There are other ways in which we now can see, retrospectively, how the evolution of British racial thought in North America paralleled what had happened previously among the Spanish and Portuguese. We noted earlier, for instance, how changing Portuguese attitudes toward the Indians of Brazil were illustrated dramatically in an early sixteenth-century painting of the Gift of the Magi that used a depiction of a Brazilian Indian in place of one of the wise men calling on the Christ child, followed by a mid-sixteenth-century painting that used a feather-bedecked Indian of the same region to illustrate a depiction of Satan in his lair of Hell. A similar transformation in the Europeans’ moral perceptions of Virginia’s Indians is traceable in the famous illustrations of Theodor de Bry and his sons, throughout the thirty volumes of pictorial representations they published between 1590 and 1634. From initial imagery suggestive of Virginia as a place inhabited by people, in Barlowe’s words, who “lived after the manner of the Golden Age,” iconographic evolution soon converted that world into a place of monstrously deformed and diseased savages. To the European artists, as to Europeans in general, notes Bernadette Bucher in her structural analysis of the de Brys illustrations, there was from the start a categorical ambiguity surrounding the New World’s native peoples. Citing the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Bucher notes that
beings and things that participate in two or more categories as fixed by a given culture appear ambiguous and monstrous for that reason, and become instantly burdened with interdictions, horror and disgust. . . . At first, the Amerindian, by his very existence on a previously unknown continent and the mystery surrounding his origins, introduced chaos into the order of things such as the Europeans imagined it in their own cosmogony, moral code, and ideas on the origin of man. 93
But before long, as Bucher says, the Europeans became fairly settled in their opinion that while the Indians were likely human, they were not so in an unambiguous sense—for if they were men, they were “men without God, without law, without breeches.” These final two words presumably are an unattributed reference to the closing sentence of Michel de Montaigne’s famous ironic essay, “Of Cannibals,” in which Montaigne—writing in the late 1570s—favorably compares the life and culture and dignity of the American Indian to that of the “real savages” of Europe, only to conclude sarcastically, “but what of it? They don’t wear breeches.”94 If Montaigne and Bucher were being pointedly lighthearted, however, many other Europeans saw nothing amusing in the stories of the Indians’ near-nakedness and what it represented in terms of the allegedly libidinous and bestial nature of these people of the fearsome wilderness. And there is no doubt that that is how Europe was coming to regard the New World peoples. Indeed, as John Higham recently has demonstrated, artistic conventions of the time personified each of the world’s continents as female, but in distinct and individually stereotyped ways:
To differentiate America from Africa and Asia, artists relied chiefly on her partial or complete nudity. Asia was always fully clothed, often sumptuously so. Africa, attired in sometimes revealing but always elegant dress, was supposed to look Moorish, since Europeans were most familiar with the Mediterranean littoral. America alone was a savage.95
In recent years some historians have begun pointing out that the British colonists in Virginia and New England greatly intensified their hostility toward and their barbarous treatment of the Indians as time wore on. One of the principal causes of this change in temperament, according to these scholars, was the Europeans’ realization that the native people were going to persist in their reluctance to adopt English religious and cultural habits, no matter how intense the British efforts to convert them. No doubt they are correct in this interpretation—a notion that is not at all at odds with Bucher’s structural analysis of the de Brys iconography, with the earlier Spanish experience, or with the traditional Christian suspicion, at least since Augustine, that stubborn resistance to conversion by those living beyond the margins of civilization was a sign that they were less than rational and thus less than human—but this increased antipathy and violence was a matter of escalating degree, not (as some of these writers imply) a wholesale change in consciousness.96 For as we have seen at some length in the preceding pages, the Europeans’ predisposition to racist enmity regarding the Indians had long been both deeply embedded in Western thought and was intimately entwined with attitudes toward nature, sensuality, and the body. That there were some Europeans who appreciated and even idealized native cultural values—and some settlers who ran off to live with the Indians because they found their lifeways preferable to their own—is undeniable. But these were rarities, and rarities with little influence, within a steadily rising floodtide of racist opinion to the contrary.97
What in fact was happening in those initial years of contact between the British and America’s native peoples was a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy, though one with genocidal consequences. Beginning with a false prejudgment of the Indians as somehow other than conventionally human in European terms (whether describing them as living “after the manner of the Golden Age” or as “wild beasts and unreasonable creatures”), everything the Indians did that marked them as incorrigibly non-European and non-Christian—and therefore as permanently non-civilized in British eyes—enhanced their definitionally less-than-human status. Treating them according to this false definition naturally brought on a resentful response from the Indians—one which only “proved” (albeit spuriously) that the definition had been valid from the start. In his famous study of this phenomenon Robert K. Merton—after quoting the sociological dictum that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”—pointed out that “the specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error.”98 In the early and subsequent years of British-Indian contact, however, it produced and perpetuated a reign of terror because it was bound up with an English lust for power, land, and wealth, and because the specific characteristics that the English found problematic in the Indians were attributes that fit closely with ancient but persistently held ideas about the anti-Christian hallmarks of infidels, witches, and wild men.
