American Holocaust

Home > Other > American Holocaust > Page 51
American Holocaust Page 51

by David E. Stannardx


  33. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, p. 4; Stanley L. Robe, “Wild Men and Spain’s Brave New World,” in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, eds., The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 44.

  34. J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 43–44.

  35. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 55; Elena Lourie, “Anatomy of Ambivalence: Muslims under the Crown of Aragon in the Late Thirteenth Century,” in Lourie, Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Hampshire: Variorum, 1990), p. 53.

  36. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 101. Although this decision by the Priors of Florence was particularly telling, it is worth noting that in Spain a century earlier Islamic converts to Christianity continued to suffer unique indignities—such as being referred to disdainfully as baptisats—and they remained vulnerable to enslavement. See Lourie, “Anatomy of Ambivalence,” p. 71.

  37. Quoted in Elena Lourie, “A Society Organised for War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present, 35 (1966), 73; emphasis added.

  38. C.R. Boxer, Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine: Garcia d’Orta and Nicolas Monardes. Diamante, Volume 14 (London: The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1963), p. 11; quoted in Joseph H. Silverman, “On Knowing Other Peoples’ Lives, Inquisitorially and Artistically,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 161. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre is discussed briefly but insightfully in J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), pp. 95, 212–17 and Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of Racism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), pp. 70–73.

  39. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 15.

  40. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Revised Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 38–39, 47–50.

  41. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the Americans: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), p. 47; Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, translated and edited by Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), pp. 37–42.

  42. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, p. 65.

  43. Ibid., p. 74.

  44. Quoted in Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 104.

  45. Quoted in Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), p. 11.

  46. John H. Elliott, “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact?” in Fredi Chiappelli, Michael J.B. Allen, and Robert L. Benson, eds., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), Volume One, p. 15.

  47. Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), pp. 53–55.

  48. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 215.

  49. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Spain and Portugal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), Volume One, p. 281.

  50. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 180–81.

  51. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicoloson, 1973), pp. 40–41.

  52. Ibid., pp. 41–42.

  53. Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 34. Hamilton’s figures are presented in pesos of 450 maravedis; they are converted to ducats (375 maravedis) by Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 175.

  54. Payne, History of Spain and Portugal, p. 283; Davis, Rise of the Atlantic Economies, p. 68; William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 109; Charles Wilson, The Transformation of Europe, 1558–1648 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 136.

  55. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 179.

  56. Gaspar de Espinosa’s fortune is mentioned in Elliott, The Old World and the New, p. 67; “Harvest of Blood” is the title O’Connell gives to his chapter on the sixteenth century in Of Arms and Men, pp. 124–47.

  57. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 132.

  58. Ibid., p. 133.

  59. Henri de la Popelinière, Les Trois Mondes (Paris, 1582), quoted in Elliott, The Old World and the New, p. 83.

  60. Quoted in Todorov, Conquest of America, pp. 150–51.

  61. There is a substantial literature on the New World Inquisition. The best and most recent review of it is by a pioneer in the subject area, Richard E. Greenleaf, “Historiography of the Mexican Inquisition: Evolution of Interpretations and Methodologies,” in Perry and Cruz, eds., Cultural Encounters, pp. 248–76. Two other essays in this same volume, which come to conflicting opinions on certain points, deserve attention as well: J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline,” pp. 3–22; and Roberto Moreno de los Arcos, “New Spain’s Inquisition for Indians from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 23–36.

  62. Charles L.G. Anderson, Life and Letters of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, Including the Conquest and Settlement of Darien and Panama (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1941), pp. 163–65. On the matter of alleged Indian traits and brutishness generally, see Anthony Pagden, “The Forbidden Food: Francisco de Vitoria and José de Acosta on Cannibalism,” Terrae Incognitae, 13 (1981), 17–29.

  63. Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, pp. 12, 122; Phelan, Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, pp. 94–95.

  64. Toribio Motolinía, quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), p. 52.

  65. See Chapter Five, p. 166.

  66. Quoted in Phelan, Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, p. 93.

  67. Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, edited by Guillermo Lohmann Villena (Paris-Lima, 1967), p. 1618; quoted in J.H. Elliott, “The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 58 (1972), 108–109. It is worth noting that Elliott also points out in this essay (p. 108, note 3) that dark skin as both a negative and an immutable condition was an idea hardly original with Matienzo; among others, Francisco López de Gómara had put forward similar arguments at a much earlier date.

  68. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 114.

  69. For more detailed discussion of this matter, see Appendix Two, pp. 269–78.

  70. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 98.

  71. Wallerstein, Modern World System, J, p. 271.

  72. L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981), pp. 95–98.

  73. See Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940).

  74. Wallerstein, Modern World System I, pp. 225, 230–31.

  75. Davis, Rise of the Atlantic Economies, p. 211.

  76. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), p. 17.

  77. Eileen Mc
Cracken, “The Woodlands of Ireland circa 1600,” Irish Historical Studies, 11 (1959), 271–96.

  78. See the essays “Ireland as Terra Florida” and “The Theory and Practice of Acculturation: Ireland in a Colonial Context,” by Nicholas Canny in his Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 19, 36–37. Emphasis added.

  79. Ibid., p. 53.

  80. Ibid., p. 66. See also, Nicholas Canny, “Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 159–212.

  81. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 115.

  82. Loren E. Pennington, “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature, 1575–1625,” in K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair, eds., The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. 180.

