Britain 0, Spain 0, Anopheles 4,000

Spain's loss of Gibraltar in 1704 eventually proved permanent, but the Spanish Crown took many decades to acquiesce in the cession. The rocky promontory beckoned to glory-seeking Spanish officers and revanchist monarchs, who made multiple attempts to recover the Rock in the eighteenth century. One of these helped trigger one of the more obscure conflicts of the era, the Anglo-Spanish War of 1727-1729. 

Despite its chronological subtitle, the fighting in this war lasted only a few months. A Spanish army of 18,000 mounted a desultory siege of Gibraltar, pausing its bombardment daily for siesta, a practice their British counterparts eagerly adopted. (They were as likely to spend the time drinking and copulating as sleeping.) Royal Navy ships provided effective covering fire for the defenders until Spain lifted its siege. Across the Atlantic, Britain's navy used the war to justify an offensive of its own, against the city of Portobello on the Isthmus of Panama. This had less amusing consequences. Admiral Francis Hosier's attacks on the port ran afoul of the Caribbean's deadliest resident, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, and 4,000 sailors (and the admiral) succumbed to yellow fever. To the north, one of Britain's North American colonies conducted a more successful raid against the Spanish province of Florida. Militia from South Carolina, assisted by Chickasaw warriors, attacked and dispersed the Yamasee Indians who had taken refuge near Saint Augustine after the Yamasee War (1715-16). White Carolinians didn't quite settle their scores with the Yamasees, but the raid doubtless pleased colonial governor Arthur Middleton.

The war of 1727-29 thus spread to three continents, and cost several thousand men (and a few women) their lives. It ended with a treaty that made no concessions of rights or territory, and both the war and its participants faded almost immediately into obscurity. Kings and princes usually promise those who fight for them honor and immortal glory. They lie.

*

Sources: James Falkner, Fire over the Rock (Pen and Sword, 2009), 8-10; John McNeill, Mosquito Empires (Cambridge UP, 2010), 1-2; Edward Cashin, Guardians of the Valley (University of South Carolina, 2009), 15.

First Peoples in Revolution

Age of Revolutions has just finished (more or less) a series on Native Americans in the era of the American Revolution. The authors in the series wrote of efforts by the Iroquois, one of the groups most devastated by the Revolutionary War, to mitigate conflict between their own Six Nations. They studied the Chickasaws’ successful balancing of their alliance with Britain (and the vital supplies it brought) with their desire to stay out of another damaging war. They noted how the Odawas used Britain's growing demand for their military services to leverage greater material concessions from the Crown. They described how traditional masculinity, the desire to defend hunting grounds and display martial valor, drew some Cherokee men into the conflict, and how some Cherokee leaders sought to cool the tempers of warriors from the Chickamauga faction. One looked at eastern Native Americans’ efforts to mitigate the destruction of the war by shifting to a new, diversified commercial economy. One, Andrew Frank, found the Revolution a non-event from the perspective of nations like the early Seminoles.

Most of the series’ writers agree, I think, that Native Americans did not view the American Revolution as a positive good. Why would they? The rebel colonists wanted freedoms that either endangered or did not apply to American Indians: the freedom to acquire more (indigenous) land, and freedom from arbitrary, non-consensual taxation Some First Peoples did share the rebels’ distaste for the British army, the intrusive force that radicalized rural New Englanders, white Carolinians, and others as the war progressed. Few, however, trusted the Patriots enough to join force with them against that army. Those few who did generally lived “behind the frontier” in New England reserve communities, or in districts like the Catawba homeland, a capsule of southern Indians surrounded by white backcountry settlers. Indians in these regions shared at least some interests with their white neighbors. Some First Peoples also supported the rebels because they believed the alliance would bring them political advantages, or because they had personal connections to colonists that preceded the Revolution (e.g. the Oneidas). The great majority of Native Americans, however, either supported George III or stayed out of the Revolutionary War altogether.

In general, in a global context, revolutionaries don't seem to make much effort to appeal to indigenous peoples. If one is trying to overthrow a state, it makes sense to focus one's recruitment efforts on the state's constituents, on those who have to pay its taxes and obey its laws, and who also have some stake in the political community. Indigenes, who usually live independently of state authority or (all too often) live in subjugation at its margins, don't make optimal targets for revolutionary persuasion. I don't believe the First French Republic made an outreach to the Guaranis of Guyana,* for instance, nor the Bolsheviks to indigenous Siberians (at least not during the Russian Revolution), nor Mao's communists to the Miao of southwestern China. Indeed, indigenous peoples often provide fighting men to counter-revolutionary forces, as did the Senecas and Creeks in the American Revolutionary War, the Mapuches (whom my friend and colleague Pilar Herr studies) in the Chilean independence war, and the Hmong in the Second Indochina War. Incumbent regimes enjoy more familiarity with the divide-and-conquer tactics, like the use of "ethnic soldiers,"** essential to most kinds of imperial rule. Indigenous peoples, for their part, quite rightly view radical social change as more of a threat than an opportunity, particularly if Europeans introduced that change. Regrettably, their experiences after the Age of Revolution would only ratify what they had already learned.


* The First Republic's agents in the United States did try to recruit Creek and Cherokee warriors for a planned campaign against Saint Augustine, but no-one replied to their appeal. (Robert Alderson, Jr., This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions [South Carolina, 2008], 142-43, 160-61.)

** To borrow a term from Neil Whitehead. See his "Carib Ethnic Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and Antilles," Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 357-85.

The Perduvian Network

In Winnipeg last week, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, I had the privilege of participating in a panel* in honor of Theda Perdue, one of my graduate mentors. Here are the brief comments I offered on Theda and her leadership abilities:

My thanks to Rose Stremlau for inviting me to join this distinguished panel, to my fellow panelists for their narratives, to Theda Perdue for her friendship, guidance, and inspiration, and to the First Nations of western Canada for allowing us to hold this session in their homeland.

I’ve been thinking about leadership lately, and why some leaders have such a great record of success. My current research project is a history of the Chickasaw nation, whose survival in the eighteenth century depended in large part on the acumen of their chiefs and captains. Historians have described Chickasaw leaders in this era as divided into factions, depending on whether they sought the favor of the Spanish or the Americans. On closer inspection, it appears that men like George Colbert and Ugulaycabe sought instead to advance the collective fortunes of their entire nation, and to do so not by allying with one empire or another but by forming the most extensive possible networks of trade and alliance. Piomingo, to take the best example, spent his political career making friends with most of the Chickasaws’ distant connections: with the Cherokees (he had spent his youth with them), with the new commonwealth of Virginia, with George Washington and his cronies in Philadelphia, with James Robertson and his fellow settler-speculators in Nashville, with the officers of the American army at Cincinnati, and even, through his associates the Colberts, with the Spanish. Piomingo was no stooge of empire, no pursuer of self-aggrandizement. He simply saw that success for his people depended on reaching out to outsiders, making them friends and allies, and persuading them that the fortunes of one group rose or fell with the others in the network.

The themes of friendship, alliance, mutual aid, and networking necessarily bring me to Theda Perdue. I first encountered Professor Perdue when I applied to the graduate program at the University of Kentucky. She very kindly wrote me a letter of welcome and encouragement. Noting her interest in the senior-thesis chapter I had enclosed with my application, Theda went on the sing the praises of U.K.’s faculty and, especially, its graduate students, “whom I think you will find challenging, professional, and ambitious as well as congenial and supportive.” But even if I did not come to Lexington, Dr. Perdue said I should consider her a friend and mentor. “If you would like me or Mike Green to take a look at your…work on Native Americans with a view towards publishing an article or presenting a professional paper, please let us know. Our role as teachers does not end at the university boundary or state line, and we are happy to help you in any way we can.” A close friend of mine asked when I read her this letter, twenty-three years later, “Who in the academic world does something that fantastic?” Obviously, someone exceptional, someone more interested in supporting scholarship and teaching, and in building the ethnohistorical nation, than in self-aggrandizement.

In any event, when I began my studies at Kentucky I became a student of Lance Banning, an intellectual and political historian of the early American republic, and undertook a dissertation on the Federalists’ policy toward First Nations. These subjects lay outside of Theda’s area of interest, and yet she and Michael Green still treated me as well as any of their own students, pushing me to make connections with other beginning scholars and to present my work at national conferences. As I began my own career I began to see that this kind of network-building and encouragement were not activities Dr. Perdue confined to her discussions with graduate students. She combined her two professional domains, the interdisciplinary study of Native North America and the study of the American South, not only in her staggeringly prolific scholarship but in her leadership of the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Southern Historical Association, and of course in the series on Southeastern Native Americans she co-edited for Nebraska with Michael Green. She encouraged Native Americanist scholars to build relationships with presses normally known for Southern or for political history, in an effort to bring entities like UNC Press or Virginia into our scholarly network.

