Chapter 7 Transatlantic American Indians
Tim Fulford
In 1809 John Norton, traveling to the southern states of the independent US for the first time, encountered a person he found
hard to place: “I took him first for an Anglo American, or Foreigner, until I heard the fluent manner, in which he spoke the
Cherokee
; and our friend introduced us to each other; I then discovered that he belonged to the Nation; – his name was John Thompson.”
1 Thompson, to Norton’s surprise, was an Indian, and a kind of Indian few white people had ever met: “I found he was well established,
with an extensive improvement, abundance of cattle, several slaves, and some Anglo American Servants. Some of his children
are grown up; but his former wife, who was of his own Nation has been dead some years, and he is now married to a young American
Woman.”
2 Norton was surprised, but soon discovered that Thompson was by no means unique among the Cherokees. By the early nineteenth
century many of them had become adept at living in a manner that mixed aspects of both traditional Indian and imported white
culture. Indeed, the principal Cherokee leader from 1818 to 1866 was John Ross, like Thompson a man of mixed Scots and Cherokee
descent, and a man valued by the Cherokees because he had expertise in both languages and cultures – vital skills as the Cherokee
Nation found itself more and more needing to negotiate with land-hungry US states. Alexander McGillivray had been in a similar
position as the leader of the Creek
Confederacy from 1782 to 1793. The son of a Scots trader and a Creek woman of the Wind clan, and thus, since heritage was
reckoned through the matrilineal line, a full Indian, McGillivray used the skills that education among whites had given him
– literacy in English, experience of city society – to negotiate successfully with British generals and the American president
George Washington. Transatlanticism, as McGillivray showed, flourished not just in London or New York but in the Mohawk valley,
the Cherokee country, and the Creek Confederacy.
Norton had reason to know that Indians had adapted aspects of the colonists’ culture that had originated across the Atlantic
(although few other Nations took to white-style agricultural methods and social patterns to the degree of the Cherokee
s – the “Civilized Tribe”) because he was himself an Indian of one of the Nations most adept at negotiating with the British.
Teyoninhokarawen, to use his Indian name, was a Mohawk
by adoption and part Cherokee, part Scottish by birth.
3 He, Norton, was a bilingual protégé of the Mohawks’ foremost war
leader, Joseph Brant, a man who had visited Britain, impressed James Boswell, translated the gospel into Mohawk, and led
British and Indian troops in the Revolutionary War.
4 Retired to a land grant in Canada, Brant had ended his days living in a substantial house, attended by servants, owning slaves
to work his land. And now Norton was following in his footsteps, visiting Britain to negotiate land rights, fighting alongside
the British in the war of 1812, and touring the Cherokee country to recruit support for a pan-Indian resistance to US encroachment
on their territories. He was a full-blown transatlantic Indian, like Thompson the product of a resourceful Indian response
to the opportunities produced by the presence of colonists in America, yet determined to defend his Nation against those colonists’
ever-increasing demands. And he was a writer: his description of Thompson derives from a 1,000-page manuscript
journal of his political tour that he wrote, in Latinate gentlemanly English, for publication in London. His aim, again,
was to raise Indians’ reputation and publicize their case across the Atlantic: he hoped to gain further British aid for resistance
to US settlement on Indian land.
Norton’s journal was one of the last expressions of an Indian Atlantic that developed over 200 years of Anglo colonization
of America, until, after US independence in 1783, British and Indian relationships gradually diminished in political and military
significance. By the 1820s, east of the Ohio river, Indians were reduced to client status – or pushed off their lands completely
– overwhelmed by the sheer volume of white settlement and ignored by increasingly dismissive white governments in both the
US and Canada. Before this sad development, the Indian Atlantic had existed as a liminal zone of political, economic, and
cultural relationships – involving some hybridization
of the two cultures, both on the ground in America and in the London visited by Indians, and also in the circulation of goods,
images, and words across the ocean. In London in 1804, for example, Wordsworth contributed to this circulation as he recorded
his impressions of a visiting Indian – quite possibly John Norton, who was in the capital at this time:
Among the crowd, conspicuous less or more
As we proceed, all specimens of man,
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face:
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,
The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
America, the hunter Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And negro ladies in white muslin gowns.
5
Wordsworth’s reaction reveals that London was a transatlantic city: its streets presented an enthralling spectacle because
one met, as in no other city on earth, people from all over the world. The world had shrunk as Britain’s imperial trade imported
and exported people and cultures, bringing them from their remote places to the metropolis, plunging them into a commercial
culture. The Native American he encounters is an authentic figure, even if he appears only in generic terms, standing for
a whole culture defined by one practice – hunting. He was preceded, moreover, by many others. London hosted scores of Native
Americans during the course of the eighteenth century, from the Mohawk
“Indian kings” who were received by Queen Anne in 1710, to the Cherokee
delegations of 1730 and 1762, to, in 1766–67, Samson Occom, the Indian missionary whose preaching at dissenting chapels raised
over £12,000 – a colossal sum – for the Indian school of Eleazor Wheelock (today’s Dartmouth College), to Brant in 1776, to
Norton himself in 1804.
