AMERICAN GENESIS: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia

by Alden Vaughan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 21, 1974

Vaughan treats Captain John Smith, whose coat of arms bore the legend vincere est vivere (or ""to live is to conquer""), as a symbol for the early British imperial impulse -- which is, in this context, a heroic principle rather than a crime. But then Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (1965) argued that the extinction of the Indians was legal, therefore justified. Here he contends that the autocratic character of Smith, a former soldier of fortune and professional adventurer, was the salvation of the London Company's Virginia settlement -- the first permanent English outpost in America -- and that his personal style of governing was the precursor of American social order. The story of those early harsh years is neither pretty nor idealistic, marked at times by starvation, cannibalism among the colonists, massacres, continuous racial hostility, incredibly brutal ""Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martiall"" to ensure economic productivity and profits for the trading company's stockholders. As Vaughan's proiotypical American, Smith is ""bold, energetic, and optimistic; at the same time, brash, intolerant, overly proud of. . .achievements, and overly solicitous of approval."" But by what apologetic logic are those reciprocal virtues? A teleological view of European expansion and American genesis that places glory above conscience.

Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1974

ISBN: 0673393550

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION