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Present State and Probable Future of the Indian Tribes That Inhabit the Territory Possessed by the Union h - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition, vol. 2 [1835]

Edition used:

Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. A Bilingual French-English editions, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010). Vol. 2.

Part of: Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition, 4 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Present State and Probable Future of the Indian Tribes That Inhabit the Territory Possessed by the Unionh

Gradual disappearance of the native races.—How it is taking place.—Miseries that accompany the forced migrations of the Indians.—The savages of North America had only two means to escape destruction: war or civilization.—They can no longer wage war.—Why they do not want to become civilized when they could do so, and, when they reach the point of wanting to do so, they no longer can.—Example of the Creeks and the Cherokees.—Policy of the particular states toward these Indians.—Policy of the federal government.

All the Indian tribes that formerly inhabited the territory of New England, the Narragansetts, the Mohicans, the Pequots no longer live except in the memory of men; the Lenapes [Delawares] who received Penn, one hundred and fifty years ago, on the banks of the Delaware, have disappeared today.j I met the last of the Iroquois; they were begging. All the nations that I have just named formerly extended as far as the shores of the sea; now you must go more than one hundred leagues into the interior of the continent to meet an Indian. These savages have not only withdrawn, they are destroyed.2 As the natives move away and die, an immense people comes and increases continuously in their place. Neither a development so prodigious nor a destruction so rapid has ever been seen among nations.

It is easy to indicate the manner in which this destruction is taking place.

When the Indians lived alone in the wilderness from which they are exiled today, their needs were few [and the means to provide for them very numerous]; they made their own arms; river water was their only drink; and they had as clothing the hide of the animals whose flesh served to nourish them.

Europeans introduced to the natives of North America firearms, iron and brandy; they taught them to replace with our fabrics the barbarian clothing that contented Indian simplicity until then. While contracting new tastes, the Indians have not learned the art of satisfying them, and they have had to resort to the industry of whites. In return for these goods, which he himself did not know how to create, the savage could offer nothing, other than the rich furs that his woods still contained. From this moment, the hunt had to provide not only for his needs, but also for the frivolous passions of Europe. He no longer pursued the beasts of the forest only to nourish himself, but to obtain the only objects of exchange that he could give us.3

While the needs of the natives grew in this way, their resources did not cease to diminish.

From the day when a European settlement forms in the neighborhood of the territory occupied by the Indians, the wild game becomes alarmed.4 Thousands of savages, wandering in the forests, without fixed abodes, do not frighten the game; but the instant the continuous noises of European industry are heard in some place, the game begins to flee and to withdraw toward the west, where its instinct teaches it that still limitless wildernesses will be found. “But the buffalo is constantly receding,” say Messrs. Cass and Clark in their report to Congress, 4 February 1829. “A few years since, they approached the base of the Alleghany, and a few years hence they may even be rare upon the immense plains which extend to the base of the Rocky Mountains.” I was assured that this effect of the approach of whites [{Europeans}] often makes itself felt two hundred leagues from their frontier. Their influence is exercised therefore on tribes whose name they hardly know and who suffer the evils of usurpation long before knowing the authors of it.5

Soon hardy adventurers penetrate the Indian countries; they advance fifteen or twenty leagues beyond the extreme frontier of the whites and go to build the dwelling of civilized man in the very midst of barbarism. It is easy for them to do so: the limits of the territory of a hunting people are poorly fixed. This territory belongs, moreover, to the entire nation and is not precisely the property of anyone; so individual interest defends no part of it.m

A few European families, occupying widely separated points, then succeed in chasing forever the wild animals from all the intermediate space that stretches between them. The Indians, who had lived until then in a sort of abundance, find it difficult to survive, still more difficult to obtain the objects of exchange that they need. By making their game flee, it is as if you made the fields of our farmers sterile. Soon they almost entirely lack the means of existence. You then meet these unfortunate people prowling about like famished wolves amid their deserted woods. Instinctive love of native land attaches them to the soil where they were born,6 and they no longer find anything there except misery and death. They finally make up their minds; they leave, and following at a distance the flight of the elk, the buffalo and the beaver, they leave to these wild animals the care of choosing a new homeland for them. So it is not, strictly speaking, the Europeansn who chase the natives of America away, it is famine; happy distinction that had escaped the old casuists and that modern [{Protestant}] doctors have discovered.

You cannot imagine the dreadful evils that accompany these forced emigrations. At the moment when the Indians left their paternal lands, they were already exhausted and reduced. The country where they are going to settle is occupied by wandering tribes who see the new arrivals only with jealousy. Behind them is hunger, ahead of them is war, everywhere there is misery. In order to escape so many enemies, they divide up. Each one of them tries to isolate himself in order to find furtively the means to sustain his existence, and lives in the immensity of the wilderness like the outlaw in the bosom of civilized societies. The social bond, long weakened, then breaks. For them, there already was no longer a native land. Soon there will no longer be a people; families will scarcely remain; the common name is being lost, language forgotten, the traces of origin disappear. The nation has ceased to exist. It scarcely lives in the memory of American antiquarians and is known only to a few European scholars.

