America: the fractured Republic

Robert Harris’ latest novel ‘Act of Oblivion’ follows a couple of refugees from the bloody vengeance of Charles II, crossing the Atlantic to America in 1660.

Colonels Whalley and Goffe, formerly of Cromwell’s army and signatories to Charles I’s death warrant, come first to Massachusetts but have to move on because of the presence of Royalists, and some Scots they had formerly defeated in battle who had been transported to the New World as slaves.

So the two men - real historical figures - trek to New Haven, a strict Puritan colony that sympathised with the just-ended Protectorate in England.

New Haven’s story raises the question of how a future continent-wide Republic, made of very disparate elements, could stay together.

The group of Puritans who founded it sprang from Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, wishing to establish a “pure” form of Christian religion, separately from the Church of England which in their view still had too much Catholicism in it.

They sailed over the English Channel to Holland but fell out with the local Protestant reformists over doctrinal matters such as infant baptism. The taint of false belief would result in an eternity of suffering in Hell, so the Puritans left Europe, first for the Massachusetts Bay Colony (whose later 1691 Charter would guarantee freedom of worship “to all Christians (Except Papists)”) and then to the hill-sheltered bay of New Haven. Here in 1638 they established an ideal town modelled as described in the Old Testament.

After a few years, as their community was merged with other towns in the Connecticut Colony, some New Haven inhabitants split off again and sought a fresh base in Newark, New Jersey, rather than compromise the beliefs that were their foundation.

But even four centuries ago, it was not only European immigrants that faced conflict. The land on which New Haven was built was purchased from an indigenous tribe, the Quinnipiac, who sought protection from a surrounding larger and aggressive people, the Pequot, whom the colonists helped defeat in 1636-38.

The Pequot and other ‘First Nations’ and the successive waves of immigrants, all make up the complex alloy of America, whose literature strained early to encompass its vastness and complexity; think of Walt Whitman’s ragbag of images in ‘Eidolons’, or the multiracial crew in Herman Melville’s novel ‘Moby-Dick.’

In the latter, Captain Ahab’s ship is called ‘Pequod’ and sails from Nantucket, only some 200 miles from New Haven. Some who look for symbolism in the book note that the crew numbers thirty, the same as the number of States in the Union at that time. Among the men is Tashtego, a Native American harpooner from Martha’s Vineyard, also not far away. When the White Whale destroys the ship the mix of victims is like that in many Hollywood disaster movies that try to demonstrate how Americans set aside their many differences to face an emergency together.

Yet ‘Moby-Dick’ does end in disaster, and may have a deeper meaning. It was inspired by the wreck of the whaling vessel ‘Essex’ in a sperm whale’s attack in 1820; but the book could also be seen as a kind of prophetic allegory. Its publication in 1851 was a mere ten years before the outbreak of the American Civil War; perhaps, as with Stravinksy’s 1913 ‘Rite of Spring’, the dark undertones in art were the harbingers of major social disruption.

Another storm is approaching today. America’s security is weakened by growing social inequality; multiple political cultural racial and religious fracture lines; looming major foreign wars; an autocratic and - despite its gigantic power - in some ways an incompetent, even slightly mad central government.

But for the citizens relocation - the U-Haul solution - is now less likely to work. The US is populated from sea to sea and its economy and infrastructure are much more tightly integrated, even as its people are increasingly and bitterly divided. Political parties invest heavily in mutual strife, not dreaming that their activities threaten to break the nation.

Can the United States hold together or will it, like its early colonies, fracture and diverge? What can unify the Republic?