interest in early English colonial efforts in Virginia. In 1608, 19 years after the Roanoke colony was found abandoned, Smith was traveling around the coast of Virginia and mapping it; on his map, he made a note that read “Here remain the 4 men clothed that came from Roanoke to Okanahowan”. (“Clothed” refers to wearing European clothing.) Wahunsonacock (known to us as Powhatan) also willingly told Smith about other survivors—“6 from Roanoke”.

English people had long been speculating on what had happened to the people of the colony. The government maintained that they had never vanished or been killed, but still lived hidden somewhere; the impetus behind this was to keep an English foot in the door in North America. If the English could claim they had a colony in Virginia, they could continue to fight Spanish claims to the entire continent. So Smith’s news was big. If Roanoke colonists really were still alive and living in Virginia, then England had two colonies in North America in 1608. Christopher Newport was sent from England to Virginia to look for them and to take over command of Jamestown colony (to Smith’s chagrin).

The next year, in 1609, another report was made of Roanoke survivors: Sir Thomas Gates, who had arrived at Jamestown with more men, had been informed by the Virginia Company that alleged copper mines in Virginia were not far from where four English survivors lived, ones who had been with “Sir Walter Ralegh, which escaped from the slaughter of Powhatan of Roanoke, upon the first arrival of our colony.”

Who told the men in London that there were Roanoke survivors? Horn posits that it might have been an American named Machumps who went to London in 1608 with Christopher Newport and returned home with Gates. William Strachey told the Company that Machumps had said that the people of Roanoke had lived peacefully for 20 years with the Americans, freely mixing, when Powhatan ordered them killed for no reason. The werowance (leader) Eyanoco saved the lives of seven of the English to work as slaves in his copper mines. Powhatan had killed the English, according to Machumps, because his priests told him they would become a threat to him.

What threat could the colonists have posed? Horn posits that Wahunsonacock may have worried that the survivors would work to ally the newcomers at Jamestown with Americans against him. Wahunsonacock goverened a large area and had to maintain his control over many groups within his rule, while putting down threats to his rule from outside. He also wanted to monopolize the copper trade. If the English, who clearly wanted the copper, worked through the Roanoke survivors/interpreters/go-betweens to organize groups of people under their own rule, this would pose a powerful threat to Wahunsonacock.

So the colonists were hunted down in their new communities, where many had likely intermarried with Americans, and killed so that they could not reach out to their countrymen newly established at Jamestown. It was actually the arrival of the men at the site of Jamestown that triggered the deaths of their fellows, because Wahunsonacock realized the inevitable connection the survivors would make to the newcomers, no matter how assimilated into their new American society they were.

It’s heartening to know that the Roanoke colony was not destroyed by Americans as soon as it was planted. The story of Roanoke is actually a story of cooperation and assimilation and acceptance. It’s ironic that if Jamestown had not been established, the survivors would likely have lived long and happy lives as Americans. It was the arrival of their fellow English that doomed them.

Roanoke disappears

Part 2 of our short series on the lost colony of Roanoke,  deeply indebted to James Horn’s book A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, finds the group of about 100 Englishmen confronted with a conflict with their neighbors, the Secotans, in the summer of 1585. A few small battles were fought between the two groups, and their chief Wingina was killed. Ralph Lane, captain of the English colonists, decided to abandon the colony, sensing that the Secotans would redouble their efforts to drive away the intruders now that their chief had been killed. In June, all but 15 of the men left Roanoke on a ship sent by their patron Walter Ralegh that had been sent to see how they were doing.

So ended Roanoke mark 1. Roanoake mark 2 followed close on its heels, however, as the sponsors organized by Ralegh immediately made a second attempt to set up a colony. The problem, they felt, with the first try had been that it had not been set near deep waters that could accomodate shipping, and its ground was not fertile enough. They quickly recruited new colonists to settle farther north on the Chesapeake Bay, and appointed John White to lead them.

