It is commonly alleged that the anti-English virulence of the ordinary
school history of the United States is mainly responsible for this bias
towards hostility in the mind of the average American. Mr. Goldwin
Smith, a high authority, has contested this theory; and I must admit
that, after a good deal of inquiry, I have been unable to find the
American school historians guilty of any very serious injustices to
England. Some quite modern histories which I have looked into (yet
written before the Spanish War) seem to me excellently and most
impartially done. The older histories are not well written: they are apt
to be sensational and chauvinistic in tone, and to encourage a somewhat
cheap and blusterous order of patriotism; but that they commonly malign
character or misrepresent events I cannot discover. They are perhaps a
little too much inclined to make "insolent" the inseparable epithet of
the British soldier; but there is no reason to doubt that in many cases
it was amply merited. I have not come across the history in which Mr.
G.W. Steevens discovered the following passages:
"The eyes of the soldiers glared upon the people like hungry
bloodhounds. The captain waved his sword. The red-coats pointed
their guns at the crowd. In a moment the flash of their muskets
lighted up the street, and eleven New England men fell bleeding
upon the snow.... Blood was streaming upon the snow; and though
that purple stain melted away in the next day's sun, it was never
forgotten nor forgiven by the people.... A battle took place
between a large force of Tories and Indians and a hastily organised
force of patriotic Americans. The Americans were defeated with
horrible slaughter, and many of those who were made prisoners were
put to death by fiendish torture.... More than six thousand
American sailors had been seized by British warships and pressed
into the hated service of a hated nation."
These passages are certainly not judicial or even judicious in tone; but
I fancy that the book or books from which Mr. Steevens culled them must
be quite antiquated. In books at present on the educational market I
find nothing so lurid. What I do find in some is a failure to
distinguish between the king's share and the British people's share in
the policy which brought about and carried on the Revolutionary War.
For instance, in Barnes's _Primary History of the United States_
(undated, but brought down to the end of the Spanish War) we read:
"_The English people_ after a time became jealous of the prosperity
of the colonists, and began to devise plans by which to grasp for
themselves a share of the wealth that was thus rolling in....
Indeed, _the English people_ acted from the first as if the
colonies existed only for the purpose of helping them to make
money."
George III. and his Ministers are not so much as mentioned, and the
impression conveyed to the ingenuous student is that the whole English
nation was consciously and deliberately banded together for purposes of
sheer brigandage. The same history is delightfully chauvinistic in its
account of the Colonial Wars. The British officers are all bunglers and
poltroons; if disasters are averted or victories won, it is entirely by
the courage and conduct of the colonists:
"When Johnson reached the head of Lake George he met the French,
and a fierce battle was fought. Success seemed at first to be
altogether with the French; but after a while Johnson was slightly
wounded, when General Lyman, a brave colonial officer, took
command, and beat the French terribly.... Abercrombie's defeat was
the last of the English disasters. The colonists now had arms
enough, and were allowed to fight in their own way, and a series of
brilliant victories followed.... By the energy, courage, and
patriotism of her colonies, England had now acquired a splendid
empire in the New World. And while she reaped all the glory of the
war and its fruits, it was the hardy colonists who had throughout,
borne the brunt of the conflict."
The child who learns his history from Mr. Barnes may not hate England,
but will certainly despise her.
Text-books of this type, however, are already obsolescent. A committee
of the New England History Teachers' Association published in the
_Educational Review_ for December 1898 a careful survey of no fewer than
nineteen school histories of the United States, and summed up the
results as follows:
"In discussing the causes of the Revolution, text-book writers have
sounded pretty much the whole scale of motives. England has been
pictured, on the one hand, as an arbitrary oppressor, and, on the
other, as the helpless victim of political environment. Under the
influence of deeper study and a keener sense of justice, however,
the element of bitterness, which so often entered into the
discussion of this subject, has largely disappeared; and while the
treatment of the Revolution in the text-books still leaves much to
be desired, it is now seldom dogmatic and unsympathetic."
