Throughout the the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, the European-American settlers fought with the Native American tribes, seizing their land and driving them further west. Attempts were made to enslave the native peoples and to explicitly define slaves as property; a law passed in 1705 in Virginia stipulated: "All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion shall be held to be real estate and shall descend unto heirs and widows according to the custom of land inheritance." However, Indian slavery did not prove to be an efficient mode of servitude, as unlike their African counterparts, native slaves could easily escape and be assimilated into their tribal communities; their low resistance to diseases introduced by the European settlers greatly reduced their population and made them inappropriate as slaves.
The Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century had an enormous impact on the lives of the native American Indians; as white settlers continued to move west, Indian inhabitants became a hindrance to achieving the American Dream of prosperity and social progress, and there was growing support for a legalised means of removing the Indians. Although the Fourth Amendment to the American Constitution guarantees that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...", many white settlers believed that because land was a means of attaining success, and the natives, who had been living on this land had done little to cultivate it, they were acting in an acceptable manner in seeking to eliminate them from American soil. Presidential candidate Andrew Jackson used the Indian issue for his election campaign, advocating the removal of the aboriginal peoples onto the plains west of the Mississippi, an area which was hoped to be undesireable for white habitation for generations. He utilised the popular western justification that Indians and whites were unable to co-exist peacefully, stating: "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi...to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it." Once he became President, Jackson passed a bill through Congress, known as the Indian Removal Act , which became effective on 28 May 1830.
The majority of Indian tribes were unable to resist the power of Indian commissioners, who used bribery and alcohol, as well as physical violence. Conflict over land resulted in numerous bloody clashes: the Black Hawk War of 1832 between the displaced Sauk and Fox tribes under Chief Black Hawk and the white militia in Illinois and Winsconsin Territory was just one example. The army mobilised to evacuate them, chased them into Winsconsin Territory, and annihilated women and children as they attempted to flee across the Mississippi. When Black Hawk was defeated, he confessed that his "heart is dead, and no longer beats quick in his bosom. He is now a prisoner to the white men; they will do with him as they wish. But he can stand torture and is not afraid of death. He is no coward. Black Hawk is an Indian."
In the South the Cherokees, a nation of people who had adopted white ways, establishing a republic, and acquiring literacy in their own Muskogean language and English, also put up resistance against American troops. Since the end of the eighteenth century, they had resided in the mountains of northern Georgia and western North Carolina, onto land guaranteed to them in 1791 by treaty with the United States. The Cherokees adopted a constitution in 1827, in which was stated that according to the treaty, they were not subject to any other state or nation. The following year, Georgia passed legislation that stipulated that after 1 June, 1830, the authority of state law would extend over the Cherokees residing within the boundaries of the state. The discovery of gold in 1829 brought prospectors into the country; the Cherokees appealed for protection from the Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), but Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the Court lacked jurisdiction as the Cherokees were a "domestic dependent nation" rather than a foreign state, but that the Cherokees had "an unquestionable right" to their lands until they wished to surrender them to the United States. Despite this reassurance, the Cherokee nation was forced by American soldiers to cede their lands in the Southeast in exchange for lands in the Indian Territory west of Arkansas; by 1838, 15,000 were frogmarched west by 7,000 American troops along the thousand mile "trail of tears".
The European-American settlers used many exploitative and illegal means of eradicating the Native Americans from their lands; when the railroads wished to expand westwards in the mid-nineteenth century, they employed men to slaughter as many buffalo as possible, knowing that the Sioux tribe depended upon the buffalo for their livelihoods, and would therefore either starve to death or retreat; white settlers exploited the fact that the native peoples had no resistance to European diseases such as small pox, measles, and tuberculosis, and gave the Indians blankets infected with small pox.
After the American Civil War, the American government, drained of resources and uncertain about continuing a war with Indian nations following the lengthy battle between the North and the South, signed the Treaty of 1868 with the Lakota Indians, granting them the lands that make up North and South today, as well as areas of neighbouring states. However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, American troops severed the peace treaty and invaded this sacred Indian territory. In 1874, General George A. Custer led an exploring expedition of gold seekers into the Sioux (Lakota) hunting grounds despite promises that the militia would keep them out; the Battle of Little Big Horn that resulted in the death of Custer and 200 American soldiers was only short-term victory for the Indians: the army regained the offensive, and the Sioux were coerced into surrendering their hunting grounds and the gold fields in exchange for payment. A generation of Indian wars ended in 1886 with the capture of Chiricahua Apache chief Geronimo.
