By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
I’m having a hard time with the “America 250” celebrations for a lot of reasons — mostly related to current conditions — but among them is the name, which suggests that “America” sprang into existence 250 years ago.
This isn’t to say that July 4, 1776 wasn’t a significant date; however, while it marked the historical moment when 13 of Britain’s then-26 colonies in the Americas announced their intention to form a separate union, it was as much an end as a beginning. I find what happened before that rupture to be as useful — if not more so — to understanding “America” than what occurred after.
First of all, note that the “American Revolution” actually only included half of Britain’s possessions in the hemisphere. The 13 that remained after 1776 were in present-day Canada, Florida and (principally) the Caribbean. All of those places were regarded as just as “American” as the 13 situated along the Atlantic Coast, and almost all remained loyal long after 1776. The Caribbean colonies didn’t start gaining independence until the 1960s and Canada achieved full constitutional independence only in 1982 (though it remains within the British Commonwealth).
So no, “America” didn’t suddenly smash onto the scene on July 4, 1776 with the pen strokes of a handful of bewigged men in Philadelphia. There were already multiple Americas and many different types of Americans inhabiting vastly varied landscapes and for countless reasons.
And that’s only if you consider the European-Americans — which of course is one of my other beefs with “America 250.” There was nothing new about the “New World” even then, and really never was. The signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were farther removed in time from the first permanent European settlements in the Americas as we are from them. Our “America 250” observation doesn’t even meet the halfway point in contemplating “America” as a geographic term, which came into usage in 1507 when it was applied by a German cartographer. And, of course, the people who already called this continent home had ancestral connections stretching back into unknown millennia, during which the land went by innumerable names.
Which is all why I find the pre-revolutionary decades to be most instructive about what was later constructed and why. Also, to consider what could have been. For instance, on a research trip to Dutchess County, in upstate New York, I found the journals of Johann Conrad Weiser Jr., dated 1748-1765. They sketched a vivid and disorienting portrait of an American place and time — the forest country of New York and Pennsylvania — that read like it belonged in the Medieval, rather than Enlightenment Era.
Settlements of both Europeans and members of various Algonquian and Haudenosaunee peoples were interspersed in clusters throughout rich river valleys and vast, dark forests, interconnected only by rutty dirt tracks or ancient trails. Meanwhile, sprawling plantation estates rose seemingly out of nowhere from the banks of waterways like the Hudson, where local colonial lords ruled with feudal impunity.
Weiser was unique in that he could travel between these different American worlds. Born in Germany but raised in the backcountry of New York, he apprenticed as a teenager with the local Mohawk tribe, which later made him an influential translator and emissary during treaty negotiations.
More importantly, Weiser showed how another America could have been built, away from the righteous windiness of the merchants, political brokers and religious proclaimers of the seaboard cities like Boston, New York and Charleston, and (mostly) in concert with the people who were already here.
In that way, I’d consider Weiser an exemplary American — though not one of the United States — and his story reminds me that the United States of America is and always has been the latter-day product of a profoundly complex and diverse melding of places, ideas and people with histories that date back more than 500 years in some places, and tens of thousands of years in others.
We would do well to learn and remember that deep complexity — not in the spirit of lessening the ideals of unity and equality that we profess to espouse in our “founding” holiday, but to turn away from the fictitious marble-bust version of the “America 250” anti-history that makes us smaller in spirit and thought than we actually are.
