by John Demos
A rather narrow stairway with attractively fashioned railing leads up from the center hall to the second floor. There, near the front, are two similarly shaped bedrooms. Perhaps these were for the Northrups’ children. I wonder, in particular, about their daughter Sarah, who would come to play such a key role in the larger story of the Mission School. Along the west wall, the layout becomes more complex. At one corner is a large master bedroom. For father and mother Northrup? At the very back is another hallway, and then, curled in behind, a tiny (ten feet by eight) utility room. I jump on this: What more likely spot for the “sick room” where young John Ridge was lodged for more than a year? Another crucial part of the larger story.
Nearby, a steep flight of stairs leads up to the large, entirely open attic, with its original beams and chimney stack prominently displayed. (The chimney turns here from stone to brick, so as to emerge above the roof in brick profile—evidently considered a more fashionable look.) The attic could well have been used as a sleeping space for servants; such, I know, was true of other houses built and occupied during the same period. It may also have served as an extra dormitory, for lodging a few of the scholars. While descending the stairs to regain the ground floor, I give one more glance into the keeping room. Used (during the school’s lifetime) as a dining hall every day, it might also have hosted special occasions. Perhaps, for example, a wedding? Then I take my leave and am back outside on the street.
There are two more local houses with direct links to the Mission School. One was the home of Rev. Timothy Stone, where Obookiah was taken when sick—and where, eventually, he died. Unfortunately, however, a visit to this house is precluded by the illness of its current owner. The other is the original residence of the Gold family, a few hundred yards north of the green. As seen today, the Gold house has the same exterior look as the steward’s: wood-framed, Federal-style, with double chimney and several dormers. But inside it has a more complex design. There is a center hall but no large keeping room. Instead, a parlor, a dining room, a large kitchen, plus a couple of small service rooms on the first floor, and three fair-size bedrooms on the second. From here “Col.” Benjamin Gold performed many services at the behest of the agents: raised funds, gathered supplies, hosted important visitors. And here the family occasionally boarded a scholar or two—presumably, an overflow from the main school buildings.
The tour is ending; it has, for certain, lessened the distance between my own world and that of the school—between story and storyteller. Before I leave, I spend a final hour with a local resident who speaks of something that draws the two worlds even closer.
Summer 2007. The owners of a fine home on Cream Hill have convened a meeting of their friends and neighbors to discuss a matter of rising public interest—rising in Cornwall, rising across the country. They begin the discussion on a personal note. During the past few years four members of their extended family, sisters and cousins, have come here in order to be married. Soon their own daughter will be visiting with her intended—but with a different prospect. This pair is no less bonded, no less in love; but for them marriage is legally impossible (at least at that time, in the state of Connecticut). The reason is simple: Whereas with previous couples the partners were of opposite sex, the hosts’ daughter is betrothed to another woman. From this rather poignant starting point, discussion within the group ranges across a variety of conjoined topics—the law, religion, social mores, politics, civil rights. Apparently, those present share a similar perspective; they agree the law must be changed, so that all should enjoy the same opportunity for marriage. The question is: How to make this possible? How to create change? The meeting continues for most of an afternoon. Near the end one of the participants stands to add a different perspective—that of history. Almost two hundred years before, he notes, their town faced a similar “question of marriage.” Then, too, it was about a couple—in fact, two couples—whose love went against traditional norms. The women involved were local and of “white” extraction (one of them ancestrally related to the hosts of the current discussion and their daughter); the men were Indians from the Cherokee Nation. Many in the community were opposed—vehemently, even violently, so. Marriage was for persons of the same race, they said; the Almighty had willed it so, and ancient tradition fully concurred.1
You must not do this! Then and now: The line between them stretches long and taut.
PART THREE
CRISIS
• CHAPTER FIVE •
American Paradox: The Indelible Color Line
Intimacy across racial boundaries—love, sex, marriage—has a history reaching back to the earliest years of European colonization. In 1619, the Virginia planter John Rolfe famously courted and married the local Indian princess, Pocahontas. Because such liaisons were unusual—indeed, at that point unprecedented—Rolfe felt obliged to explain his choice in a long letter to the colony’s governor, Sir Thomas Dale. Fellow colonists, he knew, would see him as indulging “a hungry [sexual] appetite, to gorge myself with incontinency”; they could imagine no other motive for attraction to “one whose education hath been rude, her manners barbarous … and so discrepant in all nurture from myself.” In rebuttal, Rolfe avowed his “settled and long continued affection” for the princess, and his strong wish to “endeavor to make her a Christian.” She, for her part, evinced both “great appearance of love to me…[and] the desire to be taught and instructed in the knowledge of God.” In short, the match joined love and religion; hence it would gain the governor’s blessing—and achieve, in due course, a lasting celebrity. Many eminent Virginians, down through Thomas Jefferson’s time and beyond, would be proud to claim descent from it.1
Rolfe’s letter also spoke to a prevalent English sense of superiority toward Indians. In fact, the same attitude shaped relations with many others: the Irish, the Jews, Africans, and, to a lesser extent, various peoples of the European continent.2 But its basis was cultural, not biological. Pocahontas was a case in point—scorned for her crude manners, her lack of education, her “paganism.”
