U.S. Political Thought


Lecture 6


October 17, 1995
Joseph Boland

Outline

  1. Announcements and Administrative Items:
  2. Second small group’s discussion questions on the Constitutional Founding
  3. Lecture: American Indian Influences on the America of the Founding Fathers
    1. Introduction
    2. European (and American) intellectual responses to indigenous American cultures
    3. Cultural exchange in everyday life
    4. American Indian influences on American political development, particularly the crafting of the Constitution
  4. Small group discussion questions (these were postponed till Thursday)
  5. Ten minutes for small groups to meet

American Indian Influences on the America of the Founding Fathers

I. Introduction

The European discovery of America came at a time of dramatic changes in the European world, including the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. Todorov argues that the discovery itself was “the most astonishing encounter in [European] history” and Montiel says that it produced a crisis and a revolution in knowledge. Of course, what may have been an intellectual crisis for Europeans was devastating for indigenous Americans. Yet the story of the conquest and colonization of the Americas, whether told as a celebration of progress or a crime of genocide, has tended to overshadow and to mask the influence of the Americas on Europe. For better or worse, European and Euro-American cultures appear untouched by Indian ones, whether one credits this to the superiority of “civilization” over “savagery” or blames it on an obdurate Eurocentrism backed by military superiority and greater numbers. Louis Hartz’s remark that “The destruction of forests and Indian tribes” was “wholly external” to American liberal society exemplifies this.

Perhaps the chief aim of Robert Venables article, “American Indian Influences on the America of the Founding Fathers,” is to challenge this notion by showing that European and Euro-American thought and behavior were extensively influenced by Indian beliefs and practices. At bottom, the study of Indian influences on Euro-American cultures

raises questions of cultural pluralism--whether American culture is better understood as a tapestry or a melting pot--and, when American culture is considered as a whole, whether is it is not, after all, a mestizo culture, the product of mixing and borrowing, a culture of what were once derisively called “half-breeds”?

It also is a matter of recognition and of crediting, of fairly acknowledging all those responsible for the birth and development of American culture. As Venables puts it in discussing the Constitution, despite the evidence that Europeans found inspiration in the liberty and vitality of Indian cultures, “when retrospectives of the Constitution are written, scholars and the general public fondly refer to the Magna Carta and to other European precedents, but not to Iroquois and other American Indian influences” (78).

The Venables article, while a rich source of evidence and insight, would have benefitted from a better organization of its topics. For this lecture, at least, I propose to use the following topics to examine the question of American Indian influences on Euro-American cultures:

II. European and American intellectual responses to indigenous American cultures: the noble/brutal savage and the common cause/common enemy

Stages of development and the “noble” vs. “brutal” savage: Europeans viewed American Indians “as living at an earlier stage of human development than themselves.” This grand cultural myth served at least two purposes. Plainly, it placed European civilization at the head of humanity’s path of development, thus reassuring Europeans of their central place in the world at a time when the discovery of an entire new hemisphere might otherwise have profoundly unsettled and disoriented them. Secondly, as I discuss below, it provided a means to criticize European culture for going awry while still affirming its superiority to the savage condition. The figures of the “noble” and “brutal” savage figure prominently in this story of cultural evolutionism.

The “noble savage” possessed a freedom and naturalness that some Europeans envied and which some of the natural rights philosophers thought should, insofar as possible, be preserved/restored within civil societies. At the same time, the savage life was depicted as lacking in all the achievements of civilization--writing, science, government, agriculture, money, manners and so forth. Indeed, for Rousseau, Locke and others, the savage is a pre-social being governed by elemental sentiments and without the benefit of any higher social law through which disputes could be peaceably settled. This fiction of a natural man undergirded the Enlightenment argument that government was a social contract (thus specifically not natural) and that it should protect the liberties of the natural state while removing its “inconveniences” (Locke’s term).

Hence the falsehood that Indians had no governments was sustained in large part because of its role in European ideological battles.