And she sought, either directly or through her former students, to make friends and shape agendas in some of the most conventional, even reactionary associations. In conversation with me some years ago about the Liberty Fund, a quasi-libertarian foundation that hosts scholarly study groups in luxury resorts, Theda characterized the organization as a far-right think tank (essentially true), and in the same breath asked me to make sure she and Mike were invited to their next conference. I maintain she was less interested in the Liberty Fund’s promise of good food and wine than in the possibility of making contacts – including prominent law professors and judges – who would benefit her students, colleagues, and professional associates. Concurrently, Theda has maintained an indirect relationship with the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. SHEAR’s membership includes some deeply reactionary men, and its annual meetings always fall at the wrong time of year for anyone engaged in serious research. However, Theda’s students, the “southeastern Mafia” as it were, have turned the Society into an organization far more amenable to Native American studies, and one of them, Craig Friend, is currently the SHEAR president. Theda’s influence, like Piomingo’s, extends into groups that may sometimes seem antithetical to our enterprise. They will not remain so for long. The Perduvian network has proven more extensive and persistent than the Piomingan, and has grown in pursuit of goals at least as laudable. And unlike Piomingo, Theda built her community entirely without the use of artillery. Well, so far as I know.

* "Scholar, Mentor, Advocate, Friend: A Celebration of Theda Perdue," 14 October 2017.

Flush Times in Mississippi (and Terre Haute)

Your humble narrator spent much of the past month preparing and giving research presentations to several regional audiences: to students and faculty at the University of Mississippi, to the attendees of the Chickasaw Days celebration in Holly Springs, MS; and to the invitees of Indiana State University's Center for Global Engagement in Terre Haute. The three talks concerned, respectively, the Chickasaw Indians' perception of coinage and currency, the adoption of commercial agriculture by the same nation in the early nineteenth century, and the history and culture of the Great Lakes Indians from the Mississippian era (had to work Mississippi in there somewhere!) to the Relocation program of the mid-twentieth century.

The currency talk, which Robbie Ethridge kindly invited me to give, observed that the Chickasaws first acquired coinage, diplomatic medals, and silver jewelry at more or less the same time (between ca. 1765 and 1790). I argued that they probably saw these three novelties as commensurable objects, as diplomatic tokens and prestige symbols. Chickasaw men and women knew how Europeans used money, and were glad to acquire it, but they appear to have either hoarded it or only to have exchanged it for other "prestige goods" until the 1820s.

My address to the Chickasaw Days festival, "Stock and Trade," discussed the nation's similarly conservative approach to stock-raising and cotton cultivation, activities they adapted to their own gendered division of labor and desire not to abandon other traditional enterprises (like hunting and maize horticulture). I adapted the talk from a similar address I gave at the Ittafama Ithana conference on Chickasaw History last February, an address that I assumed most history enthusiasts in northern Mississippi had missed.* Most, but not all: some of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe, ten of whom performed in Holly Springs, had been in my audience in Oklahoma.

I had formed the idea that Holly Springs was just a wide spot in the road. Actually, it is a fairly large courthouse town with several museums - including the birthplace of famed anti-lynching activist Ida Wells - and at least one restaurant serving first-rate fried pickles. It is a majority-black community, and the Chickasaw Days event drew a predominantly white crowd. Perhaps the region's Native American history doesn't appeal as much to an African-American audience. The nineteenth-century Chickasaws were slave-owners, after all, and later made a strenuous effort to exclude their freedmen from citizenship. Perhaps the town's black families were preoccupied with the huge homecoming-day parade which took place around the main square the same day as the festival, and in which many African-American children and teenagers were featured participants. I rather hope the latter interpretation is the more accurate one.


* My conference talk has since been reprinted in the Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture, Spring 2017 issue.

Alexander McGillivray Strikes a Pose

Midway through my graduate studies, the editors of American National Biography commissioned me to write two entries on early American congressmen. Both of my subjects, William Loughton Smith and William Vans Murray, shared a common regional and party identity, apropos of which my adviser Lance Banning said I would soon become an expert on obscure Southern Federalists. Not a terribly marketable specialty, I had to admit. Fortunately, Lance's prediction did not come to pass, and the assignment instead brought me more tangible benefits: one of my first professional writing credits, a modest but welcome paycheck, and some useful bits of research.

