The Heathen School Read online

  In practice, blending would necessarily entail procreation across racial lines. (Amalgamation became the term of choice here; miscegenation was a later, and more pejorative, invention.) The prominent Revolutionary-era physician Benjamin Rush believed that race mixing might improve the entire human species. “The mulatto,” he wrote, “has been remarked, in all countries, to exceed in sagacity his white and black parent. The same remark has been made of the offspring of the European and the North American Indian.” Rev. Jedediah Morse, author of a long and influential Report on Indian Affairs (1822) and staunch supporter of the Mission School, urged that education of the natives should have first priority, “and then let intermarriage with them become general.” The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions held to a similar position, and was pleased when one of its own field representatives took a Choctaw wife. Federal agent Hawkins, on coming to his post among the Creeks, favored “the idea of forming amorous connections with the women, [and] had in contemplation to set the example myself and order my assistants to follow.”16 (Apparently, he did not go through with it. However, his predecessor in the same post had married a Cherokee.)

  Occasionally, too, there were policy initiatives along these lines. In 1784, in Virginia’s House of Delegates, Patrick Henry introduced legislation to provide tax relief and other benefits to anyone who would marry an Indian. And a few years later, Secretary Knox urged that bounties be offered to induce white men to wed Indian women. (He also raised the reverse possibility, but only for white women who had “strayed from virtuous paths”; these—if no others—might reasonably take Indian husbands.) Several state governments considered similar proposals; in short, “amalgamation,” as a means to “civilization,” was in the air.17

  To be sure, the project showed a certain one-sidedness: “your blood will run in our veins”…. “incorporating themselves with us”—never the other way around. Evidently, their blood, their customs, their goals, values, and interests were of little account. Again, Jefferson exemplified this ambivalent pattern. On the one hand, whenever the native people were disparaged by European theorists eager to brand all things American as “degenerate,” he came forcefully to their defense. The Indian, he assured the French general Chastellux, is “in body and mind equal to the white man.” He was for many years an avid student of Indian culture (especially languages), and his mansion, Monticello, included a large space he called “Indian Hall,” with an extensive display of native “curiosities.” On the other hand, he made no effort—and expressed no desire—to keep that culture alive for the future.18

  There was, too, a deeper irony here. The “civilization” offered to Indians was paired with a stark alternative: extermination. By standing firm and remaining true to their own traditions, they would seal their fate; their numbers, already much reduced from previous centuries, would dwindle to nothing. White society would insist on this; even without conscious intent, whites and their ways would prove overwhelming. It was, as Jefferson had written, “what the natural progress of things will, of course, bring on.” Of course! Hence the “choice” presented was virtually a threat: Civilize or die. Yet “civilization” would entail another kind of death, a cultural death. Indians, and Indianness, would perish either way.19

  It is impossible, moreover, to miss the paternalistic spirit that infused the entire script. Indians were cast essentially as children—lacking discipline and judgment, given to mischief, dependent on others for guidance, beholden to their “Great White Father.” Even this was something of an abstraction; individual Indians, as living, breathing specimens of humankind, seem hardly to have entered the consciousness of many who wished most strongly to “improve” them.20

  It is also impossible to overlook the way self-interest played into the mix, with Indian lands offering such an inviting target for “speculation” or outright appropriation. Jefferson himself was a large-scale land speculator (as were Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and other advocates of “civilization”). Displacement of Indians was a consistent thread in all his policy making; he repeatedly stressed the need “to familiarize them [Indians] to the idea that it is for their interest to cede lands at times to the US, and for us thus to procure gratifications to our citizens … by new acquisitions of land.” It was, after all, Jefferson’s administration that engineered the first major round of removals of native people to the Mississippi Valley and beyond.21

  During the years when Jeffersonian philanthropy took center stage—roughly 1790–1815—other, much darker viewpoints retreated to the wings, but no further. Indeed, there were always doubters and scoffers about any plans to give Indians favorable consideration. For this group, their “savagery” remained a central, ineluctable fact; the very notion of “improving” them seemed absurd and pernicious. A British visitor to the American interior, in the 1790s, encountered “rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians.” Indeed, he claimed, “nothing is more common than to hear … talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.” That same talk now included the term red nigger, which effectively lumped native people with enslaved—and despised—blacks.22

