A National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored seminar in "American Indian-White Relations" took me to Indiana University for eight weeks a few summers ago. A dozen teachers from colleges coast-to-coast gathered under the direction of Professor Bernard Sheehan, whose white socks and taped-together spectacles belied a brilliant intellect. Both his mind and eccentric manner immediately intimidated most of my colleagues, each of whom was to present a paper for the seminar's comment. Mine chanced to be scheduled for the last day of the session, and my introduction, which paid elaborate tribute to our director's earlier work, promised a peaceful conclusion to our summer. But when it became apparent that my paper would directly challenge the central thesis of Professor Sheehan's newly published book, the atmosphere around the seminar table changed.
The following summarizes my argument:
As my background in Indian-white relations had been furnished largely by popular rather than scholarly sources, my future students faced the danger of being fed easy generalizations about white guilt and Indian innocence, the easily romanticized view of white technology in conflict with noble, in-tune-with-nature savages. Bernard Sheehan’s Seeds of Extinction may have been the most important book I have read in the field simply because it awakened me to the complexity of the subject. According to Sheehan, the tragedy of Indian-white relations was not a result of willful dispossession and genocide by white policy makers, but their inability or unwillingness to bridge the gap between their perception of the Indian as a civilizable savage – a potential white man with red skin - and the reality of persistent Indian cultures in conflict with white frontiersmen for survival. And if his goals are neither to assess blame nor to search out potentially more successful approaches to Jeffersonian objectives, Sheehan does not hesitate to let the fault for failure fall where it will. Despite their genuinely philanthropic intentions, the Jeffersonian generation stands indicted - not by Sheehan, one feels, but by history - for occasional displays of stupidity, greed, and hypocrisy, but most of all, for their naivete.
Despite the influence he has had on my thinking about Indian-white relations, there is one point in Sheehan's work - more deeply examined in his recently published Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia - which I would dispute. To do so, I draw primarily from Edmund S. Morgan’s Slavery and Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Both of these sources recognize apologists who envisioned the incorporation of Indians into emigrant society, among the earliest English arrivals in Virginia. But Morgan seems to see the assimilative impulse in Virginia fading more quickly than Sheehan. And while this difference does not preclude the possibility of parallel interpretations for a subsequent period, their views of Virginians' attitudes toward Indians by the late 17th century conflict: while Sheehan sees a consistent ambiguity, a persistent noble/ignoble savage dichotomy, Morgan.recognizes an increasingly negative perception, based upon an incipient racism.
Sponsors of the Virginia experiment undoubtedly saw the Indians in the context of savagism, Morgan calling "theirs ... a patriotic enterprise that would bring civility and Christianity to the savages of North America and redemption from idleness and crime to the unemployed masses of England." But while Morgan finds it "necessary to look more closely at the kind of life each had led and the expectations that life engendered in them before they encountered one another on the banks of the James River," Sheehan's focus remains fixed on the visionaries, removed, if not from Virginia altogether, then from the first line of contact between "Idle Indians and Lazy Englishmen".1 Although he cannot be accused of one fault he ascribes to the English - their "failure … to perceive the discrete integrity of an alien society" - since his is a study of ideas more than events, Sheehan may well be guilty of another: "the English habit of seeing relations with the rest of the world through all-encompassing formulas."2
The noble/ignoble savage dichotomy is a useful one with which to ascribe motive to English behavior toward Virginia’s Indians. Early English missionary efforts seem in line with their desire to civilize seemingly godless savages, while atrocities against Indians can as easily be traced to "the doctrine of savagism," which "seemed to release [Englishmen] from whatever inhibitions might have tempered their behavior toward people fortunate to claim civility. Faced with a savage enemy, the English demonstrated a startling capacity for savage behavior."3 It seems as if Sheehan has selected a concept which allows both him and English colonists to see both Indians and Englishmen perpetually on the brink between savagism and civility, their inconsistent actions always explicable by this remarkably elastic theory.
But if savagism helped shape English and colonial officials' expectations of Indians, and helps the historian understand white policy, the doctrine had less and less to do with life on the frontier in 17th century Virginia. For although the hopes of men like George Thorpe and Edmund Sandys for biracial settlement had hardly held less thoughtful men back before, the massacre of 1622 "released all restraints that the company had hitherto imposed on those who thirsted for the destruction or enslavement of the Indians."4
London-based company officials urged their representatives in the colony to rely on rules of justice following the massacre, but to such requests the governor and council replied, "wee hold nothing unjuste, that may tend to their ruine, (except breach of faith)," and those to whom the governor delegated authority were praised not punished for poisoning an estimated 200 Indians at a peace parley.5 Even if those directing policy were motivated by ignoble savagism, one doubts that the image of the Indian in the minds of most Virginians had been much altered by the massacre. What had changed was the signal from above: they could now spill as much Indian blood as they wished.
While a few Virginians urged enslavement of Indians, because they were "apter for worke then yet our English are," able "to worke in the heate of the day," most colonists preferred to be rid of them altogether.6 Virginians on the frontier needed no direct orders from the authorities to convince them to carry out a policy of extermination. An occasional spokesman or observer might refer disparagingly to the "salvages" in their midst, but it seems unlikely that frontiersmen had ever distinguished between noble and ignoble ones, nor that they had ever hoped to incorporate them into their society. What mattered to them was that the Indians had corn and land they wanted. What mattered was that Indians, by whatever name, were different. What mattered was that Indians no longer did to those with the power to protect them. And so within a couple of years of the massacre, several thousand Indians had been killed and only their land had been incorporated into civilized Virginia. According to Morgan, Virginians had also killed the dream of "an integrated community of which the Indians would be a part. Though a few remained among them as servants or slaves (there is no way to be sure of their status), there was no longer any pretense of carrying on with the pious intentions that were still expressed from time to time in England."7
Virginians' determination to remove from rather than incorporate Indians into their society was redoubled after the massacre of 1644 and reached its culmination in Bacon's Rebellion. True, Indians still had their apologists, but whether because Governor Berkeley harbored hopes of civilizing savages or maintaining his lucrative trade with them is uncertain. Whatever Berkeley's motives, frontiersmen frustrated by their inability to break into Virginia.'s static social system threatened not only their Indian neighbors but Berkeley's and other planters' control of the colony. In the meantime, the atrocities committed by the frontier followers of Nathaniel Bacon against both friendly and hostile Indians furnish further evidence that most Virginians never bothered to distinguish between savages of any sort. As an alien presence, they were fair game.
