Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

University of California Press

The Renaissance Englishmen who became Americans were sustained by an idea of order. They were sure, above all, of the existence of an eternal and immutable principle which guaranteed the intelligibility of their relations to each other and to their world and thus made possible their life in society. It was a principle to be expressed in the progress and elevation of civilized men who, striving to imitate their God, would bring order to chaos. America was such a chaos, a new-found chaos. Her natural wealth was there for the taking because it was there for the ordering. So were her natural men.

Thus colonial Americans were from the very beginning beset by an Indian problem at once practical and theoretical. Practically, they had to overcome this natural man and to live with him; theoretically, they had to understand him. And they brought with them a pattern of culture, an idea of order, in which theory and practice were taken to be identical. They were certain that man could realize his highest potentialities in only that sort of society which they had left behind them in England. Here in America, it would be possible to realize such a society at its purest and most abundant. Aware to the point of self-consciousness of their specifically civilized heritage, they found in America not only an uncivilized environment, but uncivilized men—natural men, as it was said, living in a natural world. And they knew that the way to civilize a world was to civilize the men in it. Theoretically, savages, as men, were capable of being civilized; practically, they

were bound to be. But practice did not support theory. Indians were not civilized, but destroyed.

Such, in general, was the colonial experience with the Indian; such had been the experience of revolutionary Americans when, in the 1770's, they set out to establish their glorious new-world civilization. The colonial concern with the savage Indian was a product of the tradition of Anglo-French primitivistic thinking—an attempt to see the savage, the ignoble savage, as a European manqué . When, by the 1770's, the attempt had obviously failed, Americans were coming to understand the Indian as one radically different from their proper selves; they knew he was bound inextricably in a primitive past, a primitive society, and a primitive environment, to be destroyed by God, Nature, and Progress to make way for Civilized Man. Americans after the 1770's worked out a theory of the savage which depended on an idea of a new order in which the Indian could have no part.

Since it is an aspect of a specifically nationalistic self-consciousness, the American understanding of the Indian after the 1770's is the major concern of this study. First, however, we must look at the antecedents and origins of that understanding in the Renaissance theory of the ignoble savage and its colonial variations. Everywhere in the colonies we can see efforts to understand the Indian as one to be lived with, one whose way of life is simply a corrupt variant of the particular way of life of his civilized neighbors, one who can surely be brought to civilization. Equally, we can see the sad failure of such efforts. The record is one of a failure in theory which made for a failure in practice.

1

The Indian whom the sixteenth-century voyagers came to know was, more than anything else, a creature whose way of life showed Englishmen what they might be were they not civilized and Christian, did they not fully partake of the divine idea of order. Viewed in the light of that ordered, civil nature toward which all men, as men, must aspire, he seemed to have fallen as far away from his proper state as he could and yet remain human. The

lesson to be learned everywhere in the Americas was a deep and powerful one for civilized Christians whose intellect was essentially medieval but whose world was fast becoming the one we call modern. For in the New World the Englishman might search in vain for microcosms within the macrocosm, for men whose lives reproduced in little the order of the universe. In America, he might see clearly what he himself would become did he not live according to his highest nature. The Indian became important for the English mind, not for what he was in and of himself, but rather for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be.1

Aboriginal Americans, so English voyagers were again and again to find, denied their holy, human selves and lived like beasts; they were, in the traditional terminology, more animal than rational. The northeastern Indians encountered on Frobisher's second voyage to America are described thus:

If they for necessities sake stand in need of the premisses, such grasse as the Countrey yeeldeth they plucke up and eate, not deintily, or salletwise to allure their stomacks to appetite: but for necessities sake without either salt, oyles or washing, like brute beasts devouring the same. They neither use table, stoole, or table cloth for comlines: but when they are imbrued with blood knuckle deepe, and their knives in like sort, they use their tongues as apt instruments to lick them deane: in doing whereof they are assured to loose none of their victuals.2

Moreover, these Indians " live in Caves of earth, and hunt for their dinners or praye, even as the beare or other wild beastes do," and " dare do any thing that their conseites will allowe, or courage of man male execute."3 The southeastern Indians described by

I have discussed the sixteenth-century conception of the primitive in "Primitivistic Ideas in the Faerie Queene," JEGP , XLIV (1945), 139-51. I follow that essay here.

Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (Glasgow, 1904), VII, 224.

Ibid. , VII, 370; and Thomas Churchyard, A Prayse, and Reporte of Maister Martyne Forboishers [sic] Voyage to Meta Incognita (London, 1578), sig. B iv.

Henry Hawks "are soone drunke, and given to much beastlinesse, and void of all goodnesse."4 And the savages whom Cabot brought to England are said merely to have been of "demeanour like to bruite beastes."5 This, with hardly a variation, is a regular theme of the voyage narratives. Even the Virginia Indians described so cheerfully in Thomas Hariot's famous Brief and True Report (1588)6 are, for Hariot, interesting as they avoid beastliness, not as they approach humanity. American indians were everywhere found to be, simply enough, men who were not men, who were religiously and politically incomplete. If it was a brave new world, Caliban was its natural creature, Ferdinand one of its discoverers and planters.

America had to be planted so that sub-humans could be made human. This was one of the civilized Englishman's greatest burdens. In Letters Patent issued in 1606 for the colonizing of Virginia, the King urged the furtherance of a work "which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of His Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such people, as yet live in darkness, and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages living in those parts, to human civility and to a settled and quiet Government . . . ."7 The practical problem of bringing savages to civilization was to be solved by bringing them to the Christianity which was at its heart. Success in empire-building and trade was to be measured by success in civilizing and Christianizing; success in civilizing and Christianizing would assure success in empire-building and trade. Meantime, the Indian, in his savage nature, stood everywhere as a challenge to order and reason and civilization.

The idea of savage nature and savage destiny which seventeenth-century planters took with them to America is most clearly

Hakluyt, IX, 386.

Ibid. , VII, 155.

Ibid. , VIII, 374-83.

Calendar of State Papers, Col. Series, America and West Indies, 1675-1676, also Addenda 1574-1675 , No. 48.

and fully set down by the Reverend Samuel Purchas—he who carried on the editing of voyage narratives begun by the Reverend Richard Hakluyt. Towards the end of the long series of narratives which make up Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), Purchas inserts an apologia for English colonization of Virginia.8 Christian Englishmen, he declares, originally had not the right to despoil heathen Indians of their lands; for ownership of the land is a right in nature, not in God. Hence the Indians cannot be held responsible for not working their land according to God's revealed will; they live only according to the law of nature. Still, the English, as Christians knowing God's will, have an obligation to work that land; for it is almost bare of inhabitants and it is rich in all those things which make for "merchandise." And further, as Christians, they have the obligation to bring the Indians from a state of nature to a state of Christian civility. A&x105 first Indians in Virginia had recognized this English obligation, and the English had recognized the Indians' natural right to their lands ; the English had obtained lands by legal purchase—all according to the law of nature. But then, in the Virginia massacre of 1622, the Indians had risen against the English, forgetting even that law of nature by which they had lived and in terms of which the English had treated peacefully with them. Now, Purchas is sure, the English have the right to do virtually as they please—or rather, virtually as God would be pleased to have them do.

God is to be glorified as His rich and abundant Virginia is properly used, as Englishmen live richly on that land. He is to be glorified, moreover, as Englishmen try to force to civility and Christianity these savages who refuse even to be proper natural men. Here Purchas writes like a voyager of the 1570's and 80's. The Indians are " so bad people, having little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion; more brutish then the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly then that unmanned wild Countrey, which they range rather than inhabite; captivated

Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1906), XIX, 218-65.

also to Satans tyranny in foolish pieties, mad impieties, wicked idlenesse, busie and bloudy wickednesse; hence have wee fit objects of zeale and pitie . . . ."9 Zeal and pity are to be rewarded with the riches of Virginia—this God has arranged:

All the rich endowments of Virginia, her Virgin-portion from the creation nothing lessened, are wages for all this worke: God in wisedome having enriched the Savage Countries, that those riches might be attractives for Christian suters, which there may sowe spirituals and reape temporals.10

For giving God and civilization to the Indian, the colonial Englishman was to receive the riches of a new world. Already he had God and civilization and rejoiced in the power they gave him. Looking at the Indian in his lack of such power, the Englishman could be sure of what he himself was; looking at himself, he could be sure of what the Indian should be. In America, from the very beginning the history of the savage is the history of the civilized.

2

The handful of adventurers who came to plant Virginia in 1607 were sure that they could live peacefully with the Indians; for they were sure that the Indians needed them and their civilization. Mercantile profits, political aggrandizement, and civilizing and Christianizing the savage heathen—these were all integrally part of that glorious plan whereby the new world might be given the intelligible order of the old.11 In 1609, Sir Thomas Gates, as Governor of the colony, was told by the Virginia Company that

Ibid. , XIX, 231.

Ibid. , XIX, 232.

For a contemporary statement of this design, see A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia [1610] in Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1840), 339-40. For a general account, see Perry Miller, "The Religious Impulse in the Founding of Virginia: Religion and Society in the Early Literature," William and Mary Quarterly , Ser. 3, V (1948), 492-522; and "Religion and Society in the Early Literature: The Religious Impulse in the Founding of Virginia," ibid. , Set. 3, VI (1949), 24-41.

his missionaries should work with Indian children, that he must even have children taken from their parents if necessary, since they were "so wrapped up in the fogge and miserie of their iniquity, and so tirrified with their continuall tirrany[,] chayned under the bond of Deathe unto the Divell" that they very likely would have to be forced, when young, into the good Christian life.12 By 1619 at least fifty missionaries had been sent to Virginia to take charge of thirty Indian children who were being educated into Christianity and civilization.13 Money was being collected in England for a school for the children; and in June 1622 a missionaryrector was appointed.14 But it was too late. For in April, 1622 the Virginia Indians had attempted to wipe out the English colonists, and failing, had assured their own destruction.

