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Show jyy -"jtMtjJ Scene in the hold of the "Blood-Stained Gloria." Millions of tne largerst forced migration in history. Africans were brought to America in the 18th century as part of fli&GRSCflfc! ISSUES FORUM The reef Pimfam . . . This is the third in a series of 18 articles written for the nation's Bicentennial and exploring ex-ploring themes of the American Ameri-can Issues Forum. The series is being run in conjuction with the Southeastern Utah Center for Continuing Education's "Courses by Newspaper" department, and is copyrighted, copyright-ed, 1975 by the Regents of the University of California. By John Higham Americans are an amazingly migratory people. Statisticians tell us that one out of five moves every year, and historians histor-ians studying 19th century towns and neighborhoods of- i.TtV"..'?'.''.'''.'.v. T.'.m l-iOW.KT-t."::!t;.W..,l.J ten find that most of the people counted at one census have left before the next. Apparently no other modern, supposedly settled country has been so persistently restless. In the vast, unending flux, six major movements stand out before our own time. These were, in order of their inception: (1) the transit of people we call Indians, perhaps per-haps 30,000 years ago, across a land bridge that linked northeast Asia with Alaska and thence southward through the Americas; (2) the settlement settle-ment of something like 100,-000 100,-000 English along the Atlantic coast in the 17th century; (3) an enormous slave trade, which carried millions of Africans to British North America, largely in the 18th century; (4) an emigration in the 18th century of northern European Protestants, chiefly from Ireland, Scotland, and the German Rliineland, most of them in the status of indentured servants; (5) the migration of whites and blacks westward across the North American continent from the 18th .century to the 20th; (6) the convergence on the United States, between 1820 and 1930. of approximately 35.000 people from all quarters of Europe and large parts of Asia and the Western hemisphere. The First Americans The earliest arrivals, the Indians, had almost nothing to gain and everything to lose from their encounter with the later comers. A people long isolated from contact with other races, the eastern woodland Indians depended on the prowess of their men as hunters and warriors. Inevitably, Inevit-ably, violence was the predominant predom-inant theme in their relations with the incoming whites, who preempted land and stimulated stimu-lated a destructive fur trade. Over .a span of two and a half centuries from the 1620s to the 1870s, Indians fought whites and often were drawn by whites into intensified conflicts con-flicts with one another. Regularly, Regu-larly, demoralization followed defeat. Yet the worst effects of the white invasion flowed not from war or oilier conscious depredations depre-dations but from disease. The native races of the western hemisphere had no experience with or immunity to such European and African diseases diseas-es as small pox, measles, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, or typhus. Their devastation was incalculable. incalcu-lable. Some recent estimates suggest that the native population popula-tion north of the Kio Grande Kivcr may have amounted to as much as 10 million in the time of Columbus. Within the United States a relentless decline reduced their numbers to a low point, in 1900, of 237,000. Since then, Indians have made a vigorous biological recovery, only to discover that the poor land remaining lo them cannot support a growing population. So the liiilians---AnK'rica's poorest minority iire on the move again, this time into the cities. Meanwhile various groups are pushing to restore tribal lands and Indian self-respect. Imported Africans The Africans who were imported in the 17th and 18th centuries enjoyed certain advantages ad-vantages over Indians in coping with Englishmen. For one, the Africans had more resistance to many of the diseases that ravaged the Indians. For another, a larger percentage of Africans than Indians were agriculturalists whose respect for farming as a way of life matched that of the English. Finally, the total uprooting of Africans from their homelands, followed by a helter-skelter dispersion in the New World, pulverized their tribal identities compelled them to adapt to new circumstances and allegiances. allegian-ces. Native Americans, by contrast, clung inflexibly to their own way of life. Africans, by their ability to survive as farm laborers in the English colonies, made possible the enormous growth of slavery in North America. In 1808 Congress prohibited further importation of slaves into the country. Since the immigration of whites continued, contin-ued, the