American Institutions and Their Influence by Alexis de Tocqueville et al

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Among these widely differing families of men, the first which attracts
attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is
the white or European, the MAN pre-eminent; and in subordinate grades,
the negro and the Indian. These two unhappy races have nothing in
common; neither birth, nor features, nor language, nor habits. Their
only resemblance lies in their misfortunes. Both of them occupy an
inferior rank in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and
if their wrongs are not the same, they originate at any rate with the
same authors.

If we reasoned from what passes in the world, we should almost say that
the European is to the other races of mankind, what man is to the lower
animals;--he makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot
subdue, he destroys them. Oppression has at one stroke deprived the
descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity.
The negro of the United States has lost all remembrance of his country;
the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he
abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong
to Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges. But he
remains half-way between the two communities; sold by the one, repulsed
by the other; finding not a spot in the universe to call by the name of
country, except the faint image of a home which the shelter of his
master's roof affords.

The negro has no family; woman is merely the temporary companion of his
pleasures, and his children are upon an equality with himself from the
moment of their birth. Am I to call it a proof of God's mercy, or a
visitation of his wrath, that man in certain states appears to be
insensible to his extreme wretchedness, and almost affects with a
depraved taste the cause of his misfortunes? The negro, who is plunged
in this abyss of evils, scarcely feels his own calamitous situation.
Violence made him a slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the
thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he
hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of
those who oppress him: his understanding is degraded to the level of his
soul.

The negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born; nay, he may have
been purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery before he began
his existence. Equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to
himself, he learns, with his first notions of existence, that he is the
property of another who has an interest in preserving his life, and that
the care of it does not devolve upon himself; even the power of thought
appears to him a useless gift of Providence, and he quietly enjoys the
privileges of his debasement.

If he becomes free, independence is often felt by him to be a heavier
burden than slavery; for having learned, in the course of his life, to
submit to everything except reason, he is too much unacquainted with her
dictates to obey them. A thousand new desires beset him, and he is
destitute of the knowledge and energy necessary to resist them: these
are masters which it is necessary to contend with, and he has learned
only to submit and obey. In short, he sinks to such a depth of
wretchedness, that while servitude brutalizes, liberty destroys him.

Oppression has been no less fatal to the Indian than to the negro race,
but its effects are different. Before the arrival of the white men in
the New World, the inhabitants of North America lived quietly in their
woods, enduring the vicissitudes, and practising the virtues and vices
common to savage nations. The Europeans, having dispersed the Indian
tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering
life full of inexpressible sufferings.

Savage nations are only controlled by opinion and by custom. When the
North American Indians had lost their sentiment of attachment to their
country; when their families were dispersed, their traditions obscured,
and the chain of their recollections broken; when all their habits were
changed, and their wants increased beyond measure, European tyranny
rendered them more disorderly and less civilized than they were before.
The moral and physical condition of these tribes continually grew worse,
and they became more barbarous as they became more wretched.
Nevertheless the Europeans have not been able to metamorphose the
character of the Indians; and though they have had power to destroy
them, they have never been able to make them submit to the rules of
civilized society.

The lot of the negro is placed on the extreme limit of servitude, while
that of the Indian lies on the utmost verge of liberty; and slavery does
not produce more fatal effects upon the first, than independence upon
the second. The negro has lost all property in his own person, and he
cannot dispose of his existence without committing a sort of fraud: but
the savage is his own master as soon as he is able to act; parental
authority is scarcely known to him; he has never bent his will to that
of any of his kind, or learned the difference between voluntary
obedience and a shameful subjection; and the very name of law is unknown
to him. To be free, with him, signifies to escape from all the shackles
of society. As he delights in this barbarous independence, and would
rather perish than sacrifice the least part of it, civilisation has
little power over him.

The negro makes a thousand fruitless efforts to insinuate himself among
men who repulse him; he conforms to the taste of his oppressors, adopts
their opinions, and hopes by imitating them to form a part of their
community. Having been told from infancy that his race is naturally
inferior to that of the whites, he assents to the proposition, and is
ashamed of his own nature. In each of his features he discovers a trace
of slavery, and, if it were in his power, he would willingly rid himself
of everything that makes him what he is.

The Indian, on the contrary, has his imagination inflated with the
pretended nobility of his origin, and lives and dies in the midst of
these dreams of pride. Far from desiring to conform his habits to ours,
he loves his savage life as the distinguishing mark of his race, and he
repels every advance to civilisation, less perhaps from the hatred which
he entertains for it, than from a dread of resembling the
Europeans.[208] While he has nothing to oppose to our perfection in the
arts but the resources of the desert, to our tactics nothing but
undisciplined courage; while our well-digested plans are met by the
spontaneous instincts of savage life, who can wonder if he fails in this
unequal contest?