The period from 1607 to 1622, as a matter of fact, had been one of uneasy peace.15 The Virginia Indians were antagonistic but learned soon that they could not dislodge the English, whose armor protected them from arrows and whose will and determination protected them from the confusions and mistakes attendant upon exploration and pioneering. On their part, although they did not recognize Indian title to land, the English still tried always to purchase such land before taking it over, thus to respect Indian dignity and natural law. They were aware of the power of Powhatan and, after him, of Opechancanough, whose intent it was to league all Indians against them; still they felt that John Rolfe's marriage to Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, in 1613 secured once and for all such treaties as they had arranged with Powhatan. But peace was secured only because Powhatan hoped that the colonial experiment would fail through English ineptitude. When

Records of the Virginia Company , III (Washington, 1933), 14-15.

Ibid. , III, 116, 128, 165-66.

See Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Baton Rouge, La., 1949), pp. 142-44; and Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 411-15.

Accounts of the details vary. I follow those in Matthew P. Andrews, Virginia, the Old Dominion (New York, 1937), pp. 23-24, 30, 56-57, 66-70, 99-107, 104-107; and Craven, The Southern Colonies , p. 146.

Powhatan died in 1616, his successor, Opechancanough, continued the policy of watching and waiting. Meantime, the English became surer and surer that their peaceful, civilizing, Christianizing ways were winning over the Indians; and they encouraged the Indians to come to them as good friends. Then, on April 1, 1622 (March 22, O. S.) suddenly and without warning the Indians rose over a hundred-mile area and killed all Englishmen they could—at least 347. That the massacre failed to wipe out all the English was owing, God willing, to the last-minute warning of an Indian convert. God willed, moreover, English vengeance in punitive expeditions in 1622 and 1623. The problem now became one of simple survival. The savages had committed themselves. As the Reverend Samuel Purchas triumphantly pointed out, they no longer had any rights, since they had broken even the law of nature by which, as natural men, they should have lived.

The assurance with which Englishmen had first gone to the Virginia Indians was that of the Protestant humanist with his supreme confidence in the order of nature:

And surely [it had been written in a promotional tract of 1609] so desirous is man of civill society by nature, that he easily yields to discipline and government, if he see any reasonable motive to induce him to the same ... for it is not the nature of men, but the education of men, which make them barbarous and uncivill, and therefore chaunge the education of men, and you shall see that their nature will be greatly rectified and corrected; seeing therefore men by nature so easily yielde to discipline and government upon any reasonable shewe of bettering their fortunes, it is everie roans dutie to travell both by sea and land, and to venture either with his person or with his purse, to bring the barbarous and savage people to a civill and Christian kinde of government, under which they may learne how to live holily, justly, and soberly in this world, and to apprehend the meanes to save their soules in the world to come, rather than to destroy them, or utterly to roote them out ....16

After 1622, however, it seemed to most Englishmen in Virginia

Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia [1609], ed. W. F. Craven (New York, 1937), Sig. [C 1v ]-C 2r .

that destruction of the Indians was warranted. This free and open pioneering declaration is characteristic of a new sentiment:

Because our hands which before were tied with gentlenesse and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Savages, not untying the Knot, but cutting it: So that we, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground then their waste, and our purchase at a valuable consideration to their owne contentment, gained; may now by a right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us.17

The Indian became for seventeenth-century Virginians a symbol not of a man in the grip of devilish ignorance, but of a man standing fiercely and grimly in the path of civilization.18 In 1644 when Opechancanough tried again to wipe out the English, the Virginians were ready, and rather easily put him down, captured him, and allowed him to be killed by his guard. His successor sued for peace and was granted it for an annual tribute and, inevitably, for all the land that the English might want. From this time on, with nearby Indians secured as allies against possible incursions by Indians from the north and west, Virginia Indian troubles were strictly frontier troubles, somehow distant from the civilized affairs of Jamestown and the tidewater plantations. In 1675 an Indian uprising forced frontier planters to unite in their own defense and to defy the royal governor who would not give them adequate support; the result, of course, was Bacon's rebellion, in which the Indian problem came to be only incidental. Steadily the Indian problem became the western problem which it was for American society in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Steadily such missionary work as was to be done was becoming a matter of distant, enlightened philanthropy and

Edward Waterhouse, "A Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia" [1622], Records of the Virginia Company , III, 556-57.

See John Martin, "The Manner Howe to Bringe the Indians into Subjection," a report prepared for the Virginia Company, December 15, 1622, ibid. , III, 704-706.

charity.19 Meantime, Virginians, in mastering their new land, had mastered its aboriginal inhabitants.

When, in 1622, Virginians discovered they had to destroy or be destroyed, they ceased trying to understand the Indian; for such understanding presumably would avail them little. Hence such accounts of Indians as they wrote come before 1622 and reflect the early, optimistic views of men who are certain that savages can be readily civilized. The accounts from 1607 through 1622 are few and simply to the point.

In his Nova Brittania (1609) Richard Johnson reports briefly and straightforwardly. Virginia, he writes, "is inhabited with wild and savage people, that live and lie up and downe in troupes like heards of Deere in a Forrest: they have no law but nature, their apparell skinnes of beasts, but most goe naked: the better sort have houses, but poore ones, they have no Arts nor Science, yet they live under superior command such as it is, they are generally very loving and gentle, and do entertaine and relieve our people with great kindnesse: they are easy to be brought to good, and would fayne embrace a better condition."20 In his The New Life of Virginea (1612) Johnson makes practical suggestions for bringing such natural men to a better condition. Seeing no need for violence, he advises the Virginia planters, "In steed of Iron and steele you must have patience and humanitie to manage their crooked nature to your form of civilitie . . . ."21

Henry Spelman's manuscript Relation of Virginea (1613) fills in random but particular observations on Indian Life—on religion, habitations, marriage customs, naming of children, care of the sick, burial, government, executions, agriculture, quarrels, war, pastimes—yet his prime interest is still in the fact that there is a minimal sense of order and discipline, something analogous to civilized order, in Indian society. Of religion, he observes that

See, for example, Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Spotswood's discussion of his interest in work with Indian children in a letter to the Bishop of London, November 11, 1711, Virginia Historical Society Collections , n. s., I (1882), 126.

Peter Force, Tracts , I, no. 6, p. 11.

Ibid. , I, no. 7, pp. 18-19.

although "for ye most part they worship ye divell," such worship is, however bad, still worship. And concerning Indian "Justin and goverment," he is pleased to discover that although he had thought the Indians were by nature lawless, yet he has found laws justly administered among them.22

The most hopeful view is that of Alexander Whitaker, minister at Henrico, in his Good Newes from Virginia (1613). Whitaker observes that the Indians acknowledge a "great good God" but that they fear the Devil more; they worship him and are virtually slaves of their" Priests," who "are no other but such as our English Witches are." Then:

Wherefore my brethren, put on the bowells of compassion, and let the lamentable estate of these miserable people enter in your consideration: One God created us, they have reasonable soules and intellectuall faculties as well as wee; we all have Adam for our common parent: yea, by nature the condition of us both is all one, the servants of sinne and slaves of the divell . . . .

But if any of us should misdoubt that this barbarous people is uncapable of such heavenly mysteries, let such men know that they are farre mistaken in the nature of these men, for besides the promise of God, which is without respect of persons, made as well to unwise men after the flesh, as to the wise, &c. let us not thinke that these men are so simple as some have supposed them: for they are of body lustie, strong, and very nimble: they are a very understanding generation, quicke of apprehension, suddaine in their dispatches, subtile in their dealings, exquisite in their inventions, and industrious in their labour.

What kind of a society do these savage servants of Satan have?

Finally, there is a civill governement amongst them which they strictly observe, and shew thereby that the law of Nature dwelleth in them: for they have a rude kinde of Common-wealth, and rough governement, wherein they both honour and obey their Kings, Parents, and Governours, both greater and lesse, they observe the limits

I have used the text of Spelman's relation printed in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith , ed. Arber and Bradley (Edinburgh, 1910), "Introduction," I, ci-cxiv.

of their owne possessions, and incroach not upon their neighbours dwellings . . . .

Thus there are in the Virginia Indians glimmerings of the light of civilized nature—glimmerings of an idea of rational, holy order with its government, laws, and sense of private property. Clearly "these unnurtured grounds of reason" in the Indians urge upon all Christians the hope and necessity of bringing them to Christian civility and its glories. Whitaker promises more details; but he is sure now of the essentials.23

The details are systematically given by Captain John Smith; the system assumed is that of the naturally minimal order of savage life, with its natural aspiration towards the higher life of Christian civility. Smith's central account is in his Map of Virginia, with a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion (1612).24 (This is virtually the same account he gives in the General History of Virginia [1616].) He begins with names of tribes and statistics, and then proceeds to descriptions: his Indians are comely, brown (but all born white), close shaven, very strong and agile, inconstant, timorous, quick of apprehension, "all Savage ," covetous, malicious, as honest as could be expected. He is fascinated and revolted by their gaudy dress, their barbaric ornaments, and their monstrous body painting. He observes that they live in groups of six to twenty in houses "built like our Arbors" and that they have gardens which they work together. The men fish, hunt, war, and occupy themselves generally with" such manlike exercises "; and "the women and children do the rest of the worke." In this careful manner Smith goes methodically through the whole range of Indian culture as he has observed it: diet, weapons, tools, utensils, boat-building, cloth-making, fishing, hunting, war, music, entertainment, and medicine.

But what interests him most is Indian religion and government, to which he devotes two separate sections of his account. "There

Good Newes from Virginia [1613] (New York, 1936), pp. 24-27.

Travels and Works of Captain John Smith , ed. Arber and Bradley, I, 65-84.

is," he says, "yet in Virginia no place discovered to bee so Savage in which the Savages have not a religion . . . ." "But," he points out immediately, "their chiefe God they worship is the Divell." Devil-worship, in fact, deforms the whole of a religion dominated by evil priests who are agents of Satan and who must be paid Satanic homage. So the religious ceremonies of these people are diabolical, with outrageous costumes, conjuring, singing and dancing-even human sacrifice. They believe that only the chiefs and priests live after death, and these with the Devil whom they worship; the common people, they suppose, do not have life after death. There is hope for Christian conversion; some have sought it already. But for the present ". . . in this lamentable ignorance doe these poore soules sacrifice themselves to the Divell, not knowing their Creator."