In a similar fashion, the fiction of the natural liberty of the savage was used to argue for civil liberties in Europe and its colonies. Natural liberty was liberty without society; civil liberty was liberty within society. It not only entailed compromise, since each person’s liberty had to be limited in order to protect the rights, particularly the property rights, of others. Civil liberty was really different in kind from natural liberty. For example, European philosophers usually depicted the liberty of the savage as licentious, a consequence of paganism. Christian liberty was, by contrast, freedom of conscience--that is, freedom governed by one form or another of Christian morality. In addition, the basic idea of civil liberty is liberty under the law, while natural liberty was said to be liberty based on the absence of law. Here again, the claim that Indian societies lacked governments is essential to the ideological function of the noble savage myth.

The cultural evolutionism of European thought, according to which humanity developed through stages from savagery to civilization, brought coherence to a cultural landscape profoundly shaken by the discovery of an entire hemisphere of previously unknown peoples. It enabled Europeans to study and interact with other cultures without this cultural exposure to the “other” jeopardizing their own sense of cultural identity. Yet in its “positive” version, this was only via an extremely racist affirmation of European cultural and religious achievements in contrast to Indian backwardness. Besides the conservative bent of such a view and its assimilationist or exterminist orientation toward the Indian other, it severely distorted European efforts to understand Indian cultures by imposing European categories and standards upon them. Even if one rejects ethical relativism, methodological relativism is essential to such understanding.

But what of the “negative” or critical version of cultural evolutionism, according to which Indian cultures were the measure of what European cultures had lost in the course of becoming civilized? In this critical version, Indian cultures serve as a mirror through which Europeans could be confronted with disturbing, subversive truths about their lack of liberty, the corruption of their politics and the degeneracy of their social behavior, the absurdity of their harried pursuits, their own brutality (made worse by technical sophistication and cold calculation), and so forth. Aside from the often stereotyped conceptions of Indian life upon which these critical theories rested, they also ultimately affirmed European superiority, however ambivalently, by retaining the notion of Indian societies as marking an earlier stage of development. It was still better to be civilized, and if Europeans were not as civilized as they thought, Indians were not yet civilized at all.

The “noble savage” myth rooted European yearnings for greater freedom and a less repressive moral code in a natural past from which it was said to be irrevocably severed, while justifying liberal political reforms that were to address these yearnings, completing the civilizing project by transmuting the natural virtues into civilized ones.

Perhaps no one’s thinking better exemplified this complex maneuver than Rousseau’s (For more information about Rousseau, see the separate posting). Venables characterizes Rousseau rather naively--as someone who merely used the noble savage as a critical ideal with which to illuminate the pointless drudgery and vanity of European life (79-80). Rousseau did this, but as the additional posting shows, he ultimately affirms the superiority of European civilization.

Moreover, it is only through an understanding of the dialectical nature of Rousseau’s cultural evolutionism that one can appreciate the internal relationship of the “noble” to the “brutal” savage in much of European thought. Venables merely juxtaposes the two myths. Both were available to Europeans, and the latter “allowed Europeans to justify their expansion into territories occupied by inhabitants who were ‘unworthy,’ ‘inferior,’ or so ‘cruel’ as to make them expendable” (80). True, of course, but the noble savage is just as inferior, and the brutality of the brutal savage is implicit in Rousseau’s description of his ‘noble’ brother--just look at the contrasts in the sidebar. It is only the independence of the savage and the simplicity of his needs that keeps him from acting brutally, for the law of the strongest governs his relations with others, he possesses none of the graces and forms of restraint and tact which culture bequeaths on humans, and he is largely lacking in compassion (Rousseau makes compassion universal, but he also denies a social consciousness to the savage). By contrast, the genuinely civilized person is noble precisely by virtue of living within a culture which has transcended the savage state. The civilized person has internalized the norms of a society which has itself subjected the interdependence of living conditions to the rule of law.

Venables further confuses the matter by supposing that the fact that the noble savage myth referred initially to Europe’s own mythic past (81) allowed it to be used by those seeking universalist links across cultural differences (the “common cause”). Instead, this connection (the European past with the indigenous American present) merely reflected the role of the myth in Eurocentric cultural evolutionism, showing that the European present was a real advance on its own past and on the indigenous present.

