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THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,” Jefferson wrote in 1776, in a draft of the Declaration of Independence:
roots of these ideas are as ancient
But they are this nation’s founding principles: it was by declaring them that the nation came to be.
After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson’s draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words “sacred & undeniable,” and suggested that “these truths” were, instead, “self-evident.” This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.
this divide is nearly always overstated and it’s easy to exaggerate the difference between Jefferson and Franklin, which, in those lines, came down, too, to style: Franklin’s revision is more forceful.
The real dispute is between “these truths” and the course of events: Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?
The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching.
often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is
crumbling.
But part of this argument has to do with ideology: the United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.
fits and starts did history become not merely a form of memory but also a form of investigation, to be disputed, like philosophy, its premises questioned, its evidence examined, its arguments countered.
To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.
This new understanding of the past attempted to divide history from faith.
the new history books, historians aimed to solve mysteries and to discover their own truths. The turn from reverence to inquiry, from mystery to history, was crucial to the founding of the United States.
But it
did require subjecting the past to skepticism, to look to beginnings not to justify ends, but to question them—with evidence. “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Thomas Paine,
wrote in Common Sense, in 1776. Kings have no right to reign, Paine argued, because, if we could trace hereditary monarchy back to its beginnings—“could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise”—we’d find “the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian o...
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whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a...
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Paine wrote, his pen aflame, and “a new method of thinking hath arisen.”14 Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let facts be submitted to a candid world.”
These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history.
“whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,”
“WE SAW NAKED PEOPLE,” A
that’s what Christopher Columbus is thought to have written in his diary that day in October 1492,
No one knows for sure
because his diary is lost. In the 1530s, before it disappeared, parts of it were copied by a frocked and tonsured Dominican friar
The friar’s copy was lost, too, until about 1790, when an old sailor found it in the ...
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most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept—placed
preserved and even catalogued.
Relying on so spotty a record requires caution. Still, even its absences speak. “We saw naked people,” Columbus wrote in his diary (at least, according to the notes taken by Las Casas). “They were a people very poor in everything,
describing the people he met on an island they called Haiti—“
but that Columbus called Hispaniola—“the little Spanish island”—because he thought it had no name. They lacked weapons, he reported; they lacked too...
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“I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses,” he wrote, addressing the king and queen of Spain, “in order that they may learn to speak,” as if, i...
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admitted the truth: “None of us understands the ...
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Two months after he reached Haiti,
Columbus prepared to head back to Spain but, off the coast, his three-masted flagship ran aground. Before the ship sank, Columbus’s men salvaged the timbers to build a fort;
On the voyage home, on a smaller ship, square-rigged and swift, Columbus wondered about all that he did not understand about the people he’d met, a people he called “Indians” because he believed he had sailed to the Indies. It occurred to him that it wasn’t that they didn’t have a religion or a language but that these things were, to him, mysteries that he could not penetrate, things beyond his comprehension. He needed help. In Barcelona, he hired Ramón Pané, a priest and scholar, to come along on his next voyage, to “discover and understand . . . the beliefs and idolatries of the Indians, and
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Pané sailed with Columbus in 1493. Arriving in Haiti, Pané met a man named Guatícabanú, who knew all of the languages spoken on the island, and who learned Pané’s language, Castilian, and taught him his own. Pané lived with the natives, the Taíno, for four years, and delivered to Columbus his report, a manuscript he titled An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. Not long afterward, it vanished.
Before An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians disappeared, Columbus’s son Ferdinand, writing a biography of his father, copied it out, and even though Ferdinand Columbus’s book remained unpublished at his death in 1539, his copy of Pané’s extraordinary account had by then been copied by other scholars, including the learned and dogged Las Casas, a man who never left a page unturned. In 1570, a scholar in Venice was translating Pané’s Antiquities into Italian when he died in prison, suspected of being a spy for the French; nevertheless, his translation was published in 1571, with the
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Guatícabanú’s tongue to Castilian and then, by Pané, from Castilian.5 And yet it remains a treasure.
they most certainly did have a religion. They called their god Yúcahu. “They believe that he is in heaven and is immortal, and that no one can see him, and that he has a mother,” Pané explained.
“But he has no beginning.”
People order their worlds with tales of their dead and of their gods and of the origins of their laws.
The Taíno did not have writing but they did have government. “They have their laws gathered in ancient songs, by which they govern themselves,” Pané reported.7 They sang their laws, and they sang their history. “These songs remain in their memory rather than in books,” another Spanish historian observed, “and this way they recite the genealogies of the caciques, kings, and lords they have had, their deeds, and the bad or good times they had.”
STORIES OF ORIGINS nearly always begin in darkness, earth and water and
night, black as doom. The sun and the moon came from a cave, the Taíno told Pané, and the oceans spilled out of a gourd.
The Iro...
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The Akan o...
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In 1492, seventy-five million people lived in the Americas, north and south.12 The people of Cahokia, the biggest city in North America, on the Mississippi floodplains, had built giant plazas and earthen mounds, some bigger than the Egyptian pyramids.
before Cahokia was abandoned, more than ten thousand people lived there. The Aztecs, Incas,
and Maya, vast and ancient civilizations, built monumental cities and kept careful records and cal...
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