Of the two congressmen Smith proved the less likable. He struck me as a typical spoiled conservative rich kid: born into money in South Carolina, educated abroad, lukewarm about the American Revolution but keen to draw a salary from the new government it created, and supportive of Alexander Hamilton's elitist national economic program. After his few minimally consequential terms in Congress, W.L.S. became the United States' minister to Portugal, a suitably obscure last chapter to an obscure public career. The men with whom Smith worked, however, were often quite famous, and one particularly intriguing acquaintance became directly relevant to my dissertation and first book.

In 1790 William Smith attended the formal signing of the United States' first treaty with the Creek Indian nation, the Treaty of New York. After the main event, Smith exchanged a few pleasantries with the most famous Creek man at the conference, Alexander McGillivray. Since the end of the Revolutionary War, the biracial warlord had harried Southern white frontiersmen and perturbed American officials. Now assuming a more pacific and magnanimous posture, McGillivray told the congressman that “his Nation [the Creeks] had been always much pleased with the conduct of South Carolina and had been well treated by us.” By contrast, he continued, the white inhabitants of neighboring Georgia “thought too highly of their own power and too meanly of that of his [McGillivray's] nation.” The new treaty gave Georgia “a line more favorable than they had any right to expect” - an allusion to the Creeks' recent raiding campaigns against that state's frontier, the military power they had displayed, and chiefs' subsequent willingness to give Georgians some of the Creek lands they demanded. Smith closed by noting that George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, had been competing with one another in demonstrations of courtesy and hospitality toward the Creeks. Their solicitousness may have contributed to McGillivray's good humor, but probably had no bearing on the outcome of the treaty itself. 

Indeed, McGillivray displayed rather more hauteur in his conversation with Smith than one would expect from a southeastern Indian leader, especially one on a diplomatic mission. His arrogant posture toward Georgia, I suspect, was just that, a pose. Native Americans always made their diplomatic conferences stagy and dramatic events, though they differed in one significant way from stage plays: the Indian "actors" usually got to write their own parts. McG had apparently, in this exchange at least, decided to adopt the role of a triumphant but magnanimous general. Perhaps he modeled his part on some of the reading he had done while he was a boy, attending school with white colonists' children in Smith's own hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. The cultural distance between nabob and warlord wasn't always as great as one might assume.

Sources: George Rogers Jr., ed., "Letters of William Loughton Smith to Edward Rutledge" (8 Aug. 1790), South Carolina Historical Magazine 69: 135; Michael D. Green, "Alexander McGillivray," in R. David Edmunds, ed., American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity (Lincoln, 1980), 41-63.

Power Shopping

 

Anticipating an official inquiry into the mounting expenses of Chickasaw removal, which despite that nation's small size would eventually exceed one million dollars, federal agent A.M. Upshaw sought to deflect blame from himself and his contractors. In an 1838 letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Carey Harris, Upshaw argued that his cost overruns originated with the demands of the Chickasaws, whom the Treaty of Pontotoc (1832) authorized to pay for and supervise their own emigration. Chickasaw leaders wanted to assemble emigrants at Memphis and take them to Indian Territory by water, which obliged Upshaw both to hire steamboats and pay demurrage fees while they awaited their passengers. Then, after a steamboat accident killed 300 Creek emigrants and alarmed their Chickasaw counterparts, many of the latter decided to move by land, a slower and more expensive process.

Overland travel proved costly because, Upshaw noted, the Chickasaws brought a huge quantity of baggage. Many families brought at least one wagonload (half a ton or more), some took three or four fully loaded wagons, and one had eight of them. The first few emigrant parties also brought 7,000 horses and ponies, packed high with luggage, “and [Indians] can pack more on a horse than any other people I ever saw.” Individual heads of household spent up to $1,000 on merchandise before Removal. "In fact, sir” (Upshaw wrote) “I saw two women purchase seven hundred dollars' worth of goods in the course of two hours.” This was the modern equivalent of somewhere between $4,000 and $8,500 per hour.

