6.
The people of this country . . . covet and are ready to grasp at all that lies upon their borders, and are ambitious of extending their empire from sea to sea.
—William Sturgis, 18451
The relation now existing in the slave-holding States . . . is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.
—Senator John C. Calhoun, 18472
Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
—Herman Melville, 18513
ONCE THE INDIANS WERE GONE, the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi became an empty mansion with squatters camping in its silent rooms. Chicago, one traveller wrote, was “a dull uninteresting place. . . . in 1832 there were only two houses.”4 Tocqueville called Detroit an “American village,” beyond which “the road goes into the forest and never comes out of it.”5 St. Louis was dwarfed by the great earthen ruin of Cahokia, a pyramid covering sixteen acres and rearing ten storeys high on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. In the 1830s, the big river was about as far as the white empire had advanced.6
Tocqueville remarked that America had yet to produce any outstanding writers—a fair comment when he made it—and he was right about the reason: “The majority lives in the perpetual practice of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the Americans can only learn from strangers or from experience. . . . there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist.”7
America could not bear to take a hard look at itself, especially the inconvenient truths of slavery, dispossession and genocide. Religion and profit, “jumping together,” had little time for introspection. The slaveholder, the frontiersman and the fundamentalist all hated the historian—and anti-intellectualism has been a strong force ever since.8 Yet in the generation between the Indian Removal and the Civil War, the intelligentsia tore off the blinkers of the chapel and the counting-house and looked at their surroundings as if for the first time, seeing not some hand-me-down Holy Land shipped across the Atlantic but a mysterious hemisphere with its own life, demanding their engagement. Americans began to think more deeply about their relationship to the peoples who had gone before them, leaving ancient ruins from Ohio to Peru.
The 1840s and 1850s became a golden age in literature and scholarship—in fiction, poetry, history, travel and anthropology—as white America explored its world.9 The young archaeologist Ephraim Squier made the first scientific studies of pre-Columbian monuments in the United States,deducing that American Indians, not some “unknown race,” had built them.10 John Stephens, a New Jersey antiquarian, travel writer and businessman, went on a long muleback journey through Central America, looking for lost cities “said to exist in the dense forests of those tropical regions.” The results were spectacular; on the first trek alone, he found eight major Maya ruins.11 The mysterious buildings aroused a nascent pan-American pride—and Stephens’s commercial instincts. The richly inscribed monoliths of Quiriguá, he mused, “might be transported bodily and set up in New York.”12
Stephens had already visited Egypt, Greece and the Holy Land, so he was not misled by popular theories claiming that the New World’s ancient wonders were the work of Egyptians or other overseas visitors.13 In the ornate stonework and hieroglyphic writing of the Maya he knew he was seeing a civilization previously unknown to science: “A people skilled in architecture, sculpture . . . having a distinct, separate, independent existence; like the plants and fruits of the soil, indigenous.”14
While Stephens was chopping his way through Guatemalan jungles, his friend the historian William Prescott was unearthing America’s past from forgotten books and archives. Prescott had been studying for the law until he was half-blinded by a crust thrown in a Harvard bunfight—a mishap that steered him into the calmer life of scholarship. His History of the Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru were sensations when they appeared in the 1840s and are still the classics in their field.15 Unable to see for himself the land where the great conflicts had taken place, Prescott urged both Stephens and Squier to do the travelling for him, to find what remained of the old American empires overthrown by Spain.
Stephens died before he could go on to South America, his health shattered by the tropics, but Squier did get there in the 1860s, writing his lively Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. He found the Andes tough going, with transport, food and lodging hard to come by—while all around him Inca roads, granaries and post-houses lay in ruins. “The influence of Spain in Peru,” Squier wrote testily, “has been in every way deleterious: the civilization of the country was far higher before the Conquest than now.”16
Shortly before President Andrew Jackson left office in 1837, he had abolished the Bank of the United States and handed the funds to private banks that became known as his “pets.” As with Ronald Reagan’s Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s, the result was fraud, speculation and collapse, followed by a slump that lasted nearly a decade. Among those ruined was Herman Melville’s family: without Jackson’s looting of the national treasury, Moby Dick might never have been written.
A younger son of old money and Revolutionary fame—one grandfather had been at the Boston Tea Party and the other at Fort Stanwix—Melville found himself unable to earn a living or even finish his studies. In 1840, at the age of twenty-one, he shipped aboard a “world-wandering whale ship” named the Acushnet. “If, at my death,” he wrote, “my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS in my desk, then here I prospectively prescribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”17
Melville was one of those unlucky authors who lose readers with each title. During his lifetime, his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, based on his desertion from the Acushnet in the Marquesas, outsold everything else he wrote.18 The young writer became famous as “the man who lived among cannibals.”19 Typee and its sequels turned out to be merely the gateway to Moby Dick, or The Whale, but few readers followed Melville there. He had sailed too far beyond the shallows of Romanticism, where Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper splashed about in the wake of Sir Walter Scott.20 Not until the twentieth century, when James Joyce and other modernists rediscovered the waters charted by Melville, would many agree with D.H. Lawrence that Moby Dick is “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.”21 If there has to be one Great American Novel, The Whale is it.