This would be a mixed group of men and women (and nine children), as the sponsors felt that the soldiers they sent the first time had likely been too aggressive with the local peoples. Average citizens would also be more likely to farm and start creating trade goods to send back to England than the soldiers, who had been mostly looking for gold and other types of easy plunder. The new colonists left in May 1586 and arrived in America in mid-July.

They had their ship’s captain stop briefly at Roanoke Island, site of the first colony, to check on the 15 men who had stayed behind and likely take them along on the trip farther upriver to the Chesapeake Bay. But once they stopped at Roanoke, the captain, Fernandes, suddenly refused to take them upriver, claiming he and his men were missing the privateering season in the Caribbean and had no further time to waste in the mid-Atlantic. Stranded on Roanoke, the new settlers suffered attacks from the Secotans, who saw history repeating itself.

The colonists decided that John White should sail back to England with Fernandes and get more supplies and more people from the colony’s sponsors, and let them know that the plan of moving upriver was going to be delayed. Ideally, with more people and supplies they might be able to make the move, but for now, they would relocate inland, where they could find more food over the winter (White would be back in the spring).

White left. He would not return for three years. In his absence, the colony disappeared.

We have no records, so far, left by the men, women, and children he left on Roanoke Island, except for one word White found carved on a tree at the original settlement when he did return in 1589: Croatoan. Baffled and grieving, White and his group searched for the colonists, especially his daughter, Eleanor Dare, who had given birth to his grand-daughter Virginia Dare—the first English person known to have been born in America—in his absence,  to no avail.

What happened, they asked themselves? White had been prevented from returning to the colony by the Spanish Armada attack on England in 1588, when no ship was able to leave an English port. The Armada episode was just one part of the shipping and privateering war between Spain and England that was played out in the Americas. Perhaps the colony had been attacked by the Spanish. But Croatoan did not sound like a Spanish name… the more likely scenario, they felt, was slaughter by the hostile local people.

And so Roanoke mark 2 ended, and to this day most people are not told about some very clear and persuasive evidence pointing to the real fate of the colonists that was reported by the men of Jamestown just a few decades later.

Next time: the fate of the Roanoke colonists

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?

One of my vivid memories of school-based learning is of being in fourth or fifth grade, reading about the early English colonization efforts in Virginia in our Social Studies textbook. This included a paragraph on the Lost Colony of Roanoke: its English colonists were left there with the promise that another ship would come with more people and supplies, the first English baby born in America, Virginia Dare, was born there, supply ships were delayed by years, and when a ship finally did arrive, the colony was deserted and in disrepair, with only the word “Croatoan” carved on a tree. The account ended with the statement that no one knows what “Croatoan” meant, or what happened to the people of the colony, and that Roanoke remains a mystery to this day.

Startled and deeply upset by this closure-free story, I used my fourth-grade knowledge of how to get information: I went to the glossary of the textbook and looked up “Croatoan”, fully expecting to see a sizable entry explaining it. I have to laugh when I remember my shock to find a short entry that said something like “Unidentified term; see colony of Roanoke”. Still holding on, I duly looked up “colony of Roanoke” expecting to find an answer, and was once again brutally disappointed. It was the first time a resource book had ever failed to provide an answer to something for me, and an inauspicious start to my career as a historian.

Over the years since then, I’ve had the same mild interest in Roanoke that most Americans have, idly wondering what happened there, but figuring we’d just never know. Then I read A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, by James Horn (2005), and was exposed to the very likely solution of this mystery.  We’ll explore the whole story in this brief series, drawing on Horn’s fantastic book, starting with the founding of the colony.

Roanoke was originally planned by Sir Walter Ralegh and a group of experienced explorers, sailors, and financiers. It was to be located on the mid-Atlantic coast for strategic reasons: England was looking for a foothold in the continent well north of the Spanish in Florida and well south of the French in Canada. The English had seen French settlements in northern Florida crushed by the Spanish, and knew that the Spanish were well aware of England’s own plan to use Atlantic settlements as bases for raids on the rich Spanish shipping routes running from the Caribbean to Spain.

