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

Preface

Preface HIS IS a book about a belief. I have tried to recount how it was and what it meant for civilized men to believe that in the savage and his destiny there was manifest all that they had long grown away from and yet still had to overcome. Civilized men, of course, believed in themselves; they could survive, so they knew, only if they believed in themselves. In America before the 1850's that belief was most often denned negatively— in terms of the savage Indians who, as stubborn obstacles to progress, forced Americans to consider and reconsider what it was to be civilized and what it took to build a civilization. Studying the savage, trying to civilize him, destroying him, in the end they had only studied themselves, strengthened their own civilization , and given those who were coming after them an enlarged certitude of another, even happier destiny—that manifest in the progress of American civilization over all obstacles. Now, coming after those who came after, knowing what we know, being what we are, we are bound to question that certitude. We readily comprehend, after the fact, something of the forces of violence and denial which supported it—even as we live among the achievements which in good part it made possible. Yet because our own failures and discontents drive us to search out its strengths and weaknesses, its potential for creation and destruction , we must first take care to understand it well enough to ask the right questions. Only then may we hope to find the right answers. We are not in a position either to justify the past or to instruct it. We can only assent to its certitudes and ask ourselves how they comport with our own. One of the ways xvii T of coming to understand a certitude is to study the belief which nourished it. This is such a study. 1 To write the history of a belief one must develop a clearly outlined chronology and scheme of analysis, yet not force the materials of the history into that sort of precisely articulated rise-and-fall, cause-and-effect pattern which their very existence denies. The chronological limits and the kind of analysis which I have set for this study are intended to make for such a plan. The chronological limits 1609 and 1851 mark the dates of publication of Richard Johnson's Nova Brittania and of Lewis Henry Morgan's League of the Iroquois. These books—both dedicated in significant part to explaining the savage to civilized men—are, to be sure, neither the first of their kind nor the last; for there is never a first or a last in the history of such explanations . Nor are they unique. They are symptomatic, cumulative, typical of their kinds and the concerns of their times. As the work of men who were trying to comprehend events significant for life in America, these two books are effects and expressions of current history—that which was being made even as it was being recorded. Their dates of publication mark off one phase in the history of American interest in the Indian—and thus, in effect, one phase of the American's interest in himself. That phase in its largest implications, the American obsession with the problem of the civilized vs. the savage, is my subject here. It is as a means to the clear analysis of those implications that I have given the terms Idea, Symbol, and Image somewhat specialized , narrow meanings—though not so specialized and narrow, I trust, that the intellectual and cultural historian will find them unfamiliar and the general reader will think them difficult. The terms are meant to categorize, however roughly, stages in the history of an idea as it becomes part of a system of thought and action. By Idea I mean a predication, explicit or implicit, which offers a solution of a major human problem. By Symbol I mean xvin PREFACE a vehicle for an Idea: a concrete, emotionally powerful sign for an abstract proposition. By Image I mean a vehicle for a Symbol: a particular mode of expounding and comprehending a Symbol and the Idea it bodies forth. In this study, as the epigraph facing the title page indicates, the Idea is that which Noah Webster and all those for whom he spoke called the savage and his savagism; the Symbol is the Indian; and...