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Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

University of California Press

The Renaissance Englishmen who became Americans were sustained by an idea of order. They were sure, above all, of the existence of an eternal and immutable principle which guaranteed the intelligibility of their relations to each other and to their world and thus made possible their life in society. It was a principle to be expressed in the progress and elevation of civilized men who, striving to imitate their God, would bring order to chaos. America was such a chaos, a new-found chaos. Her natural wealth was there for the taking because it was there for the ordering. So were her natural men.

Thus colonial Americans were from the very beginning beset by an Indian problem at once practical and theoretical. Practically, they had to overcome this natural man and to live with him; theoretically, they had to understand him. And they brought with them a pattern of culture, an idea of order, in which theory and practice were taken to be identical. They were certain that man could realize his highest potentialities in only that sort of society which they had left behind them in England. Here in America, it would be possible to realize such a society at its purest and most abundant. Aware to the point of self-consciousness of their specifically civilized heritage, they found in America not only an uncivilized environment, but uncivilized men—natural men, as it was said, living in a natural world. And they knew that the way to civilize a world was to civilize the men in it. Theoretically, savages, as men, were capable of being civilized; practically, they

were bound to be. But practice did not support theory. Indians were not civilized, but destroyed.

Such, in general, was the colonial experience with the Indian; such had been the experience of revolutionary Americans when, in the 1770's, they set out to establish their glorious new-world civilization. The colonial concern with the savage Indian was a product of the tradition of Anglo-French primitivistic thinking—an attempt to see the savage, the ignoble savage, as a European manqué . When, by the 1770's, the attempt had obviously failed, Americans were coming to understand the Indian as one radically different from their proper selves; they knew he was bound inextricably in a primitive past, a primitive society, and a primitive environment, to be destroyed by God, Nature, and Progress to make way for Civilized Man. Americans after the 1770's worked out a theory of the savage which depended on an idea of a new order in which the Indian could have no part.

Since it is an aspect of a specifically nationalistic self-consciousness, the American understanding of the Indian after the 1770's is the major concern of this study. First, however, we must look at the antecedents and origins of that understanding in the Renaissance theory of the ignoble savage and its colonial variations. Everywhere in the colonies we can see efforts to understand the Indian as one to be lived with, one whose way of life is simply a corrupt variant of the particular way of life of his civilized neighbors, one who can surely be brought to civilization. Equally, we can see the sad failure of such efforts. The record is one of a failure in theory which made for a failure in practice.

1

The Indian whom the sixteenth-century voyagers came to know was, more than anything else, a creature whose way of life showed Englishmen what they might be were they not civilized and Christian, did they not fully partake of the divine idea of order. Viewed in the light of that ordered, civil nature toward which all men, as men, must aspire, he seemed to have fallen as far away from his proper state as he could and yet remain human. The

lesson to be learned everywhere in the Americas was a deep and powerful one for civilized Christians whose intellect was essentially medieval but whose world was fast becoming the one we call modern. For in the New World the Englishman might search in vain for microcosms within the macrocosm, for men whose lives reproduced in little the order of the universe. In America, he might see clearly what he himself would become did he not live according to his highest nature. The Indian became important for the English mind, not for what he was in and of himself, but rather for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be.1

Aboriginal Americans, so English voyagers were again and again to find, denied their holy, human selves and lived like beasts; they were, in the traditional terminology, more animal than rational. The northeastern Indians encountered on Frobisher's second voyage to America are described thus:

If they for necessities sake stand in need of the premisses, such grasse as the Countrey yeeldeth they plucke up and eate, not deintily, or salletwise to allure their stomacks to appetite: but for necessities sake without either salt, oyles or washing, like brute beasts devouring the same. They neither use table, stoole, or table cloth for comlines: but when they are imbrued with blood knuckle deepe, and their knives in like sort, they use their tongues as apt instruments to lick them deane: in doing whereof they are assured to loose none of their victuals.2

Moreover, these Indians " live in Caves of earth, and hunt for their dinners or praye, even as the beare or other wild beastes do," and " dare do any thing that their conseites will allowe, or courage of man male execute."3 The southeastern Indians described by

I have discussed the sixteenth-century conception of the primitive in "Primitivistic Ideas in the Faerie Queene," JEGP , XLIV (1945), 139-51. I follow that essay here.

Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (Glasgow, 1904), VII, 224.

Ibid. , VII, 370; and Thomas Churchyard, A Prayse, and Reporte of Maister Martyne Forboishers [sic] Voyage to Meta Incognita (London, 1578), sig. B iv.

Henry Hawks "are soone drunke, and given to much beastlinesse, and void of all goodnesse."4 And the savages whom Cabot brought to England are said merely to have been of "demeanour like to bruite beastes."5 This, with hardly a variation, is a regular theme of the voyage narratives. Even the Virginia Indians described so cheerfully in Thomas Hariot's famous Brief and True Report (1588)6 are, for Hariot, interesting as they avoid beastliness, not as they approach humanity. American indians were everywhere found to be, simply enough, men who were not men, who were religiously and politically incomplete. If it was a brave new world, Caliban was its natural creature, Ferdinand one of its discoverers and planters.

America had to be planted so that sub-humans could be made human. This was one of the civilized Englishman's greatest burdens. In Letters Patent issued in 1606 for the colonizing of Virginia, the King urged the furtherance of a work "which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of His Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such people, as yet live in darkness, and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages living in those parts, to human...