This might sound like prudent, if frantic, preparation for an arduous journey, except that little of what the Chickasaws bought was food. They planned to draw government rations during their emigration, or hunt for their meals en route. According to another official, the Chickasaws had instead loaded their horses and wagons with “many heavy articles of comfort as well as convenience.” None of the Removal agents recorded Chickasaw men and women's precise purchases, but based on the goods they bought at their trading factory two decades earlier, and based on the records of an Alabama merchant who traded with Chickasaw customers in the late '30s, Your Humble Narrator suspects their Removal inventory included plaid and calico cloth, finished clothing, hardware, ammunition, furniture, and scarce consumables like coffee, sugar, and whiskey.

The money for this spree almost certainly came from the sale of the Chickasaws' land reserves, which federal commissioners and Chickasaw leaders had recently allotted to each adult member of the nation. Under the treaties of Pontotoc and Washington (1834), each man and woman received one square mile of land in the old Chickasaw nation; each head of household received three additional square-mile tracts, or four if he owned slaves; and bonus sections went to a dozen or so national leaders. The treaties authorized the emigrants to sell their reserves on the open market, at a minimum price of $800 per square mile. Despite price-fixing efforts by white land speculators, who formed semi-monopolistic land companies, many sellers cleared more than the minimum price for their land; some, generally biracial Chickasaws with large improvements, sold their reserves for several thousand dollars. The proceeds went to buy wagons, horses – though the Chickasaws already had large herds of them before Removal – the aforementioned “articles of comfort [and] convenience,” and, more opprobriously, African-American slaves, several hundred of whom accompanied the first emigrants westward.

In one sense, Removal presented the Chickasaws with a terrible loss: their homes and their familiar country, with all the memories and collective history embedded in its features.* In another sense, the Chickasaws did not so much lose their land as transmute it, under duress to be sure, into different forms: slave laborers, transport, a surplus of the manufactured goods on which they had come to rely, and, from the remaining portion of their old homeland that the U.S. government sold, funds to purchase a new homeland in the west and sustain the emigrants for their first few years there.

One final point: the Chickasaws' heavy pre-Removal investment in consumer goods, hardware, livestock, and slaves certainly helps explain their initial decision to settle among the Choctaws in southeastern Oklahoma rather than on their national reserve in the south-central part of that territory. The new Chickasaw national domain fronted the Texas borderlands and Comancheria, and the Indian inhabitants of both regions periodically plundered their neighbors' horses, cattle, and possessions, and captured (or offered refuge to) runaway slaves. Moving to that domain would put the Chickasaws' property, whose cost had been so high, at risk. In 1841, the U.S. Army established a post at Fort Washita to guard the Chickasaw-Texas frontier, and within a couple of years many of the Chickasaws were moving to their new homeland to establish farms and rebuild their old lives.

**

1 Aug. 1838, Upshaw to Harris, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, NARA Microfilm M-234, Reel 143: 692-94; J.A. Phillips to Harris, 4 May 1838, ibid, 143: 614; List of Goods Wanted for the Indian Trade for the Years 1816-17, Miscellaneous Accounts of the Chickasaw Bluffs Factory, Records of the Office of Indian Trade (National Archives Records Group 75, Washington, DC), Entry 39, Folder 5; John Allen to Thomas McKenney, 7 Feb. 1830, Letters Received, M-234, 136: 17-18; Account Book of William Otey, Folder 64, Wyche-Otey Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013), 39-44; Dan G. [last name illegible] to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 12 Dec. 1841, ibid, 144: 193-194; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1838, 510-511; Arrell Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman, OK, 1971).

* Not to mention the five hundred men and women who lost their lives to a smallpox outbreak in Arkansas as they moved to Indian Territory in 1838.

Above image of Tishomingo from https://www.chickasaw.tv/historic-figures/video/chickasaws-signatories-to-the-choctaw-removal-treaty/list/chief-tishomingo

Chickasaw Country

Oklahoma, the eventual homeland of more than a dozen Indian nations expelled from the eastern United States, has formed a part of Your Humble Narrator's mental landscape since he first became interested in Native American history, over 25 years ago. Not until earlier this month, however, did I visit the Sooner State for the first time. I've always assumed Oklahoma resembled the opening scenes in The Wizard of Oz: a featureless grassland under a flat and boundless sky. Driving to the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, I discovered the inaccuracy of my preconceptions. The territory of the Chickasaw Nation actually overlaps the Cross Timbers country, a rolling, sandy-soiled prairie criss-crossed by rivers and crowned with oak and pine forests. The region is prone to periodic extremes of weather: hard winters, drought, and floods, such as those that partially inundated the district just before my visit. The soil is fertile but not very suitable for demanding crops like cotton, the Chickasaws' chief cash crop in the nineteenth century. This probably helps explain why most Chickasaw emigrants initially settled in the richer bottom lands on the district's eastern edge. However, Chickasaw country is no wasteland, and it has sustained ample herds of livestock, one of the Chickasaws' other sources of wealth, since the mid-nineteenth century. (It still does. Driving south and east from Norman, my partner and I saw hundreds of cattle, horses, goats, even some bison.)