6The so-called “Indian kings” – in fact four of the younger war leaders of the Mohawks – arrived in London in 1710. This diplomatic
visit was to both sides’ advantage: the Mohawks traveled in order to cement an alliance that would increase their Nation’s
prestige in the Iroquois confederacy since it allowed them first access to the powerful and wealthy colonists who provided
trade goods; the British invited “two or three of the Sachims & Principall Captains” in order to forge an alliance before
launching an attack on French colonies in Canada – “the most proper method for securing the Indians in our Interest, and preventing
the Incursions of the Enemy on any part of our Countrey.”
7 As official guests of the Crown these leaders were not imported to be exhibited; they were received as diplomats and depicted
in official portraits according to established visual conventions for aristocrats and men of importance.
8 Identified as kings, they were, according to Eric Hinderaker,
9 represented in terms that enabled the British to do business with them – the business of engaging allies and trade partners,
extending British commerce, empire, and
authority through North America. The visit, in sum, saw the formation of a “new…language of empire”
10 to both sides’ advantage (though ultimately the Mohawk
s’ closeness to the British both led them to cede land and put them on the losing side in the Revolutionary War). The language
had to be continuously renewed for the relationship to flourish: treaties, visits, and gift-exchange were methods by which
this was achieved for the next 100 years. Indeed, the British Indian agent Sir William Johnson did more than visit Mohawk
country, he made his home there and married a Mohawk woman, Molly Brant (it was her brother, Joseph, educated at Johnson’s
expense, who became the most powerful Mohawk leader over the next thirty years). Johnson occupied a liminal zone
11 that was neither wholly Indian nor British, an actual and metaphorical “middle ground”
12 in which each side gained some political advantage by sanctioning the hybridization
of its own customs and priorities with those of the other. In July 1751 the Mohawk sachem Hendrick told Governor George Clinton
that “the one half” of Johnson “belonged to His Excellency and the other to them.”
13The resultant hybrid culture was the fruit of a transatlantic exchange rather than simply an effect of colonial subjugation.
By improvising on their knowledge of each side’s traditions, those who could represent each side to the other exerted a (precarious)
power. They can be seen as cultural brokers, people who used their rare expertise in both cultures to negotiate, for themselves
and for the people they led, strategic and material advantage, but who also knew enough to achieve effective compromise and
working partnerships.
14 To attain this delicate diplomatic balance, they had to be able to don masks and costumes like the tricksters whose cultural
power, in many Aboriginal nations, stemmed from their ability to transform themselves into animals, spirits, or feared enemies.
By playing roles, such brokers might, for instance, impersonate (and so interpret) the people of the other side to their own
people. Johnson, a man of multiple loyalties as an Irishman of Catholic and Jacobite background, became a master of Mohawk
and British ceremonies – manipulating the ritual symbols of the Iroquois on the one hand, and the newspaper press of the British
on the other. Brant learned from his example, for when he visited London in 1776 he had acquired enough skill to play upon
his hosts’ prejudices to his own advantage. Expecting a savage war
rior, the British instead met a gentleman officer whose command of their language, and their codes of politeness, enabled
him to rebuke them for failing to keep their promises. Brant told the Colonial Secretary Lord George Germain,
Brother. We return you thanks for this promise, which we hope will be performed, and that we shall not be disappointed, as
has often been the case, notwithstanding the firm friendship of the Mohocks to his Majesty and his government, who are so
immediately concerned, that the same has been often mentioned by the Six Nations and their getting no redress a matter of
surprise to all the Indian Nations.
15
Here Brant was acting as the recently deceased Johnson’s heir – operating by manipulating the existing language of diplomacy,
but for the Mohawks’ ends. And diplomacy mattered in 1776 for both Indians and British: the Mohawks wanted British manufactures and protection
from encroachment on their lands by the now-rebellious colonists; the Crown needed their influence on other Indian Nations
and their support in the war.
