全英文版建造美国MAKINGAMERICA美国的社会与风俗第一部分筑造国家2.doc

MAKING AMERICAThe Society and Culture of the UNITED STAESPART ONE Building a Nation4. A Consonance of TownsBy Richard LingemanA dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her history.—William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country Confronted by what the seventeenth century Puritan preachers liked to call “the howling wilderness”, the earliest settlers in America lived in towns or villages. Huddling together for protection amid a hostile envi- ronment is an instinctive animal reaction, but more than instinct was involved. After all, many English writers called the New World the “American Eden”—that is, a benign place. Captain Morton and his band of escaped bond servants at Merry Mount, near the first Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, probably leaned toward such a view, which brought about their undoing. The Pilgrims claimed to have sound reasons for sending a band of soldiers under Miles Standish to arrest Morton and his men, accusing them of selling firearms and liquor to the Indians. Their carnal trafficking with Indian maids also had something to do with it—as did their pagan revels, which included May Pole dancing.“Outlivers”, the English Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony would contemptuously call the people who did not dwell in the prescribed orderly villages. The conflict between the Puritans and the Merry Mounters in 1628 was an emblematic one, the earliest example of the tension between community and individual, society and nonconformists, that has continued to pulse, like an alternating current, throughout American history. The national motto E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one—expreeses it. How to bond into one people the variegated, restless multitudes that broke upon American shores in continuing waves? A strain of “Don’t Tread on Me” individualism is branded deep in the American character, but, less frequently recognized, so is one of community, which can be traced directly back to the first Puritans and their utopian dream of founding “a city upon a hill.”From the beginning, the settlement of America divided into two cultural streams, one in the South and the other in New England, that in turn shaped the nature of the towns and to a degree the character of the people. We can observe these two revers of people, which sprang from a common source in England, divide and take on new and distinctive chara- cteristics from their separate channels.The Virginia Plantations and Decentralization The first flowed through the southern part of the vast uncharted area on the eastern seaboard granted to the Virginia Company. The “planters” dispatched by the investors (“adventurers”) in London were instructed to found “handsome towns”, one of those home-office admonitions that the person in the field learns to ignore. Indeed, the principals in London soon scaled their charge down to the more realistic “compact and orderly villages”. The reasons behind both injunctions were the same, however. The principals in England wanted to make certain their men would work collectively at extracting the gold and gems and other putative riches of the New World, providing mutual assistance and also watching one another, checking any tendencies to theft and immorality, or reversion to savagery. The investors’ vision of neat orderly towns flowering in the Virginia garden soon shattered against the harsh conditions that existed there. Neither Eden nor Inferno, the New World could be unforgiving, especially to those who did not adapt to it quickly. The first settlement, Jamestown, founded in 1607, was sited in a marshy area. Malaria wiped out large numbers of planters; fires and Indian assaults did the rest. After being resupplied, reinforced and rebuilt several times, Jamestown was abandoned in 1676 after it was burned during Bacon’s Rebellion. Other early settlements, planted farther up the river during the next decade, never amounted to much. After decades of failure, the Virginia colonists began the cultivation of Nicotiana tabacum. Tobacco was the salvation of a colony that had been lurching toward disaster, the first viable cash crop of the New World. The colonists were indifferent farmers, and they continued to import the bulk of their supplies from England. Tobacco could be grown on large plantations, and the wealthier of the planters—most of them second or third sons of noble houses disinherited under the law of primogeniture—bought large tracts of land or acquired them through influence at court. Poor whites toiled for them as indentured servants while a sprinkling of the middle order cultivated smaller farms. Each year the planters brought their crops to “ports”—small settlements at the heads of the numerous creeks, inlets, bays and estuaries that formed natural harbo。