Violent Saviors, page 11
Although Constant had denounced the hypocrisy of conquerors with a civilizing mission (like Napoleon), Constant did see progress as desirable. He agreed that “civilization is in the destiny of the human species”; it was preferable to “savage life.” He said, “One cannot and should not stop it.”19
Even after condemning Western conquests around the world, Constant had an ambiguous view of the French seizure of Algiers in 1830. He denounced the conquest as an “affair of royal vanity.” But his patriotism in this case trumped his anti-imperialism: “Let us wish ardently for the military successes of our brave compatriots.” Contrary to his previous writings, Constant was open to the notion that the right to sovereignty did not hold for a bad government; he praised “the ruin of a den of pirates.” He didn’t think the French had to respect “sovereignty in a barbarian.” Constant died in December 1830 before France’s colonial plans for Algeria had fully developed.20
The liberal opposition to colonialism was increasingly fragile. The next great thinker in the French liberal line of succession, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), supported the colonization of Algeria by French settlers and armies in the 1830s and 1840s. Tocqueville did so mainly because of a desire to promote the international standing of France: He wanted to “raise a great monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.” Much as he regretted it, he said this required violence against the locals.21
Tocqueville’s tortured commentary on Algeria still recognized some liberal principles. Most notably, he rejected the conquest for progress narrative. He ridiculed the British for pretending their conquests were good for the conquered: “What I cannot get over is their perpetual attempts to prove that they act in the interest of a principle, or for the good of the natives.” He acknowledged that European settlers’ claims to be superior beings were “so mortifying to the self-respect of the Indigenous people that more anger resulted from that than from any political oppression.” Yet after all that, he still accepted the need for brutal violence for the glory of France. It was not easy for liberals to go against powerful interests in their own countries.22
A more faithful heir to liberal anti-imperialism during the Algeria debate was Algerian. Hamdan ben Othman Khodja (ca. 1773–1842) was a local scholar and businessman. He published a book in 1833 with an epigraph from Benjamin Constant. He denounced the double standard in which free nations in Europe advocated self-determination for Poland but not Algeria. “When my eyes return to the country of Algiers,” Khodja said, “I see its wretched inhabitants placed under the yoke of despotism, extermination, and all the scourges of war, and all these horrors committed in the name of free France.” End the hypocrisy, he demanded, because “Algerians, too, have rights that should permit them to enjoy liberty and all the advantages that European nations enjoy.” The most reliable defenders of rights were often going to be those who fought for their own rights.23
The French settlement and colonization of Algeria would go ahead. Although Constant’s ideas had lost the debate in France on colonialism, there was at least one Western nation at the time that did renounce both conquests for liberation in Europe and colonial conquests in Asia or Africa. The infant United States had tried to follow a neutral foreign policy ever since George Washington called for it in his farewell address in 1796.24
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821 gave one of the most eloquent statements of this policy. Adams’s own background set him up well to debate conquest. The son of the second president of the US, John Adams, he had an inside view of many of the big events of the period. He was the US minister to Russia at the time of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 and followed the war from Saint Petersburg. Adams met Benjamin Constant in Paris and London in 1815 and 1816 and was aware of his writings. Adams called Constant “invariably a friend of liberty.”25
As secretary of state, Adams discussed America’s role in the world in a speech celebrating the Fourth of July in 1821. His position on nonconquest was similar to that of Constant. The Declaration of Independence had “demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest.” While Adams expressed sympathy for the cause of freedom, he emphatically rejected any American military intervention to advance the cause:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.26
Was this just what a later generation would condemn as isolationist? But Adams was not simply trying to attend to America’s self-interest. He thought that American interventions abroad would become tyrannical and therefore harmful to others. Her policy would shift “from liberty to force.” He presciently worried that “she might become the dictatress of the world.”
Adams insisted that America respected a liberal international order, similar to what Smith, Kant, and Constant had begun to sketch out. America held out to other nations “the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.” She had always “respected the independence of other nations.” She had renounced paternalism as well as coercion, having “abstained from interference in the concerns of others” even on behalf of her most cherished principles.27
Like Smith and Constant, Adams saw commerce as the alternative to conquest. In the same address, he said American policy since independence had been to “form connexions of friendship and of commerce with foreign nations.”28
Adams’s ringing denunciations also applied to colonial conquests—sort of. In the Fourth of July address, he equivocated: “Colonial subjection is compatible with the essential purposes of civil government, only when the condition of the subordinate state is from its weakness incompetent to its own protection.” The rationale for one power conquering you was to protect you from being conquered by some other power.29
In a letter seven months later, Adams went much further opposing colonialism. The letter to Edward Everett (the influential editor of The North American Review and a future politician) explained what he had meant to say about colonialism in his Fourth of July address. He anticipated an American debate on “whether we too shall annex to our federative government a great system of colonial establishments.” Now his denunciation of colonialism was as forceful as anything Smith, Kant, or Constant had said. He had demonstrated in the address that “colonial establishments cannot fulfil” a “just purpose.” He had proven the justice of the contemporaneous struggles of South American colonies for independence from Spain. He had looked forward to “the downfall of the British Empire in India.” The address had showed that “great colonial establishments are but mighty engines of wrong,” which humanity should abolish just as it should abolish slavery.