This relationship of mutual need was not new. Brant’s visit was an attempt to continue, rather than begin, a fruitful although
uneasy alliance. By the mid eighteenth century, the British empire in America could not have been sustained without Native
Americans as willing (though unequal) partners. Britain needed the Indians. Indians, meanwhile, had become dependent on British
goods in every aspect of their lives, from cooking, to hunting, to clothes. They needed guns, gunpowder, hatchets, kettles,
pipes, paint, blankets, alcohol. Britons wanted not only land and fur but also alliances with Indian military power. And so
the colonists, the Crown, and the Indians made deals with each other, entering a political and economic relationship that
altered society – and the very landscape – on both sides of the ocean. Indian society was, to a greater extent than ever before,
reconfigured: subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering were supplanted by hunting and trapping of fur for the British felt
market. Indians became commercialized; their relationship to the land altered as more and more of the country became a resource
to be exploited in exchange for British manufactures, while in Britain industries grew up to supply this demand, changing
the British landscape and helping to create an urban working class.
16 Thus indigenous people were at one end of a capitalized transatlantic commerce, British peasants at the other. North American
landscapes were exploited – whole areas were hunted out – and so were British ones, as the Black Country of iron forges and
workshops spread over the English Midlands.
If empire linked, through the power of capital, people who would never meet each other, it also engendered many close encounters.
The Seven Years’/French-Indian War (1756–63) put more whites in close proximity to Native Americans, and vice versa, than
ever before – as enemies, allies, captives, negotiators. It turned more Indians than before into agents together
with colonists, in complex and shifting alliances, in making a new Atlantic world that left both Indian and white societies
changed and that took effect not just in America but in Britain too. As Linda Colley has pointed out, the experience of loss
and captivity, as well as alliance, in American war led Britons to redefine their own individual and nation
al identities.
17 It had a similar effect on many Indians, bringing into power in numerous Indian Nations those who could benefit their fellows
by successfully manipulating the colonists. For many Native Americans, engagement with white culture, necessary for diplomatic
and political reasons, presented new opportunities; for others it seemed a dangerous path to take, leading only to betrayal
and corruption. Thus Indian societies came to exhibit (at least) two political responses to the closer relationship with colonists:
on the one hand, the appearance of leaders, many of them of mixed Indian/white descent and education, skilled in Anglo as
well as Indian practices; on the other, the kindling of prophetic religious movements designed to revitalize Indian life by
rejecting much (but not all) white influence. The movement begun in 1808 by the Shawnee
prophet Tenskwatawa
in conjunction with his brother Tecumseh
is a case in point. Tenskwatawa sought to revive Indians’ fortunes by ending their spiritual demoralization by and economic
dependence on the colonists. Converts were to abstain from alcohol and to eschew the white manufactures on which they had
come to rely. The pan-Indian center of the movement – the new settlement of Prophetstown, Indiana – was to be culturally as
well as geographically as far removed from transatlantic influence as possible. Yet even there, the history of Indians’ adaptation
of the colonists’ culture for their own ends was evident. Not only did Tenskwatawa’s followers continue to rely on guns and
gunpowder, but the prophet also introduced into his preaching some elements that were not traditionally present in Indian
spiritual teaching – such as the concept of punishment after death. These he probably derived from Christian missionary teaching.
Thus even a determined nativist resistance to colonization was still inflected by it, here, however, as a matter of strategic
choice by a prophet seeking to rally his fellow Indians’ pride and help them resist further encroachment by the ideologies
of white society. Tenskwatawa’s brother Tecumseh, meanwhile, sought military unity among the Nations and with British aid
– in a last gasp of the British/Indian alliances of old – succeeded in battle against US forces until, outnumbered at the
1813 Battle of the Thames, he found the British would not fight alongside him.
On the ground the Indian Atlantic ended in the betrayal of Indians by a weakened Britain. Yet it had long existed too as a
virtual world, a circulation of ideas, images, music, and texts. I turn now to chart the course
of this virtual Atlanticization of British, colonist-American, and Native American cultures. A major factor – perhaps the
greatest single factor in the developing circulation – was war
. The French/Indian and subsequently Revolutionary wars put British soldiers into the valleys and forests of Native America
on a large scale. Many were captured by Indians: some were killed; many were tortured. A few of those who returned produced
narratives detailing their horrific experiences. One of the most reprinted of these was by Peter Williamson, a Scot by birth,
who had come to America as an indentured laborer and was working on the frontier of Pennsylvania when, on October 2, 1754,
he was captured by Indians allied to the French. His narrative, published on his return to Britain, was a sensationalist account
of the torture of his fellow captives.
