American Heroes (6 page)

The Reverend Trumbull was speaking three years before Jefferson penned his famous words. He was arguing for the preservation of a condition that he believed to exist already. For he thought that property, in his own state at least, was pretty evenly divided. He wanted to keep it that way, and he believed in governmental action to preserve an even division. No one rebuked him. Indeed, many other examples of his sentiment can be found in the Revolutionary period.

But suppose the student escapes the heresy that might grow from a projection of Trumbull's sentiments. Suppose he examines the ideas of Jefferson himself. Jefferson's affirmation of human equality has informed the most profound and most needed changes in American society for more than two centuries. Yet Jefferson could lead the student to a very novel application of equality. Jefferson thought that the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead, a stirring rhetorical concept, with a strong appeal to the young. With Jefferson it was not mere rhetoric.

He thought that all men, of whatever generation, were created equal, and that therefore one generation was not bound by the actions of the preceding one. From tables of mortality he calculated that the majority of the adult inhabitants in a country at a given time would be dead in about twenty years. A generation, therefore, might be taken as lasting twenty years and should have authority only for its own duration. No government should have authority, for example, to contract debts for its successor. A people, therefore, could repudiate debts contracted by their government more than twenty years previously. Such a doctrine, if applied today, would dissolve, among other institutions, the United States government.

Benjamin Trumbull was a respected clergyman, and Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States. The study of the American past would lose some of its richness and excitement if we confined our study to such respectable and eminent persons. We cannot neglect the various movements for reform. Some of these were so extreme or eccentric that our students are not likely to be infected by them with any zeal for imitation, or if they are it will not matter. We need not, for example, worry about the kind of equality that Bronson Alcott and his followers practiced in 1843, at Fruitlands, their Utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts, where even the cows were considered equal and not subjected to the degrading exploitation of being milked.

But there was one equalitarian movement that proved successful and that still has implications in American life, the movement for abolition of slavery. The historian's understanding of this movement was transformed in the last century by the publication of the letters of Theodore Dwight Weld in 1934. Anyone studying abolitionism must begin with these letters, and in them will be found ideas to shake any tendency to look upon American history as a source of conservatism. Theodore Weld was one of the great radicals of the nineteenth century. In fact, he was almost a caricature of a radical.

By his own confession he never combed his hair from one end of the year to the other. He never had any fixed time for shaving, but waited until his beard chafed against his collar and then shaved simply to avoid the discomfort. His appearance was so appalling that children fled in terror when he entered a room. He was completely absentminded, with a very poor memory. He was constantly meeting people who greeted him affectionately but whom he could not remember having seen before. He used to peel an apple, eat the peelings, and throw the apple away. He used to go for walks in the middle of the night, in the course of which he climbed young trees, swung the top of them down to the ground, and jumped off. As a grown man, he liked to dive off high cliffs, stand on his head, scream like a loon, run on all fours. In other words, to all outward appearances he was a complete nut.

Yet this man had one of the most commanding personalities of his time. He could truthfully say in a letter to his future wife in 1838, “Those with whom I have been associated have always
deferred
and
conceded
to me—they have spontaneously
yielded
to me…. And yet so far from having a desire to be looked upon as a
leader
, to
be
a leader, I always loathed and spurned it, and from a child have always refused all office and worked in the ranks as a common soldier and yet in reality did actually control and give shape to a thousand things with which I
seemed
to have nothing to do.”

One of the things Weld gave shape to was the movement for abolition of slavery. He controlled it without seeming to, kept it from being sidetracked into ineffectual demands for other kinds of equality, made it a powerful instrument of reform. He believed in the fullest social and racial equality, but with a perfect sense of timing knew just how much to ask for at once. Though he stayed well ahead of both the Supreme Court and the election returns, he did not get so far ahead as to be out of sight. The United States began to catch up with him in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and is still moving in his direction. It is not improbable that some of us may live to see it overtake him. He was and is a dangerous man, and the dangerous part of him is housed in libraries, where he may still incite men to decency.

One might go on with a list of dangerous Americans who defied the orthodoxy of their times and could teach their readers to do likewise. One can find them in every period, from Roger Williams in the seventeenth century to Henry Thoreau in the nineteenth. But there is no need to enlarge the list. My point is that those who fear change and hope to find protection against it in American history are likely to be disillusioned. If they could control the kind of history taught in our schools and colleges, they might conceivably be successful. But while libraries exist, where students and scholars can go to the original sources and discover the facts for themselves, all efforts at control will be futile. The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books “any old time they have a mind to,” libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our life than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.

—1959

A
NYONE WHO READS VERY FAR
in the voluminous literature of the American Indian is likely to be impressed by the variety of the peoples described and exemplified. When Columbus opened the New World to Europeans, it was inhabited by people who lived under the most widely differing conditions. Their number was not great; current estimates range as low as a million for the whole of North America in 1492. But every part of the New World was inhabited. People were living in the arctic wastes of Hudson's Bay and in the tropical jungles of Central America, on the plains and in the mountains, in coastal swamps and desert basins.

