3.5 Minority Rights in the New Republic 

Led by the slave Gabriel, close to one thousand enslaved men planned to end slavery in Virginia by attacking Richmond in late August 1800. Some of the conspirators would set diversionary fires in the city’s warehouse district. Others would attack Richmond’s white residents, seize weapons, and capture Virginia governor James Monroe. On August 30, two enslaved men revealed the plot to their master, who notified authorities. Faced with bad weather, Gabriel and other leaders postponed the attack until the next night, giving Governor Monroe and the militia time to capture the conspirators. After briefly escaping, Gabriel was seized, tried, and hanged along with twenty-five others. Their executions sent the message that others would be punished if they challenged slavery. Subsequently, the Virginia government increased restrictions on free people of color.

Gabriel’s Rebellion, as the plot came to be known, taught Virginia’s white residents several lessons. First, it suggested that enslaved blacks were capable of preparing and carrying out a sophisticated and violent revolution—undermining white supremacist assumptions about the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks. Furthermore, it demonstrated that white efforts to suppress news of other slave revolts—especially the 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti—had failed. Not only did some literate slaves read accounts of the successful attack in Virginia’s newspapers, others heard about the rebellion firsthand when slaveholding refugees from Haiti arrived in Virginia with their slaves after July 1793.

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) inspired free and enslaved black Americans, and terrified white Americans. Port cities in the United States were flooded with news and refugees. Free people of color embraced the revolution, understanding it as a call for full abolition and the rights of citizenship denied in the United States. Over the next several decades, black Americans continually looked to Haiti as an inspiration in their struggle for freedom. For example, in 1829 David Walker, a black abolitionist in Boston, wrote an  Appeal  that called for resistance to slavery and racism. Walker called Haiti the “glory of the blacks and terror of the tyrants” and said that Haitians, “according to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.” Haiti also proved that, given equal opportunities, people of color could achieve as much as whites.¹  In 1826 the third college graduate of color in the United States, John Russwurm, gave a commencement address at Bowdoin College, noting that, “Haytiens have adopted the republican form of government . . . [and] in no country are the rights and privileges of citizens and foreigners more respected, and crimes less frequent.”² In 1838 the Colored American, an early black newspaper, professed that “no one who reads, with an unprejudiced mind, the history of Hayti . . . can doubt the capacity of colored men, nor the propriety of removing all their disabilities.”³ Haiti, and the activism it inspired, sent the message that enslaved and free blacks could not be omitted from conversations about the meaning of liberty and equality. Their words and actions—on plantations, streets, and the printed page—left an indelible mark on early national political culture.

The black activism inspired by Haiti’s revolution was so powerful that anxious white leaders scrambled to use the violence of the Haitian revolt to reinforce white supremacy and pro-slavery views by limiting the social and political lives of people of color. White publications mocked black Americans as buffoons, ridiculing calls for abolition and equal rights. The most (in)famous of these, the “Bobalition” broadsides, published in Boston in the 1810s, crudely caricatured African Americans. Widely distributed materials like these became the basis for racist ideas that thrived in the nineteenth century. But such ridicule also implied that black Americans’ presence in the political conversation was significant enough to require it. The need to reinforce such an obvious difference between whiteness and blackness implied that the differences might not be so obvious after all.

Henry Moss, a slave in Virginia, became arguably the most famous black man of the day when white spots appeared on his body in 1792, turning him visibly white within three years. As his skin changed, Moss marketed himself as “a great curiosity” in Philadelphia and soon earned enough money to buy his freedom. He met the great scientists of the era—including Samuel Stanhope Smith and Dr. Benjamin Rush—who joyously deemed Moss to be living proof of their theory that “the Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the leprosy.”⁴  Something, somehow, was “curing” Moss of his blackness. In the whitening body of slave-turned-patriot-turned-curiosity, many Americans fostered ideas of race that would cause major problems in the years ahead.

The first decades of the new American republic coincided with a radical shift in understandings of race. Politically and culturally, Enlightenment thinking fostered beliefs in common humanity, the possibility of societal progress, the remaking of oneself, and the importance of one’s social and ecological environment—a four-pronged revolt against the hierarchies of the Old World. Yet tension arose due to Enlightenment thinkers’ desire to classify and order the natural world. Carolus Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and others created connections between race and place as they divided the racial “types” of the world according to skin color, cranial measurements, and hair. They claimed that years under the hot sun and tropical climate of Africa darkened the skin and reconfigured the skulls of the African race, whereas the cold northern latitudes of Europe molded and sustained the “Caucasian” race. The environments endowed both races with respective characteristics, which accounted for differences in humankind tracing back to a common ancestry. A universal human nature, therefore, housed not fundamental differences but rather the “civilized” and the “primitive”—two poles on a scale of social progress.

