January 2011

I would like to have witnessed the decisive moment when the amendments of the Bill of Rights were adopted, when freedom of the press, of speech, of religion, of assembly and all the other citizen rights were set into the Constitution.

Without this affirmation of the rights of individuals as against the power of the state, our country might have taken a far different course. The twentieth century has shown that although literacy has increased in most of the countries of the world, as in our own, even the educated citizen is helpless if there are no established and widely accepted curbs on the power of the state.

My wish would put me in Thomas Jefferson’s study when he got his comeuppance as a bird watcher. The President, a dedicated naturalist, was a subscriber to The American Ornithology , a pioneer work by Alexander Wilson (often called the father of American ornithology) and he had asked Wilson to identify a rare species that had mystified him for years. It was, he wrote, “heard… but scarcely ever to be seen but on the top of tallest trees from which it perpetually serenades us with the sweetest notes… clear as those of a nightingale. I have followed it for years without ever but once getting a good view of it. ”

I would like to have had an extra long life, and to have sat on a pier between 1200 and 1300. to see who besides Columbus and Sebastian Cabot showed up

Nothing so attracts and holds my imagination as the fact of the virgin North American continent as the amazed Europeans first saw it. Here was “a plaine wildernes as God first made it.” in the words of John Smith. It bespoke Eden itself, a beautiful land already planted, in which all possibilities might be realized.

Most tantalizing was the thought of it all. the very scent of it. from over the horizon at sea. For three centuries. European explorers plying uncertainly in Atlantic waters far from the sight of land repeated a certain moment: they smelled on the west wind the distant flowering forest.

The amazingly scrupulous records we have of Anne Hutchinson’s trial in early November of 1637 tantalize me into wishing I could have been there. Hers was a religious culture and ours is pluralist and secular, but the troubling issues from back then have analogies now. In facing state (John Winthrop) and church (John Cotton), she represented dissent against establishment. As so often since, neither side looked good, and, from other angles, both sides made a case. They fought over the covenant of grace and the covenant of works, ideas almost incomprehensible to many today. Yet they are signal issues about liberty and license versus law and responsibility, and remain alive.

Three centuries ago Pemaquid was a vast, vaguely bounded expanse of Indian tribal lands centering around what is now the town of Bristol, Maine. It fronted on no fewer than fifty miles of Atlantic littoral and incorporated scores of offshore islands such as Georges, Monhegan, and Damariscove.

It was—and is—permeated with unrecorded, unrecognized, unsubstantiated, forgotten history. Unquestionably it was the real birthplace of New England and the northeast U.S.A. Fishermen from England had at least summer settlements there decades before the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod; in fact their handouts saved the Pilgrims from starvation, but the Pemaquidians seemed to prefer anonymity to avoid attracting competitors to their locale.

On May 18, 1675, a handbell rang from the east shore of Lake Michigan. It was the only sound that afternoon in all the vast wilderness of lake and hills and forest, and it marked the passing of a Jesuit Father, Jacques Marquette. His great and stirring mission among the Illinois Indians had come to an end on Easter morning when he celebrated mass before five thousand of them. They had stood in rings around him in an open field—old men, chiefs, and warriors, with women and children on the outer fringe. No Indian had ever experienced anything like that service: if not all of them were converted, all were deeply moved. The young men escorted Marquette and his two French companions from their town to the head of Lake Michigan to say farewell. They did not try to keep him with them but begged him to come back when he was able. They knew that he was very ill, and had been desperately so when he had returned the fall before to winter with them according to his promise.

Maybe it’s my Quaker ancestry (on the paternal side) that has me choosing personally to witness a small jewel of a thing that happened in nascent Pennsylvania on February 27, 1684. Back then, it seems, Quakers were not altogether immune to the witch-mindedness of their day; and here was an elderly woman, doubtless psychotic, on trial for witchcraft. William Penn, creator of the colony and temporarily a resident there, lent his proprietary presence and took part in examining the accused.

“Art thou a witch?” he asked her. “Hast thou ever ridden through the air on a broomstick?” The poor old thing insisted that indeed she had. Penn told her in effect that he knew of no law against it and recommended that the jury dismiss her. So they found her guilty not of witchcraft but merely of having the “common fame of being a witch” and set her free.

I would like to have been in the British ranks on the Plains of Abraham on the morning of September 13, 1759, at the moment when Wolfe’s British army defeated Montcalm’s French forces. Rarely have single battles proved decisive to history, but those that have so proved were usually enormously decisive. Wolfe’s victory was one such engagement.

Although more war would follow, that battle essentially ended the French empire in North America, an empire that had contended with the English colonies over the course of one hundred and fifty years for die culture, the economy, the native inhabitants, the soil, and the soul of North America. Wolfe s victory ensured that North America would be mostly Englishspeaking, but it also, because of British imperial policy, ensured that a French culture would survive in a British Canada.