Indian government, although savage, is more enlightened than Indian religion:

Although the countrie people be very barbarous; yet have they amongst them such government, as that their Magistrates for good commanding, and their people for due subjection and obeying, excell many places that would be counted very civill.

It is a monarchical government, with an emperor ruling over kings. The emperor is Powhatan; and he is supreme, ruling not by written laws, but by custom. "Yet when he listeth, his will is a law and must bee obeyed: not only as a king, but as halfe a God they esteeme him." Each king and his people hold their land directly from the emperor; and they live within its limits, fearing always to violate any of his commands; for he is hard and cruel. He has tried, Smith notes, to frighten the English, but he has failed, and peace has been secured. Throughout his account Smith has been sure that it will always remain so.

But it did not remain so. The massacre of 1622 made the hope of Christianization and civilization seem unreal beyond practical reason. Essentially, the problem presented by the Indian came to be taken as one not of securing peace but of surviving. So Virginians concerned themselves little with knowing the Indian; for he was literally not worth knowing. Not until the early eighteenth

century, when eminent Virginian gentlemen-scholars, surveying their land and its past, looked curiously at the Indian's role in that past and at the difference between the civilized and the savage, was there exhibited a serious or sustained interest in the Indian, his nature, and his fate.

3

Settlers in Maryland were more fortunate in their relations with the Indians than the Virginians; and Maryland accounts and reactions reflect this good fortune. The Anglicans and Catholics who came to found Maryland in 1634 encountered peaceably disposed Indians, eager to welcome them. As a matter of fact, the local Indians, the Patuxents, hoped for English aid against the raids of their fierce neighbors, the Susquehannocks. Anxious to secure their colonial establishments, the English were pleased to protect the Indians; knowing about Indian troubles to the south, they were determined to make good their decision to use the Indians kindly. They took proper precautions, erected fortifications to protect themselves just in case trouble should develop; ". . . yet," in the words of a contemporary promotional tract, "they ceased not to procure to put these jealousies out of the Natives minds, by treating and using them in the most courteous manner they could, and at last prevailed therein and setled a very firme peace and friendship with them."25 Indian lands were always treated for and purchased. In the 1650's the proprietor, Lord Baltimore, acting ever in the grand feudal style, ordered about 10,000 acres set aside as a kind of Indian reservation; but this scheme was lost in the midst of political battles for the control of the colony.26 Troubles with Indians on the northern and southern and western frontiers developed in the 1640's and in the 1670's; on both occasions successful punitive expeditions were sent out. The expedition of the 1670's, conducted jointly with Virginia, was part of the chain of events that led to Bacon's Rebel-

A Relation of Maryland [1635], in Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633-1684 , ed. C. C. Hall (New York, 1910), p. 76.

Matthew P. Andrews, History of Maryland: Province and State (New York, 1929), p. 63.

lion. But in Maryland itself, by and large, the peace was kept, and the Marylander's view of the Indian reflected that peace.

Although there was in Maryland, too, the high intention of converting the savages, that intention never was realized as part of Lord Baltimore's official policy. Christianization became a matter of private enterprise—largely Catholic enterprise.27 Anglicans and Puritans, the latter having moved into Maryland during the middle of the century, sent out few missionaries. But Catholics, tolerated in Maryland as nowhere else, thought that this colony was to be that one where Jesuit missionaries might work their will. The narrative (1634) by a Jesuit priest who was part of the first colonizing expedition is full of the high hopes of one who sees the Indians simply as infidels waiting to be converted.28 The Jesuits were for a time free to work among the Indians, and they worked hard and successfully enough for one of them to report in 1639:

Whoever shall contemplate in thought the whole earth, will perhaps nowhere find men more abject in appearance than these Indians; who nevertheless have souls (if you consider the ransom paid by Christ) no less precious than the most cultivated Europeans. They are inclined indeed to vices, though not very many, in such darkness of ignorance, such barbarism and in so unrestrained and wandering a mode of life; nevertheless in their disposition they are docile, nor will you perceive in them, except rarely, the passions of the mind transported in an extraordinary manner . . . . They are readily swayed by reason, nor do they withhold their assent obstinately from the truth set forth in a credible manner. This natural disposition of the tribe, aided by the seasonable assistance of divine grace, gives us hope of a most desirable harvest hereafter, and animates us in the highest degree to continue our labors in this vineyard.29

But for all this confidence, with its touch of Jesuitical enthusiasm for primitives who are easily open to conversion because they

Ibid. , p. 42.

Father Andrew White, A Briefe Relation of the Voyage unto Maryland [1634], in Narratives of Early Maryland , pp. 40-45.

Annual Letter of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 1639, ibid. , pp. 129-30.

have not yet acquired civilized vices, the Jesuits were not allowed to proceed freely.30 In their attempts to get directly to the Indians, they had secured land grants directly from them. Lord Baltimore, though a Catholic himself, was forced to object; for he was to be absolute ruler in Maryland. Jesuit authorities in England acceded to his objection; Jesuits in Maryland surrendered their Indian lands; and although they continued to work among the Indians, they could not realize their hopes for large-scale conversions such as were being managed in Canada and South America.31

If Jesuits could not take advantage of peaceful relations with the Indians, secular Marylanders could. The anonymous author of A Relation of Maryland (1635), writing some thirteen years after the Virginia massacre, can still believe in the inevitable union of religion and empire.32 He objects, he says, to such accounts as that of Captain Smith, because Smith always writes from an assumption that war with the Indians is an essential fact of colonial life. (Here the author of the Relation misreads Smith; but he has an axe to grind.) Smith's account is simply in error, he feels; if the Indians are treated well, introduced to civility, husbandry, and the "mechanick trades," they may become very useful to the English. As it is now, they live only under the law of Nature and that "discretion" which derives therefrom. Add the virtues of Christianity to their natural virtues, and you have a "brave people." He concludes:

that since God Almighty hath made this Countrey so large and fruit-full, and that the people be such as you have heard them described; It is much more Prudence, and Charity, to Civilize, and make them Christians, then to kill, robbe, and hunt them from place to place, as you would doe a wolfe. By reducing of them, God shall be served, his Majesties Empire enlarged by the addition of many thousand

See Gilbert Chinard, L'Amérique et le Rêve Exotique dans la Littérature Française au XVII e et au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1934), pp. 122-87.

The exact proceedings here are puzzling. See for a cogent analysis, Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History , II (New Haven, 1936), 313.

"Of the Naturall disposition of the Indians," in Narratives of Early Maryland , pp. 83-90.

Subjects, as well as of large Territories, our Nation honoured, and the Planters themselves enriched by the trafficke and commerce which may be had with them.33

The optimism here perhaps derives from the promotional intentions of the Relation itself. But, in a larger sense, it reflects the assurance of Christianization and civilized progress which invariably shaped the earliest American understanding of the Indian. That Maryland optimism is not so grim as that of Virginia, so peaceful as that of Pennsylvania, or so fierce as that of New England, is owing primarily to the fact that there was virtually no Indian "problem" in colonial Maryland. Significantly, all that could be said of the Indian in Maryland was said as early as 1635.34

4

The New England Puritan of the 1630's knew, in the very intensity of his Puritanism, that he too must be a civilizer and Christianizer, and thus a savior of the Indians, and that God would show him the truest way with the savage. He knew that Pilgrim experience with the Indians, some ten years before, had been fortunate: God had sent a "wonderful plague" among the savages to destroy them and to leave most of their lands free for civilized occupation.35 The Puritan received, as he must have expected to receive, the same kind of help. Yet he helped himself too.

Although in 1634 John Winthrop could write to an English friend, "[the natives] are neere all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess,"36 still Indians

Ibid. , p. 90.

In the only other detailed account I have seen, that in George Alsop's Character of the Province of Maryland , the Indian is not taken seriously. See ibid. , pp. 365-71.

Edward Winslow to George Morton (?), December 11, 1621, in Alexander Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (Boston, 1841), pp. 232-33; The Great Patent of New England, November 3, 1620, as quoted ibid. , p. 184, f. n. 3; and a Plymouth sermon of Robert Cushman (1621), ibid. , pp. 258-59.

Winthrop to Sir Nathaniel Rich, May 22, 1634, Winthrop Papers , III (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 167.

to the south and north, who were plagued mainly by the English themselves, remained relatively strong and independent and had to be faced down. Twice in the century formal frontier war was waged: in 1637, against the Pequots, who were easily slaughtered at Mystic by Mason's expedition; and in 1675-1676, against the Wampanoags and their leader King Philip, who were destroyed in their turn, though not quite so easily as the Pequots had been. And continually there was trouble on a small scale; the problem was to keep various tribes split up and thus weak in striking power, to protect frontier settlements from marauding bands, to combat papist French influence to the north, and gradually to take over lands as the proper time came. Steadily, as the colonies developed in holdings and in power, the English moved further inland from their coastal settlements and took over more Indian land. Warfare resulted. But this too was part of God's Way with New England.

For here the Puritans carried to its extreme the logic of seventeenth-century Christian imperialism. God had meant the savage Indians' land for the civilized English and, moreover, had meant the savage state itself as a sign of Satan's power and savage warfare as a sign of earthly struggle and sin. The colonial enterprise was in all ways a religious enterprise. For Puritans, as for Pilgrims before them, land tenure was finally to be demonstrated from theology.37 Indian lands were to be bought if local savages should pretend to ownership, but to be bought only as a means of keeping peace With those savages.38 The fact was that the Indians possessed their lands only as a natural right, since that possession existed anterior to and outside of a properly civilized state and since that possession was not in accordance with God's commandment to men to occupy the earth, increase, and multiply; what

"Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing Out of England into the Parts of America," Mourt's Relation [1622], in Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers , pp. 243-46.