Some of them were tied to a tree, and a great fire made around them, where they remained till they were terribly scorched
and burnt; when one of the villains with his scalping knife, ript open their bellies, took out their entrails, and burnt them
before their eyes, whilst the others were cutting, piercing, and tearing the flesh from their breasts, hands, arms, and legs,
with red hot irons, till they were dead. The third unhappy victim was reserved a few hours longer, to be, if possible, sacrificed
in a more cruel manner; his arms were tied close to his body, and a hole being dug deep enough for him to stand upright, he
was put therein, and earth ram’d and beat in all round his body up to his neck, so that his head only appeared above ground;
they then scalp’d him, and there let him remain for three or four hours in the greatest agonie; after which they made a small
fire near his head, causing him to suffer the most excruciating torments imaginable, whilst the poor creature could only cry
for mercy in killing him immediately, for his brains were boiling in his head: inexorable to all his plaints they continued
the fire, whilst shocking to behold! His eyes gushed out of their sockets; and such agonizing torments did the unhappy creature
suffer for nearly two hours, ’till he was quite dead! They then cut off his head, and buried it with the other bodies; my
task being to dig the graves, which feeble and terrified as I was, the dread of suffering the same fate, enabled me to do.
18
Williamson’s sensationalist prose amounts to a pornography of violence. Along with other captivity narratives
in similar vein, it revealed both Indian and colonist cruelty, but aimed to define British identity as civilized by opposing
it to an Indian other configured as savage. Such narratives turned Indian warriors into bogeymen to terrorize Britons’ imaginations
and into symbols of imperial guilt when, in the war of 1776–83, they became Britain’s allies in fighting the rebellious colonists.
Many Britons were horrified to think of their government employing Indians, whom Burke called in Parliament “savages and Cannibals
the most cruel and ferocious,”
19 against fellow whites, many of whom had been born in Britain. Indians and their
characteristics thus became the focus of intense public interest, causing a reaction against the liminal zone that men like
Johnson and Brant occupied. Brant, indeed, was termed a “monster” for his supposed participation in a massacre of women and
children in 1778.
20Because the captivity narratives
piqued public interest, in the 1760s a market for accounts of Indian societies began to thrive. It was fed by settlers (often
deserted soldiers turned traders) and colonial officials, who published travel narratives and histories of Indians, often
on the basis of having lived among them for many years. These narratives, of which James Adair’s
History of the American Indians (1775) and Jonathan Carver’s
Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (1778) were the most successful, provided a far more nuanced picture of Indian society, beliefs, and customs than did the
captivity narratives: they were not sensationalist and they evinced considerable understanding of Indian traditions.
21 They were reports from the liminal zone, written by men living on the hybrid ground, which then circulated that zone virtually
in text and image. Adair, for instance, accumulated forty years’ experience of Indian society: having begun as a trader with
the Catawba and Cherokee, he married and lived among the Chickasaw on the headwaters of the Yazoo river from 1744. His account
included highly influential descriptions of Indian life that went beyond the merely generic. The effect of narratives such
as Adair’s and Carver’s was to make possible fictional representations of Indians that were far more nuanced than before.
Would-be Indian speeches were penned by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Thomas Jefferson.
22 Indians became pivotal in the texts of other eminent literary figures too, including such philosophers and theorists of the
Scottish Enlightenment as Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson, Henry Home Lord Kames, James Burnett Lord Monboddo, and
Adam Ferguson, who used present-day Indians to imagine what early Britons were like.
23 In the American tribes, Ferguson wrote, “we behold, as in a mirror, the features of our progenitors.”
24 These writers converted what they had read about Indians in captivity and travel narratives
into generalized discussions of human progress, natural history
, social theory, moral philosophy, and ethics. Indians served to prove points in arguments about humanity in general, because
the new sources about them were taken to be accurate.
From the 1760s on, firsthand experience of Indians was more and more available within Britain. But the increasing number of
Indians visiting Britain had a varied cultural impact: while some, like Occom and Brant, impressed literary men such as Boswell,
others, speaking no English, were exhibited for money, their individual identities reduced to shows.
Transatlantic empire produced a trade in which Native Americans were imported and exported for their commercial value as spectacles
– in which capacity they created great cultural interest among Native Britons, stimulating reports, poems, plays, and pictures,
many of which were circulated in America as well as Britain itself. The 1710 visit of the Mohawk
s – official, diplomatic, decorous – can be contrasted with the 1762 visit of three Cherokee
s. They came to cement a peace treaty which had recently brought to an end two years of hostilities precipitated by an over-confident
British government under General Jeffery Amherst – a man with little experience of America. Flushed by success in taking French
Canada, Amherst reduced expenditure on trading with Indians and neglected diplomacy with them. The result was Pontiac’s war
in the north, and conflict with the Cherokees in the south. So damaging were these conflicts that William Johnson was able
to outmaneuver Amherst in London’s corridors of power and have him recalled to Britain. The Cherokees, then, were invited
to Britain to demonstrate Britain’s renewed goodwill. Ostenaco, Pouting Pigeon, and Stalking Turkey made the trip, intending
to see whether the reports of previous Cherokee visitors were truthful. With them were Lieutenant Henry Timberlake and their
interpreter George Shorey. But Shorey died en route, leaving the party with extreme difficulties in communication that would
affect its reception. After meeting the king, the visit degenerated as Timberlake and his London agent sought to make as much
money as they could from the public’s eagerness to see the exotic novelties. So exploitative was the show that it caused an
outcry in the press. A correspondent of
Lloyd’s Evening Post complained that
I went in, paid my shilling, and drank tea, which at another time is no more than sixpence…I saw only two Chiefs, the King
being not well…these were shewn to some hundreds of people; and, if their looks or behaviour may be believed, not from their
own choice…I was too much shocked to stay long…reflecting on a very just, though shocking remark, made by a vulgar fellow,
in the room whilst I was present; “They are brought here,” says he, “to be shewn like beasts”…King George has honoured the
Cherokee King with his protection; and…I think no man has a right to make a property of them.