Melville meant what he said about a whaleship being his education. Owned by New Englanders and manned by men of all races, whalers went everywhere and stayed at sea for years. In its origins, whaling was American as maize: “Where else but from Nantucket,” asks Ishmael, “did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan?” By the time of the American Revolution, whaleships were sailing from Sag Harbor to Brazil, their crews “in large part Indians, who are the most capable harpoonists and are generally named boat officers.”22 By the 1840s, whaling had become the first worldwide industry dominated by Americans, the forerunner of Big Oil.23
Like petroleum in our day, the oil of the sea was soon drained by reckless exploitation. “The moot point,” Ishmael asks himself, “is whether Leviathan . . . must not at last be exterminated [like] the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri . . . where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch.”24
Each age gets the Moby Dick it deserves. One can dig forever into the book’s rich lodes of allegory. Melville knew the real history of America and trembled for his country’s future.25 By naming the ship after the Pequots exterminated by the early colonists at Mystic, he struck a blow in what Milan Kundera has called the fight of memory against forgetting. The Pequod becomes a microcosm of the United States, tricked out with the “chased bones of her enemies,” recalling those who thought that Indian bones should sweeten the land for the white man’s plough.26 Captain Ahab is the wrathful Puritan—“a crucifixion in his face”—unhinged by hatred for the sea monster that took his leg, walking “on life and death” with one limb of flesh and the other of whale ivory. Ahab is also the modern American, his faith archaic, yet his means those of the machine: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails. . . . Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”27
Some critics have seen the white whale as the symbol of an evil or hostile Nature, but I disagree. Moby Dick is Nature, neither good nor bad but simply itself, abused by human beings at their peril.28 Ahab-America is doomed by hubris. The great whale rams the ship and swims away, horribly wounded, garrotting Ahab with a harpoon line. The Pequod’s mastheads sink into the deep “together with long streaming yards of the flag.” It is an end of history.29
Moby Dick marked the maturing of an authentic American sensibility: original, bold, self-aware and hence self-critical. The same was true of Melville’s later Confidence Man. This satirical work has its doldrums and is best known today for the chapter on Indian hating. But anyone who reads it can’t fail to be struck by the oddness and freshness of the opening sentence: “At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake of Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.”
At that time, literary allusions were expected to be classical or biblical. Only those who had read Prescott were likely to know that Manco Capac was a legendary Inca king—an American Christ and Caesar sent down to Earth by his father, the Sun, to rule and civilize mankind.30 By likening one of his riverboat swindlers to this Peruvian hero, Melville insists on a New World frame of reference. He also draws an ironic contrast between the ancient utopia evoked so powerfully by Prescott and the new American empire of Indian haters, hucksters, preachers and confidence men embarking that April First on a ship of fools.31
While American high culture was starting to digest the historical realities of its presence in the New World, those who set faith above fact had been brewing up spiritual moonshine. In the summer of 1801, a crowd of twenty-five thousand had gathered near Bourbon, Kentucky, in a kind of Pentecostal Woodstock, “jerking, rolling, running, dancing and barking.” 32 With such events began the religious wildfires of the Second Great Awakening (the First being the spread of Presbyterianism, Baptism and Methodism in the colonies before the Revolution).
Some sects, notably the Unitarians and Shakers (an offshoot of the Quakers), believed in peace, tolerance and the right to seek God in one’s own way without denying that right to others. Unitarianism “took a great weight from the soul of New England” and led to the movement known as Transcendentalism. 33 At its best—in the hands of such thinkers and writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau— Transcendentalism was morally courageous, respectful of Nature and skeptical of worldly progress; at its worst it became windy and self-centred, a forerunner of the Me Generation.34
The better of these radical movements were sympathetic to the plight of Indians, blacks, women and the poor. Some embraced forms of communitarianism, supporting themselves by cottage industries—Shaker furniture and Oneida silverware. The Oneida Community’s free love and the Shakers’ no love both caused trouble. The celibate Shakers died out, leaving behind only the vigorous simplicity of their style. The Oneidas went the other way, forsaking social engineering for mainstream manufacturing.
The seeds of these sects had been carried westward by the Puritan diaspora. Far from the deep waters of their own civilization, and able to absorb only superficial elements of the native civilization they displaced, the frontier folk became cultural castaways. Religion decayed into superstition, liberty into anarchy, education (when there was any) into Bible study and little else. “Complex society,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, shrinks “into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control.”35This culture, in a perpetual state of insecurity and adolescence, exerted a “founder effect” on those who settled in its wake, especially after crossing the Appalachians—a psychological as well as a physical separation from the seaboard.
To modern America the frontier bequeathed positive attributes of boldness, equality and self-reliance; and negative ones of self-absorption, xenophobia, extremism and intolerance. As the historian Bil Gilbert puts it, the legacy of the frontier wars is the delusion “that only a feral man can be genuinely free.”36 Such men bedevil the United States today in the shape of gun-crazy survivalists, Dominionists, and vigilantes patrolling the southern border against a feared “invasion” from Mexico.37
By 1830, upstate New York—the former Longhouse of the Iroquois—had become so notorious for the frequency and heat of its religious fires that it was called the Burned-Over District, smoking with delusion and quackery. There was a sect of feral men who neither washed nor shaved, and dressed only in bearskins. There were diviners, dowsers and necromancers. There were assorted millennialists, daily expecting the return of Jesus Christ—a strain of Christian belief that has survived two thousand years of disappointment.38
One of the Burned-Over District’s strangest fires—and ultimately the most successful—was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons. The sect was founded near Rochester in 1830 by a farm boy named Joseph Smith, a tall, handsome youth with shining blue eyes shaded by unusually long lashes, giving him an otherworldly gaze that enhanced the magnetism of his personality. His creed absorbed almost every element of frontier metaphysics, along with social and sexual unorthodoxy.
The cultural critic Harold Bloom argues that Mormonism and other “post-Christian” sects amount to a form of Gnosticism, an idiosyncratic approach to faith that has become the American religion—pervading all denominations, even Catholic and Episcopalian.39 Certainly, the American way of belief emphasizes a personal relationship with God transcending history and society: a lifelong conversation like that of the lonely child with an imaginary friend. Although radical in their beginnings—posing a moral, political and military threat—most Latter-Day Saints have since become conservative, drawing closer to other Christian fundamentalisms. Americans were not much alarmed when a Mormon, Mitt Romney, ran (briefly) for the U.S. presidency in 2008; it was a different matter when Joseph Smith himself did so in 1844.
Even as they tried to escape the American empire, the Mormons became an important force in its westward march, and their early history opens a revealing window on the frontier soul. Like the Puritans (the original “latter-day Saints”), Smith intended nothing less than to build the City of God on Earth. But he trod where Puritans had feared to go. His peculiar genius was to Americanize Holy Writ by adding the “Bible of the Western Continent,” or Book of Mormon, claiming to unveil the New World’s ancient history.40 While men such as Stephens and Prescott were making this inquiry through scholarship, Smith (who was at best half-literate) did so by divine revelation. America’s two cultures—high and low—were responding to the same need in their distinctive ways.
