Know-Nothings

Know-Nothings

The American Party, or Know-Nothing Party, developed inwards the context of the increasing sectional tensions that led to the Civil War. An exclusive, native Protestant, anti-immigrant, together with anti-Catholic organization, it stemmed from the nativist displace together with from the anxiety caused past times the massive influx of immigrants, reaching its peak inwards the 1850s.

The Papal Plot

Foreign immigration led many conservatives to believe that the nation’s social together with fifty-fifty political ills could live solved past times the elimination of unusual influence. The province had experienced an unprecedented current of immigrants inwards the mid-nineteenth century, reaching dazzling numbers.

From 1841 to 1860, to a greater extent than than iv 1000000 immigrants arrived, alongside 2 notable peaks: 369,980 inwards 1850 together with 379,000 inwards 1851, the bulk of whom were Irish Gaelic (1.2 million) together with High German (more than a million). In cities such equally Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, together with St. Louis, immigrants outnumbered native-born citizens.


Many feared the touching on the rattling textile of the United States of such large groups, impoverished, ignorant, illness ridden, together with alien inwards their religion together with languages. From a political indicate of view, many traditional parties were distressed past times the growing political influence of those groups inwards large cities, peculiarly Catholics, since many of these immigrants tended to live manipulated past times urban democratic political machines.

Consequently, in that location developed a rigid belief inwards a papal plot to subvert U.S. values together with fifty-fifty destroy U.S. institutions together with cultural homogeneity. In addition, Catholics were deemed unfit to alive inwards a democracy together with unpatriotic because they owed allegiance to the pope.

The Irish Gaelic were peculiarly blamed equally tools used past times the pope to command U.S. religious together with political life. Moreover, the keen number of Catholics moving to the Midwest caused the Know-Nothings together with other nativists to intend that the powerfulness of the pope mightiness live transferred there.

By the goal of the 1840s, several nativist hush-hush societies were formed to protect together with relieve the country, supposedly threatened past times an alien menace. In 1849, Charles Allen, a New Yorker, formed a hush-hush fraternal social club made upwardly of native-born Protestant working men, artisans, together with minor businessmen, who feared economical contest from cheaper immigrant labor.

It was called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, together with evolved into a hush-hush political displace (with a formal pledge of secrecy) known equally the American Party, formed inwards 1854 past times delegates from 13 states. If questioned, members were required to say, “I know nothing,” thence the pop appellation. They pledged never to vote for whatsoever foreign-born or Catholic candidate.

Know-Nothings made broad piece of job of newspapers together with periodicals for their propaganda, together alongside a network of activists from Boston to the Mississippi Valley. Some predicted that the pope together with his regular army would the world on U.S. shores to fix a novel Vatican inwards Cincinnati, Ohio.

One famous Know-Nothing was Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, who wrote a serial of articles denouncing a “foreign conspiracy.” Another was Lyman Beecher, a seventh-generation Puritan preacher. Intent on stopping the West from becoming Catholic country, he wrote that he came to Cincinnati “to battle the Pope for the garden spot of the world.” Mob attacks on Catholic churches inwards New England presently became frequent.

Popularity without Long-lasting Results

In practice, the Know-Nothings’ political aims were non so much to suppress immigration, nor fifty-fifty trammel it—although approximately sponsored resolutions to bar paupers together with criminals—but to command the influence of foreigners together with “purify” U.S. politics.

Their legislative programme called for the exclusion of foreigners together with Catholics from populace office, for to a greater extent than stringent naturalization laws (extension of the residency menstruum earlier naturalization from 5 to twenty-one years), for literacy tests equally a prerequisite for voting, together with for restrictions on liquor sales.

The Know-Nothings capitalized on the Compromise of 1850 together with the furor over “Bleeding Kansas,” which led to a primal political realignment inwards the mid-1850s, winning national prominence chiefly because the 2 major parties—Whigs together with Democrats—were at that fourth dimension breaking apart over the slavery issue.

By 1855 they had captured command of the legislatures inwards parts of New England together with were the dominant opposition political party to the Democrats inwards New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, together with Louisiana.

In the presidential election of 1856, the party, past times so mainly composed of southerners equally a trial of the internal debates over slavery, supported sometime Whig president Millard Fillmore alongside a simplistic platform—reputedly the shortest inwards U.S. history: “America must dominion America.”

When the vote was counted, Fillmore gathered most i 1000000 pop votes (21 percentage of the pop vote) together with 8 electoral votes. In Congress, the political party had 5 senators together with forty-three representatives.

Afterwards, Know-Nothingism declined for internal reasons: lack of efficient organization, the precipitous reject inwards immigration, the failure to force whatsoever legislation against immigration together with Catholics, disagreement over secrecy, together with the mounting violence of its supporters (rioting together with bloodshed took house during the elections).

The slavery number broke downwards the party, equally was the illustration for the Whigs together with the Democrats. In 1855, at the party’s start convention inwards Philadelphia, when southern delegates pushed a resolution to back upwardly the Kansas-Nebraska Act, northern delegates left the room.

While northern workers felt to a greater extent than threatened past times the southern Slave Power than past times the pope together with Catholic immigrants, at the same time, fewer southerners were willing to back upwardly a political party that ignored the query of the expansion of slavery. By 1860, many members together with sympathizers joined the ranks of the growing Republican Party alongside a political platform based on gratis soil.

In fact, both parties overlapped ideologically; their supporters both believed inwards conspiracy, i existence the pope’s, the other the slaveholders’. However, historians accept debated whether the inevitability of the Know-Nothings’ reject inwards favor of Republicanism was because the papal plot was less plausible than the slaveholders’ conspiracy.

The anti-immigration opinion of the political party was condemned past times many Americans, similar Abraham Lincoln, who frowned on their discriminatory together with exclusionist philosophy equally betraying such sacred U.S. values equally equality together with hospitality to immigrants; or William H. Seward, who attacked their failure to run into that U.S. economical evolution required immigrants.

In 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote inwards a mortal letter: “I am non a KnowNothing.... As a patch nosotros began past times declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We at i time practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings larn control, it volition read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, together with foreigners, together with catholics.’”

The Know-Nothings left an indelible grade on U.S. politics. The displace eroded loyalty to the national political parties, was instrumental inwards the breakdown of the Whig Party, together with made the political scheme to a greater extent than frail earlier the divisive number of slavery.

Mexican-American War

Mexican-American War

Numerous conspiracy theories pump on the controversial state of war fought betwixt the U.S. together with United Mexican States betwixt 1846 together with 1848. One theory states that the state of war was a production of a conspiracy past times southern U.S. congressmen to arrive at to a greater extent than southern territory, and, therefore, arrive at to a greater extent than political power.

Another catch suggests that it was U.S. President James K. Polk who initiated a complex conspiracy to start a “just” state of war against Mexico. Yet a 3rd theory puts the blame for starting the state of war on a conspiracy amid an aggressive Mexican press.

As early every bit the Missouri Compromise (1820), the U.S. Congress had made attempts at balancing political ability betwixt the gratis together with slave states. This balancing human activity continued throughout what historians telephone telephone the “era of sectional conflict,” together with ended entirely alongside the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War.


Abraham Lincoln was 1 of many politicians who saw a state of war alongside United Mexican States every bit detrimental. He together with many others believed that the acquisition of southern territory would offset the residual of political power.