The negro who earnestly desires to mingle his race with that of the
European, cannot effect it; while the Indian, who might succeed to a
certain extent, disdains to make the attempt. The servility of the one
dooms him to slavery, the pride of the other to death.

I remember that while I was travelling through the forests which still
cover the state of Alabama, I arrived one day at the log house of a
pioneer. I did not wish to penetrate into the dwelling of the American,
but retired to rest myself for a while on the margin of a spring, which
was not far off, in the woods. While I was in this place (which was in
the neighborhood of the Creek territory), an Indian woman appeared,
followed by a negress, and holding by the hand a little white girl of
five or six years old, whom I took to be the daughter of the pioneer. A
sort of barbarous luxury set off the costume of the Indian; rings of
metal were hanging from her nostrils and ears; her hair, which was
adorned with glass beads, fell loosely upon her shoulders; and I saw
that she was not married, for she still wore the necklace of shells
which the bride always deposits on the nuptial couch. The negress was
clad in squalid European garments.

They all three came and seated themselves upon the banks of the
fountain; and the young Indian, taking the child in her arms, lavished
upon her such fond caresses as mothers give; while the negress
endeavored by various little artifices to attract the attention of the
young Creole. The child displayed in her slightest gestures a
consciousness of superiority which formed a strange contrast with her
infantine weakness; as if she received the attentions of her companions
with a sort of condescension.

The negress was seated on the ground before her mistress, watching her
smallest desires, and apparently divided between strong affection for
the child and servile fear; while the savage displayed, in the midst of
her tenderness, an air of freedom and of pride which was almost
ferocious. I had approached the group, and I contemplated them in
silence; but my curiosity was probably displeasing to the Indian woman,
for she suddenly rose, pushed the child roughly from her, and giving me
an angry look, plunged into the thicket.

I had often chanced to see individuals met together in the same place,
who belonged to the three races of men which people North America. I had
perceived from many different results the preponderance of the whites.
But in the picture which I have just been describing there was something
peculiarly touching; a bond of affection here united the oppressors with
the oppressed, and the effort of Nature to bring them together rendered
still more striking the immense distance placed between them by
prejudice and by law.

* * * * *

THE PRESENT AND PROBABLE FUTURE CONDITION OF THE INDIAN TRIBES WHICH
INHABIT THE TERRITORY POSSESSED BY THE UNION.

Gradual disappearance of the native Tribes.--Manner in which it takes
place.--Miseries accompanying the forced Migrations of the Indians.--The
Savages of North America had only two ways of escaping Destruction; War
or Civilisation.--They are no longer able to make War.--Reasons why they
refused to become civilized when it was in their Power, and why they
cannot become so now that they desire it.--Instance of the Creek and
Cherokees.--Policy of the particular States toward these Indians.--
Policy of the federal Government.

None of the Indian tribes which formerly inhabited the territory of New
England--the Narragansets, the Mohicans, the Pequots--have any existence
but in the recollection of man. The Lenapes, who received William Penn a
hundred and fifty years ago upon the banks of the Delaware, have
disappeared; and I myself met with the last of the Iroquois, who were
begging alms. The nations I have mentioned formerly covered the country
to the seacoast; but a traveller at the present day must penetrate more
than a hundred leagues into the interior of the continent to find an
Indian. Not only have these wild tribes receded, but they are
destroyed;[209] and as they give way or perish, an immense and
increasing people fills their place. There is no instance on record of
so prodigious a growth, or so rapid a destruction; the manner in which
the latter change takes place is not difficult to describe.

When the Indians were the sole inhabitants of the wilds whence they have
been expelled, their wants were few. Their arms were of their own
manufacture, their only drink was the water of the brook, and their
clothes consisted of the skin of animals, whose flesh furnished them
with food.

The Europeans introduced among the savages of North America firearms,
ardent spirits, and iron: they taught them to exchange for manufactured
stuffs the rough garments which had previously satisfied their untutored
simplicity. Having acquired new tastes, without the arts by which they
could be gratified, the Indians were obliged to have recourse to the
workmanship of the whites; but in return for their productions, the
savage had nothing to offer except the rich furs which still abounded in
his woods. Hence the chase became necessary, not merely to provide for
his subsistence, but in order to procure the only objects of barter
which he could furnish to Europe.[210] While the wants of the natives
were thus increasing, their resources continued to diminish. From the
moment when a European settlement is formed in the neighborhood of the
territory occupied by the Indians, the beasts of chase take the
alarm.[211] Thousands of savages, wandering in the forest and destitute
of any fixed dwelling, did not disturb them; but as soon as the
continuous sounds of European labor are heard in the neighborhood, they
begin to flee away, and retire to the west, where their instinct teaches
them that they will find deserts of immeasurable extent. "The buffalo is
constantly receding", say Messrs. Clarke and Cass in their Report of the
year 1829; "a few years since they approached the base of the Allegany;
and a few years hence they may even be rare upon the immense plains
which extend to the base of the Rocky mountains." I have been assured
that this effect of the approach of the whites is often felt at two
hundred leagues' distance from the frontier. Their influence is thus
exerted over tribes whose name is unknown to them, and who suffer the
evils of usurpation long before they are acquainted with the authors of
their distress.[212]

