Chapter 19
Transforming Indian Lives
“It is a striking fact,” wrote the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, “that the Indians, in their uncivilized state, should so behave towards each other as though they were a civilized people.” Others who knew them well made similar observations. Indians, for their part, pointed out that their supposedly civilized white neighbors often displayed decidedly uncivilized and un-Christian behavior.1 For Washington, however, civilization had less to do with present conduct and living Christian lives than with future progress—for both Indians and the United States. A society based on private property could not accommodate tribal societies based on communal landholding, and Christian or not, Indians could have no place within the United States if they continued to hunt, hold their lands in common, and live separate from American jurisdiction.2 Getting Indian people to reorient their economies, societies, and values around American concepts of agriculture, family, and property would prepare them to assume their place in the new nation as individuals rather than as members of sovereign tribes; it would also free unused hunting territory to fuel the nation’s growth. Remaking Indian lives was necessary to bring Indian people and Indian lands into American society. Their “father” George Washington would oversee this benevolent policy of amalgamation.3
With Indian military resistance—for the time—quelled and new boundaries secured, Washington and his administration looked to deliver on the other promise of his Indian policy and step up the tempo of injecting civilization into Indian communities. Just as the United States could not expand without depriving Indian people of their lands, neither, so it believed, could it extend the blessings of American civilization without ridding Indian people of their “savage” ways, which also entailed depriving them of their lands. Treaties that furnished domestic animals, plows, and spinning wheels were designed not only to make hunters into farmers but also to transform gender roles, alter labor patterns, and change people’s relationships with both the land and the animals with which they shared the land.
On December 29, 1794, Knox submitted his final report on Indian affairs to Washington. Washington forwarded it to Congress the next day. Knox said nothing about Wayne’s victory four months earlier or the disastrous campaigns of 1790–91. Instead, he emphasized the humanitarian aspects of US Indian policy since the adoption of the Constitution: making treaties of peace with the Indians “upon principles of Justice” and extending to them “all the blessings of civilized life” that their condition would allow. Continuing such policies would reflect “permanent honor upon the national character.” There were problems, of course. Rapacious frontier settlers continually encroached on Indian land, and if the powerful Indian nations south of the Ohio united in war against the United States, it would dwarf the conflict the nation had just fought north of the Ohio. It would be necessary to establish military posts and police the frontiers. But the secretary of war was no warmonger. “The United States can get nothing by an Indian war, but they risque men money and reputation,” he said, repeating a by now familiar refrain. And peace required more than simply preventing war. Since the United States was more powerful and “more enlightened” than the Indians, the nation had a responsibility to treat them well. Instead, Knox lamented, “it is a melancholy reflection that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. The evidence of this is the utter extirpation of nearly all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union. A future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable Colours.”4
For Knox and Washington, saving Indian people from destruction meant transforming Indian lives. Washington recommended what he termed “rational experiments” for imparting the blessings of civilization and believed, or at least hoped, that the United States would not need to fight Indians if it traded with them.5 The best way to secure their attachment was “to convince them that we are just and to show them that a proper and friendly intercourse with us would be for our mutual advantage.”6
The twin instruments for carrying out this policy were Indian agents and government trading posts. Agents placed in the principal Indian towns would act as liaisons between the tribes and the federal government, protect the Indians’ boundaries against encroachment, and assist Indian people in building a new way of life. In his annual messages in 1793 and 1794, Washington called on Congress to establish a system of government factories or trading posts in Indian country to better regulate trade. “Next to a rigorous execution of justice on the violators of peace, the establishment of commerce with the Indians in behalf of the United States is most likely to conciliate their attachment,” he said. “But it ought to be conducted without fraud, without extortion, with constant and plentiful supplies, with a ready market for the commodities of the Indians and a stated price for what they give in payment and receive in exchange.” He returned to the theme in his seventh annual address, delivered in the Senate Chamber on December 8, 1795. There could be no peace on the frontiers—and Washington had Georgia specifically in mind—unless Indians were afforded legal protection from murderous whites and provided with fair trade, and the work of civilizing the Indians would “reflect undecayed luster on our national character.”7 The government’s Indian diplomacy also incorporated a civilizing component. Like Knox, Pickering favored giving gifts to lubricate the wheels of diplomacy, but he thought the gifts should be more transformative than martial: farm tools and cattle rather than medals and uniform coats. Washington endorsed a mix of both kinds of presents.8
With limited funding, the War Department set up the first two government trading posts in Creek country at Coleraine on the St. Marys River (moved in 1797 to Fort Wilkinson on the Oconee) and in Cherokee country at Tellico on the Little Tennessee, already the site of an army blockhouse. The trading posts were to provide Indians with goods at cost and required substantial subsidies to undercut private traders and oust foreign competitors. Ironically, because American merchants in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore had exhausted their supplies, the posts could not begin operating until shipments of Indian goods arrived from London in the fall of 1795. In 1796 Congress passed legislation authorizing the president to establish factories at his discretion and allocated $150,000 for the purpose. It also increased restrictions on private traders in Indian country and provided annual funding for the purchase of livestock and agricultural implements for Washington’s “civilization” program. The trading posts fulfilled a diplomatic role and became sites of political and cultural negotiation as well as economic exchange between Indians and the US government. Other posts followed early in the nineteenth century.9
In the Scottish Enlightenment thinking that informed Washington’s views, human societies developed in stages from hunters to herders to farmers. To survive on the small amount of land that remained to them, Washington believed, Indian men must give up the gun and the bow and take up the plow. If they could not do it directly, they should adopt livestock and become herders as a transitional phase. They must learn to inhabit and treat their tribal land as individual plots of property. They must clear fields and plant corn, wheat, and hay; erect fences to protect their crops; pen their livestock; mark their boundaries; and build cabins for their families. They might continue to hunt during the winter months to procure pelts for trading, but that phase would pass as they became self-sufficient farmers capable of feeding and clothing themselves and participated in the market economy by exchanging agricultural surpluses for the manufactured goods they formerly purchased with pelts. As they spent less time hunting, they would need less land and sell “surplus” acreage to the United States.
