If for nothing else, Christopher Columbus should be remembered for his desire to explore and expand the realm of Western civilization. We might very well agree or disagree with his motives, but we would be fools to ignore Columbus’ importance as a figure in history.
Amazingly enough, thanks to my very few essays at The Imaginative Conservative (usually cranky ones about statues coming down and wondering where on God’s Green Earth the Knights of Columbus are in the defense of their patron) on the great Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, I was invited to give the Columbus Day address this year for the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Yes, this is the same program founded and run by the formidable and intensely intelligent Robert P. George and the mighty and gregarious Brad Wilson. Frankly, I was a bit surprised (and quite pleased) to be asked, as I really don’t know all that much about Christopher Columbus as a person—that is, biographically speaking—and I often have to ask my wife (another mighty one, Dedra Birzer!) about Columbus’s personal details. She seems to know everything about the man, and I, more often than not, bask and benefit from her knowledge.
Additionally, the ego (yes, I admit it; I have an ego) is always a bit stoked to be asked to speak at an Ivy League school. I’ve spoken at Princeton before—though never at the behest of the university—but I’ve had the chance to lead a week-long seminar on Russell Kirk and conservatism at Yale. Yeah, I’ll admit, all this is pretty cool—especially for some Kansas kid who only slowly climbed his way up through academic circles. Admittedly, it’s pretty great to be asked to speak anywhere, Ivy League or not, all the way from Colorado Christian to UC-Boulder to Seattle Pacific University to Faulkner University to the University of Notre Dame (my undergraduate institution… which should be an Ivy League school, frankly). I’m grateful to all of them for caring about what I think.
Rather than speak for 50 minutes about Christopher Columbus (again, I don’t know enough about him to do such a thing) at Princeton, I decided to speak on the American frontier as the realm of history in which all things were possible. Want to start a colony of Jewish socialists? Buy some land in Kansas in the late-19th century and have at it! Indeed, all colonization efforts—from Jamestown to Plymouth Rock to Philadelphia—were experiments in what might (or might not) work. Crazily enough, many, if not most, of the colonization efforts—from New England all the way to Rodeo Drive—did actually work, even if the Indians were often horribly and tragically moved aside. And, even if the colonization efforts failed, they were always rather noble failures. Again, aside from the very high cost to the Native Americans (usually wiped out by disease).
If for nothing else, Columbus should be remembered for his desire to explore and expand the realm of Western civilization. We might very well agree or disagree with his motives, but we would be fools to ignore Columbus’ importance as a figure in history. Whatever his motives, he reconnected Pangea, connecting the continents after eons of separation. Horses, cattle, hogs, tomatoes, and potatoes all became interhemispheric after his voyages. Seriously, can we imagine Ireland without the potato or Italy without the tomato? Can we imagine the American Indian of the Great Plains without the horse?
In my talk at Princeton, I offered three different examples of the frontier as the realm of possibilities—the future of it all.
First, I talked about the mysticism of Christopher Columbus. As I’ve had the chance to write about this previously at The Imaginative Conservative, I won’t go into all the details here. But, suffice it to say, as a Third-Order Franciscan, Columbus possessed a deeply mystical streak. He believed that he had been called by God to connect the East to the West. Rather than travel eastward, a direction that all knew led to China, he decided, with the king’s blessing, to explore the West. If he sailed westward, he knew, he would reach Asia eventually. Asia, he presumed—because of the earlier travels of the mythical Prester John and his several Catholic bishops fleeing the Muslims—would eagerly convert to Christianity. If he could reconnect the East and the West, he believed, the Spanish (who had been fighting the Muslims, since the Islamic invasion of Spain, beginning in 711), could unite with Chinese Christians and attack Islamic Jerusalem from two fronts. Ultimately, Columbus hoped and believed, his conversion of China would lead to a Christian Jerusalem and, 155 years hence, the ushering in of the New Jerusalem. In this, Columbus sounded much more like a fundamentalist Protestant than a devout Roman Catholic. Yet, devout Roman Catholic he was.
Second, I brought up the Northwest Ordinance, one of the nation’s four organic laws (along with the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution of 1787 and 1791). Passed unanimously on July 13, 1787, the Northwest Ordinance was written originally by Thomas Jefferson for Virginia when he believed it controlled the Ohio country, and it was re-written by Nathan Dane of Massachusetts to cover the Northwest (Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and a sliver of Minnesota) Territories. The ordinance established freedom of religion, the extension of the common law into the West, and, critically, the right to association (in marriage, business, education, and religion). Further, it demanded that all interactions with the American Indians be peaceful, treating the Indians as natural republicans and future citizens of the United States.
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson thought it would take 1,000 years for American settlement to reach St. Louis. By 1819, however, all of Missouri (from St. Louis to Kansas City) was ready to be settled and admitted as a state, and, by 1848, the United States controlled all of the continental 48 states, with the bizarre exception of extreme southern Arizona. By 1890, the frontier, for all intents and purposes, no longer existed. In other words, what should’ve taken 1,000 years, took less than nine decades. As such, the Indians—envisioned as the future of all things—were encountered rapidly and brutally. The American frontier moved at lightning speed, and, Americans, frankly, were never mature enough to handle such responsibilities, when it came to the American Indian or to the extension of the horrors of American slavery.
Finally, I brought up the example of Exodusters: American freedmen (liberated black slaves) who settled the Great Plains in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. For all his liberality, President Abraham Lincoln believed, through much of his presidency, that freedmen would need to be shipped to parts of Africa or Latin America for colonization purposes. What many freedmen realized, however, was that they could colonize Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Probably 40,000 settled in these states after the Civil War, and another 50,000, inspired by the teachings of Booker T. Washington, settled Oklahoma. Never, of course, did the 4.25 million ex-slaves ever settle the American West. But, they could have! Again, a possibility of the frontier. Kansas communities such as Nicodemus proved that such settlement was not only possible, but healthy.
Again, all this was merely a way of showing that the American frontier was always a realm of possibilities. What if Columbus’s mystical vision had been true? What if the Founders really would have established good, republican relations with the American Indians? What if the freedmen of the South could have escaped Jim Crow laws and Black Codes, escaping to the abundant (and free!) wheat fields of Kansas?
Possibilities. Always, possibilities.
Brad Birzer, happily, delivered a version of this talk in Bowen Hall, Princeton University, October 10, 2022. He would especially like to thank Robby George and Brad Wilson. And, of course, a huge thanks to The Imaginative Conservative for always promoting the good, the true, and the beautiful, even when I’m actually just really cranky.
This essay was first published here in October 2022.
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The featured image is “Columbus” (circa 1520) by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.