Such was the general pattern among the first generation or two of colonists, with Indians seen to fit the ancient concept of “the noble savage.” They were admired for their “fine stature” and “clean-jointed” physique. Their skin color was taken as a variant of white, its “tawny” hue the result either of intense exposure to the sun or of their custom of rubbing their bodies with bear grease. Their manner seemed dignified, their physical courage beyond doubt. Their political organization—tribal chiefdoms, sometimes grandly mischaracterized by the English as “empires”—was freely acknowledged. Even their religious practice, including their worship of a “Great Spirit,” could be understood, if not approved.3
Their everyday cultural ways were another matter. In “habit” (clothing), in housing, in diet, in many aspects of technology, in speech (and also in their lack of literacy), in the impermanency of their settlements, Indians seemed undeniably “barbarous.” Still, these and other perceived deficiencies were not understood as fixed. Indians, no less than other peoples, were educable; with careful training and practice, they might sooner or later become “civilized.” The English themselves had once been “backward,” prior to being lifted toward their current lofty status through the help of invading Romans and Anglo-Saxons (among others). The native people of America could aspire to the same, with the colonists serving as exemplars and teachers.4
These hopeful expectations were framed by a belief in the underlying unity of mankind. Humans of every type were thought to have descended from a single act of creation (a theory that would later be known as “monogenesis”); differences among them reflected environmental pressures, not biology or genes. To be sure, humans—and the entire cosmos—presented, in full vertical array, a “great chain of being,” stretching from the Almighty Himself at the top to the lowliest animate organisms on the bottom. As elaborated with increasing precision in the eighteenth century by (among others) the eminent Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnae
us, this idea placed white people above the tawny Indians, with the latter in turn outranking “Moors” and Africans. But, again, these positions could be changed over time. Indeed, all groups might eventually rise together—toward the pinnacle that was God’s kingdom and the “end times” of His ultimate triumph.5
Under the circumstances, there was no explicit bar to Indian-white contact—up to and including “intimacy.” Indeed, at least a few colonists openly advocated intermarriage. For example, William Byrd of Virginia, ever eager to advance the cause of Christianity, bantered that “a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent among these, or any other infidels.” And Robert Beverley, Byrd’s contemporary and author of the first history of Virginia, sounded a similar note; if only his fellow colonists had tried intermarriage on some considerable scale, “in all likelihood many … of the Indians would have been converted by this kind method.”6
In truth, the Rolfe-Pocahontas match was extraordinary; no similar case involving English persons of such prominence can be discovered through the entire span of the seventeenth century. Surely, there were some less formal liaisons—though the surviving records afford only an occasional glimpse. Colonists showed, from the start, a degree of sexual curiosity about their native neighbors—witness their fixation on Indian “nakedness.” Some of them ran off “to take up their abode with the Indians in a profane course of life”; these, almost certainly, formed intimate relationships with Indian peers. Others were captured in the course of wars, were integrated into native communities, and acquired Indian spouses. The most famous of the latter group was Eunice Williams, daughter of a leading Massachusetts minister. Taken as a child from her home in Deerfield in 1704, she elected to remain with her Mohawk captors for the rest of her very long life. She married a Mohawk and became in all ways “Indianized.” Her choices electrified—and horrified—colonists throughout New England and beyond. But it was the cultural, not the biological, aspect that especially concerned them—her preference for “savage” ways (and indeed for Catholicism, since her captors were part of a Jesuit mission community outside Montreal).7
On the whole, then, little, from the early years, seems to reflect feelings of a specifically racial revulsion among the “settler” population at large. However, revulsion would develop, more and more, during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. By then, colonists’ perception of the Indians’ color had begun to darken. No longer was it plausible to regard them as fundamentally white; instead, they were “red” or even, as some said, “black.” In fact, it was Indians themselves who adopted—not to say invented—“red” as a mark of their own distinctiveness, and colonists would increasingly follow the same usage. Moreover, the growing presence of African slaves invested the whole matter of color difference with new and heightened meaning; pigmentation, behavior, social position, and inborn character were increasingly seen as linked. By this time, large numbers of Indians were themselves enslaved (mainly in New England, the southern colonies, and the West Indies). Some had been taken in wars—“enemy combatants,” in the parlance of today—while others were sentenced to slavery by colonial courts following criminal prosecution and conviction.8
Hence the term redskin, rarely encountered prior to 1750, would now become (for whites) a stereotype conjuring a raft of negative images—degraded status, violence, deceit, shiftlessness, and, most pointedly, “savagery.”9 All of these were thought to characterize Indians as Indians; in short, Indians had become racialized, as never before. (So, too, had the colonists, though the meanings attached to their whiteness were diametrically opposed.)
