Sherry Chandler

The winners write the history

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

America’s pioneer heritage continues to be credited with generating many of America’s core values, and its stories form a central part of the nation’s history. But the stories and the values they carry emerged over time. Elizabeth Perkins, in her study of historical experience and memory in the Ohio Valley, notes that as the original combatants died off, new generations of historians and writers “shaped their accounts along increasingly racist and nationalistic lines.” The settlers’ own stories were “often tinged with ambivalence or regret,” but “later conquest narratives breathed moral certainty.” Pioneers were heroes, Indians inhuman. A long and bloody war that sometimes hung in the balance now became “the inevitable triumph of a superior race.” . . . But what if our pioneer forefathers also butchered Indian families, stole Indian lands, broke treaties, desecrated the environment, and destroyed socieities that were truly free and egalitarian?

. . . Many historians . . . insist that it is essential to paint as full a picture as possible of the past and to consider multiple historical experiences; otherwise, we perpetuate a mythic past that offers little guidance for the real world. History and humans, even in America, have their dark sides. Indians had no monopoly on cruelty, vengefulness, and treachery, and no one has a monopoly on courage and love of freedom. [176]

Such a sane view, in what often seem to me insane times.

Now even the Native Americans are being co-opted in the name of propaganda and patrioteering. I understand that Glenn Beck found a couple to stand behind him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Another view

Brooks Carver writes to share this from Letters of a Nation (Random House, 1999):

From a letter by Gen James A. Carleton of the US Army on what should be done with Indians:

“…teach them the truths of Christianity[...] Little by little they will become a happy and contented people.”

From the reply by the Indians of the Six Nations to the college of William and Mary, which had invited the Indians to send twelve young men to their college to be “properly” educated.

“…our ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our Young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy…were therefore neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counselors; they were totally good for nothing. [...] If the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take care of their Education; instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.”

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In The Shawnees and the War for America , Colin G. Calloway says that, after their final defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, some of the Shawnee tried to assimilate. They lived in cabins, farmed, and kept domestic animals. But on two points they were adamant: they would not give up their religion for Christianity and they would not attend European-style schools.

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And it all ended in [the Trail of] Tears

Hammon and Taylor (Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786 ) on the outcome of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 for indigenous nations in the Ohio territory:

Inevitably, the future required adaptation and a new kind of education from succeeding generations of Indians. Yet assimilation under adverse circumstances was to be a tediously painful process. One historian of the period wrote that the Indian civilization was like a rock, which could not be changed in form without destroying it. This immutability was to be fully evident after the advent of widespread development and settlement in the Old Northwest lands. . . . Particularly distressing was the Indians’ affinity for, and inability to tolerate, strong liquor. [Little Turtle] had warned, in vain, that it would perhaps be better to be at war with the white people than submit to the degradation of alcoholism.

. . .

Granted a yearly annuity, which was all too frequently misspent, his Miami tribesmen continued to degenerate, so that by 1814 William Henry Harrison reflected that they were “merely a poor drunken set, diminishing every year.” [p. 226-227]

This degeneration suited the Whites very well, in that it gave them excuse for the bad faith in which they brok treaty after treaty in their greed for land.

One man’s view of compassion

Joseph Brant, a War Chief of the Mohawk, seems to have carried on an extensive correspondence in English. He made this statement in a letter to an unknown correspondent. It is quoted in the Life of Joseph Brant by William Leete Stone, published in 1845:

The palaces and prisons among you form a most dreadful contrast. . . . Those you call savages relent; the most furious of our tormentors exhausts his rage in a few hours, and dispatches his unhappy victim with a sudden stroke. Perhaps it is eligible that incorrigible offenders should sometimes be cut off. Let it be done in a way that is not degrading to human nature. Let such unhappy men have an opportunity, by their fortitude, of making an atonement in some measure for the crimes they have committed during their lives.

But for what are many of your prisoners confined? — for debt! — astonishing!— and will you ever again call the Indian nations cruel? Liberty, to a rational creature, as much exceeds property as the light of the sun does that of the most twinkling star. But you put them on a level, to the everlasting disgrace of civilization. I knew, while I lived among the white people, many of the most amiable contract debts, and I dare say with the best intentions. Both parties at the time of the contract expect to find their advantage. The debtor, we will suppose by a train of unavoidable misfortunes, fails; here is no crime, nor even a fault; and yet your laws put it in the power of the creditor to throw the debtor into prison and confine him there for life! a punishment infinitely worse than death to a brave man! And I seriously declare, I had rather die by the most severe tortures ever inflicted on this continent, than languish in one of your prisons for a single year. Great Spirit of the Universe! — and do you call yourselves Christians? Does then the religion of Him whom you call your Saviour, inspire this spirit, and lead to these practices? Surely, no. It is recorded of him, that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you publish to the world your hypocricy. Cease, too, to call other nations savages, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty than they.