Roanoke Island was chosen by Ralegh and his team after a scouting voyage to the coast picked it out as a good spot. Ralph Lane led the band of slightly more than 100  men who arrived on the island in 1585. Lane was a soldier, and the first building built was a fort, as much to protect the colonists from Spanish attack as American. The group in fact felt confident about good relations with their American neighbors, as the scouting trip had come back to England with two American guides, Manteo and Wanchese, who seemed to welcome the plan for a colony in their midst.

Through the summer of 1585 the men explored the region, and entered the Chesapeake Bay area (where Jamestown would later be founded). Lane visited Menatonon, chief of the Chowanocs, in Spring 1586, and was told perhaps the first of many misunderstood stories of riches to be found just a little farther inland. Lane, like most European explorers, believed he was being told about hordes of gold in bottomless mines just a few miles west, on the Pacific Coast. (The vastness of the continent was undisclosed at this time to all but a few mostly luckless Spanish explorers.) Lane wrote that Menatonon told him of a king in the west who had so many pearls that “his beds, and houses [were] garnished with them… that it [was] a wonder to see” [Horn 31]. As Horn points out, this was actually a description of Wahunsonacock, known generally to history as Powhatan, because he was the leader of the Powhatan people.

Lane returned to Roanoke with the good news, but it was quickly forgotten, as trouble began brewing with the colony’s American neighbors.

Next time: Secotans v. Roanokes

Consequences of the Mexican War

Part the last of our series on interesting facets of the Mexican War concludes with the 1848 peace Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the United States full ownership of Texas, with its western border at the Rio Grande, and the modern States of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, almost all of Arizona, Colorado, and part of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming (the rest of Arizona and New Mexico would be acquired through the 1853 Gadsden Purchase). In return, Mexico received a little over $18 million in compensation and forgiveness of $3.25 million owed by Mexico to the U.S.

Immense as the territories ceded by Mexico were, there were a number of U.S. Senators who urged Congress to take advantage of Mexico’s internal political chaos and force it to also give up its states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, in today’s northeastern Mexico. This would have extended the U.S. hundreds of miles beyond Texas’ current southern border. Partly because there was growing opposition to the war in the U.S. (Illinois Rep. Abraham Lincoln was opposed), and partly because the parts of Mexico that the U.S. had so long desired, particularly California, were already handed over, Congress declined to pursue the war any longer, and this plan was dropped.

The Mexican Cession was at once a great acquisition for the U.S. and the end of the U.S. as it had been. The new lands made the slavery debate impossible to resolve through political compromise. The 1820 Missouri Compromise would have allowed slavery in New Mexico, Arizona, and the southern half of California, but not in Colorado, Utah, Kansas, or Wyoming. But anti-slavery Americans were not about to let California, the greatest prize of them all, the one that held out the most promise to small farmers and free labor, become a slave state (since a state could not be half-free, half-slave, California ran the risk of becoming a full slave state). Pro-slavery Americans knew that New Mexico and Arizona were not lands that lent themselves to plantation farming, and determined more fiercely than ever to have California, and the farmland that would become Kansas, too.

Free-Soil, free-labor, anti-slavery, and abolitionist Americans said now was the time to contain slavery altogether—to see the new territories not in the context of the north-south line of the Missouri Compromise, but as The West, a new entity that was not bound by the north-south politics or agreements of the eastern states. Keep slavery out of The West, they said, and keep it contained in the southern states until slave states were so outnumbered by free states, and slavery such an anomaly in the country, that slavery itself would die out.

Pro-slavery Americans had been ready for this fight for years. The nation had expanded along the Missouri Compromise line for nearly 30 years, it was the law of the land, there was no reason to change it, and any anti-slavery agitation in The West would be illegal, and punishable by law.