I would not want the reader to be able to believe that I am exaggerating my descriptions here.o I have seen with my own eyes several of the miseries that I have just described; I have gazed upon evils that would be impossible for me to recount.

At the end of the year 1831, I found myself on the left bank of the Mississippi, at a place named Memphis by the Europeans. While I was in this place, a numerous troop of Choctaws (the French of Louisiana call them Chactas) came; these savages left their country and tried to pass to the right bank of the Mississippi where they flattered themselves about finding a refuge that the American government had promised them. It was then the heart of winter, and the cold gripped that year with unaccustomed intensity; snow had hardened on the ground, and the river swept along enormous chunks of ice. The Indians led their families with them; they dragged along behind them the wounded, the sick, the newborn children, the elderly about to die. They had neither tents nor wagons, but only a few provisions and weapons. I saw them embark to cross the great river, and this solemn spectacle will never leave my memory. You heard among this assembled crowd neither sobs nor complaints; they kept quiet. Their misfortunes were old and seemed to them without remedy. All the Indians had already entered the vessel that was to carry them; their dogs still remained on the bank; when these animals saw finally that their masters were going away forever, they let out dreadful howls, and throwing themselves at the same time into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam after their masters.

The dispossession of the Indians often takes place today in a regular and, so to speak, entirely legal manner.

When the European population begins to approach the wilderness occupied by a savage nation, the government of the United States commonly sends to the latter a solemn embassy. The whites assemble the Indians in a great field and, after eating and drinking with them, say to them:

What are you doing in the land of your fathers? Soon you will have to dig up their bones to live there. How is the country where you live better than another? Are there woods, marshes and prairies only here where you are, and can you live only under your sun? Beyond these mountains that you see on the horizon, beyond the lake that borders your territory on the west, you find vast countries where wild game is still found in abundance; sell us your lands and go to live happily in those places.

After giving this speech, firearms, woolen clothing, casks of brandy, glass necklaces, tin bracelets, earrings and mirrors are spread out before the eyes of the Indians.7 If, at the sight of all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they cannot refuse the consent demanded of them, and that soon the government itself will be unable to guarantee to them the enjoyment of their rights.[*] What to do? Half persuaded, half forced, the Indians move away; they go to inhabit new wildernesses where whites will not leave them in peace for even ten years. In this way the Americans acquire at a very low price entire provinces that the richest sovereigns of Europe could not afford.8

I have just recounted great evils, I add that they seem irremediable to me. I believe that the Indian race of North America is condemned to perish, and I cannot prevent myself from thinking that the day the Europeans settle on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race will have ceased to exist.9

The Indians of North America had only two paths to salvation: war or civilization; in other words, they had to destroy the Europeans or become their equal.

At the birth of the colonies, it would have been possible for them, by uniting their forces, to rid themselves of the small number of foreigners who had just arrived at the shores of the continent.10 More than once, they attempted to do it and saw themselves on the verge of success. Today the disproportion of resources is too great for them to be able to consider such an undertaking.p But men of genius still arise among the Indian nations, who foresee the final fate reserved for the savage populations and who seek to bring together all the tribes in a common hatred of Europeans [{and to silence individual animosities in order to deal only with this objective [v: to consider all saving themselves}];[*] but their efforts are ineffectual. The tribes that are near the whites are already too weak to offer effective resistance; the others, abandoning themselves to this childish lack of concern about tomorrow that characterizes savage nature, wait for the danger to appear before giving it their attention. The first cannot act, the others do not want to act.

[≠If at the same time that the Indians gave up hope of chasing the Europeans away from American soil, they had succeeded in becoming civilized, they would still be able to avoid the destruction that threatens them, for it is nearly impossible to dispossess a farming people completely.≠]

It is easy to foresee that the Indians will never want to become civilized, or that they will try too late, when they reach the point of wanting to do so.

Civilization is the result of a long work of society that proceeds in the same place and that the different successive generations bequeath to one another. It is among hunting peoples that civilization has the greatest difficulty managing to establish its dominion. Tribes of herders change places, but they always follow a regular order in their migrations and constantly retrace their steps; the dwelling-place of hunters varies like that of the very animals they pursue.

Several times the attempt has been made to bring enlightenment to the Indians while leaving them with the mores of wandering peoples; the Jesuits had tried to do it in Canada, the Puritans in New England.11 Both accomplished nothing lasting. Civilization was born within the hut and went to die in the woods. The great failing of these legislators of the Indians was not to understand that, to succeed in civilizing a people, it is necessary above all to get them to settle down, and they can only do so by cultivating the soil; so it was first a matter of making the Indians farmers.

Not only do the Indians not possess this indispensable preliminary of civilization, but also it is very difficult for them to acquire.