Bold adventurers soon penetrate into the country the Indians have
deserted, and when they have advanced about fifteen or twenty leagues
from the extreme frontiers of the whites, they begin to build
habitations for civilized beings in the midst of the wilderness. This is
done without difficulty, as the territory of a hunting nation is ill
defined; it is the common property of the tribe, and belongs to no one
in particular, so that individual interests are not concerned in the
protection of any part of it.

A few European families, settled in different situations at a
considerable distance from each other, soon drive away the wild animals
which remain between their places of abode. The Indians, who had
previously lived in a sort of abundance, then find it difficult to
subsist, and still more difficult to procure the articles of barter
which they stand in need of.

To drive away their game is to deprive them of the means of existence,
as effectually as if the fields of our agriculturists were stricken with
barrenness; and they are reduced, like famished wolves, to prowl through
the forsaken woods in quest of prey. Their instinctive love of their
country attaches them to the soil which gave them birth,[213] even after
it has ceased to yield anything but misery and death. At length they are
compelled to acquiesce, and to depart: they follow the traces of the
elk, the buffalo, and the beaver, and are guided by those wild animals
in the choice of their future country. Properly speaking, therefore, it
is not the Europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of America;
it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction, which
had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted
to modern discovery.

It is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which attend
these forced emigrations. They are undertaken by a people already
exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the new-comers betake
themselves are inhabited by other tribes which receive them with jealous
hostility. Hunger is in the rear; war awaits them, and misery besets
them on all sides. In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies,
they separate, and each individual endeavors to procure the means of
supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the
immensity of the desert like an outcast in civilized society. The social
tie, which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they
have lost their country, and their people soon deserts them; their very
families are obliterated; the names they bore in common are forgotten,
their language perishes, and all the traces of their origin disappear.
Their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection of the
antiquaries of America and a few of the learned of Europe.

I should be sorry to have my reader suppose that I am coloring the
picture too highly: I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of
misery which I have been describing; and I was the witness of sufferings
which I have not the power to portray.

At the end of the year 1831, while I was on the left bank of the
Mississippi, at a place named by Europeans Memphis, there arrived a
numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas, as they are called by the French
in Louisiana). These savages had left their country, and were
endeavoring to gain the right bank of the Mississippi, where they hoped
to find an asylum which had been promised them by the American
government. It was then in the middle of winter, and the cold was
unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the
river was drifting huge masses of ice. The Indians had their families
with them; and they brought in their train the wounded and the sick,
with children newly born, and old men upon the verge of death. They
possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some
provisions. I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will
that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob was heard
among the assembled crowd: all were silent. Their calamities were of
ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. The Indians had all
stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs
remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their
masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and
plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam
after the boat.

The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place at the present day,
in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. When the European
population begins to approach the limit of the desert inhabited by a
savage tribe, the government of the United States usually despatches
envoys to them, who assemble the Indians in a large plain, and having
first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner:
"What have you to do in the land of your fathers? Before long you must
dig up their bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you
inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes, or prairies,
except where you dwell? And can you live nowhere but under your own sun?
Beyond those mountains which you see at the horizon, beyond the lake
which bounds your territory on the west, there lie vast countries where
beasts of chase are found in great abundance; sell your land to us, and
go to live happily in those solitudes." After holding this language,
they spread before the eyes of the Indians fire-arms, woollen garments,
kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, ear-rings, and
looking-glasses.[214] If, when they have beheld all these riches, they
still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of
refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not
long have the power of protecting them in their rights. What are they to
do? Half convinced and half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts,
where the importunate whites will not let them remain ten years in
tranquillity. In this manner do the Americans obtain at a very low price
whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not
purchase.[215]

These are great evils, and it must be added that they appear to me to be
irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of North America are
doomed to perish: and that whenever the Europeans shall be established
on the shores of the Pacific ocean, that race of men will be no
more.[216] The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or
civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the
Europeans or become their equals.