The problems the Mexican Cession caused would have to be quickly hammered out in the Compromise of 1850, a five-part piece of legislation that tried to create true compromise between anti- and pro-slavery Americans, not along purely geographical lines, but more philosophically. Slavery was not banned in the West (1), but California would enter the Union as a free state, end of story (2). Each of the remaining  western territories that wanted to become a state would decide on its own whether to come in as slave or free: popular sovereignty let the people in the territory vote on their status before applying for statehood (3). The Fugitive Slave Act was introduced, which allowed slaveholders to violate the personal liberty laws in free states (4), and slavery would remain a feature in the capital, Washington, DC (5).

This Compromise would be short-lived. As settlers poured into all regions of the Cession, the stakes became higher and higher on both sides of the slavery issue. Pro-slavery Americans needed numbers; they couldn’t allow slavery to be restricted to the existing southern states or their needs would never be met in Congress, where free-state Representatives and Senators would far outnumber slave. Anti-slavery Americans also needed numbers, to reduce slavery to a regional curiosity of a small number of states, rendered economically useless. The battles over how western states would come into the Union led to vote-rigging, where people from outside a territory would pour in when it came time to vote slave or free, making a mockery of the concept of popular sovereignty. The violence that ensued in these situations was made legendary in Bloody Kansas.

In short, the Mexican War was most important both for expanding the U.S. and for hastening the coming of the Civil War. Both events made the nation greater, one geographically, one morally. It was a dress-rehearsal for the Civil War in that so many men who fought together in the Mexican War fought against each other in the Civil War, including both Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. And it nearly completed the U.S. conquest of the continent between Canada and what was left of Mexico (the last bits settled in the Gadsden Purchase). The discovery of gold in California the year after the war ended spurred not only Californian settlement but the western rush of pioneers that dominated American demographics until the end of the 19th century. It also left the United States as the undisputed great power of the western hemisphere—a great deal of impact for a war that is often skipped over as students of U.S. history move from the Revolutionary War directly to the Civil War.

California, Californios, and Americans

Part 4 of our series on interesting aspects of the Mexican-American War takes us to California. California is part of the Mexican War, of course, because what is now the State of California was northern Mexico at that time. While many Easterners in the U.S. talked almost mystically of the riches of California, and how it was the fairest land on the continent, the distance and the fact that it was a foreign country kept the number of U.S. settlers in Upper California very small.

John C. Frémont was an American who wanted to annex California, and hoped to do so almost single-handedly. He had been granted permission by the U.S. government to explore in the west, and was supposed to be canvassing the Disputed Area (now Oregon and Washington) in December 1845, but Frémont took his time moving through northern Mexico, dragging his feet and looking for a chance to lead his small group of armed men in an attack on the Mexican government in Upper California. He tried to start a revolution at Gavilan Peak but was told to cease and desist immediately by the U.S. consul in Upper California, Thomas Larkin. This was in early 1846, and the U.S. was not yet at war with Mexico. There was no reason to expect U.S. support for a minor insurrection begun in its name and likely doomed to failure.

Once war was declared in May, and Americans in California got word of it in June, things moved quickly. By mid-July, Sonoma, Monterey, and Yerba Buena (today’s San Francisco) were quickly occupied by American and pro-American settlers, including Frémont. The Mexican government was let down by its governor, Pío Pico, who fled, and the emboldened Americans occupied Los Angeles in mid-August. This occupation was carried out by U.S. Marines as well as settlers, but the local Mexican population was not intimidated, and launched a counter-attack under José María Flores. These Californios were unaided by the Mexican government, which was fighting U.S. forces far to the east; the Californios were defending their land from hostile occupation and seizure, and they defeated over 300 Americans, including Marines, at the two-day Battle of Dominguez Rancho in early October. In early December, Californios fought U.S. soldiers under General Stephen Kearny to a standstill near San Diego.