See, for example, the letters of instruction sent to John Endicott from the Massachusetts Bay Company, April 17 and May 28, 1629, in Alexander Young, Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1846), pp. 159 and 176.

followed, then, was that the land was technically vacuum domicilium , and that the English, who would farm the land and make it fructify, who would give it order, were obliged to take over.39 Thus, characteristically, the Puritan in his eager orthodoxy was little interested in natural law and went directly to divine law, to divine logic. For John Winthrop, in 1629, it was a matter of such logic:

. . . the whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved by them. Why then should we stand starving here for the places of habitation, (many men spending as much labor and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of lands as would procure him many many hundreds of acres, as good or better, in another place,) and in the mean time suffer whole countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement.40

Convinced thus of his divine right to Indian lands, the Puritan discovered in the Indians themselves evidence of a Satanic opposition to the very principle of divinity. In a world in which the divine plan was so clear, in a world through which the Bible would guide all men in all things, in a world in which civilization and the divinely illuminated human reason had to count for everything, the Indian might well be a terrifying anomaly, at best a symbol of what men might become if they lived far from God's Word. Yet he also was a man who had to be brought to the civilized responsibilities of Christian manhood, a wild man to be improved along

The problem is surveyed by Chester E. Eisinger, "The Puritans' Justification for Taking the Land," Essex Institute Historical Collections , LXXXIV (1948), 131-43. The best single statement of the Puritan position is in John Winthrop's "General Considerations for the Plantation in New-England," [1629], in Young, Chronicles of the First Planters , pp. 271-78. Winthrop's authorship of the "General Considerations" is demonstrated and variant texts are given in Winthrop Papers , II (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), 106-21. Young's text seems to be that which G. W. Robinson, editor of the Winthrop Papers , calls draft D, from the Higginson Papers. Young's text varies slightly, but never significantly, from draft D as printed in the Winthrop Papers .

"General Considerations," in Young, Chronicles of the First Planters , p. 272.

with wild lands, a creature who had to be made into a Puritan if he was to be saved. Save him, and you saved one of Satan's victims. Destroy him, and you destroyed one of Satan's partisans.

The logic was inexorable and unrelieved. Wherever the Indian opposed the Puritan, there Satan opposed God; Satan had possessed the Indian until he had become virtually a beast; Indian worship was devil worship. The faintly optimistic (and propagandistic?) reports about Indian religion which were published in London early in the seventeenth century soon were drowned out in the general recounting of its evils.41 Satanism, it was abundantly evident, was at the core of savage life.42 And it was not hard to associate the physical state of the Indian, his living a cold, hard life, with his spiritual state; hence, everywhere one might see in the flesh what it meant to be a devil-worshipper. Racial and cultural tension mounted throughout the century, until, in the 1690's, the very presence of Indian devil-worshippers was taken as part of the evidence of that great visitation of witches to New England, which we call the Witchcraft Craze. Indian witch doctors clearly were sharing diabolically in the wonders of the invisible world.43

When frontier New Englanders suffered at the hands of Indians, they inevitably interpreted their suffering as God's warning

For an optimistic report, see Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England [1624], in Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers , pp. 354-67. For the contradiction of this view, see Francis Higginson, New-England's Plantation [1630], in Young, Chronicles of the First Planters , pp. 241-64; Philip Vincent, A True Relation of the late Battell Fought in New England [1638], in Charles Orr, History of the Pequot War (Cleveland, 1897), pp. 98-99; John Underhill, Newes from America [1638], ibid. , pp. 47-86; Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing: or, Newes from New-England [1642], Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 3, III (1833), 102-106; and John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England [1674], ibid. , Ser. 3, III (1833), 293-311.

Morison, The Founding of Harvard College , p. 415.

George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 362-63, 371; Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum [1699], in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 , ed. Charles H. Lincoln (New York, 1913), p. 242.

to New England through Satan. Of the hard captivity of Mary Rowlandson in 1676, the contemporary editor of her narrative concluded:

I may say, that as none knows what it is to fight and pursue such an enemy as this, but they that have fought and pursued them: so none can imagine what it is to be captivated, and enslaved to such atheisticall, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, bruitish (in one word) diabolicall creatures as these, the worst of the heathen . . . .44

Thus for those who lived in the frontier settlements to the west and south and to the north in Maine, it came to be, simply enough, destroy or be destroyed; this was yet another skirmish in man's Holy War against Satan, now on a new-world battlefield. When, as late as 1703, it was recommended that troublesome Indians be hunted down with dogs, the argument from Christian violence was an old one. Some sixty-five years before a military man had argued with saintly authority in defense of the massacre of the Pequots:

It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious ? . . . Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David's war. When a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man, and all confederates in the action, then he hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.45

Soveraignty and Goodness of God [1682], reprinted from ed. 1795 as A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, ibid. , p. 116. Cf. the Stockwell narrative in Increase Mather's Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (London, 1684), pp. 39-58; and the preface to John Williams' Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (Boston, 1707).

The recommendation is that of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard in a letter to Governor Dudley, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 4, II (1854), 235-37. The argument is that of John Underhill, second in command to Mason at the proceedings at Mystic, in his Newes from America [1638], in Orr, History of the Pequot War, p. 81.

So Puritans made history. So they wrote it too. Puritan historians and reporters, determined to understand their nature and destiny, uniformly saw Indian troubles in light from the word of God. Edward Johnson, for example, equated the Pequot War with the Antinomian disturbance as Puritan trials with Satan. John Mason appended to his history of the Pequot War a list of "special providences" by means of which the English had won their victory. Nathaniel Saltonstall insisted that however heavily the hand of the Lord lay upon his Puritan sinners, still He had commissioned them to destroy the crafty, bestial, diabolical creatures who opposed them. William Hubbard was sure that King Philip's War was nothing less than a Satanic plot against God's Chosen People, and both Mathers took the Indian wars as evidence that Satan was putting up a last fight against his Puritan adversary.46 For the Puritan, history was everywhere cosmically and eternally meaningful. A Satanic principle was part of that meaningfulness; and the New England Indians somehow embodied that principle.

Out of such an understanding of civilized man in New England arose the Puritan understanding of savage man. There was, at the outset, no difficulty in accounting for the genesis of the savage. Almost universally it was agreed that the Indians were of the

Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence [1654], ed. J. F. Jameson (New York, 1910), p. 80; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War [1736], in Orr, History of the Pequot War , pp. 1-46; Saltonstall, A Continuation of the State of New-England [1676], in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 , p. 54; Hubbard, Narrative of the Indian Wars in New England [1677] (n. p., 1814), p. 61; Increase Mather, Brief History of the War with the Indians (London, 1676), passim and Relation of the Troubles Which Have Hapned in New England (London, 1677), passim ; Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (London, 1699), passim . This is a mere sampling, of course. Johnson's equation of the Pequot War with the Antinomian troubles is not unique with him: Cf. letter from John Higginson to John Winthrop (c. May 1637), Winthrop Papers , III (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 404-407; and Thomas Shepard's "Memoir of Himself" (c. 1645-1650), in Young, Chronicles of the First Planters , p. 550.

race of men, descendants, in order, of Adam, Noah, and those Asiatic Tartars who had come to America by a land-bridge from northern Asia.47 This opinion, orthodox in the seventeenth century,48 allowed Puritans to account simply for the savage, heathenish state of the Indian. Was he not perhaps the farthest of all God's human creatures from God Himself? Descended from wanderers, had he not lost his sense of civilization and law and order? Had he not lost, except for a dim recollection, God Himself? And wasn't he, as a direct result of this loss, in the power of Satan? Seen only thus, as one item in a God-centered course of experience, the Indian took on an awful meaning for the Puritan mind.

The Puritan writer on the Indian was therefore less interested in the Indian's culture than in the fallen spiritual condition which that culture manifested. Such early accounts of the Indian as those contained in Edward Winslow's Good Newes from New England (1624), Francis Higginson's New-England's Plantation (1630), and William Wood's New England's Prospect (1634) describe the appearance, social organization, and customs of the local Indians sketchily and, considering the tone of later accounts, somewhat optimistically. They depict heathen Indians, almost wiped out by the plague, living without the benefits of civilization, fearing their enemies, who will certainly welcome the English and the way of life they bring. But as the century wore on, Puritans were troubled by disputes, warfare, and what we can see now as the stubborn integrity of some Indian cultures. It was clear to many Puritans that all Indians were victims beyond rescue of their low condition and that not much was to be gained by studying them. By the 1680's even Daniel Gookin, in charge of Christian Indian settlements for the United Colonies and known to be soft toward

A general survey of contemporary received opinion on Indian origins is Daniel Gookin's, in the first chapter of his Historical Collections of the Indians of New England [MS., c. 1680?], Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 1, I (1792), 141-226.

See John H. Powell's sketch On the Origin of the American Indians (Philadelphia, 1946); and Don Cameron Allen's definitive study in his The Legend of Noah (Urbana, Ill., 1949), pp. 113-37.

the savages, could give only a despairing account of Indian culture. His "Of the Language, Customs, Manners, and Religion of the Indians"49 is straightforward and gloomy. The Indians, he concludes, have been and continue to be, with a few Christianized exceptions, brutish and barbarous; they indulge in polygamy; they are revengeful; the men only hunt and fish and fight while the women cook and do a little planting; they are all thieves and liars and by now they have virtually all become drunkards. True enough, they are hospitable and have some faintly systematic way of government. Yet their heathen worship and their submitting to powwows, who are nothing but witches and wizards holding familiarity with Satan, damn them forever. Gookin is interested in the Indians insofar as they fail to be potential Puritans.

What mattered was not the intrinsic character of the New England Indians, but rather the meaning that character might have for the whole of New England life. Thus the account of tarnished noble savages in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1632), of hypercholeric warriors in Philip Vincent's True Relation (1638), of natural men in Thomas Lechford's Plain Dealing (1643) and in John Josselyn's Account of Two Voyages (1674)—each of these attempts by non-Puritans to describe New England Indians disinterestedly would have seemed to Puritans mistaken. Precisely because the Puritan was so deeply concerned with the meaning of the Indian for the whole of his culture, he hardly could conceive of describing that Indian disinterestedly. The Puritan understanding of savage man is most fully recorded in the history of the bitter failure of Puritans to bring the Indians to God.

The record of individual New England missionary efforts is abundant but scattered, involving almost as many organizations as men.50 Apparently money was first sent to New England for mis-

This is the third chapter of Gookin's Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 1, I (1792), 149-56.