Men who have once given themselves over to the idle and adventurous life of hunters feel an almost insurmountable distaste for the constant and regular work required by farming. You can see it even within our societies; but it is even much more visible among peoples for whom hunting habits have become the national customs.

Apart from this general cause, a cause no less powerful is found only among the Indians. I have already pointed it out; I believe I must return to it.

The natives of North America consider work not only as an evil, but also as a dishonor, and their pride struggles against civilization almost as obstinately as their idleness.12

There is no Indian so miserable who, in his bark hut, does not maintain a proud idea of his individual value; he considers the cares of industry as degrading occupations; he compares the farmer to the ox that traces the furrow, and in each of our arts he sees only the work of slaves. It is not that he has not conceived a very high idea of the power of whites and of the grandeur of their intelligence; but, if he admires the result of our efforts, he scorns the means that we have used to obtain them, and, even while under our influence, he still believes himself superior to us. Hunting and war seem to him the only cares worthy of a man.13 So the Indian, deep within the misery of his woods, nurtures the same ideas, the same opinions as the noble[*] of the Middle Ages in his fortress, and to resemble him fully he only needs to become a conqueror. How strange! It is in the forests of the New World, and not among the Europeans who populate its shores, that the ancient prejudices of Europe are found today.

I have tried more than once, in the course of this work, to make understood the prodigious influence that the social state seemed to me to exercise on the laws and mores of men. Allow me to add a single word to the subject.

When I notice the similarity that exists between the political institutions of our fathers, the Teutons, and those of the wandering tribes of North America, between the customs recounted by Tacitus and those that I was sometimes able to witness, I cannot prevent myself from thinking that the same cause has produced, in the two hemispheres, the same results, and that amid the apparent diversity of human affairs, it is not impossible to find a small number of generative facts from which all the others derive. So in all that we call Teutonic institutions, I am tempted to see only the habits of barbarians, and the opinions of savages in what we call feudal ideas.r

Whatever the vices and prejudices that prevent the Indians of North America from becoming farmers and civilized, necessity sometimes forces them to do so.

Several considerable nations of the South, among others those of the Cherokees and the Creeks,14 found themselves as though encircled by Europeans who, landing on the shores of the Ocean, going down the Ohio and coming back up the Mississippi, surrounded them all at once. They were not chased from place to place, as the tribes of the North were, but were squeezed little by little into limits that were too narrow, as hunters first make an enclosure around a thicket before entering simultaneously into the interior. The Indians, placed then between civilization and death, saw themselves reduced to living shamefully by their work like whites; so they became farmers, and without entirely abandoning either their habits or their mores, they sacrificed what was absolutely necessary for their existence.

The Cherokees went further; they created a written language, established a fairly stable form of government; and, as everything moves with a hurried step in the New World, they had a newspaper15 before all had clothes.

What singularly favored the rapid development of European habits among these Indians was the presence of half-breeds.16 Sharing the enlightenment of his father without necessarily abandoning the savage customs of his maternal race, the half-breed forms the natural link between civilization and barbarism. Wherever half-breeds have multiplied, savages are seen to modify little by little their social state and change their mores.17

So the success of the Cherokees proves that the Indians have the ability to become civilized, but it in no way proves that they can succeed in doing so.s

This difficulty that the Indians find in submitting to civilization arises from a general cause that is nearly impossible for them to elude.

If you cast an attentive eye on history, you discover that in general barbaric peoples have risen little by little by themselves, and by their own efforts, toward civilization.

When it happened that they went to draw enlightenment from a foreign nation, they did so with the rank of conquerors, and not the position of the vanquished.

When the conquered people are enlightened and the conquering people half-savage, as in the invasion of the Roman Empire by the nations of the North, or in that of China by the Mongols, the power that victory assures to the barbarian is enough to keep him at the level of the civilized man and allow him to move as his equal, until he becomes his equal; the one has strength in his favor, the other, intelligence; the first admires the arts and sciences of the vanquished, the second envies the power of the conquerors. The barbarians end by introducing the civilized man into their palaces, and the civilized man in turn opens his schools to them. But when the one who possesses physical force enjoys intellectual preponderance at the same time, it is rare for the vanquished to become civilized; he withdraws or is destroyed.

Therefore you can say in a general way that savages are going to seek enlightenment with weapons in hand, but that they do not receive it.t

If the Indian tribes who now inhabit the center of the continent could find in themselves enough energy to undertake becoming civilized, they would perhaps succeed. Superior then to the barbarian nations that surround them, they would little by little gain strength and experience, and, when the Europeans finally appeared on their frontiers, they would be in a state, if not to maintain their independence, at least to make their rights to the soil recognized and to become integrated with the conquerors. But the misfortune of the Indians is to enter into contact with the most civilized, and I will add the most greedy people of the globe, while they are themselves still half barbarian; to find in their teachers, masters, and to receive oppression and enlightenment at the same time.u

Living within the liberty of the woods, the Indian of North America was miserable, but he felt inferior to no one; from the moment he wants to enter into the social hierarchy of the whites, he can occupy only the last rank; for he enters ignorant and poor into a society where knowledge and wealth reign. After leading an agitated life, full of evils and dangers, but filled at the same time with emotions and grandeur,18 he must submit to a monotonous, obscure and degraded existence. To earn by hard work and amid shame the bread that must nourish him, such in his eyes is the sole result of this civilization that is praised to him.