With the weight of the U.S. government behind the push to annex Upper California, however, the efforts of the Californios were doomed. By mid-January 1847, U.S. forces (including Frémont and his men) had won two significant battles and the majority of the remaining Californios surrendered. On January 13, 1847, the Treaty of Cahuenga was signed. This was a treaty strictly between the Californios and the U.S. military forces in Upper California, ending the fighting in Upper California. California would not change hands until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the next year.

Next time: The end of the war

The U.S. declares war on Mexico

Part 3 of our series on interesting facts and background to the Mexican War addresses the U.S. declaration of war and the factors leading up to it.

You will recall from part 2 that the U.S. saw two distinct threats to its ability to gain control of the Pacific Coast: Britain, which owned land from the southern border of today’s Alaska to the current southern border of British Columbia, Canada, and which had designs on the disputed territory just south (today’s States of Washington and Oregon); and Mexico, which owned Upper California (today’s State of California). Britain was taken out of the picture by the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which removed British claims to the disputed territory. Now there was only Mexico to deal with.

Relations between the two countries had been strained by the Texan independence movement, in which American citizens who moved to Mexico to settle its northern state of Coahuila y Tejas decided, after a short residence, to create an independent state there called Texas. The Mexican government responded in 1829 by levying a property tax, putting high taxes on American imports, and prohibiting slavery. Because Americans in Coahuila y Tejas outnumbered native Mexicans, and because internal political strife in Mexico made it difficult to fully command the northern states, they were able to ignore those laws, particularly the one against slaveholding.  But when General Antonio López de Santa Anna became dictator of Mexico in 1834, he was determined to bring Coahuila y Tejas firmly back under Mexican control, and when the Texans declared their independence in 1836, Santa Anna traveled north to squash them.

Santa Anna’s defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto seemed to leave the Texans free to declare their independence. They did so, claiming all the territory in yellow on the map below (courtesy of Wikipedia), which they actually had settled, and then all the land in green as well, which they had not, and which, as you see, extended all the way north into Wyoming.

 

 Because of the unsettled state of Texas, with its disputed borders and no official treaty with Mexico stating that it gave up Coahuila y Tejas, the U.S. was relatively slow to move when Texans made it clear they wanted to join the Union. The biggest potential problem was Texas’ claim to the Rio Grande as its western border which, as you can see, cut deeply into Mexico. U.S. politicians realized Mexico would not accept the U.S. annexing a new state that claimed so much Mexican soil as its own. When Texas was brought into the Union, in 1845, no mention of the Rio Grande border was made, and the U.S. made no formal claim to the land up to the river.

Still, Mexico was outraged with the annexation of Texas by the United States. Mexico had never officially ceded Coahuila y Tejas to the Texans. It was both the disastrous political instability in Mexico City and pressure from Britain and France, both of which had recognized Texas as a U.S. state, that kept the nation from immediately marching the full force of the army into its northern state and reclaiming it. Mexico did not declare war, but did break off diplomatic relations with the U.S.

In response, President Polk, who wanted the Rio Grande border, sent General Zachary Taylor to Texas to claim it. Again, Texas and the Rio Grande were just a means to an end for Polk and for most Americans—controlling the western lands up to the Rio Grande was one step closer to owning the Pacific, and Upper California. An army launched from the Rio Grande could be in California much sooner and with much less difficulty than one launched from the Mississippi River.

This is made clear by the secret cash offer Polk made to President José Joaquín de Herrera on November 10, 1845: $25 million for the lands up to the Rio Grande, and also for Upper California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico; U.S. forgiveness of a $3 million debt Mexico owed the U.S.; and another $25-30 million to sweeten the deal.

It was too late. Mexicans were outraged when the deal was made public. They would not be bought. National honor was at stake. President Herrera was accused of treason for having entertained Polk’s representative and was deposed. The new government under General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga stated its intention to re-claim Texas and retain all of Mexico’s northern states.

