SOURCE: “Notes on the Vanishing Aborigines,” in Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Belknap Press, 1999, pp. 75-107.

[In the following essay, Wallace discusses the sections of Notes on the State of Virginia that deal with Native Americans and claims that many of Jefferson's facts were inaccurate.]

After Jefferson left the Virginia governor's office in 1781, his letters to George Rogers Clark shifted from matters of war—which continued unabated in both the east and the west—to matters of science. In December 1781 he asked Clark to send to Monticello “some teeth of the great animal whose remains are found on the Ohio” and commented that in his retirement he was eager to pursue studies in natural history. In Clark's reply, in addition to remarks about animal bones, he alluded to “the powerful nations that inhabited those regions,” perhaps a reference to the vanished builders of the impressive ceremonial mounds that dotted the Ohio valley.¹

Jefferson's curiosity about the mammoths of the Ohio valley had been piqued by a visit of some Delaware Indians to Williamsburg about the time he was becoming governor. After matters of business had been discussed, the Indians were asked some questions about their country, and particularly what they knew of the large bones found at Great Salt Lick on the Ohio. Years later, Jefferson described the response with relish: “Their chief speaker immediately put himself into an attitude of oratory, and with a pomp suited to what he conceived the elevation of his subject, informed him that it was a tradition handed down from their fathers, That in antient times a herd of these tremendous animals came to the Big-bone licks, and began an universal destruction of the bear, deer, elks, buffaloes, and other animals, which had been created for the use of the Indians: that the Great Man above, looking down and seeing this, was so enraged that he seized his lightning, descended on the earth, seated himself on a neighbouring mountain, on a rock, of which his seat and the print of his feet are still to be seen, and hurled his bolts among them till the whole were slaughtered, except the big bull, who presenting his forehead to the shafts, shook them off as they fell; but missing one at length, it wounded him in the side; whereon, springing round, he bounded over the Ohio, over the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he is living at this day.”² Jefferson, who believed that nature would never permit any link to fall from the Great Chain of Being, took this as confirmation of the mammoth's continued existence to the north and west of the Great Lakes.

Jefferson's interest in natural history was further stirred by the queries of François Marbois, the secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia, whose questionnaire on the new states with whom France was now aligned had come into Governor Jefferson's hands in mid-1780. By late fall Jefferson was busy at Monticello gathering information to answer the queries. Although work on the project was delayed by General John Burgoyne's invasion of Virginia and the evacuation of the capital to Charlottesville, as well as by his own retirement in June 1781 and by the death of his wife in September, he was able to put a completed manuscript of Notes on the State of Virginia in the hands of Marbois by the end of December. In the following several years before its first publication in Paris in 1785, Jefferson sent the manuscript to a number of friends and acquaintances for their comments and corrections.

Information on Native Americans was contained in two sections of the Notes, one entitled “Productions, Mineral, Vegetable and Animal” and the other “The Aborigines.” The first Indian essay was an elegiacal mixture of salutation and farewell, crystallized in the story of Logan, which, as we have seen, served in later years to rationalize Jefferson's and future generations' drive westward to fulfill America's destiny. The other was largely a statistical review of the decline of the native population. But even in this essay, omissions, errors, and distortions, however unintended or unavoidable most of them may have been, also had the practical function of further sanctioning the cause of white settlement in the New World.

JEFFERSON'S ELEGY FOR THE INDIANS

In the first section of the Notes, Jefferson's praise of the racial characteristics of Native Americans was couched as a rebuttal to the popular French naturalist the Comte de Buffon. Buffon's Histoire naturelle argued that the peculiar environment of the New World had stunted the development of its native flora and fauna (including the aborigines) and retarded even the European colonists who settled there. Jefferson staunchly defended the productivity of his native land, trotting forth facts and figures on the large quadrupeds of America, including the mammoth whose bones were found in Ohio, and which, he claimed on the basis of Indian fables like the Delaware legend, still lived in the north and west of the continent.

He then proceeded to refute Buffon's assertion that “the savage of the new world” was defective in sexual ardor and potency (“the most precious spark of the fire of nature”) and therefore was timid and cowardly, stupid, incapable of love or loyalty, lacking any sort of communion, commonwealth, or “state of society.” To the contrary, declared Jefferson, “the Indian of North America” was as ardent as the white man, free, brave, preferring death to surrender, moral and responsible without compulsion by government, loving to his children, caring and loyal to family and friends, and equal to whites in vivacity and activity of mind. The women, to be sure, were forced to submit to unjust drudgery and, owing to their circumstance, produced fewer children. But that was the result of culture, not nature. “It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality.”

He went on to consider in particular the equality of Indian intelligence with that of whites and argued that when all the facts were in hand, “we shall probably find that they are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same model with the ‘Homo sapiens Europaeus.’” As proof of this natural equality of mind, he cited the Indians' bravery and skill in warfare, of which “we have multiplied proofs, because we have been the subjects on which they were exercised,” and their “eminence in oratory.” The example of Indian oratory which he brought forward was, of course, Logan's Lament.

Jefferson turned next to a comparison of Indians “in their present state with the Europeans North of the Alps, when the Roman arms and arts first crossed those mountains.” He pointed out that it took sixteen centuries before the Anglo-Saxons produced an Isaac Newton. The implication was clear: given time and exposure to European civilization, the Native Americans too could rise to the same level of culture as the whites, as Enlightenment theories of progress would predict.³ Writing to General Chastellux a few years later (in 1785), he declared that he had “seen some thousands [of Indians] myself, and conversed much with them, and have found in them a masculine, sound understanding … I believe the Indian to be in body and mind equal to the white man.”⁴

The question thus arose whether the Native Americans, when “civilized,” might be admitted to membership in the new republic. Jefferson does not seem to have advanced that idea at this period, but twenty years later he was to embrace it, confidentially. In a letter to Benjamin Hawkins in February 1803, he expressed the opinion that citizenship and amalgamation with whites was inevitable: “In truth, the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people. Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the United States, this is what the natural course of things will, of course, bring on, and it will be better to promote than to retard it … We have already had an application from a settlement of Indians to become citizens of the United States.”⁵ The means of promoting this idea was the conversion of the Indians to the white man's way of agriculture, domestic manufactures, and education—a policy to be pursued by Congress and President Jefferson in the ensuing years.