Despite the antagonistic and highly-exploitive approach of frontiersmen towards the Indian nations, Eastern citizens were increasingly expressing a more humanitarian view; President Hayes protested in 1877: "Many, if not most, of our Indian wars have had their origin in broken promises and acts of injustice on our part." As a consequence of such objections, Indian policy gradually became more humane. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 attempted to introduce the Native Americans to individual land ownership and agriculture, allowing the president to divide the lands of any tribe and allocate 160 acres to every head of family. The government retained the property in trust for a period of twenty-five years, after which the proprieter aquired full title and became a citizen. This citizenship was extended to the Five Civilised Tribes of Oklahoma in 1901, and to all Native Americans in 1924. However, this well-intentioned act backfired when Indian families, not used to private ownership and fraud, lost an estimated 86 million of their 130 million acres of soil to land sharks, and it destroyed what remained of the traditional cultures.
An increasing number of reformers sought to "Americanise" the Indian peoples by treating them as a homogenous mass, rather than as diverse and sophisticated tribes, who should be "civilised" into accepting American, Christian values. Their aim was the complete assimilation of Indians into mainstream American society. Charles C. Painter, an active member of the Indian Rights Association in Washington, toured the Indian territories of the West from 1884 until his death in 1895, criticising the treaty system, the reservation system, the Indian Bureau and the American Congress. His objective was to destroy the reservation system, and persuade the Indians into accepting American citizenship: "We have, as parts of our civilising machine, a reservation which excludes civilisation and law and social order, and the institutions of organised society; which shuts in savagery and lawlessness...I would give them without delay citizenship with all its privileges and duties...There should nothing remain to separate the Indian from other citizens except the bronze of his skin and the memory of his great wrongs softened and made tender by the grace and sufficiency of our tardy atonement."
Similarly, Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz expressed the view that the only alternative to extermination availative to the Indians was civilisation: "What we can and should do is, in general terms, to fit the Indians, as much as possible, for the habits and occupations of civilized life, by work and education...The end to be reached is unquestionably the gradual absoption of the Indians in the great body of American citizenship." Convinced of the superior status of Christian civilisation, Schurz however rejected the idea of allowing the Native Americans the rights and privilages of American citizenship, with an ethnocentrism of frightening intensity: "The mere theoretical endowment of savages with rights which are beyond their understanding and appreciation will...help them little."
American Indian policy was therefore wholly exploitative, serving to legitimise a system of mass genocide, unconstitutionally attacking the personal liberties of its original inhabitants and stripping them of their land. From the early colonial period, the European settlers exploited the aboriginal people, attempting to enslave them, and attacking their villages and property. The white occupants failed to see these native peoples as belonging to a multiplicity of nations, each with its own language, religion, and customs, perceiving the natives to be "primitive savages" to be treated with inferiority. Frontiersmen saw the Indians as an obstacle in achieving the American Dream of agricultural prosperity and expansion, and used the justification that the Indians had made no use of this land in order to eradicate them. The absolute approach taken by President Jackson to remove the Indian populations was accompanied by massacres, broken promises, and illegal means of coercion through blackmail, the deliberate spread of European diseases, and the extinction of their major source of food, the buffalo. The late nineteenth century saw a more humane approach to American Indian policy: The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 attempted to introduce the Native Americans to individual land ownership and agriculture. Although the intentions of Christian reformers were altruistic and benevolent, their conformist and patronising policy served to dehumanise the Native peoples and strip them of their personal dignity and identity to the same extent as the hardline policy implemented by the American government.
Bibliography
George B. Tindall & David E. Shi, America, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989
George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, Dover Publications, Inc., 1973
Francis Paul Prycha, Americanising the American Indians, University of Nebraska Press, 1973
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Bantam Books, 1970
Rachel Kranz, Straight Talk About Prejudice, Facts on File, Inc., 1992
James Oakes, The Ruling Race, a history of American Slaveholders, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982
David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia, Cambridge University Press, 1990
