Made In America - Bill Bryson [20]
Sprinkled among this motley assemblage of new arrivals were increasing numbers of black Africans. Blacks had begun arriving in Virginia as early as 1619 – thus easily predating the oldest New England families – but not until late in the century did their usefulness as field workers and household servants become overwhelmingly evident. Though their removal to America was involuntary, they were at first regarded as servants, with the same rights of eventual earned freedom as indentured whites. The irony is that all these early menials, white and black alike, were called slaves, the term having temporarily lost its sense of permanent involuntary servitude. Servants were called indentured, incidentally, because their contract was indented, or folded, along an irregular line and torn in two, master and servant each keeping one half.30
Gradually, out of this inchoate mass a country began to emerge – loosely structured, governed from abroad, populated by an unlikely mix of refugees, idealists, slaves and convicts, but a country none the less. By the fourth decade of the eighteenth century the British were feeling sufficiently confident of their standing in the New World to begin looking for an excuse to throw their weight around a little. In 1739, the Spanish gave it to them when they made manifest their long and wholly understandable exasperation with British privateers by cutting off the ear of an English smuggler named Edward Jenkins. Never mind that Jenkins was little more than a common criminal. The British responded by launching possibly the only interesting-sounding conflict in history, the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
The war was in fact pretty dull, but it did have a couple of interesting linguistic spin-offs. One came with the introduction of a daily ration of rum and water for the sailors on the instructions of the commander of the fleet, Edward Vernon. Vernon’s nickname was Old Grog – no one seems to know why – and the drink, as you will doubtless have guessed, was soon called grog. (And those who drank too much of it would perforce become groggy.) Vernon was by all accounts an inspiring figure, and was greatly loved by his men. One of his colonial officers, Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George, was so taken with the admiral that he named his Virginia plantation Mount Vernon in his honour.
However – and here we come to the point of all this – the euphonious if largely forgotten War of Jenkins’ Ear marked a telling semantic transition. It was then for the first time that the British began to refer to their colonial cousins as Americans, rather than as provincials or colonials. American had been recorded as early as 1578, but previously had been applied only to the native Indians. No one realized it yet, but a new nation had begun.
3
A ‘Democratical Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
I
When dawn broke on that epochal year 1776 – a year that would also see the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – America’s war with its British masters was already, in a sense, several years old. The much despised Stamp Act was eleven years in the past. It was nearly three years since the Boston Tea Party