Both earlier together with afterwards the war, contemporary abolitionists, including prominent spokesmen inwards both the northern Democrat together with Whig Parties, defendant the so-called Slave Power, a suspected cabal of southern oligarchs bent on expanding slavery together with the southern agency of life throughout the Western Hemisphere, of arranging the state of war to achieve their ends.

Though many at that fourth dimension believed that President Polk was exercise of the Slave Power conspiracy, others so together with since possess got pointed to Polk himself every bit the cardinal conspirator inwards instigating the war. Polk was a prominent advocate of Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was the God-given destiny of the U.S. to spread from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

Mexico’s to a greater extent than northerly provinces— together with inwards the minds of some, all of Mexico—were thus a legitimate target for U.S. expansion. Polk lent song back upward to this seat during his sweat for the presidency, announcing his potent back upward for the annexation of Texas, which was currently beingness considered past times Texas President John Tyler.

According to Anson Jones (the concluding president of the Republic of Texas), Polk sent agents to Texas to attempt to persuade him to provoke hostilities alongside United Mexican States piece the annexation procedure was taking place, bringing the U.S. into a territorial state of war inwards defense forcefulness of 1 of its states together with fixing the responsibleness for the state of war on Mexico. This suspected conspiracy, which anticipated the Mexican-American War past times 11 months, did non succeed entirely because Jones would possess got no exercise inwards it.

Having failed inwards this conspiracy, Polk attempted the buy of New Mexico, California, together with the disputed reason inwards Texas betwixt the Nueces River together with the Rio Grande. However, it presently became painfully clear to Polk that, afterwards losing Texas to U.S. annexation, United Mexican States had no intention of parting alongside whatever to a greater extent than of its land.

At this point, theory holds, Polk initiated merely about other together with fifty-fifty to a greater extent than complex conspiracy past times ordering General Zachary Taylor alongside a large Earth forces to station himself merely within the disputed territory southwest of the Nueces River. When hostilities failed to materialize, Polk ordered Taylor to the rima oris of the Rio Grande, which was the southernmost fringe of the edge claimed past times Texas.

Once there, Taylor built a fort together with blockaded the river. At the same time, a U.S. military machine exploring political party nether John C. Fremont moved into California’s Salinas Valley together with Polk secretly instructed the navy to invade California should whatever hostilities interruption out betwixt the U.S. together with Mexico.

These actions proved sufficient to provoke Mexico. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 detachment of the Mexican Earth forces defending the port metropolis of Matamoros fought an appointment alongside merely about of Taylor’s troops, killing 11 together with wounding merely about other five. Now able to claim that United Mexican States had “shed American blood upon American soil,” Polk went earlier Congress together with asked for a annunciation of war.

Thus, according to this theory, a complicated conspiracy initiated past times the U.S. president succeeded inwards starting a war. However, whether this was to achieve his ain aims or those of the Slave Power remains at issue.

Relating to this presidential conspiracy is merely about other that points inwards a completely dissimilar direction. Claiming that the treaty that fixed the southern boundary of Texas at the Rio Grande had been signed nether duress, United Mexican States repudiated both that boundary together with fifty-fifty Texas’s correct to be every bit an independent republic.

Thus annexation of Texas past times the U.S. was regarded every bit an invasion of Mexican sovereignty together with United Mexican States forthwith broke off all diplomatic relations. Although regime together with military machine leaders inwards United Mexican States did non desire state of war alongside the United States, merely about possess got pointed to a conspiracy amid the nationalistic Mexican press, which enflamed populace thought sufficiently to forcefulness a to a greater extent than aggressive policy.

Polk’s efforts, whether the production of a conspiracy or not, fed into the aims of this grouping of journalists, providing ammunition for a barrage of scathing editorials disputation that United Mexican States must instruct to war, both inwards retaliation for the annexation of Texas together with to dissuade the U.S. from seeking to instruct to a greater extent than territory inwards the southwest. The bottom draw of piece of occupation was that Mexico’s national pride was at stake. According to this view, this culminated inwards the skirmish along the Rio Grande, which sparked the starting fourth dimension of the war.

The Mexican-American War ended alongside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ceded nearly one-third of Mexico’s territory to the United States. In return, the U.S. paid United Mexican States $15 1 K m together with agreed to allow Mexicans living on the reason to rest if they chose to produce so.

Paranoia

Paranoia

The psychiatric concept of paranoia is unremarkably traced to ancient Greece, where Hippocrates inaugurated it alongside several other mental maladies, coining the term from the Greek para (meaning “beside,” or “changed”) too nous (signifying “mind,” or “reason”).

Its etymology tin flame also last traced dorsum to Plato’s too Aretaeus’s identifications of “religious madness” too “divine mania,” or citations inward the piece of work of Francois Boissier de Sauvages (Pathologie Methodica, 1759) to transformative delusions inward which patients believed they were beingness transformed into either animals or the reverse sex.

It was non until Etienne Esquirol’s Mental Maladies: Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Treatise on Insanity (1845) and, later, Emil Kraepelin’s Textbook of Psychiatry (1883–1915) that the concept of paranoia, every bit it is understood today, began to direct keep shape.


Esquirol’s descriptivist business concern human relationship catalogued, alongside others, erotic, reasoning, theomaniacal, incendiary, too homicidal monomanias. Paranoia was identified every bit a délire partiel (monomania), a folie raisonante (a reasoning madness).

Kraepelin’s influential Definition of dementia praecox (early-onset dementia, straight off classed nether the broad category of schizophrenia) most deeply informs the contemporary agreement of the concept every bit a delusional disorder that builds a highly organized, grandiose organization that is held with swell conviction.

From this tradition too that which followed, paranoia has come upwardly to last characterized past times symptoms such every bit projective thinking, hostility, suspicion, centrality, delusions, fright of the loss of autonomy, too grandiosity. Even though paranoids are oftentimes able to make a high grade of occupational functioning, different other psychoses, at that spot is no pharmaceutical or therapeutic “cure” for paranoia.

The most famous instance of paranoia, which has served every bit the footing for most of the major contributions on the report of the plain of report every bit good every bit beingness a remarkable autobiography of paranoia, is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [1903]).

Schreber, a high-ranking High German judge, describes the tedious too torturous procedure of beingness transformed into a adult woman past times God inward fellowship to select forth a novel race of men; beingness made into God’s sexual slave; too beingness the victim of a “soul murder” at the hands of physician Paul Emil Flechsig, the managing director of the psychiatric infirmary inward which he offset stayed.

Sigmund Freud’s influential report of the instance read paranoia every bit a defence against (unconscious) homosexuality, or homosexual attack. Although this theory has largely been cast aside, it is notable for Freud’s offset theorization of projection.

Freud also argued that paranoia is a recuperative process, i inward which the paranoid attempts to rebuild his or her the world after a psychotic interruption through delusion. Interestingly, “paranoia” every bit a discrete medicalpsychiatric Definition no longer exists. The electrical flow Diagnostic too Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) instead classifies it every bit an appear of other psychoses, such every bit schizophrenia.

The category of paranoia gradually moved beyond the psychiatric domain too began to last used past times philosophers too social theorists to explicate literary texts, social formations, too historical epochs.

