Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

V: An Impassable Gulf: The Social and Historical Image

V^EN as all American thinking about the Indian was based, at the very least, on an implicit comparison of savage ana civilized life, a great deal of his thinking about himself was based on explicit comparison of the two. For the American before 1850—a new man, as he felt, making a new world—was obsessed to know who and what he was and where he was going, to evaluate the special society in which he lived and to know its past and its future. One means to this end was to compare himself with the Indian who, as a savage, had all past and no future. The final result was an image of the Indian as man out of society and out of history. As a man sprung from western European stock, the American had inherited a notion, faint but clear, that the simpler life of the savage was a good devoutly to be wished for. As a civilized man face to face with savages, he tested this notion in theory and practice and found it sometimes inviting, sometimes amusing, more often puzzling. Evaluating the savage's role in his good society, he could in the end only define and redefine that society and himself as he might flourish in it. The repetitiousness of his arguments is important to us, because it marks a growth towards the certainty which made for American self-knowledge, so for American selfconfidence , so for the westward course of empire. 135 E v An Impassable Gulf: The Social and Historical Image SAVAGISM AND CIVILIZATION 1 In its origins the American's need to compare himself with the Indians whom he knew is as deep and basic as his humanity. A major western European intellectual and imaginative tradition was that of primitivism—the belief that other, simpler societies were somehow happier than one's own. Believing thus, one would be concerned to search for and find such a society and the men who lived in it; that is to say, one would be concerned to find noble savages. The discovery of America furnished savages in abundance . The question was: How noble were they? On the one side there was set in motion a current of strongly antiprimitivistic thinking. This current directly fed that American thinking about the Indian which issued into the idea of savagism. On the other side, there was set in motion a current of primitivistic thinking which swept the Indian into the work of European critics of society. Since this Indian was that noble savage who theoretically embodied all that good men should be, for primitivists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what he actually was came less and less to be a serious issue. What mattered was what Europeans should be. The need was to recover that portion of the primitive self which civilization had corrupted and, in the process, to lay bare the faults of civilization. Thus a primitivistic mode of social criticism came to America fully developed and virtually innocent of actual study of actual primitives. The trick for Americans was to preserve the mode in the face of primitive actuality. The trick soon became merely humorous; or it simply failed. Writers who tried it seriously only confused themselves. When this had come to pass, however, actual primitives were well enough known as savages to furnish in themselves the foundation for a new critical mode, and there developed an antiprimitivistic criticism which could only affirm the glories of American civilization and American progress westward. For the forces which informed the idea of savagism at one and the same time destroyed the idea of the noble savage and made isolated radicals of those who would believe in it. 136 In eighteenth-century literary periodicals, themselves imitations of their English betters, there first began to appear the noble savage as critic of American society. One example among many such will suffice:1 the "Letter from an Indian Chief to his Friend in the state of New York," printed in the American Museum in 1789.2 Here the chief considers the relative happiness of civilized men and Indians. Having been educated among the whites, he feels that he knows their ways well. Among them, "the happiness of the people is constantly sacrificed to the splendor of empire; hence your code of civil and criminal laws have had their origin; and hence your dungeons and prisons." The Indian needs no...