In The Beginning: 1607–1798 (February/March 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 1)

In The Beginning: 1607–1798

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February/March 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 1

“We are a nation of immigrants.” It’s a politician’s generality at an ethnic picnic, a textbook bromide swallowed and soon forgotten. It is also, as it happens, a profound truth, defining us and explaining a good part of what is extraordinary in the short history of the United States of America. There is no American ancient soil, no founding race, but there is a common ancestral experience of moving from “there” to “here.” Among the founders of this nation who believed that they were agents of destiny was an English preacher who said in 1669, “God hath sifted a nation that he might send choice grain into this wilderness.” The grain has arrived steadily and from many nations. “Americans are not a narrow tribe,” wrote Herman Melville; “our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one.”

We begin arbitrarily with a seventeenth-century English migration that produced the First Families of Virginia (founded in 1607) and Massachusetts’s Pilgrim Fathers (1620). Arbitrarily because already in 1643 Isaac Jogues, a French Jesuit missionary visiting New Amsterdam, said he heard eighteen languages spoken in that seaport town, which probably included Mediterranean and North African dialects and the Hebrew of a small settlement of Sephardic Jews.

But the stock planted in the 1600s was basically English. In the eighteenth century it turned “British” as Scots and Irish arrived in significant numbers, then partly European through an influx of Germans, and African, too, through the thousands of involuntary black immigrants brought in on the hell ships of the slave trade.

Those initial colonial migrations to “British North America” illustrate forces that are still at work in 1993. The names, faces, and languages change, but the basics remain. Immigrants are pushed out of their original homes by war, upheaval, misery, and oppression. They are pulled toward America by the promise of economic betterment and a chance to breathe free. Sometimes they are lured by promoters who want their passage money or their labor and skills. Sometimes they have come in legal or actual bondage.

But whenever and wherever they have come, they have changed what they found. That was clear from the moment that seventeenth-century England sent the first immigrant wave. The land was ripe for mass exodus. Civil, religious, and class war raged from beginning to end of the century, encompassing in their course the execution of one king and the expulsion of another. Major changes in the economy drove small farmers off their subsistence plots in favor of sheep. “The people … do swarm in the land as young bees in a hive,” said one clergyman. “The land grows weary of her inhabitants,” said another—by name John Winthrop, soon to move with fellow Puritans to a place called Massachusetts Bay.

The London government planted colonies to help houseclean the surplus population. Some started under the rule of private corporations