The Columbian Covenant: Race and the Writing of American History

Race and the Writing of American History

James Carson

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137438638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This provocative analysis of American historiography argues that when scholars use modern racial language to articulate past histories of race and society, they collapse different historical signs of skin color into a transhistorical and essentialist notion of race that implicates their work in the very racial categories they seek to transcend.

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Imperial Designs

Abstract: The diary Christopher Columbus composed on his first voyage to what came to be called America relied on certain assumptions, expectations, and tropes to set the places he visited beyond biblical time and to construe the many people he met as Indians. His ideas were of foundational importance to the development of subsequent Spanish histories of the Americas and, in turn, also shaped the French and English narratives of exploration and discovery. Together, the three imperial historiographies set the baseline from which all subsequent American histories would be written.

Keywords: Christopher Columbus; colonial; covenant; historiography; imperial

Carson, James. The Columbian Covenant: Race and the Writing of American History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137438638.0004.

Whether we pick apart geological strata, meter by exact means the distance starlight travels, or trace a backyard family tree we do nothing more, really, than grapple with where things began. In many ways, looking for origins will always be arbitrary because who can ever really say when something begins and ends? For the writing of American history, however, we can probably, at least reasonably, agree that it begins with the diary that Christopher Columbus composed during his first voyage when he sailed to the west to find the east. Of course, his diary is a primary historical source in the narrowest sense of it being a record of what he saw, did, and thought daily, but it is also a secondary source—a work of history—for a couple of reasons. What we think of as his diary was in fact a document that Bartolomé de Las Casas put together years later as part of his own preparation to write his monumental history of the Indies. The diary we have received from the great Franciscan comprises text from a missing but presumably authentic copy of the original diary, summaries that Las Casas inserted, and other less conspicuous revisions he might have made that are beyond our sight to see. As soon as the Las Casas version appeared, however, the restored diary vanished again for reasons unknown until 1790 when a scholar uncovered a copy in the Duke of Infantado’s personal library. Odd as the diary’s creation and life have been, the text matters because it opens the only window we have on to the medieval mind that always intervened between what Columbus saw and what he wrote as he crafted the story that in all of its compelling and confusing ways set the pegs from which all subsequent embroideries would hang.¹

If his diary—as historiography—is in many ways the antecedent of all American history that would follow, we must account too for the past he inhabited in which disparate intellectual and narrative traditions inherited from myth, hearsay, published travel accounts, recovered classical texts just finding their way into European thought, and, the most continuous source of all to his understanding of the world, the Bible set in motion the historiographical invention of his story of discovery out of the debris of his own conceptions. After weighing anchor and casting off his lines in the tiny port of Palos and taking on water and supplies at the last known, to him, way-station in the Atlantic, the Canary Islands, he pointed his prow west and led a ragged trinity of ships, each smaller than you would ever imagine, toward what he thought would be the east. His departure from Palos marked an important leap in the history of a people that had only committed to God’s covenant perhaps a millennia before. Caught between the foothills of the Pyrenees and the brawling armies of the Ummayad and Almoravid caliphs, Christians had taken heart in the castles that studded the valley of the Ebro River and in the faith that such stout walls enclosed. After centuries of struggle the crowns of Navarre, Léon, Castile, Aragón, Galicia, and Asturas, with Alexander II and the power of the Papacy behind them, finally toppled Grenada, the last Muslim caliphate of al-Andalus, the same year that Columbus departed. In the end the reconquest transformed the clutch of Visigothic kingdoms that had held out against the initial North African onslaught into the crusading vanguard of western Christianity.²

Casting himself as an errant knight in a chivalric tale of his own fabrication, Columbus hoped to bring the east under God’s dominion in order to hasten the apocalypse and Christ’s second coming on behalf of the two crowns whom God had elected to enact His divine plan on the face of His troubled Creation. With the patronage of Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Castile, and her husband King Fernando of Aragón, Columbus carried millenarian impulses into an unknown but wholly anticipated region that medieval cosmographers had associated with antediluvian health, happiness, and paradise. Indeed, as he tracked the expanses of the open Atlantic during the three voyages he made to the Indies, he thought himself closer and closer to a holy paradise that sat atop not the spherical earth of Aristotle and Ptolemy but one that was pear-shaped or, better yet, pendulous like a woman’s breast. The cyclopes, cannibals, and other inversions of the natural order that had inhabited the antipodal lands since classical antiquity, however, were another matter altogether. To his sovereigns, the “lovers and promoters of the Holy Christian Faith, and enemies of the false doctrines of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies,” Columbus pledged fealty and promised to continue across the seas what the assault on the Alhambra had finished. Whether with a bite of the pear or a grasp at the tit, such were his metaphors, Columbus would take ownership of a western paradise that medieval clerics had regarded as all but closed to any but the divine.³

The great sailor navigated the western seas by dead reckoning and celestial mapping, inferring what was not known—his actual position—from what was known—the speed at which he was moving and his ship’s relationship to the path the sun and the stars traced across the sky. The rhumb lines, compass roses, and meridians of the portolan charts he and others used to ply the Mediterranean and the shores of western Africa were of no use in the open Atlantic, and the farther he sailed, the more his own mind had to determine the relationships of wind, sun, and water that bore him ever on. The same system of navigation showed him his way through the worlds he entered in the west, but to locate himself on the ground he looked not to the sky but to books—histories, geographies, sacred texts, and medieval compilations—as well as to his own memories to position what he had found in relationship to what he knew. Marco Polo had already named the land, and Columbus sought in vain Cathay, Quinsay, and Cipango. The dwellings he spied through his eyeglass reminded him of the tents Moorish soldiers pitched on their campaigns. Pliny the Elder explained to him why the trees he saw were so large while Ptolemy and Aristotle enabled him to correlate latitude, climate, and the skin color of the people he met. Pierre d’Ailly’s 1483 compilation Imago mundi provided the map that forced Columbus to reconcile what he saw with what the Bible taught, and a library of other authors prepared him to believe that beyond the island that came to be called Cuba, he would find, he wrote, “one-eyed men, and others, with snouts of dogs, who ate men.”⁴