The discourse of heroic “enlightenment”—which seeks to uncover, reveal, too discover knowledges that are otherwise concealed, shrouded, too hidden—is firmly entrenched inward Western philosophical traditions. The notion of “suspicion” every bit an interpretive strategy tin flame last traced from academic too Pyrrhonian skepticism through to the piece of work of Machiavelli, Rousseau, too Hobbes.

Paul Ricouer identifies Nietzsche, Marx, too Freud every bit the key proponents of a tradition that sought to redirect its Cartesian uncertainty from a regard of things, to uncertainty consciousness itself. In Crowds too Power (1962), Elias Canetti describes paranoia every bit an “illness of power” that tin flame assistance to explicate the nature of political ability inward general.

Canetti establishes an equivalence betwixt paranoids similar Schreber too despots too rulers such every bit Adolph Hitler too Genghis Khan. Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style inward American Politics,” continues this genealogy past times theorizing paranoia every bit a political style, rather than a pathological category.

Conducted nether the banner of “Studies on the American Right,” it charted the paranoid agency inward U.S. political life since independence, through the key feature of persecution too its systematization inward conspiracy theory.

Hofstadter sought to pull a by too large right-wing agency of mind, too chose to refer to it every bit “paranoid” because “no other give-and-take evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, too conspiratorial fantasy” that characterizes this mindset.

The concept of paranoia has dispersed into pop civilization inward a vast array of forms including films such every bit JFK (dir. Oliver Stone 1991) too Conspiracy Theory (dir. Richard Donner 1997), television set programs such every bit The X-Files too Nowhere Man, pamphlets, rants, too tracts of every political color, magazines such every bit Paranoia, too books such every bit Jim Keith’s Secret too Suppressed: Banned Ideas too Hidden History (1993).

Rhetorics of paranoia tin flame last identified inward pop music, from Black Sabbath’s classic anthem “Paranoid” to Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, too Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid.” The paranoid ethic of hypervigilance fifty-fifty extends to managerial advice books such every bit Andrew S. Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company too Career (1999).

The cultural sensibility expressed inward these works, i that has wholly digested Delmore Schwartz’s adage that “even paranoids direct keep existent enemies,” suggests that at that spot is less danger inward beingness paranoid than inward non beingness paranoid enough.

Like the term “conspiracy theorist,” “paranoid” represents a heavily loaded political too epistemological description, i that is used at for sure times every bit an ironic cast of self-identification, too at others, every bit a condemnatory indictment.

In a fashion similar to the agency “conspiracy theory” is used every bit a description of simulated history, the accusation of paranoia has travel a powerful tactic inward the marginalization of one’s ideological opponents.

Cultural critics too pop psychologists direct keep inward recent years taken upwardly the psychiatric history of paranoia, too (consciously or not) Freud’s contribution to it, inward their attempts to delegitimize those they consider conspiracy theorists.

The conspiracy theorist (or paranoid), it is argued, takes an object or figure that was i time revered too transforms it into the focus of persecutory anxiety, too thence that their conspiracy theories tell us to a greater extent than nigh the subject’s ain wish too fright than they produce nigh anything inward the world.

Paranoia, too thence the floor goes, is a affliction of disaffection: the WASP patriot, the militant feminist, too the Islamic fundamentalist are united past times their marginality, i which organizes their thinking inward a paranoid or conspiratorial fashion.

Other critics direct keep argued that such theories cast appropriate responses to actual circumstances: for example, the widespread belief inward the African American community of the early on 1990s that the authorities was spreading drugs such every bit cleft cocaine inward wretched dark communities should non last read merely every bit “paranoid,” but every bit a dramatization of really existent fears of an institutionally sponsored programme of genocidal neglect, i that is based on the historical revelation of actual conspiracies such every bit COINTELPRO too the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Slave Power

Slave Power

During the antebellum period, northerners opposed to slavery feared that a modest grouping of southern slave-holders was conspiring to gain command of the federal regime together with run it to farther southern slave-holding interests. These northerners argued that the conspiracy sought to expand the South’s political ability at the expense of northern whites’ liberties.

The Republican Party, which developed during the tense sectional politics of the 1850s, made the fullest run of this argument. Its leading figures, such equally Charles Sumner, William Seward, together with Joshua Giddings, were amidst the most active proponents of the theory that a “Slave Power Conspiracy” existed inwards the South.

Their arguments asserted that this conspiracy was committed to the defence forcefulness of slavery together with was an aristocratic relic inwards democratic America, 1 that failed to observe such basic rights equally liberty of speech, assembly, the press, together with conscience.


From 1845 to 1860, the number of northerners who came to believe inwards the beingness of the conspiracy increased considerably. Though at that topographic point was no cabal of slaveholders who truly tried to assume command of the federal government, the words together with actions of the men of the slaveholding southern states led many northerners to fright that such a conspiracy existed.

Fear of conspiracies had a historical precedent inwards the United States, together with was 1 of the reasons why northerners gave acceptance to the Slave Power Conspiracy. They could refer to a number of conspiracy theories believed to remove keep threatened republican liberties inwards America.

During the colonial era, England had sought to deprive American colonists of their liberties. After the Revolution, at that topographic point were charges that the Bavarian Illuminati sought to subvert the American Republic.

Federalists together with Jeffersonian Republicans traded allegations that the other political party sought to sell out the novel nation to either Great UK of Britain together with Northern Republic of Ireland or France. Burr’s conspiracy of 1804, fright of Masonic subterfuge inwards the 1820s together with 1830s, together with the suspected designs of the Catholic Church were 3 to a greater extent than examples of alleged conspiracies inwards the midst of republican America.

Antislavery northerners could non concur upon the number of southern members of the conspiracy. William Seward believed at that topographic point were 350,000 southerners involved, but Gamaliel Bailey included all household unit of measurement members of slaveholders together with thus came upwardly alongside the figure of 2 million.

Lincoln, the republicans, together with slave power

Other proponents of the “Slave Power” theory included inwards the count northerners who had concern relationships or political sympathies alongside the slaveholding South. Despite these varying estimates, all agreed that the political ability of this conspiracy was considerable equally it drew upon the wealthiest, most politically influential segment of southern gild (Gienapp).

Members of the “Slave Power” shared a belief inwards several principles. First, they accepted the premise of the “positive good” declaration nearly slavery, believing that slavery lifted the African out of savagery together with heathenism together with turned him into a Christian servant, cheerfully laboring for a kindly master copy who together with so cared for the slave inwards his declining years.

Second, these slaveholders believed that they had a correct to ain the labor, equally good equally the bodies, of their slaves. Third, the slaveholders argued that slavery was legal together with constitutional.


They believed that zip inwards the Constitution precluded the ownership of slaves; inwards fact, they asserted that the Constitution protected their ownership of slaves through the protection of private holding afforded yesteryear the Fifth Amendment, which protects life, liberty, together with holding from dry soil seizure without due process. They asserted that slavery was largely a dry soil matter, regulated yesteryear private states, which supported the establishment through the creation of elaborate slave codes.

Origins of the Conspiracy

Abolitionists were the initiative off grouping to brand the accuse that a “Slave Power” existed. Their postal drive of 1835, which sent abolitionist literature to southern slaveholders, together with petition drives, which inundated Congress alongside abolitionist petitions, drew the immediate ire of southern whites. President Andrew Jackson instructed southern postmasters non to deliver this literature.

