Alexis de Tocqueville on Native Americans

Monday, October 13th, 2014

On Columbus Day it seems apropos to share Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations on American attitudes toward native Americans:

In the midst of this American society, so well policed, so sententious, so charitable, a cold selfishness and complete insensibility prevails when it is a question of the natives of the country. The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at the bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilised; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.

When he encountered real, live Indians, he was disappointed:

I was full of recollections of M. de Chateaubriand and of Cooper, and I was expecting to find the natives of America savages, but savages on whose face natured had stamped the marks of some of the proud virtues which liberty brings forth. I expected to find a race of men little different from Europeans, whose bodies had been developed by the strenuous exercise of hunting and war, and who would lose nothing by being seen naked. Judge my amazement at seeing the picture that follows. The Indians whom I saw that evening were small in stature, their limbs, as far as one could tell under their clothes, were thin and not wiry, their skin instead of being red as is generally thought, was dark bronze and such as at first sight seemed very like that of Negroes. Their black hair fell with singular stiffness on their neck and sometimes on their shoulders. Generally their mouths were disproportionately large, and the expression on their faces ignoble and mischievous. There was however a great deal of European in their features, but one would have said that they came from the lowest mob of our great European cities. Their physiognomy told of that profound degradation which only long abuse of the benefits of civilisation can give, but yet they were still savages.

Comments

  1. James James says:

    And yet, and yet…

    When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

    Letter to London merchant Peter Collinson (9 May 1753); reported in Labaree: “Papers of Benjamin Franklin”, vol 4, pp 481-482.

  2. James James, I think this is possibly a case of the difference 60 years can make.

  3. A Boy and His Dog says:

    It certainly depends on the tribe. Some were fierce raiders, and some were sedentary. For a captured youth the war and rape life of the warrior tribes would be much more appealing than returning to a life of sitting in church and farming.

  4. Chedolf says:

    Scott Alexander’s review of Empire of the Summer Moon is worth reading for his discussion of “the phenomenon of whites [and Indians] preferring the Indian lifestyle.”

    I have a hunch that an Isegoria link sent me there in the first place, so apologies if everyone has read that before.

  5. Isegoria says:

    That does sound like something I’d cite, but I hadn’t seen it before. Thanks for the pointer!

  6. Mike in Boston says:

    Scott Alexander’s review was interesting, thanks!

    Seems to me that the process repeated itself fractally among the white: less appealing lifestyles squeezed out more appealing ones. Fred Reed tells the story.

  7. Toddy Cat says:

    This review just proves that Scott Alexander can be informative and interesting, as long as he stays away from alleged “Social Justice” issues.

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