Description OPTION 1. In what ways did the Second Great Awakening help result in profound politic ...
Description OPTION 1. In what ways did the Second Great Awakening help result in profound political and social changes in American society in the mid-19th century? Include in your answer an analysis of the effect of the Second Great Awakening on a) the role of women in American society. b) American attitudes toward slavery, and c) beliefs concerning the destiny of the United States. OPTION 2. The Civil War had its roots in the way the northern colonies and southern colonies were settled in the 1600s. Agree or disagree, using specific examples from across the span of the course. 2 attachments Slide 1 of 2 attachment_1 attachment_1 attachment_2 attachment_2 UNFORMATTED ATTACHMENT PREVIEW T h e A m e r i c a n Y aw p © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com The A meric a n Y aw p A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook vol. 1: to 1877 e di t e d by jose ph l . l ock e a n d be n w r igh t sta n f or d u n i v e r si t y pr e s s • sta n f or d, c a l i f or n i a © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Some rights reserved. [[[Insert logo]]] This book is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0, AttributionShareAlike. This license permits commercial and non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit https://?creativecommons?.org/?licenses/?by?-sa/?4?.0/. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Locke, Joseph L., editor. | Wright, Ben, editor. Title: The American yawp : a massively collaborative open U.S. history textbook / edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015206 (print) | LCCN 2018017638 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503608139 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503606715 | ISBN 9781503606715 (v. 1 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503606883(v. 2 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503608139(v. 1 :ebook) | ISBN 9781503608146(v. 2 :ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Textbooks. Classification: LCC E178.1 (ebook) | LCC E178.1 .A493673 2019 (print) | DDC 973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015206 Typeset by Newgen in Sabon LT 11/15 Cover illustration: Detail from “Grand Democratic Free Soil Banner,” by N. Currier and John Plumbe Jr., 1848. Source: Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Yawp \yôp\ n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Walt Whitman, 1854 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Contents Preface ix 1. The New World 1 2. Colliding Cultures 28 3. British North America 54 4. Colonial Society 81 5. The American Revolution 109 6. A New Nation 143 7. The Early Republic 170 8. The Market Revolution 198 9. Democracy in America 227 10. Religion and Reform 253 11. The Cotton Revolution 283 12. Manifest Destiny 315 13. The Sectional Crisis 343 14. The Civil War 371 15. Reconstruction 402 Contributors 435 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com Preface We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our culture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 To understand who we are, we must therefore understand our history. But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would we even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too complex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It must be something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past. Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from primary sources (material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpretations, and argue for their conclusions. History, then, is our ongoing conversation about the past. Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say, about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on slave plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of Civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. Library of Congress. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com xP r ef ace leaders and dates of events may not change, but the weight we give them and the context with which we frame them invariably evolves. History is a conversation between the past and the present. To understand a global society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To understand the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, we must look beyond the elites who framed older textbooks and listen to the poor and disadvantaged from all generations. But why study history in the first place? History can cultivate essential and relevant—or, in more utilitarian terms, “marketable”—skills: careful reading, creative thinking, and clear communication. Many are familiar with a famous quote of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”2 The role of history in shaping current events is more complicated than this quote implies, but Santayana was right in arguing that history offers important lessons. The historical sensibility yields perspective and context and broader awareness. It liberates us from our narrow experiences and pulls us into, in the words of historian Peter Stearns, “the laboratory of human experience.”3 Perhaps a better way to articulate the importance of studying history would be, “Those who fail to understand their history will fail to understand themselves.” Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective: it requires method, rigor, and perspective. The open nature of historical discourse does not mean that all arguments—and certainly not all “opinions”—about the past are equally valid. Some are simply wrong. And yet good historical questions will not always have easy answers. Asking “When did Christopher Columbus first sail across the Atlantic?” will tell us far less than “What inspired Columbus to attempt his voyage?” or “How did Native Americans interpret the arrival of Europeans?” Crafting answers to these questions reveals far greater insights into our history. But how can any textbook encapsulate American history? Should it organize around certain themes or surrender to the impossibility of synthesis and retreat toward generality? In the oft-cited lines of the American poet Walt Whitman, we found as good an organizing principle as any other: “I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable,” he wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”4 Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. Here we find both chorus and cacophony together, as one. This textbook therefore offers the story of that barbaric, untranslatable American yawp by con- © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com P re f a c e x i structing a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that can strangle narratives of American history. We have produced The American Yawp to help guide students in their encounter with American history. The American Yawp is a collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for general readers and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic historians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely accessible online at www?.AmericanYawp?.com, and in addition to providing a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with The American Yawp to publish a print edition. Furthermore, The American Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are encouraged to help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page, available through AmericanYawp?.com. The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to use it, download it, distribute it, and modify it as you see fit. The project is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the standards of a “Free Cultural Work.” We are happy to share it and we hope you will do the same. Joseph Locke & Ben Wright, editors N o t e s t o p r e fac e 1. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1954), 73. 2. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress, Volume I (New York: Scribner, 1905), 284. 3. Peter N. Stearns, “Why Study History,” American Historical Association (July 11, 2008). https://?www?.historians?.org/?about?-aha?-and?-membership/?aha?-history?-and?-archives/?archives/?why?-study?-history?-?(1998. 4. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: Rome, 1855), 55. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T h e A m e r i c a n Y aw p © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 1 The New World I. Introduction Europeans called the Americas “the New World.” But for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but. Humans have lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years. Dynamic and diverse, they spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of distinct cultures. Native Americans built settled communities and followed seasonal migration patterns, maintained peace through alliances and warred with their neighbors, and developed self-sufficient economies and maintained vast trade networks. They cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual values. Kinship ties knit their communities together. But the arrival of Europeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes—what scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange— bridged more than ten thousand years of geographic separation, inaugurated centuries of violence, unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had ever seen, and revolutionized the history of the world. It began one of the most consequential developments in all of human history and the first chapter in the long American yawp. Cahokia, as it may have appeared around 1150 CE. Painting by Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 2 Chap ter 1 II. The First Americans American history begins with the first Americans. But where do their stories start? Native Americans passed stories down through the millennia that tell of their creation and reveal the contours of indigenous belief. The Salinan people of present-day California, for example, tell of a bald eagle that formed the first man out of clay and the first woman out of a feather.1 According to a Lenape tradition, the earth was made when Sky Woman fell into a watery world and, with the help of muskrat and beaver, landed safely on a turtle’s back, thus creating Turtle Island, or North America. A Choctaw tradition locates southeastern peoples’ beginnings inside the great Mother Mound earthwork, Nunih Waya, in the lower Mississippi Valley.2 Nahua people trace their beginnings to the place of the Seven Caves, from which their ancestors emerged before they migrated to what is now central Mexico.3 America’s indigenous peoples have passed down many accounts of their origins, written and oral, which share creation and migration histories. Archaeologists and anthropologists, meanwhile, focus on migration histories. Studying artifacts, bones, and genetic signatures, these scholars have pieced together a narrative that claims that the Americas were once a “new world” for Native Americans as well. The last global ice age trapped much of the world’s water in enormous continental glaciers. Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois. With so much of the world’s water captured in these massive ice sheets, global sea levels were much lower, and a land bridge connected Asia and North America across the Bering Strait. Between twelve and twenty thousand years ago, Native ancestors crossed the ice, waters, and exposed lands between the continents of Asia and America. These mobile hunter-gatherers traveled in small bands, exploiting vegetable, animal, and marine resources into the Beringian tundra at the northwestern edge of North America. DNA evidence suggests that these ancestors paused— for perhaps fifteen thousand years—in the expansive region between Asia and America.4 Other ancestors crossed the seas and voyaged along the Pacific coast, traveling along riverways and settling where local ecosystems permitted.5 Glacial sheets receded around fourteen thousand years ago, opening a corridor to warmer climates and new resources. Some ancestral communities migrated southward and eastward. Evidence found at Monte Verde, a site in modern-day Chile, suggests that human activity began there at least 14,500 years ago. Similar evidence hints at © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d human settlement in the Florida panhandle at the same time.6 On many points, archaeological and traditional knowledge sources converge: the dental, archaeological, linguistic, oral, ecological, and genetic evidence illustrates a great deal of diversity, with numerous groups settling and migrating over thousands of years, potentially from many different points of origin.7 Whether emerging from the earth, water, or sky; being made by a creator; or migrating to their homelands, modern Native American communities recount histories in America that date long before human memory. In the Northwest, Native groups exploited the great salmon-filled rivers. On the plains and prairie lands, hunting communities followed bison herds and moved according to seasonal patterns. In mountains, prairies, deserts, and forests, the cultures and ways of life of paleo-era ancestors were as varied as the geography. These groups spoke hundreds of languages and adopted distinct cultural practices. Rich and diverse diets fueled massive population growth across the continent. Agriculture arose sometime between nine thousand and five thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Mesoamericans in modern-day Mexico and Central America relied on domesticated maize (corn) to develop the hemisphere’s first 3 Prehistoric settlement in Warren County, Mississippi. Mural by Robert Dafford, depicting the Kings Crossing archaeological site as it may have appeared in 1000 CE. Vicksburg Riverfront Murals. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 4 Chap ter 1 settled population around 1200 BCE.8 Corn was high in caloric content, easily dried and stored, and, in Mesoamerica’s warm and fertile Gulf Coast, could sometimes be harvested twice in a year. Corn—as well as other Mesoamerican crops—spread across North America and continues to hold an important spiritual and cultural place in many Native communities. Agriculture flourished in the fertile river valleys between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, an area known as the Eastern Woodlands. There, three crops in particular—corn, beans, and squash, known as the Three Sisters—provided nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations. In Woodland areas from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast, Native communities managed their forest resources by burning underbrush to create vast parklike hunting grounds and to clear the ground for planting the Three Sisters. Many groups used shifting cultivation, in which farmers cut the forest, burned the undergrowth, and then planted seeds in the nutrient-rich ashes. When crop yields began to decline, farmers moved to another field and allowed the land to recover and the forest to regrow before again cutting the forest, burning the undergrowth, and restarting the cycle. This technique was particularly useful in areas with difficult soil. But in the fertile regions of the Eastern Woodlands, Native American farmers engaged in permanent, intensive agriculture, using hand tools rather than European-style plows. The rich soil and use of hand tools enabled effective and sustainable farming practices, producing high yields without overburdening the soil.9 Typically in Woodland communities, women practiced agriculture while men hunted and fished. Agriculture allowed for dramatic social change, but for some, it also may have accompanied a decline in health. Analysis of remains reveals that societies transitioning to agriculture often experienced weaker bones and teeth.10 But despite these possible declines, agriculture brought important benefits. Farmers could produce more food than hunters, enabling some members of the community to pursue other skills. Religious leaders, skilled soldiers, and artists could devote their energy to activities other than food production. North America’s indigenous peoples shared some broad traits. Spiritual practices, understandings of property, and kinship networks differed markedly from European arrangements. Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated their world and was both tangible and accessible. It could be appealed to and harnessed. Kinship bound most Native North © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d American people together. Most peoples lived in small communities tied by kinship networks. Many Native cultures understood ancestry as matrilineal: family and clan identity proceeded along the female line, through mothers and daughters, rather than fathers and sons. Fathers, for instance, often joined mothers’ extended families, and sometimes even a mother’s brothers took a more direct role in child-raising than biological fathers. Therefore, mothers often wielded enormous influence at local levels, and men’s identities and influence often depended on their relationships to women. Native American culture, meanwhile, generally afforded greater sexual and marital freedom than European cultures. Women, for instance, often chose their husbands, and divorce often was a relatively simple and straightforward process. Moreover, most Native peoples’ notions of property rights differed markedly from those