25
To another commentator, the Indians’ visit became a meretricious spectacle that effectively collapsed the distinction between
civilized and savage:
to read in the papers, how these poor wild hunters were surrounded by as wild gazers on them at Vauxhall, and that three hundred
eager crouders were made happy by shaking hands with them…I should like to read a letter (if they could write one) on that
subject, to their friends at home, in order to learn what they think of the mad savages of Britain.
26
So great was the craze to see the Cherokee
s that fakes appeared.
27 To the kind of gentlemanly Britons who wrote for newspapers and journals, the visit highlighted a worrying new trend among
their fellow countrymen – a madness to consume the new which commodified relationships. The Cherokees had become imperial
goods, like sugar and coffee, packaged and sold in a commercial city where the people were enslaved to their craving for show
and novelty. The Native Americans had been made to embody the deleterious workings of transoceanic capitalism – a diagnosis
forcefully made about the visit of another, Pacific, Indian by the anti-slave trade poet William Cowper:
Thee, gentle savage! whom no love of thee
Or thine, but curiosity perhaps,
Or else vain-glory, prompted us to draw
Forth from thy native bowers, to show thee here
With what superior skill we can abuse
The gifts of Providence, and squander life.
…
We found no bait
To tempt us in thy country. Doing good,
Disinterested good, is not our trade.
We travel far ’tis true, but not for nought;
And must be bribed to compass earth again.
28
If for Cowper visiting Indians exemplified the working of capitalism – reducing indigenous people to goods to be traded and
used – the Cherokees felt differently. They hoped to gain enhanced cultural prestige and authority when they returned home,
because they had completed so daring an enterprise and because they had successfully dealt with the British. As the visit
continued, however, they were gradually co-opted into their own commodification – going to be shown for money where their
agents took them. They were seen at Vauxhall Gardens in the company of prostitutes – Ostenaco so drunk that in trying to climb
into a carriage he fell over and was unable to rise: “Force however effected what Persuasion could not, for he was Neck and
Heels lifted in, and laid along the bottom of the Coach. Soon after, his Legs,…being carefully packed up with the Rest, the
Coachman, by driving away, put an End to this wretched Scene of British curiosity and Savage Debauchery.”
29 It was noted that the Cherokee chief who had visited in 1730, Attakullakulla, the “Little Carpenter,” had not behaved like
this.
The goggling crowds and the plethora of prints, pictures, verse, and newspaper and magazine reports all demonstrate the fascination
that
Britons felt for Native American visitors. Nowhere was this more strongly marked than with their songs
. Indian songs, supposedly productions of an authentically oral and primitive culture, fascinated both the ordinary people
who flocked to see the visitors and the Edinburgh philosophes who slotted them into their conjectural histories of human society.
They appeared, translated, in learned histories of music and in broadside song garlands hawked in the street. Some of these
English versions were inventions; others, however, were based on ethnographic information gleaned in the liminal zones. One
such was the so-called Cherokee song “O Alknomook,” the English words of which were composed in fashionable London by the
expatriate Scot Anne Home Hunter. Hunter’s lyrics were sung at her literary soirées by musicians, artists, and poets, then
published in the
Gentleman’s Magazine and reprinted in Joseph Ritson’s scholarly collection
Scottish Songs, in Two Volumes (1794). They were also included in sheets of miscellaneous songs sold in the street to a lower-class market, for singing
in pubs. They made their way back across the Atlantic as early as 1789, when they were published in
The Philadelphia Songster.
30 Hunter’s lyrics run thus:
The sun sets in night, and the stars shun the day,
But glory remains while the light flies away.
Begin ye tormentors your threats are in vain,
For the son of Alknomook shall never complain.
Remember the arrow he shot from his bow,
Remember the chiefs by his hatchet laid low;
Why so slow? Do you wait till I shrink from the pain?
