A History of American Literature

The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 27

The civilization that John Smith anticipated coming to the New World, and

pushing aside the Native American, was one that he came more and more to associ-

ate with New England rather than Virginia. This was hardly surprising, as the

Massachusetts Bay Colony was much more driven by the ideas of settlement, private

property, and the establishment of a body politic than many of the early Virginia

investors and adventurers were. It came much closer to Smith’s own preferences and

his emphasis on useful toil. “Who can desire more content, that hath small meanes ...

then to tread, and plant that ground hee hath purchased by the hazard of his life?”

Smith asked in A Description of New England. “If he have but the taste of virtue ...

what to such a mind can bee more pleasant, then planting and building a foundation

for his Posteritie, gotte from the rude earth ...?” For Smith, appealing for settlers to

plant a colony in New England, prosperity would flow naturally to anyone of mid-

dling condition who was willing to venture as he had done. It would come “by Gods

blessing and ... industrie,” as a sign of special election and a reward for hard work.

Anyone in England with only “small wealth to live on” could “by their labour ... live

exceeding well” in America, Smith declared. And they could add to the usefulness of

their toil by “converting those poor Salvages” who lived there “to the knowledge of

God,” by instruction, admonition, and the power of example, showing their faith by

their works. Like others eager to promote settlement, Smith was not reluctant to use

national pride, and a sense of rivalry with other imperial powers, to promote his

cause. Nor was the dream of Eden and its recovery ever very far from his thoughts.

“Adam and Eve did first beginne this innocent worke, To plant the earth to remaine

to posteritie,” he pointed out. “Noe [Noah], and his family, beganne againe the sec-

ond plantation; and their seed as it still increased, hath still planted new Countries,

and one countrie another.” Without such devotion to the planting of seeds and faith,

Smith insisted, “wee our selves, had at this present beene as Salvage, and as miserable

as the most barbarous Salvage yet uncivilized”; the European, in short, would have

been as benighted and as desperate as the Native American. Now it was up to Smith’s

own contemporaries to show similar devotion, so that the spread of civilization and

Christianity could continue and a plantation much like Eden wrested out of the

wilderness of the New World.

Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

There were, of course, those who dissented from this vision of a providential plan,

stretching back to Eden and forward to its recovery in America. They included those

Native Americans for whom the arrival of the white man was an announcement of

the apocalypse. As one of them, an Iroquois chief called Handsome Lake, put it at

the end of the eighteenth century, “white men came swarming into the country

bringing with them cards, money, fiddles, whiskey, and blood corruption.” They

included those countless, uncounted African-Americans brought over to America

against their will, starting with the importation aboard a Dutch vessel of “Twenty

Negars” into Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. They even included some European

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