And he is not always sure to obtain even this result.

When the Indians undertake to imitate the Europeans their neighbors, and like them to cultivate the land, they soon find themselves exposed to the effects of a very destructive competition. The white is master of the secrets of agriculture. The Indian starts out crudely in an art that he does not know. The one easily makes great harvests grow, the other extracts the fruits of the earth only with a thousand efforts.

The European is placed amid a population that he knows and whose needs he shares.

The savage is isolated in the middle of an enemy people whose mores, language and laws he knows incompletely, but without whom he cannot manage. Only by exchanging his products for those of the whites can he become well-off, for his compatriots are nothing more than a feeble help to him.

Therefore, when the Indian wants to sell the fruits of his work, he does not always find the buyer that the European farmer easily finds, and he can produce only at great cost what the other delivers for a small price.

So the Indian has escaped from the evils to which barbarian nations are exposed only to subject himself to the greatest miseries of civilized peoples, and he finds almost as much difficulty living amid our abundance as within his forests.

At home, however, the habits of the wandering life are still not destroyed. Traditions have not lost their dominion; the taste for hunting has not been extinguished. The savage joys that he formerly experienced deep within the woods are then represented by the most vivid colors in his troubled imagination; the privations that he endured there seem to him less dreadful in contrast, the perils that he encountered less great. The independence that he enjoyed among his equals contrasts with the servile position that he occupies in civilized society.

From another perspective, the solitude where, for so long, he lived free is still near him; a few hours of walking can restore it to him. For the half-cleared field from which he draws hardly enough to feed himself, the whites, his neighbors, offer him a price that to him seems high. Perhaps this money that the Europeans present to him would allow him to live happily and tranquilly far from them. He leaves his plow, picks up his weapons, and goes into the wilderness again forever.19

You can judge the truth of this sad portrait by what is happening among the Creeks and the Cherokees, whom I cited.

These Indians, in the little that they have done, have surely shown as much natural genius as the peoples of Europe in their wider undertakings; but nations, like men, need time to learn, whatever their intelligence and their efforts.w

While these savages worked to become civilized, the Europeans continued to envelop them from all sides and to squeeze them in more and more. Today, the two races have finally met; they touch each other. The Indian has already become superior to his father, the savage, but he is still very inferior to the white, his neighbor. With the aid of their resources and their enlightenment, the Europeans did not take long to appropriate most of the advantages that possession of the soil could provide to the natives; the Europeans settled among them, seized the land or bought it at a low price, and ruined the Indians by a competition that the latter could in no way sustain. Isolated in their own country, the Indians no longer formed anything except a small colony of inconvenient foreigners in the middle of a numerous and dominating people.20

Washington said, in one of his messages to Congress: “We are more enlightened and more powerful than the Indian nations; it is to our honor to treat them with kindness and even with generosity.”

This noble and virtuous policy has not been followed.

The greediness of the colonists usually joins with the tyranny of the government. Although the Cherokees and the Creeks were settled on the soil they inhabited before the arrival of the Europeans, although the Americans often negotiated with them as with foreign nations, the states within which they find themselves did not want to recognize them as independent peoples, and undertook to subject these men, barely out of the forests, to their magistrates, to their customs and to their laws.21 Misery had pushed these unfortunate Indians toward civilization, oppression drives them today back toward barbarism. Many of them, leaving their half-cleared fields, resume the habit of savage life.

If you pay attention to the tyrannical measures adopted by the legislatures of the states of the South, to the conduct of their governors and the actions of their courts, you will easily be convinced that the complete expulsion of the Indians is the final goal toward which all their efforts simultaneously tend. The Americans of this part of the Union enviously regard the lands that the natives possess;22 they feel that the latter have not yet completely lost the traditions of savage life, and before civilization has firmly attached them to the soil, they want to reduce them to despair and force them to move away.

Oppressed by the particular states, the Creeks and Cherokees addressed the central government. The latter is not insensitive to their misfortunes; that government would sincerely like to save the remnants of the natives and assure them the free possession of the territory that it guaranteed to them.23 But when it seeks to execute this plan, the particular states put up a formidable resistance, and then the central government resolves without difficulty to let a few savage tribes, already half destroyed, perish in order not to put the American Union in danger.x

Powerless to protect the Indians, the federal government would at least like to ease their lot; to this end, it has undertaken to transport them at its expense to other places.[*]

Between the latitudes of 33rd and 37th degrees north, extends a vast country that has taken the name Arkansas, from the principal river that waters it. It borders on one side the frontier of Mexico, on the other, the banks of the Mississippi. A multitude of small streams and rivers cut across it from all sides; the climate is mild and the soil fertile. Only a few wandering hordes of savages are found there.[*] It is to a section of this country, which is closest to Mexico and at a great distance from American settlements, that the government of the Union wants to transport the remnants of the native populations of the South.

