I am "something" of an expert on US history... and what you've written here is almost entirely wrong.
First, note that the "founding fathers," 1776 to 1787... and the Mayflower, in 1620... are themselves separated by a span of 156 years. Columbus, arriving in 1492, led to Cortes arrival on Hispaniola in 1504... the conquest of the Aztecs essentially completed in 1521... again, leaving a span of a full hundred years before the arrival of the Mayflower. The world today has changed a lot, since 1787... but, it had changed quite a lot more between 1521 and 1787.
Spain, England, and France... those most obviously responsible for the colonization of the America's... have each also changed quite a lot in the same time ? As the pardon requests of the Catalan Separatists begin to be heard.... should we intervene, now, asking Spain to keep them held in jail... because... Cortes ?
Of course not... but, why not ? Post earlier today, re Trudeau's apology tour... is on point. The reason is... today... you are held responsible for your own actions, not those of others. Sons, PROPERLY, even in the case of treason, are not held guilty (as "corruption of blood") because of their fathers crimes... much less their father's father's father's fathers etc, etc. The legal principle is also formulated in the US Constitution, in a limit on government power, as No Bill of Attainder... shall be passed. In other words, you can't ever be declared to be guilty of something without being properly accused of a crime you committed, with you being convicted of breaking some law. That all has to happen, following legitimate process, in a court, with a trial, with you having the right to defend yourself in relation to some law that you are said to have violated. If YOU didn't do it... then YOU are not guilty of it. Period. No one alive today... is guilty of something that people now long dead might have been guilty of.
It makes very little sense, today, to look back at history written over 500 years ago... while making an attempt to judge the actions of people then... using today's standards. That was a different time.
It makes vastly less sense, now, to look back at the actions of people alive then... while making an attempt to attribute the value you (wrongly) adjudge in relation to them... to anyone alive today. No one alive today, with the only possible exception in the script of a Bill and Ted adventure movie that I'm not fully aware of having yet been written... has any real connection to, or any responsibility for the acts of, any conquistador ?
Otherwise, separated by the same span in time and logic, it makes precisely as much sense, given the "emergence" of American baseball in the 1840's, to claim that bit of history is "part and parcel, exactly the same thing" as the invention of computer video games in the early 1950's and 1960's. But, No. They're not the same thing ? They can't possibly be "the same thing" ?
Yours is similarly wrong in assuming any meaningful connection existed, at all, between the Spanish conquistadors seeking fame and fortune and the blessings of the King and Pope in South and Central America, and the English Pilgrims seeking to escape English religious oppression, when they settled as social outcasts on the northeast coast. Those two groups were as different, then, in the America's, as it was possible for Spanish Catholics in 1521 and English Protestants from 1621 to be... even true in Europe... including a chasm standing between them in the excommunication of Martin Luther in 1521, and the many meaningful events in the Reformation that followed, radically transforming Europe.
The nature of the resulting engagements between the different peoples... was thus very different... as the two sets of Europeans were very different, and by a wide margin... just as the two sets of natives they encountered were very different, by an equally wide margin.
In the English / North American case, at least... its fair to say that the conflicts that resulted, early on, were of a character not much different than the violence that occurred routinely between warring tribes already there. Initially, the Europeans were at a distinct disadvantage in relation to those conflicts... a situation which took most of a human lifetime to meaningfully change.
In the Spanish case, even if simply due to the reality imposed by the numbers involved... it is also true that the conquest was more essentially political than it was military. The Spanish intruded into conflict in local affairs, and exploited the pre-existing conflicts to leverage an advantage for themselves by playing the role of arbiters in outcome. But, then, yes, the Spanish were repulsed by rituals of human sacrifice... which wasn't really that much of an issue in the English experience with the northern tribes... but, in the north, the Europeans were still taken aback by the casual cruelty common among the natives ?
But, then, yes, there were wars... lots of violence... almost all of which was fully consistent with the norms of the pre-existing cultures... and then, European dominance in the end... some of it being truly hard fought... and some not so much. How many died in those battles ? Hard to say, now... but, fair to say "not very many" relative to the total number of people present.
What did kill people in really massive numbers... wasn't a slaughter due to European soldiering in wars of whites against natives ? Most of the wars in the South were fought as between warring tribes, with European influence as a top layer ? It was only much later, from the time of the Revolutions, that violence took that form as wars between (vastly reduced) tribes fighting against growing European populations and governments.
It was not the wars that killed people... it was diseases that began to spread coincident with the earliest European arrivals... that then proceeded in waves as Europeans introduced new pestilences against which the natives had no resistance. By the time Europeans were present in sufficient numbers to begin to directly challenge natives for control... most of the population of natives that had been there.... were already long gone. That was as true in the most habitable parts of the American West as it was in the massive cities of the South American jungles.
A good place to start in considering that aspect of the sweep of history in the Americas... with information current enough in relation to a modern view of historical reality, necessary to makes it relevant... is here:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Probably around $10 each in a good used paperback edition on any of the popular book sellers websites. Both are written by Charles C. Mann, the first in 2005, and the second in 2006... They're the first to properly consider the sciences of genetics and epidemiology in a proper deciphering of the remains finally emerging only now in archeology... which, it turns out, contributes vastly more to a full understanding of what happened, than do the written histories of the period. The early histories had neither the necessary awareness of the sciences... nor a full awareness of the extent of the civilizations that existed before the Europeans arrived... so they got most of it wrong.
It happened... a long time ago. Whatever you think about the result, now, and there's a lot there that's well worth thinking about... none of it is the fault of anyone who is alive today. |