Since childhood, Joseph Smith had been having visions, possibly linked to seizures. Inspired by his father’s looting of ancient mounds, which sometimes held silver and copper artifacts for which collectors would pay well, he became curious about the remote past. At that time the Egyptians and the Lost Tribes of Israel were high on the list of Old World peoples thought to have built the New World’s monuments.41 A fascination with Egypt had been filtering into Euro-American culture since the previous century, not least via Masonic lodges. Early in the 1820s, Jean-François Champollion had made his great breakthrough in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics by means of the Rosetta Stone—an achievement widely covered in American newspapers.42 So Joseph Smith’s claim that he had unearthed an ancient book of gold sheets covered with “reformed Egyptian” writing from a New York hill would not have seemed as unlikely as it does today.43 Even so, his tale of being guided to the find by an angel named Moroni was widely mocked, especially as only a few witnesses were willing to swear they had seen the golden book before the angel came back and collected it.
By then, with the help of magical eyeglasses—also supplied and retrieved by Moroni—Joseph had deciphered the writing and dictated his translation from behind a bedsheet. The resulting Book of Mormon makes up for the Bible’s awkward silence on the Western Hemisphere. It turns out that a tribe of Israelites had sailed to America in 590 B.C. Before long they split into two clans, the Nephites and the Lamanites, the first righteous by inclination, the other “an idle people, full of mischief [who] seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey.”44
Originally they had all been European in appearance, but God cursed the Lamanites by darkening their skins. Nevertheless, these two scions of Israel were persuaded to reconcile when Jesus Christ himself visited America soon after the Resurrection. Both clans then became Christian. All went well until the Lamanites slid back into wickedness and unbelief. Things came to a head at a great battle in 384, when the evildoers slew their righteous brethren on the very hill in upstate New York where Joseph Smith would later unearth the golden book.
Only a handful of Nephites escaped the killing, among them their patriarch Mormon and his son Moroni. Soon Moroni was the only Nephite left alive, a paleface Last of the Mohicans. Before leaving Earth for his future as an angel, Moroni buried the sad story of his people’s extermination. From that day until 1492, the New World lay in the bloody hands of the “red sons of Israel”—the American Indians.
This saga has not, I need hardly say, been borne out by scientific research. (Besides all the archaeological problems, American Indians and Semites have no genetic link except as fellow members of the human race.) There are also blunders in Joseph Smith’s text that were known anachronisms in his day: pre-Columbian horses, Israelite ships with compasses, and more. Mormons are understandably touchy about factual challenges to their beliefs. Yet, as Jon Krakauer points out in his recent book Under the Banner of Heaven, their mythology is hardly less credible than that of most other religions, Christianity included.45 It was Mormonism’s bad luck to arise in the glare of newspapers and scholarship instead of the forgiving mists of time.
There is a startling resemblance in thrust (though not style) between the Book of Mormon and President Jackson’s State of the Union address on the Indian Removal, quoted in the previous chapter. Both Mormon and Jackson appeared in 1830; both claimed that America once belonged to a civilized race wiped out by the existing “savage tribes”; both imply that the extermination of Indians is therefore historically and morally justified.
Of course, I am not suggesting that Jackson perused a copy of Mormon before drafting his speech; rather, that both documents reveal the Zeitgeist. It isn’t hard to see the appeal of Smith’s creed on the frontier. His race of fair-skinned Christian Jews become spiritual ancestors for the white invaders, while the real victims of genocide—the Indians—are made the perpetrators of it. And the redskins’ evil triumph happens right inside the Iroquois Longhouse, which had been taken over by incomers like the Smiths only a generation before Joseph began talking to Moroni.46
Nor was this all. In 1831 Smith revealed that the Garden of Eden hadn’t been in the Holy Land but in Missouri, thus making the frontier the centre, not the periphery, of sacred space.47 He also restored the age of miracles to the here and now, bringing back the days when the Lord spoke out of the whirlwind to prophets and patriarchs. Smith is named Prophet in the Book of Mormon, and the head of the church has held that title to this day. Mormons believe their Prophet is in regular touch with the Almighty, receiving orders on policy matters, great and small.48 New “revelations” often contradict earlier ones. But that doesn’t matter, because history doesn’t matter: as in all fundamentalisms, faith trumps fact and reason.
The most notorious of Joseph Smith’s instructions from God nearly destroyed his sect in the 1840s and has been a thorn in its side ever since. The Prophet told trusted friends that the Lord had given the nod to bringing back the ancient practice of polygyny, or “plural marriage,” even though the Book of Mormon inconveniently (and ungrammatically) states that a man may have only “one wife . . . for I the Lord God delighteth in the chastity of women.”49 The Lord’s change of mind was not made public until some years after Smith’s death in 1844, but shocking tales had leaked out long before that. Like many a cult leader, Smith was a ladies’ man. “Whenever I see a pretty woman,” he admitted, “I have to pray for grace.”50 It seems that grace had not been enough to stop Joseph—already married to Emma—from bedding a fifteen-year-old while the Smiths were lodging with the girl’s family in 1832. For this the Prophet was nearly castrated by a mob. Had his assailants carried out their surgical vengeance, the history of Mormonism might have been quite different. In all, Joseph is thought to have “married” more than forty women, several in their early teens. To a man who had already rewritten the Bible, revising the sexual code of Christendom was no big thing: Smith the Puritan accommodated Smith the seducer by redefining sin.
Their leader’s libido, the audacity of their beliefs and the financial clout of their cooperative endeavours did not endear the Mormons to their neighbours. The sect kept wearing out its welcome with local “Gentiles” (non-Mormons), who came to regard Smith as a whoremonger and heretic. Before the golden book had been in print one year, Smith led his flock from New York to Ohio. Less than a year later, they moved on to Missouri, intent on buying up Eden.