Washington’s program of social engineering involved imposing a social revolution in Indian communities, reorganizing life around intensive agriculture. Most eastern woodland peoples had farmed for centuries. Indian women using hoes and digging sticks produced the vast “emporium” that Wayne described and destroy
ed after his victory at Fallen Timbers. But now men, not women, were to do the farming, and they were to do it with horse- and oxen-drawn plows. Plowing bit into the soil more deeply than hoeing; it destroyed native plant species, created new habitats dominated by domesticated species, and transformed the landscape.10 Villages surrounded by communal fields would give way to dispersed family farms with individual plots of land demarcated by fences; tribal ethics of sharing and reciprocity would be replaced by Anglo-American principles of property and inheritance.
Western, male-centered gender roles would be imposed. As men spent more time at home, the nuclear family, with the male at its head, would supplant the clans, which in many tribes were matrilineal. Instead of planting and harvesting in the fields, women would raise children, prepare meals, and sew clothes in their homes, modeling their domestic lives on those of white American women. Children would go to school to study reading, writing, and arithmetic rather than learn the old stories from their grandparents; they must prepare for their new lives as farmers and housewives instead of accompanying their fathers and mothers into the forests and fields.11 Although the government wanted Indian women to take up spinning, Native American Indian women, like Anglo-American women, were already buying increasing quantities of factory-made cloth.
In implementing its programs, the federal government turned for assistance to the Quakers and other religious groups committed to what they saw as the salvation of Indian people. Quakers enjoyed a reputation for honesty and integrity among Indians and furnished a model of white American society at its best. In addition to working as missionaries, they tried to instill in their Indian neighbors an economy based on plow agriculture and animal husbandry, a Protestant work ethic, and what they regarded as morally upright personal conduct. The Indian Affairs Committee of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting first met in 1795; it directed its efforts to the tribes of the Old Northwest, and in time would work closely with Little Turtle’s Miamis. The Philadelphia Friends formed a similar committee dedicated to promoting the civilization and welfare of Indian people and focused on the Iroquois in New York State. Pickering, who became secretary of state in December 1795, endorsed and supported the Quakers in their efforts.12
Cornplanter also supported the Quakers. He met them during his visits to Philadelphia and viewed them as allies in his people’s efforts to survive by accommodating with the United States and adopting American ways of life. The first Quaker missionaries arrived among the Allegheny Senecas in 1798 and set up a demonstration farm as a model for the transition to an agricultural way of life.13 Cornplanter himself set an example of adjustment and accommodation. He built a sawmill in 1795 to provide income for his family. In 1797 he traveled to Philadelphia again. In his “last address to you as the great Chief of the fifteen fires,” on February 28, a fragment of which survives, he asked Washington, “If we should dispose of part of our County and put our money with yours in that strong place, will it be safe? Will it yield to our children the same advantages after our heads are laid down as it … at present produces to us?”14 By the time Washington died, Cornplanter was building himself a new house.
Joseph Brant already had an elegant house and enjoyed many of the trappings of “civilized life,” but he was not so solicitous of the president. Now fifty-four, he accompanied Cornplanter on the arduous winter journey to Philadelphia in 1797. He met Robert Liston, George Hammond’s replacement as British minister to the United States, attended a dinner hosted by Aaron Burr, and sat for another portrait, this time by Charles Willson Peale. But he did not keep the appointment the new secretary of war, James McHenry, made for him with Washington.15
Nor were all Senecas as amenable as Cornplanter to Washington’s civilization plans. Just as some white captives resisted the acculturative pressures and attractions of Indian life more strongly than others, so Indian responses varied from willing acceptance to outright rejection. Cornplanter sent his son, Henry Abeel, to a Quaker school in Philadelphia, and the young man utilized his education, serving as interpreter at the Treaty of Canandaigua. But by the fall of 1795 it had become “evident that he could derive no advantage by continuing here.” On Saturday, November 14, Knox dropped Washington a note telling him to expect the young man to stop by before he left for home.16 Mary Jemison, an adopted white captive who lived her adult life as a Seneca woman, said she had seen many instances where young Indians were taken from their families, placed in school before they had had an opportunity to contract many Indian habits, and kept there until adulthood, but she had “never seen one of those but what was an Indian in every respect after he returned. Indians must and will be Indians,” she concluded, “in spite of all the means that can be used for their cultivation in the sciences and arts.”17 What Knox and Washington saw as failure and disappointment, others saw as cultural resilience. Red Jacket asked for a sawmill when he was in Philadelphia in 1792, but he was scrupulously selective in his adoption of American ways and skeptical of civilization and Christianity as practiced by Americans. Half a dozen years after Washington’s death, he remained a forceful spokesman for Iroquois cultural and religious independence.18
He was not alone. David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary who lived and worked among the Delawares, said they thought that God had created Europeans and Indians to lead different ways of life, just as different species of animals did. For one species to adopt another’s way of life was contrary to God’s will, and the same principle applied to Indians and Europeans. They recognized that Europeans were “industrious and clever” and that trading with them gave Indians many things they would otherwise lack, and they acknowledged that whites were “very ingenious, because of their ability to manufacture a great variety of things,” but they regarded their way of life “as wearisome and slavish as compared with their own.” With good reason, Zeisberger added, they suspected that whites were just after their land.19
Many Indians refused the future Washington offered them. Observers lamented that Indians clung stubbornly to their old ways. Indian people responded that their dealings with white men who stole, lied, and cheated them out of their lands offered little incentive to become “civilized.” Some found a haven in a world turned upside down by joining or building Christian communities; others continued to find stability, order, and decency in Indian ways. So did some non-Indians. Before the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, and others had noted that while few Indians chose to become “civilized,” many people went willingly to live with Indians. Indian society, said Crèvecoeur, exerted a “singular charm” on Europeans; Franklin said that people who had lived with Indians and then returned home soon “become disgusted with our way of life.” Washington’s policies of civilization evidently did little to change the fact that some people preferred to live with the Indians. Francis Baily, an Englishman traveling the backcountry in 1797, observed that people like this were to be found throughout Indian country, “yet you seldom hear of an Indian renouncing his mode of living or his country, and imposing upon himself the bonds and shackles of civilized society.”20
Nevertheless, Indians had been adopting aspects of American society, economy, and religion for generations, and they continued to do so. Many raised livestock, made cloth, participated in the cash and market economy as merchants, consumers, and laborers, and lived in dispersed single-family homesteads rather than communal villages or longhouses. The government’s policies institutionalized processes that were already under way. Even by the criteria Washington applied, some of his “savage” enemies were quite “civilized” before he offered them a systematic program of change.
Delawares had long since adopted many elements of so-called civilized life. They acquired pigs, cows, and chickens from Europeans, and fences in Delaware villages protected their cornfields from their cattle. Although most preferred to live in traditional wigwams, some Delawares built houses, sometimes with two stories and a chimney. As the historian Gregory Dowd notes, the inventory of White Eyes’s personal effe
cts at the time of his death gives insight into the changing material culture of Ohio Indians as well as White Eyes’s role as an intermediary: buckskin leggings, breechcloths, a pipe tomahawk, and a wampum belt, along with scarlet breeches, four jackets (one of them made of scarlet silk and laced with gold trimming), three green coats, a fur cap, a beaver hat, three pairs of shoes, a rifle, a silver medal bearing a portrait of King George III, and a pair of spectacles.21 White Eyes married a white captive, ran a tavern, operated as a trader, and encouraged conversion and gradual acculturation as part of a strategy for survival and security in a changing world.22
Indian people had also for years been converting to Christianity, accepting elements of Christian teachings, and building new Christian communities. Delaware converts to the Moravian faith lived in mission villages such as the well-ordered Christian community Nicholas Cresswell visited, where the church service was conducted with more decorum than “I ever saw in any place of Worship in my life.”23 Good Peter served as a deacon in his Oneida church. The Mohegan minister Samson Occom led a movement of New England Indian people after the Revolution to Oneida country, where they established a new, Christian Indian community. Christian Mahicans from Stockbridge joined them. Educated at the Stockbridge mission school, the Mahican sachem Hendrick Aupaumut imagined that incorporating Christian beliefs and other aspects of “civilization” would revive the Indians’ cultures, strengthen their communities, and secure them a place in a republic where Christian Indians and Christian Americans could coexist. He advocated adopting American-style agriculture as the best path forward for Indian people and credited “the great men of the United States” with trying “to lift us up the Indians from the ground, that we may stand up and walk ourselves.”24
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