Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (62 page)

The lot of the governors of such outposts, therefore, was not a happy one. Dependent on remittances of money that arrived only irregularly from the New Spain treasury and were in any event inadequate, the governors of eighteenthcentury Florida - all of them military men, who lacked experience of government and could call on none of the administrative support systems enjoyed by the viceroys of New Spain and Peru - were expected to fight off attacks by the English and the French, strengthen the defences, maintain the missions and the clergy, and turn this outpost of empire into a going concern. Not surprisingly the colony languished, staggering from crisis to crisis, and surviving, if barely, with the help of small permanent garrisons, sporadic injections of defence subsidies, and illicit trade.97

There was an obvious contrast, therefore, between these Spanish northern borderlands, envisaged primarily as buffer zones against European rivals and hostile Indians, and the border regions of the British mainland colonies which were pushing forward in response to the pressure of colonists hungry for land or anxious to extend their trading contacts with the Indian peoples of the American interior. Yet for the British, too, strategic requirements became an increasingly important consideration in the forward movement of the frontiers, as they looked to ways of responding to the growing threat posed by France's empire in America. The founding of the new colony of Georgia on the southern flank of South Carolina in the 1730s may have been inspired by the philanthropic ideals of James Oglethorpe and his friends, but it also met an urgent strategic need by creating a buffer against the expansionist tendencies of the French and Spanish settlements.98

London, however, was as reluctant as Madrid to take on long-term military commitments in outlying frontier regions.99 The imperial authorities therefore left it to the individual colonies to settle their border arrangements as best they could. Some, like New York and Pennsylvania, resorted to diplomacy to remain on good terms with the Indians. Others made attempts to improve their military capability. As it became necessary for larger numbers of soldiers to travel greater distances, the colonial militias began to be supplemented by volunteer forces, paid and provisioned by colonial assemblies. Advancing frontiers called for extended means of protection.'°°

Irrespective of the different motivations, military, economic, demographic and religious, that were driving frontiers forward - motivations that varied within the colonial empires themselves, as well as between them - those of British and Spanish America possessed certain common characteristics. Even where protected by a string of forts and garrisons, like the arc of Spanish forts running from the top of the Gulf of California across southern Arizona and on to El Paso and San Antonio,101 the frontiers were not boundary lines but porous border regions - lands neither fully settled by, nor integrated into, the colonial European societies that aspired to possess them, nor as yet wholly abandoned by their indigenous inhabitants. As such, they were zones of contact, conflict and interaction on the periphery of empire, where the requirements of survival on both sides found expression in violence and brutality, but also in co-operation and mutual accommodation.

As far as the Indians were concerned, these frontiers were first and foremost frontiers of disease. Wherever the Europeans - sometimes perhaps even a single lone trader - came into contact with an Indian population hitherto protected by a degree of isolation, the ravages of disease were all too prone to follow The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico may have numbered some 80,000 when the Spaniards reached the banks of the Rio Grande in 1598. By 1679 their numbers were down to an estimated 17,000, and fourteen years later to 14,000, following the revolt. 102 A million Indians may have been living east of the Mississippi on the eve of the English settlement of North America. By the end of the colonial period only 150,000 were left. A sudden lethal attack of smallpox or influenza could wipe out an entire people. Alternatively, recurring bouts of epidemics over two or three generations could lead to a similar disaster, played out in slow motion.103 With their tightly packed concentrations of converts, the Spanish missions were breeding-grounds for disease,104 and warfare completed the work that epidemics left undone. Not surprisingly, `the Indians generally choose to withdraw, as white people draw near them', as an English official remarked in 1755.10'

Consequently, the frontier regions were often regions of withdrawal and retreat, and not only for Indians desperate to escape the scourge of European-born diseases. The settlers, too, might be forced to pull back in the face of Indian attacks, as in New England during King Philip's War, or in the Spanish mission provinces of Guale and East Texas. The advance of the European frontier may have been inexorable, but it was never irreversible. Yet even as frontiers, whether British or Spanish, shifted to and fro, new human relationships were all the time being forged, as a consequence of coercion, mutual necessity, or a combination of the two.

