The social arrangements of these people also differed in several respects from what we saw in the Old World: one might have said that they had multiplied their numbers freely in the heart of their deserts, with no contact with races more civilized than their own. Thus with them one did not encounter those nebulous and incoherent ideas of good and evil, that deepest corruption, which is usually linked with ignorance and crude ways of life in civilized nations which have reverted to barbarity. The Indian owed a debt only to himself: his virtues, vices, and prejudices were his own achievement: he had grown up in the primitive independence of his nature.
The coarseness of the populace in civilized countries results not only from their ignorance and poverty but from the fact that, being coarse, they are in daily contact with enlightened and wealthy men.
The sight of their adversity and weakness, in contrast each day to the happiness and power of some of their compatriots, arouses, at the same time, anger and fear in their hearts; the feeling of their inferiority and dependence frustrates and humiliates them. This inner state of mind finds a parallel in their ways as it does in their language; they are simultaneously rude and vulgar.
The truth of this is easily proved by observation. The populace is coarser in aristocratic countries than anywhere else, in affluent towns more so than in the countryside.
In those places where one encounters very powerful and rich men, the weak and poor feel, as it were, burdened by their lowly status and, since they discover no means of being able to recover equality, they lose any sense of hope in themselves, drifting below any standards of human dignity.
The vexing effect of this contrast of human conditions is not to be found in the lives of the natives: the Indians, while they are all ignorant and poor, are all equal and free.
When the Europeans arrived, the native North Americans had no knowledge of the value of wealth and revealed an indifference toward the comforts which civilized man acquires with his means. However, nothing coarse could be perceived in them; rather there resided in their actions a characteristic reserve and a kind of noble politeness.
Gentle and hospitable in times of peace, pitiless in war, even beyond the known bounds of human ferocity, the Indian ran the risk of dying of hunger so as to help the stranger knocking upon his cabin door in the evening and yet would tear apart the quivering limbs of his prisoner with his own hands. The most notorious republics of ancient times had never admired courage more steadfast, souls more proud or a love of independence more uncompromising than that which was concealed by the wild woods of the New World at that time.12 Europeans made but little impression when they landed upon the North American shores; their presence evoked neither envy nor fear. What hold could such men have over them? The Indian could live without necessities, suffer without complaint, die singing.13 Like all the other members of the human family, these primitive men believed in the existence of a better world and worshipped, under different names, the Creator of the universe. Their ideas of the great intellectual truths were, in general, simple and philosophic. (See Appendix D, p. 826.)
However primitive appears the race whose character we are tracing, it could not be doubted that another, more civilized and more advanced in every way than this one, had preceded it in these same lands.
An obscure tradition, although one widely known to the majority of the Indian tribes of the Atlantic seaboard, informs us that, once upon a time, the settlement of these same races had been situated to the west of the Mississippi. Along the banks of the Ohio and in the central valley, we still find, every day, man-made tumuli. Digging to the very center of these monuments, one scarcely ever fails, so it is said, to come across human bones, strange instruments, weapons, metal utensils of all kinds, even some whose use is unknown to present-day races.
Present-day Indians are able to give no information on the history of this unknown people. Neither have those who lived three hundred years ago, at the time of the discovery of America, said anything from which one can draw even a theory. The traditional stories, these decaying monuments, cast no light. Yet, at that time, thousands of people lived who were similar to us; one cannot possibly doubt that. When did they arrive there, what was their origin, destiny, history? When and how did they perish? No one could say.
What a strange thing! There are races which have so utterly disappeared from the earth that even the memory of their name has been blotted out; their languages have gone, their reputation has faded away like a sound without an echo; but I know of not a single race which has not at least a grave to remind us of its passing. Thus of all the works of man, the most lasting is still the one which records his annihilation and wretchedness.
Although the vast country we have just described was inhabited by countless native tribes, it is justifiable to assert that, at the time of its discovery, it formed only a desert. The Indians took up residence there but did not possess it. It is through agriculture that man takes ownership over the soil and the first inhabitants of North America lived off the products of hunting. Their unforgiving prejudices, their indomitable passions, their vices and, still more perhaps, their savage virtues, exposed them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these races began the day the Europeans landed on their shores; it has continued since then; it is reaching its completion at the present time. Providence, in placing them in the midst of the riches of the New World, seemed to have granted them only a short period of enjoyment; they had, in some sense, only a waiting brief. These shores so ready for commerce and industry, these deep rivers, this inexhaustible Mississippi Valley, this entire continent thus appeared like the still empty cradle of a great nation.
There it was that civilized men were to try to build society upon new foundations and that, applying for the first time theories unknown until then or considered inapplicable, they were about to give to the world a sight for which the history of the past had not prepared it.
12. “One has seen among the Iroquois attacked by superior forces,” says President Jefferson (Notes on Virginia, p. 148), “old men disdain to recur to flight or survive the destruction of their country, and brave death like the ancient Romans in the sack of Rome by the Gauls.” Further, on p. 150: “There was never an instance known of an Indian begging his life when in the power of his enemies: on the contrary, he courts death by every possible insult and provocation.”
13. See Histoire de la Louisiane, by Lepage Dupratz; Charlevoix: Histoire de la Nouvelle France; Letters of the Rev. G. Heckewelder, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 1; Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, pp. 135–90. What is said by Jefferson is of special weight, given the personal merit of the writer, his especial position and the down-to-earth age in which he lived.
D. (p. 35) In Charlevoix, vol. 1, p. 235, will be found a history of the first war which the French inhabitants of Canada undertook against the Iroquois in 1610. The Indians, although they were armed with bows and arrows, offered desperate resistance to the French and their allies. Charlevoix, who is not a great commentator, is, however, able to show in this extract the contrast between the European manner and that of the Indians as well as the different idea which the two races had of honor.
“The French,” he said, “seized hold of the beaver skins with which the fallen Iroquois were covered. The Hurons, their allies, were scandalized by the sight of this. The latter, for their part, began to exercise their usual cruelties upon the prisoners, devouring one of those who had been killed, which horrified the French. Thus, these barbarous men prided themselves on a detachment which they were surprised at not finding in our nation and did not understand that it is less heinous to strip the bodies of the dead than to feed upon their flesh like wild animals.”
Charlevoix again, in another extract, vol. 1, p. 230, describes thus the first torture which Champlain witnessed and the return of the Hurons to their own village:
After having covered eight leagues our allies halted and, taking one of their captives, reproached him for all the cruelty which the braves from their nation who had fallen into his hands had suffered and told him that he should expect to be treated similarly, adding that if he had any courage he would prove it by singing. He immediately intoned his battle song and all the songs that he knew but in a very mournful way, said Champlain, who had not yet had the time to get to know that all primitive music contains a lugubrious element. His torture, accompanied by all the horrors which will be described later, terrified the French who made every effort to put a stop to it, but in vain. The following night, when a Huron dreamed that they were being followed, the retreat changed to real flight and the Indians did not stop anywhere until they were out of all danger.
From the moment that they spied the huts of their village, they cut long sticks to which they attached the scalps that they had shared between them and they carried them in triumph. Seeing them, the women ran toward them, flung themselves into the water and, having swum out to the canoes, took the bloody scalps from the hands of their husbands and tied them around their necks.
The braves offered one of these horrible trophies to Champlain and also made him a present of some bows and arrows, the only spoils which they had been willing to seize from the Iroquois, begging him to show them to the King of France.
Champlain lived alone all one winter surrounded by these barbarous people without either his person or his property being compromised for a single moment.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Democracy in America
and Two Essays on America
Translated by GERALD E. BEVAN