But the serpent of slavery had reached the garden first, and the abolitionist sympathies of some Mormons were unwelcome. Local mobs and state militia were soon giving the Saints the kind of treatment the Cherokees were getting from Georgia at the same time. In October 1838 Joseph Smith made a fiery speech, reminding his followers—who then numbered about ten thousand—how they had been driven from one place to another by “unscrupulous mobs eager to seize the land we have cleared and improved.” He then veered into megalomania, invoking not Christianity but the founding conquests of Islam: “If they come on to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword. We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Mohammed. . . . Joseph Smith or the Sword!”51
In this spirit of jihad, the Mormons attacked their Gentile neighbours, burning down fifty houses. The governor of Missouri responded by ordering his militia to treat the white tribe as enemies and either “exterminate” them or drive them from the state. Thus began the first, and worst, of the three Mormon Wars (of 1838, 1845 and 1857). At Hawn’s Mill, eighteen Saints were gunned down inside a log building, including a ten-year-old boy shot in cold blood on the excuse that “nits will make lice.”52
The Mormons trekked 150 miles east to the Mississippi and crossed into Illinois, where news of their harsh treatment had aroused some pity. The sudden arrival of so many new voters gave them influence in what was then a thinly peopled state, recently emptied of Indians by the Black Hawk War.53 With energy and speed, the Mormons settled on good land not far from where Black Hawk himself had farmed eight hundred acres and began building a town called Nauvoo (a Hebrew word for beautiful). The Illinois legislature granted Smith a charter with enough powers for him to forge a semi-autonomous city-state. 54 Before long, he was styling himself “King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” He was also the commander-in-chief of the Nauvoo Legion—well armed and five thousand strong. Finally, in the electoral campaign of 1844, Smith ran for the presidency of the United States.55
Once again the Saints had made too many enemies, and the open secret of polygyny had caused a serious rift within the sect. Smith’s heavy crackdown on dissidents fed Gentile fears of theocratic tyranny—fears already aroused by the Prophet’s bid for the White House.56 That summer, militia and vigilante groups gathered for an attack, and Smith was arrested by Illinois on a charge of treason. In June a mob rushed the jail and murdered him. The Mormon faith was barely fourteen years old, and its Prophet dead at thirty-eight.
After a power struggle between monogamists and polygynists, the leadership went to Brigham Young, a short, stout, unprepossessing but gifted man with several wives.57 No seer or dreamer, Young knew how to get things done.58 His first accomplishment was to reach terms for ending the Second Mormon War. If the Gentiles would leave them alone for the winter, the Saints would pack up in the spring of 1846 and leave the United States forever. The Mormons prepared to trek west into the Great American Desert, to unconquered Indian territory which, on paper, belonged to Mexico.
And so, only a decade after the Indian removals, a strange white tribe was also driven beyond the writ of the American empire. The Saints were alien enough to be treated like Indians by the settler society from which they sprang—even to the point of expulsion, murder and threats of extermination—an ironic fate for a sect whose beliefs de-nativized the real Indians. In short, the Mormons were both products of the frontier culture and victims of its intolerance. As in conservative America today, talking about freedom was one thing, doing it quite another.
The Mormon wagons rolled west for thirteen hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, wintering on the way. The hardships of the trek cemented the Saints’ neo-biblical identity: now they had their Exodus, their Moses and at last their Promised Land. In July 1847 they crested the Wasatch Mountains and looked down on the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The Prophet arose from his sickbed and pronounced, “This is the Place!”59
The western edge of the American empire was still a fretwork of free and semi-independent states, some white, some native and some belonging to Mexico. With its independence in 1821, Mexico had inherited Spanish claims to all territory west of the Louisiana Purchase and south of British America. 60 Some parts, such as Texas, California and New Mexico, had a thin scattering of missions, ranches and outposts. Before the 1849 goldrush, California had only twelve thousand non-Indian residents, of whom perhaps one thousand were Americans involved in whaling, sea-otter peltry and the cowhide trade.61 In the rest of the territory, indigenous peoples were still free. The ancient Pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico—whose cliff-top towns of stone and adobe may be the oldest continuously occupied buildings in the Americas—had driven out the Spaniards in 1680 and, despite reprisals, had managed to keep a high degree of autonomy ever since.62
Texas had so few non-Indian residents (only four thousand Mexicans in 1821) that Mexico had invited Americans to settle there, hoping they would adopt the Catholic faith, become Mexican citizens and form a buffer against the rising Anglo-Saxon empire. The invitation was taken up mainly by slave-owning cotton growers, and Mexico soon saw it had made a big mistake.63 By 1830 there were three white Americans for every Mexican in Texas. At first these Anglo-Texans tried to work out a modus vivendi, but those hopes were quashed by the vainglorious Mexican dictator General Santa Anna, who massacred American settlers at the Alamo and Goliad in 1836, and was then beaten (but spared) by Sam Houston at San Jacinto.
For nearly ten years, the Lone Star became an independent white republic with its own dreams of expanding to the Pacific. Texan desires to join the United States were blocked by Eastern abolitionists fearful of adding another slave state to the Union. Westerners and Southerners took the opposite view; some even toyed with the idea of leaving the Union and joining with Texas to form an empire of their own. In a cynical phrase with recent echoes, ex-president Andrew Jackson argued that the admission of slave-holding Texas to the United States would be “extending the area of freedom.”64 This view eventually prevailed. When the annexation went through in 1845, the London Times commented that the Americans had won their new province “as the cuckoo steals a nest.”65
The subsequent provocation and conquest of Mexico was America’s first great foreign adventure and one of its least justifiable. President James Polk (a Jackson protegé) started the war by sending a small force into disputed territory; when this was repelled, as he hoped it would be, he told Congress that Mexico had shed American blood on American soil—a statement Abraham Lincoln later called “the sheerest deception.”66 The eighty-year-old statesman John Quincy Adams charged Polk with “unscrupulous suppression” of facts and said that Congress’s control of the right to declare war was “utterly insufficient . . . as a check upon the will of the President.”67 Adams would be proven right: Congress’s last declaration of war was immediately after Pearl Harbor; all America’s wars since 1945 have been fought without one.