Though we have given them all a single name, Indians, it is obvious that people existing under such divergent conditions must have displayed many different ways of life. You cannot behave the same way in Alaska and in Panama. New Mexico demands of humans something different from what New England does. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Indians in many different stages of what we commonly call civilization. Some tribes were farmers, others hunters. Some lived in stone houses, others in wigwams. Some wove cloth and made their clothes of it; others dressed in animal skins; and still others did not dress at all. Many of these differences were clearly the result of the natural environment: of the climate and the character of the land. It quickly becomes apparent, however, to anyone who looks closely at the Indians, that their variety is not simply a matter of adaptation to different habitats.

What are we to make, for example, of the bewildering number of Indian languages? Linguists today recognize 375. One would not suppose there were that many different habitats. It would appear that many Indians were unable to talk to their near neighbors. Actually, it seems that most of them did not want to. Even the Indians who spoke a single language were apt to be divided into a host of independent tribes, each one usually numbering no more than a few hundred individuals, who looked on all the others as undesirable aliens. In many places the tribes were in a state of open and continuous warfare.

Much of the variety displayed by the Indians might therefore be described as political in origin, a result of centuries of living in small, isolated units. This multiplicity of tribes, added to differences of habitat, will go a long way toward explaining Indian variety, but there is still another kind of difference, the source of much debate among anthropologists, and that is the tremendous variation in physical appearance and conformation. The Indians not only behaved differently and lived differently; they actually
were
different in the physical characteristics by which anthropologists have sought to differentiate the races of mankind.

I am aware that some anthropologists deny altogether the existence of different races among men, but there are many who occupy themselves with classifying people by shape of head, color of skin, length of jaw, and so on. When these scientists approach the American Indian, they find a greater variety of types than exists within the entire range of persons called white. It seems to be agreed that Columbus was not very far off in calling them all Indians, because they probably all came from Asia originally, by way of the Bering Strait, but the variety of physical types suggests that they did not all come at the same time or from the same place. Archaeological evidence suggests that they came in three surges, fifteen, ten, and five thousand years ago. The progenitors of some may have lived for a long period in the Far East. Others may have originated elsewhere and simply passed through Asia. The variety of languages and cultures, then, may be not merely the product of time and local circumstance operating on a single people. Instead, we may be dealing with people who from the beginning have differed widely.

In view of this overwhelming diversity, one may well ask whether it is at all profitable to speak, as I have proposed to do, of
the
American Indian. My first impression, after surveying the evidence was that there was no such thing as
the
American Indian and that one would do well to stop talking as though there were. But upon closer reading and further reflection, it appeared to me that the manifold peoples we call Indian did exhibit one remarkable characteristic in common: almost without exception they refused to be absorbed into the civilization offered them by the people who have appropriated the name American, the people who settled the eastern seaboard of the United States and from there pressed westward to the Pacific. For our purposes it will avoid confusion if we call these invaders the English Americans. The Indian refused to become an English American. The history of most other invasions during historic times shows invaders and invaded mingling together, the one absorbing the other, or the two joining to produce a composite civilization. The very Englishmen who became Americans were the product of many different mixtures that had resulted from the successive conquests of England by Anglo-Saxons, Romans, Danes, and Normans. The invasion of America had no such result; the Indian refused to mix. One might have supposed that among the many different tribes, some would have joined the invaders and others not, but this was not the case. The Indians were almost unanimous in preferring their own way of life to that of the new arrivals. And for the historian this is perhaps the most important single fact, the fact that justifies considering the Indian in the singular instead of the plural.

Of course, part of the Indian's refusal to mingle must be blamed on the English American: it was a failure to absorb as well as a failure to be absorbed. The French in Canada, though they never really assimilated the Indians, came closer to it than the English Americans. The French lived with the Indians, married Indian women, taught them to say prayers, and were able to bring a fair number of Indians into a moderately French manner of living. The Spanish were still more successful, though perhaps because they were dealing with a different, and for the most part more technologically advanced, set of Indians. The Spaniards were able to devise colonial institutions that incorporated these Indians. Often, to be sure, they incorporated them as slaves, but slavery can be an effective, even though a crude and cruel, way of absorbing another people. Perhaps, then, the trouble lay with the American rather than the Indian. It will be worth examining briefly what kind of efforts the Americans made to absorb the people whose territories they invaded.

Absorption, if successful, would undoubtedly have meant, first of all, Christianization. The English Americans considered Christianity to be the most important single advantage of their civilization over the barbarism of the Indians. To convert an Indian into a Christian would be to convert him in the most important possible way, from a savage to a civilized man. To undertake this task was the announced purpose of many English settlers in coming to America, and there were a number who stood fast in their intentions after arriving here. The number was small, in comparison with those deployed by the Spanish and the French, but the measure of success achieved was even smaller. The French and Spanish enrolled hundreds of Indians in the Catholic Church for every one claimed by English Protestants.

The reason, according to the English, was that the French and Spanish missionaries were content to set the Indians to kneeling, kissing the cross, and reciting a few unintelligible prayers. English Protestantism, and especially the Puritan brand of it, demanded a higher standard of piety. The Indians must not only say the right words; they must know what they meant. This evidently proved an insuperable obstacle to the Puritan missionaries. It was either impossible to make the Indians understand Puritanism, or if you did get them to understand, to make them like it. A succession of notable men from John Eliot to Jonathan Edwards labored long and hard in the attempt but with pitifully small results.

