Bailyn - The barbarous years : the peopling of British North America : the conflict of civilizations, 1600-1675

H ISTORIANS BUILD on the work of their predecessors, and this book rests heavily on the original scholarship of several distinct groups of historians who in recent years have transformed their fields of interest: the Chesapeake historians, led by Lois Green Carr, James Horn, Karen Kupperman, Russell Menard, and Lorena Walsh, who have revealed in their studies a social and economic world of the upper South never seen before; three generations of New England scholars led by Perry Miller, Edmund Morgan, and David Hall, who have found in Puritanism an astonishing richness of life and thought; and the Dutch archival scholars, editors, and translators led by Charles Gehring, Joyce Goodfriend, Jaap Jacobs, Donna Merwick, Oliver Rink, and David Voorhees, who have transcended linguistic barriers to explore the complexity of New Netherlands multi-ethnic community. None of them bear any responsibility for what I have written, but like so many others I have greatly benefited from their scholarship and that of the other historians who in recent years have helped transform these fields.

On a more personal level, I am enormously indebted to Elizabeth McCormack, whose interest in the Peopling project as an officer in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund led to grants from the Fund and from the National Endowment for the Humanities that have made much of the research possible. I am deeply grateful to her and to the Funds and the Endowments support.

Jane Garrett, my old friend, early collaborator, and editor at Knopf has been wonderfully patient and encouraging over the years. I have relied on her judgment in many ways, and appreciate all she has done to bring history to a broad audience. In her absence, Leslie Levine took over at Knopf, and did everything she could to help bring the book to completion.

Barbara DeWolfe worked with me in searches through the vast archive of materials, in this country and abroad, bearing on early North American population history, and contributed especially to the complex documentation, literary and electronic, that went into Voyagers to the West. She continues her discerning scholarship in her present position, as curator of manuscripts at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

I am grateful to Ginger S. Hawkins for her ingenious assistance, especially in data collection and analysis, and to C. Scott Walker, cartographer at the Harvard University Map Collection, who generously set aside his other work to devise and adapt, with skill and imagination, the basic maps for this book. Jennifer Nickerson bore with me patiently and cheerfully through long, complex stints of research and revision while keeping track of books, files, and notes. Her assistance was indispensable.

Lotte Bailyn has listened, read, re-read, and corrected endlessly. Her forbearance, encouragement, and blessed optimism have kept the entire project alive, and made this book possible.

B.B.

Faces of Revolution 978-0-307-79847-3

The Origins of American Politics 978-0-307-79851-0

The Peopling of British North America 978-0-307-79846-6

To Begin the World Anew 978-0-307-42978-0

Voyagers to the West 978-0-307-79852-7

For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

Bernard Bailyn did his undergraduate work at Williams College and his graduate work at Harvard, where he is currently Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Emeritus. His previous books include The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century; Education in the Forming of American Society; The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which received the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes; The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, which won the National Book Award for History; Voyagers to the West, which won the Pulitzer Prize; Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence; To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders; and Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal.

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T HEY LIVED crowded lives. Few in number by modern demographic standards, even before European diseases tore through their villages like the wrath of God, their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient, and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories, and purposes, that surrounded them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible, these vital spirits inhered in the heavens, the earth, the seas, and everything within. They drove the stars in the sky and gave life and sensibility to every bird, animal, and person that existed, and they were active within the earths materialsrocks, hills, lakes, and riversand in the wind, the cold, the heat, and the seasons.

These purposeful, powerful

The earths generosity, on which survival depended, could be jealously withheld. Profligacy, waste, irreverence could offend. Though

Since the myriad, immanent spirits were everywhere alert, everywhere sensitive and reactive, the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise, and the rules of behavior had to be finely drawn. Propitiating the anima of beavers, who were greatly respected, was especially demanding, and there were significant distinctions: those that were trapped had to be treated differently from those that were otherwise killed. There were special rules for dealing with birds and animals caught in nets; the sex of captured animals mattered in their treatment. Respectful of the animals spirits, Penobscot hunters would not eat the first deer or moose they killed each season,