The change was owing to a number of intertwined factors. The project to educate native people, such as it was, seemed to have borne little fruit, and parallel efforts at Christian conversion had also fallen short; most of the early New England “praying towns,” for example, were languishing badly. The Indian—again, in stereotype—had supposedly rejected “civilization”; more and more, the two seemed antithetical. But, most telling by far, “Indian wars” had taken—and continued to take—a large toll in colonists’ lives and treasure. (Never mind that most such wars were far more ruinous on the other side.) Anxiety, terror, and outrage rose in direct proportion. Especially along the ever-widening frontier, site of the bloodiest, most persistent conflicts, anti-Indian feeling reached new levels of virulence. In the 1760s, Sir William Johnson of New York, a preeminent trader and diplomat with Indians, described the deteriorating situation to imperial authorities in London. Throughout the backcountry, he wrote, colonists “murder, robb [sic], and otherwise grossly misuse all Indians they could find.” Moreover, they treated the native population “with contempt much greater than they had ever experienced” before.10
Somewhat paradoxically, it was on or near the frontier that cross-racial intimacy also reached new levels. Warfare with Indians was regularly admixed with trade. And wherever there was trade, there were white traders. And wherever there were white traders, there were female Indian “consorts” and “bed-fellows.” From these alliances, most of which were never formalized, came a growing population of mixed-race offspring. Both consorts and offspring would, in turn, play a vital role in the trade. They were translators, negotiators, facilitators, “intermediaries” in every possible sense; as such, they were conspicuous. So it was, on both sides, that the potential for racial “inter-mixture” became real.11
In the later part of the century, the Revolutionary struggle, the transatlantic cultural movement known as the Enlightenment (with its deep faith in human progress), and, not least, the “spirited resistance” of Indians to white dominance would together force a process of reconsideration around race. “All men are created equal,” announced the Declaration of Independence, in starkly unambiguous terms. However, practice and experience would repeatedly contradict this principle—most obviously in the case of enslaved blacks. A nascent antislavery movement gained some ground in the immediate post-Revolution years, then faded under the weight of massive economic interest and anti-black prejudice; henceforth discussion of fundamental rights could ignore all so-called Negroes. With Indians, the case was different. White or red, noble or degraded, were they not “men”? And, as the land’s original occupants, did their claims to recognition not equal, or even surpass, those of white citizens? Indeed, these claims could now be backed with impressive political and military might. What came to be known as the Old Northwest produced a series of tribal “confederacies” barring the way to white expansion. In the Southeast, the presence of five large and independent Indian nations—Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—had a similarly limiting effect.12
Meanwhile, some in the leadership of the nascent United States sought to breathe fresh life into the old plan to lift native people out of their “savage” state. President George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, declared the start of an official “civilization policy,” in which the resources of government would be directly engaged. Its basic goals were threefold: to turn Indians from hunters into settled agriculturalists; to draw them fully into the orbit of Christianity; and to attach them to the principle of private, as opposed to communal, ownership of property. (No matter—regarding the first point—that many in the native population had long engaged in farming, something white Americans were unable, or unwilling, to see. What did matter, a great deal, was the way success with these plans might bring a drastic reduction of Indians’ footprint on the land, and thus open vast new territories to white settlement.)13 Specially commissioned agents were dispatched to Indian country, with plows, looms, cookware, livestock, and other equipage of “civilization,” for general distribution there.
If the Washington administration took the first steps with all this, it was Jefferson who made the policy a special focus. Throughout his presidential tenure, the federal presence among the native population would steadily, and measurably, increase. Meanwhile, too, missionaries began to arrive with plans to found churches and scho
ols. In time, these two elements—the one secular and governmental, the other religious and evangelical—would join in uneasy alliance. The educational program, in particular, achieved impressive growth; by the mid-1820s, the total of new Indian schools (mostly in the Southeast) had surpassed forty, with almost two thousand pupils officially enrolled. As part of the same general strategy, the households of resident agents and missionaries would serve as little replicas of “civilization”—modeling, for the native population, up-to-date farming, enlightened domesticity, and firm devotion to Christianity.14
All aspects were carefully rationalized; all were couched in the language of “improvement” and “assimilation.” To one visiting Indian delegation, President Jefferson grandly declared, “The day will soon come when you will unite yourselves with us, join in our great councils, and form a people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage; your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great continent.” To Benjamin Hawkins, a principal government agent among the southeastern tribes, he wrote, “The ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs blend together, to intermix, and become one people. Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the Unites States … is what the natural progress of things will, of course, bring on.”15
