by Jill Lepore
I dwell the more on this point, because it is one of vague reproach to the memory of our fathers, and yet I am not sure that, unless we deny altogether the rightfulness of settling the continent,—unless we maintain that it was from the origin unjust and wrong to introduce the civilized race into America, and that the whole of what is now our happy and prosperous country ought to have been left as it was found, the abode of barbarity and heathenism,—I am not sure, that any different result could have taken place.65
Everett was, alas, almost entirely alone in pointing out this particular hypocrisy. Most white Americans, including New Englanders, were quite comfortable celebrating Philip as a hero (and as an ancestor) without questioning their own right to the land they lived on, or, even more basically, “the rightfulness of settling the continent.” One of the baldest statements of this contradiction was offered in 1831, by the members of the Worcester Historical Society who offered a two-part toast to “Philip of Pokanoket—Had we lived in the days of our forefathers, as an enemy we would have slain him.” Yet “the present generation may safely express their respect for his sagacity and patriotism.”66
What allowed these well-heeled Worcester men to admire Philip “safely” was their assumption that there were essentially no more Indians left alive in New England, an assumption that became commonplace in the first half of the nineteenth century. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would write in 1845, “We in Massachusetts see the Indians only as a picturesque antiquity. Massachusetts, Shawmut, Samoset, Squantum, Nantasket, Narragansett, Assabet, Musketaquid. But where are the men?”67 To many New Englanders, the Indians seemed to have vanished as early as the 1810s. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1812, for instance, John Adams wrote from Massachusetts, “We scarcely see an Indian in a year. I remember the Time when Indian Murders, Scalpings, Depredations and conflagrations were as frequent on the Eastern and Northern Frontier of Massachusetts as they are now in Indiana, and spread as much terror.”68 Adams, clearly, had little nostalgia for New England’s Indians and the violence he associated with them, but by the 1820s and 1830s many New England writers expressed only sorrow at the Indians’ disappearance. In 1828 Joseph Story noted the disappearance of New England’s Indians with more regret than relief: “We hear the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone forever.” And while lamenting the fate of northeastern Indians had become a cliché by the 1820s, Story and others applied their remarks not just to New England’s Indians but to Indians all along the eastern seaboard. “Two centuries ago,” Story declared, “the smoke of their wigwams and the fires of their councils rose in every valley, from Hudson’s Bay to the farthest Florida,” while today, “The winds of the Atlantic fan not a single region, which they may now call their own. Already the last feeble remnants of the race are preparing for their journey beyond the Mississippi.”69 The Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, that is, would vanish as surely as had the Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts.
Joseph Story was no idle observer. He was a U.S. Supreme Court justice. After making these remarks (in a speech given in Salem, Massachusetts), Story sent a copy of them to John Marshall, the Supreme Court’s chief justice, and Marshall made the same connection Story had, between the vanished Indians of New England and the vanishing Indians of the Southeast: “The conduct of our forefathers in expelling the original occupants of the soil grew out of so many mixed motives that any censure which philanthropy may bestow upon it ought to be qualified,” Marshall remarked. And yet, he continued, “I often think with indignation on our disreputable conduct … in the affair of the Cherokees in Georgia.”70 When John Marshall wasn’t behind the bench, he was an armchair historian. He knew a thing or two about King Philip’s War and had even written a brief and, all things considered, relatively balanced account of it in his History of the Colonies, published in 1824. Perhaps his acquaintance with the cruelties of the conflict (“a war so bloody as to threaten the very existence of New England”) led him to qualify his censure of the colonists.71 Whatever its origin, Marshall’s position, as revealed in his letter to Story, made the fine distinction of exonerating the conduct of seventeenth-century New England Puritans while criticizing contemporary Indian policy. Such a distinction was as uncommon in the debate about Indian removal as was Everett’s acknowledgment of the hypocrisy of New Englanders romanticizing Philip.
FOR LYDIA MARIA CHILD and Sarah Savage, the story of King Philip’s War was a parable about white greed, a cautionary tale told to raise support for the Cherokees in their struggle with land-hungry Georgians. For Edward Everett and John Marshall, King Philip’s War was a horrible, complicated, and perhaps not altogether regrettable tragedy whose similarities to the Cherokee case were mostly superficial but whose memory should inspire all men of integrity to consider their consciences in dealing with the Indian question. Jeremiah Evarts took this position a step farther. For him, the Cherokee case bore no relation to earlier events; it was a radical break with history. “Nothing of this kind has ever yet been done,” Evarts wrote in 1829. “To us, as a nation, it will be a new thing under the sun.”72
Andrew Jackson, of course, frowned at each of these faces of the past, but most of all he frowned at Evarts’. To Jackson, Indian removal was entirely consistent with the past and entirely consistent with the (justifiable) conduct of America’s earliest colonists. “The present policy of the Government,” he wrote, “is but a continuation of the same change by a milder process.”73 In his first annual address on December 8, 1829, when Jackson first articulated his Indian removal policy, he himself compared the contemporary Indians of the Southeast to the historical Indians of the Northeast: “Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek.”74 What Jackson’s address underscores is that both advocates and opponents of Indian removal looked to earlier Indian conflicts—especially the much-memorialized conflicts of the seventeenth-century colonies—to bolster their arguments. Whether they (like Child and Savage) characterized the Cherokee case as history repeating itself or (like Evarts) as a radical break with the past or simply (like Jackson) as another small step toward America’s date with its manifest destiny, all commentators on Indian removal related it to older policies. They differed only in the uses to which they put the past.