I follow here the summaries in W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston, 1899), pp. 12-13; and George Parker Winship, "Introduction," The New England Company of 1649 and John Eliot, Publications of the Prince Society , XXXVI (1920), vi-xliv.

sionary work in the 1630's, when Roger Williams and perhaps John Eliot were going to the Indians. In 1636 Plymouth Colony enacted laws to provide for the preaching of the Gospel among the Indians, and in 1643 Thomas Mayhew began his mission on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Little or nothing was achieved, however, until November 1644 when the Massachusetts General Court asked the ministers to recommend measures for converting the Indians. Two years later the General Court directed the ministers to elect two of their number every year to engage in gospel work among the heathen. In 1646 John Eliot, having learned a local Indian dialect, began systematically to preach to them. Then, in 1649, Edward Winslow, acting as London agent for the United Colonies, managed to get Parliament to authorize the incorporation of "The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England," and this organization, poorly administered, financed missionary work in New England until the Restoration. With the Restoration, the charter of "The President and Society" was declared invalid and a royal Charter was granted, in February 1662, to the "Company for Propagacion of the Gospell in New England, and parts adjacent, in America." Until 1779, when the Revolutionary War caused remittances to America to be cut off, this Company carried on most of the financing of New England missions. A "Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge," formed in England in 1698, the "Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge," formed in 1709, and an abortive "Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge," incorporated in Massachusetts in 1762, likewise contributed to the holy cause. (The "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" was an Anglican corporation founded in 1701, which sent its missionaries mainly to the Indians in the middle colonies and which gave up work with the Indians late in the eighteenth century.) All these organizations issued, finally, in "The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, and Others, in North America," founded in 1787. A great number of

intentions and organizations certainly, but few practical results. Only with self-consciously dedicated souls like Eliot and the May-hews in the seventeenth century and with evangelical missionaries like Sargeant and Brainerd in the eighteenth, did the Gospel reach the heathen. There were, it seemed, only a few workers for this vast, wild vineyard.

For all his assurances that it was his holy mission to convert the heathen, the Puritan felt that the business seemed to be proceeding with agonizing delay. Why? he wondered. And, as always, he had answers from Scripture. Indian troubles, Indian opposition, and Indian recalcitrance were taken as God-ordained reminders to the Puritan that his way on this earth was a hard way; hence the Indian was to be literally and continually the devil's advocate for a people who needed to be reminded of their own sinfulness and of the agonizing hope of regeneration and election. Moreover, in the 1640's it seemed that there was specific scriptural authority for the delay in Indian conversion. The wild prophecy of Revelation 15 was interpreted as meaning that there could be no large-scale conversion of the heathen until the Jews themselves had been converted and until the Anti-Christ had been destroyed.51 The notion still persisted in the 1670's during King Philip's War, when Increase Mather tried to dismiss it by pointing out that, in spite of the troubles which had resulted in the war, there nevertheless was a "glorious Sprinkling" of Indian converts in New England.52

It was indeed a "Sprinkling"—the result of work carried on by a few men who felt a deep personal need to go to the Indians directly. Yet even these few men were so sure of their Puritan

See Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing [1642], Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 3, III [1833], 79-80; Roger Williams, Christenings Make Not Christians [1645], ed. H. M. Dexter, Rhode Island Historical Tracts , Ser. 1, no. 14 (1881), pp. 19-20; and John Cotton, The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648), Part I, p. 78.

A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England [1676], in The History of King Philip's War , ed. S. G. Drake (Boston, 1862), p. 39.

way that they could not see the Indian as anything but imperfect copies of themselves. John Eliot, for example, worked for the Indians from 1634 on, was able in the 1640's to preach to them in their own language, translated the Old and the New Testaments into the local Massachusetts dialect, founded a Christian-Indian town in 1651 and saw thirteen others founded by 1674, and even ventured in 1659 to suggest that it would be possible to form the purest of Christian Commonwealths on the basis of his experiments in organizing Indian towns. Yet it is clear that he viewed savage life as one of satanic degradation and that he knew the Indians to be, as Cotton Mather pointed out in his biography of Eliot, "doleful creatures [who were] the veriest ruines of mankind , which [were] to be found any where upon the face of the earth."53 Even a man like Roger Williams, who strove for savage as well as for civilized rights, was appalled by Indians in their "hideous worships of creatures and devils ."54 The missionaries' triumph was that they did not let such feelings keep them from their sacred duty.

Their faith was simple. If English missionaries could go to the Indians, first organize their living into some civil pattern, and then teach them the Word, they might pull them from the embrace of Satan. An ordered civil life was the basic condition of a holy life; civilization was properly a means to holiness. The Civil and the Holy Covenants of man with God were parts of a cosmic principle of order. If such a faith could sustain a Puritan society, certainly it could create an Indian society.

Yet for all the missionaries' faith in themselves, their society, and the savage's potentialities for civilization and God, the few who worked with the Indians seemed bound to fail. By the end of the seventeenth century everyone knew it. The trials of King Philip's War had hardened Puritan hearts; even the Christian Indians, well on the way to salvation, were mistreated.55 A list

Magnalia (Hartford, 1820), I, p. 504.

The Bloody Tenant Yet More Bloody [1652], Publications of the Narragansett Club , Ser. 1, IV (1870), p. 85.

See Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians [MS., c. 1680], American Antiquarian Society Collections , II (1836), 423-534; and A True Account of the Most Considerable Occurrences [1676], in S. G. Drake, The Old Indian Chronicle (Boston, 1867), pp. 247-85.

drawn up in 1698 gives only 2500 as the number of converts in the Indian towns, and points out that most of these are dying off rapidly.56 Indian drunkenness, which had been sadly remarked before, came regularly to be denounced in a kind of ritualistic Puritan breast-beating.57 For all this, Puritans could blame not themselves but the non-Puritan English traders among them;58 or, going farther, could insist that both the failure of the missions and the successes of the corrupt traders were proofs of Puritan decadence, God's warning to New Englanders to mend their ways.59 The frightening paradox was that the savage heathen was lowered, not raised, by his contact with the civilized Christian.

Yet we may observe that the cause of Puritan failure went deeper than the introduction of disease, drunkenness, and vice. It stemmed from the very quality of Puritan understanding of the Indian, necessarily from high Puritanism itself, from the desperate need of those who had settled New England to hold on to their special beliefs about the nature and destiny of man if they were to hold on to their God-ordained way of life. They had to assume

Nicholas Noyes, New Englands Duty and Interest (Boston, 1698), appendix.

Compare, for example, such early accounts as Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing [1642], Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 3, III (1833), 105, and John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages [1674], ibid. , Ser. 3, III (1833), 304, with such late accounts as Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England [c. 1680], ibid. , Ser. 1, I (1792), 151; Samuel Danforth, The Woful Effects of Drunkenness, a Sermon (Boston, 1710); The Diary of Samuel Sewall, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 5, V (1878), 108 and 115, VI (1879), 438; Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New England [1726] (Cincinnati, 1859), p. 125; and Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts (London, 1727), pp. xvii-xviii.

A Monitory, and Hortatory Letter to Those English, Who Debauch the Indians by Selling Strong Drink Unto Them (Boston, 1700), pp. 10-12.

Increase Mather, Ichabod, or, a Discourse Shewing What Cause There Is To Fear That the Glory of the Lord Is Departing from New-England (Boston, 1702), pp. 71-73.

that the Indian's nature was absolutely one and the same with their nature; the integrative orthodoxy of their society demanded such an absolute. Herein they might very well be desperate enough to fool themselves. Or so a Royal Commission noted in 1665, reporting first that in heterodox Rhode Island "is the greatest number of Indians[,] yet they never had any thing allowed towards the civilizing and converting of the Indians," and then that in orthodox Massachusetts:

They convert Indians by hiring them to come & heare Sermons; by teaching them not to obey their Heathen Sachims, & by appointing Rulers amongst them over tenns, twenties, fifties, &c. The lives, Manners, & habits of those, who they say are converted, cannot be distinguished from those who are not, except it be by being hyred to heare Sermons, which the more generous natives scorne.60

This is perhaps unfair, certainly antagonistic. Yet it indicates, if from an anti-Puritan viewpoint, how the Puritan might confuse appearance with reality. And it points, however obliquely, to an essential fact: that the seventeenth-century Puritan, in trying to recover for the Indian a civil and religious purity which he was sure he had already recovered for himself, was simply defining one reality in terms of another, the primitive in terms of the civilized, the Indian in terms of the Puritan. And, in the nature of things, he was bound to be wrong, and so to fail in his holy enterprise.

However, there was yet to be a renewed hope. Essentially an evangelical hope of saving a dying Indian for God, it rose as part of the last-ditch efforts of some Puritans to remain Puritans in spite of the reasonable theology and material progress that made them out to be gloomily and inhumanly old-fashioned. They would help manage a miracle, save the worst of Satan's creatures, and thus gloriously justify their Puritanism.

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, reports to the English missionary societies which were financing evangelical work recounted, proposed, and promised great things—increased use of native missionaries, a kind of reservation system, some

Maine Historical Society Collections , Ser. 2, IV (1889), 294.

thirty congregations newly established in southern New England, more attempts to get to the eastern Indians whom the French papists had debauched, cooperation with Dutch missionaries working among the Five Nations, and attempts to combat the effects of liquor, dishonest traders, and disease.61 Even so, it was clear that God was angry with New England for her failure to Christianize the heathen when He had clearly indicated in Scripture that it was to be done.