In 1836, the House of Representatives, nether pressure level from southerners, adopted the “gag rule,” which tabled without word all abolitionist petitions sent to that body. Protection of slavery superseded protection of First Amendment rights for northerners. Abolitionists began to publicize these attacks on the liberties of northern whites, together with this proved to locomote an effective strategy that would pay dividends inwards subsequently decades.

Though abolitionists began to run the concept of the “Slave Power” around 1835, some abolitionists together with northern politicians went dorsum to the offset of the federal regime to seek the origins of the “Slave Power.” They discovered the roots of the work inwards some of the compromises made at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

These compromises included the three-fifths clause, which gave the South additional political power; a provision for a fugitive slave law, subsequently passed inwards 1793, which obligated northern states to provide runaway slaves to their original states; together with the twenty-year extension of the international slave merchandise until 1808.

The Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821 reawakened fears of the expansion of slavery amidst many northerners. Missouri was business office of the Louisiana Purchase together with lay on the westward banking concern of the Mississippi River, where it served equally the gateway to the western territories.

Northern concerns included the damaging consequence of slavery on the gratis project economic scheme of the western territories, the preservation of western lands for white non-slaveholding men, the failure of the US of America to alive upwardly to the ideals enshrined inwards the Declaration of Independence together with the Constitution, the growth of southern political power, together with the growing opposition to the establishment of slavery. The Tallmadge Amendment, proposed yesteryear James Tallmadge, sought to ban the farther importation of slaves into Missouri together with to laid out the procedure of gradual emancipation inwards that state.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820, however, permitted Missouri to shape a dry soil regime without regard to slavery, but it also created a geographic line of piece of work at 36°30' northward latitude (the southern boundary of Missouri) inwards a higher house which slavery could non expand into the residual of the Louisiana Purchase. It also admitted Maine into the union, thus preserving the sectional balance betwixt gratis together with slave states.

The side yesteryear side major trial that contributed to the fright of a “Slave Power Conspiracy” was the Texas annexation number of 1845. Texas had gained its independence from United Mexican States inwards 1836, but U.S. presidents had rebuffed Texans’ requests for annexation. Fear of state of war alongside United Mexican States together with sectional discord at domicile over the slavery number were the deciding factors inwards those decisions.

There was an equal number of gratis together with slave states inwards the Union, together with Texas, which would locomote a slave state, threatened to disrupt this balance of power. John Tyler, hoping to win reelection inwards 1844, used the number of Texas annexation equally a political tool.

His reelection bid failed, but Texas entered the Union equally a slave dry soil inwards 1845. Some extreme northerners, such equally John Smith Dye, charged that John C. Calhoun led the plot to annex Texas, together with when President William Henry Harrison refused to assent to the plan, the president died of an disease that resembled arsenic poisoning.

Calhoun claimed Tyler, the lately inaugurated vice-president, was fully inwards understanding alongside Calhoun’s plan, pointing to the fact that Tyler appointed Calhoun secretarial assistant of dry soil together with several years later, Texas was a slave state.

However, this interpretation left out 2 substitution points: first, the US of America had long sought Texas, together with second, the US of America feared that Great UK of Britain together with Northern Republic of Ireland mightiness shape an alliance alongside Texas, a diplomatic displace that would remove keep derailed the expansionist goals of Manifest Destiny.

The annexation of Texas helped pave the way for a state of war alongside Mexico, a state of war that antislavery northerners believed to locomote motivated yesteryear southern slaveholders bent on the acquisition of to a greater extent than territory for slavery southward of 36°30'.

During this war, David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, proposed an amendment to a spending nib that demanded that slavery non locomote permitted to spread into whatever territories that the US of America mightiness larn from Mexico. The amendment, known equally the Wilmot Proviso, attracted dandy back upwardly amidst northern Democrats together with Whigs, together with passed inwards the House of Representatives, thank y'all to a northern bulk inwards that chamber.

The amendment died inwards the Senate, where the 2 sections enjoyed parity. The Wilmot Proviso thus went the way of the Tallmadge Amendment, supported inwards the House but rejected inwards the Senate. Antislavery northerners chalked upwardly this defeat to southern political ability aided yesteryear its northern allies.

The Growing Threat of “Slave Power”

Out of the Mexican War came the Mexican Cession, which gave the US of America a massive improver of dry soil inwards the southwest together with along the Pacific coast. When the territory of California asked to locomote admitted into the Union equally a gratis dry soil inwards 1850, southerners feared the loss non solely of valuable territory but also of political power.

California’s entry into the Union would contestation the balance of ability inwards the Senate inwards the North’s favor together with violent debates erupted inwards Congress. Out of the sectional bitterness emerged the Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to locomote a gratis dry soil together with also resulted inwards a novel Fugitive Slave Law. This police delineate concerned many northerners because it placed the national regime inwards the seat of aiding the recapture of fugitive slaves.

Federal marshals could require whatever northerner to assist inwards a search for runaway slaves, without regard to northern citizens’ feelings nearly slavery. The police delineate also stripped the defendant fugitive of the rights of habeas corpus, trial yesteryear jury, together with testifying on his or her ain behalf.

Abolitionists used these features of the police delineate to combat their instance to adept effect, alert that what happened to the defendant fugitive slaves could hap to gratis white men. They also warned that slaveholders wished to spread slavery throughout the nation together with the Americas.

In the 1850s, many antislavery northerners grew concerned nearly growing ties betwixt southern expansionists together with the national regime together with the possible improver of novel slave states to the union. One such illustration of these unopen ties was the Ostend Manifesto (1854).

Three U.S. ministers met inwards Ostend, Belgium, together with issued this manifesto, which declared that Castilian claims to Republic of Cuba were unnatural together with that Kingdom of Spain ought to sell the isle to the United States. The manifesto asserted that the US of America should seize Republic of Cuba if it failed inwards its efforts to buy it from Spain.

At this fourth dimension at that topographic point were also several efforts led yesteryear southern filibusters to works life U.S. command over Republic of Cuba together with Nicaragua. Fears of presidential back upwardly for these ventures were greatly exaggerated, equally the actions taken yesteryear the administrations of Presidents Franklin Pierce together with James Buchanan to disavow them or to halt filibustering expeditions attested (May).

Northern fears of southern expansionism were non express to overseas activities. There was fifty-fifty greater concern that slavery would spread to the western territories. When Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act inwards 1853, which would practise territories through which a transcontinental railroad would locomote constructed, he needed southern back upwardly inwards monastic tell to win its passage.

Douglas seized upon the thought of pop sovereignty, which allowed the residents of a territory to determine if it would locomote slave or free. Since the territories inwards interrogation lay northward of the Missouri Compromise line, Douglas’s proposal meant the repeal of the 1820 line. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress inwards 1854, but led to increased fright of the beingness of the “Slave Power Conspiracy.”

Both North together with South sent settlers to Kansas, the territory most probable to locomote a slave state, to determine the territory’s gratis or slave status. After a fraudulent ballot, inwards which Missouri “border ruffians” illegally cast ballots, a proslavery regime began inwards Lecompton.

Under the proslavery constitution, men who espoused antislavery opinions lost their correct to vote, patch supporters of slavery from exterior the territory could vote, equally long equally they swore to back upwardly the Fugitive Slave Law together with the Kansas-Nebraska Act together with paid a dollar on election day.

