MDDM Ch. 62 Slavery

[Doug Millison]

>>Stig: " ... the 'new' Continent Europeans found, had been long attended,
>>from its own ancient Days, by murder, slavery, and the poor fragments of a
>>Magic irreparably broken." (612.10)

Pynchon points to a complex historical record, many stories that differ
according to who's telling the story and why.


"[...] Like Colden, French writers sometimes compared the Iroquois to the
Romans. Three years before Colden published his History of the Five Indian
Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America in its 1727
edition, a line drawing from a book by the Frenchman Joseph Francois
Lafitau purported to illustrate an Iroquois council meeting. As was rather
apparent from the drawing, the artist had never seen a meeting. In the
drawing, a chief was shown standing, holding a wampum belt. He and other
Iroquois sitting around him in a semicircle wore white, toga-like garments
and sandals. Their hair was relatively short and curly, in the Roman
fashion. The chiefs were shown sitting against a background that did not
look at all like the American woodland, but more like the rolling, almost
treeless Roman countryside. Accounts of Indian (especially Iroquoian) life
and society, especially those by Colden, enjoyed a lively sale on both
sides of the Atlantic.

Other eighteenth-century writers compared the Iroquois to counterparts of
Old Testament life; James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775)
"prefers simple Hebraic-savage honesty to complex British civilized
corruption." Indians, wrote Adair, were governed by the "plain and honest
law of nature . . . ":

Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty; and when there is
equality of condition, manners and privileges, and a constant familiarity
in society, as prevails in every Indian nation, and through all our British
colonies, there glows such a cheerfulness and warmth of courage in each of
their breasts, as cannot be described.

Iroquoian notions of personal liberty also drew exclamations from Colden,
who wrote:

The Five Nations have such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow of
no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from
their Territories. They never make any prisoner a slave, but it is
customary among them to make a Compliment of Naturalization into the Five
Nations; and, considering how highly they value themselves above all
others, this must be no small compliment . . .

      The Great Law provided for adoption of those prisoners willing to
accept its provisions. For those who did not, there awaited the possible
death by torture that Colden had deplored.

      The Iroquois' extension of liberty and political participation to
women surprised some eighteenth-century Euro-American observers. An
unsigned contemporary manuscript in the New York State Library reported
that when Iroquois men returned from hunting, they turned everything they
had caught over to the women. "Indeed, every possession of the man except
his horse & his rifle belong to the woman after marriage; she takes care of
their Money and Gives it to her husband as she thinks his necessities
require it," the unnamed observer wrote. The writer sought to refute
assumptions that Iroquois women were "slaves of their husbands." "The truth
is that Women are treated in a much more respectful manner than in England
& that they possess a very superior power; this is to be attributed in a
very great measure to their system of Education." The women, in addition to
their political power and control of allocation from the communal stores,
actedas communicators of culture between generations. It was they who
educated the young. [...]

Interest in treaty accounts was high enough by 1736 for a Philadelphia
printer, Benjamin Franklin, to begin publication and distribution of them.
During that year, Franklin published his first treaty account, recording
the proceedings of a meeting in his home city during September and October
of that year. During the next twenty-six years, Franklin's press produced
thirteen treaty accounts. During those years, Franklin became involved to a
greater degree in the Indian affairs of Pennsylvania. By the early 1750s,
Franklin was not only printing treaties, but representing Pennsylvania as
an Indian commissioner as well. It was his first diplomatic assignment.
Franklin's attention to Indian affairs grew in tandem with his advocacy of
a federal union of the colonies, an idea that was advanced by Canassatego
and other Iroquois chiefs in treaty accounts published by Franklin's press
as early as 1744. Franklin's writings indicate that as he became more
deeply involved with the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, he picked up
ideas from them concerning not only federalism, but concepts of natural
rights, the nature of society and man's place in it, the role of property
in society, and other intellectual constructs that would be called into
service by Franklin as he and other American revolutionaries shaped an
official ideology for the new United States. Franklin's intellectual
interaction with Indian peoples began, however, while he was a Philadelphia
printer who was helping to produce what has since been recognized as one of
the few indigenous forms of American literature to be published during the
Colonial period. In the century before the American Revolution, some fifty
treaty accounts were published, covering forty-five treaty councils.
Franklin's press produced more than a quarter of the total. These documents
were one indication that a group of colonies occupied by transplanted
Europeans were beginning to develop a new sense of themselves; a sense that
they were not solely European, but American as well. [...]
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFchp3.html


[...] Franklin's sense of cultural relativism often led him to see events
from an Indian perspective, as when he advocated Colonial union and
regulation of the Indian trade at the behest of the Iroquois. His
relativism was expressed clearly in the opening lines of an essay, "Remarks
Concerning the Savages of North America," which may have been written as
early as the 1750s (following Franklin's first extensive personal contact
with Indians) but was not published until 1784.

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we
think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs. . . .
Perhaps, if we could examine the Manners of different Nations with
Impartiality, we should find no People so rude, as to be without any Rules
of Politeness; nor any so polite, as not to have some Remains of Rudeness.

      In this essay, Franklin also observed that "education" must be
measured against cultural practices and needs:

Having few artificial Wants, they [Indians] have abundance of Leisure for
Improvement by Conversation. Our laborious Manner of Life, compared with
theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the Learning, on which we value
ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless. [...]
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFchp5.html


[...]  Meeting in Paris to settle accounts during 1783, the diplomats who
redrew the maps sliced the Iroquois Confederacy in half, throwing a piece
to the United States, and another to British Canada. The heirs to some of
the Great Law of Peace's most precious principles ignored the Iroquois'
protestations that they, too, were sovereign nations, deserving
independence and self-determination. A century of learning was coming to a
close. A century and more of forgetting -- of calling history into service
to rationalize conquest -- was beginning.  [...]
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFchp6.html





F O R G O T T E N
F O U N D E R S
By Bruce E. Johansen
Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois
and the Rationale for the
American Revolution
1 9 8 2
G a m b i t   I N C O R P O R A T E D, Publishers
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.html#TOC