And as we dread to go to Hell our selves [wrote the Reverend Solomon Stoddard in 1723], it should be awful to us to consider their Damnation. Love and Pity calls for it, that we should help them out of their Danger. We should pity Beasts in Misery, much more Men : Tho' they be Brutish Persons; yet, they are of Mankind, and so objects of Compassion. It is an act of Love to our own nature to seek their Salvation . . . .62

Who were the Indians who were thus to be saved? There was, for example, Joseph Quasson who had been bound to a white man when his father died in debt, who in his servitude had learned how to read and had come to know God. Freed, however, he had become a roisterer and a drunkard and by 1726 a condemned murderer. The account of Quasson which we have was written from his death cell by a friendly minister. And the point that the minister makes is this: the fact that Quasson had been bound to a white man; that his trial was delayed three years after the

Samuel Sewall to Sir William Ashurst, head of the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, May 3, 1700, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , Ser. 6, I (1886), 231-33; [Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and Nehemiah Walker], A Letter About the Present State of Christianity, among the Christianized Indians of New England (Boston, 1705); and Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts (London, 1727), pp. xvii-xviii.

Question, Whether God is not Angry with the Country for doing so little towards the Conversion of the Indians (Boston, 1723), p. 8. Cf. letter from Cotton Mather to Robert Wodrow, Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, September 17, 1715, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections , ser. 7, VIII (1912), 328-29; and Thomas Paine, The Temporal Safety of the Lord's People (Boston, 1732) for variations on the same theme.

murder; that he was given seven weeks to live after being condemned; that liquor was taken away from him—all this shows how hard the Lord was working for his salvation.63 And there was Sarah Coomes, the dying six-year-old of whom Experience Mayhew wrote in 1727:

She lay sick a considerable while before she died; and in that time continued to crave Instructions in things of God and the eternal World, and to express her Assent to, and acquiesce in them. She in particular expressed her steadfast Belief of the Doctrines of Christ's Person, Suffering, and Intercession for Sinners; and when she prayed, she called upon God to have Mercy upon her for his sake.64

This is Puritanism in extremis .

Along with the enthusiasm of the Great Awakening, this revivalistic interest in Indian conversion marks a final stage in the history of Puritanism. The work of New England born and trained Congregationalist missionaries had shifted by 1725 to the western parts of the middle colonies, where, joining with ScotchIrish Presbyterian missionaries from the middle colonies, they worked toward that union of Congregationalist and Presbyterian missionary efforts which was to become official at the end of the century. The infusion of Presbyterian Calvinism must have done much to hearten the Congregationalist missionaries. For the ministers involved, John Sargeant, David Brainerd, Charles Beatty, and Jonathan Edwards chief among them, conversion was everything and civilizing nothing; the high Puritan faith in the uses of civilization as a means to conversion had disappeared almost entirely. Savages were to be converted on the frontier, apart from the immediately baneful influence of civilization. In a report which he prepared for the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, Brainerd is primarily concerned with "experimental religion," which is to say, demonstrable religious conversion. He tells, for example, of his violent preaching to Indians, August 8, 1745, in Crosweeksung, New Jersey; he was pleased

Samuel Moody, A Summary Account of the Life and Death of Joseph Quasson, Indian (Boston, 1726).

Indian Converts (London, 1727), p. 264.

that the Indians were not able to "withstand the shock of this surprising operation. . . . They were almost universally praying and crying for mercy in every part of the house, and many out of doors, and numbers could neither go nor stand."65 He was thus living up to the precepts of Ebenezer Pemberton who had preached at his ordination, insisting that conversion was to be achieved only by powerful preaching: "They [the preachers] are to 'compel sinners to come in' by a lively representation of the power and grace of an almighty Redeemer."66 In his own short life, so his editor, biographer, and intended father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards, was pleased to note, the desperately consumptive Brainerd showed evidence, above all, of those authentic religious affections which were the only means to salvation. In an edition of the Life of Brainerd , published after Edwards' death, there was included further contemporary evidence of this need for violent conversion of the heathen—this in Charles Beatty's "Further remarks respecting Indian affairs." Beatty argues in so many words that Indians must be converted before being civilized; for they hate civilization and Christianity equally and must be convinced of the misery of their spiritual state before they can realize the misery of their civil state. Only "gospellizing" will succeed where civilizing has failed.67 Having virtually destroyed the Indian by trying to bring a new civil life to him, the New England missionaries, encouraged by their Scotch-Irish Presbyterian brethren, were now to call the Holy Spirit directly to the Indian in order that they might give him that new life immediately. Certainly a miracle was needed.

Thus the Puritan's understanding of the Indian issued into the revivalism and anti-rationalism which in the end marked his

Mirabilia Dei Inter Indicos [1746], in Jonathan Edwards, ed., An Account of the Life of Mr. David Brainerd [1749], (Edinburgh, 1798), pp. 376-77. Cf. an analogous account by John Brainerd, the brother of David, John Brainerd's Journal (1761-1762 ), a Reprint (Newark, N. J., 1941).

A Sermon Preached in Newark, June 12 , 1774, in An Account of the Life of Mr. Brainerd , pp. 525-45.

Ibid. , appendix, pp. 52-[60]. Beatty's "Remarks" are part of his Journal of a Two Months' Tour (London, 1768), here reprinted.

understanding of himself. Always his mind had worked from the inside out, from God, Scripture, and reason to man and nature. Whatever he saw outside, he had somehow already seen inside. Understanding the Indian as he was related to man and nature, the Puritan thus succeeded, if he did succeed, only in knowing a little more about God, Scripture, and reason, and in understanding himself.

5

It is the Pennsylvania Quakers who should have best succeeded in bringing the Indian to God and to civilization. Yet they too failed. The reason for this failure follows, simply enough, from the nature of Quaker culture and the Quaker idea of the good life. In coming to America, the Quakers too hoped to bring the Indians out of heathenism and into a saving awareness of the divine principle within them. The Quaker problem was not to discover and describe the differences between savage and civilized men, but rather to discover and make known likenesses in terms of which all men could live the good, peaceful life together and in terms of which savages might be "convinced" into civilization. Quakers travelled widely among Indians, worked hard, but bothered themselves not at all with theorizing, with constructing complex systems for converting the savage heathen into the civilized Christian. They could believe in cultural complexity no more than they could believe in political complexity. They could offer the Indians not ritual and dogma, but love. Hence, so far as our record here is concerned, they finished where they had begun, with a simple faith in the saving awareness of the divine principle within all men. Meantime, the Indians on the frontiers of Pennsylvania were destroyed by that very cultural and political complexity in which the Quakers could not believe.

Travelling Quakers from the first worked earnestly to establish friendly relations with the Indians. Settling in 1677 in West Jersey, they were careful to treat honestly and fairly for such Indian lands as they had been granted by the Crown. And, more often than not, Indians in turn helped the Quakers, showing them how to live on the frontier; and there was peace. As a Quaker

wrote back to England in 1678: "Without any carnal weapon we entered the land and inhabited therein, as safe as if there had been thousands of garrison; for the Most High preserved us from harm both of man and beast."68 In such a spirit Pennsylvania itself was established. Quaker missionary work among the Indians, however, antedates Quaker colonization in America—having begun sporadically in 1659. George Fox himself encouraged his brethren to "go and discourse with some of the heathen kings, desiring them to gather their council and people together, that you may declare God's everlasting truth, and his everlasting way of life and salvation to them."69 In 1672 and 1673 Fox himself visited North America and preached to the Indians. With the settling of Pennsylvania in 1681, Quaker missionary work and Quaker political relations with the Indians became officially one and were so for seventy-five years. In the words of a treaty of 1728, it was agreed "That all paths should be open and free to both Christians and Indians."70

Christians and Indians were alike men, alike in the principle of divinity within them. It was to be prayed and worked for that the Indians would become civilized Christians. But no good Friend could be so proud, so sure of himself in this world, as to violate the rights of another man because he was no Christian, or because he lacked the qualities of a civilized man. The love of a Friend would find a way. So William Penn addressed the Indians whom he knew:

There is a great God, and Power, which hath made the world and all things therein, to whom you, and I, and all people owe their being and well-being, and to whom you and I must one day give an account, for all that we have done in the world.

This great God hath written his law in our hearts, by which we are taught and commanded to love, and to help, and to do good to one another. Now this great God hath been pleased to make me con-

Some Account of the Conduct of the Religious Society of Friends towards the Indian Tribes in the Settlement of the Colonies of East and West Jersey and Pennsylvania (London, 1844), p. 16.

Ibid. , p. 20.

Ibid. , p. 32.

cerned in your part of the world; and the King of the country where I live hath given me a great province therein: but I desire to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbours and friends; else what would the great God do to us, who hath made us (not to devour and destroy one another, but) to live soberly and kindly together in the world?71

For all this, Quaker missionary efforts were in the long run as ineffective as Quaker politics. Indian converts were virtually nonexistent, since the savage knew that a religion meant ceremony and ritual, and since the Quakers offered only the law which God had placed in the heart. If Indians were to worship Christ, it would have to be Christ symbolized, made dramatic, and brought to life, not that private Christ who shone only as an Inner Light. Likewise, a civilization bound by the sense of innumerable meetings could mean little to Indians among whom social relationships were defined by strict traditions and forms. Quaker freedom and Quaker love were at once too much and too little for the savages whom they were to reach and to save.

We have, so far as I am aware, no attempt by a Quaker to analyze the nature of the savage and its meaning for the civilized man. It would seem that it never occurred to the good Quaker to think in general terms of differences between the savage and the civilized. We do have, however, abundant accounts of Quaker meetings with Indians and abundant incidental observations and conclusions. For example, the travelling Friend John Richardson in a long account of his "trials and exercises," recalls the end of a conference between William Penn and a few Indians. Penn had given the Indians match coats and "some Brandy or Rum, or both," which they had taken "quietly and in a solid manner." Richardson observes:

that they did not, nor I suppose never do speak, two at a time, nor interfere in the least one with another that way in all their Councils, as has been observed. Their Eating and Drinking was in much Stillness and Quietness.

William Wistar Comfort, William Penn, 1644-1718: A Tercentenary Estimate (Philadelphia, 1944), p. 44.

I much desire that all Christians (whether they may be such in Reality or Profession only) may endeavour to imitate these People in those Things which are so commendable, which may be a Means to prevent Loss of Time and expedite Business; as much as may be endeavouring to prevent one speaking at a time in Meetings of Conference and Business.72

Too, we have Penn's 1683 report on the simple, happy Pennsylvania Indians who "are under a dark Night in Things relating to Religion , to be sure, the Tradition of it; [who yet] believe [in] a God and Immortality , without the Help of Metaphysics."73 Characteristically, the Quaker saw the possible good in savage customs and in savage religion. For he wanted to live with the savages and to find in them the essential humanity he knew was there.