Perhaps no one understood this better than Old Hickory himself. In that first annual address, Jackson attempted to collapse the past into the present to challenge those Americans who supported the Cherokees by exposing their hypocrisy. Opposition to Indian removal was strongest in New England, and in an adroit attempt to garner the support of northern congressmen, Jackson posed what he believed to be an absurd set of questions:
Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure?75
These were provocative questions, but, in his attempt to recruit New England congressmen to his side, Jackson ultimately failed entirely. In the vote on the Indian Removal Bill in 1830, New England senators voted II to I against the bill, while Southerners voted 18 to 0 in favor; in the House, New Englanders voted 28 to 9 against, Southerners 60 to 15 in favor. New Englanders’ opposition, of course, counted for little in the end. The Indian Removal Act passed. And while Marshall ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that “the laws of Georgia can have no force” over the Cherokee Nation, Jackson simply ignored the ruling, since it did not prevent the federal government from acting on Georgia’s behalf. The president was even rumored to have remarked, “John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it.”76
Andrew Jackson believed that no real American could ever truly mourn the fate of America’s Indians:
What good man would prefer a country covered with for
ests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?77
What good man indeed? Of all the participants in the debate, only Edward Everett went so far as to admit, “unless we maintain that it was from the origin unjust and wrong to introduce the civilized race into America … I am not sure, that any different result could have taken place.”78 Yet Everett and other opponents of Indian removal also understood that supporting the Cherokees did not necessarily mean turning back the clock to October n, 1492. When carried to its logical conclusion, the Cherokees’ case did indeed undermine Americans’ earliest territorial claims, but as Everett knew, such retroactivity would not have been the practical consequence of a Cherokee victory in the Supreme Court (although it would have strengthened Indian tribes’ subsequent resistance to white encroachment and treaty violation). Andrew Jackson believed that “the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek” and that this fate was inevitable. Edward Everett believed that these were different matters entirely and that the fate of the southeastern Indians could, and should, be different. Between Jackson and Everett a vast horizon of opinion stretched over the nation—but the majority of Americans supported removal.
HAVING SURVEYED the debate over Indian removal and the place of history in it, it is time to raise the curtain on Metamora once again. Act V, Scene 5: “Metamora’s stronghold. Rocks, bridge, and waterfall.” Nahmeokee waits for her husband (“He comes not, yet the sound of the battle has died away like the last breath of a storm!”). The Wampanoags have lost. When Metamora arrives, Nahmeokee shows him their son’s body (“Ha! Dead! Dead! Cold!”). To save his wife from bondage, Metamora stabs and kills her (“In smiles she died!”). Benjamin Church and his soldiers arrive (“Fire upon him!”) and Metamora is shot. Dying, the last of the Wampanoags issues his final curse (“Spirits of the grave, I come! But the curse of Metamora stays with the white man! I die!”). According to the final stage direction, Metamora “Falls and dies; a tableau is formed. Drums and trumpet sound a retreat till curtain. Slow curtain.”79
THE END. The end of the play and the end of the race. The audience rises in rapturous applause. Recall the words of the critic for the American Quarterly Review: “Let us hope, for the honour of humanity, that this applause is bestowed on Mr. Forrest, rather than the ferocious savage whom he impersonates.”80 He need not have worried. Metamora might be full of ambiguities and might be seen by at least one audience in Augusta as condemning Georgians, but in the end, quite literally at the end, Metamora spotlighted Philip’s death. A tragic death, yes, but a necessary one. Metamora mourned the passing of Philip and the disappearance of New England’s Indians but it mourned these losses as inevitable and right. In this, Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags had much in common with the fiction, verse, and painting of its day, including, most famously, Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.81 Yamoyden, for example, mourned “a departed race,— / Long vanished hence,”82 and in John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1830 poem “Metacom,” the dying chief moans about his tribe’s decay:
The scorched earth—the blackened log—
The naked bones of warriors slain,
Be the sole relics which remain Of the once mighty Wampanoag.83
Philip’s death is also the most commonly depicted scene of the war, and most illustrations, like G. I. Brown’s painting The Last of the Wampanoags, show him falling or fallen, alone in the wilderness. Here, as in the final scene of Metamora (“Rocks, bridge, and waterfall”), Philip is closely associated with the
The Last of the Wampanoags by G. I. Brown. Engraved by G. E. Ellis, c. 1850. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
wilderness and with a rocky landscape. Most critics supposed that “Metamora” was simply a poetic rendering of “Metacom”; in fact it is bad Greek for “big rock.”84 And by the end of the play, Metamora is a rock, a speechless, motionless memorial. In paintings, plays, poems, and prose, Philip is similarly petrified—dead but symbolically transformed into a mute rock, a stage prop. (A popular engraving of Forrest in the role of Metamora pictured him leaning on a massive boulder.)