This vision of a Native American citizenry blending happily into white society depended upon Jefferson's belief in the inherent racial equality of Indians with whites and their innate capacity for climbing the ladder of cultural evolution. To the other ethnic minority within the bosom of the United States, the blacks of African descent, most of them slaves, Jefferson was less generous. In the section of the Notes devoted to his proposed revision of the laws of Virginia, he described blacks as physically ugly, offensive in body odor, and oversexed but underloving. “They are more ardent after their female, but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient.” But what truly disqualified blacks from membership in white society, according to Jefferson, was their inferiority in mental faculties. They were, he felt, “in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” In art and oratory, they stood far below the Indians, and although gifted in music, were incapable of writing a decent poem (Phyllis Wheatley's productions, he felt, were “below the dignity of criticism”).⁶

That said, he nevertheless deplored the immorality of the institution of slavery, although he defended what he regarded as the humane practices of Virginia slaveowners like himself and compared them favorably with those of ancient Rome, even though the Romans' slaves were mostly white. And he proposed, unsuccessfully, a bill for the emancipation of all slaves born after a certain date, thus anticipating a gradual abolition of slavery as current slaves eventually died. But these free blacks ought not be allowed to remain within the state (as emancipated slaves were not by current law). The deep-rooted prejudices among whites, and the memory of past injuries among blacks, “will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

The only solution was to educate the free black children in tillage and artisanship and then, when the females reached eighteen and the males twenty-one years, “they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper,” where they could have their own country—perhaps the West Indies or even Africa. To replace them, white immigrants should be invited to come to Virginia, lured by “proper inducements.” Failing such a solution, he foresaw in the perpetuation of the slave system the inevitable corruption of white masters, the degeneration of the yeomanry into sloth and depravity, until God himself intervened and permitted the “extirpation” of the slave masters. In an oft-quoted passage from the Notes, Jefferson wrote: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situations, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference.”⁷

This was Jefferson in apocalyptic mode. But there was something of the same tone underlying his hope for eventual amalgamation with the Indians. In the section on “The Aborigines” he drew attention to the virtual extinction of the native population of Virginia, and he lamented that “we have suffered so many Indian tribes already to extinguish” without saving even records of their languages.⁸ And there is discernible in his story of Logan's Lament a kind of mordant fascination with the image of the Indians as a conquered and dying race. For Jefferson did believe that those Native Americans who refused to sell their hunting grounds, now depleted of game, and adopt “civilization,” or who even took up arms against the United States, were destined for extinction.

THE TIDEWATER INDIANS OF VIRGINIA

“The Aborigines” provided a largely statistical review of the decline of the Indian population in Virginia. In 1743, when Jefferson was born, the Indians east of the Appalachian Mountains were already becoming a distant memory. The Algonkian-speaking chiefdoms of the Powhatan Confederacy, whose prosperous agricultural villages had spread throughout the Tidewater countryside at the beginning of the previous century, were now reduced to a remnant, a few bands of survivors of war and plague living on tiny allotments of land. The Siouan-speaking villagers of the Piedmont had also been greatly reduced in numbers, and most of their survivors had moved away to live as refugees among the Iroquois to the north and the Catawbas to the south. A few Susquehannocks from the Susquehanna valley, who had fled into the colony toward the end of the seventeenth century to join local Iroquoians (the Nottoways and Meherrins), clustered on small reservations in the south near the Carolina border.

“Very little can now be discovered of the subsequent history of these tribes severally,” Jefferson wrote. He counted as living descendants of the Powhatans only three or four men of the Mattapony tribe (“and they have more Negro than Indian blood in them”), living on fifty acres of land on the Mattapony River, and ten or twelve Pamunkeys, on three hundred acres of “very fertile land” on Pamunkey River. (Both reservations still exist, about thirty miles northwest of Williamsburg.) Of the Nottoways, “not a male is left. A few women constitute the remains of that tribe.”⁹

Actually, a good deal was known in Jefferson's time about the Powhatans, thanks to the writings of Captain John Smith and other early seventeenth-century chroniclers of Virginia. In addition, the watercolors of John White preserve vivid images of the appearance, the material culture, and the rituals of the nearby and culturally similar Carolina Algonkians. Jefferson was familiar with Smith's account, but he did not have access to White's watercolors. He did not discuss ethnographic information about the Powhatans or other Virginia Indians.¹⁰

The tribes living along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, and particularly those of the Powhatan Confederacy (which was actually a quasi-empire held together by force and hierarchy), were estimated by Jefferson to have numbered on the order of 2,400 warriors or 8,000 souls at the time of the arrival of the first colonists at Jamestown in 1607.¹¹ At first, relations between colonists and local tribes were by and large peaceable, both sides being eager for trade. But after Powhatan's death, his nephew Opechancanough, resentful of the tobacco planters' insatiable hunger for Indian land, in 1622 launched a surprise attack on the colonists that resulted in the death in one day of about 350 settlers and the devastation of all the settlements except those around Jamestown. A war of extermination was declared against the Indians that continued for fourteen years.

A second war in 1644, again led by Opechancanough, started with the death of 500 whites in the first day, but this conflict lasted only a couple of years. Opechancanough was captured and shot, and the confederacy disintegrated. The separate tribes made their own treaties of peace, abandoning much of their land in the process and accepting reservations, which were further reduced in size thereafter by piecemeal purchases. Despite these concessions, peace eluded the Powhatans: they were harassed by raiding Iroquois from the north and massacred in 1675 during Bacon's Rebellion by Virginians, who accused them of depredations actually committed by invading Susquehannocks.

These wars, the introduction of alcohol, and repeated epidemics of measles, smallpox, and other European diseases drastically reduced the Tidewater Indian population. A census taken in 1669 showed a total of 525 warriors or (using Jefferson's ratio of 10:3) 1,750 souls, a loss of 78 percent in the sixty-two years since the founding of Jamestown.¹² By 1705, when Robert Beverley published his History and Present State of Virginia, his total for the Powhatans plus other survivors was less than 500 warriors, and he concluded that “The Indians of Virginia are almost wasted.”¹³

The Middle Plantation treaties of 1677 had confirmed to the survivors their small reservations, for which each community paid a tribute of three arrows for the land and twenty beaver skins for protection each year. The protection was from neighboring Indians, of whom they were “much in fear.” Beverley observed that they “live poorly” and were a “harmless people.” In 1727, when William Byrd of Westover published his Natural History of Virginia in Switzerland (which he wrote in German in the hope of attracting good European farmers to the colony), he declared that there were “very few wild or native Indians in Virginia.” He still allowed them as many as 500 men able to bear arms but declared them to be “excessively gentle and easy-going.”¹⁴

Jefferson's estimate that in the 1780s the last of the Powhatans amounted to not more than four Mattapony men and twelve Pamunkey men, with only the eldest preserving “the last vestiges on earth, as far as we know, of the Powhatan language,” would seem to have been wildly inaccurate.¹⁵ James Mooney, an authority on Native American demography and especially on the Indians of the southeast, asserted in 1928 that the Powhatan remnants in Jefferson's time “must have numbered not far from 1,000,” and he counted at the time of his writing at least 700.¹⁶ More than a thousand persons claiming descent from Powhatan ancestors—Pamunkey, Mattapony, and Chickahominy—still inhabit small state reservations and other rural communities in eastern Virginia.¹⁷

It is difficult to understand Jefferson's underestimation of the number of surviving Tidewater Algonkians. The sources that he cited were out of date, the latest being Beverley's 1705 book, but he must have been familiar with the region where the Indian communities were located, east of Richmond or north of Williamsburg. When Jefferson was in college and later when he was a practicing lawyer, member of the House of Burgesses, and finally governor, the Algonkians were still paying their annual tribute to the governor at Williamsburg and later Richmond. Perhaps Jefferson's error can be ascribed to the existence of small, uncounted remnant groups living in out-of-the-way niches who later joined the reservation communities. Whatever the case may have been, it should be kept in mind that Jefferson was writing a usable history, intended to promote confidence among Europeans who might wish to invest or emigrate to a safe and secure Virginia, one whose Indian population no longer posed a threat to white settlement.¹⁸

THE INDIANS OF THE VIRGINIA PIEDMONT

In Captain Smith's time, the stretch of country between the fall line and the Blue Ridge Mountains—and perhaps also the Valley of Virginia west of the Blue Ridge—from Maryland south to the Carolina border was occupied by tribes of Siouan Indians who spoke a language radically different from that of the Tidewater Algonkians. Smith reported that they were organized in two large, allied confederacies, the northern being called the Mannahoac and the southern the Monacan; modern usage embraces both under the rubric Monacan. Like the Powhatans, the Siouan tribes of the Piedmont depended upon a combination of female horticulture and male hunting for subsistence but would seem to have been less hierarchial in social organization than the Powhatans. They may also have traded their own Blue Ridge copper with the Powhatans during lulls in the fighting, and may have served as middlemen, conveying copper, iron trade goods, and wampum from the north down to the Chesapeake region.

