The United States of Paranoia (4 page)

More than half of the Deer Island prisoners died that winter. Several of the remainder were enslaved. And still that wasn’t enough for certain settlers, so convinced were they that all the Indians were in league with one another. After some Nipmuc warriors burned the town of Medfield, the magistrate Daniel Gookin reported sadly, it “gave opportunity to the vulgar to cry out, ‘Oh, come, let us go down to Deer Island, and kill all the praying Indians.’ They could not come at the enemy Indians, for they were too crafty and subtle for the English; therefore they would have wreaked their rage upon the poor unarmed Indians our friends.”
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The fact that whole towns could be filled with native converts to Christianity cuts against the idea that the Indians and the English lived in diametrically opposed worlds. So does the fact that several unconverted tribes took the colonists’ side in the war. So does the fact that Harvard allowed John Sassamon to study there, and that Harvard’s 1650 charter described it as a place for “the education of English and Indian youth.”
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So does the fact that an Indian known to his people as Wassausmon would answer to the name “John Sassamon” in the first place; and, for that matter, that a sachem called Metacom would adopt the name “Philip.” Behind those black-and-white tales of the Enemy Outside lay a much messier reality, one where English and Indian worlds overlapped, settlers and natives found common ground, and there was an ongoing process of assimilation and exchange.

When I use the word
assimilation
, I don’t simply mean that Indians adopted European ways. The colonists absorbed a lot from the Indians too. When the men who built the colonies feared the frontier, they were afraid of more than just Indian attacks. They knew that frontier life lured people away from the discipline of life in a Puritan town, and they were concerned that men and women of European descent might feel the pull of the Indian’s ways, which they associated with sexual license and spiritual degeneration.

Thanks to the land available in the wilderness, Increase Mather complained, people “that profess themselves Christians have forsaken Churches, and Ordinances.” Away from strong social controls, frontiersmen put worldly self-interest above their devotion to God, trading arms with the Indians without any thought for the greater good. “[W]ould ever men have sold Guns, and Powder, and Shot, to such faithless and bloody creatures, if a lust of Covetousness had not too far prevailed with them?” Mather asked.
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“How many that although they are
Christians
in name, are no better then
Heathens
in heart, and in Conversation? How many Families that live like profane Indians without any
Family prayer
?” Whole towns, he declared, “have lived from year to year, without any publick Invocation of the Name of God, and without his Word.”
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Those anxieties were fuel for the Puritans’ paranoia. When societies are still acquiring a sense of identity, Slotkin suggests, “the simplest means of defining or expressing the sense of such a norm is by rejecting some other group whose character is deemed to be the opposite.”
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For many New Englanders, the Indians filled that role, with the undisciplined, Indianized frontiersmen forming a potential fifth column. The temptations of native culture had to be resisted, and clear lines were needed between the community of the devout and the hostile outer world.
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The Puritans weren’t the only colonists struggling with the Enemy Outside. The fear of unlikely Indian conspiracies flared up in settlements ranging from Quaker Pennsylvania to Anglican Virginia. In 1689, it sparked a revolution in Maryland.

A Protestant rebellion in England had deposed the Catholic king James II just a year before. In Maryland—the only colony in English America to be ruled by Catholics, though it had a predominantly Protestant population—a rumor started to circulate that “the great men of Maryland hath hired the Seneca Indians to kill the protestants.”
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Ten thousand Seneca Indians were said to be gathering at the head of the Patuxent River; when that army turned out to be a fiction, a new report claimed that nine thousand were gathered at the mouth of the river and another nine hundred had already invaded a settlement. One man swore that he had overheard some drunken Eastern Shore Indians blabbing that a man on the Provincial Council had hired them to attack the colonists. The rumors cooled down for a spell when the invasion didn’t materialize, only to flare up again when the colony’s government failed to recognize the new king and queen of England. A Protestant agitator named John Coode raised an army, seized the State House, and installed himself as the new governor of Maryland.
31
The colony then banned Catholic worship, a restriction that would not be lifted until after the American
Revolution
.

As with the French soldiers who bedeviled Cotton Mather, this was a case of an alleged alliance between the Indians and a white foe. Usually such alliances involved one Enemy Outside joining forces with another. The Maryland rumors were different in that they combined the Enemy Outside with a cabal in the highest reaches of the government—in our terms, the Enemy Above. The fear of the
Indian
/Catholic conspiracy had at least as much to do with resentment of Maryland’s autocratic regime as it did with the fear of an external attack. A similar tale took hold around the same time in the Dominion of New England: An unpopular governor, Edmund Andros, was accused of conspiring with the Wabanaki, deliberately sending white troops to be slaughtered by the Indians. (In one soldier’s words, his comrades wondered whether Andros had “brought them theither to be a sacrifice to their heathen Adversaries.”)
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As in Maryland, such reports fed a revolt, and in 1689 Andros was
deposed
.

From Isaac Kelso,
Danger in the Dark
, 1855

But the Indians’ alleged allies were usually based outside the community’s gates. At different moments, Philip was said to be a pawn or partner of an Old World power, of a Catholic conspiracy, or of a Quaker conspiracy. He was hardly the only Indian whose purported plots were supposedly linked to the machinations of white allies. In 1653, while England and the Netherlands were at war in Europe, the colonists of New England looked suspiciously at the colonists in New Netherland. A belief took hold that, in Increase Mather’s words, “there was an horrid Conspiracy amongst the Indians throughout this Land to cut off all the English, and that they were animated thereto by the Dutch.” (The evidence for the plot, Mather conceded, was “vague and uncertain.”)
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In 1700, in turn, the former New Netherland—now controlled by the English and known as New York—barred all Catholic clergy from the colony, citing among its reasons the Church’s alleged efforts “to Debauch, Seduce and Withdraw the
Indians
from their due Obedience unto His Majesty; and to excite and stir them up to Sedition, Rebellion and Open Hostility.”
34
In 1736, the founder of Georgia claimed casually that “the French and Spaniards” were “labouring to debauch [the Indians] from us.”
35
In 1755, part of Pennsylvania went into an uproar after news spread that a “parsell of Indians” had gathered a few miles from the local Catholic chapel.
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The fretful colonists didn’t worry that the Indians were about to attack the building. They worried that the Indians and the Church were in cahoots.