Quaker efforts and Quaker hopes were crushed by the power politics of Anglo-French dealings with the Pennsylvania Indians during the first half of the eighteenth century. Under William Penn's son, mercantile interests were coming more and more to dominate the politics of the colony. "Practical" men in Pennsylvania, administrators whose interests were with the Proprietors of the colony, not with its Quaker inhabitants, made peace with the Iroquois in 1732 because the Iroquois and their allies controlled the balance of savage power on the frontier; hence the Quakers could only stand by and see all their good work with the Delawares undone—by, among other things, the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737. The Delawares, bitter that Pennsylvanians, forgetting their pledges of friendship, had betrayed them to the outlander Iroquois, rapidly came under the influence of the French; life on the frontier, now inhabited by Scotch-Irish pioneers, came to be bloody and hard. The Quakers, holding to their pacifist principles, could not give full and prompt support to plans

An Account of the Life of That Ancient Servant of Jesus Christ, John Richardson (London, 1758), pp. 137-38. Cf. for analogous observations and conclusions, Emily Moore, ed., Travelling with Thomas Story (Letchworth, 1947), pp. 54-56.

A Collection of the Works of William Penn (London, 1726), II, 699-706. I quote from p. 703.

for frontier defence, to Braddock's expedition in 1755, for example; they still hoped (they still had to hope, being Quakers) to kill the Indian danger with loving kindness. In the midst of Anglo-French imperialistic rivalry which centered in the middle colonies, the Quakers were unaware of the insignificance of their pacifist aims and hopes. Of necessity, they became politically less and less effective; their failure with the Indians was, as a matter of fact, only one of many failures, all relating to their insisting on being Friends to all rival parties, when none would be friends to them. In 1756 there was war, and Pennsylvania, having firmly secured Iroquois friendship, was offering large bounties for Delaware scalps.74 A principle of survival had overridden a principle of divinity.

With the coming of the French and Indian War, the Quakers soon achieved that status of neutral observer which was implicit in their position from the very beginning. Wealthy Quaker merchants in Philadelphia founded in 1756 "The Friendly Association for gaining and preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures." (The following year a similar, but less active, New Jersey Association was founded by John Woolman and others.) Supported with large funds for gifts and councils, the Association got permission to treat with the marauding Delawares and Shawnees on the frontier and succeeded in making a peace. Such peace as there was on the Pennsylvania frontier during the French and Indian War was due largely to the efforts of the Association; yet after the initial success, the administrators of the colony allowed the Quakers to take part in negotiations with the Indians only informally, as advisors and observers. Finally even the Friendly Association, with infinite good intentions and high hopes, could not keep peace between Indians and ruthless men on the frontier. With such affairs as the massacre of harmless Connestoga Indians by the so-called Paxton Boys in 1763 and Pontiac's Rebel-

I follow here the analysis of Julian Boyd, "lndian Affairs in Pennsylvania, 1736-1762," in lndian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736-1762 (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. iii-lxxviii; and Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel Hill, 1948), pp. 21-28.

lion in the northwest, the Friendly Association passed out of existence. However, a tradition had been established; the Quakers were often to figure officially in future Indian-white relations as interested neutrals. This was logical enough; for from the beginning what had interested the Quakers was not the rights of Indians nor the rights of white men, but rather the divine rights of all men.75

The Quaker experience furnishes still another lesson in practical failure. Ironically enough, that failure was rooted in what Quakers assumed (and assume) to be the very principle of success—the awareness of the divine principle in all men. Believing thus, they were constrained to be pacifists, not to make over the Indians in their own images but rather simply to try to bring them to an awareness of that divine principle. The simplicity of such a principle was beyond most savages, certainly, as it was (and always has been) beyond most civilized men, even, if we may look closely at the record of Quaker mercantilism in the first half of the eighteenth century, beyond many Quakers. We have early and direct contemporary testimony concerning this failure. In the 1680's, the Dutch travellers, Dankers and Sluyter, noted that the Quakers were bound to fail with the Indians either because the Quakers themselves could not live up to their ideals, or, if they could, the Indians could neither respect nor understand actions rising from those ideals:

The Indians hate the Quakers very much on account of their deceit and covetousness, and say they are not Englishmen, always distinguishing them from all other Englishmen, as is also done by almost all other persons. The Indians say "they are not Christians, they are like ourselves."76

To point out that the Indians say of the Quakers, "they are like ourselves" is certainly to mark a failure. But it is also to mark a success. In a world dominated by imperialistic and mercantilistic

See Theodore Thayer, "The Friendly Association," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , LXVII (1943), 356-76.

Journal of a Voyage to New York in 1679-80, Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society , I (1867), 244.

drives and consequent hatred of savages who stand in the path of empire, the precise mark of success is failure.

6

The imperialist, mercantilist forces which had destroyed Quaker efforts to save the Indian for civilization had, in fact, been moving everywhere in the American colonies. As it developed, official British policy carne to treat the Indian not so much in terms of civilization as of trade. In the western parts of the middle colonies and in the colonies to the south of Virginia, traders were officially encouraged to keep up good relations with the Indians, and settlers were by and large told to keep off Indian lands. Inevitably settlers followed traders onto Indian lands or traders were dishonest; inevitably there resulted such an Indian-colonial conflict as the bloody Yamasee War of 1715-1716. But Indian resistance in the long run figured for little. By the time of the French and lndian War, which was itself being fought over control of trade in America, indians were involved only as trading victims of both sides. British imperialism won out against French imperialism. British Superintendents of lndian Affairs in the North and in the South were appointed in the middle 1750's; control of Indian affairs was thus centralized and the future of the lndian trade secured. But still traders were dishonest and Indian lands were encroached upon by settlers. Affairs got out of hand once more in Pontiac's Conspiracy of 1763-1765. The record is one of quarrels, treaties, stop-gap measures to keep the peace, inter-colonial squabbles over Indian trade and Indian lands, and the beginnings of what was to be an inexorable progress westward.

The problem, then, became one of understanding the Indian, not as one to be civilized and to be lived with, but rather as one whose nature and whose way of life was an obstacle to civilized progress westward. What was observed was that the virtues of high civilization, as well as its vices, destroyed savage life, destroyed what could be frankly admitted to be savage virtues. How explain this paradox of the admitted incompatibility of admitted virtues ? This is the problem of the savage as it comes to exist for colonial Americans towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Their

achievement is that they begin to state the problem clearly and objectively, to think not only of possible likenesses between the savage and the civilized, but of necessary differences. So stated, the problem was to be handed on to Americans after 1775 and then to be solved in such a way as to form a grand rationale for the progress of American civilization over what was called American savagism.

7

In Robert Beverly's History of the Present State of Virginia (1705), there is the first attempt by a colonial American to write a "complete" account of the nature of the Indian.77 After tracing the history of seventeenth-century Indian-white relations in Book I of his History , and emphasizing throughout that the English were equally responsible with the Indians for the bloodiness of those relations, Beverly moves, in Book III, to a synoptic account "Of the Indians, their Religion, Laws, and Customs, in War and Peace." He details, to use his headings, Persons and Dress, Marriages and Children, Town Buildings and Fortifications, Cooking and Food, Travelling, Reception, and Entertainment, Learning and Language, War and Peace, Religion and Worship, Diseases and Cures, Sports and Pastimes, Laws and Authority, Treasure and Riches, and Crafts. The rich details are presented as objectively as Beverly can manage, drawn from observation and the best authorities, and are treated systematically, so we would say, as they range from appearance through material culture to institutions and customs.

Beverly's main concern is to understand the Indians as natural men. Yet he is not willing wholly to condemn them for being natural men. He is especially pleased to record certain parallels

Beverly's account of the Virginia Indians was in part written to correct materials in John Oldmixon's British Empire in America (1708), which Beverly had seen in manuscript in 1703. Beverly's brother-in-law, William Byrd II, had supplied Oldmixon with materials for his account. Beverly was asked to revise the Oldmixon account, but found it not worth revising. In his British Empire Oldmixon speaks disparagingly of Beverly, but nonetheless borrows verbatim from him. See Louis B. Wright, ed. The Present State of Virginia (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1947), pp. xvii, 349.

between savage life and classical, heroic life. He notes, for example, that lndian cooking and lndian food resemble those of the Spartans, and observes of the wondrous custom of offering maidens of the village to distinguished visitors; "After this manner perhaps many of the Heroes were begotten in old times, who boasted themselves to be the Sons of some Way-faring God."78 He has his History illustrated with Gribelin's copies of De Bry's copies of John White's drawings of sixteenth-century Virginia Indians; in Gribelin's copies the original Indians have virtually been classicized out of existence; they are Spartans. Arguing against both orthodox and rationalistic religionists, Beverly decides that lndian religion is neither brutal devil-worshipping nor deistical freethinking; rather it simply is the religion of savage ignorance.

In the end, he faces the present state of the Virginia Indians as he sees it:

Thus I think I have given a succinct account of the Indians ; happy, I think, in their simple State of Nature, and in their enjoyment of Plenty, without the Curse of Labour. They have on several accounts reasons to lament the arrival of the Europeans, by whose means they seem to have lost their Felicity, as well as their Innocence. The English have taken away great part of their Country, and consequently made everything less plenty amongst them. They have introduc'd Drunkenness and Luxury amongst them, which have multiply'd their Wants, and put them upon desiring a thousand things, they never dreamt of before . . . . 79

Civilization, Christianization, even marriage of Indians and whites, remain as great hopes of saving savages for God and civilization.80 But Beverly knows that if the Indians give up their savage life, they will be giving up not only the evil, but also the good in that life.

Like Beverly, John Lawson in his New Voyage to Carolina (1708) is interested, first, in the nature of savage life and, second,

Ibid. , p. 189.

Ibid. , p. 233.