proportion of the total population classified as Negro gradually declined. It fell from 22 per cent in 1770 to 14 per cent in 1860 and reached a low point of 9.6 per cent in 1930. In absolute numbers, however, howev-er, the black population grew prodigiously throughout the slavery era. The health and fertility of American slaves were such that they increased almost as rapidly as the white Americans and much faster than the people of any European country. Slavery's Aftermath After the closing of the slave trade, perhaps the most trying time for American blacks was from 1890 to 1940, long after emancipation, when the hopes the Civil War raised had largely collapsed. Before the War the inhumanity of slavery was sometimes softened some- , what by paternalistic attitudes. at-titudes. Though coerced and regimented, though bought and sold, slaves were commonly com-monly regarded as part of their owner's extended family. After emancipation, especially espec-ially during the Radical Reconstruction Recon-struction years, blacks gained new educational opportunities and a substantial measure of political power as well. But by the 1890s the gains were stopped or rolled back. Rigid barriers of segregation cut across the closer relations of an earlier day. Blacks were disfranchised, excluded from public office, ghettoized, pushed out of skilled trades, reduced to the most abject poverty in the rural South, and in many areas forced into a posture of cringing servility. The crowning atrocity of this terrible era in race relations the event it has burned most deeply in our collective memorywas mem-orywas the lynching party. From 1892 to 1904 more than 100 lynchings occurred every year. The outstanding Afro-American Afro-American leader, W. E. B. Du Bois, once saw a victim's black fingers displayed in a butcher shop. Land Hungry Strangers The African migration to Virginia, Maryland and Care- lina had hardly begun when another great influx of strangers stran-gers swelled the English colonies. Comparatively few Englishmen ventured overseas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The growth of the middle colonies depended on new migration from Ireland, Germany and Scotland at the same time that Africans were pouring into the plantation societies farther south. Penn sylvania especially welcomed these poor, land-hungry foreigners. for-eigners. Pushing inland in search of cheap land, these Irish, Germans, Scots and Scotch Irish settled territories which later joined the Union in its earliest decades. As they moved west, however, they avoided areas where slavery was being introduced. The westward movement became a competitive struggle between two social systems, one based on free labor, the other on slave. The strong current of European immigration, flowing flow-ing to the free states, gave them a decisive advantage in that struggle. A recognition that the spread of slavery could no longer keep pace with an inexhaustible tide of immigration did much to drive the South toward secession. The Sixth Wave Immigration to the new American nation in the 19th century became so voluminous and diverse that it deserves a distinct place -in history. Whereas the non-English immigrants im-migrants of the 18th century originated overwhelmingly in Protestant cultures that were not vastly different from England's, Africa after 1820 became the destination of people torn loose from more and more disparate backgrounds. back-grounds. So large a proportion of these newcomers were Catholics that by the middle of the 19th century the Roman Catholic Church was ?Ur biggest single denomination ' Another part of the migra tion was Jewish, arising flrst from Germany, then i greater numbers from eastern Europe. Not only religious buti also national and racial differ S ences multiplied, until much oil the United States had become' a patchwork of dozens of', different ethnic groups. Other ' developing countries attracted large-scale immigrations, but ' none gathered its people from -so many different sources. A harsh immigration restric-tion restric-tion law in 1924 brought this ' sixth great folk movement of American history substantially to a close. But the reduction of foreign immigration to i" relatively low level does not end the epic of American ' migrations. For example, by closing the nation's gates to cheap immigrant labor, Congress Con-gress in the 1920s gave new impetus to a growing exodus of blacks from the rural South. Immobilized in previous decades dec-ades because immigrants pre-J I empted the opportunities in the cities, blacks now surged northward in quest of the unskilled jobs that immigrants -no longer monopolized. Thus the tidal movements of a restless people continually assume new forms, but each is shaped by those that have,-gone have,-gone before. |