Polk ordered Taylor to take his army to the Rio Grande—into Mexico itself—and ignored Mexican demands to withdraw. This invasion sent the Mexican army north, and in April 1846 sixteen American soldiers on a patrol were killed by Mexican cavalry at the Nueces River. The Nueces, as you can see on the map, is just north of the Rio Grande in the boot of modern-day Texas and was the actual border of Texas (unlike the Rio Grande, which was the Texans’ desired border). Polk went to Congress on May 11 and stated that since the attack had occurred on the Nueces, officially U.S. territory because it was the actual State of Texas, Mexico had “shed American blood upon American soil”. Polk asked Congress to declare war, which it did on May 13th.

Mexico was likely irritated to hear the Nueces righteously claimed as American soil, since again there had never been a signed treaty handing over its northern state to the Texans or to the U.S. It declared war on July 7.

The debate in the U.S. Congress over whether to declare war fell along party lines—Whigs being mostly against it, Democrats being mostly for it. This sounds familiar to us today, but it was not the norm back then (see The Birth of Red and Blue States for more on this.) The Democrats were becoming more identified with Southern slaveholding interests. They wanted to fight for Texas, and the rest of northern Mexico, to make more slave states, and to bolster the slave-state population. Pro-slavery Americans worried that their influence was shrinking as the west was won in more northern areas. The free North was expanding faster than the slave South. If stalwartly slave Texas could be secured and substantially expanded west, it would be easy to continue the westward drive of slavery through what would become New Mexico and part of Arizona (Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico) and the great prize of California itself.

The Whigs were becoming more identified with Northern free state interests, and knew exactly why the Southern Democrats were so eager to go to war. In the end, however, the Whigs were not united enough to challenge the Southern Democrats on the slavery issue, or to resist the war fever that swept Washington. They also longed to annex California, the most desired land in the west, and so they voted for war.

Next time: California in the Mexican War

Fifty-four Forty or Fight!

The second post in our series on the interesting background of the Mexican War is on Oregon.

While Mexico held the desirable land of Upper California, it was Great Britain which provoked the first conflict with the U.S. on the Pacific Coast, and Oregon that was the disputed territory.

Today’s States of Washington and Oregon were, in 1846, a disputed area that Britain called the Columbia District and the U.S. called the Oregon Territory. By 1840, British citizens and officials in Canada began to petition London to annex the Columbia District—the disputed zone—and make it a part of the British Empire, an extension of British Canada. It was in part expanded American settlement in the disputed zone—what the settlers called Oregon Territory—that led the British to call for annexation.

Unfortunately for those advocates of British expansion, a new government in London led by Prime Minister Robert Peel came to power in 1841 which advocated strengthening Britain’s home defenses and home industry rather than further colonial expansion. While Britain was not actively working, then, to annex the disputed zone, Americans did not know this, and in 1844 the Democratic party began to insist that the U.S. not only officially incorporate the Oregon Territory, but also British Canada up to the border with Russian Alaska—the border at latitude 54°40′.

The Oregon Dispute was on. James Polk became president in 1844 and began negotiations with Great Britain for a U.S. annexation of the disputed zone up to the 49th parallel—the modern-day borderline between Washington State and Canada. But Democratic politicians, led by an Indiana Senator and a Missouri Congressman, called for the U.S. to annex British Canada up to 54°40′, and the catchphrase “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” was born.

Of course, while there were always a few Manifest Destiny hotheads calling for war in the west in this period, neither nation really wanted to fight another war. The U.S. and Britain had been in conflict over western land on the North American continent since 1763, when the French and Indian War ended and the British forbid American settlers to move west of the Appalachians. Now, after the Revolution and the War of 1812, both sides wanted a diplomatic answer to the conflict over the disputed zone.

They got one, in the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which set the current border between the U.S. and British Columbia, Canada. But why did the conflict fizzle out so quickly? And why is this post about Canada and the Pacific Northwest in our series on the Mexican War?