As Venables himself notes a few pages later, some Europeans linked the Indians with the old European idea of “the monstrous races, the ‘wild men’” (82). These typically were physically weird or grotesque creatures (one-eyed, headless, having enormous ears, etc.) who “had unusual sexual appetites” (83). The served, moreover, as cultural warnings: “Of course, one of the reasons the European culture perpetuated myths of wild men in the first place was to describe examples of what not to be, and by setting a negative example, to encourage proper Christians to adhere to the opposite behavior” (84).

The “common cause” or “common enemy”: “The common cause was an attempt to bridge the European and American Indian cultures on both sides of the Atlantic by perceiving universals that transcended racial and cultural differences” (81). Venables mentions two versions of the common cause--a self-serving assimilationist one and one “based on respect . . .[that] was a precursor to twentieth-century pluralism and ethical relativism” (81). He takes Las Casas as an outstanding example of the latter, seemingly without distinguishing between phases as Todorov does.

The common cause can also be approached via antagonisms within Europe. Thus Venables suggests that Jan Mostaert’s painting A West Indian Scene (circa 1550), portraying a Spanish attack on a Pueblo Indian town apparently from the Indians’ point of view, was “a parable with clear political overtones, because both Holland and the New World chafed under the imperialist yoke of Spain” (81). The brutal subjection of the Irish by the British could also be cited here, especially since techniques of cultural destruction later applied in the New World were earlier imposed on the Irish (e.g., suppression of the native tongue, replacement of Irish with English place-names).

The theme of Indian as common enemy shows up, Venables notes, in depictions of Indians as devils.

III. Cultural Exchange in Everyday Life

Venables offers a number of examples of social interaction between Indians and Euro-Americans, and a great many others can be found in histories of the colonies and early republic. Both the colonials and the British adopted Indian methods of fighting, and the use of Indian scouts was commonplace in armies (105-106).

Settlers had Indian neighbors and friends, as John Adams story of his boyhood shows (107-108). The Van Bergen Overmantle depicts an Indian couple passing in front of the Van Bergen home in a scene intended to typify early Hudson River settler life (107). There were urban Indians--the sailors and servants mentioned by Adams and portrayed in Moby Dick. Whites sometimes married Indians. Sam Houston, who became famous in the fight of Texas settlers against Mexico, at one time lived among the Arkansas Cherokee, spoke their language, and was married to a Cherokee woman (Rogin, Fathers and Children, 301). Settlers taken captive by Indians often did not wish to return, as Benjamin West’s painting of the return of the captives taken in Pontiac’s Rebellion reveals (100). James Madison, on a visit to Iroquois country in 1784, met an Oneida man who had been taken captive from a French village as a child and later married a chief’s daughter. He also encountered an English woman who had fled her life as a servant in a New York planter’s house to live with the Oneida, where she found a freedom and respect not given her in colonial society (Grinde in Exiled in the Land of the Free, 258-259).

The pervasiveness and often intimacy of these social relationships obviously raises troubling questions about how cumulatively genocidal practices could nevertheless be countenanced by settlers. Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence, his cultural study of the American frontier, suggests that a kind of bad faith typified white relationships with Indians. Though speaking in the following passage specifically of the Puritans, his assessment is meant to apply more generally. The Puritans “were bent simply on destroying the wilderness and replacing it with New England.” They “feared too intimate contact with the wilderness,” yet their survival required them to learn from and sometimes to imitate the Indian, even “against their will and conscience” (Slotkin, 125). He also shows how the settler community tended to treat the “crossing over” of individual whites as indicative either of demonic possession, moral degeneracy or defection, responses which only intensified settler solidarity against Indians and against acceptance of cultural mixing. Thus it is possible to see how the very extent and intimacy of social contact inflamed exterminationist and assimilationist tendencies.