It’s not easy to find these remarkable anti-colonial demonstrations in the public address, perhaps because they are not there. Nor did Adams make them public at this point. He implored Edward Everett to keep the letter confidential, to show it only to one other trusted confidant. Adams was going to successfully run for president in 1824, and maybe these positions were a little too radical for the electorate. Anti-colonial liberalism in America was at least still alive in secret.30
Even in secret, John Quincy Adams had one rather important omission from his condemnation of colonial conquests. He did not apply it to the British/American conquests of Indian nations. He didn’t even see this as conquest. In the Fourth of July address, he had a not-completely-accurate account of how the first settlers of Massachusetts had “purchased from the Indian natives the right of settlement upon the soil.” In a later passage in the address, the Indians disappear from the picture altogether, as the settlers “civilize the wilderness and fill with human life the solitudes of this immense continent.”31
Adams thus embodied some of the contradictions of the victory for liberal anti-imperialism in the US. The nation would refrain from conquest outside North America for many more decades, but these liberal restraints did not apply to continental expansion. The contradictions would lead to some tortured debates on Indian policy in America.
7
The Civilizing Plan for the Creek Indians
Success finally is no longer doubtful.” So wrote the US government agent Benjamin Hawkins to Thomas Jefferson in 1803 about a government program of economic development he was running among the Creek Indians in what is now Georgia and Alabama.1
Hawkins was a former senator from North Carolina and a Princeton graduate. Hawkins had been teaching the Creeks, formerly hunters, how to farm, raise cattle, and produce handicrafts. What became known as his Plan of Civilization had multiple objectives. It would above all improve the well-being of the Creeks. It would achieve peace on the frontier. Because farming took less land than hunting, the plan would free up Creek lands to satisfy the demands of white American settlers. The success or failure of the plan for the Creeks was to determine the fate of many.2
The flood of Europeans settling the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand forced Anglo-American thinkers and leaders to confront the dilemma of how to treat native peoples of those lands. The answer was again giving the Indians development aid in exchange for their land, as Winthrop and Condorcet had. It began sounding more and more like some modern rhetoric that is perpetually hopeful that development will solve all problems and reconcile all interests, no matter how much it has previously failed to do so.
The reader may suspect already that the Creek plan was not going to be a great success. This may unfairly imply Indian development efforts always failed. Cherokee development was more successful and will be discussed in the next chapter. But the Creek case illustrates what backup plan experts had in mind if civilizing efforts were unsuccessful. Such a failure could be either because the Indians were unable or unwilling to do what whites defined as development—or because the white developers were a tad incompetent. That the white developers preferred the first to the second explanation is an important part of the story. In the wake of the plan’s failure, many white thinkers shifted to the mandate of developing the land rather than the people. Removing the Indians and taking their land would then be justified in the name of progress. What was at the time called “extermination” began to emerge in Anglo-American thought.
Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin note that the terrifying word extermination had two meanings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One was the way that it is understood today: the elimination of a whole group. The other was removal of the group from the place under discussion to somewhere else.3
The development justification for conquering Indians had been restated numerous times since Winthrop. The great English philosopher John Locke in 1689 endorsed the idea of development as a basis for land rights in his Two Treatises of Government, which otherwise is a classic statement of liberal ideals, such as the consent of the governed. God had commanded man to “subdue the earth, i.e. improve it.” Whoever “in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it” could claim that part of it as their property. God made this rule to give the land to “the industrious and rational” so that the earth would not remain “uncultivated.” Locke applied this principle to “the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry,” where “the needy and wretched inhabitants” get no more from a thousand acres than the English got from ten acres in Devonshire. Locke encouraged the English settler to “plant in some in-land, vacant places of America.” Like Winthrop, Locke thought the English occupation of the Indians’ land was actually good for the Indians. Arguing by analogy with some other vacant places in Spain, Locke suggested the “inhabitants think themselves beholden to him, who, by his industry on neglected, and consequently waste land, has increased the stock of corn, which they wanted.”4
The right to conquer for development also made it into the extremely influential 1758 book The Law of Nations, by Emer de Vattel (1711–1767), which would be gratefully quoted by European settlers in America for many years afterward. The Europeans had found lands “of which the savages stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use.” The Europeans “were lawfully entitled to take possession of it, and settle it with colonies.” Vattel did not argue that this process was actually good for whom he called the savages. In an earlier passage in The Law of Nations, he declared that any people who inhabit fertile land, fail to cultivate it, and plunder their neighbors “deserve to be extirpated as savage and pernicious beasts.” Vattel applied these principles to declare lawful the conquest of North America.5
Critics of the development right to Indians’ land emerged early on. In 1726, Jonathan Swift was already mocking the idea in Gulliver’s Travels. Upon Gulliver’s arrival in the land of the gentle Houyhnhnms, he “took out some Toys, which Travellers usually carry for Presents to the Savage Indians of America.” In Swift’s satire, Gulliver explains to his Houyhnhnm host the civilizing rationale for conquest. “Where the People are poor and ignorant,” the conquerors “may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living.” Swift was not slow to ridicule the notion that some people had to partially disappear for their own good.6
The settlers in America had not asked Indians what they thought of this civilizing solution. Native American voices only occasionally appear in the records. In 1777, some Cherokee chiefs made a treaty under duress giving up five million acres of their land. Even after the treaty, settlers continued to encroach on the Cherokees’ remaining lands. One of these chiefs, Onitositah (also known as Old Tassel or Corn Tassel), protested against the endless invasions of Cherokee lands rationalized by a supposed civilizing effort. He addressed the whites: “Much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians.” You whites wanted us Indians “to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners and your customs,” presumably including respect for others’ property rights. However, we Indians “should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them.” A year after this speech, a white settler murdered Onitositah.7
The leaders of the new nation were aware of the criticisms of their treatment of the Indians. Enlightenment critiques of conquest may have partially gotten through. Secretary of War Henry Knox suggested to George Washington in 1789 that the nation maintain the “respect which every nation sacredly owes to its own reputation” by adopting a program for “the civilization of the Indians.” Instead “of exterminating a part of the human race,” we could offer “our Knowledge of cultivation, and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country.” Development was the answer to the question the Indians were not asking.8
Washington adopted Knox’s suggestions in his 1791 message to Congress. He proposed, “Rational experiments should be made” for the Indians, “for imparting to them the blessings of civilization.” Such a program, he agreed with Knox, would be “honorable to the national character.”9
The Washington administration had already broached the idea of civilization among the Creek Indians. Washington negotiated the Treaty of New York with the Creeks in 1790 to end incessant conflicts between them and Georgian frontiersmen. The idea of exchanging civilization for land came to the rescue. In return for the Creeks giving up some of their land, the treaty offered aid so “that the Creek nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization.” To support a transition from hunting to farming, “the United States will from time to time furnish gratuitously the said nation with useful domestic animals and implements of husbandry.” If civilizing did not work, Washington wrote the Marquis de Lafayette after the treaty that any Indian rebels “can be easily chastised or even extirpated if it shall become necessary.”10
Washington in 1796 gave a fuller explanation to the Indians of his plans for them. In a speech to Cherokee chiefs in Philadelphia, he set out his civilizing policy. He might have taken it as a warning when he noted that “many good men have considered how the condition of the Indian natives of the country might be improved; and many attempts have been made to effect it.” And all this had been “nearly fruitless.”
But the development idea from the beginning has been remarkably resilient to failure, as each new development thinker is sure they can finally get it right. Like a modern TED Talk, Washington’s speech to the chiefs confidently declared, “I also have thought much on this subject,” and I have finally found the “one path” to material abundance. “In this path I wish all the Indian nations to walk,” Washington said rather forcefully.
Washington detailed his one path for the Indians—keeping sheep, cattle, and hogs, using plows, growing corn, wheat, flax, and cotton, selling crops to whites. The women could learn spinning and weaving. The potential was exciting: “You can vastly increase your crops.” Like a classic enthusiast for development aid, Washington promised the chiefs that success was easier than it looked. If they just “make the attempt,” they “will find every obstacle easy to be removed.” But if the chiefs could not make it work, Washington warned in 1796, the US “may think it vain to make any further attempts to better the condition of any Indian tribe.”11
Washington announced to the Cherokee chiefs that he was sending Benjamin Hawkins as his principal agent to the Southern tribes. “His whole time will be employed in contriving how to do you good,” Washington assured the chiefs, “and you will therefore act wisely to follow his advice.”12