Catholic conspiracies are, in fact, the second most significant form taken by the Enemy Outside. The pope was perceived as a master manipulator; priests and nuns were seen as his corrupt and licentious lieutenants. Anti-Catholic sentiment has deep European roots, but it found a new shape in North America, particularly after independence. Nineteenth-century nativists believed that the Church was plotting to impose its hierarchy on an egalitarian American republic. If Indian conspiracies embodied the settlers’ fear of the anarchic New World, papal conspiracies embodied their fears of the aristocratic Old World they had left behind.

Yet both Enemies Outside were closely linked to anxieties about Satan, sexuality, and ethnic impurity, and the two were often imagined as allied. There was even an anti-Catholic equivalent of the Indian captivity story, with books like Maria Monk’s
Awful Disclosures
(1836) claiming that convents were prisons filled with sex slaves. Under the influence of such tracts, Protestant Americans sometimes invaded the institutions and attempted to free the nuns.
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So not every Enemy Outside had red skin. The Enemy Outside isn’t defined by any particular origin; he’s defined by the fact that you think he’s out there trying to come in. The details vary at different times and places, but several characteristics recur. There is the image of the world outside your gates as an unfriendly wilderness where evil forces dwell. There is the proclivity to see those forces as a centralized conspiracy guided by a puppet master or a small cabal. There is the fear of the border zone where cultures mix, the suspicion that aliens at home are agents of a foreign power, and the fear that your community might be remade in the enemy’s image. And there is the tendency to see this conflict in terms of a grand, apocalyptic
struggle
—if not literally against Satan, then against something deeply evil.
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If you didn’t have to be a Native American to be seen as the Enemy Outside, you didn’t have to be a colonist to suspect the Enemy Outside was on the prowl. Some Indians of colonial New England believed in a malevolent creature they called Cheepie, a spirit whose apparitions were thought to bring disease and death. According to one tribesman, Cheepie resembled an “Englishman, clothed with hat and coat, shoes and stockings.” When the folklorist Richard Dorson repeated that statement, he found a lesson in it: Perhaps the Indians, like the white man, “equated the Devil with their enemy.”
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For the United States, the Indian wars effectively ended in 1877, when U.S. forces fought several Sioux tribes, seized the gold-rich Black Hills, and completed the conquest of the Plains Indians. Over the previous two centuries, the colonies and then the independent United States had subdued a series of tribes—or, if you were tuned more closely to cultural myths than to the facts, a series of superchiefs, from Philip of the Wampanoag to Geronimo of the Apache. The end of the Black Hills War didn’t put an end to the fighting between the white man and the red, but from that point forward the battles would consist of rebellions by the natives and crackdowns by the government, not clashes between independent nations.

But the fact that the most notorious Enemy Outside was no longer actually outside the country’s borders didn’t mean the whites were ready to retire their Indian conspiracy stories. When a millennial faith called the Ghost Dance started sweeping through Native America in 1889, many officials and reporters were already primed to perceive it as a sign of trouble. And when the Ghost Dance was embraced by Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Sioux leader who had fought in the Black Hills War, the conspiracy story took over: Out in the wilderness, in strange ceremonies, the aliens were plotting an attack.

Sitting Bull had already been cast in the role of superchief, literally playing the part when he went on tour with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West troupe. (The show touted the Indian as the man behind the death of General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In fact, he probably wasn’t present at the battle at all.) It is true that in 1867, Sitting Bull had been anointed the supreme chief of the seven Lakota tribes. But though that sounded impressive, several important tribes that he allegedly led—and even some of Sitting Bull’s own Hunkpapa people—had never recognized his authority.

Still, even as late as 1890, if there was any area where Sitting Bull and his Caucasian foes agreed, it was, in the words of the historian Rex Alan Smith, that both “believed Sitting Bull to be the most important and powerful Sioux alive.”
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He was charismatic, mysterious, and intransigent, an imposing figure with an even more imposing reputation. When the children’s writer Elbridge Streeter Brooks described Sitting Bull in a novel about Little Bighorn, he presented the old Indian as a manipulator operating behind the scenes, with the Midnight Strong Hearts, a prestigious order of Sioux warriors, recast in conspiratorial terms:

“Why, Sitting Bull is the Master of the Strong Hearts; and they don’t give in, I can tell you.”

“The Master of the Strong Hearts?” Jack was certainly learning many new things, and each one only increased his curiosity. “What’s that?” he queried; “some sort of a secret society?”

“That’s just where you’re right, sonny,” the squaw-man assented with an emphatic nod. “The Strong Hearts are just the biggest,
secretest
, most consarnedly bravest and determined of all the Sioux societies. And their main point, in all their doings is just this: never to back down, back out, or give up, when once they’ve determined to do anything. And that’s what the Bull meant. . . . I never knew him to lead on the war-path never. He leaves the real fighting to some of the other big chiefs—like Red Cloud, or Gall, or Iron Hawk, or Rain-in-the-Face. The Bull, he just makes medicine for the boys, and they pitch in and fight, while he dreams things out for ’em and eggs ’em on. . . .”
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