No: – the son of Alknomook will never complain.
31
If these words were largely of Hunter’s invention, she had nevertheless learnt in such narratives as Adair’s, Carver’s, and
Williamson’s about the songs Indian warriors were supposed to sing, defying their captors, while being tortured to death.
In effect, Hunter fictionalized the factual reports of men who had lived with Indians, emphasizing qualities that were so
often stressed that they became stereotypical – defiance, stoicism, courage, valor, cruelty.
It was not only the words that crossed the ocean. Ritson states that Hunter learnt the tune from “a gentleman named Turner,
who had (owing to some singular events in his life) spent nine years amongst the natives of America.” Turner told Hunter that
the tune “was peculiar to that tribe or nation called the Cherokees, and that they chanted it to a barbarous jargon, implying
contempt for their enemies in the moments of torture and death.”
32 Tunes, in fact, circulated around the Indian Atlantic: Scots
such as McGillivray, Thompson, and Adair who settled with Indians took folk tunes with them to America; these became mingled
with Indian airs as the settlers intermarried; some then returned to Britain where they helped precipitate the folk-song revival
which began in Scotland
and spread across Europe in the wake of Ossian, the Celtic bard. In fact, in the dissertation introducing Ossian’s supposedly
ancient Scots poetry
to the world, Hugh Blair set it in the context of Native American song. Ancient Scotland and contemporary Native America,
he argued, had similar song cultures because both were primitive societies in which authentic passion had not yet been muffled
by politeness and refinement: the Highlander and the Indian were both noble savages and Romantic bards
.
33Both directly and indirectly (via Ossian) the Indian song helped spark Romantic poetry.
Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800) contained “The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman” – a poem inspired by Samuel Hearne’s narrative of life
among the Chippewyan in the Canadian north – “The Foster Mother’s Tale,” and “Ruth,” poems inspired by William Bartram’s travel
account of Florida. Numerous magazine poets published Indian songs
, as did Shelley, Hemans, Samuel Rogers, and William Lisle Bowles, whose “Song of the American Indian” idealized Native Americans
as noble savages entreating the civilized reader to join them in their idyllic forest life. For Robert Southey as well as
for Bowles, Indians’ savagery offered an idealized opposite to what he saw as the corrupt and exploitative ways of his own
imperialist nation. In 1799 he would base an entire sequence of Indian songs,
34 as ethnographically informed as possible in their form and content, on his reading of Adair, Carver, and Timberlake. Southey
presented the Indian male as a hero – a more honest, dignified, and virtuous man than the so-called civilized whites, full
of patriarchal authority and filial piety. The Indian’s song was supposedly a natural expression of who he – a generic he
– was, a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, as Wordsworth said poetry should be. It was the ideal Romantic genre
.
Indians would feature in longer poems too as a new generation of poets pondered what it was to be a member of a colonizing
and slavetrading nation that now interacted with indigenous peoples in India, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands,
as well as America. Southey based sections of
Madoc (1805), his epic on the colonization of America, on what he read in Adair and Carver. Indians’ social customs, as detailed
in accounts by other white men who had lived in the liminal zone, would feature in Bowles’s
Missionary (1811), Rogers’s
Voyage of Columbus (1810), and Wordsworth’s
Excursion (1814). At the same time, Indians began to feature in another burgeoning genre – the novel. Works by Tobias Smollett,
Robert Bage, and Henry Mackenzie all showed the influence of the accounts of Indians that reached Britain after the 1750s.
35 These British writings, crossing the Atlantic, would then influence the fictional portraits of Indians made by white Americans
such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant – so that American-based writing on Indians came to be inflected as
much by transatlantic literary imports as it was by firsthand experience of Indians themselves.
By 1820 a grim irony was increasingly apparent: Indians were now outnumbered and deprived of their land as never before yet
at the same time they were cycled and recycled as text across the Atlantic by white writers looking to romanticize their seeming
disappearance. They thus blossomed as literary figures even as they were forced from their homelands. It was in these difficult
times – when what Alan Taylor has called “the divided ground”
36 superseded the old middle ground of cultural interaction – that men such as John Norton spoke out, determined not to be voiceless
or passive victims of a colonial process that was now more or less openly one of removal and eradication. Missionary education
in America left a number of Native Americans able to write in English and they, like Norton, now criticized colonialist hypocrisy,
using the sophisticated forms of irony and parody as well as direct factual assertion. Writing in English, of course, presumed
upon a white readership: most Indians did not speak English; fewer still read it. Anglophone Indian authors, then, showed
themselves to be affiliated to both cultures, their authorial identity more liminal than Indian or white in the traditional
senses.