Henry David Thoreau, then dwelling on Walden Pond, denounced the Mexican war, withheld his taxes and spent a night in jail. (The story goes that when Emerson came in the morning to get him out, saying, “Henry, why are you in here?” Thoreau answered, “Waldo, why are you not in here?”) The incident sparked Thoreau’s famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” which would inspire opposition to other wars, above all Vietnam. But not all the intelligentsia could resist the drumbeat. The young poet Walt Whitman, drunk with patriotism, cheered Polk on: “Yes, Mexico must be thoroughly chastized. . . . Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that . . . America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!”68 And then there were those—as there always are—who found a way to dress greed as altruism: “The universal Yankee nation,” cried the New York Herald in 1847, “can regenerate and disenthrall the people of Mexico in a few years; and we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”69
Besides locking its hold on Texas, the United States wanted California and the great natural harbour of San Francisco. Of course, everything in between would have to come too. Instead of simply occupying the desired territory, the Americans struck at the Mexican heartland. After bombarding Veracruz, where Cortés had landed in 1519, they marched through the mountains to the high Valley of Mexico, where the ancient capital of the Aztecs lay within its ring of smouldering volcanoes.
In September 1847 the Americans took the castle of Chapultepec outside Mexico City and at last reached the National Palace—the “Halls of Montezuma.”70 Peace was signed in 1848. Some of Polk’s backers wanted to annex all of Mexico, but that had never been his objective—a nation of 7 million was too much for white America to swallow. Polk’s strategy was to conquer the whole but keep only the northern half. The rest could be left independent, sovereign in name yet subservient to American interests and investment: the same kind of relationship the Aztecs had once forced on their unhappy neighbours. Mexico became the first client-state under American hegemony.71
The mood of the day—after this victory and just before Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan—was well expressed in a colourful outburst by the Southern journalist and cotton trader James De Bow.
We have a destiny to perform, a “manifest destiny” over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies and Canada. . . . The gates of the Chinese empire must be thrown down by the men from the Sacramento and the Oregon, and the haughty Japanese tramplers upon the cross be enlightened in the doctrines of republicanism and the ballot box. The eagle of the republic shall poise itself over the field of Waterloo, after tracing its flight among the gorges of the Himalaya or the Ural mountains, and a successor of Washington ascend the chair of universal empire.72
Not even Joseph Smith at his most Mohammedan had soared quite so high on his own updraught. “Manifest destiny” was on every patriotic tongue—a reissue, in broader currency, of the old Puritan (and new Mormon) belief in Americans as the Chosen People.73 Like other self-serving notions of what Providence had in mind, the phrase shone a beam of divine approval on anything America might seize or do in the Aladdin’s cave of the New World. In his 1935 book Manifest Destiny, the distinguished historian Albert Weinberg called it a monstrous alchemy turning “democratic nationalism into a doctrine of imperialism.”74
While their former countrymen were conquering Mexico, the Latter-Day Saints had been busy building their desert holy land. Under Brigham Young’s able leadership, they had laid out the grid of Salt Lake City and begun ditching water to their fields from the “Jordan” and other streams feeding the lake.
These irrigation works are often said to be the first in North America, but the Mormons were following indigenous practice, whether they knew it or not. (They probably did: not far south of Utah, ancient Americans had been building irrigation systems since the time of Julius Caesar. The elaborate Hohokam canals of Arizona were so well built that white settlers put them back to work in the 1860s. Phoenix was named in recognition of this rebirth.) The new Israel did a lively trade, provisioning overland trekkers to the California goldfields. The colony began to prosper and to draw new members, some from as far away as the slums of England. Brigham Young became bold enough to tell the world about the Lord’s endorsement of polygyny, “one of the best doctrines ever proclaimed.”
So it may have seemed in Utah; most outsiders were appalled. “It is a scarlet whore,” thundered one congressman: “It is a reproach to Christian civilization, and deserves to be blotted out.”75 Under the treaty that ended the Mexican War, Utah had become part of the United States: the Mormons had escaped the American empire for only one year. Polygamy was against federal law, and that—plus Brigham Young’s harassment of American officials—gave the new President James Buchanan reason to deny Utah statehood and send an army to enforce the writ of Washington in 1857.
But that was far from the whole story. Only months before, the Supreme Court had handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision, ruling that slaves were property, not persons, and thus unprotected by the freedoms of the Constitution even in free states.76 A Northerner with Southern sympathies, Buchanan decided to take a leaf out of Jackson’s book and sacrifice a marginal group on the altar of national unity, hoping to eclipse “Negro-Mania with the . . . excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade.”77
The Third Mormon War (or Utah War) never came to a straight fight. The worst violence happened at a desert watering hole called Mountain Meadows, where a California-bound wagon train was butchered by “Indians,” most of whom were Mormons in disguise.78 Brigham Young was deposed as territorial governor but not deported. The federal appointee who took his seat was no match for his machinations: the Prophet still ran Utah.
Among the celebrity visitors who trekked to Utah to see the new American religion was the eccentric English Orientalist Sir Richard Francis Burton. Disguised as a “dervish,” Burton had recently penetrated Islam’s forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina—a journey for which unbelievers were likely to pay with their lives. The perils of Mormondom were nothing to such a man; the worst, in his view, being Salt Lake City’s sanctimonious gloom and the lack of a bar at his hotel. Burton, who favoured polygamy for his own reasons, regarded Mormons as underdogs and liked the Islamic echoes in their “faith of the poor.” He ignored, or did not see, the Saints’ less saintly side: their plundering of Indians and Gentiles, their endorsement of slavery (despite earlier abolitionist leanings) and their ban on blacks in the priesthood (which stayed in effect until 1978). “The Prophet,” Burton wrote admiringly, had “stood up to fight with the sword of the Lord . . . against the mighty power of the United States.”79
That power soon had to pull back to fight the Civil War. The Saints hailed the conflict as fulfilling prophecy that the Gentiles would destroy themselves and Christ would come back to Earth. Though the war did give the Mormons time to consolidate, the decisive “coming” in Utah was that of the railroad in 1869. Little by little, the City of God reached terms with earthly powers: in 1890 the Lord again changed his mind about polygyny; plural marriage went underground, and, in 1896, Utah became a state at last. Some Mormons continued to practise “plural marriage” quietly, and a few still do—in remote “fundamentalist” Mormon strongholds such as Bountiful, British Columbia. There are now about 12 million Mormons worldwide, and the faith still grows.
Thirty years before the Civil War, in one of his most prophetic insights, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that the moral contradictions and headlong drive of white America might lead to self-destruction:
The future of the New World belongs [to] a restless, calculating, adventurous race which sets coldly about deeds that can only be explained by the fire of passion, and which trades in everything, not excluding even morality and religion. A nation of conquerors that submits to living the life of a savage without ever letting itself be carried away by its charms, that only cherishes those parts of civilisation and enlightenment which are useful . . . and presses forward to the acquisition of riches, the single end of its labours . . .
It is a wandering people whom rivers and lakes cannot hold back, before whom forests fall and prairies are covered in shade; and who, when they have reached the Pacific Ocean, will come back on its tracks to trouble and destroy the societies which it will have formed behind. 80
As the empire grew, so did the pressure on its contradictions. One by one the Indian Removal, the conquest of Mexico, the taking of California and the westward march of Mormons, Texans, goldminers and other colonists wrenched open the suture between North and South. Texas was a slave state, Utah became a slave territory and the former home-lands of the Civilized Tribes had become not so much republics as forced-labour plantations. By 1860, of the South’s 12 million people, 4 million—one-third of the total—were slaves.81
Europeans had not practised servitude on such a scale since the days of pagan Rome.82 Its revival—which would not have happened without the Columbian bonanza of loot, labour and land—belied western civilization’s ideal of moral progress. Tocqueville’s outrage was well aimed (if not wholly accurate) when he wrote, “I reserve my execration for those who, after a thousand years of freedom, brought back slavery into the world once more.”83 Though thralldom had never died out and has existed in many societies, the forms it took in the New World after 1492 were among the worst in history.
The first American slaves were indigenous Americans, but they died away too soon to be a significant labour pool except in Mexico and Peru.84 Four-fifths of the Africans taken to the New World were shipped after 1700. Between then and about 1810, by which time the trade (though not slavery itself) had been banned by the British Empire and the United States, at least 6 million slaves crossed the Atlantic.85 As many as one in three may have died on the way.86 Another 2 million were taken after 1810, mainly to Brazil and some unlawfully to the American South.
Quite apart from its moral stink, slavery was inefficient. During his travels, Tocqueville had been struck by the contrast in wealth and development on opposite sides of the Ohio River. “The only reason,” a local explained to him, “is that slavery reigns in Kentucky, but not in Ohio. There work is a disgrace, here it is honourable.”87 A Louisville merchant agreed, identifying the weakness that would doom the Southern system: “Slavery is even more prejudicial to the masters than to the slaves. . . . If the South is not as industrialized as the North, that is not because slaves cannot work in factories, it is because slavery deprives the masters of . . . energy and spirit.”88
By the time of the Civil War, the South had become an archaic, rural and exposed society. The slaveholding states had only 8 million free citizens to the North’s 19 million. The North had embraced the Industrial Revolution. Understanding this disparity, President Abraham Lincoln expected a quick victory before antiwar feeling tied his hands. But the South put up a much tougher fight for its way of life than the North had expected. One reason was patriotism: the South was well on its way to becoming a separate nationality. Another was fear: the South dreaded a black uprising, a great settling of scores for what everyone knew, deep down, was wrong.
The Civil War needs no retelling here, except as it influenced American expansion and the emerging world order.89 It haunts America just as the Great War haunts Europe, and for similar reasons: it was not a fight against an outlandish foe who could be demonized and dropped in the oubliette of history; rather, it was between kin, sometimes literally. And its impact on society was immense. More than six hundred thousand soldiers died: ten times the number who fell in Vietnam and seventy times more when adjusted for population. 90
Despite Gone with the Wind kitsch and “Lost Cause” nostalgia, the Civil War is the one aspect of America’s past that America takes seriously: “our only felt history,” in Robert Penn Warren’s memorable words, a “history lived in the national imagination.”91
In his 1996 book, Exterminate All the Brutes, the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist draws a link between nineteenth-century colonial atrocities and the horrors of the two World Wars. In the twentieth century, he argues, Europeans reaped on their own turf a harvest of racial hubris and mechanical slaughter which they had sown years before overseas. Their easy victories over tribesmen—for example, at Omdurman in 1898, where a Sudanese army was mown down by Gatling guns before it could get within musket shot of the British—fostered an illusion that technology had made war simple and one-sided and that the deaths at the far end of the gunsight did not matter. “This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills,” recalled Winston Churchill, who had been at Omdurman. “It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed.”92 Nobody white, that is.
A similar link can be drawn between America’s “easy” victories over Indians and its slide into the Civil War, which, like the World Wars, Vietnam and Iraq, was wrongly foretold to be simple and quick. The age of the machine gun had not quite dawned by 1861, but the gunboat, the railway and the percussion-cap rifle had all been at work for some time. Like European imperialists in Africa, Americans had grown used to enemies with obsolete weapons, little ammunition and no artillery. The leaders of both North and South shared this colonial conceit. Indeed, the Union president, Abraham Lincoln, and the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, had served together during the Black Hawk War of the 1830s.93 (As for racial hubris, the governor of Iowa kept Black Hawk’s skeleton hanging up in his office.94)
The breakaway South formed the Confederate States of America with its capital at Richmond, Virginia—the very place where, two and a half centuries before, King Powhatan had ruled a smaller confederacy from his Tower. The city on the James certainly had historic prestige and fine buildings, but the location was unwise. Only a hundred miles separated President Davis in Richmond from President Lincoln in Washington City.
