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  The early cartographer Lewis Evans tells us, of the Indians in Pennsylvania, “that there is no such thing as coercive power in any Nation: nor does the government ever interfere between party and party; but let every one be judge and Executioner in his own Case.”

  Even among the Iroquois, who appeared to have the most powerful government of all the eastern Indians, the authority of the chiefs rested only on public opinion. The New York savant Cadwallader Colden, in his history of the Five Indian Nations that made up the Iroquois, says, “Each Nation is an absolute Republick by its self, govern’d in all Publick Affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems or Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gain’d by and consists wholly in the Opinion the rest of the Nation have of their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force upon any of their People.”

  If we turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth and from the Indians of the East to those of the Great Plains, we find the same observations. George Catlin, a Pennsylvania portrait painter, was so enthralled by the sight of a group of Indians who visited his studio in Philadelphia that he packed up his paints and brushes and headed for the Far West. There, on the banks of the Missouri and the Yellowstone and the Columbia, he lived for eight years among the Indians. That was in the 1830s when the only other white men on hand were a few fur traders and soldiers, before the slaughter of the buffalo drove the Indians off the plains. Catlin recorded his experience in hundreds of paintings and drawings and in a remarkable book.

  He knew the Mandan and the Minataree and the Sioux and the Comanche and the Flatheads and dozens of other tribes, knew them intimately and described the peculiar customs and characteristics and physical appearance of each. But he observed that the governments of all the tribes were much the same, under the leadership of a chief. This chief, he observed, “has no control over the life or limbs, or liberty of his subjects, nor other power whatever, excepting that of influence which he gains by his virtues, and his exploits in war, and which induces his warriors and braves to follow him, as he leads them to battle—or to listen to him when he speaks and advises in council.”

  In war as in peace, discipline imposed from above was at a minimum. Indian warfare was carried on mostly by small parties, among the eastern tribes seldom more than ten together. The leader of such a group had no more authority than the other members chose to allow him, and in the actual fighting it was every man for himself, each seeking to outdo the others in the fury of his attack. Indian warfare was not a pretty thing, no matter how one looks at it: no atrocity was too great for the Indian to commit against his opponent. Women and children were as fair game as men. But the object of war was as much to display the power and courage of the individual as it was to destroy the enemy.

  The absence of coercive government, together with the horrendousness of Indian warfare, may suggest that Indian life was, as Hobbes would have maintained, nasty, brutish, and short. If we may believe the testimony of eyewitnesses, the opposite was true: the Indians who move through the pages of the early accounts display an extraordinary dignity and decorum. They appear very much indeed like the noble savages of fiction.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in a body of literature composed by the Indians themselves, the Indian treaties. The Indians, of course, did not actually write the treaties, for they did not know how to write. Like other illiterate peoples, they relied heavily on their memories. And in order to establish so important an event as a treaty in the tribal consciousness, they did their peacemaking in an impressive ceremonial manner. The records of these ceremonies, taken down by white observers, were so beautiful, so moving, and withal so aesthetically satisfying, that colonial printers brought them out in pamphlet form for sale.

  In the treaties we begin to get a glimpse of what contemporary writers meant when they said that the authority of the chiefs depended solely on merit and persuasive powers. The stature and eloquence of the Indian sachem at the council table speak strongly to us even at this distance in time and circumstance: a chief who relied solely on persuasion may not have been altogether helpless among men who valued dignity at a high rate. And if we look at the everyday life of the everyday Indian, we may see that it was not merely the chiefs who had dignity. For people to live together in the absence of coercive government, even in so small a unit as a tribe, it was necessary that everyone maintain a barrier of dignity around oneself and respect the same barrier in others. The English traveler John Lawson says of the southern Indians, “They never fight with one another unless drunk, nor do you ever hear any Scolding amongst them. They say the Europeans are always rangling and uneasy, and wonder they do not go out of this World, since they are so uneasy and discontented in it.” The famous frontiersman Robert Rogers, who knew only the northern Indians, says much the same of them: “if any quarrels happen, they never make use of oaths, or any indecent expressions, or call one another by hard names.” Indians were not long on conversation, and white guests used to find their silence quite unnerving at times. When they did speak, courtesy required that it be in a low voice. They spoke so low, in fact, that Europeans found it difficult to hear what they were saying, while the Indian was often obliged to ask white visitors if they supposed him to be deaf. No matter how angry he might be, an Indian never raised his voice.

  Obviously not all Indians were faultless, even by their own standards, but when any one of them violated the customs or mores of his tribe, the treatment he received either from the chief or from the offended party was calculated to shame, rather than force, him into reform. In some tribes the most deadly weapon of authority seems to have been sarcasm. If a man was thought guilty of theft, for example, he might be commended before a large audience for his honesty. If he ran away from the enemy in battle, he would be praised for his courageous actions, each one of which would be related so as to bring out his cowardice. Adair says, “They introduce the minutest circumstances of the affair, with severe sarcasms which wound deeply. I have known them to strike their delinquents with those sweetened darts, so good naturedly and skilfully, that they would sooner die by torture, than renew their shame by repeating the actions.”

