At its best, The First Frontier is a gripping if scattershot account of the first steps taken by English settlers in New England and Virginia. Only the author can’t decide what it is he wants to write.
Is it about the displacement and slaughter of Native Americans? Or is it about how a new nation invented itself by first resisting, then selfishly rising up against the proper authority of its European overlord?
Published in 1978 when David Horowitz was a well-known leftist academic, The First Frontier echoes the social studies teacher in Dazed And Confused telling her class the upcoming Bicentennial is celebrating “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
Horowitz has gone through some changes, as revealed by titles of his more recent books like The Anti-Chomsky Reader and Trump Will Smash The Left And Win. But throughout the 1970s, he wrote books for progressives, and The First Frontier is designed as a prequel to Dee Brown’s celebrated 1970 revisionist history Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.
The book begins off Massachusetts in 1620, where the Pilgrims arrive to make a home in Plymouth. Horowitz lays out the situation:
The land was hard and flat, a glacial clay studded with rocks; thickets and vines stripped of their summer leafage gave the country “a wild and savage heiw.”
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| The Pilgrim landing at Plymouth, site of a recently vacated Nauset camp. Four years prior, the Native population had been reduced by an outbreak of sickness. King James hailed "the wonderful plague among the salvages." Image from https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/plymouth |
It would prove savage indeed, a bloody laboratory for cultural survival of the fittest. While the Pilgrims attempted to make their home, the native population of Nausets and Wampanoags were initially both curious and intimidated by their new neighbors, and the strange weapons they fired off both in greeting and warning.
For the Pilgrims, surviving that first winter would have been impossible without the Indians’ ready help. But as the Pilgrims found their strength, they got to be bullies about it, pushing their God on their “heathen” neighbors, demanding more land, and becoming quicker to violence.
Myles Standish, the Pilgrims’ military leader, had a habit of making war against peaceful Indians of whom he was often suspicious. At Wessagusset, a white settlement near Plymouth, he invited some of the leaders of the Cape Indian tribe to sit down with him, then had the doors sealed and hacked them up.
Even fellow Pilgrims were troubled by this and other Standish atrocities, Horowitz notes:
“Concerning the killing of those poor Indeans,” [Plymouth pastor] John Robinson wrote his flock, “how happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you had killed any.” It was “more glorious in mens eyes, then pleasing in Gods, or conveniente for Christians, to be a terrour to poor and barbarous people…”
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| Myles Standish was called "Captain Shrimpe" by one of his many colonist enemies. Horowitz notes that while he never shared the Pilgrims' faith, Standish did quite well by them, leaving a sizable estate when he died in 1656. Image of a dubious portrait from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myles_Standish |
Some white settlers followed policies that truly reflected kind words. Roger Williams’s friendliness so annoyed the Pilgrims and later settlers of Massachusetts Bay that he was forced to form his own colony, Rhode Island, which operated under a less exploitative, more peaceful policy.
But Williams still followed the same script:
Yet, he too accepted the inevitability of native displacement, preferring only that it be by lawful purchase rather than sanctimonious plunder. The submergence of native culture was justified as the march of civil progress: not because the natives were heathens, but because they were “barbarians” who lacked the blessings of European learning and science.
In some cases, the whites were solely responsible for the crimes Horowitz writes of. In others, particularly in Virginia, the main crime of slaughtered whites was settling on land they didn’t morally own. Instead of blaming white people entirely, Horowitz blames their exploitative proto-capitalist system for what was committed against the non-materialist Native population. Horowitz quotes the Ottawa chief Pontiac:
“You have bought, knives, kettles, and blankets, from the white men, until you can no longer do without them; and what is worse, you have drunk the poison firewater, which turns you into fools. Fling all these things away; live as your wise forefathers lived before you.”
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| Huron Indians bringing furs from the north to settlements for trade were often ambushed by other tribes seeking to control the monopoly. "They were less to humble the opponent than to eliminate him from the competition," Horowitz writes. Image from https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/B001247/Huron-warriors-of-North-America |
The problem is The First Frontier is it is written not as a history but a thesis, with a lot of choppiness. Often I felt him reaching for anecdotes rather than building a narrative. When he writes of the destruction by Pilgrim killjoys of a rival colony accused of loose mores, he offers no citations for what seems a straight retelling of the Nathaniel Hawthorne tale “The Maypole Of Merry Mount.”
The highlight of the whole book is Horowitz’s telling of an affair known as “Bacon’s Rebellion.” One of Virginia’s biggest freeholders, Nathaniel Bacon was deeply aggrieved that colonial policy forced him to honor Native treaty rights. He also didn’t like paying taxes to defend against Indian raids when those rights were ignored. Bacon’s solution was to “extirpate” the Indians, friend or foe, and also attack whatever Virginian authorities attempted to stand in his way.