Smith and his colonists visited outlying territories of the Piedmont tribes on a couple of occasions, with some armed conflict, but he depended largely on information given him by the Powhatans and by Mosoc, a bearded captive Monacan, and by an informant who described village locations. Later, travelers' journals and official accounts recorded the changing locations of the Monacans, who by 1700 were coming to be known by other terms applied to various component groups, such as the Saponis, Tutelos, and Ocaneechis.¹⁹

Very little cultural information is revealed in either Smith's or later accounts, except for the narrative of William Byrd, who served on the commission that surveyed the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728. The surveying party hired a Saponi Indian named Bearskin to accompany it as a hunter. Bearskin spoke enough English to provide some account of the traditional religious beliefs and rituals of his people, and Byrd included the substance of these interviews in his journal. Bearskin came from the Indian town at Fort Christanna in southern Virginia. Two Indian towns had been established there in 1714 as a collection point for the several tribes of the Piedmont who had a generation earlier fled into North Carolina. In 1728 remnants of at least four Monacan subgroups, named by Byrd the Ocaneechis, the Saponis, the Tuteloes, and the Steukenhocks, were living there, all “speaking the same language, and using the same Customs.”²⁰

In later years (in 1816 and 1817), Jefferson was called upon to evaluate the authorship and authenticity of Byrd's still unpublished “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” and in that correspondence he revealed no prior acquaintance with it.²¹ But Jefferson can hardly have been totally unaware of Byrd's work, for in 1751 his father and Joshua Fry had run a continuation of Byrd's line westward into the mountains and had published their famous map of Virginia based in part on his surveys.

In addition to Byrd's narrative, Jefferson might also have been aware of John Lederer's book, published in 1672, describing his travels in Virginia and the Carolinas during which he visited several Saponi villages.²² Apart from Smith's accounts, however, Jefferson's only cited source for the numbers and locations of the Piedmont tribes actually living in Virginia is the 1669 official census of Virginia Indians, which lists fifty Tutelo warriors living with other tribes in southeastern Virginia and thirty Monacan warriors living in a town at the fork of the James River, above the falls.²³

If there was little information available to Jefferson about the culture of the Piedmont Indians, there was even less about their language. Captain Smith recognized that they spoke a different tongue from the Powhatans but was able to communicate, on the brief occasions of contact, through Powhatan interpreters. Neither Smith nor anyone else seems to have collected any Siouan vocabularies to permit linguistic comparison, although the place names and translations provided Byrd by Bearskin might have served that purpose (but Byrd's history was not published until 1844). Jefferson gained the impression that the Powhatans, the Manahoacs, and the Monacans spoke languages of “three different stocks, so radically different that interpreters were necessary where they transacted business” and that the several tribes that constituted each of the three confederacies in turn spoke various dialects perhaps mutually intelligible.²⁴

Jefferson himself, in his later vocabulary-collecting days, never obtained a word list from any of the Siouan remnants, and his pleas for salvage of the native languages before they became extinct came too late for local antiquarians. Not until nearly a hundred years later was Tutelo at last recognized as a Siouan language related to the languages of the Siouan-speaking tribes of the west. In 1870 the linguist and ethnologist Horatio Hale visited the Cayuga settlement on the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River in Ontario and there met Nikonha, the last pure-blooded Tutelo, allegedly 106 years old. From him Hale obtained a vocabulary of nearly one hundred words that clearly identified his language as Siouan. Nikonha died the next year, but Hale was able to obtain more words and phrases from a couple of “children of Tutelo mothers by Iroquois fathers.” This additional information enabled him to construct a preliminary analysis of the grammar. In 1883 Hale published his linguistic results in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, along with a historical sketch of the Tutelos and their companions and a speculative theory that the Siouan tribes of the west in fact had emigrated from an eastern homeland. Today there are apparently no surviving fluent speakers of the Tutelo language.²⁵

It is sad to contemplate that Siouan languages spoken by thousands of Native Virginians were apparently never learned by any white man, that not even a vocabulary was recorded until over 250 years after white people encountered them, when the language itself was on the edge of extinction. It may have been the Siouan tribes of the Piedmont that Jefferson was thinking of when he wrote in the Notes, “It is to be lamented, then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke.”²⁶

Jefferson's only mention in the Notes of Piedmont Indians in his own neighborhood was a notice of mortality. There was a barrow, or burial mound, containing the bones of about a thousand persons, located on low ground near the Rivanna River, about two miles above its main fork at Charlottesville and not far from the site of the former Monacan Indian town of Monasickapanough. By the time that Peter Jefferson and other settlers arrived in the 1730s and 40s, no Indians had resided in the immediate area for many years, and on the mound itself grew trees as much as twelve inches in diameter.

Probably in the late 40s or early 50s, according to Thomas Jefferson, a group of Indians visited the mound. They “went through the woods directly to it, without any instructions or inquiry, and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road [probably the road from Richmond to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley], from which they had detoured about half a dozen miles to pay this visit, and pursued their journey.”²⁷

Some time before writing his Notes, Jefferson had a trench dug across the middle of the mound, so as to reveal the series of successive strata deposited during the gradual buildup of the mortuary. He was able to conclude that it contained the remains of men, women, and children, the disarticulated skeletons bundled together as if they were periodically being given a secondary burial after the flesh had been removed.²⁸

Research by modern ethnohistorians fills out and mostly confirms Jefferson's brief account of the Piedmont Siouans' demise and departure from Virginia. Before the 1670s they lived beyond the frontier settlements, their lands unoccupied by whites, alternately feuding and trading with the Powhatans to the east and with the Massawomecks to the west. Iroquois warriors from the north attacked the Monacans, who took refuge still farther to the south, first moving onto the islands in the Roanoke River, near the North Carolina border, at the Ocaneechi trading center. By 1700 these refugees, now known as Tutelos and Saponis, had moved southward to take shelter with the Tuscaroras in North Carolina and probably with the Catawbas in South Carolina. But the Tuscaroras themselves were dislodged by the whites in a major war in 1711, and many began moving northward into Pennsylvania in 1712.

A few Tuscaroras, and associated Tutelo and Conoy fugitives from earlier Iroquois assaults in Virginia and Maryland, remained behind, most of them after 1714 on the Roanoke River near Fort Christanna. Eventually the Tutelo and Saponi remnants in Pennsylvania joined the Iroquois in New York and after the Revolution moved onto the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, where a few descendants remain to this day. People claiming to be Monacans also live in Amherst County, Virginia, in the midst of the Blue Ridge mountains, on the upper reaches of the James River, and are active in recovering their ancient history.²⁹

THE MYSTERIOUS MASSAWOMECKS

The ancient Indian tribes of Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia were of little concern to eighteenth-century Virginians. Of far more importance, as young Jefferson grew up, were the Indians to the westward. Beyond the Blue Ridge, beyond the newly settled Valley of Virginia, beyond the Appalachian Mountains lay imperial Virginia's vaster domain, ranging from the North Carolina boundary northward across the Ohio valley and westward in a great swath to the Pacific Ocean (at least as Virginians interpreted their 1609 charter). The land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, called the Ohio country for the Ohio River which bisected it, was occupied in Jefferson's time by diverse tribes who had moved into the vacancy created by the Iroquois wars in the seventeenth century. These tribes included, among others, the Sac and Fox, the Illinois, the Miamis, and the “Three Fires”—the Ottawas, Potawatomies, and Chippewas—and even more recently, in the eastern part of the region, tribal remnants from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Canada, especially the Delawares, the Shawnees, and the Wyandots, accompanied by some Iroquois, locally called Mingoes.

South of the Ohio River, the demographic pattern was different. What are now the states of West Virginia and Kentucky (but were then the western counties of the colony of Virginia) in the seventeenth and eighteenth century seem to have been home to few resident Indians, although in previous centuries mound-building cultures had flourished there and north of the river as well. Occasionally hunting parties from the Cherokees and Catawbas to the south, and no doubt also hunters from the north, penetrated the region, and for a time there were a few Shawnee villages, but mostly it was traversed by war parties of Iroquois coming down to strike their enemies, particularly the Cherokees and Catawbas. Kentucky came to have the reputation of a “dark and bloody ground.”

Success in the wars of the seventeenth century encouraged the Iroquois to claim, in their perennial negotiations with the British, conquest of the whole Ohio country, from the Great Lakes south at least to the Virginia-North Carolina boundary. This assumed conquest, in their eyes, reduced the status of any actual Indian residents of the region to mere tributaries, tenants at will, whose lands could be sold by the Iroquois to Europeans whenever they chose. Colonial governors and land speculators were only too glad to take the Iroquois claim at face value, on such occasions as the Lancaster treaty of 1744. Unfortunately for Virginia, and later for the United States, the resident tribes did not accept the Iroquois interpretation of their land tenure.

None of this information appears in the text of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. He contented himself with one brief paragraph: “Westward of all these tribes [i.e. the Indians of the Tidewater and Piedmont], beyond the mountains, and extending to the Great Lakes, were the Massawomecks, a most powerful confederacy, who harassed unremittingly the Powhatans and Manahoacs. These were probably the ancestors of the tribes known at present by the name of the Six Nations.”³⁰ This is an extraordinary statement, both for the positive misinformation it contains and for the failure to mention facts with which Jefferson should have been familiar.

Jefferson's identification of the Massawomecks with the Six Nations Iroquois is mistaken. “Massawomeck” is the word originally used by the Powhatans of Captain Smith's time to denote their enemies to the north and west and probably did not refer to the Iroquois at all. Furthermore, in the seventeenth century, and indeed even in the eighteenth, the five tribes that made up the original Iroquois Confederacy never lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas lived in villages in what is now New York State, extending roughly from the Hudson River west to Lake Erie. The sixth tribe, the Tuscaroras—also speakers of an Iroquoian language—emigrated from North Carolina to Pennsylvania and New York after 1712. Many took refuge among the Five Nations and eventually were accepted as the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. About the middle of the eighteenth century, some Iroquois people (including Logan) did make their residence in what is now eastern Ohio and became known as Mingoes.

A second piece of misleading information (if not misinformation) concerns the number of Indians in the various tribes west of the Appalachians. The section of Notes on the State of Virginia on “The Aborigines” concludes with a census and gazetteer of the Indian tribes of the United States. This census, arranged in tabular form, reproduces the numbers contained in several reports by well-known authorities: Colonel Bouquet, Thomas Hutchins, and George Croghan. Some figures were provided informally by John Dodge, who was Jefferson's star witness against Governor Hamilton “the Hair Buyer”; Jefferson later came to consider them unreliable. The entries in the original lists, however, were not figures for the total population but were rather warrior counts, in keeping with the traditional practice of estimating only the number of fighting men that a tribe could mobilize. Conventionally, the figure for the total population was obtained by multiplying the warrior count by a factor of four or five (although elsewhere Jefferson used a factor of three).

But Jefferson's list does not mention that he is presenting only the warrior count; he introduces the list as a statement of “the nations and numbers of the Aborigines which still exist in a respectable and independent form.” Thus, for instance, he cites John Dodge's estimate of the Six Nations population in 1779 as 1,600 souls; the total actually was on the order of 10,000. Furthermore, Jefferson's omission of the Virginia Indians implied that they were extinct. Actually, as we have seen, several hundred still lived on small reservations and enclaves. The omission of the information that the numbers were only warrior counts was most likely a slip of the pen; but however it came about, it had the practical effect of minimizing whites' apprehension of Indian interference with their settlements.³¹

Why did Jefferson assert that the Iroquois Confederacy (the Six Nations) or their ancestors were the sole occupants of the country west of the Appalachian Mountains in the seventeenth century? The answer would appear to be simple economic interest. In 1722, 1744, and 1768 the colony of Virginia, and land companies and speculators associated with it, bought a large part of that land from the Iroquois and were prepared to acquire the rest from the same “owner.” Although in 1781 Virginia was preparing to cede to Congress her claims to land north of the Ohio, in the Notes Jefferson was silently validating Virginia's exclusive claim to Kentucky by asserting that the Six Nations had once held title and that such other populations as could be found there were of minor importance. Jefferson's identification of the Massawomecks as the aboriginal proprietors of all that part of the Old Dominion lying immediately to the west of the Appalachians, and as being the ancestors of the Six Nations themselves, thus appears to be a peculiar and arbitrary construction.

In another confused passage, he suggested that the Monacans, “better known latterly by the name of Tuscaroras,” were probably connected with the Massawomecks and with the Eries, “a nation formerly inhabiting on the Ohio,” who spoke a language akin to Tuscarora.³² These errors of identification likewise lent support to Virginia's legal claim to have purchased the Piedmont, the Shenandoah valley, and the territories west of the Appalachians from the Six Nations at Albany in 1722, at Lancaster in 1744, and at Fort Stanwix in 1768.