  The whole Indian mode of government was designed to emphasize the dignity of the individual. The same emphasis may be found elsewhere in Indian life. The Indian was so fond of his dignity and so proud of his ability to sustain it by strength of character alone, that he completely discounted the props by which the European supported his. The Indian lacked entirely the European’s respect for worldly goods. In Europe, and indeed in most of the world, the acquisition and possession of riches constitutes the ultimate basis for social esteem. We may think it better to be born rich than to become rich, but in our society wealth has seldom been thought a handicap. Among the Indians, on the other hand, there existed a deliberate indifference to wealth, an indifference that could sometimes be infuriating to the white man.

  Consider, for example, the Puritans of Massachusetts, who in 1643 were trying to take under their protection a group of Narragansett Indians. The immediate object was a land grab, to get the Indians’ land away from Rhode Island, but Massachusetts felt obliged to conduct the transaction in such a way that the Indians would appear to be receiving a favor. Since Christianity was the greatest favor a white man could confer on a savage, the authorities of Massachusetts undertook to instruct the Indians in the Ten Commandments. There is no record of what was said about coveting neighbors’ lands, but Governor Winthrop noted in his journal the Indians’ response to the fourth commandment. Will you agree, the men of Massachusetts inquired, not to “do any unnecessary work on the Lord’s day”? To which the Indians replied, “It is a small thing for us to rest on that day, for we have not much to do any day, and therefore we will forbear on that day.”

  By Puritan standards, the Indian was not only lazy; he was proud of his laziness. The settlers observed this fact at the beginning and never forgave him for it. But those observers who saw the Indian in his tribal life and
made some attempt to understand him, knew that his unwillingness to labor for riches was something more than mere laziness. Rather, it was the result of a genuine scorn for the riches of this world, to which the Puritans themselves were constantly professing their own indifference. The Indian could afford to scorn riches and to shun the industry necessary to acquire them, because in his society it was the man that counted, not what he owned. The observers are surprisingly unanimous in their statements on this subject. Let me give you a few of them. Robert Rogers, speaking of the northern Indians: “Avarice, and a desire to accumulate…are unknown to them; they are neither prompted by ambition, nor actuated by the love of gold; and the distinctions of rich and poor, high and low, noble and ignoble, do not so far take place among them as to create the least uneasiness, or excite the resentment of any individual; the brave and deserving, let their families or circumstances be what they will, are sure to be esteemed and rewarded.” John Lawson, of the Indians of Carolina: “They are a People that set as great a Value upon themselves, as any sort of Men, in the World, upon which Account they find something Valuable in themselves above Riches. Thus, he that is a good Warriour is the proudest Creature living; and he that is an expert Hunter, is esteemed by the People and himself; yet all these are natural Vertues and Gifts, and not Riches, which are as often in the Possession of a Fool as a Wise-man.” James Adair: “Most of them blame us for using a provident care in domestic life, calling it a slavish temper: they say we are covetous, because we do not give our poor relations such a share of our possessions, as would keep them from want….”

  Among the Indians, wealth was not merely a matter of indifference. It was, in fact, something to be avoided by anyone who prided himself on his merits. According to Cadwallader Colden, the chiefs of the Iroquois nations were generally poorer than the common people. For in order to attain their eminence they had to demonstrate their indifference to worldly goods by giving away all the presents and plunder they obtained from friends or enemies. “If,” says Colden, “they should once be suspected of Selfishness, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men and would consequently loose their authority.”

  It may be that some of the observers I have quoted were idealizing the Indian. Perhaps you will think that they rationalized laziness into a virtue. Yet it was a laziness that Henry Thoreau also practiced: like the Indian, Thoreau was too busy being himself to spend his time in pursuit of wealth. And if my chroniclers idealized the Indian, they were idealizing something they had seen themselves. Most of them had lived among the Indians and knew what they were talking about. Indeed, the man who knew the Indians most intimately was the one who has given us the noblest savages of all. George Catlin found in the Indians of the Far West all the attributes that our earlier observers discovered in the eastern tribes. “I have watched,” says Catlin in the florid prose of his day,

  the bold, intrepid step—the proud, yet dignified deportment of Nature’s man, in fearless freedom, with a soul unalloyed by mercenary lusts, too great to yield to laws or power except from God. As these independent fellows are all joint-tenants of the soil, they are all rich, and none of the steepings of comparative poverty can strangle their just claims to renown. Who (I would ask) can look without admiring, into a society where peace and harmony prevail—where virtue is cherished—where rights are protected, and wrongs are redressed—with no laws, but the laws of honour, which are the supreme laws of their land?

  Here, as in the other remarks by other eyewitnesses about other Indians, we have a series of characteristics that most Indians of North America seem to have shared.

  These common characteristics, I believe, indicate that Indian ways of life in North America, however diverse, all produced men who attached the highest possible value to the individual. Indeed, the diversity of Indian life was fostered and encouraged by this very exaltation of the individual. Men who valued individual freedom so highly would not create any large or effective political organization of their own, nor would they be content to live under one created by white men. They preferred their own small and ineffective organizations, preferred them because they were small and because they were ineffective. They were individualists, intransigent and incorrigible.

  I do not mean that the Indian was possessed of some mysterious essence to which we can give the name “individualism.” I use the word merely to tie together the different aspects of Indian life that we have been examining. They all add up to a single quality, which has been given various names. The Massachusetts General Court, for example, as we have seen, called it “a malicious, surley, and revengeful spirit.” But the more positive epithet of “individualism” will also apply.

  By whatever name we call it, and however it was produced, this quality was preeminent among the Indians of North America, and it may help us to understand not only why the Indian refused to join us but also why we have admired and hated him for his refusal. The Indian in his individualism displayed virtues to which Americans, and indeed all Christians, have traditionally paid homage. An indifference to the things of this world, a genuine respect for human dignity, a passionate attachment to human freedom—these are virtues we all revere. We should be flattered, I think, if someone said of us that “the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent; that no one…on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it.” But these words were not written about us or our ancestors. They were written about the Indians (by Robert Rogers) and published eleven years before the Declaration of Independence.

  They fit the Indian better than they fit us. The Indian therefore is both a challenge and an affront to us. We see in him what we might be if we carried some of our avowed principles to their logical conclusions. And what we see is disturbing. For we do not wish to be like the Indian. We do not wish to see our nation disintegrate into a thousand petty republics; we do not wish to be so free that no superior authority will make us behave. Nor do we intend to abandon whatever riches we have laid up in this world. It may be as difficult for a rich man to enter heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but most of us would welcome a chance to make the attempt. And so we are irritated, annoyed, and even infuriated by men who exhibit our values better than we do.

  I do not suggest a mode of accommodation. We do not in fact have room for such incorrigible individualists within our civilization. And yet that civilization will have been impoverished beyond repair if the time ever comes when we cannot admire the Indian in his diversity, his dignity, and his intransigence, more than he ever had reason to admire us.

  —1958

  CHAPTER FOUR

  John Winthrop’s Vision

  JOHN WINTHROP’S “MODELL of Christian Charity” has probably enjoyed as much attention from historians as from Winthrop’s shipmates aboard the Arbella in 1630. It offers an explicit statement, convenient for quotation, of the idea that the Bay Colony was in covenant with God, a chosen people, a new Israel. It has accordingly become the very emblem of the Puritan quest, the manifesto in which Winthrop proclaimed the place of Massachusetts as a “city upon a hill.”

  The document deserves the attention it has received and perhaps a little more. Historians have generally related it to the events that followed it. It represents the ideal by which the later actuality is measured or the key by which to explain the sense of mission that engaged first New England and then the United States. The validity of this interpretation is not in question, but a look at the context in which Winthrop was operating may enrich our understanding of what he was doing in his shipboard sermon.

  The “Modell of Christian Charity” was an explication of the love that flows from regeneration in Christ, and of the hope that this love would inform and sustain the holy experiment on which Winthrop and his companions were embarked. More immediately it was an appeal for subjection to authority. God himself, Winthrop said, had ordained that “som
e must be rich some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” This was the lesson, the “model,” which the rest of the sermon or essay was designed to uphold. The passengers must have expected some iteration of the lesson, for it was the central platitude of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century social and political thought, invoked whenever the occasion seemed to suggest a need for reinforcing authority. The founding of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts Bay was surely such an occasion. Its success, in Winthrop’s view at least, would depend on the willingness of the participants to join in loving subjection to the men they trusted to lead them. But Massachusetts Bay was not the first English colony in America, and the voyage of the Arbella was only one of a long line of voyages in which Englishmen boarded ship on dangerous errands that they thought would redound to the glory of God and country. By the same token it was not the first time that the leader of a voyage or colony appealed to Christian charity in order to foster subjection to authority and to discourage the dissension that must imperil the mission.

  Winthrop makes no mention of the “Modell of Christian Charity” either in his journal or in his surviving correspondence, and the only known copy is not in his hand. Though there seems no doubt that the authorship is properly ascribed to him, the circumstances under which he may have delivered it aboard the Arbella are therefore uncertain. Given the theme, it seems likely that it preceded or accompanied the taking of the sacrament among the passengers during one of the Sunday shipboard services. Whether or not that was the case, the communion of Christians in the Lord’s Supper was often the occasion for appeals to brotherly love in voyages or colonizing enterprises.