It was only to be expected, therefore, that when the witchcraft crisis at Salem broke out as the seventeenth century was ending, it would be blamed by New England’s foremost clergyman on “the Indians, whose chief Sagamores are well known unto some our Captives, to have been horrid Sorcerers, and hellish Conjurers, and such as Conversed with Daemons.”99 Indeed, as Richard Slotkin has shown, the fusion of the satanic and the native in the minds of the English settlers by this time had become so self-evident as to require no argument. Thus, when a young woman named Mercy Short became possessed by the Devil, she described the beast who had visited her as “a wretch no taller than an ordinary Walking-Staff; hee was not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour; he wore a high-crowned Hat, with straight Hair; and had one Cloven-foot.” Observes Slotkin: “He was, in fact, a figure out of the American Puritan nightmare . . . Indian-colored, dressed in a Christian’s hat, with a beast’s foot—a kind of Indian-Puritan, man-animal half-breed.”100
In the preceding chapter we explored at some length Catholic doctrines of asceticism, purity, and religious self-righteousness and intolerance—as well as the Church’s murderous treatment of those it regarded as unchaste and impure non-believers. But Protestantism deserves some scrutiny in its own right. For even though most of England’s Protestants had shunted aside asceticism of the specifically contemptus mundi variety (the anti-Roman elements of the faith condemned monastic withdrawal from the world and insisted that Saints partake—albeit in moderation—of the earthly gifts that God had provided for men and women), asceticism in the larger sense remained alive and well for centuries. Indeed, probably never before in Christian history had the idea that humankind was naturally corrupt and debased reached and influenced the daily lives of a larger proportion of the lay community than during New England’s seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. New En
gland Congregationalist Susanna Anthony was only one among many thousands of Protestant divines who as late as the 1760s delighted in examining her soul and—in phrases reminiscent of her saintly Catholic sisters from four and five centuries earlier—discovering
the sinfulness of my nature, the corrupt fountain from whence proceeded every sinful act. . . . My heart has looked like a sink of sin, more loathsome than the most offensive carrion that swarms with hateful vermin! My understanding dark and ignorant; my will stubborn; my affections carnal, corrupt and disordered; every faculty depraved and vitiated; my whole soul deformed and polluted, filled with pride, enmity, carnality, hypocrisy, self-confidence, and all manner of sins. . . . Woe is me, because of the leprosy of sin, by which I am so defiled, that I pollute all I touch! . . . Good God, what a leprous soul is this! How polluted, how defiled! What a running sore, that pollutes all I touch!”101
Unlike her medieval Catholic forebears, Miss Anthony did not (as far as we know) accompany this torrent of self-hatred with self-inflicted physical abuse. But like them before her, the more she expressed her loathing for the rottenness of her heart and will and all her sensual affections, the more admirable and godly a person she was in her own eyes and in those of others. Such sanctification of what one commentator has described as the “furtive gratifications of an ascetic sadism” was, after all, the evangelical way. And as Philip Greven clearly has shown, in the fanatical and obsessive efforts of people like Miss Anthony and her spiritual kin “to placate implacable consciences and in their systematic efforts to mortify and subdue the body and the self,” along with their consequently heightened perception of the world “as a dangerous and seductive place,” the early New England settlers of evangelical Puritan character “often saw evidence of anger and hostility in other people which they denied within themselves.” And in no people did they see such things so clearly as in the indigenous people of the territory they were invading who became the unwilling victims of the Protestants’ “unending . . . warfare with the unregenerate world in which they lived.”102
This also is why what David Brion Davis once said about the belated emergence of the antislavery movement was equally true regarding the unlikelihood of any semblance of humanitarian concern for the Indians gaining serious support during this time: it could not and would not happen so long as Christians “continued to believe that natural man was totally corrupt, that suffering and subordination were necessary parts of life, and that the only true freedom lay in salvation from the world.”103 For a core principle of the saintly Puritan’s belief system was that the “natural” condition of the hearts of all humans prior to their conversion to Christ—even the hearts of the holiest and most innocent of Christian infants—was, in the esteemed New England minister Benjamin Wadsworth’s words, “a meer nest, root, fountain of Sin, and wickedness.”104 By defining the Indians as bestial and as hopelessly beyond conversion, then, the colonists were declaring flatly that these very same words aptly described the natives’ permanent racial condition. And to tolerate known sin and wickedness in their midst would be to commit sin and wickedness themselves.