At the end of the year 1831, we were assured that 10,000 Indians had already gone to the banks of the Arkansas; others arrived every day. But Congress has not been able to create as well a unanimous will among those whose fate it wanted to determine. Some consent with joy to move away from the home of tyranny; the most enlightened refuse to abandon their growing crops and new dwellings; they think that if the work of civilization is interrupted, it will not be resumed again; they fear that sedentary habits, barely contracted, will be permanently lost in the middle of still savage countries where nothing is prepared for the subsistence of a farming people; they know that in this new wilderness they will find enemy hordes and, to resist them, they no longer have the energy of barbarism and have not yet acquired the strength of civilization. The Indians easily discover, moreover, all that is provisional in the settlement that is proposed to them. Who will assure them that they will finally be able to rest in peace in their new refuge? The United States promises to maintain them there; but the territory that they now occupy had formerly been guaranteed to them by the most solemn oaths.24 Today the American government does not, it is true, take their lands from them, but it allows their lands to be invaded. In a few years, undoubtedly, the same white population that now presses around them will again be at their heels in the solitude of Arkansas; they will then find the same evils again without the same remedies; and sooner or later without land, they will still have to resign themselves to dying.

There is less cupidity and violence in the way the Union acts toward the Indians than in the policy followed by the states; but the two governments equally lack good faith.

The states, while extending what they call the benefit of their laws to the Indians,y count on the fact that the latter will prefer to move away than to submit; and the central government, while promising these unfortunate people a permanent refuge in the West, is not unaware that it is not able to guarantee it to them.25

Therefore, the states, by their tyranny, force the savages to flee; the Union, by its promises and with the aid of its resources, makes the flight easy. These are different measures that aim at the same end.26

“By the will of our Father in Heaven, the Governor of the whole world,” said the Cherokees in their petition to Congress,27 “the red man of America has become small, and the white man great and renowned.”

When the ancestors of the people of these United States first came to the shores of America, they found the red man strong—though he was ignorant and savage, yet he received them kindly, and gave them dry land to rest their weary feet. They met in peace, and shook hands in token of friendship.

Whatever the white man wanted and asked of the Indian, the latter willingly gave. At that time the Indian was the lord, and the white man the suppliant. But now the scene has changed. The strength of the red man has become weakness. As his neighbors increased in numbers, his power became less and less, and now, of the many and powerful tribes who once covered these United States, only a few are to be seen—a few whom a sweeping pestilence has left. The Northern tribes, who were once so numerous and powerful, are now nearly extinct. Thus it has happened to the red man of America.

Shall we, who are remnants, share the same fate? [. . . (ed.) . . .]

The land on which we stand we have received as an inheritance from our fathers, who possessed it from time immemorial, as a gift from our common Father in Heaven. [. . . (ed.) . . .] They bequeathed it to us as their children, and we have sacredly kept it, as containing the remains of our beloved men. This right of inheritance we have never ceded nor ever forfeited. Permit us to ask what better right can the people have to a country than the right of inheritance and immemorial peaceable possession? We know it is said of late by the State of Georgia, and by the Executive of the United States, that we have forfeited this right—but we think this is said gratuitously. At what time have we made the forfeit? What great crime have we committed, whereby we must forever be divested of our country?z Was it when we were hostile to the United States, and took part with the King of Great Britain, during the struggle for independence? If so, why was not this forfeiture declared in the first treaty of peace between the United States and our beloved men? Why was not such an article as the following inserted in the treaty: “The United States give peace to the Cherokees, but, for the part they took in the late war, declare them to be but tenants at will, to be removed when the convenience of the States, within whose chartered limits they live, shall require it”? That was the proper time to assume such a possession. But it was not thought of, nor would our forefathers have agreed to any treaty whose tendency was to deprive them of their rights and their country.

Such is the language of the Indians; what they say is true; what they foresee seems inevitable to me.

From whatever side you envisage the destiny of the natives of North America, you see only irremediable evils. If they remain savage, they are pushed ahead and kept on the move; if they want to become civilized, contact with men more civilized than they delivers them to oppression and misery. If they continue to wander from wilderness to wilderness, they perish; if they undertake to settle down, they still perish. They can become enlightened only with the aid of Europeans, and the approach of Europeans depraves them and pushes them back toward barbarism. As long as you leave them in their empty wilderness, they refuse to change their mores, and when they are finally forced to want to change them, there is no more time to do so.

The Spanish unleash their dogs on the Indians as on wild beasts; they pillage the New World like a city taken by assault, without discrimination and without pity; but you cannot destroy everything, fury has an end. The rest of the Indian populations that escaped the massacres ended up mingling with their conquerors and adopting their religion and their mores [{the Indians today share the rights of those who conquered them and one day perhaps will rule over them}].28

The conduct of the Americans of the United States toward the natives radiates, in contrast, the purest love of forms and of legality. Provided that the Indians remain in the savage state, the Americans do not in any way get involved in their affairs and they treat them as independent peoples; they do not allow themselves to occupy their lands without having duly acquired them by means of a contract; and if by chance an Indian nation is no longer able to live in its territory, the Americans take it fraternally by the hand and lead it themselves to die outside of the country of its fathers.

The Spanish, with the help of monstrous crimes without precedents, while covering themselves with an indelible shame [{that will live as long as their name}], were not able to succeed in exterminating the Indian race, nor even in preventing it from sharing their rights;a the Americans of the United States have achieved this double result with a marvelous ease, calmly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality29 in the eyes of the world. You cannot destroy men while better respecting the laws of humanity.

[{This world is, it must be admitted, a sad and ridiculous theater.}]

[h. ] Detached note in the manuscript:

Plan of the chapter.

1. Destruction of the Indians, a fact.

2. How it is taking place.

You make the wild game flee. You buy the land. (Here introduce commercial mores.)

3. Inevitable destruction.

1. War or civilization.

War, they can no longer wage it.

2. Civilization remains.

Difficulty that hunting peoples have in becoming civilized. It would be necessary to have [in advance (?) (ed.)] to become a farmer.

Idleness and pride that prevent them from wanting to do so.

When they want to do so, they are not longer able (here I placed the half-breeds, perhaps elsewhere). Effects of an incomplete civilization in contact with a complete one.

What precedes is an imperceptible and so to speak involuntary action of one race on another, but often the positive and voluntary action of governments is joined with it. Cherokees, Creeks, way of acting toward them of the state and federal governments.

The appendix devoted to the Indians in the second volume of Marie (“Note on the past state and the present condition of the Indian tribes of North America”) gives interesting details on their way of life and their habits that do not appear in Tocqueville’s work.

See Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 92-112.

[j. ] On a loose slip of paper in the manuscript: “Present state of the relations of the United States with all the Indians who surround their territory. See report of the Secretary of War, L. Cass, 29 November 1833. National Intelligencer of 10 December 1833.” Beaumont had subscribed to the National Intelligencer in 1833. Tocqueville drew from this newspaper many details for writing this chapter.

[2. ] In the thirteen original states, only 6,273 Indians remain. (See Legislative Documents, 20th Congress, n. 117, p. 90).

[4. ] “Five years ago,” says Volney in his Tableau des Etats-Unis, p. 370, “while going from Vincennes to Kaskaskia, territory included today in the state of Illinois, then entirely wild (1797), you did not cross the prairies without seeing herds of four to five hundred buffaloes; today none of them remain; they crossed the Mississippi by swimming, bothered by hunters and above all by the bells of American cows.”

[5. ] You can be persuaded of the truth of what I am advancing here by consulting the general portrait of the Indian tribes contained within the limits claimed by the United States (Legislative Documents, 20th Congress, n. 117, pp. 90-105). You will see that the tribes in the center of America are rapidly decreasing, although the Europeans are still very far from them.

[m. ] An identical sentence can be found in Marie (II, p. 233).

[6. ] The Indians, say Messrs. Clark and Cass in their report to Congress, p. 15, are attached to their country by the same sentiment of affection that ties us to ours; and furthermore, to the idea of alienating the lands that the Great Spirit gave to their ancestors, they attach certain superstitious ideas that exercise a great power over the tribes that have still not given anything up or who have given up only a small portion of their territory to Europeans. “We do not sell the place where the remains of our fathers rest,” such is the first response that they always make to whoever proposes to buy their lands.

[n. ] If the word European is kept here, in most cases it has been crossed out and Anglo-Americans substituted.

[o. ] In the manuscript: “that I am inventing [v: creating] descriptions at will here.”

[7. ] See in the Legislative Documents of Congress, doc. 117, the account of what happens in these circumstances. This curious piece is found in the report already cited, made by Messrs. Clark and Lewis Cass, to Congress, 4 February 1829. Today Mr. Cass is the Secretary of War.

The Indians, as has been stated, say Messrs. Clark and Cass, reach the treaty ground poor, and almost naked. Large quantities of goods are taken there by the traders, and are seen and examined by the Indians. The women and children become importunate to have their wants supplied, and their influence is soon exerted to induce a sale. Their improvidence is habitual and unconquerable. The gratification of his immediate wants and desires is the ruling passion of an Indian. The expectation of future advantages seldom produces much effect. The experience of the past is lost, and the prospects of the future disregarded. This is one of the most striking traits in their character, and is well known to all who have had much intercourse with them. It would be utterly hopeless to demand a cession of land, unless the means were at hand of gratifying their immediate wants; and when their condition and circumstances are fairly considered, it ought not to surprise us that they are so anxious to relieve themselves.

[[*]. ] See the treaty with the Osages. Everett, p. 16. Long’s Expedition, vol. II, p. 245.

[8. ] On 19 May 1830, Mr. Ed. Everett asserted before the House of Representatives that the Americans had already acquired by treaty, east and west of the Mississippi, 230,000,000 acres.

In 1808, the Osages gave up 48,000,000 acres for an income of 1,000 dollars.

In 1818, the Quapaws gave up 29,000,000 acres for 4,000 dollars; they reserved a territory of 1,000,000 acres for hunting. It had been solemnly sworn that it would be respected; it was not long before it was invaded like the rest.

In order to appropriate the uninhabited lands to which the Indians claim ownership, said Mr. Bell, secretary of the Indian affairs committee of Congress, 24 February 1830, we have adopted the practice of paying the Indian tribes the value of their hunting ground after the game has fled or has been destroyed. It is more advantageous and certainly more in conformity with the principles of justice and more humane to act in this way than to take the territory of the savages by force of arms.

The practice of buying from the Indians their title of ownership is therefore nothing more than a new mode of acquisition that humanity and expediency have substituted for violence, and that will equally make us masters of the lands that we claim by virtue of discovery, and that moreover assures us the right of civilized nations to settle the territory occupied by savage tribes.

Until now, several causes have constantly diminished in the eyes of the Indians the value of the soil that they occupy, and then the same causes have led them to sell it to us without difficulty. The practice of buying from the savages their right of occupancy has therefore never been able, to any perceptible degree, to slow the prosperity of the United States.

(Legislative Documents, 21st Congress, n. 227, p. 6).

[9. ] This opinion seemed to us, moreover, that of nearly all the American statesmen.

“Judging of the future by the past,” said Mr. Cass to Congress, “we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their numbers, and their eventual extinction, unless our border should become stationary, and they be removed beyond it, or unless some radical change should take place in [the principles of (ed.)] our intercourse with them, which it is easier to hope for than to expect.”

[10. ] See among others the war undertaken by the Wampanoags and the other confederated tribes, under the leadership of Metacom [King Philip (ed.)], in 1675, against the colonists of New England, and the war that the English had to withstand in 1622 in Virginia.

[p. ] According to Beaumont, the only possibility rested on an alliance of Indians with the Black population. Nonetheless, in his novel, this alliance and the revolt that follows lead to a sharp defeat.

[11. ] See the different historians of New England. Also see Histoire de la Nouvelle-France by Charlevoix and Lettres édifiantes. [See report of the Commission of Indian Affairs, 21st Congress, n. 217, p. 25.]

[12. ] “In all the tribes,” says Volney in his Tableau des Etats-Unis, p. 423, “there still exists a generation of old warriors who, seeing the hoe handled, do not cease to shout about the degradation of ancient mores and who claim that the savages owe their decline only to these innovations, and that, to recover their glory and their power, it would be sufficient for them to return to their primitive mores.”

[13. ] In an official document the following portrait is found:

Until a young man has been engaged with an enemy, and can boast of his prowess, he is held in no estimation, and is considered little better than a woman.

At their great war dances, all the warriors in succession strike the post, as it is called, and recount the feats they have done. The auditory, upon these occasions, is composed of the relations, the friends, and the companions of the narrator, and the intensity of their feelings is manifested by the deep silence with which they listen to his tale, and by the loud shouts with which he is hailed at the termination. Unfortunate is the young man who has no deeds of valor to recount at these assemblages; and instances are not wanting, where young warriors, in the excitement of their feelings, have departed alone from these dances, in search of trophies to exhibit, and of adventures to relate.

[[*]. ] See the piece from Cass and Clark, p. 29, on the need for military glory that makes itself universally felt among them.

[r. ] In the second lecture of his History of Civilization in Europe, Guizot asserted that the savage life of the American Indians had some similarity to the mores of the ancient Teutons. He added that the idea of individual independence, that of modern personal liberty, had appeared in Europe on the occasion of the great Teutonic invasions. The same ideas are found, more developed, in the seventh lecture of the course on civilization in France. Montesquieu, Saint-Simon and Boulainvilliers, before Guizot, had shown a great admiration for Teutonic institutions.

[14. ] These nations today are encompassed in the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.

There were formerly in the south (you see the remnants of them) four great nations: the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Cherokees.

The remnants of these four nations still had about 75,000 individuals in 1830. There is at present, in the territory occupied or claimed by the Anglo-American Union, a count of about 300,000 Indians. (See Proceedings of the Indian Board in the City of New York.) Official documents provided to Congress bring the number to 313,130. The reader curious to know the name and strength of all the tribes that inhabit the Anglo-American territory should consult the documents that I have just indicated. (Legislative Documents, 20th Congress, n. 117, pp. 90-105.)