The fact remains, however, that we have still to live down our wars
with the United States, in which there was much that was galling to the
just pride of the American people, and much, too, that was perhaps
over-stimulating to their self-esteem. There is no doubt, on the one
hand, that we were inclined to adopt a supercilious and contemptuous
attitude towards the "rebel colonists" of 1775, the new-made nation of
1815; no doubt, on the other hand, that they made a splendid fight
against us, and taught our superciliousness a salutary lesson. They feel
to this day the humiliation of having been despised, and the exultation
of having put their despisers to shame. These wars, which were, until
1861, almost the whole military history of the United States, were but
episodes in our history, and one of them a trifling episode. Therefore,
while the average Englishman has not studied them sufficiently to
realise how much he ought to deplore them, the average American has been
taught to dwell upon them as the glorious struggles in which his nation
won its spurs. To the juvenile imagination, battles are always the oases
in the desert of history, and the schoolboy never fails to take sides
fiercely and uncompromisingly, exaggerating, with the histrionic
instinct of youth, his enthusiasm and his hatreds. Thus the insolent
Britisher became the Turk's-head or Guy Fawkes, so to speak, of the
American boy, the butt of his bellicose humours; and a habit of mind
contracted in boyhood is not always to be eradicated by the sober
reflection of manhood, even in minds capable of sober reflection. The
Civil War, be it noted, did not depose the insolent Britisher from his
bad eminence in the schoolboy imagination. The Confederates were, after
all, Americans, though misguided Americans; and the fostering, the
brooding upon, intestine rancours was felt by teachers and pupils alike
to be impossible. But there is in the juvenile mind at any given moment
a certain amount of abstract combativeness, let us call it, which must
find an outlet somewhere. Hatred is a natural function of the human
mind, just as much as love; and the healthy boy instinctively exercises
it under the guise of patriotism, without clearly distinguishing the
element of sheer play and pose in his transports. England's attitude
during the Civil War certainly did nothing to endear her either to the
writers or the readers of school histories; and she remained after that
struggle, as she had been before, the one great historical adversary on
whom the abstract combativeness of young America could expend itself.
How strong this tendency is, or has been, in the American school, may be
judged from the following anecdote. A boy of unmixed English parentage,
whose father and mother had settled in America, was educated at the
public school of his district. On the day when Mr. Cleveland's Venezuela
message was given to the world, he came home from school radiant, and
shouted to his parents: "Hurrah! We're going to war with England! We've
whipped you twice before, and we're going to do it again." It is clear
that at this academy Anglomania formed no part of the curriculum; and
who can doubt that in myriads of cases these schoolboy animosities
subsist throughout life, either active, or dormant and easily awakened?
Let us admit without shrinking that the history of the United States
cannot be truthfully written in such a way as to ingratiate Great
Britain with the youth of America. There have been painful episodes
between the two nations, in which England has, on the whole, acted
stupidly, or arrogantly, or both. Nor can we shift the whole blame upon
George III. or his Ministers. They were responsible for the actual
Revolution; but after the Revolution, down even to the time of the
Civil War inclusive, the English people, though guiltless in the main of
active hostility to America, cannot be acquitted of ignorance and
indifference. It is not in the least to be desired that American history
should be written with a pro-English bias, and, as I have said, I do not
find the anti-English bias, even in inferior text-books, so excessive as
it is sometimes represented to be. The anti-English sentiment of
American schools is, as it seems to me, an inevitable phenomenon of
juvenile psychology, under the given conditions; and it is the
alteration in the actual conditions wrought by recent events, rather
than any marked change in the tone of the text-books, that may, I think,
be trusted to soothe the schoolboy's savage breast. England has now done
what she had never done before: shown herself conspicuously friendly to
the United States; and another European country has given occasion for
spirit-stirring manifestations of American prowess. Thus England is
deposed for the time, and we may trust for ever, from her position as
the one traditional arch-enemy.
But though the errors of commission in American history-books have been
exaggerated, I cannot but think that a common error of omission is
worthy of remark and correction. They begin American history too
late--with the discovery of America--and they do not awaken, as they
might, the just pride of race in the "unhyphenated" American boy. Long
before Columbus set sail from Palos, American history was a-making in
the shire-moots of Saxon England, at Hastings, and Runnymead, and
Bannockburn. In all the mediæval achievements of England, in peace and
war--in her cathedrals, her castles, her universities, in Cressy,
Poictiers, and Agincourt--Americans may without paradox claim their
ancestral part. Why should the sons of the English who emigrated leave
to the sons of those who stayed at home the undivided credit of having
sent to the right-about the Invincible Armada? Nay, it is only the very
oldest American families that can disclaim all complicity in having, as
Lord Auchinleck put it, "garred kings ken that they had a lith in their
necks." Of course I do not mean that the American schoolboy should be
taken in detail through British history down to the seventeenth century
before, so to speak, he crosses the Atlantic. But I do suggest that he
would be none the worse American for being encouraged to set a due value
on his rightful share in the achievements of earlier ancestors than
those who fought at Trenton or sailed with Decatur. Let him realise his
birthright in the glories of Britain, and he will perhaps come to take a
more magnanimous view of her errors and disasters.