  83. See Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), p. 409.

  84. Pennington, “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature,” p. 183.

  85. Quoted in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 145.

  86. Ibid., p. 184.

  87. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 134.

  88. Joseph François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, edited and translated by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1974). The illustration is on plate 3, between pages 72 and 73 in Volume One; for discussion, see Volume Two, pp. 278–79.

  89. In David B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), Volume One, pp. 108, 110.

  90. Ibid., p. 191.

  91. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609), n.p.

  92. Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia (London, 1622), pp. 30–31. For other examples of Spanish influence on British thinking regarding the nature and colonization of indigenous peoples, see Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization from Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 30 (1973), 593–95.

  93. Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages, translated by Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 142–44.

  94. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 220.

  95. John Higham, “Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Female Symbols of America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 100 (1990), 48.

  96. See, for example, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), esp. pp. 169–88; and Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 917–53.

  97. One writer (Karen Ordahl Kupperman, in Settling With the Indians, op. cit.) makes much of the point that those Englishmen who were most likely to have favorable things to say about the Indians were those who actually spent time with them. While the observation is correct, the conclusion that she draws from it—that among those Englishmen who settled in America racism was a later seventeenthcentury development—is completely unfounded. For while it may well be that a higher proportion of those who visited America became friendlier to the notion of Indians as potential equals than were those who stayed in England (a common and predictable phenomenon) in both cases the proportion holding positive views of the natives was infinitesimal. Through the early years of the seventeenth century the number of Englishmen who lived in North America never numbered more than several hundred (as late as 1625 it still was less than 1500), while the population of Britain, where the dominant ideology was being molded, was about 5,000,000. Thus, even accepting Kupperman’s premise without question—that in the early years of exploration and settlement, within the very small group of Englishmen who actually lived in North America, there was a minority (that did not include those who held important leadership positions) who had favorable impressions of the Indians—the observation best serves to provide a relative few exceptions who prove the rule. And that in part explains, for example, the confused statement of one of the first Jamestown settlers that the Indians “are naturally given to trechery, howbeit we could not finde it in our travell up the river, but rather a most kind and loving people.” [Anonymous (Gabriel Archer?), “A Breif discription of the People,” in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969), Volume One, pp. 103–104.] The realities of Indian society were forcing on this writer a befuddled reconsideration of what he—and millions of other Englishmen—had been taught for nearly a century. But he was only one among multitudes, and the others were not having similar second thoughts. On another small point, Kupperman claims (p. 40) that the British did not associate the Indians with the wild men of European cultural tradition (despite her own quoting of such comments as Robert Johnson’s assertion in 1609 that the Indians were “wild and savage people, they live and lie up and down in troupes like heards of Deare in a Forrest: they have no law but nature, their apparell skinnes of beasts, but most goe naked”) because, says Kupperman, “the Indian was depicted as being less hairy than Europeans,” whereas the traditional image of the wild man was that “he was covered with a coat of hair.” Again, the simple observation is correct, but not the conclusion drawn from it—for what Kupperman is doing here is insisting that informal sixteenth- and seventeenth-century folk knowledge meet the strict consistency criteria of the modern academic. Popular racist thought, however, invariably confounds such finicky maxims, as with the extreme and inconsistent anti-Semitic charge that Jews are both inferior sub-human beings (even “vermin” in certain versions) and enormously intelligent, powerful, and wily leaders of world-wide conspiracies. Clearly, the Indians’ comparative lack of body hair was no impediment to British and other European commentators four and five hundred years ago who regarded the New World’s indigenous people as brutes in the manner of—but not necessarily identical with—the creatures described in their own classic literature. Nor should it be an impediment to our understanding—evident in an immense body of data—of the brutal and racist ways in which the Europeans, including the British, viewed and treated the Indians.

  98. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Enlarged Edition (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 474, 477.

  99. Cotton Mather, quoted in John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in New England (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), p. 79.

  100. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 132.

  101. Quoted in Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 68.

  102. Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 19. This insightful work, originally published in 1966, must be read in this most recent edition as it contains an important Afterword by the author addressing the excesses of its psychoanalytic approach. Greven, Protestant Temperament, pp. 110, 121. Emphasis added. Greven subsequently has pursued these themes across the Protestant American historical experience, up to and including the p
resent. See Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), esp. pp. 60–72.

  103. Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, p. 337.

  104. Benjamin Wadsworth, “The Nature of Early Piety as it Respects God,” in A Course of Sermons on Early Piety (Boston, 1721), p. 10.

  105. On the fear of contamination, see Canup, Out of the Wilderness, pp. 155–56, 169–72. See also, Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, pp. 116–45. On aversive attitudes of the British colonists toward Indian-European sexual encounters, including the examples cited, see Michael Zuckerman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Canny and Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, esp. pp. 145–47.

  106. R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: New American Library, 1954), pp. 35, 125–26.

  107. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, p. 47; Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 31.

  108. The quotation from More’s Utopia is also cited in Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972), p. 24; Luther is quoted in Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (New York: Russell & Russell, 1973), p. 88.

  109. Schlatter, Private Property, p. 89.

  110. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), section 32.

  111. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 261–62.

  112. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), p. 381.

  113. See Schlatter, Private Property, pp. 77–123.

  114. Thomas More, Utopia, edited by Edward Surtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 76.

  115. See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 82, 135–38.

 

‹ Prev