Newspapers that opposed slavery committed a felony together with their editors faced imprisonment, patch the decease penalization awaited those who helped slaves escape. Free-state Kansans established a competition regime inwards Topeka together with during the ensuing impasse, Kansas descended into a civil war.

Proslavery forces “sacked” the free-state town of Lawrence inwards May 1856, an activity widely reported inwards northern newspapers sympathetic to the novel Republican Party, whose stated destination was to halt the western expansion of slavery inwards the territories. These accounts strengthened the conviction that the Slave Power was at work, attempting to spread slavery into Kansas yesteryear whatever agency possible.

Additional evidence of the willingness of the “Slave Power” to run violence to defend slavery occurred that same calendar week inwards Washington when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina assaulted Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner had spoken against the outrages inwards Kansas, slavery, together with the defenders of slavery, including Senator Andrew Butler, Brooks’s uncle.

Brooks hitting Sumner on the caput alongside a cane several times together with inflicted serious injuries that kept Sumner from his Senate duties for 2 together with a one-half years. Southern newspapers together with pop catch defended this attack. These defenses prompted renewed fears inwards the North that the civil liberties together with physical security of slavery’s opponents were inwards grave peril.

From the Dred Scott Case to Secession

In 1857, the Supreme Court decided the instance of Dred Scott v. Sanford. The courtroom decided that Dred Scott, a slave from Missouri, could non sue because he was non a citizen, together with that blacks could never locomote citizens, that slaves were constitutionally protected property, together with thus that Congress could non regulate or bound slavery inwards the territories.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 together with pop sovereignty were declared unconstitutional together with thus the instance opened the way for the expansion of slavery throughout the territories. Many Republicans defendant President James Buchanan, who had discussed the instance alongside several justices earlier his inauguration, together with the Supreme Court of conspiring alongside the Slave Power to convey nearly this outcome.

This conclusion was untrue equally the Supreme Court was bitterly divided over the instance together with Buchanan’s remarks nearly the impending determination were typed earlier he spoke alongside the justices at his inauguration. Notwithstanding, many northerners at 1 time feared that the side yesteryear side footstep of the Supreme Court would locomote to strike downwards northern dry soil laws that forbade slavery’s existence, thus nationalizing slavery.

Buchanan became the focus of some other struggle involving the “Slave Power” inwards 1858 when he presented the Lecompton Constitution to Congress together with defended it equally the volition of the people of Kansas. Voters inwards Kansas had overwhelmingly rejected the proposed constitution, but Buchanan asserted that Kansas was a slave dry soil together with that free-state forces were disloyal. To deny Kansas admission to the wedlock equally a slave state, he asserted, would anger the South.

Republicans denounced Buchanan equally a willing tool of the “Slave Power,” together with charged that southerners sought a slave dry soil to counterbalance California together with restore a sectional balance of power. In the end, alongside the assist of Stephen Douglas, Congress rejected the Lecompton Constitution. Kansas would eventually bring together the Union equally a gratis dry soil during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

In the belatedly 1850s, potent sentiment for reopening the African slave merchandise emerged inwards the cotton-producing states of the Deep South. Supporters of this movement claimed that the 1808 prohibition was unconstitutional together with a reply to northern antislavery fanaticism.

Defenders of this policy argued that additional slaves would give the South greater political ability inwards the House of Representatives, where the three-fifths clause held sway, together with restore a sectional balance of power.

The concluding dandy human activity of the “Slave Power” was secession from the Union, offset alongside South Carolina on 20 Dec 1860. Slaveholders feared that the novel Republican management of President Lincoln, elected inwards 1860, would comprehend an abolitionist policy toward slavery inwards the South.

What began equally an elbow grease to protect slavery from regime interference ended inwards failure equally the Confederacy lost the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation together with the Thirteenth Amendment pose an halt to slavery together with fears of a “Slave Power.”

Witchcraft

Witchcraft

Few episodes from America’s colonial past times are as good known or as notorious as the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. For many, the Salem trials cause got represented the defining 2d inward the history of Puritan conspiracy-minded intolerance as well as superstition; however, belief inward magic as well as witchcraft was an inextricable business office of the seventeenth-century worldview.

Witches were prosecuted inward Europe as well as inward all of the American colonies, non simply inward Puritan New England. While historians cause got produced competing explanations for colonial witchcraft belief, as well as though peradventure no ultimate explanation is possible, they cause got described many of the social, cultural, as well as religious weather inward which witches could live identified as well as witch-hunts could gain momentum.

Briefly stated, a witch was understood to live a soul who had made a pact with Satan to price neighbors, the community, or the terra firma through supernatural means. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 witch, inward other words, was a devil-worshipper, someone whose actions constituted a criminal as well as heretical conspiracy to destroy orderly Christian society.


A World of Wonders

Colonial Americans lived inward an enchanted universe, a “world of wonders,” as historian David D. Hall has phrased it. Their the world was 1 where the supernatural infused the natural, where God as well as Satan were active agents inward daily events, as well as where storms, disasters, illness, as well as crop failure were “special providences” demonstrating God’s volition or displeasure.

Existence as well as livelihood were oft precarious inward early on America, as well as from a rich fund of pop religious beliefs people chose the practices or rituals that mightiness offering simply about sort of added protection from catastrophe. Magic as well as countermagic, spells, astrology, divination, palmistry, as well as witch lore were employed to predict the future, or heal the ill, to price enemies, or to defend against occult attack.

In the seventeenth century, local folk magic practitioners called “cunning folk,” “conjurors,” “white witches,” or “wizards” were omnipresent—though oft suspicious—members of English linguistic communication as well as American social club to whom people could plough for assistance.

Witches were a malevolent business office of this the world of wonders. While the do of magic was an accepted element of folk belief, witchcraft had to a greater extent than sinister connotations. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 witch was someone who had acquired superhuman powers through a covenant with Satan; principal amid these powers was the powerfulness to perform maleficium, or to drive price through supernatural means.

The types of maleficium varied. Witches were oft defendant of causing disease or death, or causing miscarriages, or spoiling beer or butter. They were believed to torment their enemies inward other ways, past times invisibly entering the rooms of sleeping people as well as choking them, or turning themselves into animals to conduct out their evil deeds.

They were also said to live able to tempt others to bring together inward their satanic pact past times a hold back or glance, or past times sending out their specters to haunt their enemies. People nether this sort of satanic influence were believed to live “possessed,” a status that oft manifested itself inward inexplicable physical contortions or illnesses.

And spell belief inward magic as well as witchcraft was feature of pop as well as elite layers of early on American society, for clergymen specially the existent or imagined presence of witches was profoundly troubling. In making a covenant with Satan, the witch was rejecting God as well as godly society.

This import of heresy had deep resonance amid the Puritans, who believed themselves to live a covenant land of God as well as a terminal bastion of Protestantism. Witches inward New England represented aught less than a satanic conspiracy against God’s “city on a hill.”

Identifying these witches was a social process, a agency past times which people controlled social club as well as punished “antisocial” elements. Most accusations of witchcraft were of a face-to-face diversity as well as reflected local tensions betwixt neighbors.

What is oft surprising close these cases is the apparent banality of their origins. Testimony inward the 1651 trials against Mary as well as Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, shows that untidy describe concern transactions lay at the root of the accusations.