The answer is that at the same time it was negotiating with Britain over the disputed zone, the U.S. was teetering on the brink of war with Mexico over Texas. Texas, the territory that most Americans would have traded in a heartbeat for Upper California, had been admitted into the Union as a state in 1845, despite the fact that it had never been officially given its independence by Mexico. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the U.S. and prepared for war. The U.S. needed a victory in Texas to pave the way for a smooth annexation of Upper California; Mexico had to be defeated by and in fear of the U.S. to make that possible. So war over Texas it must be, and matters in the Pacific Northwest had to be wrapped up. It was also key to have firm and official U.S. control of the lands bordering Upper California, so that Mexico would be surrounded by U.S. territory, and could be invaded if necessary from the north.

Next time: The Mexican War begins

Origins of the Mexican War; or, the fight for the Pacific Coast

Welcome to our series on the Mexican War. Rather than outline the events of the war itself, which are easily found in many other places, we’ll focus here on the less well-known aspects of that war, the drivers and the players who, in different ways, brought the war on and saw it through.

The Mexican War (1846-8) is often seen today as a major example of U.S. western expansion at all costs, at the expense of Mexico alone. While there were many Americans at the time who believed in the nation’s Manifest Destiny—its right and even its duty to expand across the continent and take possession of it—the situation surrounding the Mexican War, American motives and actions leading to that war, and the nations involved were more complex than they seem.

Mexico was going through tremendous upheaval at the time. In 1846 four different presidencies took office. Democratic Mexican self-government was hampered by a colonial history which left few Mexicans with the experience or understanding of democratic self-government. Internal revolutions convulsed the nation and made it very difficult for the Mexican government to exert control over its northern territories, particularly Texas, which was quickly filling up with American citizens who, over the course of the 1830s, began to see themselves as citizens of an independent republic.

Most Americans, however, when they looked west, were far more interested in California than Texas. “Upper California” was the territory that is now most of the State of California (“Lower California” being what is now the Baja peninsula in Mexico), and it was considered the finest land in the west. Upper California was part of Mexico, but it was part of the expansion plans of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia.

Each of these nations wanted to claim the entire Pacific Coast, from the Arctic Circle to the present-day U.S.-Mexican border, for itself. Russia had been enjoying a lucrative fur-trading industry on the Pacific Coast since the early 1700s, with trading posts established from Alaska to just north of San Francisco. Alaska was shown on maps as “Russian America.” For Russia, taking control of Upper California from Mexico would be the first, most important step in taking control over its entire fur trading territory. Great Britain of course controlled Canada as a colony, and had an established presence north of the modern-day border of Washington State. But many Britons wanted to seize the Oregon Territory, which was tentatively claimed by the United States, extending British Canada right down to the border with Mexico (the present-day northern border of California).

A map of the Pacific Coast in 1846 would show Alaska as Russian America, with British Canada to its south, extending to its modern border with the State of Washington, a “disputed zone” that is today’s Washington and Oregon south of that, and Mexico (today’s California) south of that. There was no official U.S. presence at all on the Pacific Coast—no U.S. state or territory from the Arctic Circle to modern-day Mexico. There were American citizens living in Upper California, but their population was dwarfed by that of the native Mexicans.

But the U.S. wanted Upper California, and the Oregon Territory (today’s States of Washington and Oregon), and many Americans set out for both destinations in anticipation of U.S. annexation at some point. While Americans in Texas fought their own war against Mexico, it would be the Oregon Territory that first pushed the U.S. itself toward war in the west.

Next time: Fifty-four forty or fight!

Truth v. Myth: The First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving: it’s a hallowed phrase that, like “Washington crossing the Delaware“, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” or “Damn the torpedoes!”, does not bring up many solid facts. Unfortunately, “the first Thanksgiving” is usually either completely debunked, with people saying no such thing ever happened, or used as a weapon against the Pilgrims—i.e., they had a lovely Thanksgiving with the Indians and then killed them all.