Scholarly opinion about the actual identity of the Massawomecks has been divided. Some, like Jefferson, have concluded that they were indeed the Five Nations (that is, the Six Nations minus the Tuscaroras). Jefferson's own authority for his assertion that the Massawomecks were the Five Nations, or their ancestors, would seem to have been the Reverend William Stith, a native of Virginia and president of William and Mary College. Stith's History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia was published in Williamsburg in 1747, and Jefferson listed it right after Captain Smith's work in his bibliographical essay in the Notes. There he described Stith as “a man of classical learning,” though he criticized his work as being choked with “details often too minute to be tolerable.”³³ But Jefferson did follow Stith's characterization of the Massawomecks as “a great and powerful Nation of Indians, inhabiting upon some of the Lakes of Canada, and the original perhaps of those, at present known by the Name of the Senecas or Six Nations.”³⁴

The most recent, and authoritative, opinion on the identity of the Massawomecks is that of James Pendergast, who concluded that the Massawomecks were an Iroquoian-speaking tribe, or group of tribes, who early in the seventeenth century occupied a region between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, west of the Five Nations, where they were known to the French as Antouhonorons. They began to raid and trade into the Chesapeake Bay region sometime prior to 1627 and eventually migrated south to a location along the headwaters of the Potomac, Monongahela, and Youghiogheny rivers, where they continued their commerce with the Virginia Indians well into the middle of the seventeenth century. Their fate thereafter is not known.³⁵

JEFFERSON'S STYLE OF ETHNOLOGY

Jefferson's approach to Native American ethnology—the study of customs, beliefs, and institutions—tended to be historical. The section on “The Aborigines” of Virginia is entirely historical, apart from the table listing tribes and their present locations and numbers. So few Native Americans still remained in the part of the state east of the mountains that his account of them amounted to little more than a recital of the names of the extinct tribes and confederacies.

Next followed the account of his excavation of the Indian burial mound along the Rivanna River, near Monticello. His methodology was exemplary and well suited to the theoretical question that prompted him, namely, the popular opinion that such mounds were the mass graves of victims of a furious battle, buried on the spot. After initial surface collecting of a disorderly mixture of bony fragments, Jefferson ordered a perpendicular trench to be dug across the barrow, which revealed the stratigraphy of the site and permitted rational inference about the history of the mound and the method of interment (the deposit of collections of bones at successive intervals, each deposit being covered by a layer of earth). As noted earlier, archaeologists have given Jefferson high marks for his sophisticated excavating technique.³⁶ Jefferson did not continue his archeological researches into burial mounds, however, even when retirement would have given him the opportunity.

The only place in the Notes where Jefferson describes Indian customary behavior is in the essay “Productions Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal.” It betrays little interest in the details of native social institutions, which, of course, he was committed to replacing with “civilized” ones, and it ignored not only the monumental earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys but also the high cultures of the Incas and Aztecs. The commentary contra Buffon emphasizes the estimable moral qualities and intellectual abilities of the Indians, not what later scholars would refer to as their culture. He appraises their character in a style perhaps reminiscent of dinner-table conversation among a family evaluating the worthiness of their neighbors. He makes no mention of the rules of kinship, those systems of consanguinity and affinity that were the backbone of Native American social structure and that would fascinate scholars of the next generation, beyond recognizing affection for children and “other connections.” He praises the “care” and “indulgence” with which children are treated, and the heartbreak felt when they died.

Jefferson does not deal with the division of labor by gender, whereby the women were responsible for producing the crops of corn, squash, and beans that were the major staples of the native diet. He correctly notes that all forms of compulsion are prohibited in Indian society (a cardinal virtue, in his eyes), but he ignores major features of the political organization, such as the role of women in nominating the traditional chiefs who represented clans and lineages or the recent ascendancy of nonhereditary “chiefs” who achieved eminence as brave warriors and orators eloquent in council, or the structure of ethnic confederacies like that of the Iroquois. In the Notes he has nothing to say about religious beliefs and rituals, which of course he would be apt to dismiss as superstitious nonsense in any case.³⁷

Jefferson was modest in his claim to be an authority on Native Americans. “Of the Indians of South America I know nothing,” he admitted, and he labeled the available published accounts of them as mere “fables.” He gave some credit to more general works on human nature and to what he himself had “seen of man, white, red, and black.” Of the Indian of North America, “I can speak … somewhat from my own knowledge, but more from the information of others better acquainted with him, and on whose truth and judgment I can rely.”³⁸

Jefferson's most trusted advisor on Indian ethnology was Charles Thomson, to whom Jefferson sent (by the hand of Marbois) a copy of the Notes in 1781. In response, Thomson wrote an extended commentary on Indian affairs, which Jefferson published in the Appendix to the Notes in 1800. Jefferson probably first became acquainted with Thomson when this upright scholarly gentleman was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1785, and he later knew him as the perennial secretary of the Continental Congress. The two corresponded regularly on a variety of scientific subjects, and when Thomson—a devoted Presbyterian and a classicist—produced his own translation of the Old Testament from the Greek, about the time that Jefferson was completing his “Philosophy of Jesus,” they exchanged views on the true Christian morality.³⁹

Thomson had a wide reputation as an absolutely honest man. He had traveled in Indian country, visiting the Delaware settlement at Wyoming along the Susquehanna in company with the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, and had served as secretary to Teedyuscung, the Delaware Indian spokesman at treaties at Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1757 and 1758. His notes were so carefully taken that they became the official minutes. In 1759 Thomson published a notorious book, Enquiry into the Causes of the Alienation of the Delaware and Shawanese Indians from the British Interest, charging that mistreatment of the Delawares by the Crown and the colonists had caused them to take the French side in the French and Indian War and to lay waste the frontiers of Pennsylvania.

Thomson became known, in the words of an admiring biographer, as “the leading authority on all questions relating to the Indians.”⁴⁰ His “commentaries” on the Indian material in the Notes are partly a corroboration of Jefferson's refutation of Buffon, point by point, with allusions to moral similarities between the Indians and the ancient Hebrews and Romans. He too made sweeping generalizations: “All the nations of Indians in North America lived in the hunter state, and depended for subsistence on hunting, fishing, and the spontaneous fruits of the earth, and a kind of grain which was planted and gathered by the women, and is now known by the name of Indian corn. Long potatoes, pumkins of various kinds, and squashes were also found in use among them. They had no flocks, herds, or tamed animals of any kind.” This is accurate enough except for the omission of reference to beans, an important part of the diet, and of course it does not describe contemporary Indians who had been more or less acculturated.

He goes on to describe the Indians' “patriarchal” style of government in some detail, their mode of burial, and the history of several wars. Thomson is perhaps weakest in identifying the various tribes outside the territories of the Iroquois, whom he also calls Mingoes (a term generally used to refer to transplanted Iroquois in the Ohio valley), mismatching the Monacans with the Tuscaroras and the Saponis with the Unami branch of the Delawares, and mislocating the Tutelos as aboriginal residents of the Delmarva peninsula (that is, the eastern shore of the Chesapeake).⁴¹

Still, Thomson was one of the best choices Jefferson could have made as critical reader of the Indian portions of his manuscript. Most of the other colonial authorities on the Indians were unavailable, and the earlier Indian agents and superintendents, who were generally very well-informed, were either dead or relocated in Canada or Florida. Jefferson did write to Thomas Walker but seems to have gotten no useful response from him. He also consulted George Rogers Clark, whose later elaboration on the Cresap affair Jefferson mostly ignored and concealed, and Thomas Hutchins, for population estimates. At that time he seems not to have known well enough the Moravian and other missionaries who might have given helpful comments, although he did consult later with John Heckewelder on the Cresap affair and published his lengthy discussion in the Appendix.