Hugh Parsons, a brick maker, exchanged threatening words with neighbors who after argued that he had bewitched them: their children had fallen unaccountably ill, their cow’s milk had curdled—all prove of “bewitchment.”

Other witchcraft trials cause got like quotidian origins. Unexplained illness, crop failures, missing farm implements, or abrupt deaths could easily live attributed to a suspicious neighbor’s demonic intervention.

Many of these cases never came to trial since the defendant would oft countersue for defamation. Yet the confluence of personal or communal misfortune as well as the demand for explanation as well as retribution oft meant that individuals who exhibited “antisocial” demeanour or who existed on the margins of social club were identified as witches.

Most of the individuals identified as witches inward colonial America were women. Historians dispute the numbers as well as gender proportions of witchcraft accusations, but 1 scholar, Carol F. Karlsen, has argued that of the 344 known people defendant of witchcraft inward New England betwixt 1620 as well as 1725, 267 (78 percent) were women.

Most of these were women who, purposefully or not, refused to convey their house inward society. For example, most defendant witches inward New England were middle-aged or older women who were eligible for inheritances; they interfered with the traditional patriarchal patterns of succession.

Women defendant of witchcraft inward New England commonly faced a familiar litany of sins that defined their deviance: excessive pride, sexual promiscuity, lying, discontent, or anger. They stuck out, inward other words, inward a social club that prized them chiefly as submissive Christian wives.

If witchcraft was defined as a rebellion against God, rebellion against the gender norms as well as hierarchy of early on American social club was every bit threatening to godly order. In times of problem or misfortune, marginalized or deviant women were hence amid the most vulnerable to live social scapegoats as well as defendant of beingness “handmaidens of the devil”.

The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692

These patterns tin give notice live seen writ large inward the Salem outbreaks, which lasted from belatedly 1691 to May 1693. This was non the initiative of all major witch-hunt inward colonial America; in that place had been a pregnant 1 inward Hartford, Connecticut, inward 1662–1665, during which at to the lowest degree 3 people were executed.

And the Salem trials, during which 19 people (fourteen women as well as v men) were hung as “witches” as well as hundreds were imprisoned, were dwarfed inward scale past times the massive witch-hunts that had swept Europe during the sixteenth as well as seventeenth centuries, which reputedly led to the executions of tens of thousands of women.

Salem inward the 1680s was a troubled town. Flooded with refugees from frontier wars with the Native American tribes allied with France, facing a failing economy, as well as separate past times deep shape as well as factional fissures, the town was a tinderbox of the kinds of social antagonisms where witchcraft accusations could thrive.

The outbreak itself began inward belatedly 1691. Several immature women began to experiment with magic as well as spells, as well as simply about of them, including the immature lady as well as niece of Samuel Parris, a local clergyman, began to exhibit the signs of “possession.”

When consulted, physicians as well as clergy could solely conclude that the fits as well as trances that afflicted these women were prove that they were nether the influence of an “Evil Hand.” When interrogated, the girls at initiative of all would non cite their “tormenters” but eventually gave out 3 names, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, as well as Tituba.

These “witches” were arrested as well as presumed guilty. Good as well as Osborne denied the charges, but Tituba, a Carib Indian adult woman who was also Parris’s slave, confessed. She implicated Good as well as Osborne as accomplices as well as claimed that in that place were many other witches at large as well as conspiring against the community.

This confession initiated a bicycle of accusations as well as trials that extended far exterior of Salem; fifty-fifty the married adult woman of Governor William Phips inward Boston was accused. Some people chop-chop came to the decision that the scale as well as achieve of the accusations meant that the outbreak was all a delusion, if peradventure a satanically inspired one.

Others were non as well as then moderate inward their opinions. Samuel Parris, for one, argued that Salem witchcraft was aught less than a “War the Devil has raised with us.” Judicial moderation was non an option, according to Parris, for “If e'er in that place were Witches, Men & Women inward Covenant with the Devil, hither are Multitudes inward New-England”. Other members of the clergy were to a greater extent than ambiguous inward their assessment of the situation.

When the judges inward Salem asked New England’s clergy for advice, Boston pastor Cotton Mather prepared on behalf of his colleagues a document entitled “Return of Several Ministers” (15 June 1692) that gave mixed directives. On the 1 hand, the document declared, the judges must live scrupulous as well as exacting as they weighed the evidence.

On the other hand, if witchcraft was afoot, the prosecution against it must live speedy as well as vigorous. The hunt raged on until Governor Phips suspended the proceedings inward belatedly 1692; inward the leap of 1693 he pardoned everyone soundless inward custody.

From Magic to Metaphor

The Salem trials were non the terminal witch prosecutions inward the American colonies; a instance emerged inward Colchester, Connecticut, inward 1724. In general, however, witchcraft was no longer treated as a crime.

Many scholars cause got argued that the increment of scientific rationalism, get-go with the Enlightenment inward the eighteenth century, made belief inward magic as well as the supernatural increasingly ludicrous. While this explanation has simply about credence, many people continued to believe inward witchcraft after 1692, as well as soundless do.

The aftermath of the trials brought no immediate resolution as well as healing to Salem or New England, as well as the witch-hunt remained a source of contention as people looked for scapegoats. Among those most visibly selected for censure were the Puritan ministers, specially Samuel Parris as well as Cotton Mather, whose actions many believed were catalysts for the trials.

In Mather’s case, these accusations were largely unfair, since other than his published describe concern human relationship of the trials, Wonders of the Invisible World (1692), his dealings with the trials were relatively indirect.

Nevertheless, inward 1700 a Boston merchant named Robert Calef published a book, More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), which claimed that the Puritan clergy, as well as Cotton Mather inward particular, had conspired to encourage the witch hysteria inward monastic tell to eliminate heterodox belief as well as to bolster their sagging religious as well as cultural potency inward New England.

The volume was instantly labeled libelous past times the Puritan authorities, as well as Increase as well as Cotton Mather were as well as then angered past times Calef’s accusations that they had copies of the volume publicly burned inward Harvard’s college yard.

Whatever the immediate effect of the suppression of Calef’s book, the long-term consequences to Cotton Mather’s reputation were catastrophic. No unmarried figure is as closely identified with the trials as Mather, as well as his retentiveness remains as the archetypal intolerant Puritan as well as superstitious witch-hunter.

In the twentieth century witchcraft as well as witch-hunting remained live as a powerful metaphor for repression of many kinds: state-sponsored religious or political persecution, or for the oppression of women inward a patriarchal society.

Many contemporary believers inward witchcraft or paganism, called Wicca, vogue themselves as the religious descendents of the victims of the Salem trials, as well as terra firma a continuity of utilisation betwixt their ain struggles for liberty of religious human face as well as the lives of those who died inward 1692. Probably the most famous utilisation of the witchcraft metaphor came with the production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1952).

Declaring that the “witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which laid inward amid all classes when the remainder began to plough toward greater private freedom,” Miller used the Salem trials as an analogy for the political repression of McCarthy-era America.

In his view, the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy as well as the House Un-American Activities Committee represented a conspiracy against liberty of conscience akin to the Puritan backlash against witchcraft.

