Captain John Smith's Image of America

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N K r EARLY a hundred years ago, John Gorham Palfrey, a devoted student of New England's antiquities, remarked to Henry Adams that he had certain historic doubts as to the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. An article in the North American Review on that subject, he suggested, would attract as much attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other stone that could be thrown by a beginner.' Adams' essay on Captain John Smith in the North American Review was a full-scale attack on Smith's veracity as a historian. He centered his attack on the Pocahontas story as it appears in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles published more than a decade after Smith had written his first brief account of his adventures in the New World. Adams frankly stated that his purpose was nothing less than the entire erasure of one of the more attractive portions of American history.2 For a generation or more after Henry Adams' famous essay, Smith became the subject of one of the most celebrated controversies in American history. To a certain extent, the quarrel over Smith's reputation as a historian became a sectional battle in which Southern writers, particularly Virginians, sought to defend Smith against a Yankee conspiracy to defame him.3 More recent scholarship, however, demonstrates that there is sub-