initiated by Columbus’s son in 1505. Predictably, Haiti then became the site of
the first large-scale slave revolt, when blacks and American Indians banded
together in 1519. The uprising lasted more than a decade and was finally
brought to an end by the Spanish in the 1530s.^73
One of the new textbooks, The Americans, reveals the conflict on Haiti. This
book also quotes Las Casas to show how Haiti was only the beginning: “This
tactic begun here [will soon] spread throughout these Indies and will end when
there are no more land or people to subjugate and destroy in this part of the
world.” One of my original twelve, The American Adventure, associated
Columbus with slavery. One old book and one new one let it go with the
phrase “Columbus proved to be a far better admiral than governor” or its
equivalent. The other books, old and new, mostly adore him.
Clearly most textbooks are not about teaching the history of Columbus. Their
enterprise seems to be Building Character. They therefore treat Columbus as an
origin myth: He was good and so are we.^74 In 1989 President George H. W.
Bush invoked Columbus as a role model for the nation: “Christopher Columbus
not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by
showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance
and faith.”^75 The columnist Jeffrey Hart went even further: “To denigrate
Columbus is to denigrate what is worthy in human history and in us all.”^76
Textbook authors who are pushing Columbus to build character obviously have
no interest in telling what he did with the Americas once he reached them—
even though that’s half of the story, and perhaps the more important half.
As Kirkpatrick Sale poetically sums up, Columbus’s “second voyage marks
the first extended encounter of European and Indian societies, the clash of
cultures that was to echo down through five centuries.”^77 The authors of The
Americans have read Sale, for they write, “[Haiti] signaled the start of a
cultural clash that would continue for the next five centuries.” These are not
mere details about Haiti between 1493 and 1500 that the other textbooks omit
or gloss over. They are facts crucial to understanding American and European
history. Captain John Smith, for example, used Columbus as a role model in
proposing a get-tough policy for the Virginia Indians in 1624: “The manner
how to suppress them is so often related and approved, I omit it here: And you
have twenty examples of how the Spaniards got the West Indies, and forced the
treacherous and rebellious infidels to do all manner of drudgery work and