Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 6

 II.

The Beginning of America

6.

The first "Americans" land in America

Exactly one hundred years after a German coined the name America and inscribed it on a world map, the first "Americans" landed on the shores of the new continent.

When we speak of Europeans or Asians, we mean all inhabitants of the continent without regard to race or nationality, but "Americans" in common parlance means the inhabitants of just one of America's twenty-two states. Its founders called themselves Americans and their country the United States of America. Thus they seized the name of the whole for their small part, which was even quite small at that time. In this way they made anyone who uttered it a propagandist of their claims, which were aimed from the outset at the whole continent, at least to the extent that they wanted all Europeans to be eliminated from it. But the Americans accomplished something even more extraordinary. They founded their continental state as an English one, and they managed to impress the Anglo-Saxon character of their country on their own population as well as on the whole world in such a way that both dare not doubt it, although hardly half of its inhabitants are of Anglo-Saxon blood. This is such an astonishing achievement, such an astounding fact, that in the long run one cannot pass it by in silence, even if one has hitherto acted before the whole world as if it were self-evident.

In 1607, when the "Susan Constant," with her two small escort vessels, was rocking in the Chesapeake Bay on the Virginian coast, and one hundred and five colonists named their tents, leaf huts, and burrows Jamestown in honor of King James, no one could have known that this humble beginning would form the basis of what would later become the mighty United States of America. Still less could it have been foreseen that the largest and most important part of the New World would have an Anglo-Saxon language and character.

We of today like to think with a sigh of the times when the world was still free and open, when adventurers, explorers and conquerors still had great opportunities. But that is not true. The world has never been free and open. What has any value has always had a master. Whoever wants it must get it, if the other does not let it go to him willingly or under pressure. At the most, deserts and ice seas were formerly masterless, and it is a special characteristic of our slowly overpopulating earth that they too are divided up today.

But America was not masterless in the seventeenth and even in the sixteenth century. No sooner was it discovered than it was divided by the famous or rather infamous Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which divided the whole earth into a Spanish and a Portuguese zone of interest. These zones were jealously guarded by the lucky owners as long as they had the power to do so. Only to the cold and foggy Newfoundland, could the rest of the European peoples, locked out of the American paradise, go at all, especially since this island had been awarded to Portugal as a result of a surveying error, which did not know what to do with it and to which it was completely out of the way. But all attempts by the English and the French to establish themselves on the Atlantic coast were relentlessly prevented by the Spanish, sometimes even with the greatest cruelty. If the English wanted to cross the Atlantic they first had to destroy the Spanish Armada, and only after they had succeeded in doing so could they dare to send traders and settlers across the ocean to secure for themselves a modest share of the New World. That it could ever become very large seemed unlikely at the time. Spain and Portugal were still too strong for that. For the time being, they held the best pieces, and there were plenty of suitors for the rest.

First, there were the French. These had established themselves in western Newfoundland, had discovered the St. Lawrence from there, and, moreover, had sailed down the whole Atlantic coast. They had called it Nova Francia and had taken possession of it for the French king. Of course, British sailors had done the same in Elizabeth's time. The name Virginia, in honor of their virgin queen, applied to the entire North American coast, up to the point north of Florida where the Spanish power was still unquestionable, and with her cannon would have very vigorously repudiated the attempt to create a suzerainty even if in name only. 

The fact that Spanish, Portuguese, French and British claims overlapped did not prevent the Dutch from establishing themselves at the mouth of the Hudson, nor the Swedes from claiming the Delaware. At that time it did not remotely look as if North America would one day become an Anglo-Saxon continent, but it seemed as if at least the northern half of the New World would be opened up and developed by all European peoples together, that it would become a pan-European daughter continent.

It was not to be. The British swallowed the Dutch, Swedish and French possessions one by one. Their successors, the Americans, who remained English in language and culture, pushed the Spanish elements back across the Rio Grande. Everywhere they proceeded against everything that was not Anglo-Saxon as anti-American. Efforts were made to strip Florida and California of their original Spanish character, Louisiana of its former French character. Only with the Canadian province of Quebec this did not work; it remained French in language and custom to this day, a stake in the flesh of Anglo-Saxon America.

But what about the Germans? The Germans had not founded a colony of their own in America, pretty much as the only European state not to do so; even little Denmark had secured its share of at least the West Indies with the Virgin Islands. This happened because in the same year in which England set her force overseas for the material as well as spiritual conquest of a new world, the knot was tightened in Germany which plunged the entire German people into the most terrible fratricidal war for the sake of the interpretation of divine doctrine. In the same year in which the English laid the foundation for a new great overseas empire with the city of Jamestown, disputes arose between the Catholic and Protestant citizens of the German imperial city of Donauwörth over a procession, which ended after a bloody battle with imperial outlawing. This was the beginning of a thirty-year war and almost three hundred years of powerlessness of the German people.

Those who subsequently emigrated overseas did not go as victorious conquerors with sword in hand, but came humbly as beaten and persecuted, as plundered, as sold, as emigrants, as persecuted for their religious or political convictions. Even if the Germans over there achieved unheard-of things, even if there were individual bold and strong men among them who swaggered up to become leaders, they too were not able to secure this position for their fellow citizens, since there was no German state behind them that would have protected and covered them.