37 Both the parodic and the liminal are evident in the following passage from Norton’s journal, containing an account of a Cherokee
satirizing his white opponents but written by a part-white part-Cherokee adopted-Mohawk who wrote for his British friends
to aid the cause of the Indian Nations.
Another time the American Commissioners, addressing the Cherokees, said, That they felt assured that their brethren would
not be so ungenerous as to refuse them a small tract of land whereon to place some poor families destitute of a home? The
Bloody Fellow replied, “Brothers, we thought we had already let you have a sufficient extent of our lands to have accommodated
all your people, both rich and poor; and if we should continue to comply with your requests, we would soon be left without
any ourselves: but as it is lamentable to see our fellow creatures suffering for want of a piece of land whereon to raise
the means of subsistence, while we enjoy abundance, I shall engage to provide land for them, if you will permit me to make
the first allotments within your own territory, and when I can find no more unoccupied land therein, I shall grant them in
ours.” The Commissioners not being so much inclined to practice generosity, as to talk of
it, the proposals of the Bloody Fellow were not acceded to, so things remained as they were…
It was now past the middle of April and the Sun’s cheering rays seemed to give additional lustre to every surrounding object;
– the foliage of the stately trees that crowned the summits of the surrounding hills, moved by the pleasant western gale;
the clear refreshing streams glistening through the grassy meads. Alternately the eye was attracted by these delightful prospects
and the mind by the contemplation of the situation of these kind friends, and companions from whom I was on the eve of separating.
Long may they possess these fertile vallies and airy hills (did I inwardly pray) and may they increase in virtue and in number
to fill them with inhabitants, who may gratefully acknowledge the bounties they enjoy from the beneficent hands of that Great
and Benevolent Being from whom all good proceeds!
38
Norton’s prose, with its references to “meads” and “prospects,” demonstrates his mastery of the vocabulary and aesthetics
of English gentlemen – the men of power in the imperial center. Yet he occupies their phraseology without replicating their
point of view: mimicking their terms allows him to destabilize them, both by reporting Bloody Fellow’s irony and by “inwardly”
praying that Indians, rather than whites, will possess the fertile land.
Norton’s language was decorous; other Indians were more confrontational. William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot Indian descended
from a white grandfather and Pequot grandmother, and converted to Methodism aged seventeen, addressed white readers in general,
with all the discomfiting forcefulness of a preacher buttonholing a sinner after church:
Now let me ask you, white man, if it is a disgrace for to eat, drink, and sleep with the image of God, or sit, or walk or
talk with them. Or have you the folly to think that the white man, being one in fifteen or sixteen, are the only beloved images
of God? Assemble all nations together in your imagination, and then let the whites be seated among them, and then let us look
for the whites, and I doubt not it would be hard finding them; for to the rest of the nations, they are still but a handful.
Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it – which skin do you think
would have the greatest? I will ask one question more. Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole
continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving them the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature
and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds and welter out their days under
the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun? I should look at all the skins, and I know that
when I cast my eye upon that white skin, and if I saw those crimes written upon it, I should enter my protest against it immediately
and cleave to that which is more honorable.
39
Here Apess brilliantly creates a fable about the absurdity of reading people by their race
. Writing in a world in which white people used skin color and cranial capacity as “evidence” of indigenous people’s natural
inferiority, Apess turns the tables, beating the white man by manipulating his own discourse – writing. Apess trumps the white
man’s racial science – his written law – by summoning his first Author (God), claiming to read God’s judgment on the skin
just as white men claimed to read nature’s. Having done so, he can lash his readers for their arrogance and hypocrisy.
An attack on the racism that was hardening around him, Apess’s discourse, written in 1833, signals the end of the transatlantic
Indian’s ability to broker relationships between colonial and native powers. By this time, Britain was of less and less importance
to Indians in the USA, although the Methodism that gave Apess his critical voice had originated there. It was to American
whites – East-coast liberals and policy makers – that he would appeal, on behalf of an oppressed Indian population being forcibly
removed to dusty reservations in the West. In Canada a similar appeal was made by George Copway, a Methodist-educated Mississaugas
Ojibwa, who, however, had no authority among his Nation.
40 Copway strove to represent a pan-Indian perspective to Canadian whites, who were by the 1830s so numerous that they could
disregard the formerly powerful tribes, which had anyway dwindled in numbers and succumbed to disease and alcoholism. As a
subject of the Crown, however, Copway had a transatlantic outlet for his speeches and books: he traveled to Britain aiming
to alert liberals and evangelicals there to the plight of the once-powerful Native Americans. Helped by his wife, the daughter
of an immigrant from Britain, Copway deployed the aesthetics – and the very language – of the British Romantic poetry that
had itself been inspired by the figure of the Indian. In his
Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850) he quoted Southey and Byron and included his own nature lyrics: he was a Romantic writer too, at least when it suited
his rhetorical and political need to represent a sensitivity to nature that Indians possessed, but settlers and land agents
did not.