Moreover—and ominously—from the earliest days of settlement the British colonists repeatedly expressed a haunting fear that they would be “contaminated” by the presence of the Indians, a contamination that must be avoided lest it become the beginning of a terrifying downward slide toward their own bestial degeneration. Thus, unlike the Spanish before them, British men in the colonies from the Carolinas to New England rarely engaged in sexual relations with the Indians, even during those times when there were few if any English women available. Legislation was passed that “banished forever” such mixed race couples, referring to their offspring in animalistic terms as “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” though even without formal prohibitions such intimate encounters were commonly “reckoned a horrid crime with us,” in the words of one colonial Pennsyl-vanian.105 It is little wonder, then, that Mercy Short described the creature that possessed her as both a demon and, in Slotkin’s words, “a kind of Indian-Puritan, man-animal half-breed,” for this was the ultimate and fated consequence of racial contamination.
Again, however, such theological, psychological, and legislative preoccupations did not proceed to the rationalization of genocide without a social foundation and impetus. And if a possessive and tightly constricted attitude toward sex, an abhorrence of racial intermixture, and a belief in humankind’s innate depravity had for centuries been hallmarks of Christianity, and therefore of the West’s definition of civilization, by the time the British exploration and settlement of America had begun, the very essence of humanity also was coming to be associated in European thought with a similarly possessive, exclusive, and constricted attitude toward property. For it is precisely of this time that R.H. Tawney was writing when he observed the movement away from the earlier medieval belief that “private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world . . . but it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself,” to the notion that “the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”106
The concept of private property as a positive good and even an insignia of civilization took hold among both Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Thus, for example, in Spain, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that the absence of private property was one of the characteristics of people lacking “even vestiges of humanity,” and in Germany at the same time Martin Luther was contending “that the possession of private property was an essential difference between men and beasts.”107 In England, meanwhile, Sir Thomas More was proclaiming that land justifiably could be taken from “any people [who] holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to no good or profitable use,” an idea that also was being independently advanced in other countries by Calvin, Melanchthon, and others. Typically, though, none was as churlish as Luther, who pointed out that the Catholic St. Francis had urged his followers to get rid of their property and give it to the poor: “I do not maintain that St. Francis was simply wicked,” wrote Luther, “but his works show that he was a weakminded and freakish man, or to say the truth, a fool.”108
The idea that failure to put property to “good or profitable use” was grounds for seizing it became especially popular with Protestants, who thereby advocated confiscating the lands owned by Catholic monks. As Richard Schlatter explains:
The monks were condemned, not for owning property, but because they did not use that property in an economically productive fashion. At best they used it to produce prayers. Luther and the other Reformation leaders insisted that it should be used, not to relieve men from the necessity of working, but as a tool for making more goods. The attitude of the Reformation was practically, “not prayers, but production.” And production, not for consumption, but for more production.109
The idea of production for the sake of production, of course, was one of the central components of what Max Weber was to call the Protestant Ethic. But it also was essential to what C.B. Macpherson has termed the ideology of “possessive individualism.” And at the heart of that ideology was a political theory of appropriation that was given its fullest elaboration in the second of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. In addition to the property of his own person, Locke argued, all men have a right to their own labor and to the fruits of that labor. When a person’s private labor is put to the task of gathering provisions from the common realm, the provisions thus gathered become the private property of the one who labored to gather them, so long as there are more goods left in the common realm for others to gather with their labor. But beyond the right to the goods of the land, Locke argued, was the right to “the Earth it self.” It is, he says, “plain” that the same logic holds with the land itsel
f as with the products of the land: “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.”110
Only through the ability to exercise such individual acquisitiveness, thought Locke, does a man become fully and truly human. However, notes Macpherson, concealed within this celebration of grasping and exclusive individualism was the equally essential notion that “full individuality for some was produced by consuming the individuality of others.” Thus, “the greatness of seventeenth-century liberalism was its assertion of the free rational individual as the criterion of the good society; its tragedy was that this very assertion was necessarily a denial of individualism to half the nation.”111 Indeed, more than a denial of individualism, Locke’s proposals for how to treat the landless poor of his own country—whom he considered a morally depraved lot—were draconian: they were to be placed into workhouses and forced to perform hard labor, as were all their children above the age of three. As Edmund S. Morgan observes, this proposal “stopped a little short of enslavement, though it may require a certain refinement of mind to discern the difference.”112
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