Beginnings of the American People

the American People, by Carl
Lotus Becker

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Title: Beginnings of the American People
Author: Carl Lotus Becker
Editor: William E. Dodd
Release Date: May 16, 2007 [EBook #21501]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BEGINNINGS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY CARL LOTUS BECKER
PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF
KANSAS
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON NEW YORK
CHICAGO The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CARL LOTUS BECKER ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS U.S.A.
THE RIVERSIDE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
In the following volumes the authors seek to present a brief account of
the beginnings, development, and final unity of the people of the
United States. There are many histories of the country, many
biographies which are in large measure histories; but these are
exhaustive works traversing minutely certain periods, like Rhodes's
History of the United States from 1850 to 1877, or Nicolay and Hay's
Abraham Lincoln: A History; or they are shorter "patriotic" accounts
which seek to prove something, or which fail to tell the whole story.
Important as these classes of historical literature are, they hardly suffice
for the teachers of advanced college classes, or for business and
professional men who would like to know how the isolated European
plantations or corporations in North America became in so short a time
the great and wealthy nation of to-day.
To meet these needs, that is, to describe in proper proportion and with
due emphasis, but in the brief space of four short volumes, the forces,

influences, and masterful personalities which have made the country
what it is, has not been an easy task. For, contrary to the view of
European students, American history is not simple. The hostile camps
of Puritans and Church of England men, the Dutch of New Amsterdam
and the Catholics of Maryland, could hardly be expected to merge into
a single state without violent struggle. Nor could the hundreds of
thousands of Scotch Calvinists, militant enemies of England and all her
ways, who seized and held the fertile highlands of the Middle and
Southern colonies, submit quietly to any program not of their own
making. And again, in the thirties and fifties of the nineteenth century,
millions of people speaking a strange tongue sought asylum in the
Mississippi Valley--an isolated region whose early inhabitants, of
whatsoever national strain, were strongly inclined to secession or revolt
against the older Eastern communities. Never was a nation composed
of more diverse ethnic groups and elements.
And the geographical environments of these groups and segments of
older civilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the
nations of Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England
no more resemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand
dunes of Prussia resemble the fertile plains of Andalusia. Geographical
differences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be added
inherited antagonisms like those of Puritan and Cavalier, one wonders
how the East and the South of the United States ever became integral
parts of one great social unit. Adding to this apparent impossibility the
new antagonism of the West toward the East as a whole, the historian
wonders at the statecraft that could hold the diverse elements together
till certain economic and social factors became powerful enough to
conquer in a long and bloody war. Or was it the influence of new
inventions, railways, and the tightening bonds of commerce that did the
work?
Leaving the reader to answer this question for himself, it remains for
the Editor to set forth in as few words as possible the method, the
emphasis, and the interpretations of the authors of these volumes.
Professor Becker approaches his work, the discovery of the New World,

the rise of the plantations, the slow growth of an American culture, and
finally the Revolution of 1776, from the standpoint of a student of
modern European history. The infant colonies are to him disjected
particles of ancient Europe. Their changes under the new environment,
their tendency to isolation and petty quarrels during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, before the days of steam and electricity, and
their defensive alliance against the