Settlers and Savages

...But the gap between optimistic predictions and the realities of slow cultural transference, compounded by rapid westward migration and the failure of some programs, led policy makers to adopt increasingly manipulative practices...

...Winthrop Jordan, one of Sheehan's predecessors at the Institute of Early American History and Culture, provided a model study in this regard that won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in 1968...

...Recognition of the virtues of the Indian's natural life and the desire for peaceful relations did not diminish the European's belief in the superiority of his own civilization or his fervid proselytizing, despite the fact that aboriginal society collapsed after contact with the intruders...

...Nonetheless, this book cannot be easily ignored—and not only because of the timeliness of its subject...

...Indeed, Sheehan's thesis that—notwithstanding the protection from advancing white settlers afforded by public officials and missionaries...

...In the end, the government removed the Indians to reservations, an implicit admission of defeat...

...Describing the typical colonial European, Mannoni argues that "a person free from complexes . . . would not in the first place feel the urge to go to the colonies, but even should he find himself there by chance, he would not taste those emotional satisfactions which, whether consciously or unconsciously, so powerfully attract the predestined colonial...

...the other regards all people as equally rational and concludes that full communication with the natives is possible...

...It argues that because the Englishmen who colonized America were obsessed with the idea of order, they sought to civilize the disorderly savages and insure against imitating their ways...

...Yet the most compelling defect of Seeds of Extinction is the total absence of a psychological viewpoint...

...Mannoni takes great pains to caution "how limited are the conclusions which may legitimately be drawn from a psychological study," but it is evident enough that his insights could have enriched Seeds of Extinction, transforming its fascination with the apparent contradictions in men's thought and action into a sympathetic understanding of human behavior...

...Less ambitious and more closely tied to conventional literary sources than Jordan's study, Pearce's is nevertheless also a venturesome attempt to plumb the psyche of a society...

...Furthermore, Jordan points out that "unrestrained sex seemed a dangerous trap to Jefferson" (in a society that expected wifely self-restraint and submission this was not uncommon, but Jefferson was especially touchy on the issue), that he was able to make alliances only with those white women who were married or widowed, and that he was an opponent of miscegenation with blacks though clearly aware of its existence and possibly the father of several mulatto children...

...they hoped to bring him to civilization but saw that civilization would kill him...

...the book is aridly intellectual...

...I am more inclined, however, toward Robert Berkhofer's recent assessment in Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787-1862: "Any contradiction that the scholar finds between professed ideals and actual behavior is more a reflection of the ambivalence in past cultural assumptions than deliberate hypocrisy, unless proved otherwise, and even the incongruity may be explained by reference to conflicting values...

...His study must be reckoned a fair example of what historians are, or are not, doing...

...To use the language of psychology, the first group project upon the colonial people the obscurities of their own unconscious—obscurities they would rather not penetrate—and their interpretation of the natives' behavior is repressed because it is associated with the dangers and temptations represented by the 'instincts' . . . the [second] group...

...For Seeds of Extinction germinated in one of the most prestigious of scholarly establishments, the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, and its author is associate editor of a leading publication of the trade...

...which includes thoughtful asides on the Indian and a provocative section on Jefferson, proceeds on the premises that men act irrationally, that their expressed ideas are often rationalizations for subconscious or embarrassing thoughts or actions, and that there is a sophisticated logic to the interplay between words and behavior...

...With the omniscience of retrospective judgment and the tough tone so often assumed by those who question liberal intentions, Sheehan concludes, "The persistence of the humanitarian expectation that Indian-white relations would end happily with the eventual coalescing of the two societies raised serious questions about the sincerity of the philanthropic advocates of removal...

...His White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812...

...White Over Black followed by a decade and a half Roy Harvey Pearce's The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization...

...His contemporaries recognized and attacked him for this inconsistency, yet Sheehan disregards it...

...Though thoroughly ethnocentric, the white man's initial efforts to incorporate the Indian into his society, generally carried out by missionaries in schools near tribal centers, were partially successful...

...Also notable is the contrast between Jefferson's defense against Buffon's claim that Indian genitals were "small and feeble" and his failure to make the anatomical observation, so frequently made by white Americans, that Negro men had unusually large penises...

...In contrast...