of Europeans. Native Americans generally felt a personal ownership of tools, weapons, or other items that were actively used, and this same rule applied to land and crops. Groups and individuals exploited particular pieces of land and used violence or negotiation to exclude others. But the right to the use of land did not imply the right to its permanent possession. Native Americans had many ways of communicating, including graphic ones, and some of these artistic and communicative technologies are still used today. For example, Algonquian-speaking Ojibwes used birch-bark scrolls to record medical treatments, recipes, songs, stories, and more. Other Eastern Woodland peoples wove plant fibers, embroidered skins with porcupine quills, and modeled the earth to make sites of complex ceremonial meaning. On the Plains, artisans wove buffalo hair and painted on buffalo skins; in the Pacific Northwest weavers wove goat hair into soft textiles with particular patterns. Maya, Zapotec, and Nahua ancestors in Mesoamerica painted their histories on plant-derived textiles and carved them into stone. In the Andes, Inca recorders noted information in the form of knotted strings, or khipu.11 Two thousand years ago, some of the largest culture groups in North America were the Puebloan groups, centered in the current-day Greater Southwest (the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico), the Mississippian groups located along the Great River and its tributaries, and the Mesoamerican groups of the areas now known as central Mexico and the Yucatán. Previous developments in agricultural technology enabled the explosive growth of the large early societies, such as that at Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico, Cahokia along the Mississippi River, and in the desert oasis areas of the Greater Southwest. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 5 6 Chap ter 1 Native peoples in the Southwest began constructing these highly defensible cliff dwellings in 1190 CE and continued expanding and refurbishing them until 1260 CE before abandoning them around 1300 CE. Andreas F. Borchert, Mesa Verde National Park Cliff Palace. Wikimedia. Creative Commons AttributionShare Alike 3.0 Germany. Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico was home to ancestral Puebloan peoples between 900 and 1300 CE. As many as fifteen thousand individuals lived in the Chaco Canyon complex in present-day New Mexico.12 Sophisticated agricultural practices, extensive trading networks, and even the domestication of animals like turkeys allowed the population to swell. Massive residential structures, built from sandstone blocks and lumber carried across great distances, housed hundreds of Puebloan people. One building, Pueblo Bonito, stretched over two acres and rose five stories. Its six hundred rooms were decorated with copper bells, turquoise decorations, and bright macaws.13 Homes like those at Pueblo Bonito included a small dugout room, or kiva, which played an important role in a variety of ceremonies and served as an important center for Puebloan life and culture. Puebloan spirituality was tied both to the earth and the heavens, as generations carefully charted the stars and designed homes in line with the path of the sun and moon.14 The Puebloan people of Chaco Canyon faced several ecological challenges, including deforestation and overirrigation, which ultimately caused the community to collapse and its people to disperse to smaller settlements. An extreme fifty-year drought began in 1130. Shortly thereafter, Chaco Canyon was deserted. New groups, including the Apache and Navajo, entered the vacated territory and adopted several Puebloan customs. The same drought that plagued the Pueblo also likely affected the Mississippian peoples of the American Midwest and South. The Mississippians developed one of the largest civilizations north of modernday Mexico. Roughly one thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located just east of modern-day St. Louis, peaked at a population of between ten thousand and thirty thousand. It rivaled contemporary European cities in size. No American city, in fact, would © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d match Cahokia’s peak population levels until after the American Revolution. The city itself spanned two thousand acres and centered on Monks Mound, a large earthen hill that rose ten stories and was larger at its base than the pyramids of Egypt. As with many of the peoples who lived in the Woodlands, life and death in Cahokia were linked to the movement of the stars, sun, and moon, and their ceremonial earthwork structures reflect these important structuring forces. Cahokia was politically organized around chiefdoms, a hierarchical, clan-based system that gave leaders both secular and sacred authority. The size of the city and the extent of its influence suggest that the city relied on a number of lesser chiefdoms under the authority of a paramount leader. Social stratification was partly preserved through frequent warfare. War captives were enslaved, and these captives formed an important part of the economy in the North American Southeast. Native American slavery was not based on holding people as property. Instead, Native Americans understood slaves as people who lacked kinship networks. Slavery, then, was not always a permanent condition. Very often, a former slave could become a fully integrated member of the community. Adoption or marriage could enable a slave to enter a kinship network and join the community. Slavery and captive trading became an 7 An artist’s rendering of Cahokia as it may have appeared in 1150 CE. Prepared by Bill Isminger and Mark Esarey with artwork by Greg Harlin. From the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 8 Chap ter 1 important way that many