IV. American Indian influence on American political development, particularly the crafting of the Constitution

I’ve already outlined the role the noble savage myth played in justifying liberal arguments for the protection of personal liberties and for popular sovereignty. While this myth was patronizing and based on a generally false view of Indian cultures, its use did show that the existence of Indian societies served to bolster the arguments of European political reformers. Indeed, the myth’s depiction of how Indian leaders ruled largely through persuasion rather than coercion came close to the truth in the case of the Indians of eastern North America. As Venables puts it, “The Indians, Europeans declared, were currently demonstrating that power came from ‘the people.’ Such an example could be referred to objectively, scientifically, because it did not depend upon historical interpretation or upon religious faith” (111).

Venables also points out that Anti-Federalist’s who opposed ratification of the Constitution because they “saw local state sovereignty offering better protection for individual liberty” were probably aware that the neighboring Indian societies were themselves very much like the small republics they idealized. The development of the Articles of Confederation, which the Anti-Federalists preferred as a model of government, was very likely shaped by borrowing from the Iroquois and other Indian confederacies (for more information on this, see Donald Grinde, “Iroquois Political Theory and the Roots of American Democracy,” in Exiled in the Land of the Free). Moreover, Montesquieu, one of the favorite sources of philosophical authority among Anti-Federalists, believed that the government of the Savages was most conducive to the preservation of natural liberty (114). Thus Indian political practices contributed to the Anti-Federalist cause, and while the Anti-Federalists lost the debate over the Constitution, there is no doubt that they affected the shape of the Constitution in numerous ways.

From the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution: It is worth noting here that the failed effort to negotiate a treaty in 1778 between the Continental Congress and the Delaware Indian nation, under which the latter would have joined the United States (then organized as a confederation of sovereign republics) is, as Venables notes, one of the outstanding “might have beens” of the period (113-114). This effort suggests the compatibility of the Articles of Confederation model (then in the process of being ratified) with Indian approaches to governance. Unfortunately, one of the principal reasons for the treaty’s failure--the inability or unwillingness of the American government to protect the Delawares from settler encroachments--also exemplified the issue over which Euro-Americans and the American Indians diverged philosophically and fought militarily--property and the treatment of the land. Venables argues that the constitutional convention delegates “were determined to find a balance that would combine the protection of life and liberty affirmed in the philosophy of the American Revolution, with the protection of property” (114). In doing so, “the Founding Fathers rejected the Indians’ concept of property, based as it was on a communal ethic” (116). Thus they “turn[ed] away from the American Indian models of local sovereignty represented by the Six Nations. They turned away from the Iroquois model of government by persuasion rather than by centralized cohesion. And they rejected their own Articles of Confederation, the closest white American had ever come to reflecting even a part of the decentralized premises of Iroquois government” (116).

To Venables, the Constitution “was a betrayal of values held in esteem by the Iroquois. Women were originally omitted from the United States’ political system. Black human life was valued at three-fifths the value of white human life. The Constitution separated government into branches intended more to check than to balance each other, because the checks and balances were achieved through tension. Moreover, the Constitution specifically rejected the idea that government is by consensus. . . . And under the Constitution, church and state are separate, whereas the Iroquois integrate religion and politics. Finally, the Constitution was defined in terms of private, individual property rights, not communal property rights” (116).

Interestingly, Venables suggests that the Founding Fathers drew their constitutional lessons from their own tribal pasts, specifically the conquest by Rome of their tribal ancestors. Not only did they not want to risk being conquered by an imperial power, they intended, Venables writes, “to do to the American Indians what Rome had done to the Britons, Germans, and other northern European tribes in their imperialist expansion” (117). In short, “In a fascinating psychological choice, the Founding Fathers rejected their own tribal histories for the methods of their conquerors, the Romans and Normans” (119). He notes that John Adams, in his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, “specifically compares the Germans and the American Indians and rejects both as political models” (119). Venables concludes his article with a discussion of Indian efforts to form a pan-Indian confederacy to resist Euro-American expansion. His lament that this efforts fell short is, perhaps, ironic, since pan-Indian confederation required a centralization of power and authority similar in spirit to that of the United States Constitution. In effect, the price of preserving Indian autonomy vis-a-vis Euro-Americans would have been the loss of the tribal sovereignty and diminishment of the personal liberty which both Indians and Euro-Americans appreciated in Indian life.