Mutual Perceptions

The idea of the “civilised” and the “savage”

In the eighteenth century, western Europeans measured civilisation by three yardsticks: literacy, an organised religion, and urban living. Measured against these, the native peoples of America appeared to them as “uncivilised”. But not everyone drew the same conclusion from this. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued the opposite — that such people were to be admired precisely because they had not been touched by the corruptions of “civilisation”. This admiration found a popular label: “the noble savage”.

A different shade of the same European attitude appears in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Neither he nor Rousseau had ever met a native American, yet Wordsworth described them as living “amid wilds / Where fancy hath small liberty to grace / The affections, to exalt them or refine”. In plain words, he believed that people who lived close to nature had only limited powers of imagination and emotion. The poet was, in effect, pitying them for a deficiency he had simply assumed.

A much younger writer, Washington Irving, had actually met native people, and his account is strikingly different. He found the Indians in real life quite unlike the ones described in poetry. It was true that they were taciturn in the company of white men, whose goodwill they distrusted and whose language they did not understand — but, Irving noted, the white man was equally silent under the same circumstances. Among themselves, the Indians were great mimics and entertained themselves endlessly at the expense of the whites, who had flattered themselves into believing the natives were impressed with profound respect for their grandeur and dignity. Irving also recorded the other side of the encounter: white men, as he had witnessed, were prone to treat the poor Indians as little better than animals.

Two different economies, two different worlds

The mutual misunderstanding went deeper than manners — it reached into the very meaning of exchange. To the natives, the goods they traded with Europeans were gifts, given in friendship. To the Europeans, who dreamed of becoming rich, the fish and furs were commodities to be sold for profit back in Europe. The prices of these goods varied from year to year depending on supply, and the natives could not understand this. They had no sense of a “market” operating in faraway Europe, and they were puzzled that European traders sometimes gave them a great deal in exchange for their goods and sometimes very little.

They were also saddened by European greed. In their impatience to get furs, the Europeans had slaughtered hundreds of beavers, and the natives were uneasy, fearing that the animals would take revenge on them for this destruction. Many native folk tales mocked Europeans and described them as greedy and deceitful, but because these tales were told as imaginary stories, it was only much later that the Europeans understood the references.

Settlers, forests, and the idea of land

Following the traders came the settlers. From the seventeenth century, groups of Europeans who were being persecuted for their religion — Protestants living in predominantly Catholic countries, or Catholics where Protestantism was the official religion — left Europe for America to begin a new life. As long as vacant land was available, this caused no problem. But gradually the Europeans moved further inland, near native villages, and used their iron tools to cut down forests and lay out farms.

Natives and Europeans saw different things when they looked at a forest. The natives identified tracks that were invisible to the Europeans. The Europeans imagined the forests cut down and replaced by cornfields. Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA and a contemporary of Wordsworth, dreamed of a country populated by Europeans with small farms.

The natives, who grew crops for their own needs rather than for sale and profit, and who thought it wrong to “own” the land, could not understand this dream. In Jefferson’s view, this made them “uncivilised”. His words about the natives would cause a public outcry today: “This unfortunate race which we have been taking so much pains to civilise… have justified extermination.”

The expansion of the USA and Canada

The countries now known as Canada and the United States of America came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century, occupying only a fraction of the land they cover today. Over the next hundred years they extended their control to reach their present size. Large areas were acquired by the USA by purchase

— the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, and Alaska from Russia — and by war, since much of southern USA was won from Mexico. It did not occur to anyone that the consent of the natives living in these areas should have been asked. The western “frontier” of the USA was a shifting one, and as it moved, the natives were forced to move back with it.

A few dates mark the political milestones of this period:

The land transformed

The landscapes of America changed drastically in the nineteenth century because the Europeans treated the land differently from the natives. Some of the migrants from Britain and France were younger sons who would not inherit their fathers’ property, and were therefore eager to own land in America. Later came waves of immigrants from Germany, Sweden and Italy who had lost their lands to big farmers and wanted farms they could own. People from Poland were happy to work in the prairie grasslands, which reminded them of the steppes of their homes, and were excited at being able to buy huge properties at very low prices.

They cleared land and developed agriculture, introducing crops such as rice and cotton, which could not grow in Europe and could therefore be sold there for profit. To protect their huge farms from wild animals — wolves and mountain lions — these animals were hunted to extinction. The settlers felt totally secure only with the invention of barbed wire in 1873.

Slavery and the Civil War …