  A half century of particularly devastating warfare—stretching from Pontiac’s War in 1763 to the end of the Creek War in 1814—served repeatedly to renew, and strengthen, anti-Indian feeling. Tales of dreadful “massacres” circulated widely, gaining notoriety as they went; even young children were among the hearers. “Which of us,” asked Indian superintendent Thomas McKenney, recalling his own earliest years, “has not listened with sensations of horror to the nursery stories that are told of the Indian and his cruelties? In our infant mind … we have been made to hear his yell, and to our eyes has been presented his tall, gaunt form, with the skins of beasts dangling round his limbs, and his eyes like fire, eager to find some new victim on which to fasten himself, and glut his appetite for blood. We have been made to see … him striding amidst the bodies of the slain … his fingers dripping with blood, and his face disclosing a ferocious smile, as he enjoyed the sight of the quivering limbs and the agonies of the dying!” Other observers claimed to find in Indian psychology an inherent taste for violence, mayhem, and war—and especially for revenge, “which is the most distinguishing characteristic of these people.” (This last idea contained a kind of ironic truth, for much Indian violence against whites was, at bottom, reactive—a response, that is, to the repeated depredations made on their own lands and security.) Where previously some had seen a noble savage now stood his antithesis, the vicious savage, “but a little way removed from a beast.” The embellishments here were endless: “furious and deadly … desperate and rapacious … fierce and cruel … thirsting for blood … habituated to licentiousness … vagrant, lawless, and debauched.” (And so on.)23

  Joined to these horrific images was a widespread belief that Indians had consistently opposed the Revolutionary movement—siding with the British, and thus forfeiting any right to benefit from the achievement of national independence. From then on, in the eyes of many whites, they were indelibly branded as actual or potential traitors to the cause of “liberty.” The truth of Indians’ involvement with the Revolution was much more complicated. There was no single pattern; different tribal groups made different choices. Some fought valiantly on the patriot side. Others allied with the British. And still others tried to maintain a precarious neutrality. In virtually every case, their goal was simply to protect their own interests. But no matter what route they chose, nearly all suffered grievous loss as the war ranged deep into their own home territories. The War of 1812 would add to the same resentment, as many (not all) Indians supported the British side, in both the South and the Old Northwest.24 (Again, Indians endured terrible devastation, including “massacres” such as the one inflicted by U.S. forces under Gen. Andrew Jackson on the Creeks in March 1814. Indeed, Jackson’s rise as a political figure owed much to his reputation as a fierce Indian killer.)

  There were also some countercurrents, c
hannels of “sympathy” crossing racial boundaries, especially among reform-minded evangelicals (people often identified as “the benevolent”). Sympathy was indeed a key word here—both sympathy for a race thought to have been wronged, and ultimately doomed, by white encroachment, and sympathy with all that it seemed to stand for. The third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a (so-called) Romantic movement, elevating emotion over reason, the natural over the artificial, human connection over personal striving. Accordingly, Indians might emerge as exemplars; their highly traditional, close-to-nature, communitarian way of life had supposedly resisted the corrupting influence of modern “civilization.” Ethnographers, playwrights, novelists, and poets played endless variations on this theme.25

  However, at around the same time, invidious racial feeling began to ramp up markedly. The immediate cause was heightened tension over slavery; this, in turn, followed from abolition of the slave trade, the Missouri Compromise (famously described by Jefferson as “a fire-bell in the night”), the start of an organized emancipation movement, and two substantial, though failed, slave rebellions (Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, Nat Turner in Virginia). White reaction bore down first and hardest on blacks, but Indians, too, were increasingly drawn in. Toward the end of the 1830s, leading public intellectuals had begun to develop a body of pseudoscientific race theories that would exert wide influence for years to come. Though somewhat different in emphasis, all were premised on the linked notions of absolute biological difference among the country’s three main racial groups, the separate creation of each (“polygenesis”), and their profoundly unequal mental and moral “endowments.” About Indians, in particular, learned opinion was now unequivocal. According to one prominent authority, “the intellectual faculties of this great family appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races.” (Sometimes “Caucasian race” might be smoothly elided to “American race”—a usage that, ironically enough, did not mean those most truly native to the land.)26

  Moreover, as these lines were ever more sharply etched, “amalgamation” came to seem utterly repulsive—and, at the same time, fascinating. Novels, cartoon imagery, folklore, and learned discussion all testified to its powerful grip on the public imagination. In some states—Massachusetts, for example—laws were passed to prohibit marriage between persons of different race. In Georgia, a legislative committee recorded the widely prevalent anxiety that “constant intermarriages” would lead to “a sort of mongrel population … unfit for the character of citizens.” Concern for “blood”—always a key marker, and supposed determinant, of racial inheritance—was everywhere; with respect to Indians, the older, relatively neutral term mixed-blood gave way to the highly pejorative half-breed. Under these conditions, hopes for Indian “civilization” necessarily ebbed. President James Monroe signaled the new climate when, in an official report to Congress, he declared, “It is impossible to incorporate them [Indians] in such masses, in any form whatever, into our system.”27

  Although these trends embraced the entire country, individual regions experienced them in different ways and to varying degrees. The South, of course, was most deeply imbrued in black-white relations (though the North was far from exempt). The western frontier was the flash point for whites and Indians; there would be found the most bitter of enmities—yet also the closest, most intimate, of connections.

