Penguin History of the United States of America (13 page)

It may also be considered that it is only in the last fifty years or so that regular association with animals of many kinds – horses and cows as well
as dogs and cats – has ceased to be universal. Today, it is easy enough for the white man to see red men, black men, yellow men, as human, for their likeness to himself strikes him instantly, their likeness to animals not at all, since he does not know many of these. The reverse was true during the settlement of America. The pre-Darwinian Englishman, supposing himself to be a little lower than the angels, his perceptions stultified by a narrow creed and culture, saw the differences between himself and other races as vastly important, and the same went for their likeness to the brute creation. The African was clearly a beast of burden, and might be enslaved; the Indian was a hunting beast, and might be shot (especially since on the whole he made poor material for slavery). The note of contempt (Prospero on Caliban) runs right through the literature and cannot be missed. It is to be found in Hakluyt (‘more brutish than the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly than that unmanned wild country, which they range rather than inhabit’), in eighteenth-century Virginia (‘Indians and Negroes… they scarcely consider as of the human species; so that it is almost impossible, in cases of violence, or even murder, committed on those unhappy people by any of the planters, to have the delinquents brought to justice’), Pennsylvania (‘the animals vulgarly called Indians’) and even in the enlightened nineteenth century, when the coming of Darwin merely encouraged the whites to hold that the law of the survival of the fittest had condemned the ‘Vanishing Indian’ to the usual fate of obsolete species (‘they do accept the teaching that manifest destiny will drive the Indians from the earth,’ said Bishop Whipple of Minnesota in 1881. ‘The inexorable has no tears or pity at the cries of anguish of the doomed race.’).

Mercifully, the time has come when, as Senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey hoped in 1830, ‘it is not now seriously denied that the Indians are men, endowed with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves’. Progress is possible. But its very fact makes the past more difficult to understand imaginatively. White contempt for the red man now seems so absurd as to be almost incredible. We can see that over a period of millennia the Indians, making use of very limited resources, had in every part of the Americas evolved ways of life that were almost perfectly adjusted to the environment, and in many cases held out high hopes of future evolution. More, we can see that in some respects – and those which were most universally to be found among the tribes – Indian culture too was superior to the European.

Thus, the idea of co-operation was central to Indian life, as competition is to ours. The Indians were highly individualistic, and vied with each other in the performance of brave deeds. They adored dressing up, and cherished favourite horses, favourite guns. And among the far tribes of the North-West there was even competition in the acquisition and display of personal wealth.’
¹⁸
But their essential social belief was one of property-as-use. The Indians shared what they had, especially food: it was noted that while there was any to share, all shared it; when there was none, all starved. Most of all, they shared the land. The tribe had its territory. Any member might set up his lodge on any part of it and there grow his corn. The Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek) explained in 1881:

Improvements can be and frequently are sold, but the land itself is not a chattel. Its occupancy and possession are indispensable to holding it, and its abandonment for two years makes it revert to the public domain. In this way every one of our citizens is assured of a home.

The Indian could no more understand the Europeans’ conception of perpetual personal title than they could understand his conception of none. Nor could he understand the accumulating itch. Why did the People Greedily Grasping for Land want more acres than they needed to grow food on? Why did they build houses that would outlast their occupants? Why were Indians called thieves for helping themselves to what they needed, as they always had? Above all, why, even when he had acquired it honestly, did the white man insist that land he had bought became his exclusively, and for all time? How could he make such a claim? It was ridiculous. ‘Sell a country!’ exclaimed Tecumseh. ‘Why not sell the air, the clouds, and the great sea?… Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?’
¹⁹

