Racial Violence: The English And The Indians

3 INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS IN NORTH AMERICA: 1607–1851 Now your soul has faded away. It has become blue. When darkness comes your spirit shall grow less And dwindle away Never to reappear. Listen!

A Cherokee Song ORIGINS OF AMERICAN NATIVE PEOPLES Anthropologists estimate that the Indian population of America north of Mexico at the time of Columbus’s voyages was about eighteen million, though there is some disagreement on that number. The first humans set foot on the North American continent somewhere around 20,000 B.C. They came from Asia looking for food and animals to hunt. Within a thousand years the people coming into the New World had killed off most of the large-animal population of North America. Before the coming of Homo sapiens, the area that is now the United States and Canada was home to sloths as big as cows, woolly mammoths bigger than elephants, camels, and other large animals. Scientists cannot be certain whether the extinction of these animal populations resulted from over-hunting or if other factors were involved. Perhaps the migrants from Asia brought diseases with them that spread to the animals, or, more likely, the humans brought dogs and rats with them and they spread deadly viruses and bacteria to the New World species. Scientists believe that the human migrants to North America eventually killed off more than seventy animal species.

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What happened to the animals would later happen to the many of the native peoples of North America; they too would die out, but over a much shorter period of time. There is no disagreement among experts that the Indian population declined rapidly after 1607, when the first English colonists settled in Jamestown, and reached its lowest point three hundred years later, in 1915, when only about 400,000 Indians were still alive in all of North America. What accounted for that decrease during a time when the population of the rest of the United States and Canada climbed to more than 100 million? The key reasons for the decline in North America, as in South America, were diseases brought by outsiders, such as smallpox, influenza, and whooping cough. To these deaths from bacteria and viruses must be added war and the desire of many Europeans to destroy the entire Indian way of life, because they believed it was immoral, savage, and ungodly. Was this genocide? Genocide refers to the deliberate killing of an entire race of people simply because they are member of that race, as the crime was defined by the United Nations after World War II. There are many examples of mass killings in the history of Indian-white relations. The case of the Beothuk, explained below, is only one of many tales of the destruction of an entire community of people. There may have been as many as five hundred separate cultures in what is now the United States in 1492, but according to the 1990 census fewer than two hundred of them remain. While some Indian peoples survived, including the Catawba and the Cherokee, they did so only by sacrificing much of their traditional way of life. Table 3.1 shows the tremendous decline of the Indian population after the coming of Columbus. TABLE 3.1 NATIVE AMERICAN POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES* 1500 18,000,000 1890 248,253 1920 244,467 1950 343,410 1988 1,688,000 *Source: Bureau of Census: Historical Statistics of the United States, 1988.

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EXTERMINATION An example of what happened to many Native peoples after contact with the English is that of the Beothuk, a now extinct tribe that lived in small settlements along the coast of Newfoundland. From the English point of view, the Beothuk lived in very primitive circumstances and were savages. The Beothuk population was small, never more than five hundred, and no Englishman seemed concerned with saving such an obscure people. What, after all, could the English learn from these miserable-looking inhabitants of a rocky, usually bitterly cold part of the New World? Their villages consisted of three or four wigwams— cone-shaped dwellings made of sticks and birch bark, with a hole in the top to let out smoke. There were no great cities or palaces! To keep warm in the winter the Beothuk slept in trenches dug in the floor around a central fireplace that was also used for cooking. The men fished for salmon and hunted seals, birds, and caribou while the women and children gathered eggs, roots, and berries. The meat and fish were frozen or smoked for winter consumption. Beothuk customs are known from reports made by early missionaries, who wanted to learn the native language in order to provide the Indians with a Bible translated into their language. The Beothuk, like most North American Indians, had no written language. What is known from missionary reports is this: the Beothuk had twenty-four-hour wedding ceremonies with much dancing and feasting. Adult males had to undergo purification ceremonies in dome-shaped sweat lodges before they got married. Inside the skin-covered lodges were hot rocks and water that created steam. Young men entered for a few seconds and then ran out and jumped into a snow bank. This act was believed to cleanse their bodies of evil. The Beothuk dressed in caribou-skin robes, with leggings, mittens, and fur hats in the winter. The women sewed together birch and spruce bark for dishes, buckets, and cooking pots. The tribe buried its dead in caves above ground accompanied by weapons and tools and small, carved, wooden figures representing a god or goddess. Little else is known about Beothuk philosophy or religious practices. English sailors made contact with the Beothuk in about 1625, calling them red men because they covered their body hair with a reddish powder made from plants that repelled insects. By the early 1700s French fur trappers from Labrador, hunting for beaver, began trading with the Beothuk. Hat makers in Paris demanded huge quantities of these furs because they resisted water and wind. At first white trappers bought skins from the Indians along the coast. But as demand grew the beaver population declined, and the trappers headed inland, making

