Sojourner pluralism was far less restrictive than caste pluralism, and the children of sojourners who remained to become settlers for the most part entered the civic culture and its system of voluntary pluralism in a fashion similar to the children of European immigrant settlers. Like them, they embraced the American founding myth, with its dream of opportunity for all based on equal rights. African-Americans also treasured that ideal. Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois said there were “no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”1 But blacks were denied the promise of the Declaration.
The white Anglo-Saxon charter members of the government of the United States had created an idea of national membership based on equal rights for all, but the systems of sojourner pluralism and, to a much greater degree, that of caste pluralism contradicted that ideal. Not until the 1960s–1980s would the Euro-American determination to maintain a racially exclusive civic culture be abandoned.
*The term “Native Americans” is preferred over “Indians” by the leaders of many North American tribes. I use both terms in this book, and prefer “Indians” where I wish to distinguish native American Indians from Aleuts, Eskimos, and Hawaiians, who also settled in what is now the United States long before the Europeans arrived.
*In this book, I use the term “blacks” extensively, for reasons that are made clear in chapter 9, and also occasionally “Negroes,” the term preferred by most blacks in the first sixty-plus years of this century. I personally prefer the term “African-Americans,” having taught a course on the African-American experience at Brandeis for many years, and I often use it here. That term is apparently coming into wider use.
Chapter Four
“GO BACK TO THE COUNTRY FROM WHENCE YOU CAME”
Predatory Pluralism and the Native American Response
WHEN in the early nineteenth century Pawnee Indians first encountered Anglo-Americans, the whites proposed a treaty, promising blankets, guns, and knives made of steel in exchange for land. The head chief of the Pawnees declined the offer. His robe would keep him warm, even in winter; his arrows would kill cattle, his stone knife would cut meat for eating. “Go back to the country from whence you came,” he said, “We do not want your presents, and we do not want you to come into our country.”1
There was no question of assimilation or integration. “The Great Spirit has made us all,” the Seneca chief Red Jacket said in 1805, “but he has made a great difference between his red and white children.”2 The whites agreed.
The early encounters between the English settlers and the Indians on the East Coast in the seventeenth century established the terms of the American system of tribal pluralism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much of the twentieth. Although early white settlers tried and usually failed to get Indians to work for them, they did not want their labor first of all. They desired their land. To possess the land became their overwhelming obsession. They negotiated for it or they seized it. Coercion became the dominant strategy of acquisition. If Indians refused the colonists’ offers for land or resisted their incursions into Indian lands they were pushed out, or even captured and held or sold as slaves. Roger Williams thought that the Massachusetts Bay Colony belonged to the Indians. He would have established a system of pluralism based on respect for the tribal integrity of the indigenous population. William Penn bought title from the Indians. But Williams and Penn were exceptions.
The authors of the American Constitution made the Indians’ position clear. They, not the colonists, were the outsiders. Most Indians were not taxed and not counted as part of the population that determined apportionment of representatives. Congress was granted the power to regulate commerce not only with foreign nations but also with Indian tribes. They were, in effect, aliens in their own lands. Still, Indians were a force to be reckoned with, and making war against them was not always the most effective policy. Where conquest was not likely except at great cost, negotiation made sense. Beginning in 1778, when the first treaty was signed between the Continental Congress and an Indian nation (the Delaware), and until the treaty system was abrogated in 1871, the U.S. government negotiated nearly four hundred treaties with Indian nations.
Many treaties conceded that some land should remain Indian and agreed that certain fishing and hunting rights be maintained. But substantial acreage was gained without a fight. Whites clothed their avarice in high-minded phrases about fair treatment. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established a system for incorporating western territories as states, affirmed an Indian policy based on “good faith”; Indian “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful ways authorized by Congress.” The promise of good faith was never fulfilled. The white settlers ignored it as they pushed the frontier farther west. The Congress was left to decide what is “just and lawful,” but Congress most often responded to political pressures emanating from land-hungry whites.
The ambiguous and shifting positions of Thomas Jefferson reflected the continuing (albeit tenuous) hold of the ideals of the Northwest Ordinance but even more the general white attitude of disdain for Indians and lust for their lands. One year before the ordinance, Jefferson embraced the view of tribal rights in a letter to a European friend. “It may be regarded as certain, that not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians, without their consent. The sacredness of their rights is felt by all thinking persons in America.”3 Ten years earlier, when the Indians were labeled “merciless savages” in the Declaration of Independence, he also wrote that “nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.”4 By the time Jefferson became president, he had abandoned both his 1776 and his 1786 positions and had been converted to an assimilationist approach. Writing to Andrew Jackson, he advocated that the Indians be guided “to an agricultural way of life.… In leading them thus to … civilization … I trust and believe we are acting for their greatest good.”5 By his second inaugural address in 1805, Jefferson was still an assimilationist: “Humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts.” But, concerned that Indians would oppose his policies, he complained that they had “a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors.”6 He then abandoned the policy of assimilation and ordered his representatives on the frontier to acquire all Indian lands east of the Mississippi. By 1808, Jefferson told some Cherokees who wished to retain their lands in the upper South and become citizens of the United States that it would not work. He urged them to move west of the Mississippi. By 1812, he had reverted to his 1776 position, predicting that the Indians “will relapse into barbarism and misery … and we shall be obliged to drive them with the beasts of the forests into the Stony [Rocky] Mountains.”7
Andrew Jackson both reflected and stimulated the hostility of whites on the frontier toward the Indians. In 1833, in his second inaugural address, he justified a policy of white expansion: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests 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 twelve million happy