Radical feminists inward the 1960s, meanwhile, also employed the witchcraft metaphor. In 1968, the “action wing” of New York Radical Women was formed, as well as they chose the cite WITCH, an acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

The grouping attacked institutions that were seen as emblems of patriarchal power; they hexed the Chase Manhattan bank, for example, as well as disrupted a bride fair at Madison Square Gardens dressed as witches (Purkiss, 8–9). For these women, a witch was an emblem of woman soul empowerment, non patriarchal victimization.

Natives of North America

Natives of North America

Perhaps no other group in human history has experienced as extreme a change in its circumstances as did the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere between 1450 and 1750.

The so-called Columbian exchange, set off by Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage from Spain, completely altered the ecology, economy, and web of social relationships among the diverse peoples that Columbus (inaccurately) named “Indians.”

The people who populated North and South America between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago crossed what was then a land bridge between Siberia and modern Alaska and gradually settled the hemisphere.


When a worldwide Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago, the land route between Asia and the Americas disappeared. By the time of Columbus’s first voyage, historians and anthropologists have estimated that the hemispheric population stood between 10 million and 75 million, most living in Central and South America.

The peoples of North America were diverse in almost every possible way except biologically. Experts argue about the extent of North America’s precontact population—the range is 1 million to 18 million—but most agree that populations began declining several hundred years before Europeans showed up.

By 1450, some large Indian communities in the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and middle Mississippi Valley had vanished or dispersed, abandoning sophisticated buildings and artifacts. Factors that have been proposed to explain these declines include climate change, warfare, and disease.

By 1450, there were dozens of tribal groups and alliances speaking diverse languages and following very different religious and social customs. There were some commonalities: Most Indians were animists, believing in the spiritual power of their natural surroundings.

They devised elaborate rituals to placate these spirits, especially those of animals they had killed. In many areas human burials were placed in elaborate and extensive earthen mounds. Most tribes respected shamans (healers) and believed that a Great Spirit oversaw the natural world.

Because tribes were likely to move often in search of better land or more abundant game—or to avoid other hostile tribes—property ownership in the European sense was all but unknown. Archaeologists have found abundant evidence of trade routes that spanned the continent, bringing tribes together in the process of tukar barang and exchange.

In most North American tribes, women were in charge of agricultural production, while men hunted for game. Maize (corn), first cultivated in Mexico, was by the time of contact a basic crop in much of North America.

Squash and beans were also staples of most tribes’ diets. While by no means environmentalists in any modern sense, most North American tribes were well adapted to their surroundings and were often helpful to inexperienced Europeans.

For example, natives taught French explorers how to build lightweight birchbark canoes to travel where their clunky wooden ships were useless. Others helped Europeans identify strange plants and animals, learning which were edible and which poisonous.

Most famously, Squanto, a Patuxet who had been kidnapped by an English slave trader in 1614, returned to America in time to teach the Pilgrims how to fish and grow corn, keeping them alive to hold a Thanksgiving in 1621.

Warfare was a constant among various Indian groups both before and after European contact. Early on, some tribal groups welcomed alliances with Europeans as a way to overpower their traditional rivals, in part by acquiring the foreigners’ goods and technologies, especially their superior weapons.

But as the trickle of Europeans became a flood, especially in British-claimed regions, some tribes forged alliances with traditional friends and even enemies to counter European threats to Indian survival.

For example, Algonquian chief Powhatan, head of a strong confederacy, at first welcomed Jamestown settlers, even allowing his daughter, Pocahontas, to marry Englishman John Rolfe.

But in 1622, Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough, now leader of the Powhatan Confederacy, launched a surprise attack on settlers, killing more than three hundred of them and capturing women and children. Ultimately, the Virginians rallied, using trickery and even poison to reclaim their holdings.

In this early war, as in later conflicts, tribes were responding to growing white populations. Whites were no longer perceived simply as traders who would soon move on; they had become settlers using—and claiming as their own—traditional tribal lands.

Disease did even more damage than European land grabs and weapons of war. Because Indians were genetically very similar, and because they had been isolated in the New World for many centuries, they were at the mercy of pathogens carried by the invaders.

The worst of these was smallpox, with measles and influenza also sowing death. These diseases killed Europeans, too, but ravaged the Indian population. Long before germs were known to cause disease, Europeans praised God for smiting Indian enemies, thus making it easier to colonize America.

Some Europeans “assisted” this process by purposely distributing to Indians smallpox-infected blankets and other tainted goods. Smallpox epidemics could and did change the course of battles and negotiations between natives and Europeans.

Southwest

Descendants of the Anasazi, whose complex civilization came to a puzzling end in about 1300 c.e., the Pueblo Indians, including Hopi and Zuni, for centuries had lived in settled agricultural communities in today’s southwestern United States.

The Spanish, who had already made a fortune exploiting Central and South America, in the 17th century also began aggressively exploring the southern reaches of North America, with terrible consequences for the native population. In 1598, Juan de Oñate marched four hundred soldiers, priests, and colonists into New Mexico, killing almost half the residents of the cliff city of Acoma and forcing most of the rest into slavery.

In 1680, Popé, a Pueblo religious leader who had been punished for rejecting Franciscan priests’ attempts to convert him, led the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful native retaliation in this masa of European occupation.

Indian ranks had thinned through disease and compelled labor, but they still outnumbered the Spanish colony of about three thousand. The Pueblo peoples spoke several different languages, yet they managed to unite, with the help of traditionally hostile Apache, to expel the Spaniards and destroy symbols of Catholicism.

Although internal native strife, including raids by Apache and Navajo enemies, soon resumed, and the Spanish retook New Mexico in 1692, the Pueblo were treated with greater respect, becoming one of the few tribal groupings in North America to mostly retain ancestral homelands.

Southeast and Florida

In 1513, Hernán Ponce de León invaded Florida in search of slaves, wealth, and promises of eternal youth but was repulsed by local Calusa Indians. More sustained and far-ranging efforts led by Hernando De Soto and others in the 1540s explored the Gulf coast and penetrated as far as the Great Plains. Not until 1565 did King Philip II authorize what was essentially a Florida military base to deter British, French, and Dutch piracy of Spanish gold.

In the process, the Spanish massacred a tiny colony of refugee French Huguenots and built a fort at St. Augustine, the oldest U.S. site continuously peopled by Europeans. Efforts to convert the local Guale tribe sparked an uprising in 1597. The tiny Spanish colony put down the uprising in 1602 but never attracted more than a few thousand settlers.

In other sections of the Southeast, a confederacy among four tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek—preceded the European invasion. They would be tested by European incursions that forced these tribes to relocate, sometimes competing among themselves for territory.

By 1745, the Cherokee were allied with the British in their effort to contain France and Spain, focusing on lands between Florida and the recently established colony of Georgia. In this period, Creek began migrating to Florida under pressure from both Europeans and members of their own tribe. In the 19th century, they would call themselves Seminole.

British and French American Alliances

The five (later six) tribes that became the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) centered in what became New York State, had also, prior to European contact, initiated a Great League of Peace in response to destructive warfare among tribes.

These “people of the longhouse” included the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida tribes, joined in the early 1700s by Carolina’s Tuscarora. The Iroquois were not nomadic but lived in large villages. Their longhouses were wood and bark structures that might be 400 feet long and accommodated many family groups.

Skilled negotiators, the tribes individually and confederacy as a whole for a time held their own against Dutch, British, and French claims and demands. Some among the Iroquois hoped to remain neutral, but they soon were edging toward the British.