As Jace Weaver observed in Episode 3 of We Shall Remain, Removal was hugely traumatic, but the southern Indians did not have to contend with the shock of relocating to a purely alien landscape. Their new homeland bore enough similarities to the old that the survivors could adapt and, eventually, even prosper.*

* We shouldn't attribute this to the wisdom of the U.S. War Department. The Chickasaws sent a surveying party to their prospective reserve in the late 1820s, and carefully negotiated the boundaries of their new territory with its initial owners, the Choctaws.

Giving Currency to Native American Women

Indian Country Today has proposed removing Andrew Jackson from the 20-dollar bill, on the grounds that Americans should not so honor an Indian hater and genocidaire, and recommends replacing him with a Native American leader. Though I believe many other people deserve the blame for Indian Removal, I have no brief for Jackson and no problem finding new heroes for our national currency. I do, however, find ICT's list of suggested replacements a bit dispiriting, even stereotypical: ten Indian men, mostly from the West, nearly all of them war leaders. Perhaps the authors were looking for well-known people and figured most readers could not identify Native women or civil leaders, but there is something to be said for using currency to popularize less well-known leaders who nonetheless reflect useful virtues: endurance, business acumen, organizational ability, political activism, and artistic virtuosity. To this end, let me propose the following substitutes:

Matoaka, alias Rebecca Rolfe, alias Pocahontas. Powhatan chief's daughter, endured captivity under the English, converted to Christianity, and became a diplomat and traveler – one of the first Native Virginians to visit London.

Weetamoo, or Wettimore, Wampanoag sachem, wife of sachem Quannopin, co-leader of the insurgency known as King Phillip's War (1675-77). Captive Mary Rowlandson described her as haughty but a snappy dresser, which, given Rowlandson's Puritan worldview, is probably an exaggeration.

Nonhelema, or Catherine Grenadio, Shawnee businesswoman who provided intelligence to the Americans during the Revolutionary War, sold cattle to the Continental Army, and attended the Fort McIntosh (1785) treaty council.

Gertrude Bonnin, alias Zitkala-Sa, Sioux activist who attended Earlham College, taught at Carlisle Industrial Training School, later proponent of cultural preservation and organizer of the National Council of American Indians.

Maria Martinez, Pueblo ceramicist who rediscovered the thin-walled, shiny black pottery-making technique for which Pueblo potters would become famous.

Wilma Mankiller, author, Alcatraz occupier, and first female principal chief of the western Cherokee Nation.

Mildred Loving, Rappahannock woman, identified as black under Virginia law, who became one of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case Loving versus Virginia (1967), legalizing interracial marriage. Putting her on American currency would cause Sean Hannity's head to explode.

The Hostage Situation

Those familiar with U.S. Indian policy know that few elements of it have generated as much controversy as education. Until recently, schools for Native Americans were almost exclusively run by whites, who sought to turn Indian children into Anglo children. Boarding schools like Carlisle Indian School, with their uniforms and short haircuts, their military-style drill and ban on Native languages, sought, in the words of Carlisle's founder, to “kill the Indian and save the man" - the normative man being, in this case, a white one. Earlier missionary-run academies had similar goals, though they pursued them without the same level of military discipline. Only a few Indian nations, like the Cherokees, maintained control over their own educational system prior to the late twentieth century.

