The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
spirits and blights every free and noble quality of their natures. They
become drunken, indolent, feeble, thievish, and pusillanimous. They
loiter like vagrants about the settlements, among spacious dwellings
replete with elaborate comforts, which only render them sensible of
the comparative wretchedness of their own condition. Luxury spreads its
ample board before their eyes, but they are excluded from the banquet.
Plenty revels over the fields, but they are starving in the midst of its
abundance; the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden, but they
feel as reptiles that infest it.
* The American Government has been indefatigable in its
exertions to ameliorate the situation of the Indians, and to
introduce among them the arts of civilization and civil and
religious knowledge. To protect them from the frauds of the
white traders no purchase of land from them by individuals
is permitted, nor is any person allowed to receive lands
from them as a present without the express sanction of
government. These precautions are strictly enforced.
How different was their state while yet the undisputed lords of the
soil! Their wants were few and the means of gratification within their
reach. They saw every one round them sharing the same lot, enduring the
same hardships, feeding on the same aliments, arrayed in the same rude
garments. No roof then rose but was open to the homeless stranger; no
smoke curled among the trees but he was welcome to sit down by its fire
and join the hunter in his repast. “For,” says an old historian of New
England, “their life is so void of care, and they are so loving also,
that they make use of those things they enjoy as common goods, and are
therein so compassionate that rather than one should starve through
want, they would starve all; thus they pass their time merrily, not
regarding our pomp, but are better content with their own, which some
men esteem so meanly of.” Such were the Indians whilst in the pride
and energy of their primitive natures: they resembled those wild plants
which thrive best in the shades of the forest, but shrink from the hand
of cultivation and perish beneath the influence of the sun.
In discussing the savage character writers have been too prone to
indulge in vulgar prejudice and passionate exaggeration, instead of the
candid temper of true philosophy. They have not sufficiently considered
the peculiar circumstances in which the Indians have been placed, and
the peculiar principles under which they have been educated. No being
acts more rigidly from rule than the Indian. His whole conduct is
regulated according to some general maxims early implanted in his mind.
The moral laws that govern him are, to be sure, but few; but then he
conforms to them all; the white man abounds in laws of religion, morals,
and manners, but how many does he violate!
A frequent ground of accusation against the Indians is their disregard
of treaties, and the treachery and wantonness with which, in time of
apparent peace, they will suddenly fly to hostilities. The intercourse
of the white men with the Indians, however, is too apt to be cold,
distrustful, oppressive, and insulting. They seldom treat them with that
confidence and frankness which are indispensable to real friendship, nor
is sufficient caution observed not to offend against those feelings of
pride or superstition which often prompt the Indian to hostility
quicker than mere considerations of interest. The solitary savage feels
silently, but acutely. His sensibilities are not diffused over so wide
a surface as those of the white man, but they run in steadier and deeper
channels. His pride, his affections, his superstitions, are all
directed towards fewer objects, but the wounds inflicted on them are
proportionably severe, and furnish motives of hostility which we cannot
sufficiently appreciate. Where a community is also limited in number,
and forms one great patriarchal family, as in an Indian tribe, the
injury of an individual is the injury of the whole, and the sentiment
of vengeance is almost instantaneously diffused. One council-fire is
sufficient for the discussion and arrangement of a plan of hostilities.
Here all the fighting-men and sages assemble. Eloquence and superstition
combine to inflame the minds of the warriors. The orator awakens
their martial ardor, and they are wrought up to a kind of religious
desperation by the visions of the prophet and the dreamer.
An instance of one of those sudden exasperations, arising from a motive
peculiar to the Indian character, is extant in an old record of the
early settlement of Massachusetts. The planters of Plymouth had defaced
the monuments of the dead at Passonagessit, and had plundered the grave
of the Sachem’s mother of some skins with which it had been decorated.
The Indians are remarkable for the reverence which they entertain for
the sepulchres of their kindred. Tribes that have passed generations
exiled from the abodes of their ancestors, when by chance they have
been travelling in the vicinity, have been known to turn aside from the
highway, and, guided by wonderfully accurate tradition, have crossed the
country for miles to some tumulus, buried perhaps in woods, where the
bones of their tribe were anciently deposited, and there have passed
hours in silent meditation. Influenced by this sublime and holy feeling,
the Sachem whose mother’s tomb had been violated gathered his men
together, and addressed them in the following beautifully simple
and pathetic harangue--a curious specimen of Indian eloquence and an
affecting instance of filial piety in a savage:
“When last the glorious light of all the sky was underneath this globe
and birds grew silent, I began to settle, as my custom is, to take
repose. Before mine eyes were fast closed methought I saw a vision, at
which my spirit was much troubled; and trembling at that doleful sight,
a spirit cried aloud, ‘Behold, my son, whom I have cherished, see the
breasts that gave thee suck, the hands that lapped thee warm and fed
thee oft. Canst thou forget to take revenge of those wild people
who have defaced my monument in a despiteful manner, disdaining our
antiquities and honorable customs? See, now, the Sachem’s grave lies
like the common people, defaced by an ignoble race. Thy mother doth
complain and implores thy aid against this thievish people who have
newly intruded on our land. If this be suffered, I shall not rest quiet
in my everlasting habitation.’ This said, the spirit vanished, and I,
all in a sweat, not able scarce to speak, began to get some strength
and recollect my spirits that were fled, and determined to demand your
counsel and assistance.”