FROM SAVAGISM TO THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY

The picture of the Indians presented in Notes on the State of Virginia was painted with a broad brush—a panorama of universal attributes of character and temperament supposedly shared by all Native Americans. It articulated a general view which Roy Harvey Pearce has characterized as an “American theory of savagism”—that “the savage [is] one whom circumstances, for good and for bad, have held in an early state of society.” Pearce, indeed, suggested that the idea of savagism was “first outlined” by Jefferson.⁴² This schematic view of the Indians was derived in part from the Scottish philosophers' teaching that a moral sense of right and wrong is part of human nature, in part from a belief in the importance of environment in shaping the manners and moral refinement of different societies, and in part from the Enlightenment belief in universal stages of progress toward modern civilized society. Thus the Indians could be regarded as inherently the equals of whites and yet as culturally inferior, childlike, in their savage state.⁴³

The theory of a scale of progress or Great Chain of Being was fully current in the literature of the Enlightenment by the time Jefferson was writing in the 1780s.⁴⁴ Montesquieu, one of Jefferson's most closely read authors, had in 1748 in De l'esprit des lois sketched out the familiar three-tiered schema of human progress from savagery to barbarism to civilization. And William Robertson's History of America, which appeared in 1777 and which Jefferson regarded as essential reading for any aspiring law student (despite his rejection of Robertson's repetition of Buffon's thesis), presented the conventional typology of savage, barbarian, and civilized man.

This Enlightenment belief in universal progress was explicitly invoked by Secretary of War Henry Knox in his proposal to President Washington in 1789 to commence a program of civilizing the Indians.⁴⁵ Jefferson, of course, supported the Indian civilization policy throughout his life. But he also shared with Knox the belief that “favorable circumstances” were needed for a people to make progress. Unfavorable circumstances might include an unfriendly environment or, in the case of the blacks, a racially based incapacity to rise above a certain rung on the ladder of perfection.

Later in life, with more information, he became explicit in his delineation of the positions of the Native Americans on the ladder of cultural progress. Writing to a friend in 1824, he observed: “Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.”⁴⁶

Despite these generalizations, Jefferson was aware of the need for specific studies of individual tribes, each of which had its own unique language, customs, and history. He may have had this in mind when he called for a “natural history” approach to ethnology. “To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history.”⁴⁷ His proposal in the Notes for reform of the Brafferton Institution at William and Mary envisaged resident missionaries who would move from tribe to tribe spreading the Gospel and collecting information on the cultures, languages, and histories of Native American tribes.⁴⁸ Evidently Jefferson was less interested in teaching Indian boys Latin and Greek, or even in converting them to Christianity, than in obtaining information that would contribute to his own study of the origin of tribes and of the Indian “race.”

Jefferson's 1793 instructions, on behalf of the American Philosophical Society, to the French botanist André Michaux for his exploring expedition up the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean explicitly requested him to record “the names, numbers, & dwellings of the inhabitants, and such particularities as you can learn of their history, connection with each other, languages, manners, state of society & of the arts & commerce among them.”⁴⁹ The plans of the American Philosophical Society's 1797 Committee on History included inquiry “into the Customs, Manners, Languages and Character of the Indian Nations, ancient and modern.”⁵⁰

Jefferson's instructions in June 1803 to Meriwether Lewis in preparation for the great trip to the Pacific Ocean called for many ethnographic details on the Indian tribes he would meet along the way ….⁵¹ Lewis and Clark received additional questions from Benjamin Rush and Caspar Wistar, the eminent Philadelphia physicians and members of the Philosophical Society to whom Jefferson had advised them to turn for guidance. Rush in particular was something of an ethnologist himself, having in 1774 published his Enquiry into the Natural History of Medicine among the Indians in North America. He had delivered a short list of questions to Alexander McGillivray on the occasion of the Creek chief's visit to New York, and another to Timothy Pickering on the eve of his visit to the Senecas in 1791. Rush sent his list of some twenty questions to Lewis in May 1803, covering “Physical History & medicine,” “Morals,” and “Religion.”⁵²

Clark collated Rush's list, another list from Wistar, possibly some from Benjamin Smith Barton, and Jefferson's suggestions, along with, no doubt, some thoughts of his own, into a master set of notes and queries in 1804. (Later in the century, “Notes and Queries” would become the technical term for this kind of check-list ethnography.) Clark's list of nearly one hundred topics amounted to an outline of cultural materials, divided into ten categories: “1st. Physical History and Medicine. 2nd. Relative to Morals. 3rd. Relative to Religion. 4th. Traditions or National History. 5th. Agriculture and Domestic economy. 6th. Fishing & Hunting. 7th. War. 8th. Amusements. 9th. Clothing Dress & Ornaments. [10th.] Customs & Manners Generally.”⁵³

These categories cover much of what a twentieth-century ethnographer would include under the concept of “culture.” What are most conspicuously missing are entries for kinship and political organization. In their journals and reports, Lewis and Clark did record much cultural information, the value of which has been emphasized by twentieth-century ethnohistorians, but unfortunately none of it became available in print until a two-volume history of the expedition by Nicholas Biddle, based on the explorers' journals, was published in 1814. The full text of the Lewis and Clark journals did not see print until a century and more later, beginning with the Philosophical Society's manuscript edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites in 1901 and culminating in the recent edition of Gary Moulton.⁵⁴

But a partial account of the fruits of their inquiries was transmitted to the President and the secretary of war from the Mandan village on the upper Missouri in the spring of 1805, and the President communicated it in turn to the Congress. Eventually it was published in the American State Papers, Vol. 1, Indian Affairs. This “statistical view of the Indian nations inhabiting the territory of Louisiana, and the countries adjacent to its Northern and Western boundaries,” contained information tabulated according to nineteen categories ….⁵⁵ Thus, concerning the Mandans, about whom Lewis and Clark were well informed, having spent the winter of 1804-1805 at the Mandan village, they recorded a rather bland account ….⁵⁶

Lewis reported that the Mandans had “no idea of an exclusive right to any portion of country,” an assertion of dubious validity. With respect to some of the tribes farther down the Missouri, he made a point of ascertaining the possibility of inducing them to make room for Indian tribes from the eastern side of the Mississippi, a possibility the more probable the less territory the local tribes claimed. Thus, of the Grand Osage he wrote that two villages might be prevailed on “to relocate and thus leave a sufficient scope of country for the Shawnees, Delawares, Miamies, and Kickapoos.” The Otoes likewise would not “object to the introduction of any well-disposed Indians.”⁵⁷

The most richly textured observations in Lewis and Clark's journals were made of those tribes (such as the Mandans and the Clatsops on the Pacific coast) among whom the explorers spent several months' time instead of just passing through their territory as quickly as possible. Thus, among the Mandans, Clark's journal records much detail about a ceremony in which young warriors required their wives to have sexual intercourse with respected older men, or with interesting visitors—members of the Corps of Discovery, for example. (In Biddle's published summary of the expedition's history, this event is discreetly described in Latin.) Among the Clatsops, customs relating to trade with Europeans, who had been well-established there long before Lewis and Clark arrived, were subjects of prime interest. But the explorers had not been asked nor trained to serve as professional ethnologists. While their observations have been invaluable to latter-day ethnohistorians, they did not advance the art of comprehensive ethnographic description.

