Native America-White Relations—English Colonial

Tribes affected: Northeast and Southeast polities

Significance: Indian-English relations developed over the span of two centuries and were dominated by issues of trade, land, and religion; both sides borrowed from their adversary’s culture throughout the colonial period

Indian-English relations predate English attempts to colonize the American continent. In the Chesapeake Bay region, for example, groups such as the Powhatans had contact with Europeans in the 1580’s. The experience of Don Luis (a mamanatowick, or paramount chief, of the Algonquian confederacy) with the Spanish provided a model for his successor, Powhatan, to draw upon when the English established their Jamestown colony in 1607. The English encountered the confederacy further when they began colonizing the Chesapeake Bay region. In New England, Squanto’s ability to communicate with the Pilgrims illustrates that there was a familiarity with the English before actual colonization began.

Policies and Preconceptions

When English colonists began establishing colonies on the North American continent, they hoped to coexist with their American Indian neighbors. The English assumed that their indigenous neighbors would recognize the superiority of English civilization and would try to emulate the colonists. Unfortunately for the colonists, the Indians were unwilling to accommodate these hopes. Equally distressing to the colonists, more than a few of their own found Indian culture preferable to English society. This phenomenon frightened colonial leaders, and all colonies worked to prevent their citizens from adopting Indian lifestyles. Even when introduced to Indian culture unwillingly, as prisoners of war or other captives, English colonists often preferred to stay with their Indian captors.

The treaty minutes between Native Americans and English delegates illustrate this problem. In these documents, colonial officials demand the return of English captives from the Indians. Inevitably, some of the captured colonists refused to return to colonial society. Their unwillingness to return challenged colonial attitudes of superiority throughout the colonial period. Complicating the relationship was Indian custom. Within the eastern woodlands, when two adversaries agreed to peace, they often exchanged community members, who served as visible reminders of good will. Once the colonists realized this, they demanded that Indian hostages remain with them until the articles of peace were implemented. Some colonial officials proposed placing English orphans among the Indians. Archibald Kennedy, a member of New York’s Governor’s Council, argued that placing orphans among the Indians would help bind Anglo-Indian alliances.

Indian-English relations went through various phases in the colonial period. Native Americans initially worked to establish peaceful and beneficial relations with the English colonists. Only when Native Americans had reasons to fear the colonists did relations become inhospitable. Each Indian polity welcomed English colonists for different reasons. Over the course of time, each side grew more familiar with the other; familiarity did not produce harmony. Cultural biases on both sides prevented satisfactory resolutions to problems with Anglo-Indian relations. Benjamin Franklin, in his Remarks Concerning the Savages, reports how Iroquois leaders rejected an English request to send Iroquoian youths to colonial schools. The spokesman for the Iroquois declined, stating that schooling made Indian youths unfit for any future work among the Indians.

The second phase of the Anglo-Indian relationship was one of distrust and conflict. The English made it clear that they were not willing to play by traditional tribal rules. The timing of this second period of Anglo-Indian relations depended on local circumstance. In the Chesapeake and New England regions, hostilities broke out within a decade of colonial settlement. Both sides fought these wars within their traditional understandings of war. Colonists saw women and children as legitimate targets and often fought in formations better suited to European plains than American forests. Native Americans ambushed, fought skirmishes, raided, and captured women and children. As both sides learned about the other they adopted various strategies from their opponents. (From this cultural borrowing has emerged the polemical debate about which culture “invented” scalping.)

Many architects of England’s early relationships with the American Indians based their policy on their experiences in Ireland. Two of the first colonizers, Gilbert Humphreys and Walter Raleigh, fit this generalization. They and their families, like other Devon families, had gained their position in English society through their participation in the Irish wars. Later colonizers, such as John Winthrop and Roger Williams, brought with them the legacy of the struggles of the English Reformation. These sixteenth and seventeenth century settlers held certain convictions that contact with North America’s indigenous inhabitants could not alter. English settlers viewed Algonquian society from a European perspective. Algonquian males were “lazy and indolent.” Females were immodest and lived a life of drudgery. English settlers believed the Indians “uncivilized.” They were convinced that the Algonquian religion was an alliance with Satan. These attitudes provided the theoretical underpinnings of Anglo-Indian relations.

Anglo-Indian relations had two specific spheres. The first sphere concerned official relations. This realm includes treaties, policy decisions, and trade negotiations. The second domain involved informal relations. This area included marriages, cultural borrowing, and cultural critiques. In addition to these spheres, four specific rubrics shaped Indian-English relations. These four areas were disease, trade, land, and religion. Although these areas are interrelated, each requires a separate examination.