But dead reckoning could only suggest links between fixed objects and fluid positions. The navigator’s most primitive craft could not shape new things to suit old referents. He simply could not take in the entirety of what he saw, and just a few days after sighting trees unlike anything he had seen in the Mediterranean, he finally confronted the limits of the world he had known and the new wonders that greeted him at every turn. “But that I do not recognize them,” he confessed, “burdens me with the greatest sorrow in the world.” Rather than yield to his own crisis of confidence, however, he made his own fate and his own world all the while believing that He had handed him both. Wherever his crews made landfall axes toppled trees, cross-cut saws ripped timbers, and carpenters assembled crosses to sink into the beaches to cow the forests, to bring order to the bays, rivers, and plains that opened before them, and to remake their desires into a new Eden.⁵

The crosses, prayers, and flags that accompanied each ceremony of possession situated such places on a mental map of dominion that Columbus charted in reference to his faith and revised every time he rounded a point or sounded a shoal. And the knowledge he sustained through the names he bestowed on the land bent the unfathomable origins of the place he had entered to the known genealogy of the Creation and of the crowns that he served. As the days passed into weeks, though, the world he crafted on the written page moved farther and farther from what he might have read in Pliny or Aristotle, seen in the mappae mundi that graced the walls of churches of Genoa, Lisbon, or Seville, or measured in the charts that stopped short on the far shores of the Canaries.⁶

The people he encountered posed the gravest challenge. He called them “Indios,” a term that reflected his own erroneous assumption about where he was and who he saw, but the meanings he attached to the term as he navigated the island seas came to denote so much more than simply a people who inhabited India. The edenic qualities the navigator attributed to the islands he surveyed suggested that Columbus wondered whether or not the Fall or the Flood had ever happened there. Had they not, then the Indios were a people who lived outside of the continuous line of time that his holy faith had narrated back to the first day of the Creation. And if the people were innocent, their poverty, simplicity, and lack of laws, weapons, cities, and any of the other accoutrements of civil society nonetheless set them outside of the bounds of normal humanity. However, at the same time, their alleged degradation made them ideal candidates for redemption before the One True Faith in vassalage to the Crowns of Castile and Aragon.⁷ As Columbus himself reported to his sovereigns, the Indios were “fit to be ordered about and made to work, plant, and do everything else that may be needed, and build towns and be taught our customs” and, lastly, “to go about clothed.”⁸

The imperial invasion of the Indies that followed Columbus’s first forays implemented to the last item his original plan to extend royal dominion, extract the land’s wealth, convert the people to Christians, and witness the Resurrection that would follow Christ’s final conquest of the world. Mindful of the more earthly matters of his visions, both the Crown and the accretions of daily practice in the Indies and New Spain created a variety of expectations and institutions to enable the hidalgos, men on the make whose horoscopes knew no humility, to coerce the labor they needed to extract what wealth they could. Diseases played their part too in the onslaught as viruses born of close living beside livestock and barnyard fowl jumped ashore and decimated millions of people who had had no prior exposure to such things as dungheaps, rats, smallpox, measles, influenza, and plague never mind the swords, the firearms, and the mastiffs.⁹

None of this went unnoticed—the enslavement, the riches, the slaughter, the famine, the death, and the divine—but it is easy to fail to note among such horrors the vitality of writing in the ongoing rape of Eden. It was a small group of literary minded conquerors, mendicant fathers, and humanistic scholars who, after all, began to research and to write the stories that translated descriptions of a few shoreline encounters into what came to be called the “New World.” They narrated how their emerging nation, Spain, had extended its domain; they explained how and why diseases had scoured the land; and they debated where those people called Indios fit in the Great Chain of Being on which they themselves proudly stood at its higher reaches, just below the angels’ feet. Such scholarship embodied, as do all scholarships, certain contemporary mores and conventions. Writers embellished observations in order to accentuate their rhetorical skills over and above whatever information they sought to convey. They asserted their own claims to fame, wealth, and royal patronage. And they justified, let’s be honest, theft and violence against people that they had to imagine as quasi-human in order to do and to write the things that they did. In a word, as one scholar has put it, the entire genre was “corrupt.” But, at the same time, it comprises what we might call the first generation of American historiography that followed from the founding diary, and the arguments its authors asserted and the issues they contested set in place, no matter what we might wish today, the fundamental categories and structures on which historians still rely to write American history. But if their arguments, interpretations, and conclusions piled atop Columbus’s first account, they also refracted his writings through the same classical and biblical lenses through which he had peered, and while occasionally disputing one another’s particular observations they all nonetheless shared certain basic assumptions as they replicated and, often at the same time, reinvented Columbus’s foundational story as it passed from pen to paper to press to page from the first decades of the sixteenth century to the final run of the great chronicles of Europe’s imperial invasion of the Americas at the end of the sixteenth century.¹⁰

At the time, no one published Columbus’s first diary before it was lost, but manuscript copies of his letters and later journals as well as word of mouth circulated freely within the Spanish court. A courtier named Pietro Martire de’Angheira knew Columbus, spoke with him...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Imperial Designs
• 2  Colonial and Early National Foundations
• 3  The Modern Professionals
• 4  Other Ways of Seeing and Doing
• Bibliography
• Index