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contracts for furs with other Indian tribes along the way. The Beothuk began to compete for the trade with the more numerous Micmac (Mi’kmaq, as they preferred) Indians, living in what is now Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Soon coastal Indians found themselves in a fight for control of the fur trade. This competition led to “beaver wars” between the Beothuk and their inland neighbors. The death rate in these wars was very high. Within a century, the Beothuk were almost extinct, dying as a result of the wars and epidemic diseases—smallpox, influenza, chicken pox— brought by Europeans. Many also died from starvation, with salmon and deer disappearing from the Atlantic coast due to over-hunting by white-skinned settlers. A few miserable survivors escaped to Labrador, where they were absorbed into the Montagnais (mountaineers) people. The Beothuk were one of the first Native American tribes to disappear. Nothing remained of their culture. Table 3.2 lists other cultures that were totally destroyed. Was it genocide—the “deliberate killing” of an entire people? Or was it just an inevitable result of intercultural contact, with new diseases brought unintentionally into a vulnerable, isolated population? TABLE 3.2 TRIBES EXTERMINATED: NORTH AMERICA 1530–1763 TRIBE

REGION

Calusa Massasoit Pequot Narragansett Powhatan Chitimacha Natchez Beothuk Susquehannock

Florida New England New England Rhode Island Virginia Louisiana Mississippi Newfoundland New York

YEAR LAST MEMBER DIED 1530 1633 1638 1676 1705 1717 1731 1735 1763

BY WHOM/WHAT Spanish/War Smallpox English/War English/War English/War French/War French/War English/Disease English/Disease

AN EARLY SOLUTION TO CULTURAL EXTERMINATION: RESERVATIONS Did all Indians have to die? Did their cultures have to disappear? Was it a case of a technologically superior people conquering a primitive

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band of savages? New England Puritans tried to save some parts of tribal culture by confining Indians to a reservation on which European Americans could not live. Indians could live on these lands set aside from white settlements only if they converted to the white man’s religion. So only certain kinds of natives were considered worth saving. These were the “Praying Indians,” those natives who, because they had converted to Christianity, were allowed to maintain their language, their eating customs, and other non-religious traditions. To protect Indians from exploitation, white settlement was prohibited on the reserves. This experiment lasted only a brief time, however, because the reservation land was taken from the Indians whenever it proved valuable to white farmers. Then the native population was simply driven farther west into the “wilderness.” Most of the Indians in New England had disappeared by 1676, either killed by war and disease, or forced off their land to new territory in the interior. DISSENTING IN NEW ENGLAND Race was not the most important factor in New England’s policy toward Indians. The Puritans were acting according to their religious principles, which they considered the key to life. If anyone refused to accept or obey church doctrines, they would be driven out of the commonwealth—this was true for whites as well as Indians. Unbelievers and “troublemakers” such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who challenged the authority of church leaders, were sent into exile by Puritan judges. Sometimes believing in the wrong religion led to death. Two members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) were hung by angry mobs simply because they entered the Massachusetts Bay Colony. THE SURVIVAL OF THE CATAWBA One other colony adopted the reservation system. South Carolina established a reserve in 1763 for the Catawbas, who received title to fifteen square miles of land (144,000 acres) from King George III. In South Carolina, the reservation idea—separating whites and Indians by geography in order to save Indian culture—had somewhat better results than it did in New England, depending on what is meant by save. Indeed, the 1763 reservation continues to be occupied today by about six hundred members of the Catawba tribe. Their culture and language, however, have almost totally disappeared. The first Catawba settled in what is now South Carolina about a thousand years ago. Their first contact with Europeans came in the 1550s, when Spanish explorers, coming up from Florida, marched