At the first settlement of the colonies they might have found it
possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the small
bodies of strangers who landed on their continent.[217] They several
times attempted to do it, and were on the point of succeeding; but the
disproportion of their resources, at the present day, when compared with
those of the whites, is too great to allow such an enterprise to be
thought of. Nevertheless, there do arise from time to time among the
Indians men of penetration, who foresee the final destiny which awaits
the native population, and who exert themselves to unite all the tribes
in common hostility to the Europeans; but their efforts are unavailing.
Those tribes which are in the neighborhood of the whites are too much
weakened to offer an effectual resistance; while the others, giving way
to that childish carelessness of the morrow which characterizes savage
life, wait for the near approach of danger before they prepare to meet
it: some are unable, the others are unwilling to exert themselves.

It is easy to foresee that the Indians will never conform to
civilisation; or that it will be too late, whenever they may be inclined
to make the experiment.

Civilisation is the result of long social process which takes place in
the same spot, and is handed down from one generation to another, each
one profiting by the experience of the last. Of all nations, those
submit to civilisation with the most difficulty, which habitually live
by the chase. Pastoral tribes, indeed, often change their place of
abode; but they follow in regular order in their migrations, and often
return again to their old stations, while the dwelling of the hunter
varies with that of the animals he pursues.

Several attempts have been made to diffuse knowledge among the Indians,
without controlling their wandering propensities; by the Jesuits in
Canada, and by the puritans in New England;[218] but none of these
endeavors were crowned by any lasting success. Civilisation began in the
cabin, but it soon retired to expire in the woods; the great error of
these legislators of the Indians was their not understanding, that in
order to succeed in civilizing a people, it is first necessary to fix
it; which cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil: the
Indians ought in the first place to have been accustomed to agriculture.
But not only are they destitute of this indispensable preliminary to
civilisation, they would even have great difficulty in acquiring it. Men
who have once abandoned themselves to the restless and adventurous life
of the hunter, feel an insurmountable disgust for the constant and
regular labor which tillage requires. We see this proved in the bosom of
our own society; but it is far more visible among peoples whose
partiality for the chase is a part of their natural character.

Independently of this general difficulty, there is another, which
applies peculiarly to the Indians; they consider labor not merely as an
evil, but as a disgrace; so that their pride prevents them from becoming
civilized, as much as their indolence.[219]

There is no Indian so wretched as not to retain, under his hut of bark,
a lofty idea of his personal worth; he considers the cares of industry
and labor as degrading occupations, he compares the husbandman to the ox
which traces the furrow; and even in our most ingenious handicraft, he
can see nothing but the labor of slaves. Not that he is devoid of
admiration for the power and intellectual greatness of the whites; but
although the result of our efforts surprises him, he contemns the means
by which we obtain it; and while he acknowledges our ascendency, he
still believes in his superiority. War and hunting are the only pursuits
which appear to him worthy to be the occupations of a man.[220] The
Indian, in the dreary solitude of his woods, cherishes the same ideas,
the same opinions, as the noble of the middle ages in his castle, and he
only requires to become a conqueror to complete the resemblance; thus,
however strange it may seem, it is in the forests of the New World, and
not among the Europeans who people its coasts, that the ancient
prejudices of Europe are still in existence.

More than once, in the course of this work, I have endeavored to explain
the prodigious influence which the social condition appears to exercise
upon the laws and the manners of men; and I beg to add a few words on
the same subject. When I perceive the resemblance which exists between
the political institutions of our ancestors, the Germans, and of the
wandering tribes of North America: between the customs described by
Tacitus, and those of which I have sometimes been a witness, I cannot
help thinking that the same cause has brought about the same results in
both hemispheres; and that in the midst of the apparent diversity of
human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be discovered, from
which all the others are derived. In what we usually call the German
institutions, then, I am inclined only to perceive barbarian habits; and
the opinions of savages, in what we style feudal principles.

However strongly the vices and prejudices of the North American Indians
may be opposed to their becoming agricultural and civilized, necessity
sometimes obliges them to it. Several of the southern nations, and among
them the Cherokees and the Creeks,[221] were surrounded by Europeans,
who had landed on the shores of the Atlantic, and who, either descending
the Ohio or proceeding up the Mississippi, arrived simultaneously upon
their borders. These tribes have not been driven from place to place,
like their northern brethren; but they have been gradually enclosed
within narrow limits, like the game within the thicket before the
huntsmen plunge into the interior. The Indians, who were thus placed
between civilisation and death, found themselves obliged to live by
ignominious labor like the whites. They took to agriculture, and without
entirely forsaking their old habits or manners, sacrificed only as much
as was necessary to their existence.