The issue of land cannot be shirked. Although, from one point of view, the mystery of the relations between the English settlers and the North American Indians cannot ever be understood, any more than any other great evil (for why should men oppress each other?), the temptation to which the settlers succumbed is all too plain, and all too familiar. It was the usual temptation to believe that what we want with passion must be right; and that the means of obtaining it cannot be sinful. The passion for landed property, that guarantee of independence, prosperity and prestige, which, as we have seen, uprooted the English and carried them across the Atlantic to Virginia and New England, also carried them and those who came to join them into the practice of atrocious crimes. Land-hunger is too weak a phrase, for hunger can be sated. It were better called land-lust: it was as insatiable as the sea. Like all great desire, it was fertile in rationalizations which satisfied those who felt it, if no one else. When the American Republic was established, its President became the Great Father of the Indians. Even in his most enlightened incarnations, he was swift to evade his paternal
obligations; and sometimes he committed infanticide. ‘The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it, than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life… and must yield to it… A compulsory process seems to be necessary, to break their habits, and civilize them’ (James Monroe). ‘Their cultivated fields; their constructed habitations – are undoubtedly by the laws of nature theirs. But what is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?’
²⁰
(John Quincy Adams). ‘The game being destroyed as acknowledged by all, the right of possession, granted to the Indians for the purpose of hunting ceases, and justice, sound policy, and the constitutional rights of the citizen, would require its being resigned…’ (Andrew Jackson). ‘Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?’ (William Henry Harrison). It was the universal argument; its lightness was the universal feeling. No wonder, then, that the history of the Indian in the English colonies, and in the United States afterwards, can best be sketched in terms of the development of the white programme for depriving the red man of his lands.
²¹

The tragedy had three acts, corresponding roughly to the three principal eras of American history. During the colonial epoch the Indian position remained, once the European coastal settlements had been established, surprisingly stable. The Iroquois League to the north, the looser Creek Confederation to the south, anchored as they were on the line of the Appalachians, markedly held up white expansion, particularly after the Iroquois had realized that the best way for the Indians to remain numerous and prosperous was to stay neutral in the Franco-British quarrel and not to fight each other more than they could help. There was a gradual erosion of the Indian position, but it remained a strong one so long as the English dared not attack the tribes for fear that they would go over to France. Even after the French defeat in the Seven Years War
²²
and the expulsion of the British in the American Revolution, the Indians of the South could still play the same game, using Spain (now mistress of Louisiana as well as Florida) against the Americans. The last triumph of this period was the Creek War
against the brigand state of Georgia (1786–90), which was masterminded by the great chief Alexander McGillivray,
²³
who signed a treaty with George Washington in 1790 that protected the bulk of the Creek lands against encroachment for the next twenty-five years.

By the end of that period the second act had fairly begun. This was the epoch in which the American people, relieved of almost all international anxieties and gaining in wealth and numbers every day, asserted their complete dominance over the continent. To the Indians they proved their power by stripping the tribes of almost all they possessed, thus ensuring that the third act should show the Indians as paupers dependent on the harsh, irregular and frequently stupid charity of Uncle Sam. It is the process of spoliation as carried out in the second act that raises the most serious questions about the American national character. Thus under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 the 60,000 Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes were moved from the lands they had always occupied, lands which were guaranteed to them on the honour of the United States as pledged in treaty after treaty, to lands far across the Mississippi – lands which in due time were also to be filched from them. Many other Indians, until the very end of the nineteenth century, were to be uprooted. But the Great Removal sticks in the memory because of its scale, and because of the ostentatious bad faith of all concerned, from President Jackson down to Greenwood Leflore, a renegade Choctaw chief, and because of the immense human suffering involved. One example: when the Choctaw migration was arranged, the whites of Alabama and Mississippi descended on the unhappy tribe like so many horseflies, to bully and trick the Indians out of most of their movable property as well as their lands. The tribe then had to trek to Indian Territory (today, Oklahoma) during the winter of 1831–2 – the coldest since 1776. At least 1,600, or nearly a tenth of the entire tribe, died as a result of the hardships of the emigration and a cholera epidemic to which, in their starving, naked, shelterless, hopeless and unclean condition, the emigrants could offer little resistance. Most of those who died were children or old people. Another example: the 16,000 Cherokees
²⁴
realized, long before 1838, when they were removed by force from their ancient homelands in the mountains of western Georgia and North Carolina, that the only way to survive the impact of the white man was to learn his ways. Accordingly they turned themselves into a successful farming people; Sequoya, a Cherokee half-breed of genius, invented an alphabet for their language, which rapidly spread literacy among them; they had a printing-press and a weekly newspaper, and in 1827 adopted a constitution modelled on that of the United States. All in vain: the usual cold, greedy hostility
went to work, and the Cherokees had to labour along their own path of agony into the West. They called it the Trail of Tears; and at least 4,000 died, either in the concentration camps where they were assembled for deportation or during the removal itself.