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through the area looking for gold and slaves. The Spanish never came back after that first trip. English colonists arrived about one hundred years later, and their way of life reduced the Indian population in the region by 90 percent (from five thousand to five hundred) between 1650 and 1760. The English brought guns, iron tools, and an intense desire for land, all of which helped destroy Catawba culture. In the late 1750s a smallpox epidemic killed two-thirds of the remaining Catawba. White settlers, immune to the worst effects of the disease, simply took over the land owned by dying Indians. Fearing the total loss of their property, Catawba leaders went to London and talked with King George III. To prevent further violence in his colony and to maintain the loyalty of his Indian subjects, the king gave them 144,000 acres along the Catawba River. In return, the Indians agreed to live with their white neighbors as peacefully as possible. The compromise worked for a while, mainly because the Indians had some goods and services the whites wanted. Catawba women made and sold traditional pottery highly praised by English customers; Catawba men helped catch runaway slaves and return them to their owners. They also sold deerskins to the local farmers. The Catawba sometimes rented parcels of reservation land to plantation owners so that they could grow more tobacco or indigo. Relations between whites and Indians improved so much that during the American War for Independence (1775–1783), the Catawbas supported the American cause against the British. This gave the Indians a reputation for loyalty and friendship. So, in gratitude, when the war ended the South Carolina government allowed the Catawba to keep what remained of their reservation. After a brief experiment in self-government, Catawba leaders sold the reservation to the state in 1840. In exchange they were promised new territory somewhere in western South Carolina as well as some cash— but they received nothing, as the legislature refused to appropriate funds for the purchase. Instead the state simply let whites take the Indian land without payment. The Catawba were homeless for the next decade, until the state returned 640 acres of their old reservation to them. Shortly thereafter a new force entered Catawba life with the arrival of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Within a matter of months, many Catawba had converted to this faith and built a giant tabernacle. Native Americans played a major role in Mormon theology; officially they were one of the lost tribes of Israel and descendants of the chosen children of God. Conversion to Mormonism did not resolve Indians’ problems with other whites in the area. The church’s belief in polygamy (that a husband could have more than one wife) was considered as unchristian to white

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South Carolinians as the “pagan” traditions of the Indians. Whites saw the Mormon Church and the new converts as children of the Devil, which gave them further reason to avoid contact with these neighbors. The fear that kept the communities isolated from each other helped the small band of Indians retain some of their traditions, especially pottery making and beadwork, and survive into the twenty-first century. INDIANS IN THE NEW NATION Unlike the Catawba, most Indians supported the British during the American Revolution. George III’s government had promised them a huge Indian Reserve—free from whites—between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River when the war was over. The Americans seemed to want to send the Indians west, but without the promise of any land. After independence, however, the government of George Washington adopted a policy of treating each Indian tribe, no matter how small, as a sovereign nation, with all the rights of other nation-states, including England and Russia. The policy proved difficult and expensive to pursue. There were more than two hundred Indian peoples living east of the Mississippi River and some of them had fewer than five hundred members. Thus, ambassadors had to be exchanged and treaties drawn with “nations” that had fewer citizens than many of the smallest counties and towns in the new nation. Under this policy representatives of the United States government and Native American nations negotiated more than 370 sovereign treaties between 1781 and 1871, which were ratified by the Senate as the Constitution demanded. But negotiating with each Indian people separately created some major problems. Key was that the State Department acted as if it had more important questions to deal with than handling affairs with tiny and obscure Indian nations. So war or displacement usually decided the Indian question, as the white population expanded further and further toward the Mississippi River. INDIAN REMOVAL Congress was aware of the inattention the Indian question was receiving. In 1824 it created the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) within the War Department to replace the State Department in handling Native American relations. The bureau’s work was interrupted by the election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828. A longtime hater of Indians (he had killed several during his military career), he demanded passage of the Indian Removal Act. Congress approved the bill in 1830. It was designed to move all eastern tribes to territory west of the

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Mississippi River. Indians were given three options: They could trade their land in the East for land in the West; they could give up membership in their tribes and become Americanized; or they could fight. INDIAN WARS IN THE 1830S Three major wars broke out in the 1830s as Native Americans fought to remain in their homelands east of the Mississippi. In 1832 Sauk and Fox Indians in northern Illinois, led by Chief Black Hawk, refused to move west to their new homeland in Iowa. The United States Army and state militias in Illinois were called out by President Jackson to enforce the law. The resulting Black Hawk War (1832–1833) ended when hundreds of Indians, many of them women and children, were slaughtered at the Battle of the Bad Axe River, south of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Many of the victims had their heads smashed by militiamen’s rifle butts. Fewer than 150 of the 1,000 Indians survived. Black Hawk escaped and went to live with the Winnebago Indians, but they turned him over to the Army and he was imprisoned in Virginia. The remaining Indians were driven to Iowa. Twenty years later they were removed again, this time to Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma), where many descendents of the Sauk and Fox continue to live. THE SEMINOLE WARS The Seminoles in Florida fought a seven-year war (1835–1842) against the United States. Hostilities broke out when Chief Osceola (1800?–1839) and his followers refused to sign a removal treaty. Rather than move west the Seminoles retreated into the Everglades and fought against forty thousand U.S. troops. When the war ended nearly four thousand Seminoles and fifteen hundred U.S. soldiers had been killed, but several hundred Indians remained in the swamps. Some thirty-eight hundred Seminoles agreed to emigrate to Oklahoma. The United States removed its troops from Florida and did not pursue the Seminoles who had disappeared into the swamps. In 1845 Florida became a state, and ten years later the governor launched the next Seminole War (1855–1858) to hunt down and kill or remove the four hundred or so Seminoles remaining in the Everglades. After several bitter battles the United States government settled the war by giving the Indians some money to join the rest of their tribe in Oklahoma. Still, a small band stayed in the swamps and made peace only in 1934. The Seminole Wars were the only Indian wars lost by the United States.

