Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (68 page)

Clergymen in such obscure places as Mason, New Hampshire, faithfully compiled meteorological and demographic records, and otherwise exclusively literary journals such as the
Columbia Magazine
and the
North American Review
published periodic weather charts sent from distant correspondents in Brunswick, Maine, and Albany, New York. Indeed, temperature-taking became everyone’s way of participating in the fact-gathering of enlightened science. Between 1763 and 1795 Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, filled six volumes with his daily temperature and weather readings. Every intellectual felt the need to present a paper to some philosophical society on the subject of America’s climate. The
Transactions
of the American Philosophical Society for the single year of 1799 contained no less than six articles on the topic.

All these writings and all this temperature-taking showed that Americans were actually changing their climate. By cutting down forests and filling in swamps, they were moderating the extreme temperatures that had existed decades earlier. If Americans could change the weather, then they could change anything, or so they hoped.

A
MIDST ALL THE DISCUSSION
and debate, the issue finally came back to the Indian. Had America’s climate actually retarded the development of the only people native to the New World? Jefferson’s lifelong defense of the prowess and virtue of the Indian grew out of this passionate desire to protect the American environment against European aspersions. Buffon was wrong, he wrote; the Indian “is neither more defective in ardor, nor more impotent with his female, than the white reduced to the same diet and exercise.” The difference between the native peoples of America and Europeans was “not a difference of nature, but of circum stance.” There were good reasons why Indian women bore fewer children than whites, why the Indians’ hands and wrists were small, why they had less hair on their bodies; and those reasons, said Jefferson, had nothing to
do with America’s soil or climate. For Jefferson the Indian had to be “in body and mind the equal of the white man.” He could readily doubt the capacities of blacks, who after all came from Africa, but he could never admit any inferiority in the red men, who were products of the very soil and climate that would mold the people of the United States.
⁸⁶

The Reverend James Madison, president of the College of William and Mary and a second cousin of the famous Founder, had much more hope for the assimilation of the Indian than of the African into white society. He told Jefferson of reports of an Indian near Albany who had gradually whitened in the past two years. But he knew of no African changing color. “It seems as if Nature had absolutely denied to him the Possibility of ever acquiring the Complexion of the White.”
⁸⁷
(Of course, Jefferson might have reminded the Reverend Madison of all those slave children who were becoming whiter as a consequence of what Jefferson called “the perpetual exercise of the most boisterous [meaning coarse or savage] passions” between the white planters and their African slaves.)
⁸⁸

The Indian, admitted Jefferson, was at an earlier stage—the hunting and gathering stage of development; but this was not from a lack of native genius, only a lack of cultivation. Yet what if the American environment were strong enough to prevent that process of cultivation and refinement from operating? What if the environmental conditions that kept the native peoples from advancing worked to make the transplanted whites more Indian-like? Instead of progressing along through the successive stages of civilization, Americans might degenerate to a cruder and more savage state.

Some Americans thought that such a regression was actually taking place in the frontier areas—where whites responded to brutal Indian atrocities with even more bloody atrocities of their own. Tales were told of “white savages” who bashed Indian children and cut off the limbs and severed the heads of their Indian victims. Americans had long been fearfully fascinated with stories of these “white savages,” of white men apparently abandoning civilization and adopting scalping and other violent
Indian ways. In the early Republic this fascination took on a heightened importance. Was America advancing from rudeness to refinement, as the Revolutionaries had hoped, or was the move westward actually turning the civilizing process around?
⁸⁹

“The manner in which the population is spreading over this continent has no parallel in history,” declared an anxious New England analyst of what was taking place in early nineteenth-century America. Usually the first settlers of any country were barbarians who gradually in time became cultivated and civilized. “The progress has been from ignorance to knowledge, from the rudeness of savage life to the refinements of polished society. But in the settlement of North America the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.” By moving to the West, cultivated Easterners were losing their politeness and refinement. “The tendency of the American character is then to degenerate, and to degenerate rapidly; and that not from any peculiar vice in the American people, but from the very nature of a spreading population. The population of the country is out-growing its institutions.”
⁹⁰

Jefferson himself realized that the West was more barbaric than the East; in fact, he thought that the United States contained within itself all the stages of social development, “from the infancy of creation to the present day. . . . Let a philosophic observer,” he said,

commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns.
⁹¹

Still, was the fact that the Indian remained in the earliest stage of social development the fault of the natural environment? Was the New World’s climate destined to turn white Americans into Indians, or at least prevent them from progressing? These sorts of nervous questions underlay the extraordinary concern that Jefferson and other educated Americans had
for the fate of the Indian in the early Republic. If the Indian could not be civilized, that is, assimilated and turned into something resembling white farmers, then perhaps the natural environment of the New World was too strong and too impervious to cultural and social reform, suggesting that white men living in such a powerful natural habitat could not become fully civilized either. This unease that Buffon and his followers might be proved right after all lent a sense of urgency to the Jeffersonians’ philanthropic efforts to civilize the Indian.

Of course, these efforts, like those of the Washington administration, gave no recognition whatsoever to the worth or integrity of the Indians’ own existing culture. In the minds of many early nineteenth-century whites, enlightened civilization was still too recent, too precarious, for them to treat it as simply an alternative culture or lifestyle. Only later, only when the Indians’ culture had been virtually destroyed, could white Americans begin to try to redeem the tragedy that had occurred.

