Progymnasmata: Confirmation and Refutation

Would America exist had Columbus not discovered the ‘New World’?

CONFIRMATION

Christopher Columbus was a wonderful man, an explorer and cartographer of the world who shed light in even the darkest of reaches giving us our motherland: America. ‘In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ He came to set up new trade routes, but unwittingly began the journey towards a new nation. A nation, a collection of cultures unlike any other the world had seen before. A nation bred of understanding and reason. Were he not to have endured the perils he faced as a near-directionless explorer, America would not even exist.

REFUTATION

Christopher Columbus was simply a guy who did his job. He may have been really good at his job but he was still nothing more than an opportunist seeking new trade routes. The journey of our nation’s spirit was building up long before Columbus’s little operation. Our nation’s spirit existed before; it was made of genuinely obtainable success for the common man coming at the simple cost of true grit and honest labor. It was inevitable that from every corner of the world people would migrate to a land where an individual’s worth could truly be compensated with a harmonious balance of justice and liberty. No matter the circumstance America would have come into fruition.