Europeans and the New World

 

Bert Wolfe

Sadly, the Europeans who came to the New World came as conquerors and exploiters. With the exceptions of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, there was no desire by the founders of the ten other English colonies to create anything like a Godly, “beloved community.” They came to get rich, and the quicker, the better. And mass murder of Native Americans who got in the way or who objected to the Europeans presence, the early use of badly treated and exploited indentured servants (who were often literally worked to death), and the later introduction of chattel slavery of Africans were all intended to assist in the pursuit of these evil purposes and goals.

The Founding Fathers were all deeply flawed human beings; many were slaveholders. The “freedom” and “liberty” that they ostensibly pursued and that they established this country to be a sanctuary for was originally intended for white, property owning men only. The initial expansion of freedom and liberty, and the final abolition of chattel slavery required a savage, bloody civil war. The “new birth of freedom” that President Abraham Lincoln hailed in his Gettysburg Address was, sadly, only partial and incomplete. Expanding civil and voting rights to women and to descendants of America’s black slaves required long, hard fought social movements that battled against the then prevailing delusions that guided American society.

While deep delusions and great hatreds still haunt America, I prefer to believe, as did Dr. Martin Luther King, that the arc of history bends towards justice, that the American experiment is neither over, nor a failure, and that both the very human desire for survival and the basic American historic drive to create an expansion of tolerance, civil rights, and widespread prosperity for all will lead to a society at peace, both at home and abroad.