But Indian reorganization, based in large measure on the philosophy and promise of a just system of pluralism linked to the territorial integrity of tribes, was not honored consistently. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency charged with fulfilling the government’s trust responsibility, leased Indian land to outside companies under contracts that did not protect Indian rights and sometimes even were signed without knowledge or consent of the Indians themselves. And the bureau bowed to congressional pressure for assimilation by continuing the Indian boarding school system, which sometimes took Indian children away from their parents for many years at a time and kept them from learning about their traditional cultures or languages.
In 1953, less than two decades after passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, the House of Representatives passed a resolution proclaiming as the policy of the United States the speedy abolition of federal supervision over the tribes and subjection of Indians to the same laws, privileges, and responsibilities as all other citizens of the U.S. A process aptly known as “termination” had begun. The resolution spoke of giving Indians “equal rights” and of “freeing them from all the disabilities and limitations specifically applicable to Indians.”16 But, subject to state taxes and hunting and fishing laws, Indians would lose federal protection over their lands and the right to self-governing sovereign status.
Not until the 1970s and 1980s did white Americans return to support for tribal pluralism, based upon the original promise of the Northwest Ordinance and the judicial opinions of John Marshall. The American civil rights consciousness was responsible, in part; so was the growing recognition among whites of the history of oppression of the Indian tribes and also the new assertiveness of Indians themselves in claiming their rights both as American citizens and as members of tribes that possessed a unique relationship to the polity as a whole.
Chapter Five
“THIS FOURTH OF JULY IS YOURS”
African-Americans and Caste Pluralism
SPEAKING on July 4,1853, Frederick Douglass complained: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary … this Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”1 By 1853, most free African-Americans were excluded from meaningful participation in the civic culture and from skilled or middle-class occupations.
Slavery based on race began soon after the first settlers came, when whites treated their black and their white indentured servants in a radically different manner. Of three runaway servants caught in Virginia in 1640, two, who were white, were sentenced to an extension of four years in their period of servitude, but the third, who was black, was sentenced to servitude for life. In 1662, Virginia declared that the status of offspring of a white man and a Negro woman would follow that of the mother. Two years later, Maryland prohibited intermarriage between the races; in 1690, South Carolina declared slaves to be real estate.2 By 1700, when blacks were transported in large numbers, slavery was well established.
The expansion of slavery and the tightening of controls on slaves in the South was fueled at first by profits in rice, indigo, and tobacco, and then especially in cotton. In the South in the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, slavery was supported also by the interests of New England merchants and shipbuilders, who profited from the slave trade. Slavery became entrenched in the North as well, if on a more modest scale. In 1704, the governor of Connecticut reported that all children born of Negro bondswomen were born in servitude; thirteen years later, African-Americans were barred from holding land in Connecticut. In New York, trade with blacks was prohibited by 1702; in New York City, slaves were forbidden to be on the streets after sundown and were not allowed to appear as witnesses at the trial of a free person.
The Early Agreement to Exclude Blacks from Participation in the Republic
By 1775, nine-tenths of the half million Negroes in the colonies lived in the South. Indentured servants and redemptionists could become members of the polity once they discharged their contracts, but slaves had no contract. Locked into a caste relationship, they were compelled to work at the most brutal, lowly, and unrewarding of jobs. The sons and daughters of indentured servants could go off to the West and claim land. Slaves could go nowhere without their masters’ authority.
Even the most illustrious of the founding fathers—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—all but Franklin later Presidents of the United States—saw no way to overturn the slave system when the Constitution was written in 1787. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison agreed on slavery with those other Virginians who spoke so eloquently of liberty and freedom, George Mason and Patrick Henry. The difficulties would be too great should we be deprived of slaves, said Mason, while denouncing slavery as immoral and warning of its terrible consequences. “I deplore slavery,” said Henry, but “prudence forbids its abolition.”3 Adams of Massachusetts not only deplored slavery but refused to own slaves even “when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character” and even “when they were very cheap.”4 Franklin, who came from multiethnic Pennsylvania, grew up in a household in Boston that had no Negro slaves or servants. Even before the Revolution, he expressed the hope that the slave trade could be ended.5 But not until after the Revolution, especially in the last few years of his life, when he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, did he take a strong stand on the issue. In his last public act, Franklin wrote a memorial to the first Congress of the United States to promote the abolition of slavery, but the Congress, after a debate that lasted nearly a month, put it aside.
Washington’s views were more commonly held. Slavery is immoral; slaves have the right to be free; we have come to depend on them as a source of labor that we cannot do without; therefore, we cannot abolish slavery. He wrote and said repeatedly that he hated slavery and wished it could be abolished gradually, but he was certain that to set the slaves free at once would produce “inconvenience and mischief.”6 He often said that he wished never to buy another slave, yet he found that circumstances required such purchases.7 At the Constitutional Convention, where he presided, he appears to have remained aloof from the debate on slavery (Georgia and South Carolina insisted that nothing be done to touch it and that slaves be counted for purposes of representation). As president, he told a Quaker visitor that he thought it best for him not to comment publicly on the question of slavery since the issue of its abolition might come before him for an official decision.8 His own slaves constituted so much a portion of his estate that he thought he could not afford to free them, and at the time of his death he owned 317 slaves.9
The new Constitution recognized slavery by specifying that every slave should count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representatives, by stipulating that the Congress could not prohibit the slave trade until 1808, and by insisting that no slave held under the laws of one state escaping into another could be discharged from slavery. But the authors of the Constitution themselves recoiled from the word “slave.” They wrote of “three-fifths of all other persons” and of “the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit” and that “no person held to service or labor in one state,…” So odious was the term “slavery” that the term “service or labor” is repeated three times in order to avoid it.
Madison and Jefferson both agreed with Washington on slavery’s moral evils, Madison writing in Federalist Paper No. 42 that the hope of ending the slave trade in twenty years “ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity.”10 Madison lamented, “happy would it be for the unfortunate African, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppression of their European brethren.”11 But in what sense were they “brethren”? He voted in the first Congress for a naturalization law that admitted only whites to citizenship, and neither he nor Jefferson released all of their slaves to freedom.
As