According to the secessionist theory of the Constitution, the South—or any state—had the right to leave the Union. And many Northerners were ready to let the South go. Could white America have divorced calmly and left it at that? The answer must be no; sooner or later the diverging nations would have fought it out. For one thing, the Confederacy had dreams of building a slave empire, incorporating Cuba and other Caribbean islands. The North would not have brooked such a rival. So Lincoln made his Faustian bargain, employing “one evil, empire, to destroy another evil, slavery.”95
The Confederates had early successes, won by brilliance and daring against the odds, but after the losses of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the South was doomed. Throughout 1864 the North fought an “anaconda campaign” of attrition, bringing ever more men, ships and weapons to bear on a shrinking front. Finally, in April 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant—a kindly man, a heavy drinker and sometime store clerk who disliked war but was surprisingly good at it—accepted the sword of his adversary, the more sober and equally gifted commander, Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox.
By the end, the Confederacy was in a state like that of Germany in 1945: its fields burnt, its slaves freed, its railways torn up, its cities in ruins.
Late in 1863, when it was becoming clear that the North would win, the great orator and antislavery activist Frederick Douglass, who was himself a former slave, said that the work of the “abolition war” would never be done “until the black men of the South, and the black men of the North, shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the body politic of America.”96 For the dozen years of postwar Reconstruction, the North came down hard on the South, and Douglass’s dream—later Martin Luther King’s and Barack Obama’s—seemed almost within reach. But the work of rebuilding America was hindered by the corruption of carpetbaggers and war profiteers who bedevilled Lincoln’s successors.97
Meanwhile, a terrorist insurgency threatened to break out in the conquered states. Death squads with ominous names and bizarre rituals arose to restore white supremacy: the Pale Faces, the White Brotherhood, the Knights of the White Camelia and the Ku Klux Klan. By the late 1870s, it was clear that the price for national reconciliation would be paid by African Americans. Washington turned a blind eye as segregation and Jim Crow laws overturned the new racial order, keeping the South a white man’s country for another hundred years.98
Little by little, the subdued if unrepentant states were readmitted to national life, a process that subtly changed the language. When Walt Whitman had written “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” in 1855, he reflected the usage of the time. After the war, the country’s name shifted from a plural to a singular noun: the United States became itself.99
The Civil War did not affect only white Americans and former slaves.100 Native Americans played a greater role than is generally known, and on both sides. Sandwiched between Texas and Missouri, the Civilized Tribes—by then re-established as semi-sovereign nations in the Indian Territory—were inevitably drawn into the invaders’ war, splitting into pro-Union and pro-Confederate factions. The last Southern commander to surrender his sword was Brigadier General Stand Watie, a brother of the Cherokee newspaperman known in English as Elias Boudinot.101 On the winning side, the terms of surrender signed by Robert E. Lee at Appomattox were written by Colonel Ely Parker, General Grant’s right-hand man and a Seneca chief of the Iroquois League.102 As a young man, Parker had worked with Lewis Henry Morgan on the ground-breaking ethnography League of the Iroquois, which brought the ideas of the ancient Longhouse to the attention of Marx, Engels and other Victorian thinkers.
When Ulysses Grant became president in 1869, he made Parker head of Indian Affairs—the first Indian to hold the post, and the last for a century. But neither Grant nor Parker could stop the spiral of violence in the West, and their best intentions were undermined by corrupt Washington contractors, who, like their counterparts today, padded accounts and siphoned off public funds.
With its easy money and lack of oversight, the four-year emergency had corrupted all levels of American government. It had also produced an industrial surge, especially in weapons, shipbuilding and railways. And like all great wars, it had bequeathed problems of debt and demobilization.103The Union alone had a million men under arms; they couldn’t all retire at once. Americans also realized that if they were to avoid fighting each other again in future, they would need an outside enemy against whom their divided nation could unite. So Washington turned its war machine on the unconquered peoples of the West. By 1868 General Philip Sheridan of the Army of the Potomac was out in Oklahoma, uttering his notorious words, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”104
We are now speaking of the West in the modern sense of the word—the Great Plains where the horse Indians hunted the buffalo. 105 In the American myth that Hollywood has sold to the world, these are the only real Indians: wild, nomadic, noble and unchanging.106 Forget all that. The horse Indians were never typical of America, and their life was built on change. Many of them—including the Cheyenne, the Sioux and the Arapaho—were refugees from the invaded East, obliged to take up buffalo hunting when their farmland had been overrun by whites. Their culture was a brief and brilliant response to a shifting world, a hybrid flower that bloomed and died within a hundred years.
Of course, a few people had been living on the Plains ever since the end of the last Ice Age. But they hunted on foot and had only dogs to drag everything—tipis, lodge poles, food, the elderly—on small travois across the ocean of grass. When the first horse appeared in the eighteenth century, they named it “holy dog.”107 The horse shrank distance, carried goods, and turned footsloggers into knights. The Plains Indians quickly became as skilled on horseback as Mongolians, growing rich on the great herds of buffalo, trading meat for corn and guns.
The white expansion onto the Plains was also driven by a combination of new needs, opportunities and means. Just weeks after the American conquest of Mexico, a gold strike at Sutter’s Mill in California had set off the wildest goldrush since the old Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru. Prospectors and adventurers rolled west in tens of thousands, heedless of the “permanent” Indian frontier, spreading the usual plagues of disease, alcohol and violence. By the end of the Civil War, it was clear that the Western mountains held enormous wealth—not only the traditional gold and silver but other minerals newly in demand as the world industrialized. The whites also saw that the land was not as barren as they had thought; some parts were indeed desert, but much of the West was a savannah of deep, black earth kept treeless by the buffalo.
Anyone who drives across the Great Plains today can’t fail to be staggered by their extent—some million square miles, more than the entire area occupied and claimed by the United States before the Louisiana Purchase. It seems impossible that nineteenth-century armies could find, let alone subdue, the Western nomads in a single generation. Yet the Indians weren’t the only moving target; so, in a different way, was the civilization that attacked them.