Informed by European anthropology and republican optimism, Americans confronted their own uniquely problematic racial landscape. In 1787, Samuel Stanhope Smith published his treatise  Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, which further articulated the theory of racial change and suggested that improving the social environment would tap into the innate equality of humankind and dramatically uplift nonwhite races. The proper society, he and others believed, could gradually “whiten” men the way nature spontaneously chose to whiten Henry Moss. Thomas Jefferson disagreed. While Jefferson thought Native Americans could improve and become “civilized,” he declared in his  Notes on the State of Virginia  (1784) that black people were incapable of mental improvement and that they might even have a separate ancestry—a theory known as polygenesis, or multiple creations. His belief in polygenesis was less to justify slavery—slaveholders universally rejected the theory as antibiblical and thus a threat to their primary instrument of justification, the Bible—and more to justify schemes for a white America, such as the plan to gradually send freed slaves to Africa. Many Americans believed nature had made the white and black races too different to peacefully coexist, and they viewed African colonization as the solution to America’s racial problem.

Jefferson’s  Notes on the State of Virginia sparked considerable backlash from antislavery and black communities. The celebrated black surveyor Benjamin Banneker, for example, immediately wrote to Jefferson and demanded he “eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas” and instead embrace the belief that we are “all of one flesh” and with “all the same sensations and endowed . . . with the same faculties.”⁵ Many years later, in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World  (1829), David Walker channeled decades of black protest, simultaneously denouncing the moral rot of slavery and racism while praising the inner strength of the race.

Jefferson had his defenders. White men such as Charles Caldwell and Samuel George Morton hardened Jefferson’s skepticism with the “biological” case for blacks and whites not only having separate creations but actually being different species, a position increasingly articulated throughout the antebellum period. Few Americans subscribed wholesale to such theories, but many shared beliefs in white supremacy. As the decades passed, white Americans were forced to acknowledge that if the black population was indeed whitening, it resulted from interracial sex and not the environment. The sense of inspiration and wonder that followed Henry Moss in the 1790s would have been impossible just a generation later.

Native American Power and the United States

The Jeffersonian rhetoric of equality contrasted harshly with the reality of a nation stratified along the lines of gender, class, race, and ethnicity.⁶ The foundation of the United States government, its Constitution, treated Native Americans as members of entirely foreign nations despite the reality that many native peoples, their tribes conquered or effectively dissolved, lived within the territory of the United States.  Those people, aside from some of those of mixed raced able to “pass” as white and a few conquered and colonized tribes that individually secured marginally better arrangements, would be denied citizenship in the nation that dominated their social, cultural, political, and economic worlds until after the First World War.

Even as early as the Washington Administration, and quite distinctly by the Jefferson Administration, the plan for the Native American future was clear.  Conquest, expropriation of land, and the confinement of survivors to what came to be known as “reservations.”  A term arising from the ideas of “reserved lands” and tracing its origins back beyond the praying towns of Puritan New England, these areas were allegedly places where native peoples would “learn” to practice the preferred agricultural systems, religions, gender relations, social structures, and cultures of dominant English-speaking white Americans and surrender their languages and cultures.

Yet these processes were in fact cultural colonization, the brutal use of deprivation, forcible coercion, and threats to terrorize helpless people into some of the most wrenching losses of lifeways and identities humans can endure.  Common sayings to express this included “killing the Indian to save the man,” shorthand for the abuse needed to force broken people to abandon languages, religions, cultures, and other lifeways tens of thousands of years in the making – as well as “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” a term born in borderland wars that fueled racist pogroms that bordered on legal genocide.

The lands themselves, tiny fractions of what the native peoples actually needed, were chosen to be the least attractive for agriculture to maximize the benefit to white settlers.  The food and supplies needed to sustain the native peoples in their first attempts at new agricultural systems, and to carry out the new systems demanded, were regularly misappropriated by government officials tasked with providing them and sold to white settlers in a form of corruption rarely addressed at the time.  These corrupt practices would compound the mass death and mass suffering created by the wholesale forced removals of native peoples across the 19th century, death marches without food, shelter, clean water, or even the limited medicine of the time that would in many cases collapse individual tribal nations’ populations to fractions of what they had been before.  Or drive them entirely extinct.