JEFFERSON'S CABINET OF CURIOS

As early as the 1780s Jefferson began his cabinet of curios and mementos in the entrance hall and library at Monticello, starting with the two painted buffalo hides from the Kaskaskia chief in 1780, one painted with a battle scene, the other with a native map of the lower Missouri River basin. In the Notes, as part of his defense of Native American genius, he remarked, “The Indians will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.”⁵⁸ He had little opportunity to expand his collection in the 1780s; relations with most of the Indian nations were not peaceable until after the war, and then he was off to Paris. But in the 1790s the collection at Monticello probably expanded somewhat, and it was thereafter greatly augmented with numerous items collected by Lewis and Clark and other Indian agents and philosophical gentlemen on the frontiers.

Jefferson's Indian Hall generally impressed visitors to the house; one guest described it as “the most varied complete collection that has ever been made,” containing “offensive and defensive arms, clothes, ornaments, and utensils of the different savage tribes of North America.” It was an extremely heterogeneous cabinet, full of all sorts of things hung on the walls in great profusion: portraits of great men, including Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Bacon, Newton, and Locke; paintings of classical subjects; mounted heads and horns of wild animals; minerals and crystals; fossil shells and bones, including the jaws of a mastodon; and, as Silvio Bedini puts it, “with aboriginal art and artifacts layered over the whole”: buffalo robes, peace pipes, clothing, war clubs, bows and arrows, shields (some of them hanging from horns and antlers), and wampum. The Indian materials evidently were classified as natural curiosities, memorabilia, curious productions of the New World's antique human inhabitants, shown along with extinct animals like the mastodon and Megalonyx Jeffersoni (the giant sloth).

No complete list of Jefferson's collection exists; apparently he left no catalogue of his own, and after his death the collection was dispersed, passing through various hands, some of it finding a resting place at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Harvard University. Lewis and Clark sent three shipments of artifacts to Jefferson in Washington. The first, accompanying a delegation of Osage Indians, arrived in July 1804 and probably included mostly Osage items; their fate is unrecorded, except for some pieces now at the Peabody. The second, and largest, came from Fort Mandan in August 1805 and consisted of Mandan artifacts. It was divided, as Lewis requested, between Monticello and the Peale Museum in Philadelphia (located at Philosophical Hall). Jefferson kept a Mandan bow and a quiver of arrows, a cooking pot, four buffalo robes and other items of dress, and a buffalo hide painted with a representation of a famous battle. A third shipment containing items from the northwest coast, including Clatsop hats, was sent from St. Louis on the return of the expedition in the fall of 1806.

How carefully Jefferson recorded the provenance of his artifacts—by tribe, by collector, by date, by location, and so on—is not clear. The surviving artifacts at the Peabody are generally “attributed” to tribal groups or culture areas on the basis of stylistic features and information by correspondents and observers. The miscellany of items in the Peabody collection includes (putatively) a Mandan eagle-bone whistle and buffalo robe, a Sac and Fox tobacco pouch, a flute from the northern Plains Indians, an Osage warrior's insignia, a Crow cradle, and an Ojibwa knife sheath.⁵⁹

Collecting Indian curios was an avocation of Jefferson's friends and associates as well. In February 1797 a resident of the western country, George Turner, a member of the American Philosophical Society's 1797 Committee on History, donated to the society a remarkable collection of nearly twenty items from a number of tribes: boys' leggings, a “Calumet of Peace,” and a “Conjurors' Mask,” from the Missouri; arrows made by the Sacs and by the Miamis, a sea-otter skin blanket acquired by the celebrated British explorer Alexander Mackenzie on the northwest coast in 1794, a wooden statue of a beaver from the Kaskaskias, a pair of garters “tipped with tin and Porcupine quills” from the Wabash and another pair from the Creeks; and various items with tribal provenance unspecified or of archaeological origin.⁶⁰ Where these items were deposited is not clear; probably they were displayed in Peale's Museum on the premises. Some of Peale's collection and other artifacts belonging to the society eventually came to rest in the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology and Archeology.

The allusion to Mackenzie is interesting because it suggests a possible contact of Jefferson with the first European to cross the continent and reach the Pacific Ocean—an object contemplated in the society's Michaux expedition in 1793. Mackenzie, who visited Philadelphia in 1798, probably gave Turner the blanket at that time. But there is no record of a visit by Mackenzie to the society, or of a meeting with Jefferson, and his book describing the adventurous journey did not appear until late in 1801.⁶¹

In any case, the information to be gained about the particular cultures of specific Native American communities from explorers' accounts and poorly documented collections of artifacts was far too thin and skimpy to lead to anything approaching the standards of ethnological research that came into vogue in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The hallmark of the later disciplines of anthropology and sociology was precisely the requirement that data be collected by the sort of “philosophic observer” that Jefferson once alluded to, men (and women) who resided among the subjects of study, spoke the language, and were there for the primary purpose of research.

Notes

1. Boyd, Papers, vol. 6, pp. 139, 159-170.

2. Peden, Notes, p. 43.

3. Jefferson's celebrated defense of the Native Americans, and his notorious denigration of blacks, are to be found in Peden's edition of Notes, pp. 58-64, 138-143.

4. Peterson, Writings, p. 801, TJ to Chastellux, June 7, 1785.

5. Bergh, Writings, vol. 9, p. 363.

6. Peden, Notes, pp. 138-143.

7. Ibid., pp. 138-143, 162-163.

8. Ibid., p. 101.

9. Peden, Notes, pp. 96-97.

10. Smith's writings and his map, first published in 1612, have been republished in several editions. A one-volume edition is Karen O. Kupperman, ed., Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Jefferson knew at least one of Smith's works, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), and referred to it as a principal source in the Notes, p. 177. The watercolors of John White, one of the earlier settlers at Raleigh's colony of Roanoke, were presented as woodcuts in Theodore DeBry's Report (Frankfurt, 1590) but were not reproduced in color until 1964. Jefferson does not mention DeBry in the bibliography in Notes, and it is not listed as part of his library in E. Millicent Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (Washington: Library of Congress, 1952-1958).

11. Ibid., p. 93.

12. Ibid., p. 95.

13. Louis B. Wright, ed., History and Present State of Virginia, by Robert Beverly (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), p. 232.

14. William K. Boyd, ed., William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929), p. 4.

15. Peden, Notes, p. 96.

16. James Mooney, “Powhatan,” in Bulletin 30.

17. Christian T. Feast, “Virginia Algonquians,” in Sturtevant, Handbook, vol. 15, pp. 253-270.

18. The most comprehensive and detailed accounts of Powhatan culture and history are Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries and The Powhatan Indians of Virginia (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). See also Robert S. Grumet, Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today's Northeastern United States in the Seventeenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

19. For surveys of the ethnohistory of the Piedmont, see Jeffrey L. Hantman, “Between Powhatan and Quirank: Reconstructing Monacan Culture and History in the Context of Jamestown,” American Anthropologist 92 (1990): 684; Jeffrey L. Hantman, “Powhatan's Relations with the Piedmont Monacans,” in Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan's Foreign Relations 1500-1772 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 94-111; Jeffrey L. Hantman and Gary Dunham, “The Enlightened Archaeologist,” Archaeology, May/June 1993, pp. 44-49; and David J. Bushnell, Jr., “Virginia before Jamestown,” in Essays in Historical Anthropology in North America (Washington: Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 100, 1940), p. 144.

