The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
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between God and Satan. This set in motion yet another persisting strain in American life: persecution. If you were not with them you were against them, as Jesus Christ Himself had said. And if you were against them you were to be attacked, defeated and, if necessary, destroyed. They used the Old Testament but also English common law to justify the persecution of what they saw as ‘immorality’. This included breaking the Sabbath or blasphemy, which were criminalised. Hysterical insanity could take over. In 1642, the New Haven authorities examined a piglet whose face, they said, bore a resemblance to one George Spenser. He was convicted of bestiality. He confessed and was hanged; and so was the sow.
Non-Puritans were not encouraged to come to New England and one of the leading men of the Chosen spoke of ‘the lawlessness of liberty of conscience’. Dissenters were given, as another Puritan said, ‘free liberty to keep away from us’. When the intellectually adventurous Quakers came, they were prosecuted and their ears were cropped and they were expelled. When four of them returned between 1659 and 1661, they were hanged.
One unexpected consequence of this was that Roger Williams, a minister in Salem in the 1630s, was moved to say that the Puritans had gone too far. He fled to found what became Rhode Island, unique in the English-speaking world for welcoming exiles and Dissenters, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers and also those from another religion – one both deeply allied and historically alien – Jews.
These New England Puritans hunted down witches. It was a period when medicine was primitive and when magic and ‘signs’ would be sought out to fill the gaps in knowledge. The devil was held to be ceaseless in his attempts to deform, damage, disrupt, distort and dismantle the plans and purposes of the best of God’s people. It was a time of the dramatically inexplicable and in that fear-fraught and fortressed society, vengeance seemed an essential defence. And though ‘vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’, the Old Testament furnished many dramatic examples not only of a vengeful God but also of vengeful Israelites and their enemies. It was there in the book and so it could be followed as an example.
Witches were a prime target. Overwhelmingly women and mostly of the poorer class. These were usually women canny in their knowledge of traditional country cures. They were powerless and easy to capture. For those in authority they were useful, perhaps in some primitive way: they were essential victims. For such furious and strained endeavours as the Puritans were undertaking, perhaps sacrifices were needed to satisfy the tribe – blood sacrifices, human sacrifices.
Puritan New England was persistent in the matter of witches. In Virginia, there were nine cases, only one suspect and he sentenced to a whipping and banishment. In the north ninetythree were tried, sixteen executed.
Then came Salem in 1692. Accusations by feverish adolescent girls were taken seriously and acted upon. Hundreds, mostly women, were accused by them. Eighteen were hanged. Sense returned only when the accusers turned their venomous hysteria on the ruling elite, including the governor’s wife. That went too far. ‘Further trials were suppressed,’ the historian Alan Taylor writes. ‘Regarded as a fiasco, the Salem mania became a spectacular flame-out that halted the prosecution of witches in New England.’
But the stain remained. Salem is dead but not buried. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, keeps it alive; Senator McCarthy’s search for communists in the 1950s was called a ‘witch hunt’.
These English, soon to be joined by Irish, Scots and Welsh, Puritans, and other hard-line Protestants, brought to New England a fanaticism allied with righteousness which would begin to clear the new continent of its natives. It would go on to build a capitalist democracy, global industries, new technologies, weaponry, and it would encourage mass education, equality, and princely philanthropy. The dark side led the settlers into the deceits, injustices and crimes of all dominating empires. The King James Version was there, every step of the way, for better and for worse, often the latter.
In 1789, George Washington took his oath of office and opened the Book of Genesis to passages that included Joseph’s dying reminder that God had promised the Israelites a new land. ‘So help me God,’ he said, as has every President of America since. The core tribe among the ‘Israelites’ in America were the Puritans and, deeper still, the Separatists. At the heart, what drove them was the binding Word of God in the King James Version.
It was the Bible that founded the English language over the Atlantic. It appears to have occurred to scarcely any of them that they should ‘go native’ and adopt the language of the tribes whose lands they occupied.
Their approach rested on their attitude to the King James Version. Quite simply, it was their book and its words belonged to them. In the 1630s, it began its centuries of dominance as by far the biggest selling and widest read book in America. The words were holy. They were aware that the Old Testament had been written in Hebrew, the New in Greek, the whole in Latin and that modern European nations had put it in their own languages. But the English translation was the supreme authority on all matters, the Book of Books.
They found poetry in it as well as wisdom and their guidance to the Kingdom of Heaven. They read it aloud every day. They took its names for their names, made its parables as their own, swore by it, lived and died by it. It provided meat for their daily conversation and proofs of their earthly destiny. They were married to it and no one could put them asunder.
Their behaviour to other languages echoed that of the Germanic tribes who had brought what became ‘English’ to the eastern counties of England in the fifth century. It was partly from these eastern counties that the first tide of pilgrims came to the east coast of America. The fifth-century Germanic tribes were in a vulnerable minority among the Celts, as were the Pilgrim Fathers among the American Indians. Yet they had held on to their own language and taken a very modest number of words from the hoard of British-Celtic words of the natives.
Much the same happened in New England 1,100 years later. In America they found new plants, new animals, new geographical features for which they needed new words. Some – comparatively few – came from local tongues. Others in the main came from inventive combinations of English words.
The settlers came largely from flatlands and so the new, often mountainous landscape called out for new words. They invented ‘foothill’, ‘notch’, ‘gap’, ‘bluff’, ‘divide’, ‘watershed’, ‘clearing’ and ‘underbrush’. When they had to bring in native words they did, but they anglicised them to ‘raccoon’, ‘skunk’, ‘opossum’ and ‘terrapin’, always simplifying them. For native foods they took in ‘squash’ for the variety of pumpkins. Sometimes there would be more straightforward borrowings, like ‘squaw’ or ‘wigwam’, ‘totem’, ‘papoose’, ‘moccasin’ and ‘tomahawk’.
Some of the settlers were not immune to the beauty of the native language. William Penn the eminent Quaker wrote: ‘I know not a language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness in Accent and Emphasis than this.’ Many place names came from Indian words and numerous rivers including the Susquehanna, the Potomac and the Miramichi. But all of these were minor additions.
The English and, soon following, the Scots and Irish stuck to the language in the book and were reluctant to stray very far away from it. They would coin English words for natural things rather than take them from the Indian – ‘mud hen’, ‘rattlesnake’, ‘bullfrog’, ‘potato-bug’, ‘groundhog’, ‘reed bed’. Even when describing Native American life, they preferred their own words as in ‘warpath’, ‘paleface’, ‘medicine man’, ‘peace pipe’, ‘big chief’. Their attitude to language reinforced their religious conviction. They had the Words of God through His prophets and His Son: what more could they possibly need save a few phrases which speeded up commonplace understanding?
English had taken on thousands of words from several other languages since about AD 500. It had been promiscuous. But in its beginnings in America it was very prudent. Perhaps Squanto spoiled them. Perhaps the Indian languages were just too difficult. ‘Squash’ for instance was ‘asquat-asquash’, ‘raccoon’, like many other animals, had several names. In this case they included ‘rahaugcum’ ‘raugroughcum’, ‘arocoune’ and ‘aroughcum’.
This was a