How the English Became Americans

Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans
Malcolm Gaskill   Oxford University Press   512pp   £20


Malcolm Gaskill offers us hints about what compelled him to write this book. He mentions the ‘astonishing intensity of faith, forbearance and courage’ of colonists, declaring it was the quality of that courage above all which inspired him. At the close of his long note on further reading, he confesses that the four-volume tome by Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, published in the 1930s, was seminally important for him. It argued the case that there was an English world in America in 1607 to 1692 ‘with little in it that can strictly be called American’. How odd then that he pursues, as a binding notion which he should focus upon, how the English became Americans. What he calls ‘unique environmental conditions’ blasted any chance of a close modelling of one country upon the other. 

The title of Gaskill’s book is a truism. As we proceed through eight chapters about ‘Planters’, men leaving England in the reigns of James I and Charles I, we absorb the familiar story of bold adventurers seeking to flee poverty or persecution. Gaskill’s chapter headings are as colourful as his prose, which is also taut, direct and orderly: ‘The Vast and Furious Ocean’, ‘Full of Wild Beasts and Wild Men’, ‘In Darkness and the Shadow of Death’. His narrative is relentless but, as a mass of footnotes to British and Colonial accounts and manuscripts make clear, it comes steadily from a huge archival effort, with only a dash of his own imaginative insight. One thing he makes plain: these planters were so preoccupied with survival and toil that they did not so much ponder how they were ‘becoming Americans’ as simply whether or not, if the chance came, they should go home. Mentally, Indians, as friends or foes, harried them, too, constantly.

At the start of section two, about the Puritan drive to convert as well as organise their New Jerusalem, Gaskill pauses. If original colonists were preoccupied by the adventure, its hazards and its disasters, he suggests, second generation ones had to decide ‘what being English meant and what it meant to belong physically and spiritually to America’. As if to prove how problematic his own question is, Gaskill launches into an account of two men in retreat in the 1640s from the New England experiment, Thomas Larkham, who returned to become a New Model Army chaplain, and Thomas Leckford, who was appalled by the ‘dark and uncertain interpretations of scripture’ he encountered at New Haven. ‘Remaking England in the New World and the retention of Englishness were never-ending exhausting endeavours’, sighs Gaskill, at the start of a chapter called ‘Marching Hopefully On’. He accepts that in the 1640s and 1650s rancour was ‘dividing English people on two Atlantic shores’. By the 1660s, it was ‘perhaps inevitable’ that one side of the Atlantic ‘defined itself against the other’, with the issue of the Quakers encapsulating divergent paths of development, with witchcraft a dominant Colonial obsession.  

One of Gaskill’s difficulties is binding together the complex narrative histories of New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake and the West Indies. He is well aware how different from each other their paths of development were  during the century. When he travels from the 1670s to the 1690s, Gaskill’s focus moves away from the ocean in between, to the colonists as ‘warriors’, men seeking to grasp and preserve their own destinies colony by colony. His hold on overlapping narratives remains impressive and  confident. In fact the book may appeal most to those who want a rollicking adventure story, told with pace and much detail. 

Gaskill ends by suggesting that the two countries drew culturally and perhaps emotionally somewhat closer together, before moving later in the 18th century to war and a broken relationship. He becomes more argumentative, but his final big statements do not so much cohere as jar with each other. For a  reader wanting to understand and probe the issues of coming  over and then maybe going back, more analytical works by historians such as David Cressy and Susan Hardman Moore will surely  provide greater satisfaction.

Gaskill reminds us on his final page that the extraordinary courage of the Pilgrim Fathers must never be ‘ignored or denigrated’. Point taken: some will just enjoy the way he tells the story. But we are left puzzling about what he can have intended to do, in setting out to explain how the English who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century ‘became Americans’.  

Anthony Fletcher is the author of Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front (Yale University Press, 2013).


http://www.historytoday.com/reviews/how-english-became-americans

I always think this is fascinating and a mind-bending thing to recognize:

The Declaration of Independence was written by ... British citizens.

The U.S. Constitution was written by ... British citizens.

At the same time, we should recognize the impact German thought had on the founding of the U.S. as well. The much-maligned Freemasons were bastions of the new thinking that brought about what could be called the founding philosophy of the United States. And the French -- let's not forget the U.S. founding fathers owed much to Rousseau -- particularly the idea of a secular state.

Just waiting for the U.S. right wing to catch up

As you all probably know, the U.S. right wing hates the French. I've always thought it made for an interesting tension between two incredibly arrogant nations

But Rousseau's 'Social Contract' was one of the biggest blows to the idea of divinely-inspired monarchy, and I'm sure that had an influence on the U.S. not creating a monarchy of its own -- which some newly independent Americans indeed were in favor of; there were Americans who wanted George Washington to become the nation's first king.

Ah, as it turns out, I may be once again full of shit ... this time, on the whole "Washington as king" thing ... but in my defense, my beloved high-school history teacher taught it as fact.

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/gbi/docs/kingmyth.html