But Edmund Morgan does not stop here. He argues that Bacon's Rebellion featured clear evidence of race hatred, an animosity which was quickly incorporated by Virginia’s ruling class into the colony's political structure. Although the Indians had absorbed most of the recent poor white hostility, enough had been directed toward the elite to awaken them to the danger they faced from below. By inviting indentured servants and even enslaved blacks into his ranks, Bacon had presented a combination that could not but alarm the master class. "The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt." Indians, against whom Virginians of all classes had "learned their first lesson in racial hatred," would continue to serve as scapegoats in this process.8
In 1670 a law had passed the assembly distinguishing between non-Christian servants brought into Virginia by land (usually Indians captured by friendly tribes and sold to colonists) and by sea (Africans). The former were to serve twelve-year indentures, the latter were permanently enslaved. But six years later, the House of Burgesses authorized Bacon and his followers to enslave for life Indian captives. The first assembly after the rebellion, recognizing the futility of seeking to maintain friendly relations with any Indians, and perhaps hoping to deflect the rage of future rebels against an alien race, authorized captors of Indians to "reteyne and keepe all such Indian slaves, or other Indian goods as they either have taken or hereafter shall take" (Morgan's emphasis). A law of 1682 provided that all non-Christian servants imported into the colony, by land or sea, would be permanently enslaved, and since a law of the 1660s had declared that subsequent conversion of a non-Christian slave would not change his status, imported blacks and Indians were hereafter legislatively linked. Both were condemned to permanent slavery. Although the law required less black blood than Indian before labeling one a mulatto, the child of an Indian and a white was so classified after 1682, and in 1691 the assembly sought to provide "for preventing of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another."9
Morgan maintains that "it requires a greater degree of hatred or contempt to enslave a man rather than simply to keep him a slave," and by 1676 Virginians "had made a deliberate public decision to enslave Indians.... As Virginians began to expand their slave holdings" in the final decades of the century, "they seem to have had Indians ... much in view...." And if ultimately "the natives of Virginia were insufficient in number, substitute natives could be brought in ... from Africa. They were both, after all, basically uncivil, unchristian, and above all, unwhite."10 As generations of upper class whites would find over the following centuries, they were also equally capable of absorbing the hostility of poor whites dominated by that elite. Racism, a result of early 17th century contacts between Indians and frontier Virginians, was taken up later in the century by those in the centers of power and turned against not only its original targets, but its original exponents.
The almost total absence of Indians in Virginia by 1700 enabled their successors on the land to see them more charitably. Before another century had passed, Virginia's elite were boasting not of the Indian blood their ancestors had spilt, but of that in their veins. The doctrine of savagism, now predominantly noble savagism, could once again be espoused, as Virginians in new centers of power addressed the problem of Indian-white relations elsewhere. But if the concept furnishes a helpful framework for understanding the hopes and fears of the few, although then only at the beginning and end of the colonial period, it fails throughout as a guide to the feelings of the many.
An eerie silence fell as my last words faded. I expected the worst from the usually pale-, but by now red-faced director, but my colleagues’ response would determine whether I would survive an anticipated scalping by our chief. None spoke, each awaiting Professor Sheehan's cue. Finally, after what seemed like minutes, the director pushed back his chair and graciously invited us all to a party that evening at "Big Red", a Bloomington watering hole. In the meantime, acting on a tip from his lovely wife and daughter, we ordered glassware as a thank you gift, and I sat to compose a silly but sincere poem for the occasion:
What can we give to a scholar so civil
He could sit back and smile through our insuff’rable drivel?
Who persisted in resisting the urge of the savage
Our research and writing with red hatchet to ravage?
Who accepted that this tribe of would be "Diderots"
Turned out to be a bunch of Blooming-ton Idiots?
(But at least we were lively and the blood that we drew
Was mostly from each other and seldom from you).
One thing you could use is a new pair of glasses
But a better idea came from your pair of lasses:
The glasses you cared for the most are all broken,
So we hope that our gift will be useful, not token.
(And though your specs may be broken, your view of our topic
Can hardly be viewed as blurred or myopic).
Though our present's not present at present you'll see
We'll present it post-seminar, by post, presently.
And if the glasses we've ordered for our Bloomington host
Aren't here yet, what's in order is the following toast:
We hope you'll agree as you sip hops from "Big Red"
The only good seminar is the one that's not dead!
If Professor Sheehan's reaction to my research was anti-climactic, he proved a perfect host. The evening provided a pleasant ending to a thoroughly stimulating summer.
Notes
1. Edmund S. Morgan, Slavery and Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton and Co., 1975, pp.47-48.
2. Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1980), p. 55.
3. Ibid., p. 169.
4. Morgan, Slavery and Freedom, p. 99.
5. Ibid., p.100.
6. Ibid., p. 99.
7. Ibid., p. 100.
8. Ibid., p. 328.
9. Ibid., p. 329, 335.
10. Ibid., p. 329.
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