By the 1670s, the Iroquois and British had pledged mutual friendship. After a sneak attack by French forces in 1687, the Five Nations retaliated by attacking New France settlements on behalf of British objectives in what was known in North America as King William’s War.

They fought both the French and France’s Indian allies, including the Huron and Abenaki and Algonquian people of the Great Lakes region. Both groups of Indians inflicted and suffered terrible casualties; by 1701, the Iroquois were promising their people to remain neutral in future European conflicts.

By 1750, eastern and Great Lakes Indians of many tribes, displaced by white settlement, were seeking new lands in the Ohio Valley, on the frontier between British and French territorial claims and control.

The Iroquois, as well as Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee, and Chickasaw, were all trying to use this no-man’s-land to enhance trade and perhaps prevent both the British and French from expanding even farther into the continent.

In 1749, Virginia awarded some of its favored citizens development rights to almost 8,000 square miles of the Ohio Valley. The ensuing French and Indian wars would set off a series of events that ultimately made hundreds of Native tribes—survivors of 258 years of warfare, land loss, and disease—strangers in their own land.

Kongo Kingdom of Africa

Kongo Kingdom of Africa

The kingdom of the Kongo (Kongo dya Ntotila) flourished along the Congo River in the west-central coast of Africa from about the 14th century. The kingdom covered a large part of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the king (the manikongo) lived in what is now Angola.

King Nimi, from near present-day Boma, conquered the Congo Plateau. He and his followers married into the local elite and he was accepted as ruler of the region. The wealth of Kongo was based on trade in ivory, hides, and slaves, and it also used a shell currency popular in western Africa.

In 1482, King João II of Portugal sent an expedition, under the command of Diogo Cão, to explore the west coast of Africa, and they reached the Congo River in the following year. Diogo Cão sent a delegation to see the fifth king of the Kongo, Nzinga-a-Cuum (or Nzinga Nukuwu), who was living at Mbanza (São Salvador do Congo). Nzinga-a-Cuum asked Cão to take charge of a young relative, Caçuto, and others, and take them back to Lisbon to receive a Christian education.


Caçuto learned Portuguese and much about Portuguese and European history, also converting to Christianity. At Bela in 1489, he was baptized and took the name João Silva, after King João II of Portugal, and Pire Silva, a court official who had served as his godfather. Caçuto then returned to Mbanza.

Nzinga-a-Cuum had become wary of the Portuguese. Possibly worried about Portuguese military power, Nzinga-a-Cuum converted to Christianity, becoming King João I of the Kongo. However he had long practiced polygamy. After his baptism, he returned to his many wives and disowned his son, who, with his mother and other members of the family, sought the protection of the Portuguese.

When his father died in 1506, Afonso returned to Mbanza, was crowned, and then set about converting his people to Catholicism. He regularly corresponded with King Manuel I of Portugal and sent over more of his subjects to Lisbon to receive a European education.

When Afonso I of Kongo died in 1542, his son and successor Pedro I became the next king; he was succeeded briefly afterward by Francisco I (Mpudi a Nzinga Mvemba). Pedro became king again briefly.

A nephew, Diogo, disputed these two rulers and staged a rebellion against Pedro and then Francisco and then Pedro again. He forced Pedro to seek sanctuary in a Catholic church, where he wrote and pleaded for help from King João III the Pious of Portugal and from the pope.

Diogo came to the throne at a time when some Portuguese traders were eager to expand the slave trade, and Diogo was eager to profit from this. When he died in 1561, his illegitimate son, Afonso II, succeeded him, and a violent succession crisis broke out.

While he was attending Mass within months of becoming king, Afonso II was murdered by his brother Bernardo. Bernardo I reigned for six years. His successor, Henrique I, was king for a year before being forced to flee when the neighboring kingdom of Jagas invaded Kongo. Henrique was succeeded by Alvaro I, who reigned for 19 years and brought some stability to the country.

Alvaro I also stepped up the slave trade and sent as many as 14,000 slaves annually to Brazil. Finally Antonio I, who became king in 1661, quarreled with the Portuguese over control of the slave trade. In 1665, he gathered his supporters and met the Portuguese in battle at Mbwila. He was wounded in the fighting, captured, and subsequently beheaded.

After 1678, after a violent internal civil war, the kingdom of Kongo rapidly fragmented into a number of warring states. The kings of Kongo—descended from Afonso I—did, however, continue to hold court and conduct ceremonial functions.

Henrique III, Afonso Nlengi, reigned from 1793 until 1802, and the male line continued until Pedro VII, Afonso, died in 1962, whereupon Isabel María da Gama became the regent. Although some people wanted to restore the Kongo monarchy, when Angola gained its independence in 1975, the new government refused to recognize its existence.

Mamluk Dynasties in Egypt

Mamluk Dynasties

The Mamluks ruled Egypt from the middle of the 13th century to 1517. The first 24 Mamluk sultans were called the Bahri (river) rulers. In 1382, they were followed by the Burji (tower) Mamluks, so called because they had been quartered in the towers of the Citadel fortress overlooking Cairo. The Mamluks, mostly of Turkish and Mongol origins, were slaves and professional soldiers.

They were purchased by other former slaves as young boys in the slave markets in Syria and Egypt and educated as a professional military caste. With the completion of their education they were freed and given full military regalia and land to pay for the upkeep of the equipment and horses.

The Mamluks were notoriously disputatious and constantly fought among themselves for succession to the throne. Since there was no principle of hereditary monarchy, any Mamluk could hope to become the ruler if he could overthrow the current sultan.

As a result, the average reign of a sultan was only six years. Mamluks married within the caste to the sisters and relatives of other Mamluks. Their society was based on a feudal hierarchy of allegiance of a vassal to a lord.


Recent converts to Islam, the Mamluks emphasized their rule as Muslims, even though many of them were not personally particularly devout. They allowed the exiled Abbasid caliph from Baghdad to reside in Cairo but successive caliphs exercised no real power.

The Mamluks encouraged metalworking, book binding, and textile industries. But Mamluk attempts to monopolize the trade on luxury goods, coupled with high taxes, discouraged many foreign and local merchants.

As great builders and patrons of the arts, the Mamluks encouraged scholars, including renowned historian Ibn Khaldun, to work in Cairo. Under the Mamluks, Cairo became a major intellectual and artistic center and grew into arguably the largest city in the region.

The Mamluks built hospitals, caravan-saries, public fountains, and massive mausoleums for their families. The mausoleum of Sultan Qaitbay (reigned 1468–96) was particularly impressive. Much of medieval Cairo dates from the Mamluk era.

Mamluk soldier

The Mamluk sultan Baybars (reigned 1260–77) drove the crusaders out of the eastern Mediterranean and repelled major invasions by the Mongols. A wily politician, Baybars also established alliances with potential enemies of Sicily, Seville, and the Turks.

The Black Death (plague) in 1340 reduced the population throughout Mamluk territories; in Cairo alone over 25 percent of the people perished. They were further weakened by Timurlane’s destruction in Syria. The expansion of Portuguese trading outposts along the African and Indian coasts led to mounting economic competition and as they lost control of trade from the east, the revenues from commerce declined.

In addition, constant disputes over succession weakened Mamluk authority and made them vulnerable to outside attacks. Their failure to forge a united front contributed to their defeat and the conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.