The early years of American Indian educational policy have received less attention from scholars, though Margaret Szasz has written thoughtful monographs on colonial Indian education, Bernard Sheehan and William McLoughlin have noted the obvious cultural imperialism in early nineteenth-century “civilization” policy, and Christina Snyder is completing what will surely be an exciting and thought-provoking study of Richard Johnson's Choctaw Academy. Here I want to add just a small observation on the earliest years of U.S. Indian schooling, more specifically the era of the American Revolution and the quarter-century following it: even before it began paying missionaries to set up Indian schools, the federal government had been placing Native American leaders' sons with white families who took charge of their education. During the Revolutionary War Congress paid Indian agent George Morgan to board and train the sons of prominent Delaware chief White Eyes, and in the early 1790s Secretary of War Henry Knox placed about twenty Iroquois, Creek, and Cherokee children with Pennsylvanian Quaker families, who agreed to train the boys as farmers and the girls in home economics. While I have not been able to determine if all of these children came from prominent families, at least a few of them, including the nephews of Creek "Beloved Man" Alexander McGillivray, did. Knox's successors continued the practice into the early nineteenth century, when Secretary Henry Dearborn, for instance, took charge of educating the sons of Chickasaw magnates William and George Colbert.

I want to suggest here that this policy grew not out of cultural imperialism (though there was some of that), nor benevolence, but rather out of an old imperial custom: taking the children of conquered peoples' leaders as hostages. Education allowed empires to impress their customs and values on those who would eventually grow up to govern subordinate nations, and it also gave them an excuse to hold children whose vulnerability would deter their parents from rebelling. Twenty-seven hundred years ago, the Assyrians took “aristocratic children” from conquered provinces to Ninevah for schooling, and the Romans and Byzantines educated elite youths, like Herod Agrippa (well known to fans of I, Claudius) and the Gothic princeling Theodoric*, in their capitals. I suspect medieval courts followed the Roman example, and when the English began colonizing Ireland in earnest, they on at least one occasion (1615) took hostages from the children of northern Irish landowners and brought them to England for indoctrination. The American Revolutionaries recognized the political value of the practice, and when the United States' demands for adult hostages from the Great Lakes Indians (1784-86) generated hostility, officials like Henry Knox switched to a subtler approach. The War Department never acknowledged it was essentially holding chiefs' children as hostages, but a Spanish observer in New York City suggested Knox was doing something of the kind when he took custody of Alexander McGillivray's nephews.

By the early nineteenth century missionaries were beginning to establish schools in Indian communities – at Spring Place in the Cherokee nation, for example – and the War Department provided these schools with subsidies, at first sporadically and then to the amount of $10,000 a year under the Civilization Act (1819). Prominent Native American parents supported these schools because they taught some skills, like textile-making and English literacy, that they considered valuable. They also gave them more control over their children, whom they could more easily bring home than if they had moved to Pennsylvania. I also suspect many had come to recognize the implicit danger in allowing federal officials to take their children away, however willingly, for education and training, though some allowed their older children to attend boarding schools like Choctaw Academy and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' school in Cornwall, Connecticut. If the War Department no longer placed Indian children with white families in the east, it was because officials recognized the United States' growing power lessened the need for hostage taking, and because they now primarily valued the cultural-imperialist aspect of education. The militarized boarding-school era lay several decades in the future, but one could by the 1820s begin to perceive its outlines.     

Sources: On Assyrian, Byzantine, and English education of hostages, see Simo Parpola, “Assyria's Expansion in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries and Its Long-Term Repercussion in the West,” in William Dever and Seymour Gitlin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past (Eisenbrauns, 2003), 99-111, esp. 101-102**; Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders (Oxford UP, 2014), 471-475 of 9215 (Kindle); Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642 (Oxford, 2014), p. 163. I discuss Knox's placement of Indian children with Quaker families in Red Gentlemen and White Savages (Virginia, 2008), pp. 122-123, 178. For the War Department's education of the Colbert brothers' children see Henry Dearborn to William Claiborne, 6 Dec. 1802, and Dearborn to George Colbert of 24 Sept. 1805 and 17 Sept. 1807, all in War Department, Letters Sent, Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Natl. Archives Microfilm M-15), 1: 297, 2:110-111, and 2:307. Rowena McClinton has translated and published two volumes of diaries on the Moravian mission and school at Spring Place: The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees (Nebraska, 2007).

* Theodoric's case also suggests one of the dangers of educating potential enemies: they might acquire skills that make them a potent threat in the future. As an adult Theodoric returned to Constantinople with an army and threatened the city's aqueducts, whose importance he had learned during his “internship.” The emperor became so eager to get rid of him that the Byzantines cleared the way for Theodoric to invade Italy and establish his kingdom there. (Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome, 985 of 9215.)

** My thanks to Corinna Nichols for this source.