...Sharing the 18th-century faith in the benevolence of man, the Founding Fathers were convinced that they could create the proper conditions for the Indians' transition to civilization...

...He hated himself for his yearnings and thus eliminated the temptation, while identifying with the tempters...

...Although Pearce explored territory most historians have avoided, his work was sufficiently garbed in scholarly apparatus and language to cause no overt offense...

...Still, the colonist's attitude, according to Pearce, was more ambivalent than Sheehan would have us believe: "Americans were of two minds about the Indian whom they were destroying...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, California State University...

...Bernard W. Sheehan, a professor of history at Indiana University, argues that the Enlightenment preoccupation with environmentalism led Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries to believe the aborigines would take their place in white society as the circumstances of their existence changed...

...O. Mannoni's ground-breaking work, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, published in French in 1950 (three years prior to The Savages of America) and in English in 1956, is largely disregarded by academic historians in this country...

...This person suffers from feelings of inferiority, for he has never reconciled his infantile urge to dominate with reality, the world of others he cannot adapt to and therefore rejects by escaping, like Shakespeare's Prospero...

...Hence the in-appropriateness of his title...

...Thus Jordan is not surprised to discover that Jefferson was an environmentalist when he considered the American aborigines ("In appropriately altered circumstances Indians would become white men"), but not when he contemplated blacks ("It was precisely this transformation which Jefferson thought the Negro could never accomplish...

...The fact that Jefferson and his educated friends held office does not warrant the assumption that their ideas were the basic determinant of government policy—or even that their deepest feelings were explicitly expressed on paper, enabling future historians to accept their writings as revelatory of their motives...

...They pitied his state but saw it as inevitable...

...Mannoni points out that there are two apparently opposite colonial viewpoints: One sees a clear demarcation between civilization and savagism (often referring to racial inequality...

...Yet by combining psychoanalytic theory and his own clinical experience with a knowledge of the English literature (particularly Shakespeare and Defoe) that was popular during the period of American migration, Mannoni advanc-d a brilliant analysis of colonization...

...There is a striking parallel between Sheehan's portrayal of the Jeffersonians' approach to the Indians and his own approach to the Jeffersonians...

...Ultimately," says Sheehan, "all history seeks to lay bare the sources of human motivation...

...Jordan's accomplishment is to make psychological sense of Jefferson's ideological inconsistency...

...Like most of his peers, he had no contact with Indian women but favored the mixture of white and red races (as did William Byrd II and other prominent Virginians before him...

...Like many historians, past and present, Sheehan attributes power to the ideas found in the learned treatises he uses as sources, without seeking the psychosocial origins or persuasive force of those thoughts...

...Simultaneously, the aborigines' violent reaction to frontier pressures impressed on Jeffersonians the gulf between civilization and savagery, a view substantiated by the degradation of the red man (through illness, alcoholism or whatever) upon coming into contact with whites...

...The Journal of American History...

...and the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Award and the Parkman Prize in 1969...

...The application of Mannoni's analysis to Jefferson's racial views and capitulation to removal of the Indians is obvious...

...Pearce claims that Americans were admitting the unsuccessfulness of conversion as early as the 1770s and that, between the Revolution and the Indian's removal several decades later, the settler "could envision the possibility of a life free from what he somehow felt to be the complexities of civilization...

...Some historians have recognized that a new and vital approach to past ideas hinges on informed interpretation...

...Both attitudes, mistaking reality in their separate ways, lead to frustration and finally a shared belief that the natives cannot be understood, that there is consequently no sense in trying, that the "civilized" way of thinking is the only correct one and that, in the interests of reason and morality, it ought to be imposed on the rest of the world...

...San Francisco Seeds of Extinction—a catchy but inappropriate title—examines the attitudes and behavior toward the American Indians of the European descendants who were prominent public figures in the early years of the Republic...

...try to subject all humanity to the rule of their super-ego...

...the white man's sympathy was more deadly than his animosity," is glib and unsubstantiated...

...Yet when the French naturalist Comte de Buffon ridiculed both the American continent and its native inhabitants, the Jeffer-sonians—ever sensitive to European criticism—responded with a romanticized portrait of a New World paradise occupied by noble savages, thereby failing "to treat the tribal order on its own terms...