Contemplation of these and all the other atrocities at length forces the historian to face fundamentals. He will remember the crusades, the religious wars, the Reign of Terror, the Russian purges, and the extermination of the Jews, and see that the treatment meted out to the American Indian was not exceptional, it was characteristically European, if not human, and gentler than many comparable manifestations. He will look with doubled and redoubled scepticism on all expressions of missionary zeal, remembering that though many good men set out to bring Christianity to the Indians, they were almost ludicrously fewer in number than the multitudes who, professing similar motives, were concerned only to gratify their lust for land at any price, and than the still larger numbers who apathetically allowed evil to triumph. More, he will doubt the depth and sincerity of most men’s professions of civilization, democracy and benevolence at most times, since they have so often proved such feeble checks on conduct, and compatible with actions of the utmost injustice. Yet he will not despair either of humanity or of the possibility of progress. For even on the frontier the Europeans were not uniformly or perpetually vicious. Many (if too few) deeds of kindness and truth from white to red, red to white, are known, especially in the relations of the US army with the Indians. And the faithlessness, inhumanity and greed displayed by the whites to the Indians were to prove their own punishment. It was the operation of these characteristics in Georgia which, first, expelled the Cherokees and then, in 1864, laid the state open to Sherman’s devastating march to the sea,
²⁵
when the whites paid the penalty for their headlong course
via
the oppression of the Indians and the enslaving of the Africans into rebellion and bloody civil war. More generally, we can say that as the whites did to their red victims, so they did, and do, to each other and to the blacks – with what results the criminal statistics of the United States today make plain. Yet it must be added that as time has passed, more and more white Americans have come to see the folly and loathe the evil of this legacy of violence, and have tried,
pari passu
, to behave more justly and mercifully to the Indian as they have tried to be more just, more merciful, in their other social relations.

But this has been mostly a twentieth-century development. The nineteenth century was the Indian’s era of defeat, which was only made worse (for punishment followed) by each temporary victory: that, for example, of the Little Big Horn, when some Sioux, under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, wiped out an American regiment. The news reached the East, it is pleasant to report, on 5 July 1876, in nice time to spoil the celebrations of
a hundred years of freedom and independence; but the retaliation was all the more cruel.

A year later some of the Nez Percés, generally reckoned to be among the most intelligent and large-minded of the tribes, were forced off their homelands in the Wallowa valley in eastern Oregon,
²⁶
and, after drunken outrages by a handful of their young men, were hunted by army detachments 1,500 miles across Idaho, Yellowstone Park and Montana. They fought a brilliant campaign which earned them the ungrudging respect of their antagonists: ‘they abstained from scalping,’ said General Sherman, ‘let captive women go free; did not commit indiscriminate murders of peaceful families and fought with almost scientific skill’. But in the end they were caught at a place called Snake Creek, forty miles south of the Canadian border and safety, and realized, like Lee at Appomattox twelve years before, that they faced a choice between annihilation or surrender. Their war-leaders had almost all been killed, so it was left to Chief Joseph, the wisest man among them, to accept the inevitable. He came forward between the armies and spoke nobly of what broke the Indians: