The American Empire Part 3

Such a communist att.i.tude toward property, coupled with a belief that the land--the gift of the Great Spirit--was a trust committed to the tribe, proved a source of constant irritation to the white colonists who needed additional territory. As the colonies grew, it became more and more imperative to increase the land area open for settlement, and to such encroachments the Indian offered a stubborn resistance.

The Indian would not--could not--part with his land, neither would he work, as a slave or a wage-servant. Before such degradation he preferred death. Other peoples--the negroes; the inhabitants of Mexico, Peru and the West Indies; the Hindus and the Chinese--made slaves or servants.

The Indian for generations held out stolidly against the efforts of missionaries, farmers and manufacturers alike to convert him into a worker.

The Indian could not understand the ideas of "purchase," "sale" and "cash payment" that const.i.tute essential features of the white man's economy. To him strength of limb, courage, endurance, sobriety and personal dignity and reserve were infinitely superior to any of the commercial virtues which the white men possessed.

This att.i.tude of the Indian toward European standards of civilization; his indifference to material possessions; his unwillingness to part with the land; and his refusal to work, made it impossible to "a.s.similate"

him, as other peoples were a.s.similated, into colonial society. The individual Indian would not demean himself by becoming a cog in the white man's machine. He preferred to live and die in the open air of his native hills and plains.

The Indian was an intense individualist--trained in a school of experience where initiative and personal qualities were the tests of survival. He placed the soles of his moccasined feet firmly against his native earth, cast his eyes around him and above him and melted harmoniously into his native landscape.

Missionaries and teachers labored in vain--once an Indian, always an Indian. The white settlers pushed on across mountain ranges and through valleys. Generations came and went without any marked progress in bringing the white men and the red men together. When the Indian, in the mission or in the government school did become "civilized," he gave over his old life altogether and accepted the white man's codes and standards. The two methods of life were too far apart to make amalgamation possible.

3. _Getting the Land_

The white man must have land! Population was growing. The territory along the frontier seemed rich and alluring.

Everywhere, the Indian was in possession, and everywhere he considered the sale of land in the light of parting with a birth-right. He was friendly at first, but he had no sympathy with the standards of white civilization.

For such a situation there was only one possible solution. Under the plea that "necessity knows no law" the white man took up the task of eliminating the Indian, with the least friction, and in the most effective manner possible.

There were three methods of getting the land away from the Indian--the easiest was by means of treaties, under which certain lands lying along the Atlantic Coast were turned over to the whites in exchange for larger territories west of the Mississippi. The second method was by purchase.

The third was by armed conquest. All three methods were employed at some stage in the relations between the whites and each Indian tribe.

The experience with the Cherokee Nation is typical of the relation between the whites and the other Indian tribes. (Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Vol. 5. "The Cherokee Nation," by Charles C.

Royce.)

The Cherokee nation before the year 1650 was established on the Tennessee River, and exercised dominion over all the country on the east side of the Alleghany Mountains, including the head-waters of the Yadkin, the Catawba, the Broad, the Savannah, the Chattahoochee and the Alabama. In 1775 there were 43 Cherokee towns covering portions of this territory. In 1799 their towns numbered 51.

Treaty relations between the whites and the Cherokees began in 1721, when there was a peace council, held between the representatives of 37 towns and the authorities of South Carolina. From that time, until the treaty made with the United States government in 1866, the Cherokees were gradually pushed back from their rich hunting grounds toward the Mississippi valley. By the treaty of 1791, the United States solemnly guaranteed to the Cherokees all of their land, the whites not being permitted even to hunt on them. In 1794 and 1804 new treaties were negotiated, involving additional cessions of land. By the treaty of 1804, a road was to be cut through the Cherokee territory, free for the use of all United States citizens.

An agitation arose for the removal of the Cherokees to some point west of the Mississippi River. Some of the Indians accepted the opportunity and went to Arkansas. Others held stubbornly to their villages.

Meanwhile white hunters and settlers encroached on their land; white men debauched their women, and white desperadoes stole their stock. By the treaty of 1828 the United States agreed to possess the Cherokees and to guarantee to them forever several millions of acres west of Arkansas, and in addition a perpetual outlet west, and a "free and unmolested use of all the country lying west of the western boundary of the above described limits and as far west as the sovereignty of the United States and their right of soil extend" (p. 229). The Cherokees who had settled in Arkansas agreed to leave their lands within 14 months. By the treaty of 1836 the Cherokees ceded to the United States all lands east of the Mississippi. There was considerable difficulty in enforcing this provision but by degrees most of the Indians were removed west of the river. In 1859 and 1860 the Commissioner of Indian affairs prepared a survey of the Cherokee domain. This was opposed by the head men of the nation. By the Treaty of 1866 other tribes were quartered on land owned by the Cherokees and railroads were run through their territory.

Diplomacy, money and the military forces had done their work. The first treaty, made in 1721, found the Cherokee nation in virtual possession of the mountainous regions of Southeastern United States. The twenty-fourth treaty (1866) left them on a tiny reservation, two thousand miles from their former home. Those twenty-four treaties had netted the State and Federal governments 81,220,374 acres of land (p. 378). To-day the Cherokee Nation has 63,211 acres.[9]

A great nation of proud, independent, liberty-loving men and women, came into conflict with the whites of the Carolinas and Georgia; with the state and national governments. "For two hundred years a contest involving their very existence as a people has been maintained against the unscrupulous rapacity of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By degrees they were driven from their ancestral domain to an unknown and inhabitable region" (p. 371). Now the contest is ended. The white men have the land.

The Cherokees have a little patch of territory; government support; free schools and the right to accept the sovereignty of the nation that has conquered them.

The theory upon which the whites proceeded in taking the Indian lands is thus stated by Leupp,--"Originally, the Indians owned all the land; later we needed most of it for ourselves; therefore, it is but just that the Indians should have what is left."[10]

4. _The Triumph of the Whites_

The early white settlers had been, in almost every instance, hospitably or even reverentially welcomed by the Indians, who regarded them as children of the Great White Spirit. During the first bitter winters, it was the Indians who fed the colonists from their supplies of grain; guided them to the better lands, and shared with them their knowledge of hunting, fis.h.i.+ng and agriculture. The whites retaliated with that cunning, grasping, b.e.s.t.i.a.l ferocity which has spread terror through the earth during the past five centuries.

In the early years, when the whites were few and the Indians many, the whites satisfied themselves by debauching the red men with whiskey and bribing them with baubles and trinkets. At the same time they made offensive and defensive alliances with them. The Spanish in the South; the French in the North and the English between, leagued themselves with the various tribes, supplied them with gunpowder and turned them into mercenaries who fought for hire. Heretofore the Indian had been a free man, fighting his wars and feuds as free men have done time out of mind.

The whites hired him as a professional soldier and by putting bounties on scalps, plying the Indians with whiskey and inciting them by every known device, they converted them into demons.

There is no evidence to show that up to the advent of the white men the Indian tribes did any more fighting among themselves than the n.o.bles of Germany, the city states of Italy or the other inhabitants of western Europe. Indeed there has recently been published a complete translation of the "Const.i.tution of the Five Nations," a league to enforce peace which the Indians organized about the year 1390, A. D.[11] This league which had as its object the establishment of the "Great Peace" was built upon very much the same argument as that advanced for the League of Nations of 1919.

When the whites first came to North America, the Indians were a formidable foe. For years they continued to be a menace to the lonely settler or the frontier village. But when the white settlers were once firmly established, the days of uncertainty were over, and the Indians were brushed aside as a man brushes aside a troublesome insect. Their "uprisings" and "wars" counted for little or nothing. They were inferior in numbers; they were poorly armed and equipped; they had no reserves upon which to draw; there was no organization among the tribes in distant portions of the country. The white millions swept onward. The Indian bands made a stand here and there but the tide of white civilization overwhelmed them, smothered them, destroying them and their civilization together.

The Indians were the first obstacle to the building of the American Empire. Three hundred years ago the whole three million square miles that is now the United States was theirs. They were the American people.

To-day they number 328,111 in a population of 105,118,467 and the total area of their reservations is 53,489 square miles. (Statistical Abstract of the U. S., 1918, pp. 8 and 776.)

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The total number of square miles in Indian Reservations in 1918 was 53,490 as against 241,800 square miles in 1880. (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1918, p. 8.)

[5] "The Indian of To-day," C. A. Eastman. New York, Doubleday, 1915, p.

4.

[6] "The Indian and His Problem," F. E. Leupp. New York, Scribners, 1910, p. 23.

[7] Ibid., p. 24.

[8] Ibid., p. 10.

[9] "Referring to your inquiry of November 20, 1919, concerning the Cherokee Indian Reservation, you are advised that the Cherokee Indian country in the northeastern part of Oklahoma aggregated 4,420,068 acres.

"Of said area 4,346,223 acres have been allotted in severalty to the enrolled members of said Cherokee Indian Nation, Oklahoma. Twenty-two thousand eight hundred and eighty acres were disposed of as town lots, or reserved for railway rights of way, churches, schools, cemeteries, etc., and the remaining area has been sold, or otherwise disposed of as provided by law.

"The Cherokee tribal land in Oklahoma with the exception of the possible t.i.tle of said Nation to certain river beds has been disposed of.

"In reference to the Eastern band of Cherokees, you are advised that said Indians who have been incorporated hold t.i.tle in fee to certain land in North Carolina, known as the Qualla Reservation and certain other lands, aggregating 63,211 acres."--Letter from the Office of Indian Affairs. Dec. 9, 1919, "In re Cherokee land."

[10] "The Indian and His Problem," F. E. Leupp. New York, Scribners, 1910, p. 24.

[11] See Bulletin 184, New York State Museum, Albany, 1916, p. 61.

IV. SLAVERY FOR A RACE

1. _The Labor Shortage_

The American colonists took the land which they required for settlement from the Indians. The labor necessary to work this land was not so easily secured. The colonists had set themselves the task of establis.h.i.+ng European civilization upon a virgin continent. In order to achieve this result, they had to cut the forests; clear the land; build houses; cultivate the soil; construct s.h.i.+ps; smelt iron, and carry on a mult.i.tude of activities that were incidental to setting up an old way of life in a new world. The one supreme and immediate need was the need for labor power. From the earliest days of colonization there had been no lack of harbors, fertile soil, timber, minerals and other resources.

From the earliest days the colonists experienced a labor shortage.

The labor situation was trebly difficult. First, there was no native labor; second, pa.s.sage from Europe was so long and so hazardous that only the bold and venturesome were willing to attempt it, and third, when these adventurers did reach the new world, they had a choice between taking up free land and working it for themselves and taking service with a master. Men possessing sufficient initiative to leave an old home and make a journey across the sea were not the men to submit themselves to unnecessary authority when they might, at will, become masters of their own fortunes. The appeal of a new life was its own argument, and the newcomers struck out for themselves.

Throughout the colonies, and particularly in the South where the plantation culture of rice and tobacco, and later of cotton, called for large numbers of unskilled workers, the labor problem was acute. The abundance of raw materials and fertile land; the speedy growth of industry in the North and of agriculture in the South; the generous profits and expanding markets created a labor demand which far outstripped the meager supply,--a demand that was met by the importation of black slaves from Africa.