White numbers and technology were taking off as the Columbian Age began to bear its greatest fruits. Having grown at compound interest in the Old World for two centuries, the stolen wealth of Mexico and Peru had now returned to the New—to feed, finance, equip and populate the new American empire. In 1830 the United States had 13 million people; in 1860, 31 million; and by 1900, 76 million—more than any European country.108 Just thirty years after the Indian Removal, the railway joined the coasts and split the buffalo, which shied at the gleaming rails. The first motorcar crossed America thirty-four years after the first train.109
In the eighteenth century, both whites and Indians had used the same weapons: smooth-bore muskets with powder and ball. But as the Industrial Revolution accelerated, the arms race became ever more one-sided. While the Indians were still using muskets, the whites had repeating rifles; by the time the Indians acquired rifles, the whites had machine guns.110 The Sharp rifle, the Gatling gun and the steam train were the brightest stars in a constellation of inventions that enabled white America to take the West.111
The decisive weapon, however, was nothing more glamorous than a new tanning process, perfected in 1871. Buffalo leather suddenly became part of the world economy, prized for machinery belts and army boots. The United States government realized it could subdue the Plains tribes by letting freelance hunters (many of whom were Civil War veterans) kill off their food supply. “It would be a great step forward in the civilization of the Indians,” said Senator James Throckmorton, “if there was not a buffalo in existence.”112 He got his wish. Whites with repeating rifles wiped out the great herds—perhaps 30 million animals—in just ten years, taking the hides and leaving the flesh to rot.113 By 1890 only a few hundred buffalo were left. The Indians had a Hobson’s choice: starvation or surrender. Often it was both, on reservations little better than death camps.
The definitive general history of this period is Dee Brown’s 1970 bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which quotes extensively from eyewitnesses on both sides.114 The race war followed much the same pattern as the one that began at Mystic, complete with Puritan bloodlust. One of the worst massacres was led by a Methodist preacher named John Chivington, who fell on a sleeping village of friendly Cheyennes at Sand Creek, Colorado, with these words: “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”115 What followed was the My Lai massacre of its time. Coming early in the Western wars, Sand Creek quashed whatever hopes of peace the tribes still held. It set the stage for the short-lived Indian victory over General Custer at the Little Bighorn, the Ghost Dance crisis cult, and the final squalid murder of Sioux prisoners at Wounded Knee.
The year of Wounded Knee, 1890, was chosen by the United States Census to mark the closing of the frontier. With the final defeat of the Western Indians, three hundred years of warfare for “free land” came to an end. At the same time, the Creeks, Cherokees and other Southern nations who had been driven to the Indian Territory (“theirs forever . . . under the most solemn guarantee of the United States”) were broken up by the Dawes Allotment Act, and the “surplus” opened to a white stampede.116 Since the Removal, the Five Civilized Tribes had made good progress establishing themselves in what is now Oklahoma, building schools, hospitals and towns, with national legislatures of stone and brick in high Victorian style. They had also freed their former slaves and rebuilt after the destruction of the Civil War. Their level of education was superior to the American norm, and their communal land ownership acted as a social safety net, keeping them free from the poverty of many frontier whites. But as Senator Dawes noted, they lacked “selfishness”—that essential ingredient of Anglo-American civilization. When the Cherokee and Choctaw nations fought the Dawes Act in court, Congress dissolved their national governments. When all Five Tribes then applied to join the United States as an Indian state, their request was denied. The Removal treaties had promised that the Indian Territory would never “be included within . . . limits or jurisdiction of any [white] State.” Yet in 1907, once whites safely outnumbered Indians in the territory, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed it the state of Oklahoma. Despite all these attacks, the Five Civilized Tribes are still a significant portion of Oklahoma’s population today, and they have revived their national governments as much as possible. Their lands, however, remain fragmented.
By one reckoning, the United States made 370 treaties with Indians and broke them all.117 Three centuries after Roanoke and Jamestown, the conquest of North America was done. Much the same had happened in Canada, the most violent episode being the war against the Métis leader Louis Riel and his Indian allies in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. There was less fighting north of the forty-ninth parallel, but the extermination of the buffalo, the building of a railway from coast to coast, and the settlement and treaty process were all quite similar.
It was only in this last period that white America’s oldest and biggest lie had any truth: in the Far West, the settlers really did face a “wilderness” inhabited by nomads. Until then, Europeans had made their way across the continent by taking over fields and houses emptied by disease, warfare or—where those failed—by state-enforced ethnic cleansing. From Jamestown and Plymouth to the edge of the Plains, the takeover was parasitic: America’s true pioneers were Indians. Indeed, the Civilized Tribes sent west and robbed again fifty years later became the first wave of “settlement.”
The Far West had been left to hunters because neither Indians nor whites could farm a grassland mown by buffalo and wildfire. For the first time, the white man could not purloin “the fruits of others’ labours.”118 Luckily for him, industrial technology did the job instead. After the slaughter of the buffalo, cattle briefly offered a tame substitute. But the open range was soon diced into farmland by the invention of barbed wire.119 The steel rope came west on steel rails. It also took steel and steam to flay the earth itself—to slice through ten thousand years of matted sod and turn the Prairie into wheat fields. The same Mr. Gatling whose gun reaped Sioux and Sudanese also made farm machinery and the first steam plough.120 And so the Great Plains became a chessboard, its pawns set out by industries and banks.
In 1987 a settler named Leroy Judson Daniels published his memoirs when he was more than a hundred years old. Born in 1882, breaking wild horses in Montana at fifteen, he saw the Great Plains turn into monoculture: “What a sight in the spring! Grass as far as the eye could see, wild flowers of all kinds, wild strawberries . . . millions of prairie chickens and quail, wolves and squirrels, foxes. . . . Of course, now we can see what we did to that wonderful world . . . took it away, destroyed what God and nature gave man to support his life. Then there wasn’t a fence anywhere.”121
The winning of the West was immediately laundered into entertainment, first by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and ever since by dime-store novels and films. The last word on the “conquest machine” must go to the great Sioux leader Sitting Bull, who fought Custer at the Little Bighorn, toured Europe with Cody in the 1880s, and died during a botched arrest two weeks before Wounded Knee:
The love of possession is a disease with them [the whites]. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.122