Along the way the shattering imposition of European ideas of patriarchy hobbled gender relations among native peoples, and the introduction of strong alcohol to societies with little to no experience with the means to address alcoholism within families and societies worsened every condition.

The reservation system would expand as the United States did, just as similar systems emerged and expanded in British North America and Canada.  Along with it came new horrors, especially the horrific practice of seizing and removal of the helpless children of restrained native parents.  Scenes of unimaginable grief and loss played out as children were taken for emotionally and physical brutal abuses intended to carry out what today would be called complete cultural genocide as their parents mourned the loss of their children’s futures within their own ways of life – and the children’s absence.

Rarely allowed to visit for long, and with the return of the children to these “schools” backed by military force, parents lost their children’s entire youth – and often the children themselves.  Horrifying mass deaths born of abuse, neglect, and worse continue to be uncovered across these schools for native children across North America.  In other cases, children were adopted out by non-native families on grounds ranging from outright attempts at cultural colonization to accusations of the parents’ inability to provide for their children – itself a product of the conditions enforced in the reservations.  Though the reservation system in America has, of late, improved, the loss of Native American children continues – as do the brutalities of missing and murdered indigenous women, a nightmare that spans the entire history of Europeans and European-descent polities in the Western Hemisphere.

Native nations not yet completely reduced to dependency, conquered, or colonized maintained a type of diplomatic relation that was nevertheless not equal to the international relations of European and European-descendant sovereign polities.  Prior to the Seven Years War, many Native American nations had been able to delicately play one European empire and its colonies off against another.  With the departure of France from almost all of North America and the expulsion of Spain east of the Mississippi, these opportunities faded – until the Revolution provided a brief window to try the same between the United States and the British Empire.  Throughout that time, in many parts of eastern North America, indigenous peoples dominated social relations.

Driven by the hunger for more land to the west from the effects of population expansion, soil-denuding plantation agriculture in the South, and eventually the psychological “pressure valve” effect of western opportunities in the North after the Industrial and Capitalist Revolutions, white Americans pushed for more land in almost all their interactions with native peoples, their leaders, and especially their diplomats.  But these boundaries were only one source of tension.

Trade, criminal jurisdiction, roads, the sale of alcohol, and complex alliances were also key negotiating points. Despite their role in fighting on both sides, Native American negotiators were not included in the diplomatic negotiations that ended the Revolutionary War. Unsurprisingly, the final document omitted concessions for Native American allies. Even as native peoples proved vital trading partners, scouts, and allies against hostile nations, they were often condemned by white settlers and government officials as “savages.” White ridicule of indigenous practices and disregard for indigenous nations’ property rights and sovereignty prompted indigenous peoples to turn away from most white practices.

In the wake of the American Revolution, Native American diplomats developed relationships with the United States, maintained or ceased relations with the British Empire (or with Spain in the South), and negotiated their relationship with other native nations. The balancing of Britain against America was attempted, and British irritation with America’s failure to meet the debt-based demands of the peace treaty and its successors kept a British military presence on ostensibly American soil.  When conflicts erupted, Native Americans in and around those areas were often armed by the British in a proxy war strategy practiced for thousands of years across the world.  British concerns to presence its remaining North American territories, including what is now Canada, and those francophone peoples and English-speakers in the area – many resettled Americans who had opposed and even fought against independence – ensured their interest in complicated the military and strategic defenses of the newborn United States.  Native American nations and their diplomats provided successful means to do just that.

Formal diplomatic negotiations between Native Americans and the various levels and types of American governance after independence included native rituals to reestablish relationships and open communications.  Treaty conferences took place in native cities and towns, at neutral sites in the borderlands, and in state and federal capitals. While Native American leaders were politically important, skilled orators, intermediaries, and interpreters also played key roles in these diplomatic activities. Native American orators were known for metaphorical language, command of an audience, and compelling voice and gestures.

Throughout the early republic, diplomacy was often preferred to war. Violence and warfare carried enormous costs for all parties—in lives, money, trade disruptions, and reputation. Diplomacy allowed parties to air their grievances, negotiate their relationships, and minimize violence. Violent conflicts arose when diplomacy all too often failed.

Native diplomacy testified to the complexity of indigenous cultures and their role in shaping the politics and policy of American communities states, and the federal government. Yet white attitudes, words, and policies frequently relegated native peoples to the literal and figurative margins as “ignorant savages.” Poor treatment like this inspired hostility and calls for pan-tribal alliances from leaders and members of distinct native nations and communities, including the Shawnee leader Tecumseh.

Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskatawa, the Prophet, helped envision an alliance of North America’s indigenous populations to halt the encroachments of the United States. They created pan-tribal towns in present-day Indiana, first at Greenville, then at Prophetstown, in defiance of the Treaty of Greenville (1795). Tecumseh traveled to many diverse American Indian nations from British Canadian lands to the American State of Georgia, calling for unification, resistance, and the restoration of sacred power.

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s pan-American Indian confederacy was the culmination of many movements that swept through indigenous North America during the eighteenth century. An earlier coalition fought in Pontiac’s War. Neolin, the Delaware prophet, influenced Pontiac, an Ottawa (Odawa) war chief, with his vision of native independence, cultural renewal, and religious revitalization. Through Neolin, the Master of Life—the Great Spirit—urged native peoples to shrug off their dependency on European goods and technologies, reassert their faith in native spirituality and rituals, and cooperate with one another against the “White people’s ways and nature.”7  Additionally, Neolin advocated violence against British encroachments on Native American lands, which escalated after the Seven Years’ War. His message was particularly effective in the Ohio and Upper Susquehanna Valleys, where multi-lingual communities of indigenous refugees and migrants from across eastern North America lived together. When combined with the militant leadership of Pontiac, who took up Neolin’s message, the many native peoples of the region united in attacks against British forts and people. From 1763 until 1765, the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Upper Susquehanna Valley areas were embroiled in a war between Pontiac’s confederacy and the British Empire, a war that ultimately forced the British to restructure how they managed Native-British relations and trade.

In the interim between 1765 and 1811, other Native prophets kept Neolin’s message alive while encouraging indigenous peoples to resist Euro-American encroachments. These individuals included the Ottawa leader “the Trout,” also called Maya-Ga-Wy; Joseph Brant of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee); the Creek headman Mad Dog; Painted Pole of the Shawnee; a Mohawk woman named Coocoochee; Main Poc of the Potawatomi; and the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. Once again, the epicenter of this pan-tribal resistance and revitalization originated in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions, where from 1791 to 1795 a joint force of Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Iroquois, Ojibwe, Ottawa, Huron, Potawatomi, Mingo, Chickamauga, and other indigenous peoples waged war against the American republic. Although this “Western Confederacy” ultimately suffered defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, this native coalition achieved a number of military victories against the republic, including the destruction of two American armies, forcing President Washington to reformulate federal American Indian policy. Tecumseh’s experiences as a warrior against the American military in this conflict probably influenced his later efforts to generate solidarity among North American indigenous communities.

Tecumseh and Tenskatawa articulated ideas and beliefs similar to their eighteenth-century predecessors. In particular, Tenskatawa pronounced that the Master of Life entrusted him and Tecumseh with the responsibility for returning native peoples to the one true path and to rid native communities of the dangerous and corrupting influences of Euro-American trade and culture. Tenskatawa stressed the need for cultural and religious renewal, which coincided with his blending of the tenets, traditions, and rituals of indigenous religions and Christianity. In particular, Tenskatawa emphasized apocalyptic visions that he and his followers would usher in a new world and restore native power to the continent. For Native peoples who gravitated to the Shawnee brothers, this emphasis on cultural and religious revitalization was empowering and spiritually liberating, especially given the continuous American assaults on native land and power in the early nineteenth century.

Tecumseh’s confederacy drew heavily from indigenous communities in the Old Northwest and the festering hatred for land-hungry Americans. Tecumseh attracted a wealth of allies in his adamant refusal to concede any more land. Tecumseh proclaimed that the Master of Life tasked him with the responsibility of returning Native lands to their rightful owners. In his efforts to promote unity among Native peoples, Tecumseh also offered these communities a distinctly American Indian and First Nations identity that brought disparate native peoples together under the banner of a common spirituality, together resisting an oppressive force. In short, spirituality tied together the resistance movement. Tecumseh and Tenskatawa were not above using this pan-native rhetoric to legitimate their own authority within indigenous communities at the expense of other native leaders, especially those who cooperated with the Americans.

While Tecumseh attracted native peoples from around the Ohio Valley (the modern American Midwest) and from the Tennessee Valley, the Red Stick Creeks brought these ideas to the Southeast. Led by the Creek prophet Hillis Hadjo, who accompanied Tecumseh when he toured throughout the Southeast in 1811, the Red Sticks integrated certain religious tenets from the north and invented new religious practices specific to the Creeks, all the while communicating and coordinating with Tecumseh after he left Creek Country. In doing so, the Red Sticks joined Tecumseh in his resistance movement while seeking to purge Creek society of its Euro-American dependencies. Creek leaders who maintained relationships with the United States, in contrast, believed that accommodation and diplomacy might stave off American encroachments better than violence, reflecting a divide that would dominate almost all Native American relations with the United States government in war and in later legal fights for the constitutional rights of Native American nations under the idea of reserved sovereignty of tribal nations.