Coercion was obviously at its highest in areas with a military presence, like New Mexico. Here Spanish soldiers, who were in effect soldier-settlers, were dominant figures in an evolving and highly stratified society, consisting of missionaries, a sparse settler population living in three or four towns and a number of farming villages, and large numbers of subjugated Pueblo Indians. The `Kingdom of New Mexico', as it was officially styled, possessed a small landowning nobility of fifteen to twenty families, some of them descended from the conquistadores and settlers of the late sixteenth century. Priding themselves on their Spanish ancestry, which was much less pure than they liked to boast, they lorded it over a population of mestizo landed peasants, and the so-called genizaros - janissaries. These were either detribalized Indians taken in `just wars' and pressed into domestic and military service, or captive Indians acquired from other tribes. New Mexico's was a rough, callous and highly status-conscious society of conquerors and conquered, dependent for its survival on coerced Indian labour, and constantly oscillating between barter and warfare with the surrounding Indian peoples.106

But it was also a society in which whites and Indians, even if nominally in the ranks of the excluded, found themselves in daily contact, and in which such Spanish blood as existed was being constantly diluted as a consequence of marriage and concubinage, so that by the end of the seventeenth century almost the entire population was racially mixed.107 In New Mexico, as in all the borderlands of empire in the Americas, exploitation and interdependence threw together peoples of very different background and traditions to create a world, if not necessarily of shared blood, at least of shared experience. A fort protecting the Spanish or English `frontier' might be a symbol of oppression to some and of protection to others, but at the same time it was likely to be a meetingpoint for the exchange of goods and services and for human intercourse. In this way, each party learnt something of the customs and characteristics of the other, and began adapting to new contacts and conditions, and to an environment that itself was being transformed as it was brought within the ambiguous category of `frontier' territory.

Propinquity and mutual need served as an encouragement to move towards a `middle ground' in which the actions and behaviour of both parties would become mutually comprehensible. 10' Some trod this middle ground with greater ease than others - traders, for instance, who were liable to take an Indian `wife'; interpreters, whether European or Indian, who had learnt the other's language; men and women who had once been captives, and had acquired some understanding of the ways of an alien society during the years of their captivity.109 Trade was among the strongest of inducements to search out a middle ground; and trade, which came to occupy a central place in the lives of the Indian societies of North America as they were drawn into contact with Europeans, became a prime instrument for securing the Indian alliances that were indispensable for the Europeans as they fought among themselves for hegemony. Colonial officials, therefore, in pursuit of such alliances were also liable to become denizens of the middle ground, like the trader and army contractor William Johnson (1715-74), who negotiated with the Six Nations on behalf of New York, took a Mohawk common-law wife, and in 1755 was appointed superintendent of Northern Indian affairs. 110

The middle ground, however, was treacherous territory, where a false step could prove fatal. Violence, after all, was a permanent fact of life over large stretches of the borderlands of empire. The individualism that featured so prominently in Frederick Jackson Turner's vision of the frontier and its impact on the evolution of the United States was therefore tempered by a powerful urge towards mutual assistance and co-operation among European settlers who were seeking to carve out new lives for themselves in the isolation of an unfamiliar and frequently intimidating environment.11' Many settlers must have seen themselves living, in the words of William Byrd in 1690, at `the end of the world', although not many of them did so in the relative comfort of a Virginia plantation."- In Pennsylvania and the Appalachian borderlands, home was more likely to be a cabin of roughhewn logs, the type of housing favoured by Scandinavian and German settlers in the region, and later adopted by the Scots-Irish immigrants."' Not surprisingly, these settlers handed together for help. Almost within earshot of their settlements and clearings lay `Indian Country', whose inhabitants they contemplated with a mixture of unease, contempt and fear. How many of them, like the Massachusetts minister, Stephen Williams, taken captive as a child, must have passed restless nights filled with `disquieting dreams, about Indians'?14

