A Concise History of the United States of America (2012)

32 A Concise History of the United States of America
part, environmental. Despite the instructions issued by the company to
the original settlers in 1606 that they should not “plant in a low or moist
place,” Jamestown was poorly sited for health, and especially deadly in
the summer months. Yet the remarkable fact is that the high mortality
rates, and the apparent inability of the colonists to extract sustenance, let
alone wealth, from this land that had seemed to promise so much was
not the end of England’s early version of the American dream; it was only
the beginning.
Despite all evidence from Roanoke and, later, Jamestown to the contrary,
the idea prevailed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England
that nature in the New World, if not unappreciated by its inhabitants,
was certainly underexploited; that, in short, English settlers, as Hariot
had suggested, could make more of it. The repercussions of this belief
for the areas of English settlement were foreshadowed in a widely read
work that was informed by Amerigo Vespucci’s explorations at the start
of the “age of discovery” – Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). More, like
Hakluyt, was concerned at the social conditions of his own time, in particular
the poverty and resultant social unrest. In More’s imaginary and
somewhat intimidating island utopia, removing the surplus population
to some distant mainland colony was a matter of course. “Such colonies
are governed by the Utopians,” the reader is advised, “but the natives
allowed to join in if they want to. When this happens, natives and colonists
soon combine to form a single community with a single way of life,
to the great advantage of both parties.” If, however, “the natives won’t
do as they’re told, they’re expelled from the area marked out for annexation.”’
Opposition to such exclusion, in More’s semi-fictional universe,
would result in conflict. His Utopians “consider war perfectly justifiable,
when one country denies another its natural right to derive nourishment
from any soil which the original owners are not using themselves, but are
merely holding on to as a worthless piece of property.” 9
Nearly 200 years later, on the cusp of the eighteenth century, English
intellectuals were still contemplating these moral and practical conundrums.
When philosopher John Locke proposed, in The Second Treatise
of Civil Government (1690), that “in the beginning all the world was
America,” he did so in the context of his broader discussion of property
and the nature of possession. It was labor, he argued, that both conferred
value upon land and established the right to it. Without labor, land was
worth nothing and, if unimproved by European standards, was simply
open to all comers. “There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any
thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this,” he observed,