New England was persistent in the matter of witches. In Virginia, there were nine cases, only one suspect and he sentenced to a whipping and banishment. In the north ninetythree were tried, sixteen executed.
Then came Salem in 1692. Accusations by feverish adolescent girls were taken seriously and acted upon. Hundreds, mostly women, were accused by them. Eighteen were hanged. Sense returned only when the accusers turned their venomous hysteria on the ruling elite, including the governor’s wife. That went too far. ‘Further trials were suppressed,’ the historian Alan Taylor writes. ‘Regarded as a fiasco, the Salem mania became a spectacular flame-out that halted the prosecution of witches in New England.’
But the stain remained. Salem is dead but not buried. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, keeps it alive; Senator McCarthy’s search for communists in the 1950s was called a ‘witch hunt’.
These English, soon to be joined by Irish, Scots and Welsh, Puritans, and other hard-line Protestants, brought to New England a fanaticism allied with righteousness which would begin to clear the new continent of its natives. It would go on to build a capitalist democracy, global industries, new technologies, weaponry, and it would encourage mass education, equality, and princely philanthropy. The dark side led the settlers into the deceits, injustices and crimes of all dominating empires. The King James Version was there, every step of the way, for better and for worse, often the latter.
In 1789, George Washington took his oath of office and opened the Book of Genesis to passages that included Joseph’s dying reminder that God had promised the Israelites a new land. ‘So help me God,’ he said, as has every President of America since. The core tribe among the ‘Israelites’ in America were the Puritans and, deeper still, the Separatists. At the heart, what drove them was the binding Word of God in the King James Version.
It was the Bible that founded the English language over the Atlantic. It appears to have occurred to scarcely any of them that they should ‘go native’ and adopt the language of the tribes whose lands they occupied.
Their approach rested on their attitude to the King James Version. Quite simply, it was their book and its words belonged to them. In the 1630s, it began its centuries of dominance as by far the biggest selling and widest read book in America. The words were holy. They were aware that the Old Testament had been written in Hebrew, the New in Greek, the whole in Latin and that modern European nations had put it in their own languages. But the English translation was the supreme authority on all matters, the Book of Books.
They found poetry in it as well as wisdom and their guidance to the Kingdom of Heaven. They read it aloud every day. They took its names for their names, made its parables as their own, swore by it, lived and died by it. It provided meat for their daily conversation and proofs of their earthly destiny. They were married to it and no one could put them asunder.
Their behaviour to other languages echoed that of the Germanic tribes who had brought what became ‘English’ to the eastern counties of England in the fifth century. It was partly from these eastern counties that the first tide of pilgrims came to the east coast of America. The fifth-century Germanic tribes were in a vulnerable minority among the Celts, as were the Pilgrim Fathers among the American Indians. Yet they had held on to their own language and taken a very modest number of words from the hoard of British-Celtic words of the natives.
Much the same happened in New England 1,100 years later. In America they found new plants, new animals, new geographical features for which they needed new words. Some – comparatively few – came from local tongues. Others in the main came from inventive combinations of English words.
The settlers came largely from flatlands and so the new, often mountainous landscape called out for new words. They invented ‘foothill’, ‘notch’, ‘gap’, ‘bluff’, ‘divide’, ‘watershed’, ‘clearing’ and ‘underbrush’. When they had to bring in native words they did, but they anglicised them to ‘raccoon’, ‘skunk’, ‘opossum’ and ‘terrapin’, always simplifying them. For native foods they took in ‘squash’ for the variety of pumpkins. Sometimes there would be more straightforward borrowings, like ‘squaw’ or ‘wigwam’, ‘totem’, ‘papoose’, ‘moccasin’ and ‘tomahawk’.
Some of the settlers were not immune to the beauty of the native language. William Penn the eminent Quaker wrote: ‘I know not a language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness in Accent and Emphasis than this.’ Many place names came from Indian words and numerous rivers including the Susquehanna, the Potomac and the Miramichi. But all of these were minor additions.
The English and, soon following, the Scots and Irish stuck to the language in the book and were reluctant to stray very far away from it. They would coin English words for natural things rather than take them from the Indian – ‘mud hen’, ‘rattlesnake’, ‘bullfrog’, ‘potato-bug’, ‘groundhog’, ‘reed bed’. Even when describing Native American life, they preferred their own words as in ‘warpath’, ‘paleface’, ‘medicine man’, ‘peace pipe’, ‘big chief’. Their attitude to language reinforced their religious conviction. They had the Words of God through His prophets and His Son: what more could they possibly need save a few phrases which speeded up commonplace understanding?
English had taken on thousands of words from several other languages since about AD 500. It had been promiscuous. But in its beginnings in America it was very prudent. Perhaps Squanto spoiled them. Perhaps the Indian languages were just too difficult. ‘Squash’ for instance was ‘asquat-asquash’, ‘raccoon’, like many other animals, had several names. In this case they included ‘rahaugcum’ ‘raugroughcum’, ‘arocoune’ and ‘aroughcum’.
This was a group of people obsessed by the power of the word. Improper speech, blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, railing, reviling, scolding, threatening and swearing were crimes. Curse God and you were in the stocks. Deny the Scriptures and you would be whipped and possibly hanged. These colonists set out to honour the language and it started in the schoolrooms. This began with the New England Primer, which sold over 3 million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every English-speaking family in America must have worked their way through this clear and well-constructed teaching aid. It was stocked from the Bible.
A.In Adam’s Fall we all sinned
B.Heaven to find, the Bible mind
C.Christ crucify’d for sinners died
D.The Deluge drowned the earth around
E.Elijah hid by ravens fed
F.The judgement made Felix afraid
G.As runs the grass our life doth pass
H.My book and Heart must never part
J.Job feels the rod, yet blesses God
Some commentators would call this propaganda. Some have said its effect on the minds of the young could be called ‘child abuse’. It set out to promote literacy and you were being made literate in order to study the Bible. But the law of unexpected consequences was to take that literacy far away from study of the King James Version.
The King James Version became an Anglo-American literary story and, more widely, an English-speaking story – Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, parts of India and Africa. There would be developments which took America further away from the English of the Pilgrim Fathers and other early settlers. There would be great seams of new words from other European and then Eastern immigrants who poured into the United States.
American English, extended and embellished by all these new