Another view of “theater”

About ten days ago, I shared a fiew of political theater frontier style from Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786. But Neil O. Hammon and Richard Taylor were writing from the point of view of the Virginia colonists. Not saying they were anti-Indian but their focus was on Virigina.

For example, they sum up their history like this:

Once the Indian nations had relinquished what is now Kentucky, the vast area became public domain, that is, the property of Virginia. When the governor and, later, the legislature decided that the land could be acquired by Virginia citizens, those citizens, who moved onto it, fought for it. Their property rights were important to them. In fact, in keeping with John Locke’s influential Two Treatises on Government, most of the Western settlers regarded property rights as more important than freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion.* Of course, they all agreed that they must have the right to bear arms against their ever-present enemies.

. . .

In retrospect, it is clear that the West was won almost entirely by the efforst of the citizens of Virginia, both native born and those who migrated from other colonies, especially Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Had it not been for the efforts of Virginia, the original United States would likely have been confined to the area between the Atlantic Ocean ahd the Appalachian Mountains. [p. 203]

From the point of view of the Native peoples, that boundary was much to be desired. In The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007), Colin G. Calloway shows us this same 1786 treaty negotiation from the Native American perspective:

About 150 men and 80 women finally came to meet the American commissioners at Fort Finney in Jauary 1786. . . . The oldest chief, Moluntha, a Mekoche civil chief, led the procession, beathing a small drum and singing, followed by two young warriors each carrying the stem of a pipe, painted and decorated with eagle feathers and wampum, and by other dancing warriors, all “painted and dressed the the most elegant manner,” reported commissioner Richard Butler. The Shawnee men entered the council house by the west door, the women by the east door, and the dancing warriors waved the eagle feathers over the commissioners. Kekewepellethe gave a short speechand the chiefs shook hands with the commissioners, but the warriors and women held back. “The reason they give,” wrote Butler, “is that the heads of the people should be on easy and familiar footing, but that the warriors and women, who are the strength of the nation, more distant, till peace is certain. Nonhelema, “the Grenadier Squaw” was there—Major Ebenezer Denny compiled a vocabulary of Shawnee words based on interviews with her during the conference.

Most of the Shawnees who came to Fort Finney were Mekoches. After the Revolution they had returned their war belts to the British, signifying their intention to remain at peace. They were the most conciliatory division of the Shawnees, and their traditional responsibilities included healing and negotiation. The Americans they met, however, were inno mood for conciliation. Richard Butler had been a trader among the Shawnees, spoke their language, and had two children by a Shawnee woman, but he had fought with Colonel Henry Bouquet against the Shawnees in 1764 and was a veteran of the Revolution. George Rogers Clark, the other American commissioner, had made a name for himself as an Indian fighter during the Revolution and led assaults on Shawnee villages in 1780 and 1782. At the siege of Vincennes in 1779, he had tomahawked Indian prisoners within sight of the British garrison and tossed their still-kicking bodies into the river. “To excel them in barbarity,” he declared, “is the only way to make war on Indians.”

. . .

In return for peace, the commissioners demanded hostages to ensure Shawnee compliance and offered to grant the Shawnees portions of their own lands. Kekewepellethe replied that it was not the Shawnee custom to give hostages: “When we say a thing we stand to it, we are Shawanese.” As for the land, he continued, it was not for sale: “God gave us this country, we do not understand measureing out the lands, it is all ours. You say you have goods for our women and children; you may keep your goods, and give them to the other nations, we will have none of them.” The Americans “were putting them to live on ponds, and leaving them no land to live or raise corn on.” The Shawnees would agree to the Ohio River as their boundary and nothing else. He handed the commissioners a black wampum belt. When they refused to acceptit, he laid it on the table. [pp. 80-82]

At this point, Clark swept the wampum belt onto the floor and trod on it.

The object here was not to make peace but to bully the Shawnee into giving up their land without a fight.

Butler was killed and scalped at St. Clair’s Defeat in 1791.

