Civilizations under Siege: The European Conquest of the Americas

5/27 The debate over the morality question

By Edward J. Dodson

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Between the time the Europeans first arrived in the late fifteenth century and the decade of distress that resulted in the rebellion of English colonists in the North America against British rule, the conquest of the hemisphere's indigenous people was accompanied by a sincere, if ineffective, debate over the morality questions raised. European transnationalists provided a framework for this debate, as did the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity. The number of true scholars living in the Americas was certainly small, even as late as on the eve of rebellion against Britain. Yet, there was a widespread and pervasive sentiment on the part of colonists that their life and socio-political arrangements were distinctly superior to those of the Old World and were in great external danger. "They had hated and feared the trends of their own time, and in their writing had contrasted the present with a better past, which they endowed with qualities absent from their own, corrupt era", writes Bernard Bailyn.

The age to which the colonists looked as exemplifying a condition of full liberty was that of pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon England. They did not, however, look at themselves as conquerors and usurpers where the indigenous Americans were concerned. A particularly critical assessment of the European-Americans who came to the frontier appears in Richard Drinnon's introduction to the memoirs of John Dunn Hunter, who had been captured near the end of the eighteenth century by the Osage tribe and raised to adulthood by these people. Hunter's memoirs spoke in tender and favorable terms of the life led by the Osage and other indigenous tribes, evoking great interest among European and some American intellectuals but resentment from those who felt the sting of Hunter's words. In a society supposedly built on principle, with the express purpose of protecting life and liberty, the treatment of Africans and indigenous North Americans did not stand up to close examination:

Europeans in the New World had good reason ... for not looking directly at the natives and the wilderness they were destroying. To have looked openly risked revealing that savages ... were like niggers: they existed only in the heads of whites. To have seen the natives risked discovering that these "ravening wolves" were merely that part of themselves Wasps found abhorrent, necessary to deny, and therefore necessary to project... Open-eyed scrutiny threatened to disclose that the headlong pursuit of God, Progress, the American Empire, and their own "higher nature" had hurled Wasps along a course of warring against what was natural in themselves and their environment.

After visiting Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in 1824, Hunter attempted to negotiate with the Mexican government for an Indian homeland in Texas that would become a buffer state between Mexico and the United States. In this quest, Hunter made an enemy of Stephen Austin, who first threatened Hunter and then had him murdered. Richard Drinnon's assessment of the actions of those in Andrew Jackson's administration, as harsh as they were toward Hunter and the indigenous tribes, merely confirmed that "American Indian policy had always been genocidal in intent and performance." William Penn on the other hand, who provided a detailed description of the tribes indigenous to the area he acquired by grant from the English monarch, admonished his fellow Europeans:

Do not abuse them, but let them have justice, and you win them. The worst is, that they are the worse for the Christians, who have propaged their vices, and yielded them tradition for ill and not for good things.

Benjamin Franklin displayed a strong interest in treating the Delaware and other tribes justly when he challenged the legitimacy of a land swindle executed by Thomas Penn, referred to as the "walking-purchase," because the amount of land acquired was based on the distance walked over a day and a half; Penn had, however, employed several swift athletes to cover a much larger distance than the Delaware had conceptually agreed to. Working in conjunction with Sir William Johnson, agent of the English crown and adopted chief of the Mohawk tribe, Franklin orchestrated the resale of this tract to the Iroquois -- who were the actual owners of the land and not the Delaware. This concern did not, however, prevent Franklin from becoming involved in a land company organized to promote settlement in western Pennsylvania and beyond, knowing full well that this territory was inhabited by countless indigenous tribes.

There is no reliable record of Jefferson's meeting with John Hunter; however, his respect for their civilization did not prevent him from writing to William Henry Harrison, "In war they will kill some of us; we will destroy all of them." Under somewhat less troublesome circumstances, his correspondence affirmed his conviction in the equality of the indigenous North Americans:

[T]he proofs of genius given by the Indians of North America place them on a level with whites in the same uncultivated state. ...I have seen some thousands myself, and conversed much with them, and have found in them a masculine, sound understanding. I have had much information from men who have lived among them, and whose veracity and good sense were so far known to me, as to establish a reliance on their information. They have all agreed in bearing witness in favor of the genius of this people.

Only a very small minority recognized or were troubled by the irony involved in the European-American annihilation of the indigenous tribes and forcible removal of these people from their homelands. After settlements were established in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Williamsburg and other coastal and tidewater areas, the second and third generation of European-Americans (and their contemporary arrivals from Europe) thought of the interior of North America as virgin frontier, unsettled and available for anyone able to clear the land and hold it. If, today, we are troubled by the absence of morality associated with this migration, characterized by considerable violence, we should at least consider the following perspective, provided by Theodore Roosevelt not very long after the last of the indigenous tribes surrendered their independence, their territory and much of their dignity:

The Southwest was conquered only after years of hard fighting with the original owners. The way in which this was done bears much less resemblance to the sudden filling up of Australia and California by the practically unopposed overflow from a teeming and civilized mother country, than it does to the original English lone quest of Britain itself.

The warlike borderers who thronged across the Alleghanies, the restless and reckless hunters, the hard, dogged, frontier farmers, by dint of grim tenacity overcame and displaced Indians, French, and Spaniards alike, exactly as, fourteen hundred years before, Saxon and Angle hadovercome and displaced the Cymric and Gaelic Celts. They were led by no one commander; they acted under orders from neither king nor congress; they were not carrying out the plans of any far-sighted leader. In obedience to the instincts working half blindly within their breasts, spurred ever onward by the fierce desires of their eager hearts, they made in the wilderness homes for their children, and by so doing wrought out the destinies of a continental nation.

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