If all frontiers in America shared certain common features, they were also very different. William Byrd's frontier in Virginia was not that of Stephen Williams in Massachusetts, and neither was it the frontier of New Mexico or Brazil. While their very remoteness from the major centres of settlement made them laws unto themselves, this does not mean to say that they shared a common lawlessness. Garrisons and missions imposed their own forms of discipline. There was, too, the communal discipline that was all too often needed for survival, and a selfdiscipline that might be instilled by religion or prompted by the desire to maintain standards of gentility in regions that looked out over a `barbarian' world. At the same time, there was a widespread perception in the more settled parts of the colonies that it was the dregs of humanity who moved into the frontier regions, ,the Scum of the Earth, and Refuse of Mankind', as the settlers of the Carolina Backcountry were described by a contemporary 115 Scots-Irish immigrants were regarded in Pennsylvania as turbulent and disorderly people, squatting on land to which they had no legal right, and `hard neighbours to the Indians'."6 Many of these frontiersmen lived in conditions of abject poverty. As happened in Spanish New Mexico or in those parts of North America where the land speculators were the first to arrive, a frontier region could just as easily be a setting for the most acute inequality as for the equality later hailed as the defining characteristic of frontier life.'17

Over time, the ethos of the settled regions of the colonial world in America was more likely to impress itself on the borderlands than was the ethos of the borderlands to impress itself on the heartlands of colonial societies. This became all the more true as colonies were consolidated, elites emerged, and eighteenth-century European concepts of refinement spread to the Americas. By the middle of the eighteenth century country stores were making European commodities available even in remote frontier areas of North America.11' The very fact that frontiers were advancing into territory formerly occupied by heathen and `barbarians' itself represented a gain for European notions of civility.

The contrast between these claimed or reclaimed regions and the `Indian Country' lying beyond them was, to white settlers, both obvious and painful, and created a genre of literature which was to enjoy vast popularity in British North America - the narratives of captivity among the Indians. While accounts of the Indian wars, like Increase Mather's A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England (1676), could always be assured of a wide readership,'" their popularity would be eclipsed by that of personal narratives recounting the experiences of those who had been held prisoner by the Indians. The number of such captives ran into the thousands - 750 are recorded as having been taken by Indians to French Canada alone between 1677 and 1750.12220 Many captives were in due course redeemed, but others never returned, either because they died in captivity, or, more alarmingly, because they had assumed the life-style of their captors, and, for one reason or another, were unwilling to abandon it. These were the `White Indians', many of them taken captive as children, and so successfully assimilated into Indian societies that they forgot their European ways and even their native tongue.''

To white settlers imbued with fears of cultural degeneration brought about by contact with the Indian122 it was deeply disturbing that their own kith and kin should go so far as to choose barbarism over civilization. Yet this appeared to be happening with unnerving frequency as men, women and children were taken captive during the French and Indian wars of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For Puritan New England in particular, voluntary defections to the Indians raised fundamental questions about the character and the efficacy of the errand into the wilderness of their forebears and themselves. 12' To some extent they found their answer in captivity narratives - morality tales, evoking in vivid detail the dangers and ambiguities of a frontier existence, offering solemn warnings, and providing the spiritual consolation that came from seeing the dangers overcome.

Captives might well face torture and death, but they also faced the more subtle danger represented by the temptation of turning their backs on a Christian way of life. The most popular and famous of all the captivity narratives was The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson's graphic account of her life among the Indians.124 Running through three editions in Massachusetts and another in London in 1682, the year of its publication, it conveyed an appropriately inspiring message of how the grace of God enabled a lone but pious woman in the clutches of `atheisticall proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, bruitish (in one word diabolical) creatures', to survive the many adversities and dangers that beset her. Many other such accounts would follow, containing elevating stories of redeemed captives to set against the distressing news that some, like Eunice Williams (renamed A'ongote by her Mohawk captors), obstinately chose to remain unredeemed.125