Edmund Morgan And Kuperman's Jamestown

American school and culture ingrains U.S. history into children’s mind from an early age. They tell heroic, brave accounts of pilgrims fleeing England for religious freedom and working peacefully with Natives to cultivate a difficult land, culminating in the first thanksgiving. However, these neat, tidy stories are far from the truth. Edmund Morgan and Karen Kupperman attempt to clear these historic myths, by narrating the many hardships and fewer successes of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent colonial settlement. However, Morgan achieves this goal more effectively than Kupperman because he portrays the founding of Jamestown in a more realistic, impartial view, fighting his American biases, to reveal that the English colonists were at

fault for their own disastrous beginning of the colony.
Although many Americans see their country’s founding as idyllic, settlers working with limited resources and harsh, leftover soil, as Kupperman writes, Morgan makes the colonists take responsibility for their actions in the calamitous beginning of Jamestown, solidifying that American historians cannot let their prejudice influence their narrative.

Kupperman attempts to soften the colony’s catastrophic start, saying “the little colony struggled though a horrible first decade in which it barely held on before the settlers…lead [it]… to success,” (Kupperman 1) causing the hardships to seem unavoidable. She makes the colonists appear determined to endure this adversity, rather than the producers of their own problems. History does not simply happen. Humans create their own past, so Kupperman must illustrate the colonists’ active role, instead of their passive hope. Contradicting Kupperman, Morgan puts the blame on the settlers themselves, writing “for the next ten years [the colonists] seem to have made every possible mistake and some that seem almost impossible” (Morgan 72). Morgan declares the settlers as the master of their own fate. They created their terrible circumstances. Although Morgan, an American, may want to dispel the blame from his own forefathers, nothing else produced their mistakes. Morgan represents the colonists as the actors not the reactors. Even experienced, respected historians struggle to lay their biases to the side, but they must strive to tell the past

with a neutral, objective mind.
Usually the United States’ public sees the settler-native relationship as one that started peacefully but turned into malice because of the Indians, but Morgan gives the culpability to the colonists, differing from Kupperman’s pursuit to prove a multi-sided conflict, thus illustrating the colonists in a positive light.

For instance Kupperman writes that the problems in this partnership “stemmed from actors on all sides…[the Natives] assumed that it would be easy to manipulate [the colonists]…Jamestown’s leaders…believed that they could construct a society by enforcing…discipline” (Kupperman 8). Although the Natives had an agenda, they were not at fault to defend their land. Kupperman, representing the view of the American public, attempts to avert the colonist’s responsibility from wrongdoing. However, U.S citizens must accept their ancestors’ role in the brutal treatment of Natives, who were looking for freedom just as the settlers. Unlike Kupperman, Morgan faulted the erroneously prideful English, stating to an English Colonist “you knew you were civilized and [the Indians] were savages…[but they] lived from the land more abundantly…So you tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields” (Morgan 90). He sees the settlers’ self-serving, vindictive role in these disputes. Regardless of the American guilt for the torment of the Natives, Morgan puts the reader into the shoes of a colonist, utilizing the 2nd person, to have them experience the injustice of the

events, first hand.
Through dispelling his prejudice and pride towards his own country, Edmund Morgan, blaming the settlers for the struggles, which they had to undergo, paints a more accurate picture of the founding of Jamestown than Karen Kupperman, who expressed that, despite adversities and mismanagements, Jamestown set the stage for the rest of the colonies, a reality too optimist to reflect the truth. Americans yearn to see their history as a valiant quest for freedom and equality for all through hard work and perseverance. However, their history is riddled with shortcomings and deplorable treatment toward minorities. It is important for citizens to learn the true past of their nation, or history is destined to repeat itself.