Additionally, the Red Sticks discovered that most southeastern indigenous leaders cared little for Tecumseh’s confederacy. This lack of allies hindered the spread of a pan-tribal movement like that in the Ohio Valley in the southeast, and the Red Sticks soon found themselves in a civil war against other Creeks. Tecumseh thus found little support in the Southeast beyond the Red Sticks, who by 1813 were cut off from the North by American general Andrew Jackson. Shortly thereafter, Jackson’s forces were joined by Lower Creek and Cherokee forces that helped defeat the Red Sticks, culminating in Jackson’s victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Following their defeat, the Red Sticks were forced to cede an unprecedented fourteen million acres of land in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. As historian Adam Rothman argues, the defeat of the Red Sticks allowed the United States to expand west of the Mississippi, guaranteeing the continued existence and profitability of slavery.⁸

Many native leaders refused to join Tecumseh and instead maintained their forced loyalties to the American republic. After the failures of pan-tribal unity and loss at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, Tecumseh’s confederation floundered. The War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, driven in large part by Tecumseh’s Ohio Valley War and its impact on American settlers, offered new opportunities for Tecumseh and his followers.⁹  With the United States distracted, Tecumseh and his confederated army seized several American forts on their own initiative. Eventually Tecumseh solicited British aid after sustaining heavy losses from American fighters at Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison. Even then, Tecumseh’s confederation faced an uphill battle, particularly after American naval forces secured control of the Great Lakes in September 1813, forcing British ships and reinforcements to retreat. Yet Tecumseh and his native allies fought on despite being surrounded by American forces. Tecumseh told the British commander Henry Proctor, “Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it is his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.”¹⁰ Not soon thereafter, Tecumseh fell on the battlefields of Moraviantown, Ontario, in October 1813. His death dealt a severe blow to pan-tribal resistance against the United States for many years. Men like Tecumseh and Pontiac, however, left behind a legacy of pan-tribal unity that was not soon forgotten.

Yet the constant struggle between expanding American settlers and native peoples, while not always violent, existed as an almost fractal ebb and flow down to the smallest scale of individual families scattered across a landscape not yet unified by technologies of movement and communication.  Trade, learning, and even intermarriage happened more often than violence, though these were often unequal.  And while hatred certainly simmered from the experiences of all those caught up in violence and inequality, so did the construction of new families of people of mixed ancestry – European, Native American, African, and French- and Spanish-speaking peoples.  Non-racist terms for these people in American English are sorely lacking, but in Spanish-speaking lands mestizos come from mestizaje, while in French-speaking lands métis come from métissage.  In modern America, these people of mixed race may use these terms – the latter quite differently from its use in Canada – depending on whether their families arose or lived closer to areas where French or Spanish cultures predated the arrival of English-speaking Americans.  In America, many of these people then and now carried tribal affiliation, and many more “passed as white” or forgot, over generations, their ancestry.

The violence that did erupt was not always, or even most often, driven by powerful leaders and organized political or military forms.  Weapons of many kinds, for hunting, dual-use as tools, or fighting,  existed in the hands of all the peoples of the borderlands – not a defined frontier line as in the American imagination, then as now, but rather outposts of different groups and cultures dotted across the land in increasing or decreasing numbers.  Arguments turned violent, grief or desperation turned violent, and hatreds learned by rote or learned by trauma turned violent.  These interactions, positive and negative, proved impossible for any political authority – native or American – to fully control or even manage.  And from these arose the darkness of the future, and its hope – then as now.

Notes

1. David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of The United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 21, 56.
2. John Russwurm, “The Condition and Prospects of Hayti,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents, ed. Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon (New York: Routledge, 2013), 168.
3. “Republic of Hayti,” Colored American, March 15, 1838, 2.
4. Benjamin Rush, “Observations Intended to Favour a Supposition That the Black Color (As It Is Called) of the Negroes is Derived from the Leprosy,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 289–297.
5. Banneker to Jefferson, August 19, 1791, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-22-02-0049.
6. See, for example, Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Random House, 1969), 111.
7. Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 33.
8. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
9. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 149–153.
10. Quoted in Edward Eggleston and Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1878), 309.