At the end of Forrest’s performance, white audiences applauded Metamora’s death, and the death of his race. But what of his curse? The irate judge in Augusta, Georgia, believed that “Any actor who could utter such scathing language, and with such vehemence, must have the whole matter at heart.”85Yet Forrest was an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson and most likely shared his views on Indian removal. It is probable that for Forrest, if the fate of the Wampanoags was tragic, inevitable, and right, so was the fate of the Cherokees. As the historian Brian Dippie has astutely observed, “the belief in the Vanishing Indian was the ultimate cause of the Indians vanishing.”86 Metamora was just one of dozens if not hundreds of literary productions by which the fate of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Chickasaws was made acceptable to the American public by virtue of its very inevitability, an inevitability embodied, for many readers and theatergoers, in the story of King Philip’s War. In the end, Metamora was dead, and Forrest was only a stage Indian who did not, after all, believe in “that d—d Indian speech.” And, outside of the people of Augusta, Georgia, neither did most of his audience. But only most.
III
ON THE NIGHT of November 6, 1833, Metamora played to a crowded house at the Tremont Street Theater in Boston. Edwin Forrest was no doubt in fine form, in full costume. It was a performance like any other, but for the eagerly awaited and much-honored guests: a delegation of Penobscot Indians from Maine. They were late, and the restless audience worried. As the Boston Morning Post reported, “It was thought that when their box remained so long empty they did not intend coming”87 Unfortunately, when the Penobscots did arrive, they proved to be not nearly as entertaining as the proprietors of the Tremont Street Theater had hoped. According to the Post, the Indians “doubtless do not wish to peril their popularity and consequently made no speeches.”88 Years later, William Alger would tell a slightly different story. In Alger’s account of this same night, probably told to him by Forrest, the Penobscots were “so excited by the performance that in the closing scene they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the death of the great chief.”89
On the face of it, the Post report and Alger’s anecdote about this very intriguing evening seem contradictory. If the Penobscots “made no speeches,” can they still be said to have “chanted a dirge”? Is a dirge speech? These will prove to be tricky questions. Perhaps it would be better to begin by asking why the Penobscots were at the Tremont Street Theater in the first place, and why they were delayed.
Indian attendance at performances of Metamora was not uncommon. As Alger remarked,
many a time delegations of Indian tribes who chanced to be visiting the cities where [Forrest] acted this character—Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans—attended the performance, adding a most picturesque feature by their presence, and their pleasure and approval were unqualified.90
Pleasure, approval, and enhanced ticket sales. Real Indians could pack a house (and line Forrest’s pockets).
Because the reason for the Penobscots’ attendance was obvious, there porter for the Boston Morning Post failed to remark on it. He did, however, comment on why they were late: “The motives attributed to their absence was that their presence might have some bias on the present difficulties between Alabama and the Government!” Those “present difficulties” consisted of Alabama’s attempt to force Cherokees and Creeks out of their state, following the lead of their Georgia neighbors. If the Penobscots feared that their presence at a performance of Metamora in Boston might adversely affect Cherokees and Creeks struggling to hold on to their land in Alabama, they were indeed keen observers of
the national scene. Did they suspect that white New Englanders’ valuable opposition to Indian removal depended on the illusion that there were no more Indians in New England? Possibly. Certainly they remained, at the very least, rather quiet at the performance. As the Boston Morning Post reporter suggested, the Penobscots made no speeches because they “doubtless do not wish to peril their popularity.”91 Maybe the Indians in the audience believed that if they could not disappear into the romantic mist in the forest they could at least be mute, silent as a rock. As Justice Joseph Story had declared in 1828, New England’s Indians “shed no tears; they utter no cries; they heave no groans. There is something in their hearts, which passes speech.”92
Maybe the Penobscots sensed that their reception at the Tremont Street Theater depended on their “passing speech.” But they were not expected to be entirely silent. As anyone who had heard Edwin Forrest knew, Indians were LOUD. One of the most distinctive features of Forrest’s Indian/American was the strength of his voice. Truth be told, he positively bellowed. English actor George Vandenhoff saw Forrest perform the role of Metamora in 1842 and noted: “His voice surged and roared like the angry sea, lashed into fury by a storm; till, as it reached its boiling, seething climax, … it was like the falls of Niagara.”93 But if Forrest was widely known for his trademark hollering, he was almost as often mocked for it (one parody of Metamora went by the name Metaroarer).94 Yet some criticism of Forrest’s high-decibel performance was clearly aimed, at least in part, at the barbarity of the character—and the race—he portrayed. A particularly vituperative attack likened Metamora’s speeches to the noises made by primates: