SOURCE: Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Virtues of Nature: The Image in Drama and Poetry.” In Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, pp. 169-95. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Pearce examines how the colonists of America viewed the Native American, beginning with the romantic idea of the Noble Savage, but later viewing the Native American as simply savage.]

The indian over whom Americans finally triumphed was he whom they put in their plays, poems, and stories. New-rich in their discovery of the possibility of a national culture, they were certain that they could find the Indian's place in the literature into which that culture was to flower.¹ He was part of their past, they knew; and in his nature and his fate lay a clue to the meaning of their future. Yet if they would treat him imaginatively, they faced a problem for the solution of which their national experience and understanding could not wholly prepare them.

For in the overpowering English literary tradition to which, even in their sanguinary cultural nationalism, they made obeisance, the Indian had been generally conceived as a noble savage, above and beyond the vices of civilized men, doomed to die in a kind of absolute, untouchable goodness; and American experience and understanding had been directed towards destroying just such a conception and replacing it with the conception of a savage in whom nobility was one with ignobility. Certainly, as doomed noble savage the Indian could be pitied; and American literary men, sensitive to the feeling of their readers, cultivated such pity. But he also had to be properly censured, and his nobility to be denied or so qualified as to be shown not really to be nobility; and American literary men, insofar as they were to be American, could not avoid such censure, denial, and qualification.

The specifically literary idea of the pitifully noble savage had to be accommodated to that larger idea of savagism which made possible not only pity but censure. In a country searching for culture, the literary idea was strong and long-lived, and Americans respected it. In a country feeling its independent destiny, the need for accommodation was equally strong, and Americans bent to it. The literary history of the Indian in America is one in which the idea of savagism first compromised the idea of the noble savage and then absorbed and reconstituted it. What came into being in this reconstitution was the savage whom Americans had been seeking from the first, and he served them as they willed.

1

In 1766, in London, Robert Rogers, English soldier and frontier scout, published his Ponteach; or the Savages of America. This was an Indian tragedy which he could not get acted in spite of the success of the authoritative discourse on the Indian which he had published the year before in his Concise Account of America. In the Account there is one of those omnium gatherum disquisitions which, as we have seen, were published as an aftermath of the French and Indian War and the frontier disturbances which immediately followed it. It is like them, emphasizing what its author has personally seen, shaping the details into a picture, at once excited and nostalgic, of a simple, heroic, dangerous, Spartan kind of people who are being destroyed by white civilization. There is, in short, that sense of the facts of savage life which was more and more informing colonial thinking about the Indian. In the tragedy, however, literary convention completely dominates the sense of fact. Rogers intends to emphasize, as he had in the Concise Account, the nefariousness and evildoing of English traders and to show how the English themselves have brought on Pontiac's Conspiracy. But he can do so only in terms of whites crudely ignobled and Indians as crudely ennobled. To make his plot work out, to show the Indians as simple savages victimized by superior and scheming whites, Rogers would have had to psychologize along the lines of his Concise Account. Yet his literary commitment would let him psychologize only along the lines of an Indian Queen.

The intended high seriousness of the play depends in great measure on its subplot, the tragic love story involving Chekitan and Philip, Pontiac's sons. Chekitan is in love with another chief's daughter, Monelia. Encouraged by his brother Philip, he determines to win glory in battle so that he will be worthy of her. But Philip, so he informs the audience, loves her too, and swears to kill her so that Chekitan cannot have her, and to blame her killing on the English. His plans go badly, of course. He kills Monelia and her brother Torax, so he thinks, and tells his father and brother that the English have killed them. But Torax lives, informs Chekitan, and Chekitan kills Philip and then himself. What all this has to do with the Conspiracy of Pontiac we never know. Meantime, the Conspiracy has failed—only, however, after Rogers has exhibited the Indians at a ceremony at which the chiefs sing a war song “To the tune of Over the Hills and far away.”

Rogers' play is perhaps properly considered as an English and not an American mistake. Yet in its melodramatic ennobling of savages, in its surrendering fact (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fact, we must remember) to convention, and in its vitiating confusions, it early indicates the direction in which the Indian play would move. Combining the worst extravagances of seventeenth-century heroic tragedy with those of domestic tragedy; veering away in its literary conventionality from even the actuality pictured in the Concise Account, yet ostensibly affirming a thesis of the Concise Account—it exhibits the predicament of the writer of Indian drama, who, although he found that pity was much easier and more pleasurable than censure, still knew that one was as real and necessary as the other.

One way out of the predicament was wholly to forget fact and actuality, accept the convention of the noble savage, and have a good time. This is the way of the first genuinely American Indian play, Ann Julia Kemble Hatton's Tammany, a Serious Opera (1794). Tammany exists today only in a few of its separately published songs. Yet the confusedly ennobled savages are clearly there. In one of the songs, for instance, Tammany's light-of-love sings of him:

At eve to lure the finny prey
As thro' their coral groves they stray,
Or, in their ousy bends supine,
They in the radiant sunbeams shine;
Beneath the morn's pale light to rove,
The aloed wood or palmy grove,
These, these are sweet; but not to me
So sweet as is my Tammany.

And he of her:

Fury swells my aching soul,
          Boils and maddens in my veins;
Fierce contending passions roll
          Where Manana's image reigns.(2)

At the end of the play, we know, Tammany and Manana die together like proper noble savages. We have their death song.

There is evidence of an awareness of savage inferiority in Joseph Croswell's A New World Planted (1802), yet no means to express it directly. Here Indians figure nobly as friends of struggling Pilgrims. One of the Pilgrims, Hampden, falls in love with an Indian princess, Pocahanta. Troubled by the problem of a mixed marriage, he decides that he can go ahead with it because she is of royal blood, beautiful, and witty. But still, being a noble savage is not quite enough; so he says,

I know she's browner than European dames,
But whiter far, than other natives are.

Pocahanta has to be ennobled, virtually civilized, into something which approximates a Caucasian. If literary convention makes her good enough for Hampden as she is, American feeling about the savage makes her need to be more than she is.

It was on the theme of noble love that much of the Indian drama was to center; and Pocahontas, transported to Virginia where she belonged, was to be a main subject of that drama, In 1808 there was performed the first of the Pocahontas plays, James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage. The play recounts the classic Rolfe-Pocahontas story, but loosely and adorned with confused subplots. In the confusion it is impossible to distinguish a noble savage from a noble white man. Yet Barker apparently intends that the distinction be made. He makes Pocahontas say to Rolfe:

O! 'tis from thee that I have drawn my being:
Thou'st ta'en me from the path of savage error,
Blood-stain'd and rude, where rove my countrymen,
And taught me heavenly truths, and fill'd my heart
With sentiments sublime, and sweet, and social.

And he has Smith say at the end:

                                                                                                                                            Methinks
Wild Nature smooths apace her savage frown,
Moulding her features to a social smile.
Now flies my hope-wing'd fancy o'er the gulf
That lies between us and the aftertime,
When this fine portion of the globe shall teem
With civiliz'd society; when arts,
And industry, and elegance shall reign,
As the shrill war-cry of the savage man
Yields to the jocund shepherd's roundelay.
Oh, enviable country …(3)

In spite of such insistence, however, there is very little of the blood-stain'd and rude in Barker's savages, for there was very little in the savages belonging to the extravagantly primitivistic tradition in which he was committed to write.

If we think back over the history of the idea of savagism, we can see that the situation which was developing was this: the Indian had to be described somehow as blood-stain'd and rude; yet the dramatic terms in which, by convention and the exigencies of melodramatic staging, he had to be conceived did not allow for blood-stains or rudeness. The difference between him and white men, a difference which supposedly made for his death, could only be imputed to him. In George Washington Custis' version of the Pocahontas story, Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia (first performed in 1827), the heroic English barely win out over the heroic Indians—and then only when Pocahontas aids them. She, it is pointed out, is different; above all, she is Christianized. The leader of the Indian opposition, Matacoran, talks and acts on principles identical with those of Smith, Rolfe, et al.; he fights the English because of his innately noble love of freedom and because he sees that he will lose his beloved Pocahontas to an Englishman if his people are defeated. With their defeat, he is offered pardon by Captain Smith; but he defies Smith and says that he will go west to die:

There [he declaims], on the utmost verge of the land which the Manitou gave to his fathers, when grown old by time, and his strength decay'd, Matacoran will erect his tumulus, crawl into it and die. But when in a long distant day, posterity shall ask where rests that brave, who distaining alliance with the usurpers of his country, nobly dar'd to be wild and free, the finger of renown will point to the grave of Matacoran.

As he rushes out, Smith comments, “Brave, wild, and unconquerable spirit, go whither thou wilt, the esteem of the English goes with thee.”⁴ Presumably such esteem carries with it pity and censure for savagism; for we are to take heart and to envisage the “long vista of American futurity,” as Powhatan puts it in the play's final speech. And it is this way too in a later Pocahontas play, Charlotte Barnes' Forest Princess (first performed 1848), in which, after a career of noble gentility and daring, Pocahontas dies in England. As she dies, she has a savage vision of her Virginia home and its future—with Washington, the Genius of Columbia, Time, Peace, and the Lion and the Eagle all taking part in the final tableau which is that vision. Even the Forest Princess in the Indian melodrama is made to envision the progress of a civilization which her very existence, her savage perfection, makes virtually meaningless.

Thus savage inferiority is repeatedly, almost unconsciously, imputed to Indians and then sentimentally or melodramatically ennobled out of existence. In Nathaniel Deering's Carabasset (first performed 1831), the titular hero, the last of his tribe to survive the coming of the whites, is an exceptionally noble savage; for he is said never to have slain except in the heat of battle and even to have returned “The trembling, helpless captive … / Back to its mother's arms.”⁵ Then a villainous white goads him into terrible bloodshed, and at the end, after he has achieved his vengeance, into heroic suicide. In Richard Emmons' Tecumseh (first performed 1834), the titular hero is above joining in savage butchery, yet at the end he must be killed by an American in heroic single combat. Of this Tecumseh it is said, that he was “… rude, yet great; most towering Chief that ever hatchet raised against white man”;⁶ still, there is no evidence of his rudeness, except that his English is occasionally broken. In Alexander Macomb's Pontiac (first performed 1838), the titular hero goes down before the westward course of the empire which is beyond his ken. He is at once a hero of romance and a desperate primitive. This is part of his War Song:

On that day, when our heroes lay low, lay low,
          On that day when our heroes lay low,
I fought by their side, and thought ere I died
Just vengeance to take on the foe, the foe,
          Just vengeance to take on the foe.

And this is his speech after his defeat by the British: “I have no father but the Sun—no mother but the Earth. She feeds me, she clothes me. I shall recline upon her bosom.”⁷ This last speech contains the psychological key to Pontiac and his life and death. But the play contains mainly things like his War Song, with equivalent actions and sentiments. Macomb, like Deering and Emmons, tries to create an image of savagism in terms which deny it.

The most popular of the Indian plays, John Augustus Stone's Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (first performed 1829) furnishes us the richest evidence of the imbalance between the convention of the noble savage and the idea of savagism. Stone wrote Metamora for Edwin Forrest, who specialized in noble savages of all sorts; and the title role became one of Forrest's favorites. It is probable that the popularity of the play is mainly responsible for the great number of like plays which followed it. There were some thirty-five in twenty years, mostly unpublished, mostly recorded as being well received.

The play develops with all the trappings of its melodramatic kind. There is appropriate music, much noisy business of challenges, duels, and charges; and there is a subplot which involves a disguised regicide, villainous aristocratic passion, the discovery of a long-lost son, and a happy union of unhappy lovers. In the midst of all this, Metamora (King Philip) strives hard to preserve his people, their ways, and their lands. He is depicted as an honorable friend of the white man, a protector of female virtue, and a tender husband to a sentimental wife, until he is betrayed and driven to warfare by the white man's greed. The play is advanced now by fierce alarums and excursions, now by set pieces for Metamora; there is only the dimmest attempt to make him speak like the Indian of the savage oratorical tradition. Obviously he is Forrest. At the end, seeing his people wiped out and his son killed, having killed his wife to prevent her being enslaved by the whites, he delivers himself thus:

My curses on you, white men! May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in his war voice from the clouds! Murderers! The last of the Wampanoags' curse be on you! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path the red man shall trace! And may the wolf and panther howl o'er your fleshless bones, fit banquet for the destroyers! Spirits of the grave, I come! But the curse of Metamora stays with the white man! I die! My wife! My queen! My Nahmeokee!

Then he “falls and dies; a tableau is formed. Drums and trumpet sound a retreat till curtain. Slow curtain.”⁸

As Stone gives Metamora to his audience, he is not the Metamora of the tradition of savagism. His psychology is not simple, his passions not limited, his life not centered on action rather than on thought, his morality on the whole not inferior to civilized morality. He is specifically of that primitivistic literary tradition which the idea of savagism was intended to refute. Yet there is in Stone's conception of him some feeling of this latter antiprimitivistic idea, so that we can see just how Stone was caught between two traditions, between two images, and how he was obliged, however unconsciously, to compromise. After Metamora's first noble appearance, the young white heroine of the subplot says to her beloved; “Teach him, Walter; make him like to us.” Walter replies:

'Twould cost him half his native virtues. Is justice goodly? Metamora's just. Is bravery virtue? Metamora's brave. If love of country, child and wife and home, be to deserve them all—he merits them.

She says: “Yet he is a heathen.” And Walter leaves unresolved the whole issue. He answers in his simple manly rhetoric: “True, … but his worship though untaught and rude flows from his heart, and Heaven alone must judge of it.”⁹ What we observe is that the difference between Metamora and the Walters in the play simply is not defined; it is only imputed, nominal. One can only suggest that the form of the play, and Stone's natural talent and enthusiasm for the form, won't allow for such a definition. Like all the rest who wrote Indian plays, Stone was enthusiastically unaware of this imbalance in his work. So were his pleased audiences. In their mutual unawareness they imaged noble savages who were being destroyed because they were not noble savages.

2

The predicament of the poet who would write of the Indian was more sharply defined than that of the dramatist. Bound to write either of the noble or ignoble savage, he could produce only varying combinations of the sentimental and the melodramatic. The confused images generated in his poems eventually flowed into the image of Hiawatha, in whom melodrama and sentiment were brought into satisfying combination by the genteel folklorist, in whom a grateful reading public could find the savage and the primitive softened into the quaintly and anciently heroic. By then it was 1855, and the savage had been a long time dead. In any case, American poets could never come but weakly to grips with the problem of savagism.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, budding American poets lined up, in a not very orderly fashion, either on the primitivistic or antiprimitivistic side. They pictured Indians as distinguished upstanding warriors, now dead,¹⁰ as hot-hearted lovers,¹¹ and as strong souls exhibiting their strength in defiant death-songs.¹² Or they pictured them in their sadistic mercilessness to captives and in their bloody glory in victory over Americans sent to punish them,¹³ and in their animal-like refusal to be civilized.¹⁴ There are in these poems—significant to us because they are intended to be poems, not because they really are—two contradictory themes: the Indian as nature's nobleman, perhaps superior to his civilized conquerors; and the Indian as subhuman, waiting fiercely to be wiped out.

The poet could with great and unconscious ease, develop the two themes side by side. This is the achievement of Francis Hopkinson in his “The Treaty,” a poem written, as he said, from actual observation of a meeting “upon the banks of the river Lehigh, in the year 1761, when the author served as secretary in a solemn conference held between the government of Pennsylvania and the chiefs of several Indian nations.”¹⁵ The poem begins with a description of the beauties of the Lehigh Valley, praise of Pennsylvania's governor, and a lament for the blood which has been “Shed by barbarians' unrelenting hand.” Once all was peaceful; but Indian wars brought death and destruction. This last is illustrated in the pastoral tale of Rosetta and Doris: Rosetta, the shepherdess, beloved of Doris, is taken captive by a savage troop; Doris, trying to rescue her, is captured too; carried to an Indian village, he is mercilessly and gruesomely tortured to death, and Rosetta dies, brokenhearted, at his feet. It is such tragic tales as this to which the treaty will put an end, Hopkinson goes on to say; and he describes the treaty itself, participated in by Indians of a somewhat different sort from those in the tale of Rosetta and Doris:

Solemn and grand without the help of art;
Of justice, commerce, peace, and love, they treat,
Whilst eloquence unlabour'd speaks the heart.
See from the throng a painted warrior rise,
A savage Cicero, erect he stands,
Awful, he throws around his piercing eyes,
Whilst native dignity respect commands.
High o'er his brow wantons a plumed crest,
The deep vermilion on his visage glows,
A silver moon beams placid round his breast,
And a loose garment from his shoulders flows.
One nervous arm he holds to naked view,
The chequer'd wampum glitt'ring in his hand;
His speech doth all the attic fire renew,
And nature dictates the sublime and grand.
Untouch'd by art, e'en in the savage breast,
With native lustre, how doth reason shine!
Science ne'er taught him how to argue best,
The schools ne'er strove his language to refine.
What noble thoughts, what noble actions rise
From in-born genius, unrestrain'd and free!

In this vein Hopkinson carries his poem to the finish with a complete picture of the treaty, games, feast, and war-dance,

Till wasted nature can no more sustain,
And down in sleep their wearied bodies fall.

As the poem demands it, Hopkinson's Indians are now subhuman killers, now nature's noblemen.

Philip Freneau began with such an ambiguous view too, and tried to primitivize his way out of it. He came to resolve his predicament only with a primitivistic fantasy analogous to that in his social criticism. In “The American Village” (1772)¹⁶ he describes Indians of the past, unspoiled by and superior to civilized white men:

          Nor think this mighty land of old contain'd
The plund'ring wretch, or man of bloody mind:
Renowned SACHEMS once their empire rais'd
On wholesome laws; and sacrifices blaz'd.
The gen'rous soul inspir'd the honest breast,
And to be free, was doubly to be blest.(17)

Yet in “The Rising Glory of America,” a poem written in the same year as “The American Village,” he and his collaborator, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, make one of the speakers in the dialogue say of American Indians and their past:

How much obscur'd is human nature here!
Shut from the light of science and of truth
They wander'd blindfold down the steep of time;
Dim superstition with her ghastly train
Of daemons, spectres and foreboding signs
Still urging them to horrid rites and forms
Of human sacrifice, to sooth the pow'rs
Malignant, and the dark infernal king.(18)

But this passage was cut out of the poem in editions after 1786, and Freneau came, for the most part, to image Indians as a dying race, needful of recovering their original noble primitivity. (Brackenridge, we should recall, took this passage to heart and went on to become a celebrated Indian Hater.) Thus “The Prophecy of King Tammany” (1782), “The Dying Indian, Tomo-Chequi” (1784), “The Indian Burying Ground” (1787), and “On American Antiquity” (1790) are concerned with the Indian past, or with a present which is soon to be the past. What is emphasized is the “naturalness” of the Indian, even in his attitude towards death and dying. The tone is melancholy and marks a regret for a simpler life that is past and for the passing of beings whose simplicity has ennobled them to a degree envied by the busily civilized poet.

As in his social criticism, Freneau in his poetry of the Indian is forced to be somewhat uncertain about the positive values of civilization.¹⁹ In “The Indian Student” (1787) and “The Indian Convert” (1797), he tells the stories of two boys who could not adjust to civilization; the former had to leave Harvard and return to Nature where he was happier; the latter, being disillusioned to find that heaven was like a church and not a taproom, would not

                                        consent to be lodged in a place
Where there's nothing to eat and but little to steal.(20)

One of the savages escaped civilization, presumably, and one was corrupted by it. Another who escapes is Indian Sam, to whom a disillusioned Freneau turned for poetic material late in his life, in 1822. The poet goes to school to the Indian, for three days hears civilization denounced, and concludes that “honest Sam”

… seem'd a warrior and a sage,
And there I could have pass'd an age,
For all was calm, serene, and free,
The picture of simplicity.(21)

What, then, was the lesson to be learned from this image of the Indian? It was, for Freneau, a confused one, involving the “nature” of man. To the very end, he tried in vain to accommodate his faith in civilized America to his faith in the noble savage; for he could not subscribe to the antiprimitivism which usually sustained the former. He published in 1822 a longish poem in which he tried once and for all to teach civilized men the true virtues of nature. This was “On the Civilization of the Western Aboriginal Country.” The poem begins with a general consideration of mutability: The old stars fade, new ones appear; Nature has two wheels constantly in motion—one creating as the other is destroying; only matter exists forever; forms change always. Then the poet proceeds to a consideration of “civilization”—i. e., civilizing—the western Indians. The point is that they too are simply another changing form of unchanging matter:

THOU who shalt rove the trackless western waste,
Tribes to reform, or have new breeds embraced,
Be but sincere!—the native of the wild
If wrong, is only Nature's ruder child;
The arts you teach, perhaps not ALL amiss,
Are arts destructive of domestic bliss,
The Indian World, on Natures bounty cast,
Heed not the future, nor regard the past.—
They live—and at the evening hour can say,
We claim no more, for we have had one day.
The Indian native, taught the ploughman's art,
Still drives his oxen, with an Indian heart,
Stops when they stop, reclines upon the beam,
While briny sorrows from his eye-lids stream,
To think the ancient trees, that round him grow,
That shaded wigwams centuries ago
Must now descend, each venerated bow,
To blaze in fields where nature reign'd till now.
                    Of different mind, he sees not with your sight,
Perfect, perhaps, as viewed by Nature's light:
By Nature's dictates all his views are bent,
No more imperfect than his AUTHOR meant.

For all forms of “moral virtue”—i. e., all the varying moral codes of different societies—the poet continues, tend towards one good end. Yet when civilized men try to reform the Indians, they give them only one virtue for a hundred vices. They do not realize that in every life, in every race, men must pursue the good in their own way, and that that good is everywhere the same.

Still, so the poet addressed civilized men, if you must go and Christianize, go with a good heart and a good will:

Nor selfish motives on yourselves impose,
Go, and convince the natives of the west
That christian morals are the first and best;
And yet the same that beam'd thro' every age,
Adorn the ancient, or the modern page;
That without which, no social compacts bind,
Nor honor stamps her image on mankind.
Go, teach what Reason dictates should be taught,
And learn from Indians one great Truth you ought,
That, through the world, wherever man exists,
Involved in darkness, or obscured in mists,
The Negro, scorching on Angola's coasts,
Or Tartar, shivering in Siberian frosts;
Take all, through all, through nation, tribe, or clan,
The child of Nature is the better man.(22)

The image is that of the noble savage, his nobility minimized into universality, into a least common denominator of virtuous human nature. He is, if not superior to civilized men, in his own way as good as they are. Perhaps he is superior; for he lives according to universal Reason, as civilized men so often do not. Freneau's conclusions are not unconfused and unconfusing, certainly. They seem to be a plea for the respect of the human rights of the Indians. To establish those rights, Freneau must universalize them, must appeal to Nature. And he is forced, as it were, into finding more of Nature in Indians than in civilized whites. Thus the Indians are ennobled; and Freneau, for all his philosophical maneuvering, is back where he had started some fifty years before with the noble savage of “The American Village.” The Indian lives as the image of the best man living the best life, perhaps doomed to death because he lives that life.

3

That image was most fully exhibited in a series of narrative poems beginning in the 1790's and continuing into the 1850's. The number of poems and their popularity, like the number and popularity of Indian plays, manifest the steady and sure fascination of the image for American writers and readers. It was, we must remember, an image clung to in the face of direct attacks on its validity, of a developing idea of savagism which would deny it, and, as we shall see, of a developing fiction of savagism which would reconstitute it. Why did the image persist? Certainly the sheer force of literary convention was involved. And more than that, there was the force of the primitivistic ideal, of the doubt which any civilized man must entertain as to the final rightness of his kind of civilization. Since neither the plays nor the poems concern themselves very much with attacking civilization directly, we can surmise that they furnished a safe outlet for such primitivistic doubts. In any case, they survived and thrived; and Americans read them and wrote them even while the noble savage was being destroyed.

The earliest of these narrative poems is Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton's Ouâbi; or, The Virtues of Nature (1790). Expanding upon a contemporary prose narrative,²³ Mrs. Morton makes the French Canadian official, St. Castins (i. e., the Baron Castine), into “Europe's fairest boast” and describes him fleeing civilization because he has found there—and this is his own enumeration—only terror, guilt, pain, revenge, malice, duplicity, slander, insolence, pride, envy, neglect, fear, jealousy, fraud, reproach, affectation, and passion. He flees to the Canadian woods and, roaming one day, encounters a Huron warrior who is attempting to kidnap the fair Illinois, Azakia. St. Castins rescues her and she takes him with her to her people and her husband, Ouâbi, one “form'd by nature's hand divine.” Ouâbi in gratitude makes St. Castins a member of the tribe, gives him the Indian name of Celario, and makes him a member of his household. St Castins finds life with the Illinois all that he has wished for, with one important exception. He has fallen in love with Azakia, has told her of his love, has been rebuffed, and finds himself torn between love for her and devotion to her husband. Yet he still pursues her. And when she still rebuffs him, he is more and more impressed with the integrity of the savage character and with his own weakness as a civilized man.

So it goes until St. Castins feels that he must leave the Illinois to preserve their integrity and his. But Ouâbi will not let him go; for the Illinois are about to go to war with the Hurons, and Ouâbi depends upon his adopted tribesman to stay behind and protect Azakia. This St. Castins does, even though he knows that he will continue to pursue Azakia and thus betray his friend. Then when a lone survivor returns from the Huron war and tells him that all is lost and that Ouâbi has been taken prisoner, St. Castins immediately gathers together a few over- and under-aged warriors and sets out to rescue him. They find Ouâbi at the stake, singing his death song, and they manage to save him. Rescued and rescuers return homeward, rejoicing; and as they are returning, Ouâbi finally perceives that St. Castins loves Azakia. Magnanimously, he gives her to him, saying that he will take another bride for himself. Yet, at the double marriage ceremony that follows, Ouâbi's great heart breaks, and he falls dying. Breathing his last, he speaks to St. Castin, who has now proved that he can become a truly noble savage, and asks him to be chief in his place. Then Ouâbi expires. And the narrative ends with a kind of apotheosis and a celebration of the natural virtues of the noble Illinois chieftain.

Mrs. Morton maintained in an introductory note that she had taken her Indian material from learned sources and that she was facing all the facts of Indian life. She went so far as to admit in a distressed note to her readers that the Illinois were merciless and cruel in warfare, but she was nonetheless sure that in the main her savages were noble. A contemporary reviewer picked her up on this by setting her image of the noble savage against that of contemporary students of savagism. This reviewer took great pains to show Mrs. Morton just where she went wrong, just why her Indians would not square with any modern view of them:

The manners of the original inhabitants of this continent have at different times been the theme of commendations. At first view there is something in them which powerfully excites our admiration. Undaunted courage, ardent patriotism, hospitality to strangers, gratitude to friends, respect to the heroes of their nation, and conjugal fidelity, form an exceedingly interesting picture. The absence of an host of vices resulting from society renders this still more attractive. A vivid imagination will readily add to this, until we at length conceive the poetical descriptions of the golden age to be realized. Poets and philosophers have joined in describing the excellencies of this state of society, and contrasting it with the miseries of civil government; and we regard with surprise the strange infatuation of mankind, who will not break the shackles imposed upon them by society, and fly to this happy state. But upon a nearer investigation, we are mortified to find, that the picture has enchanted us only from its distance, and from the obscure light in which we had viewed it. We then discover, that most of the good qualities which had excited our admiration, are produced from the situation in which this people is placed; and that what appeared to us virtue is often times the effect of apathy. If the vices of civilized life are absent, its virtues are equally unknown. Revenge, cruelty, treachery, indolence, drunkenness, and a long catalogue of black vices, convince us that the perfection of this state existed only in our imagination; and that a civil government, with all its ills and inconvenience, is still infinitely preferable to the savage state.²⁴

The reviewer might well have been following Jedediah Morse's Encyclopaedia article, with its emphasis on character and circumstance and on the necessity of seeing the whole of Indian life, for good and for bad, and of demonstrating the integral relationship of Indian virtues to Indian vices. In any case, he was setting what was already an intellectual commonplace against what had long been a literary commonplace. The latter could survive, as it did, only by accommodating itself to the former. The history of that survival in the poetry of the Indian is one of such accommodations of image to idea.

In a few instances the idea virtually destroyed the image. These instances are of poems about frontier warfare, more violent in their antiprimitivism than even the idea of savagism demanded. Joseph McCoy's Frontier Maid (1819) centers on the attack by British-maddened Indians on idyllic frontier farmers. In an appended note, McCoy admits that he has overdrawn both his Indians and his frontier farmers—this for contrast. The point is that the design of his poem, which is the design of frontier life, demands that he attack violently the image of the noble savage. The anonymous Ensenore (1840) exhibits its titular hero rescuing his beloved from the fate worse than death which is captivity, and manifests in its Indians only animals deserving civilized destruction. Andrew Coffinberry's Forest Rangers (1842) is a long “Poetic Tale of the Western Wilderness in 1794.” In the midst of a narrative of frontier war and frontier love, Coffinberry has two soldiers of Wayne's army debate the nature of their foe. The upshot is that they find the Indians to be so beastly in warfare and in their rejection of civilized ways that they must be not of the race of men.

But these poems, which really only continue the tradition of the sensationalistic captivity narrative, represent distinctly minority views. The noble savage could not be thus summarily got rid of. A more significant strategy for dismissing him—because it was a strategy that allowed the poet also to hold on to him—was to show that it was his very savage nobility which had brought him to his death. This was a strategy which, even if it did not completely accommodate the noble savage to the idea of savagism, at least made his destruction intelligible in relation to the progress of American civilization.

There is thus a whole series of miscellaneous narrative and descriptive poems, ranging from the crude to the innocuously competent, which celebrate the death of the noble savage and the coming of civilization. The pattern of these poems is uniform enough itself to constitute a received way of imaging American relations with the Indians. The Indian is described for what he is, a noble savage. The coming of the white man is described for what it is, the introduction of agrarian civilization. And the Indian is shown dying or moving west, often with a vision of the great civilized life which is to come after him, occasionally with the hope that he himself can become civilized. The tone is now bitter, now melancholy. The end is said to be good.

Taken most generally, this is the form of the Indian passages in Charles Mead's Mississippian Scenery (1819), of James Eastburn and Robert Sand's Yamoyden (1820), of the anonymous Land of Powhatan (1821), of Lydia Sigourney's Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822), of the Indian passages in Bryant's “The Prairies” (1832), of Job Durfee's What Cheer; or, Roger Williams in Banishment (1832), of Mrs. M. M. Webster's Pocahontas (1840), of Seba Smith's Powhatan (1841), of George H. Colton's Tecumseh (1842), and of Elbert Smith's Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak; or Black Hawk and Scenes in the West (1848). Even Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was obliged, when he put Indians into poetry, to conceive of them as doomed noble savages; his Alhalla (1843), a romance of the Creek War, and his descriptive Rise of the West (1841) are cast in terms identical with those employed by Mead, Bryant, and the rest. The image of the noble savage was to be sustained at all costs.

In these pieces, the inevitable destruction of the noble savage is not explained; it is merely accepted. The fact of destruction serves only further to ennoble the savage. Thus in Eastburn and Sand's Yamoyden, it is said of the dead King Philip:

                                                            … and if indeed,
The jewelled diadem thy front had prest,
It had become thee better, than the breed
Of palaces …(25)

Moreover, noble perfection, once destroyed, can well suggest imperfection. Thus in her Traits of the Aborigines (a poem supported by 102 pages of learned notes), Mrs. Sigourney first contrasts civilized whites unfavorably with noble savages and then, recalling frontier warfare and the butchery on both sides, pleads for the Christianization of the noble savages. She addressed her countrymen:

          Oh! make these foes
Your friends, your brethren, give them the mild arts
Social and civiliz'd, send them that Book
Which teaches to forgive, implant the faith
That turns the raging vulture to the dove,
And with these deathless bonds secure the peace
And welfare of your babes.(26)

Like the Indian of the heroic drama, Mrs. Sigourney's noble savages, and those of many of her contemporaries, are being destroyed because they are not noble savages.

Another strategy for sustaining the image of the noble savage was to deal with him as he was when he was yet out of contact with a white civilization, to put him safely in the past and to see him as the embodiment of a heroic American antiquity. This would be to give still another literary image of civilized progress; but the Indian would be so indirectly involved in that progress that the poet would not need to concern himself with the real complexity of the savage's fatefully inferior relationship to civilized man.

This strategy is worked out in a group of poems which culminates in Hiawatha (1855). William Hayne Simmons' Alasco, for example, begun as Onea in 1820 and picked up again and continued under its second title in 1857 in order to capitalize on the popularity of Hiawatha, is a fragment dealing with long-dead Indians as “venatic” Spartans. Among them, Simmons writes:

Wealth pamper'd not the few, nor poverty
The many crush'd; but in community
Born Nature's gifts they generously shared.
Bred up in Spartan discipline, they knew
No riches, or none prized. Desert in arms,
Wisdom and eloquence in council,—these
Alone conferr'd pre-eminence and place.
Equality's just rights enjoy'd by all,
On Nature's plan, by reason's dictates plain,
Guided, in social harmony they lived.(27)

In the fragment—two cantos—the plot hardly gets moving; but we are told that there was intended a great tale of love, warfare, defeat; for the Yamasees by the Creeks, and an account of the Yamasees' retreat to a distant place where they would establish a lonely paradise. Samuel Beach puts his Escalala (1824) even farther back in history, to the time of the moundbuilders in their fight to sustain their noble primitivity against the incursions of Norwegian invaders; Indians who have lived the life of lotoseaters are forced to become Spartans; they are as good at one as the other. Isaac McClellan in his “Fall of the Indian” (1830) sets out systematically to recapture an even more pristine savage past when the Indian

… sharpened … his arrow but to slay
The animal that howled around his hut,
Or drive back to the desert some wild Tribe
Of hostile savages …

Yet he admits in his prefatory note that such absolute heroicism is a little “at variance with [the Indians'] real character.”²⁸ And Henry Whiting, in his Sannillac (1831) celebrates a savage way to love and honor which, as he concludes explicitly in a series of commentary stanzas, although it has gone forever, nonetheless makes the past glorious.

But it was Longfellow who fully realized for mid-nineteenth-century Americans the possibilities of this image of the noble savage. He had available to him not only the examples of such American poems on the Indian as I have instanced above, but also the general feeling that the Indian belonged nowhere in American life but in dim prehistory. He saw how the mass of Indian legends which Schoolcraft was collecting depicted noble savages out of time, and offered, if treated right, a kind of primitive example of that very progress which had done them in. Thus in Hiawatha (1855) he was able, by matching legend with a sentimental view of a past far enough away in time to be safe and near enough in space to be appealing, fully to image the Indian as noble savage. For by the time Longfellow wrote Hiawatha, the Indian as direct opponent of civilization was dead, yet was still heavy on American consciences. He might well be conjured up in a comforting vision of American antiquity, so that everything would be shown to have gone as planned. The noble savage, that is, would be shown to have had his part in the plan; he could be loved and Americans could feel tender toward his manliness, because he was part of the plan. That manliness, in turn, could only be of the sort toward which Americans could feel tender. The tone of legend and ballad (this follows from Longfellow's opening statement of the qualities of the poem) would color the noble savage so as to make him blend in with a dim and satisfying past about which readers could have dim and satisfying feelings. In Hiawatha the image of the noble savage was sustained as such, yet was finally accommodated to the idea of savagism.

From the beginning of the poem to its end, the hero is carefully kept apart from the life of civilization. These are “voices from afar off” which

Call to us to pause and listen,
Speak in tones so plain and childlike …

This is a poem of savages in whose bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, strivings
For the good they comprehend not …

Kept apart from that good, these people may well be noble savages; yet their nobility will take on a kind of expression which will make it virtually irrelevant to civilized life. The history of Hiawatha follows naturally. He, as every schoolboy was to come to know, is in all things an aboriginal Prometheus who leads his people into an age of idyllic peace, an age of true primitivity. Yet time passes, the white man comes, and at the end Hiawatha must report his vision:

I beheld the westward marches
Of the unknown, crowded nations.
All the land was full of people,
Restless, struggling, toiling, striving,
Speaking many tongues, yet feeling
But one heart-beat in their bosoms.

He has seen, too,

… the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woful …

One day the missionaries come and Hiawatha, according to Longfellow's understanding of the fate of the American noble savage, must welcome them. As they sleep that night, he slips quietly out and goes westward alone. Thus dies still another noble savage.

In the main, as we know,²⁹ Longfellow followed Schoolcraft's version of a cycle of Chippewa legends, assuming, even as Schoolcraft had assumed, that the Chippewa demigod Manibozho was identical with the Iroquois statesman Hiawatha. Schoolcraft had felt a strong antipathy to the trickster element in the Manibozho legends and had done as much pruning of the sexual and obscene as he could. Longfellow pruned even more and virtually omitted this part of the legends. Above all, he humanized Manibozho-Hiawatha according to the ideals and beliefs of healthily civilized Americans of the nineteenth century. He created a conventionally romantic love story for Hiawatha and so brought him down to the American earth. Yet he preserved him as superman by making him part of the earliest history, even prehistory, of that earth. The point is that his qualities as superman are colored by the quality of legends selected and trimmed so as to make him in no way gross, cruel, and conniving, in no way a savage. Legendary deeds are somehow not savage deeds. The mood of Hiawatha is the mood of Idylls of the King. And it is Longfellow's use of legendary materials, as opposed to his predecessors' use of historical and quasi-historical materials, which lets him fully exploit this mood. Casting his poem in a folk-meter (we would say pseudo-folk-meter, but we must view this as Longfellow did), giving it a quality of childlike charm, he was further able to characterize his Indians as living in America's dim and distant childhood. He was able to create a noble savage who accommodated his readers', his culture's, and his own needs. Thirty-eight thousand copies of the poem were sold during the first year of publication. And the noble savage lived on in spirit precisely because he no longer lived on in the flesh. Longfellow preserved the noble savage by making him an ancient culture hero after the common reader's heart's desire.

4

Even as all these plays and poems were being written and were achieving their popularity, the Indian was being studied and his nature comprehended by that idea of savagism which directly related him to civilized men and their nature. Yet in these plays and poems the idea of savagism exists only by imputation and accommodation. The convention of the noble savage, which it was to destroy, is in them at once affirmed and compromised. It is the fact of compromise which lets us mark the presence of the idea of savagism—a dim, almost negative presence, exhibited only in the strategies which playwrights and poets use to avoid it. The strategy which is common to almost all of these writers is that of killing off the noble savage (a matter forced on them by historical fact) and of giving him a vision of the higher and better life which was to come (a matter forced on them by their sense of civilized mission). The problem was to avoid the confusion of making superior savages envy inferior civilized men, yet to show the rightness of the victory of civilization over savagism. The characteristic solution of the problem was to separate the savage from the civilized by such a great span of time or distance as to make immediate comparisons and judgments irrelevant and unnecessary. Here was Longfellow's ingeniousness: to discover the possibility of the noble savage as prehistorical culture hero, thus to save history, or at least modern history, for his own civilization.

Yet American experience of the savage had been immediate and hard and bitter. The Indian was a perversely contemporary actuality. A man like Henry Schoolcraft, who could go against all his researches in drawing the noble savages of his Alhalla, still had to stop short and write of civilizing the Iroquois, in a volume filled for the most part with sentimental pieces on the Indian:

This is the law of progress—kindlier arts
                    Have shaped his native energies of mind,
And back he comes—from wandering, woods and darts
                    Back to mankind.(30)

The Indian's nobility was something which existed not for white men to aspire to, but rather something for white men to outgrow. Thinking about it, one was thinking about his childhood; and one could afford to sentimentalize, even to celebrate, childhood—as with Longfellow. One would be returned to the reality of adulthood, of growth, of progress—to the actuality of the westward course of civilization.

The task forced upon playwrights and poets by the convention of the noble savage was to consider the Indian as part of American prehistory. The task forced upon writers of fiction by the idea of savagism was to consider the Indian as part of American history. The two tasks were not antipathetic if they were considered in their proper relationship. The idea of savagism had destroyed the convention of the noble savage by subsuming it, by showing that savage nobility was part of man's earliest nature and that it was integral with the savage ignobility of that nature. If playwrights and poets chose to celebrate that nobility, they were perforce confined to the childhood of man in America. Writers of fiction would treat of the relation between childhood and adulthood, the relation of the savage to the civilized, of red man to white. Noble savages would be viewed not in terms of what was lost when they died, but what was gained. Savagism would be comprehended, as in the end it had to be, in its relation to civilization.

Notes

1. The significance of Indian materials for a national literature is discussed in William Ellery Sedgwick, “The Materials for an American Literature: A Critical Problem of the Early Nineteenth Century,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, XVII (1935), 141-62; John C. McCloskey, “The Campaign of Periodicals after the War of 1812 for a National American Literature,” PMLA, L (1935), 262-73; and William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 143-44.

2. The Songs of Tammany, or the Indian Chief, a Serious Opera [1794], Magazine of History, Extra No. 170 (1931), pp. 8, 12.

3. James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess (Philadelphia, 1808), pp. 52, 73.

4. George Washington Custis, Pocahontas, in A. H. Quinn, ed., Representative American Plays (New York, 1930), p. 192.

5. Leola B. Chaplin, The Life and Works of Nathaniel Deering (1791-1881) (Orono, Maine, 1934), Appendix B, p. 178.

6. Richard Emmons, Tecumseh; or, The Battle of the Thames (Philadelphia, 1836), p. 35.

7. Alexander Macomb, Pontiac; or, The Siege of Detroit (Boston, 1835), pp. 31, 54.

8. Metamora and Other Plays, ed. Eugene R. Page (Princeton, 1941), p. 40.

9. Ibid., p. 12.

10. See the anonymous “Description of a Mohawk Chief,” Massachusetts Magazine, IV (1792), 329; William Prichard, “Character of St. Tammany,” American Museum, IV (1789), 104; Josias Lyndon Arnold, “Fragment of an Indian Sonnet,” Poems (Providence, 1797), pp. 53-54.

11. See Joseph Smith, “Indian Eclogue,” Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, I (1787), 146-47.

12. See Josias Lyndon Arnold, “Warrior's Death Song,” Poems, pp. 50-52; and the death-songs in Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton's Ouâbi (Boston, 1790) and in William Dunlap's Cololoo (New York, 1793?). On the convention of the death-song see Frank Edgar Farley, “The Dying Indian,” Kittredge Anniversary Papers (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 250-60; and Henry Broadus Jones, The Death Song of the “Noble Savage,” (University of Chicago dissertation, 1924).

13. See the anonymous “Defeat of Stuart's Indians in the South,” Massachusetts Magazine, IV (1792), 51-52; “Lavinia,” “Indian Victory: A Fragment,” ibid., III (1791), 763-64; the broadside The Columbian Tragedy (Boston, 1791); Eli Lewis, St. Clair's Defeat (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1792); three “Elegies” by James Lewis, Poetical and Miscellaneous Works (Greenfield, Mass., 1798), pp. 63-67, 69-73, 74-77.

14. See the anonymous “On the Emigration to America, and Peopling the Western Country,” American Museum, I (1787), 185-86; Timothy Dwight, “The Destruction of the Pequods,” Part IV, Greenfield Hill (New York, 1794); David Humphreys, “Poem on the Industry of the United States of America” [1794], Miscellaneous Works (New York, 1804), pp. 89-114; Joel Barlow, The Columbiad (Washington, 1825), Books II and V.

15. The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, Esq. (Philadelphia, 1792), III, 120. The poem was first published in 1772.

16. I follow, unless otherwise indicated, the text of F. L. Pattee: The Poems of Philip Freneau, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1902); and the dating of Lewis Leary: That Rascal Freneau (New Brunswick, N. J., 1941), pp. 418-80.

17. Poems, III, 387-92.

18. Ibid., I, 58-59.

19. See above pp. 143-46.

20. Poems, III, 189-90.

21. The Last Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. Lewis Leary (New Brunswick, N. J., 1945), p. 95.

22. Ibid., pp. 69-71.

23. “Azakia: A Canadian Story,” American Museum, VI (1789), 193-98.

24. Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, VI (1791), 105-106.

25. James Eastburn and Robert Sands, Yamoyden (New York, 1820), p. 254.

26. Lydia Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines of America (Cambridge, 1822), pp. 177-78.

27. William Hayne Simmons, Alasco (Philadelphia, 1857), p. 15.

28. Isaac McClellan, The Fall of the Indian, with Other Poems (Boston, 1830), p. 6.

29. See Stith Thompson, “The Indian Legend of Hiawatha,” PMLA, XXXVIII (1922), 128-43.

30. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, “On the State of the Iroquois,” The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends (Philadelphia, 1856), pp. 322-23.