But the food product that sparked the biggest boom was sugar, a sweetener we now take for granted. During the Middle Ages, sugar was so scarce that only wealthy lords and ladies could afford it, usually as a medicine for a sore throat or upset stomach.
New comers died in large numbers from malaria spread by mosquitoes. They died from typhoid or dysentery spread by germs in the water. They were killed by Indians. Even in the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s colonists died at great rates.
Equality was an idea that had to be created. It had to be built up gradually, through decades of experience.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite.
As Benjamin worked in his brother’s shop, he borrowed books by philosophers who were part of a movement in Europe known as the Enlightenment. These thinkers believed in God — many called them “deists.” But their God was not the sort who divided the Red Sea. God governed the world through natural laws, deists argued. Call him the “Supreme Architect” or “Nature’s God” — he had no need for miracles. Deists believed that human reason was the key to uncovering nature’s laws.
“My countrymen will expect too much from me,” Washington worried. And he was not just being modest: he had read his history. He knew very well how difficult it was for republics to survive. The generals of Ancient Rome had quarreled, murdered their rivals, and turned their republic into a dictatorship of Caesars. The leaders of the English civil war had chopped off King Charles’s head to create a Puritan commonwealth that lasted less than 5 years. Today we don’t take Washington’s fears seriously. We know how the story turned out. Yet 10 years after his inauguration, Washington went to his grave still unsure whether the US would survive.
He ordered General Zachary Taylor to march US troops all the way to the Rio Grande — land that both Texas and Mexico claimed. “We have not one particle of right to be here,” wrote an American soldier in his diary. “It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war.” He was right. Polk presented Congress a declaration of war when news came that Mexican troops had attacked Taylor in April 1846. The US-Mexican War had begun.
A Philadelphia law decreed that any slave living more than 6 months in the city would be free. That made life difficult for southern officials working in the government because they often brought slaves to Philadelphia as house servants. George Washington himself secretly arranged for his slaves to be taken back to Virginia after 6 months “under pretext that may deceive both them and the public.” Washington pretended that his wife wanted the slaves to return with her.
Inventions of every sort contributed to these new industrial systems. Americans patented more than half a million new designs and machines in the 30 years after the Civil War. Edison figured out how to send more than one message at a time over a telegraph wire, and made so much money from his idea that he was free to devote his life to thinking up new inventions. Edison’s biggest idea was to create a system for inventing things, rather than just dreaming up ideas one by one. If you could have cotton and steel factories, why not start an invention factory? Edison bought electrical generators and chemical supplies and hired technicians and toolmakers to work in what became known as a “research laboratory.” Its purpose was to put new knowledge to practical use. Big companies quickly copied the idea.
Factories got bit by dividing a shoemaker’s job into smaller tasks, each done by a different person, who could be taught the job with little training.
An old-fashioned shoemaker took pride in his skills. But these jobs? Who could feel proud of doing the same thing a thousand times?
If getting big was a key to succeeding, how did ordinary folk become big? Just as big businesses needed systems to become big, so did workers. Even before the Civil War, some had joined together in labor unions — organizations that workers formed to protect themselves and improve their lives. Early unions most often united skilled workers such as carpenters, tailors, or printers. They campaigned for public education and an end to 12-hour-work-days and debtors’ prisons. But each time that boom was followed by bust, the unions did badly. Hard times made it harder to stand up to bosses, who could hire other folk just as desperate for a job.
8 hours for work; 8 hours for rest; 8 hours for what we will.
Too often, surprise turned to suspicion and discrimination, as Chinese immigrants found themselves barred from more desirable jobs. For many of these newcomers, the only jobs available were rough manual labor, building skyscrapers, bridges, and streets. “In Italy, they told me the streets were paved with gold. When I got here I found the streets were not paved with gold, they were not paved at all, and they expected me to pave them.”
God gave us Ten Commandments, and we book them. Wilson gives us the Fourteen Points. We shall see.
But the divisions didn’t disappear. Madison thought long and hard about that problem as he worked on the Constitution. A republic would always have divisions, he decided — actions, he called them. And they arose not just because people came from different parts of the world. The causes of faction were “sown in the nature of man.” Humans make mistakes in reasoning things out. Their passions are easily aroused. They are influenced by “self-love,” which blinds them to the viewpoints of others. More important, people naturally divide because of their different circumstances in life. Most often, said Madison, divisions arise because of “the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors… A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest…” It was wishful thinking to believe that humans would ever find a golden age so gentle, a millennium so peaceful, or a commonwealth so holy that disagreements would disappear. Or, as Madison put it, no government would ever manage to give “every citizen the same opinions, the same passions and the same interests.”
No, if there was to be a “more perfect union” binding together the people and provinces of the US, it would have to come from crafting a government that allowed factions to work out their different interests — through debate, through a fair system of representation, through compromise, through laws passed. The trick was to put all that into the Constitution and still hold tight the values that the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed: freedom (liberty was the other word used) and equality.
In 1910 Teddy Roosevelt warned of the gap between rich and poor; between ordinary laborers and the “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” A century after Roosevelt, that gap had returned, stretching wider than nearly any time in the nation’s history. By 2010 half of American families collectively owned only 1% of the nation’s wealth. American workers found it harder to get ahead — to change a blue collar for a white one — than workers in most other developed nations. Equality of opportunity seemed threatened.
It’s all to easy for a chosen people to think of themselves as different, better, purer. But that path leads toward separation rather than union. To remain pure, best wall yourself off in a smaller settlement, where everyone thinks the same. The US is exceptional because its continental union is political. It welcomes diversity. It is not a union based on all citizens thinking alike.
Looking back, we acknowledge the wisdom of those who have gone before; else why bother with history? But respect is not blind. “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” Jefferson wrote in 1816. “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human. As new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”