“How miserable that man is,” Virginia Governor William Berkeley was soon to lament, “that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed.”
Bacon killed, robbed and enslaved dozens of the Pamunkey tribe. When Governor Berkeley ordered him to stop, Bacon moved on Jamestown instead, torching and looting the colony’s capital. He continued his rampage until he died of dysentery on October 26, 1676.
Horowitz records the governor chortling in his journal: “Bacon’s dead. I am sorry at my heart/That lice and flux should act the hangman’s part.”
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| A painting by Howard Pyle depicting Bacon's forces marching through Jamestown in September 1676. Widespread looting and destruction turned many against Bacon, Horowitz notes. Image from https://www.posterazzi.com/jamestown-n-bacon-1676-nnathaniel-bacon-center-and-his-followers-at-the-burning-of-jamestown-virginia-on-19-september-1676-illustration-by-howard-pyle-poster-print-by-granger-collection-item-vargrc0061344/ |
There was a different flavor to the colonial experience in Virginia than in Massachusetts. Both colonies spoke of a higher mission, but the Puritans of Massachusetts wore morality more openly, and sneered at the Virginians’s early failures, as Horowitz notes:
John Winthrop [early governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony] concluded, because “their mayne end was Carnall & not Religious… they used unfitt instruments, a multitude of rude & misgoverned persons, the very scumme of the Land; [and] they did not establish a right forme of government.”
Virginia faced much Native hostility, too, including some large-scale massacres. They were saved not by Pilgrim-like faith but by a product that would bring ruin to countless others yet unborn: Tobacco.
It was initially a failed crop, like so many others. Then a settler named John Rolfe brought seeds over from Trinidad and a cash crop took root. Horowitz explains how tobacco grew into a favored currency:
In a short space of time, “the joviall weed” became a favored vice in London’s taverns and brothels; the Gulpe, the Retention and the Cuban Ebolition were symbols of initiation among the “reeking gallants” who made smoking and elaborate cult. Others regarded the “precious stinke” more somberly as a “chopping herbe of hell,” or as “the Devil’s revenge for his Indian children upon the white man.”
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| Tobacco was a demanding crop, both on the farmer and the soil. This created a squeeze on arable land which Horowitz notes affected the poorer classes most. "The landless poor," he writes, "subsisted as a vagrant 'rabble.'" Image from https://sites.google.com/a/kenilworth38.org/virginia-colony-website-sears/home/economy |
Tobacco was tough to cultivate, and thus another market was opened for slaves. Initially these were Indians captured in battle or raids and white men and women indentured in exchange for vague promises of land. But larger numbers of hardier people were wanted to work the deathly swampy climate for free, so Africans began to be imported.
Being how central this part of the story has become to academia’s understanding of American history, I was surprised how quietly Horowitz brought Black slavery into this book. Eventually he makes it a key theme, not of colonization but rather American independence. “As slavery made white men masters over black, it made them more equal among themselves,” he writes.
The third and final part of the book introduces the French and Indian War, touched off by a young George Washington but paid for and fought by the British. Americans just whined about not being protected from French and Indian attacks, then at being asked to pay for it.
In his notes on sources, Horowitz disassociates himself from the claims of 20th-century revisionist historians that the American Revolution amounted to a cynical land grab. But that is what he presents in the book.
Horowitz approvingly quotes one official’s likening Americans chafing against the Stamp Act and the Townsend Act as being like “the most froward child” and ignores such actions as the Boston Massacre in favor of atrocities against the property of British officials.
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| The burning of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's home in Boston in 1765, by rioters protesting the Stamp Act. Among the losses, Horowitz notes: a manuscript documenting Massachusetts's history. Image from https://www.colonialsociety.org/publications/3297/such-ruins-were-never-seen-america-looting-thomas-hutchinsons-house-time-stamp |
Meanwhile relationship issues between the colonists and the Native Americans – so central to the first and second parts of the book – are dropped completely. Focus falls instead on what ingrates Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were for pushing aside their monarch to get more land for themselves:
“These people shew a spirit and conduct against us,” wrote [British] General Gage, “they never shewed against the French.”
But
when it comes to sticking his leftist indictment on the U. S. A. with the same
energy he does on Plymouth, Horowitz whiffs. I don’t think his heart was in it;
he would soon switch teams, and whether or not this was a factor, I felt he
wrapped up this book by going through the motions.
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