building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

continued. Under Governor Benjamin Fletcher, three‐fourths of the land
in New York was granted to about thirty people. He gave a friend a half
million acres for a token annual payment of 30 shillings. […] The
colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes ‐ a fact obscured
by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against
England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country, therefore,
was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant
and landlord, poor and rich. 6
The myth of the Atlantic coast as a place of shelter, where land to be cultivated
could be found and social conflicts could be solved, appears more complex and
well‐structured than it appears at first sight.
When the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower, the colonial
experiment was at its second attempt. After the foundation of Jamestown in
Virginia in 1607, the first black slaves had already been put ashore in 1619 by a
Dutch ship, in what had become the first English settlement on American soil.
However, immediately after the first half of the eighteenth century, the ideas of
equality and the language of freedom found ample approval, at least from an ideal
point of view, in the first English colonies. On the basis of these new convictions,
and with the idea and the symbol of a Nation to be built, intellectuals and influential
individuals were able to unite many people in the fight against their original
motherland, perceived by most as a distant, tyrannical power.
The years immediately after the Declaration of Independence (1776) were those
that ignited the engine of the melting pot, without, however, putting an immediate
end to slavery and inequality. These were the years in which a relationship of nonsubjection
to Europe was defined and in which the land of the new continent was
idealized, on the basis of political independence and under the symbol of hope.
The past, however, was not immediately repudiated and put aside in favour of the
future. The idealization of American nature surely has European roots and appeal.
Think how the primitive aspects of the idea of the noble savage, so dear to
6 ZINN, Howard, A people’s History of the United States, New York, Harper&Row, 1980 [quotation
translated by the author] (Italian translation by Erica Mannucci, Storia del popolo americano, dal
1492 a oggi, Milano, il Saggiatore, 2010, pp. 39‐41)
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