Jefferson, like Secretary of War Henry Knox before him, had no doubt of the superiority of white agricultural society to the “savage” state of the native peoples of America. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1801 Jefferson made clear that he would continue what he took to be the successful efforts of his predecessors to introduce among “our Indian neighbors . . . the implements and the practice of husbandry, and of the household arts.” The Indians, he said, were “becoming more and more sensible of the superiority of this dependence [on husbandry] for clothing and subsistence over the precarious resources of hunting and fishing.” Some Indians, he added, were even experiencing “an increase in population.”
⁹²

Jefferson, of course, never questioned that the Indians might not want to become civilized and participate in the progressive course of history. In his mind and in the minds of most enlightened Americans, his intentions were always pure. “We will never do an unjust act towards you,” he told a visiting delegation of Northwestern Indians in 1809 just before he left the presidency. “On the contrary we wish you to live in peace, to increase in numbers, to learn to labor as we do, and furnish food for your ever increasing numbers, when the game shall have left you. We wish to see you possessed of property and protecting it by regular laws. In time you will be as we are; you will become one people with us. Your blood will mix with ours; and will spread, with ours, over this great land.”
⁹³

Jefferson’s policy toward the Indians was tragically simple: let the natural demographic growth and movement of white Americans take their course. The dynamic white settlers would surround the Indians and circumscribe their hunting grounds and thus pressure them into taking up farming, which would not require large tracts of land. Therefore the remainder of their hunting grounds could be ceded piecemeal to the United States. But even before the assimilation and incorporation of the Indians had taken place, Jefferson jumped at every opportunity to get the land that was destined to belong to American farmers. He and his successor, President James Madison, negotiated fifty-three treaties of land cession with various tribes.

Although the Cherokees in the Southwest made extraordinary progress in developing white ways—living in houses and relying on agriculture and not game for their food—for the most part the Jeffersonian program of Indian acculturation was a disaster. Indian society and culture tended to disintegrate as they came in contact with white civilization. Commerce with the whites, especially the trade in liquor, corrupted the Indians and destroyed their independence; and diseases, especially smallpox, were devastating. In 1802 three-quarters of the tribes along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers perished from disease.

So confident were Jefferson and other enlightened Americans in the capacity of people to reinvent themselves and become civilized that none of them had any capacity whatsoever to comprehend the terrible human cost involved in destroying a way of life. They always thought they were acting in the best long-run interests of the native peoples.

Before long many of the philanthropists most concerned for the fate of the Indians were urging that removing them from immediate proximity to the whites and slowing down the process of assimilation were the only means of saving them from extinction. Thus the way was prepared for the wholesale removal of the Indians that took place under President Andrew Jackson—lending a humanitarian justification for what most white settlers wanted anyhow: to get rid of the Indians and take their lands.
⁹⁴

The encounter between the two incompatible cultures was a tragedy from beginning to end. Although Jefferson and other Americans continued to talk about incorporating the Indian into mainstream American life, in their hearts they knew better; and much of their writing about the Indians took on an elegiac tone, as if they realized that the native peoples
were already doomed. They knew that the Indians represented much of what they themselves valued—a respect for human dignity and a passion for human freedom. These were values that Americans also came to identify with the West. Americans never lost the sense that the Indian and America’s West were inextricably bound together.

11
Law and an Independent Judiciary

In 1801 the Republicans had taken control of two-thirds of the federal government—the presidency and the Congress—but the judiciary remained in the hands of the Federalists. The Federalist grip on the judiciary more than rankled Jefferson and his Republican colleagues; it enraged them. Most extreme Republicans never liked the judiciary anyway. It was the least popular part of both the state and federal constitutions and the institution relied upon by those who most scorned and feared the people. Most judges were appointed, not elected by the people, and often, as in the case of the federal judges, with tenure during good behavior. With its robes, court ceremonies, and elevated benches, the judiciary seemed to be the branch of government that was essentially unrepublican. Consequently, some of the most rabid Republicans would have liked to do away with the judiciary altogether.

This popular antagonism toward the judiciary had deep roots in the history of colonial America. Judges in the colonies had not gained their independence in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as those in the mother country had. Prior to the eighteenth century the English common law courts had been regarded as servants of the crown, and judges held their offices at royal pleasure. As a consequence of the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settlement of 1701, however, royally appointed judges in the mother country had won tenure during good behavior. But in most colonies judges had continued to hold office at the pleasure of the crown. Many colonists had resented this dependence of the courts on the crown and thus had tended to identify the judges, or magistrates, as they were often called, with the much resented royal governors, or chief magistrates.

The colonists had not usually regarded the judiciary as an independent entity or even as a separate branch of government. Indeed, they had often considered the colonial courts to be essentially political bodies, as magistracies that performed numerous administrative and executive tasks. The colonial courts in most colonies had assessed taxes, granted licenses, overseen poor relief, supervised road repairs, set prices, upheld moral standards, and
all in all monitored the localities over which they presided.
¹
Consequently, it is not surprising that many colonists had concluded that there were really “no more than two powers in any government, viz. the power to make laws, and the power to execute them; for the judicial power is only a branch of the executive, the
CHIEF
of every country being the first magistrate.” Even John Adams in 1766 had regarded “the first grand division of constitutional powers” as “those of legislation and those of execution,” with “the administration of justice” resting in “the executive part of the constitution.”
²
The colonial judges therefore had borne much of the opprobrium attached to the royal governors and often had been circumscribed by the power of popular juries to an extent not found in England itself.