Native communities regrew and gained or maintained power. Around 1050, Cahokia experienced what one archaeologist has called a “big bang,” which included “a virtually instantaneous and pervasive shift in all things political, social, and ideological.”15 The population grew almost 500 percent in only one generation, and new people groups were absorbed into the city and its supporting communities. By 1300, the once-powerful city had undergone a series of strains that led to collapse. Scholars previously pointed to ecological disaster or slow depopulation through emigration, but new research instead emphasizes mounting warfare, or internal political tensions. Environmental explanations suggest that population growth placed too great a burden on the arable land. Others suggest that the demand for fuel and building materials led to deforestation, erosion, and perhaps an extended drought. Recent evidence, including defensive stockades, suggests that political turmoil among the ruling elite and threats from external enemies may explain the end of the once-great civilization.16 North American communities were connected by kin, politics, and culture and sustained by long-distance trading routes. The Mississippi River served as an important trade artery, but all of the continent’s waterways were vital to transportation and communication. Cahokia became a key trading center partly because of its position near the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. These rivers created networks that stretched from the Great Lakes to the American Southeast. Archaeologists can identify materials, like seashells, that traveled over a thousand miles to reach the center of this civilization. At least 3,500 years ago, the community at what is now Poverty Point, Louisiana, had access to copper from present-day Canada and flint from modern-day Indiana. Sheets of mica found at the sacred Serpent Mound site near the Ohio River came from the Allegheny Mountains, and obsidian from nearby earthworks came from Mexico. Turquoise from the Greater Southwest was used at Teotihuacan 1200 years ago. In the Eastern Woodlands, many Native American societies lived in smaller, dispersed communities to take advantage of rich soils and abundant rivers and streams. The Lenapes, also known as Delawares, farmed the bottomlands throughout the Hudson and Delaware River watersheds in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Their hundreds of settlements, stretching from southern Massachusetts through Delaware, were loosely bound together by political, social, and spiritual connections. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com T he N e w W o r l d Dispersed and relatively independent, Lenape communities were bound together by oral histories, ceremonial traditions, consensusbased political organization, kinship networks, and a shared clan system. Kinship tied the various Lenape communities and clans together, and society was organized along matrilineal lines. Marriage occurred between clans, and a married man joined the clan of his wife. Lenape women wielded authority over marriages, households, and agricultural production and may even have played a significant part in determining the selection of leaders, called sachems. Dispersed authority, small settlements, and kin-based organization contributed to the long-lasting stability and resilience of Lenape communities.17 One or more sachems governed Lenape communities by the consent of their people. Lenape sachems acquired their authority by demonstrating wisdom and experience. This differed from the hierarchical organization of many Mississippian cultures. Large gatherings did exist, however, as dispersed communities and their leaders gathered for ceremonial purposes or to make big decisions. Sachems spoke for their people in larger councils that included men, women, and elders. The Lenapes experienced occasional tensions with other indigenous groups like the Iroquois to the north or the Susquehannock to the south, but the lack of defensive fortifications near Lenape communities convinced archaeologists that the Lenapes avoided large-scale warfare. The continued longevity of Lenape societies, which began centuries before European contact, was also due to their skills as farmers and fishers. Along with the Three Sisters, Lenape women planted tobacco, sunflowers, and gourds. They harvested fruits and nuts from trees and cultivated numerous medicinal plants, which they used with great proficiency. The Lenapes organized their communities to take advantage of growing seasons and the migration patterns of animals and fowl that were a part of their diet. During planting and harvesting seasons, Lenapes gathered in larger groups to coordinate their labor and take advantage of local abundance. As proficient fishers, they organized seasonal fish camps to net shellfish and catch shad. Lenapes wove nets, baskets, mats, and a variety of household materials from the rushes found along the streams, rivers, and coasts. They made their homes in some of the most fertile and abundant lands in the Eastern Woodlands and used their skills to create a stable and prosperous civilization. The first Dutch and Swedish settlers who encountered the Lenapes in the seventeenth century recognized Lenape prosperity and quickly sought their friendship. Their lives came to depend on it. © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com 9 10 Chap ter 1 In the Pacific Northwest, the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingits, Haidas, and hundreds of other peoples, speaking dozens of languages, thrived in a land with a moderate climate, lush forests, and many rivers. The peoples of this region depended on salmon for survival and valued it accordingly. Images of salmon decorated totem poles, baskets, canoes, oars, and other tools. The