As writers, Copway and Apess were the most sophisticated transatlantic Indians of all, products of two centuries of interchange
as well as exploitation. It is bitterly ironic then, that despite impressing white audiences on both sides of the ocean, they
had little influence and less power. Indians no longer had purchase in colonial politics as they once had when Britain needed
– and feared – their military might. And Britain itself was, after 1813, of less and less importance in North America – and
a newly confident
USA was able to dispose of Indians as it wished. The Indian Atlantic died, as a personal and political reality, although Indians
still came to Europe as representatives and in shows. It did not die, however, as a circulation of words and images – but
there was less and less opportunity for the whites who included Indians in their writings to meet them, their culture, and
their writing, at first hand.
NOTES
1 John Norton, The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816, ed. Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970), pp. 116–17.
3 On Teyoninhokarawen’s upbringing see Carl F. Klinck’s biographical introduction to Norton,
Journal.
4 On Brant, see
Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807, Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984).
5 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), (1805), Book
VII, lines 235–43.
6 On these visits, see
Carolyn Thomas Foreman, Indians Abroad, 1493–1938 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943) and
Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
7 Cited in
Stephanie Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), p. 35.
8 See
ibid., pp. 39–41, on these conventions coming under strain in depictions of the Indian visitors.
9 Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53 (1996), 487–526.
11 My own concept, derived from the discussion of the “contact zone” in
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986).
12 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
13 Cited in Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (London: Faber, 2005), p. 69.
14 On the cultural broker see
Margaret Connell Szaz (ed.), Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); and
R. David Edmunds (ed.), American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).
15 Speech of Brant to Germain, March 14, 1776. Cited in Kelsay,
Joseph Brant, p. 166.
16 See
James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
17 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).
18 Peter Williamson, French and Indian Cruelty; Exemplified in the Life…of P. Williamson…Containing a Particular Account of the Manners…of the
Savages (York, 1757).
19 Edmund Burke, “Speech on the Use of Indians,” February 6, 1778, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. III, ed. W. M. Elofson and J. A. Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 356.
20 Thomas Campbell’s word, in his poem Gertrude of Wyoming (London, 1809), Canto III, stanzas 17–19.
21 James Adair’s History of the American Indians, ed. Katherine E. Holland (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005);
Jonathan Carver, Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (London, 1778).
22 Samuel Johnson spoke against British imperialism in the assumed voice of an Indian chief in the
Idler, 81 (November 3, 1759); Jefferson ventriloquized the speech of Chief Logan, whose family had been treacherously killed by
whites, in
Notes on the State of Virginia (1781).
23 On Indians as figures in the discourse of the Scottish Enlightenment see
James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2003);
Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2001);
P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
24 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Fania Oz-Salzburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 84.
25 A letter in
Lloyd’s Evening Post. Cited in Foreman,
Indians Abroad, pp. 73–74.
26 The article appeared in June in the
London Chronicle; cited in Foreman,
Indians Abroad, pp. 74–75.
27 Report in the St James’s Chronicle (July 29–31, 1762). Cited in Foreman,
Indians Abroad, p. 76.
28 William Cowper, The Task, Book I, lines 633–76, in “The Task” and Selected Other Poems (New York: Longman, 1994).
29 Report in the St James’s Chronicle (July 29–31, 1762). Cited in Foreman,
Indians Abroad, p. 76.
30 Absalom Aimwell (Andrew Adgate), The Philadelphia Songster, Part I: Being a Collection of Choice Songs; Such as Are Calculated to Please the Ear, While They
Improve the Mind, and Make the Heart Better (Philadelphia, 1789), p. 8.
31 From
Joseph Ritson, A Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song, in A Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols. (London, 1783), I: ii.
32 Quoted in
Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements, ed.
Victoria Lindsay Levine (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2002), pp. 215–16.
33 Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London, 1763).
34 Southey’s “Songs of the American Indians” were published in the
Morning Post in 1798–99. See
Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793–1810, gen. ed.
Lynda Pratt, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), V.
35 For example,
Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (London, 1771),
Henry MacKenzie, The Man of the World (London, 1773),
Robert Bage, Hermsprong: Man As He Is Not (London, 1796).
36 Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
37 On these Indian writers see
Bernd C. Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Writers in Antebellum America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997);
Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997);
Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
38 Norton,
Journal, p. 161.
39 William Apess, The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833), in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), p. 157.
40 See George Copway,
Life, Letters and Speeches, ed.
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald B. Smith (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).