It was not that the Indians were intolerant or bigoted. They were quite willing to listen to stories about the Englishman's God, but they showed a surprising indifference to the rewards and punishments that He was said to dole out. Henry Timberlake, a lieutenant serving with British forces in the Carolinas during the French and Indian War, says of the Cherokees that in religious matters every one of them felt “at liberty to think for himself,” with the result that a great diversity of religious opinion existed among them. Timberlake tells of the efforts of a Reverend Mr. Martin to convert this tribe. Martin, he says, having preached “till both his audience and he were heartily tired, was told at last, that they knew very well, that, if they were good, they should go up; if bad, down; that he could tell no more; that he had long plagued them with what they no ways understood, and that they desired him to depart the country.” It was this attitude that led Benjamin Gale of Connecticut, at about the same time, to say that he would as soon undertake to convert a wolf as an Indian, unless the Indian were first civilized.

Gale, of course, was begging the question. Christianity was the major part of the civilization that had to be imparted to the Indian. But many Americans took the same view, that Christianization should not be attempted until the Indians became familiar with other aspects of civilized life. How, then, were they to gain this familiarity?

The method most commonly suggested in the colonial period was to send the Indian to college. By passing through the purifying rigors of Harvard, Yale, Brown, or Dartmouth, the uncouth Indian would begin to look and think like an Englishman. If even a few could be persuaded to undergo this experience, they might then go back home and set the fashion for their countrymen. One of the essential steps in this collegiate method was to get the Indians indoors. If you could put them inside a house and shut the windows, they might begin to act the way other people do who live inside and sleep on beds. This possibility seems to have captured the imagination of Englishmen in the mother country who wished to contribute to the ultimate salvation of lost Indian souls. At least we find that enterprising college presidents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were able to carry on successful money-raising campaigns in England in order to build dormitories for the prospective Indian students.

Unfortunately college education proved even less palatable to the Indian than Christianity. When it was possible to get an Indian boy to go to college, it would not be long before he cut his classes and lit out for the hills. Those who stayed behind seldom survived, and when they fell victims to collegiate food and overheated rooms, their parents showed an unreasonable disposition to blame the president. As a result, the buildings were quickly turned over to deserving English American boys, who could stand the strain of college life. The Indian stayed in the woods.

Another possible method of bringing civilization to the Indian was marriage. This was a mode in which, of course, the French excelled. A study of the relations between French and Indians in eastern Canada shows that the Indian girls became so eager for French husbands that they jilted the Indian boys in a wholesale manner and upset all the traditional patterns of tribal behavior. The English frequently told themselves to go and do likewise, but either they lacked the skill of the French in these matters, or else their hearts were not in it. The English government in 1719 went so far as to offer ten pounds and fifty acres of land in Nova Scotia to any Englishman who married an Indian girl or any English girl who married an Indian man. But few couples appeared to claim the reward.

When Englishmen traveled among the Indians on trading, or surveying, or hunting expeditions, they frequently accepted the hospitality of the Indians. And since the Indian notions of hospitality were generous, the guest was frequently provided with one of the comelier maidens of the tribe. Sometimes these lighthearted unions proved of more than passing duration, but if so the children of the couple usually grew up as Indians. John Lawson, himself a surveyor in North Carolina, tells us in his account of that province, that the Indians there regarded children as belonging to their mother, and therefore, he says, “it ever seems impossible for the Christians to get their Children (which they have by these Indian Women) away from them.” On the other hand, he says, “we often find, that English Men and other Europeans that have been accustomed to the Conversation of these Savage Women and their Way of Living, have been so allured with that careless sort of Life, as to be constant to their Indian Wife, and her Relations, so long as they lived, without ever desiring to return again amongst the English,…of which sort I have known several.” It seems altogether probable that marriage was an avenue along which English Americans went native more often than Indians became civilized.

The French married the Indians; the Spaniards enslaved them. If the English could not pursue the French method with enthusiasm, they were more assiduous in the Spanish one. Warfare has generally provided the justification for slavery. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the victorious party in a just war—and what war is not just in the eyes of the victor?—thought itself entitled to enslave its captured enemies. On this basis the settlers of America enslaved any Indians who made unsuccessful war against them. But the Indians were as unwilling to accept this blessing as any other the white man offered them. It was a fact that Indians did not make good slaves: they were too unruly. That fact did not prevent the English Americans from enslaving them. The Puritans of New England were as ready to do so as the planters of South Carolina. But neither in New England nor in South Carolina did people want to
keep
Indian slaves. Instead, they packed them aboard ships and sold them in the West Indies like so many wooden nutmegs. And lest this traffic should recoil upon themselves, the people of Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting the importation of Indian slaves, on the grounds that Indians were all “of a malicious, surley and revengeful spirit, rude and insolent in their behaviour, and very ungovernable.” Thus the enslaved Indians found no home among their captors, and slavery did not prove a successful means of introducing Indians into American civilization.