Disease

The role of disease in Anglo-Indian relations has, until recently, been a little understood aspect of interaction. Scholars now think that disease was the greatest killer of Native Americans in the colonial period. A series of epidemics known as “virgin soil epidemics” were particularly devastating to Indian communities because these epidemics killed people aged fifteen to forty. This age group was most responsible for the societal tasks of food gathering, making military decisions, and procreation. Native American social practices exacerbated the disease problem, since communities did not isolate the sick originally. Disease often predated significant Anglo-Indian contact and set the parameters for the Anglo-Indian relations that followed. On at least one occasion Englishmen used disease as a weapon of war: Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, ordered that blankets infected with smallpox be given to some Delaware Indians during Pontiac’s Rebellion.

Disease transformed the Anglo-Indian relationship. For Native Americans, disease meant a declining population base from which to meet European aggression. The most lethal disease that Native Americans encountered was smallpox. Other diseases that swept eastern North America in the colonial period were measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhus, and perhaps bubonic plague. The presence of a devastating disease often called for a reassessment of traditional assumptions about the world. Sometimes this reassessment provided European missionaries with the opportunity necessary to gain a foothold in native communities. Most of the time the missionaries followed the trade routes west.

Trade

From the beginning of contact, Indians and Englishmen traded. Arthur Barlow wrote of trading when he met with the Algonquians around Roanoke in 1584, and European fishermen exchanged items with Native Americans during the seasonal voyages to fishing banks off Newfoundland. From the Indians’ perspective, this trade reinforced a traditional manner of integrating foreigners into an existing worldview. While the English saw trade as a simple economic exchange, it was something more complex for the Indians. They based trade on their notion of reciprocity, and reciprocity implied obligation. Both Powhatan and Squanto based their initial relationships with the colonists on the notion of reciprocity. Very quickly this reciprocal relationship became an interdependent one. Initially it was the colonists who depended on Indian trade items for survival. By the end of the colonial period, however, the Native Americans were dependent on the trade for survival.

Trade flourished partly because it initially required little adjustment for either side. English and Indian traders tapped existing trade networks. In the early colonial period Indian expectations shaped the trade; they determined which goods were traded and at what price. English traders discovered the importance of adhering to Indian cultural expectations when doing business. Some traders found marriage with a native woman a beneficial custom. It opened doors previously closed within the native community. For many native polities, a trader’s marriage transformed the trader from a stranger to a family member. The trader now had special obligations to fulfill. As the colonial period progressed, English traders tried to transform such relationships to fit English expectations. They were never truly successful.

One reason that trade predated colonization is that the items both sides exchanged required little change within each cultural tradition. Algonquian males traditionally hunted for beaver in the winter, and winter pelts were what Europeans wanted when they began trading. Native peoples had processed deerskins for internal consumption before the arrival of Europeans. For their part, the Englishmen who did the trading did so at first in conjunction with their fishing expeditions. The furs were tangential to the primary purpose. Nevertheless, the trade in pelts and goods produced change.

For some Native American groups, trade with the English stimulated the process of political centralization. Even if trade did not produce political changes for Native Americans, it forced fundamental changes in labor. For the Cherokees, the processing of such large numbers of skins produced a cottage industry. This industry required more labor from the women of the community, which placed strains on Cherokee communities. Other groups experienced increased conflict as neighboring Indian polities attempted to obtain access to the English market. Interior polities sought their own relationships with the English. Various groups tried to force their way onto rivals’ territories in the quest for more pelts and skins; the Beaver Wars are perhaps the most famous example of this. Other polities positioned themselves as intermediaries within the growing trade. Whatever the reason, the fur trade produced an increasing level of violence, which made peaceful Anglo-Indian relations even more difficult. For the Indians, the increasing violence made any attempt to unite against the English difficult. As a result, most Indian polities stood alone against the English when colonists sought Indian land for their own occupation.

Land

Perhaps the greatest strain on Native American-English relations concerned land. English colonists had an insatiable appetite for Indian lands. To justify their taking of Indian land, English officials and colonists relied on three specific arguments. First, they claimed land by right of discovery. Second, they claimed land by right of conquest. Third, they asserted their right to the land because they could better utilize the land than the Indians. Land was probably the single most important irritant to Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial period.

In some areas, however, disputes over land were not a major factor. A smallpox epidemic had wiped out large numbers of Massachusetts Indians on the eve of Boston’s founding by the English, for example; it was only when the colonists sought more than the original land ceded them by the Indians that land became an issue. Within two decades of colonization, land was the source of Anglo-Indian conflict. The Pequot War (1636-1637), Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War (1675-1676), Bacon’s Rebellion (1675-1676), Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-1764), and Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) were some of the wars that involved, at least tangentially, English-Indian disagreements about land. So important were land issues to Indian-English relations that various attempts to restrict colonial encroachments on Indian land were tried; none of them worked. Nevertheless, the Albany Congress (1754), the creation of the Indian superintendent system, the Proclamation of 1763, and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) illustrate attempts to alleviate the problems that land created in Anglo-Indian relations.