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THE TRAIL OF TEARS One of the bloodiest wars of removal took place in northern Georgia, where the Cherokee fought bitterly for their homeland. At first the tribe tried to work within the system. It protested the constitutionality of the Removal Act all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which decided Worcester v. Georgia (1832) in the Indians’ favor. Chief Justice John Marshall held that Indian nations had the constitutional right to remain independent nations within the United States and could not be removed without their consent. President Jackson refused to enforce the decision, however, and ordered the army to drive the Cherokee to the West. Jackson’s failure to uphold the Supreme Court’s judgment had a profound impact on Cherokee history, leading to the bloody “Trail of Tears.” The U.S. Army drove the Indians out of their homes during the winter and forced them on a nine-hundred-mile march to eastern Oklahoma. Perhaps two thousand Indians died on the trail. CHEROKEE CULTURE The Cherokee were part of the Five Civilized Tribes, as whites called them. They probably got this designation because a few of their customs and beliefs seemed close to those of the Americans. They had a constitution and a political system based on a “town” government, which gave most power to local authorities. The Cherokee nation contained dozens of independently governed towns, and the “nation” was held together by language and religious values. A town consisted of all the people who prayed together to one of many Cherokee gods. No central organization existed beyond this local government, at least before the 1760s. Each town had a council that made decisions concerning relations with other Cherokee towns and neighboring Indians. Council members decided important questions, including where to plant crops, when to go to war, and when to repair religious buildings. They also established tax systems. The Cherokee concept of “law and order” was very different from the European model. In disputes over property or personal injury, families and clans (groups of families living in the same village) settled matters themselves rather than going to a police officer. Even in cases of murder, families—not government agents—administered justice. Murder usually led to “blood revenge,” which gave the victim’s family the right to kill the murderer. The entire adult male population of a town, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, attended council meetings, but only two groups controlled the proceedings. These were the religious leaders (shaman) and the “beloved men,” elderly males renowned for their wisdom.

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Deliberation was calm and orderly, and the council was required to reach a unanimous decision before any action could be taken. Debates often lasted for days as the elders tried to persuade councilmen to support their view. If consensus proved impossible, the group leading the opposition was expected to withdraw from the meeting. They would not be bound by the decision made by the council majority, but if they refused to accept the verdict they would be expelled from the village. By the 1760s several towns had organized a larger tribal council to unify the Cherokee people in their battle against white expansion. Each village sent a delegation of “headmen” to these council meetings. As usual, any town could withdraw from the council if it disagreed with the majority decision. With this custom of secession, unified resistance by the Indians was impossible. One Cherokee leader, Sequoia (1760– 1843), recognized the problem. To mold Indian unity he invented an alphabet in 1820 and used it to publish a newspaper advocating government by majority decision, with no provision for withdrawal. The minority would have to abide by the majority decision whether they liked it or not. Sequoia helped draft the tribe’s constitution, which was modeled after the United States Constitution of 1787. Voters ratified Sequoia’s proposal and the Cherokee became the first Native Americans to be ruled by a written constitution. The new framework created a General Council that controlled all public lands and property and conducted relations with the United States. Cherokee territory was divided into eight districts, with elected representatives from each district making up the General Council. A “principal chief,” chosen by the Council, acted as executive and could veto Council actions. The Council passed laws concerning road building, budgets, and tax laws, and it also acted as a criminal court, handing out punishment for horse stealing, murder, and other crimes. Council members appointed judges to hear minor disputes and abolished the tradition of blood revenge. Thus the traditional framework of village government was replaced by a more centralized administration. In their new homes in the West, the Cherokee and other displaced tribes faced hostility from the Indians native to the region: the Osages, Pawnees, Dakotas, Apaches, and others (called Indios barbaros, by the Spanish). But the newcomers endured and some flourished. In Oklahoma, the Cherokees established farms, plantations, schools, and slavery. They governed themselves until the end of the Civil War, when Congress mandated major changes in Indian policy. The Indian Removal Act was very successful in achieving its goal. By the end of the 1830s more than 95 percent of the Native Americans who had lived east of the Mississippi River no longer lived there.