  New England, by contrast, was no longer a main stage for racial encounters. Its relatively small black population, consisting by now almost entirely of freedmen, struggled for space on the margins of white society—wherever work might be found in wage labor, household service, and small-scale entrepreneurship (barbering, tailoring, porterage). Indians, too, occupied the margins, or, in some cases, locations even farther removed. A certain proportion lived on specially designated “reserves”—enclaves of their own kind, operating under the supervisory arm of state-appointed white “guardians.” Others were based in tiny encampments on the outskirts of the larger cities and towns.28

  Some secured a bare subsistence from the soil and occasional hunting and fishing. A good many became “hired men” on nearby farms; more than a few worked as whalemen and mariners in the region’s major seaports, or served in the military (when that opportunity arose). The women, for their part, became laundresses, domestics in white households, or occasional herbalists and healers. But perhaps the largest occupational group, and certainly the most visible to whites, was composed of itinerant craftspeople—producers and vendors of wood-splint baskets, brooms, mats, and chair seats (“flags”). Their presence on the roadways was ubiquitous; few village households would not have witnessed their comings and goings. Typically, they traveled in small clusters of women and children, their wares strung on tumplines affixed to head and shoulders, in bundles so large (one Massachusetts man would later remember) “as almost to hide them from view.”29

  In fact, too, local Indians and blacks had been intermarrying for generations; from the white standpoint, they increasingly formed a single, undifferentiated class of “coloreds.” As such, they were subject to a quite overt, and settled, racism. The hatred aroused by “savage” violence along the frontier had no equivalent in New England, but racism was present, and powerful, nonetheless. White folk contrived many reasons for scorning Indians: their “uniform sloth and stupidity” (so wrote Yale’s president Dwight), their propensity to alcoholism (so said almost everyone), their “roving and unsettled life” (another nearly universal charge), and their ramshackle neighborhoods, “where the vagrant, the dissipated, and the felonious do congregate” (in the opinion of a leading Boston newspaper). The same parties were sure also about their imminent extinction. In 1850, a careful history of Connecticut’s Indians concluded with the following judgment: “Nothing is left but a little and miserable remnant, hanging around the seats where their ancestors once reigned supreme, as a few half-withered leaves may be seen clinging to the upper branches of a blighted and dying tree.” Still later in the century, white residents of many New England towns would take a peculiar interest—pride even—in identifying the “last Indian” to have lived among them.30

  The wretchedness of life under these conditions can be glimpsed in a single case through the writings of the native author William Apess. Of Pequot ancestry (admixed with some white and African-American “blood”), Apess was born near the end of the eighteenth century in a tent in western Massachusetts—there to begin an unremittingly bleak childhood. He was soon abandoned by his parents, taken in by his beleaguered (and violently abusive) grandparents, and shuttled between various white households in which he worked as a servant. He had a few brief periods of schooling but was largely self-taught. While still a youth, he served with the American forces during the War of 1812, held a succession of menial jobs, endured extreme poverty, succumbed at times to “demon rum,” was baptized as a Methodist, and eventually became a circuit preacher to various New England Indian groups.31

  In 1829, Apess published his autobiography—the first such by any Native American—under the title A Son of the Forest. In this and subsequent writings, he poured out his anguish over “the calumny heaped upon us by the whites to an intense degree.” He bitterly lamented his status as “a poor Indian”—the word itself was “considered as a slur”—and believed that “had my skin been white, with the same abilities … there could not have been found a place good enough for me.” He recalled from his earliest years the humiliation of door-to-door peddling with his grandmother’s baskets, the beatings he endured at her hands and those of white masters, and the way he was cursed as an “Indian dog.” Deeply religious, he felt grievously let down by others of his faith in the white community: “In vain have I looked for the Christian to take me by the hand and bid me welcome … and if they did, it was only to satisfy curiosity and not to look upon me as a man.… And so all of my people have been treated, whether Christians or not.” In particular, he believed that “missionaries
have injured us … by degrading us as a people, in breaking up our governments, and leaving us without any suffrages whatever, or a legal right among men. Oh, what cursed doctrine is this! It most certainly is not fit to civilize men with.… We poor Indians want no such missionaries around us.” (Did he know of the Foreign Mission School? If so, he gave no sign.)32

  Considered as a whole, Apess’s published work is a piercing cry of pain—nothing less. Here is his summation: “The land of my fathers is gone; and their characters were not known as human beings but as beasts of prey. We were represented as having no souls to save, or lose, but as partridges upon the mountains.… Thus, you see, we had to bear all this tide of degradation, while prejudice stung … every white man, the young as well as the old, to the very center of the heart.” Apess was unusual in his literacy, authorship, and status as a minister; if his life was cruelly hard and unrewarding, how much more so the lives of average Indians in the same time and place?33

  In the year Apess was born, Rev. Stephen Badger offered another summation—a white man’s—of the same stung-to-the-heart prejudice. Since Badger had served for decades as minister at Natick—the first of the Massachusetts “praying towns” a century and a half before, now a mixed community with its Indian residents largely submerged and dispossessed—he knew whereof he spoke. Indians, he wrote, “are generally considered by white people, and placed, as if by common consent, in an inferior and degraded situation, and treated accordingly. Of that they themselves seem to be not a little sensible. This sinks and cramps their spirits, and prevents those manly exertions which an equal rank with others has a tendency to call forth.”34 Indeed.