I have adduced this anecdote at some length, as it tends to show how
these sudden acts of hostility, which have been attributed to caprice
and perfidy, may often arise from deep and generous motives, which
our inattention to Indian character and customs prevents our properly
appreciating.
Another ground of violent outcry against the Indians is their barbarity
to the vanquished. This had its origin partly in policy and partly in
superstition. The tribes, though sometimes called nations, were never
so formidable in their numbers but that the loss of several warriors
was sensibly felt; this was particularly the case when they had been
frequently engaged in warfare; and many an instance occurs in Indian
history where a tribe that had long been formidable to its neighbors
has been broken up and driven away by the capture and massacre of its
principal fighting-men. There was a strong temptation, therefore, to the
victor to be merciless, not so much to gratify any cruel revenge, as
to provide for future security. The Indians had also the superstitious
belief, frequent among barbarous nations and prevalent also among the
ancients, that the manes of their friends who had fallen in battle were
soothed by the blood of the captives. The prisoners, however, who are
not thus sacrificed are adopted into their families in the place of the
slain, and are treated with the confidence and affection of relatives
and friends; nay, so hospitable and tender is their entertainment that
when the alternative is offered them they will often prefer to remain
with their adopted brethren rather than return to the home and the
friends of their youth.
The cruelty of the Indians towards their prisoners has been heightened
since the colonization of the whites. What was formerly a compliance
with policy and superstition has been exasperated into a gratification
of vengeance. They cannot but be sensible that the white men are the
usurpers of their ancient dominion, the cause of their degradation, and
the gradual destroyers of their race. They go forth to battle smarting
with injuries and indignities which they have individually suffered, and
they are driven to madness and despair by the wide-spreading desolation
and the overwhelming ruin of European warfare. The whites have too
frequently set them an example of violence by burning their villages
and laying waste their slender means of subsistence, and yet they wonder
that savages do not show moderation and magnanimity towards those who
have left them nothing but mere existence and wretchedness.
We stigmatize the Indians, also, as cowardly and treacherous, because
they use stratagem in warfare in preference to open force; but in this
they are fully justified by their rude code of honor. They are early
taught that stratagem is praiseworthy; the bravest warrior thinks it
no disgrace to lurk in silence, and take every advantage of his foe: he
triumphs in the superior craft and sagacity by which he has been enabled
to surprise and destroy an enemy. Indeed, man is naturally more prone to
subtilty than open valor, owing to his physical weakness in comparison
with other animals. They are endowed with natural weapons of defence,
with horns, with tusks, with hoofs, and talons; but man has to depend
on his superior sagacity. In all his encounters with these, his proper
enemies, he resorts to stratagem; and when he perversely turns his
hostility against his fellow-man, he at first continues the same subtle
mode of warfare.
The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with
the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by
stratagem. That chivalrous courage which induces us to despise the
suggestions of prudence and to rush in the face of certain danger is the
offspring of society and produced by education. It is honorable,
because it is in fact the triumph of lofty sentiment over an instinctive
repugnance to pain, and over those yearnings after personal ease and
security which society has condemned as ignoble. It is kept alive by
pride and the fear of shame; and thus the dread of real evil is overcome
by the superior dread of an evil which exists but in the imagination. It
has been cherished and stimulated also by various means. It has been
the theme of spirit-stirring song and chivalrous story. The poet and
minstrel have delighted to shed round it the splendors of fiction, and
even the historian has forgotten the sober gravity of narration and
broken forth into enthusiasm and rhapsody in its praise. Triumphs and
gorgeous pageants have been its reward: monuments, on which art has
exhausted its skill and opulence its treasures, have been erected
to perpetuate a nation’s gratitude and admiration. Thus artificially
excited, courage has risen to an extraordinary and factitious degree
of heroism, and, arrayed in all the glorious “pomp and circumstance of
war,” this turbulent quality has even been able to eclipse many of those
quiet but invaluable virtues which silently ennoble the human character
and swell the tide of human happiness.