In 1793, after Mad Anthony Wayne had taken over the U.S. Army in the west, John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada [a Brit], wrote

It appears to me that there is little probablility of effecting a Peace, and I am inclined to believe that the Commissioners do not expect it; that General Wayne does not expect it; and that the Mission of the Commissioners is in general contemplated by the People of the United States as necessary to adjust the ceremonial of the destruction and pre-determined extirpation of the Indian Americans. [Calloway, p. 98]

A “common man writ large”

I must tell you about one more sequence of narrative sonnets I’ve been reading this summer, Richard Taylor’s Rail Splitter, Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (Larkspur, 2009). This collection of 55 sonnets was begun in response to a call from the Kentucky Arts Council that each of the Kentucky poets laureate contribute poems for an anthology celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009.

Occasional poems are notoriously difficult, especially about a figure as iconic as Abraham Lincoln. I would hazard that more books, plays, movies, have been produced about Abraham Lincoln than about any other figure from American history. However, I can’t think of anyone better qualified to write such poems about Lincoln. Richard Taylor is a poet immersed in Kentucky’s history. In addition to his several collections of poetry, he has written Sue Mundy (Univ Press of Kentucky 2006), a historical novel about one of Kentucky’s notorious Civil War guerrillas and Girty (Wind, 2006), an experimental combination of poetry and prose about the life of the Revolution’s “white Indian.” With Neil O. Hammon, he has co-authored a historical study of the American Revolution in the west, Virginia’s Western War 1775-1796 (Stackpole Books, 2002).

I have talked here about sonnets as a vehicle for strong emotion, but Richard’s sonnets strike me as more quiet and philosophical. These are not “voice” poems. Impossible to do poems in the voice of Lincoln, whose words are so widely recorded and whose life is so often enacted. The point of view in these sonnets is strictly third person. We are outside, looking in. We are two centuries on, looking back at a time of high passions through the calm lens of the historian. We look not just at Lincoln but at a range of characters: Frederick Douglas, Cassius Clay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckly, Walt Whitman. McClellan, John Wilkes Booth.

These are larger-than-life characters who talked a lot in their own right.

Richard uses his sonnets almost in the service of anecdote, of parable, of good-humored folk tale, almost in the way Lincoln himself is thought to have done. These poems don’t try to transform our view of Lincoln but they do try to show us glimpses of the real human being. The last five sonnets in the sequence, perhaps the best poems in the book, focus on our mythmaking. Poems with titles like “Theories about Who Knew Lincoln Best,” “The Shaping of an Icon,” “Losing the Diamond in the Stew,” and

The Tyranny of Myth

Lies and fabulations cling to the great of soul
like starlings to fresh excrement of crows. We thrill
in revelation, marvel at the gods we find in things,
each splinter of his natal logs a portion of The Cross.

. . . Myths father myths, Lincoln himself might
tell us, tall tales, tales taller. Truth, in the telling,
extends beyond what can with certainty be told.
The cabin he was born in was any cabin, crude,
the rails in question any that might serve to fence.

Larkspur Press has handset this limited edition book, which was then printed on a hand-fed C & P using Mohawk Superfine paper and handbound. Design, composition, printing and binding were done by Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel, and Gray Zeitz. The book is decorated by wood engravings cut by Wesley Bates and printed from the wood.

Lincoln himself might have felt at home with this book designed, not just for slow reading, not by a great corporate press, but as a work of art made by common folk. Let me end this post with the last couplet in the sequence:

Lincoln, choking on “Great Captain,” might feel
more at home with “common man writ large.”

Theater

From Neal Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786 (Stackpole Books, 2002):

The next and perhaps the last council for some time between representatives of the United States and the Indians was held at the future site of Cincinnati on January 14, 1786. It was attended by 318 Shawnee. Upon hearing the terms offered by the Americans, the Shawnee signaled their disapproval. The U.S. commissioner, Richard Butler, then took the Shawnee’s string of wampun and dashed it on the table. Not to be outdone, George Rogers Clark pushed it off the table with his cane and walked over it as he left the council. [p. 190]

And, I suppose, counter theater:

By 1787 a Latin school had been established at [James Harrod's] Boiling Springs station. Malcomb Worley, a Latin teacher, was hired, and children from nearby towns were enrolled and boarded on Harrod’s farm. In November, however, after the school had been in operation for several months, young James McDaniel, the son of Ann Harrod, was captured by Indians after he left the school, and it was soon discovered that he had been burned at the stake. James Harrod disbanded the school and sent the pupils home. [p. 191]