Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
241-250 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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241) Objection 1: We have no warrant to enter upon that land which hath been so long possessed by others.
Answer 1: That which lies common and hath never been replenished or subdued is free to any that will possess and improve it, for God hath given to the sons of men a double right to the earth: there is a natural right and a civil right [....] The natives in New England, they inclose no land neither have any settled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by, and so have no other but a natural right to those countries. So as if we leave them sufficient for their use we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and us. (John Winthrop, "Reasons to Be Considered for...the Intended Plantation in New England," 1629, qtd. in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985: 70-74. )
242) Ultimately, the image they created worked its way into the promotional tracts of a later day that sought to encourage the settlers themselves. [...] The body of promotional literature surrounding the Roanoke colony found its themes echoed in later tracts that preceded the settlement at Albemarle, showing not only the changing nature of promotional publications in the settlement process but also the adaptability and appeal of a powerful image. (Susan Schmidt Horning, "The Power of Image: Promotional Literature and Its Changing Role in the Settlement of Early Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 70.4 [1993]: 400. )
243) The place they [the Plymouth colonists] had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same. (William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647. New York: Random House, 1981: 26. )
244) They [the Massachusetts Bay colonists] legitimated their power by claiming to be the authentic bearers of the Puritan cultural and religious tradition. Through them, they insisted, the established Christian wisdom of the ages would exercise its sway over the New World Bible commonwealth. While the Puritan thinking class in England may have helped initiate the tradition of radical ideological politics, their colleagues in the Bay created a stable revolutionary regime. Puritan Massachusetts was a seventeenth-century one-party state. (Alan Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1998: xv. )
245) That England was actually suffering from a glut of population at the end of the sixteenth century may be doubted, but that scores of writers thought England was overpopulated is undeniable. (Howard Mumford Jones, "The Colonial Impulse: An Analysis of the 'Promotion' Literature of Colonization." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 90.2 [1946]: 146. )
246) A government of the people, formed by the people for the people, with Church and State completely separate, and with political privileges not dependent on religious belief, was organized and maintained successfully for the first time in Christendom in Rhode Island, the smallest of the American Colonies. Its inspiration and founder was Roger Williams, the apostle of soul-liberty [....] he has been called "The First American." (Arthur B. Strickland, Roger Williams: Prophet and Pioneer of Soul Liberty. Boston: The Judson Press, 1919: 3. )
247) And so here falleth in our question, how a man that is born and bred, and hath lived some years, may remove himself into another country. I answer, a man must not respect only to live, and do good to himself, but he should see where he can live to do most good to others;...But some will say, what right have I to go live in the heathens' country?...we ought also to endeavor and use the means to convert them, and the means cannot be used unless we go to them or they come to us; to us they cannot come, our land is full; to them we may go, their land is empty. (Robert Cushman's "Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America," 1622. )
248) What was the inevitable consequences of this state of things? The Europeans were under the necessity either of abandoning the country, and relinquishing their pompous claims to it, or of enforcing those claims by the sword, and by the adoption of principles adapted to the condition of a people with whom it was impossible to mix, and who could not be governed as a distinct society. . . . (John Marshall, Johnson v. M'Intosh, 1823 )
249) On the Christian right to take the Holy Land, Innocent IV argued that the Roman jurisdiction over the area had been inherited by the emperor, one of whose titles was King of Jerusalem, and that he had been unjustly deprived of it by the Moslems. Therefore the Christians had not only a right but a duty to reconquer the area for its rightful ruler, as long as this was done with proper authorization. (L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason. The Law of Nations and the New World. Alberta: U of Alberta P, 1989: 151. )
250) Columbus's picture of the life of those who lived on the Caribbean Islands found its way into Alexander VI's bull, Inter caetera (1493). (James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994: 40.) (hear commentary by Melissa Morris)