20. Boyd, William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line, pp. 98-102, 308-310. See also Hantman's forthcoming book on the Monacans.

21. APS, Records of the Historical and Literary Committee, TJ to DuPonceau, November 7, 1817.

22. See, for example, Knights and Cummings' edition of the Discoveries of John Lederer, a late seventeenth-century traveler through Piedmont Siouan country. Douglas L. Knights and William P. Cummings, eds., The Discoveries of John Lederer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1958).

23. Peden, Notes, pp. 94-95.

24. Ibid., pp. 92, 97, 101.

25. Horatio Hale, “The Tutelo Tribe and Language,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 21 (1883): 9-11.

26. Peden, Notes, p. 101.

27. Ibid., p. 100.

28. Ibid., pp. 98-100.

29. Mooney in Siouan Tribes of the East took up Hale's suggestion of an eastern origin for the western Siouans. Frank Speck, The Tutelo Spirit Adoption Ceremony, (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1942), p. 9, laments the demise of the Tutelo “idiom.”

30. Peden, Notes, p. 96.

31. The list is in Peden, Notes, pp. 103-107.

32. Ibid., pp. 96-97. Jefferson's identification of the Monacans with the Tuscaroras was perhaps derived from Lewis Evans's 1755 “Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies,” in Lawrence Henry Gipson, Lewis Evans (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1939), pp. 12, 156.

33. Peden, Notes, p. 177.

34. William Stith, The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia (Williamsburgh: W. Parks, 1747), p. 67.

35. James F. Pendergast, “The Massawomeck: Raiders and Traders into Chesapeake Bay,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 81, pt. 2 (1991): 68-73.

36. Karl Lehman-Hartleben, “Thomas Jefferson, Archaeologist,” American Journal of Archaeology 47 (1943): 161-163, credits Jefferson with anticipating the fundamental approach and methods of modern archaeology by a full century, and Hantman (1993) praises his excavation strategy and research design as “extraordinary” for its time.

37. Peden, Notes, pp. 58-62.

38. Peden, Notes, p. 59.

39. For Thomson's career see Lewis R. Harley, Life of Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress and Translator of the Bible from the Greek (Philadelphia: Jacobs, 1900), and the scholarly review by Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., in Patriot Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: APS, 1997). His role as secretary to Teedyuscung and protagonist of the Delawares is recounted, from various perspectives, by Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945, rpt. Wennawoods Publishing of Lewisburg, Pa.); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Teedyuscung, King of the Delawares (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949, rpt. Syracuse University Press); and in several works of Francis Jennings, most recently Benjamin Franklin—Politician: The Mask and the Man (New York: Norton, 1996).

40. Harley, Thomson, p. 50.

41. Peden, Notes, pp. 197-208.

42. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), pp. 91-96.

43. Ibid.

44. For reviews of currents of thought in the early development of anthropology, see Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Crowell, 1968), and A. I. Hallowell, “The Beginnings of Anthropology in America,” pp. 36-125, in Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). The role of Philadelphia and the APS is described in A. I. Hallowell, “Anthropology in Philadelphia,” ibid. See also Freeman, “The American Philosophical Society in American Anthropology,” in Jacob W. Gruber, The Philadelphia Anthropological Society (New York: Temple University Publications, 1967), pp. 32-46, and Clark Wissler, “The American Indian and the American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 86 (1942): 108-122.

45. ASPIA 1, p. 53.

46. TJ to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, quoted in Pearce, Savages, p. 155.

47. Peden, Notes, p. 143.

48. Ibid., p. 151.

49. Donald Jackson, Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783-1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 669-673.

50. APS, Transactions 4 (1799): xxxviii.

51. Jackson, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 62-63.

52. Ibid., pp. 50-51.

53. Ibid., pp. 157-161.

54. For a careful accounting of the fate of the Lewis and Clark journals and other scientific “booty” of the expedition, see Paul R. Cutright, A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 19XX), and Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), and Gary Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987-1996). There have been a number of versions and editions, beginning with Nicholas Biddle, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1814), and including most notably the 8-volume edition by R. G. Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 (New York: 1904-1905), which for the first time published the journals in full from the manuscripts in the library of the APS. A new edition of the original journals, cited above, has been prepared by Gary Moulton from the original manuscripts. An invaluable supplement is Donald Jackson's two-volume edition of the letters and other papers of the Lewis and Clark expedition. For the value of their ethnographic observations, see Verne Ray and Nancy Lurie, “The Contributions of Lewis and Clark to Ethnography,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 44 (1954): 358-370.

55. ASPIA, p. 707.

56. Ibid., p. 710.

57. Ibid., p. 708.

58. Peden, Notes, p. 140.

59. For the most complete account of Jefferson's Indian cabinet, I am indebted to Anne Lucas of Monticello for personal communications on the subject. See also Anne Lucas, “American Indian Artifacts,” in Susan R. Stein, ed., The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1993), pp. 404-440, and Silvio Bedini, “Man of Science,” in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1986), pp. 253-276.

60. APS, Transactions 4 (1799): xxx-xxxviii.

61. Donald Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 94-96.

A Note on Principal Sources

Much of the research for this book was done at the Library of the American Philosophical Society, which owns a collection of Jefferson manuscripts and holds microfilm copies of the major Jefferson collections at the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Huntington Library. The American Philosophical Society also maintains an excellent collection of works by Jefferson's contemporaries and many of the more recent secondary sources about Jefferson and his time.

Published primary documents that have been indispensable in this research and have been repeatedly cited in the references include: American State Papers, Indian Affairs, vol. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), hereafter cited as ASPIA; Albert E. Bergh, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907-), hereafter cited as Bergh, Writings; Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-), hereafter cited as Boyd, Papers; William Peden, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia, by Thomas Jefferson (New York: Norton, 1972), hereafter cited as Peden, Notes; Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), hereafter cited as Peterson, Writings; James Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 1 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), hereafter cited as Richardson, Messages.

Of special value in discussions of Native American history and culture are three secondary sources: Frederick W. Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Bulletin 30, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912), hereafter cited as Bulletin 30; Charles C. Royce, Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 18th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896-97 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1899), hereafter cited as Royce, Land Cessions; William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1878), hereafter cited as Sturtevant, Handbook.

The most useful biographies of Jefferson have been Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography (New York: Norton, 1974), hereafter cited as Brodie, Jefferson; Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948-1977), hereafter cited as Malone, Jefferson; Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), hereafter cited as Peterson, Jefferson; and Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1997), hereafter cited as Ellis, American Sphinx.

Abbreviations

APS: American Philosophical Society

ASPIA: American State Papers, Indian Affairs

DAB: Dictionary of American Biography

LOC: Library of Congress

TJ: Thomas Jefferson