Beverly deleted mention of miscegenation in the 1722 edition of the History .

in the effect of civilization on that life. As Surveyor-General of North Carolina, Lawson travelled extensively throughout the colony, keeping a detailed journal of his travels. In the journal there is an abundance of observations on the lndian; appended to the journal, there is a lengthy, systematic account which brings together those observations.

Lawson too begins with descriptions of appearance, moves to details of material culture, and ends with a discussion of institutions—family, marriage, government, religion, and morals. His primary concern is with concrete particulars, since, he thinks, there have been published by irresponsible reporters too many second-and third-hand accounts. He does not wish to praise the Indians nor to condemn them; he is interested in seeing them for what they are. Thus he finds the Carolina Indians to be a simple people, with simple virtues and simple vices. They do not envy other men their riches or achievements; they are concerned only to develop their own abilities as warriors or hunters, to live out their lives, not fearing the death which they know must come to them. If they are cruel to their prisoners, torturing them mercilessly, it is because they know that death is the easy, natural way out, and they wish to make the way out as difficult as possible. If they are "revengeful," it is because they never forget injuries, not because they are full of such" Heats and Passions" as possess Europeans. If their religion is savage, it is because they are unenlightened aborigines, living in a cruel, hard world. And thus far Englishmen in America have brought them only death. So Lawson can sum up:

In short, they are an odd sort of People under the Circumstances they are at present, and have such uncouth Ways in their Management and Course of Living, that it seems a Miracle to us, how they bring about their Designs, as they do, when their Ways are commonly quite contrary to ours. I believe, they are, (as to this Life,) a very happy People; and were it not for the Feuds amongst themselves they would enjoy the happiest state, (in this World) of all Mankind. They met with Enemies when we came amongst them; for they are no nearer Christianity now, than they were at the first Discovery, to all Appear-

ance. They have learned several Vices of the Europeans, but not one Vertue, as I know of.81

What is to be done? Lawson is explicit:

. . . if we will admit Reason to be our Guide, she will inform us that these Indians are the freest People in the World, and so far from being Intruders upon us that we have abandoned our own Native Soil, to drive them out, and possess theirs, neither have we any true Balance in Judging of these poor Heathens, because we neither give Allowance for their Natural Disposition, nor the Sylvan Education, and strange Customs (uncouth to us) they lie under and have ever been trained up to; these are false Measures for Christians to take, and indeed no man can be reckoned a Moralist only, who will not make choice and use of better Rules to walk and act by.82

Traders must conduct their business so as to show Indians "the Steps of Vertue, and the Golden Rule, to do as we would be done by," Like Beverly before him, Lawson recommends civilization and Christianization, even intermarriage of whites and Indians. Like Beverly, he is sure that the savage can be civilized. But he sees that savage life has an integrity of its own, an integrity which is essentially different from that of the civilized life which will necessarily destroy it.

This matter of the essential integrity of savage life, for good and for bad, became increasingly the main concern of eighteenth-century Americans writing on the Indian. William Byrd II, working up his History of the Dividing Line for publication, sees the Indians as warring, cruel, sneaking, basely malicious, cunning, yet somehow valorous—in their religion as in everything, "contented with Nature as they find her."88 Cadwallader Colden, as a kind of Indian agent in New York, writes, in the second edition of his History of the Five lndian Nations (1747), of the aristocratic, cruelly domineering Iroquois, natural men who are impassioned

Lawson's History of North Carolina (Richmond, Va., 1937), pp. 251-52.

Ibid. , p. 256.

William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line , ed. William K. Boyd (Raleigh, N. C., 1929), pp. 112-23, 218-22, 306-308.

lovers of freedom and warfare, polished orators, virtually heroes out of Homer.84 The jurist-historian William Smith follows Colden in his History of the Province of New York (1757), but finds nothing ennobled in savage heroes, out of Homer or not.85 Louis Evans, writing a Brief Account of Pennsylvania (1753), takes a dim view of Indians as true republicans who will not submit to any authority except that rising out of their natural selves.86 Likewise, Benjamin Franklin, in his "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc." (1755), observes of the Indians that "their wants . . . [are] supplied by the Spontaneous Productions of Nature" and that naturally they don't want to be civilized.87 Writers in 1764 and 1765, concerned with the effects of Pontiac's Rebellion, point out that the Indian must be fought not with honorably civilized but with dishonorably savage techniques of war. Even so, they admit that savages will fight heroically to defend the simple liberty which they love.88 Indian-white difficulties were seen more and more to arise from the difference between two conceptions of the good life, a difference so great as always to force war to the death. In 1765, Lieutenant Henry Timberlake had travelled enough among the Cherokees to see the matter from the savage's point of view:

Colden's account is contained in a "Short View of the Form of Government of the Five Nations, and of their Laws, Customs, etc." which forms the introduction to the second edition of his History of the Five lndian Nations (London, 1747).

History of the Province of New-York (London, 1757), pp. 35-38.

Brief Account [1753], in L. H. Gipson, Louis Evans (Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 90-94.

I follow the text (from the Shaftesbury Papers) given in A. O. Aldridge, "Franklin's Letter on Indians and Germans," American Philosophical Society Proceedings , XIV (1950), 391-95.

Gavin Cochrane, "Treatise on the Indians of North America," Ayer Collection MS. 176 (Newberry Library, Chicago); Robert Rogers, Concise Account of North America (London 1765), pp. 205-64; William Smith, "Of the Temper and Genius of the Indians," in An Historical Account of the Expedition against the Ohio Indians [1765] (Cincinnati, 1868 [from ed. London, 1766]), pp. 95-110;; Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lieutenant Henry Timberlake [1765] (Johnson City, Tenn., 1927), pp. 75-102.

. . . who would seek to live by labour, who can live by amusement? The sole occupations of an Indian life, are hunting, and warring abroad, and lazying at home. Want is said to be the mother of industry, but their wants are supplied at an easier rate.89

Some ten years later, James Adair, a trader among the Cherokees, could go even farther than Timberlake and see savage society as the modern counterpart of Old Testament society. Trying, in his History of the American Indians , to demonstrate a grand parallel between lndian and ancient Hebrew life and thus to prove the Hebraic origin of the lndian (against the commonly accepted theory of Tartar origin), Adair prefers simple Hebraic-savage honesty to complex British-civilized corruption. Indeed, he finds in Indian life much that would be desirable in civilized British life. For Indians are governed by the "plain and honest law of nature."

. . . their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty; and when there is that equality of condition, manners, and privileges, and a constant familiarity in society, as prevails in every lndian nation, and through all our British colonies, there glows such a chearfulness and warmth of courage in each of their breasts, as cannot be described.90

But such a version of primitive nobility among the Cherokees is easily contradicted by at least one other traveller among them (and other southeastern Indians), Bernard Romans, in his Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775). Romans thinks that these savages are so much unnatural men that they must have been separately created. And as for their day-to-day lives:

But alas! What a people do we find them, a people not only rude and uncultivated, but incapable of civilization: a people that would think themselves degraded to the lowest degree, were they to imitate us in any respect whatsoever, and that look down on us and all our manners with the highest contempt: and of whom experience has taught us, that on the least opportunity they will return like the dog to

Henry Timberlake, Memoirs , p. 99.

James Adair, History of the American Indians (London, 1775), p. 379.

his vomit. See there the boasted, admired state of nature, in which these brutes enjoy and pass their time here.91

Romans' view is extreme, of course. But for him, as for all eighteenth-century colonial writers, the lndian was, as he always had been, a natural man. Now, more and more, he was seen to be deeply and perhaps permanently attached to his savage nature. All writers, Romans excepted, might still hope and trust that somehow he could be detached from that nature and brought to civilization. Yet they were beginning to see that the gap between the savage and civilized might not be so easily bridged, that, in fact, it might not be a gap but an ocean, a continent, which could never be crossed.

8

Through the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, the problem of the relation of the lndian to American life came more and more often to be stated thus. It was, in its simplest, most general terms, the problem of the relation of savage to civilized life. Savages were inextricably bound in what was to be called savagism. They might have a kind of good life in that state; for there were specifically savage virtues, natural virtues, even if there were not specifically noble savages. Yet one could not doubt that morality and virtue were everywhere essentially one and the same, if men, sprung from Adam, were everywhere essentially one and the same. How hold to a God-ordained moral absolute and to an assurance of common humanity, and still understand whatever good there might be in savage societies? How relate that good to the obviously greater good of civilized societies? How believe in two ideas of order? This was the special problem facing Americans who, from 1775 through the 1850's, tried to understand the Indians' place in American life, who at once saw and were part of the westward progress of civilization over savagism.

The American solution was worked out as an element in an idea of progress, American progress. Cultures are good, it was

Bernard Romans, Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (New York, 1775), p. 39.

held, as they allow for full realization of man's essential and absolute moral nature; and man realizes this nature as he progresses historically from a lesser to a greater good, from the simple to the complex, from savagism to civilization. Westward American progress would, in fact, be understood to be reproducing this historical progression; and the savage would be understood as one who had not and somehow could not progress into the civilized, who would inevitably be destroyed by the civilized, the lesser good necessarily giving way to the greater. Civilized men who gave in to the temptations of savagism and its simplicities would likewise be destroyed. For the Indian was the remnant of a savage past away from which civilized men had struggled to grow. To study him was to study the past. To civilize him was to triumph over the past. To kill him was to kill the past. History would thus be the key to the moral worth of cultures; the history of American civilization would thus be conceived of as three-dimensional, progressing from past to present, from east to west, from lower to higher.

As this idea of civilized progress came to be an article of American belief, so did the idea of savagism from which it took substance and to which it gave strength. It was an idea of progress which came into being as Americans were moved to consider their own life as it might relate to Indian life; to understand that relationship practically, theoretically, and symbolically; and to act in accordance with that understanding. Americans would, in short, be obliged at one and the same time to make their destiny, to know it, and to live it out. The effort of colonial Americans had mainly been directed toward proving that savage and civilized destiny were one. That effort failed as a matter of course. And Americans after 1775, trying to know their unique destiny, would come to know it in terms of savages who could have no share in it.

Excerpted from Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mindby Roy Harvey Pearce Copyright © 1988 by Roy Harvey Pearce. Excerpted by permission.
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