Religion

English missionaries found their greatest success among Native American polities that had reached the nadir of their cultural existence. In New England, those Indian polities decimated by disease often turned to Christianity because traditional religion no longer explained what was happening to them. Other groups turned to Christianity after they could no longer defend themselves culturally because of lost territory. The “praying Indians” of New England processed the missionaries’ message within an Algonquian framework. The songs and rituals associated with Christianity, not the message, were what primarily drew the Algonquians’ attention. By the end of the colonial period, Christian Indians acted as missionaries to other Indian groups. Samson Occom, for example, a Mohegan Indian, became a missionary to the Brothertown Indians living among the Iroquois.

The missionaries and their message often divided Indian communities. The result was an increasing level of factionalism within native politics. This factionalism further hindered the Indians’ ability to withstand English pressures. The Iroquois Confederacy offers an example of how this factionalism influenced Indian-English relations. Initial Christian factions emerged in Iroquoia with the arrival of French Jesuit missionaries. They arrived at a time when the Iroquois were on the defensive in their struggles against the French and their western Indian allies. In the following years, pro-Christian Iroquois came to dominate confederacy councils. When the Iroquois turned the tables on the French, new traditionalist leaders emerged to lead the confederacy until new troubles appeared and the tide turned once again. This factional ebb and flow continued until the end of the colonial period, when Samuel Kirkland and his Oneida followers challenged the leadership position of Sir William Johnson and the Mohawks. Kirkland had converted a number of Oneida warriors to his New Light Congregationalism. Johnson was a supporter of Anglican attempts to Christianize the Indians. This religious struggle had political overtones because it became part of the colonial-imperial struggles of the 1760’s and 1770’s. When the American Revolution broke out, the league extinguished its council fire at Onondaga and let each nation determine which side to support: Christianity had helped splinter the Six Nations Confederacy.

Gift-Giving

One area of English-Indian interaction that has received extensive coverage is gift-giving. The use of gifts in Native American society was well established before English colonization. When the English arrived, they found they had to adapt to Indian protocol if they hoped to establish peaceful relations with their Indian neighbors. Indian gifts involved large expenditures on the part of colonial governments. New governors to New York were often presented an allowance of six hundred pounds for the purchase of gifts. Officials in South Carolina spent more than twenty-six thousand pounds on Indian affairs between 1732 and 1755, when the Crown officially took control of Indian relations. A significant portion of South Carolina’s Indian expenses went to Indian gifts. These expenditures suggest that colonial and imperial officials understood the importance of gifts to Anglo-Indian relations.

Intermarriage

One area often overlooked in discussions of Indian-English relations is gender. While all European nations were concerned with blood purity, the English were perhaps the most prudish on the matter. Nevertheless, there were many cross-cultural relationships. In 1615 John Rolfe married Pocahontas. In Algonquian terms this marriage served to cement the peace. In the eighteenth century the British Indian superintendent for the northern colonies, Sir William Johnson, married an Iroquoian woman, Molly Brant. Johnson’s marriage to Brant gave him an opportunity to operate within Iroquoia that he would not have had otherwise. In the southern colonies the trader Lachland McGillivray married a Creek woman, and his son Alexander became a leading figure in the Anglo-Indian dialogue. Johnson’s and McGillivray’s marriages provided each man with entry into his wife’s community in a manner no outsider could hope to achieve. Equally important, these men were now obligated to meet certain familial and kinship expectations on the part of their wives’ families.

In examining Indian-English relations it is important to remember that neither side spoke with a single voice. While scholars have repeatedly mentioned the problems Native Americans had in uniting to oppose English objectives, there has been a tendency to downplay the difficulties the colonists also had in presenting a united front to the Indians. The ramifications of the lack of unity on both sides give the study of Indian-English relations its unique character. The diversity of opinion and actions among British colonial and Indian leaders made that relationship a complex one.

Bibliography

Axtell, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981. Many of the essays in this book were previously published; together they provide a good introduction to the study of ethnohistory and Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial period.

Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 33 (1976): 289-299. This essay is considered a classic examination of the effect of disease on Indian populations in North America.

Jacobs, Wilbur R. “British Indian Policies to 1783.” In History of Indian-White Relations, edited by Wilcomb E. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. As the title indicates, this essay details British policy toward the Indians. It covers the formal relations between Indians and colonists and is particularly good at examining the role of land in the Indian-English experience.

Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, this study of the Iroquois League demonstrates the influence of factionalism on an Indian people as they dealt with the Europeans. It synthesizes much scholarship on the Six Nations and their relationship with the French, Dutch, and English. It is particularly strong on seventeenth century relations.

Rountree, Helen C., ed. Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. A series of articles written by leading scholars. The book details Powhatan relations not only with the English but also with other Indian groups in the region. The articles emphasize the complexity and difficulty of thinking about Native Americans as single-culture polities.