The truth about the first Thanksgiving is that it did happen, in the fall of 1621. The Pilgrims had landed in what is now Massachusetts the previous November—a terrible time to begin a colony. Their provisions were low, and it was too late to plant anything. It is another myth that they landed so late because they got lost. They had intended to land south of Long Island, New York and settle in what is now New Jersey, where it was warmer, but their ship was almost destroyed in a dangerous area just south of Cape Cod, and the captain turned back. They then had to crawl the ship down the Cape, looking for a suitable place to land. Long story short, they ended up in what is now Plymouth.

Most Americans know how so many of those first settlers died from starvation and disease over the winter, and how it was only by raiding Wampanoag food caches that the colony survived at all. By the spring, there were not many colonists left to plant food, but they dragged themselves out to do so. They had good luck, and help from the Wampanoags, who showed them planting techniques—potentially just to keep the Pilgrims from raiding their winter stores again. By November 1621, a very good harvest was in, and Governor William Bradford called for a day of thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims often had days of thanksgiving. In times of trouble, they had fasts, which were sacrifices given for God’s help. In celebration times, they had thanksgivings to thank God for helping them. So thanksgivings were a common part of Pilgrim life, and calling  for a thanksgiving to praise God for the harvest would not have been unusual, and would have been a day spent largely in church and at prayer.

So the men went out to shoot some “fowls” for the dinner, and perhaps they ran into some Wampanoags, or maybe a few Wampanoags were visting Plymouth, as they often did, and heard about the day of celebration. At any rate, here is the only—yes, the one and only—eyewitness description of what happened next:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.  They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.  At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.  And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

That’s Edward Winslow, writing about the thanksgiving in his journal of Pilgrim life called “Mourt’s Relation”, published in 1622. We see that Massasoit and 90 of his men arrived at some point, having heard about the feast, and the Pilgrims hosted them for three days, and had some rather Anglican sport firing their guns. Certainly the Wampanoags had a right to feel they should join in, since it was their help that had led to the good harvest. A one-day thanksgiving turned into three days of feasting and games.

And that was it. People often wonder why there wasn’t another thanksgiving the next year—we have seen that thanksgivings were not annual events, but came randomly when the people felt they were needed as a response to current events, and the idea of celebrating the harvest every year didn’t make sense to the Pilgrims. They had only held a thanksgiving for the first good harvest because it was a life-saving change from the previous fall. Once they were on their feet, they expected good harvests, and didn’t have to celebrate them. It was also against their Separatist beliefs to celebrate annual holidays—like the Puritans, they did not celebrate any holidays, not even Christmas. Holidays were a human invention that made some days better than others when God had made all days equally holy. So to hold a regular, annual harvest thanksgiving was not their way. When things were going well, Separatists and Puritans had days of thanksgiving. When things were going badly, they had days of fasting. None of them were annual holidays or cause for feasting (of course fast days weren’t, but even thanksgivings were mostly spent in church, with no special meal).

If only that first thanksgiving–an impromptu, bi-cultural celebration–had set the tone for the rest of the interactions between the English colonizers and the Indigenous peoples of North America. Since it did not, we can only think happily of the Thanksgiving called for by President Lincoln, who made an annual Thanksgiving a holiday in 1863.

The hype around the Pilgrims’ first thanksgiving only began after 1863, when historians noted the tradition of impromptu thanksgivings in the 1600s and made an unwarranted and improper connection to the new holiday to make it seem less new and more traditionally American. Before then, their many days of thanksgiving and fasting were completely forgotten. The Pilgrims certainly weren’t the inspiration for the holiday we celebrate today—they were retroactively brought into that in the worst, most ironic way: after the Civil War, southerners resented Thanksgiving as a “Union” holiday celebrating U.S. victories in the war and so the focus was changed from fighting slavery to the Pilgrims… who supported slavery.

This year, spend Thanksgiving however you like, and share the truth about where the holiday really comes from—the depths of a terrible war fought for the greatest of causes. Let Thanksgiving inspire you to stand up for the founding principles of this nation and re-commit to upholding them in your own daily life of good times and bad.