The Question of Bias

The readings from Friday were, as has been expressed by my classmates, tedious.  Approximately seventy pages of primary source documents in old English was taxing upon both my brain and my highlighter.   However, in reading the words of John Smith and John Rolfe, I was able to gain information and ideas of a different quality than those of modern historians.  There is something exciting about a first-person account, a sense of being in the action, of knowing what "really" happened.  However, in reading the day's articles, I was struck by just how often I asked myself the question, "How accurate is this?"   In particular, a quote from John Smith's 1608 account of Virgina struck me.  He recounted an encounter with a Native American chief, explaining that, "Anchanachuck described to bee the people that had slaine my brother: whose death hee would revenge"(10).  He goes on to describe the words of the chief, who tells stories of other nations, people, and ideas.   The first thought that occurred to me was: how is he understanding this?  The second was: how accurate can this possibly be?   I brought up the idea in my ORC group on Friday, and we had an interesting discussion which led even to the large group.  Was John Smith biased?  Inherently, he had a point of view, but was his status as a leader of a white community enough to diminish the quality of his information?  We discussed his descriptions of the Indian tribes as an example of his ideas.  At the beginning of his readings, Smith fawns over the Indian groups.  He does describe them in some negative terms, but mostly those denouncing their low intelligence and strange culture.  He spends many more lines expounding the virtue of their kindness and generosity as well as skills in hunting and building.  However, as time goes on, he colors the story more negatively, describing the Indians  in his 1612 account as, "barbarous"(3).  He also describes them as the colony's "first conflict"(7).   We reasoned that this grand shift in perspective may have been in large part due to the difficulties within the colony and truly stressed relation, the descriptions could also have been persuasion.  We identified bias as having some element, either known or often unknown, of persuasion, and John Smith in his second article was attempting to persuade those who criticized Virgina that the colony was doing well.  Creating an enemy could have been a truthful progression of a relationship, but it also could have been a clever creation.   While John Smith's accounts may not be competely false, and do indeed give a fascinating peek into early America as a true settler saw it, the reading taught me and my group the importance of reading our articles even more critically: to look for themes and connect them, and to weed out the "facts" which may not be facts at all.