[15. ] I brought back to France one or two copies of this singular publication. [Cite the statistical details that are found in the speech of Everett, p. 26. See id., p. 29.]

[16. ] See in the report of the committee of Indian affairs, 21st Congress, n. 227, p. 23, what makes the half-breeds multiply among the Cherokees; the principal cause goes back to the War of Independence. Many Anglo-Americans from Georgia, having taken England’s side, were forced to withdraw among the Indians and married there.

[17. ] Unfortunately half-breeds have been fewer and have exercised a smaller influence in North America than anywhere else.

Two great nations of Europe peopled this portion of the American continent: the French and the English.

The first did not take long to enter into unions with the young native women; but misfortune decreed that a secret affinity be found between the Indian character and theirs. Instead of giving to the barbarians the taste and habits of civilized life, it was they who often became passionately attached to savage life; they became the most dangerous inhabitants of the wilderness, and won the friendship of the Indian by exaggerating his vices and his virtues. M. de Sénonville [Denonville (ed.)], Governor of Canada, wrote to Louis XIV, in 1685: “For a long time we believed it necessary to move the savages near us to make them more French; we all have good grounds to recognize that we were wrong. Those who moved near us did not become French, and the French who haunted them became savage. They pretend to dress like them, to live like them” (Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, by Charlevoix, vol. II, p. 345).

The Englishman, in contrast, living stubbornly attached to the opinions, the customs and to the slightest habits of his fathers, remained in the middle of the American wilderness what he was within the cities of Europe; so he wanted to establish no contact with the savages that he despised, and carefully avoided mingling his blood with that of the barbarians.

Thus, while the Frenchman exercised no salutary influence on the Indians, the Englishman was always a stranger to them.

[s. ] Note on a small sheet of paper separate from the manuscript, but which, according to Tocqueville’s indications, should have been placed here:

I recall having been very surprised in the middle of the woods by hearing savages shout to me: bonjour with an air of friendship. This attachment of the Indians to the [lacking: French (ed.)] is due in part to very honorable causes: “If we pay attention,” say Messrs. Clark and Cass in their report to Congress, doc. n. 117, p. 11, “to the influence acquired and exercised by the French on the Indians, influence whose visible traces you still see today after two generations have passed, you will be led to conclude that the French used their power with honor and impartiality.”

The attraction of savage life for Europeans and the scorn of savage populations for civilization appear in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité of Rousseau (Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Pléiade, 1964, III, note XVI, pp. 220-21).

[t. ] In the margin, in a first version:

≠It is sufficient to see the natives of North America to be persuaded that their race is in no way inferior to ours. The social state has so to [speak (ed.)] drawn around the mind of the Indians a narrow circle, but in this circle, they show themselves the most intelligent of all men. There is without doubt in what the Cherokees have done more [v: as much] natural genius than in the greatest efforts of civilized peoples.≠

[u. ] In his “Report on the proposed law concerning the extraordinary credits asked for Algeria” (Moniteur universel, 1 June 1847, pp. 1379-84, reproduced in OC, III, 1, pp. 309-89), Tocqueville suggests taking into account the errors of the conquest of America and preventing the destruction of the Arabs by Western civilization (pp. 327-30).

[19. ] This destructive influence that very civilized peoples exercise on those who are less so is noticeable among the Europeans themselves. [{See what Volney says in his Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis, p. 360.}]

Some French had founded, nearly a century ago, in the middle of the wilderness, the city of Vincennes on the Wabash. They lived there in great abundance until the arrival of the American emigrants. The latter soon began to ruin the old inhabitants by competition; then they bought their lands from them for a small sum. At the moment when Volney, from whom I borrow this detail, came upon Vincennes, the number of French was reduced to a hundred individuals, most of whom were prepared to move to Louisiana or Canada. These French were honest men, but without enlightenment and without industry; they had contracted part of the savage habits. The Americans, who were perhaps inferior to them from the moral point of view, had an immense intellectual superiority over them; they were industrious, educated, rich, and used to governing themselves.

I myself saw in Canada, where the intellectual difference between the two races is much less pronounced, the Englishman, master of commerce and industry in the country of the Canadian, stretch out on all sides and squeeze the Frenchman into limits too narrow.

In the same way, in Louisiana, nearly all the commercial and industrial activity is concentrated in the hands of the Anglo-Americans.

Something still more striking is happening in the province of Texas; the state of Texas is, as you know, part of Mexico and serves as the frontier with the United States. For several years, Anglo-Americans have entered individually into this province still poorly populated, bought lands, taken hold of industry, and rapidly taken the place of the original population. You can foresee that if Mexico does not hasten to stop this movement, Texas will not take long to escape from it.

If a few differences comparatively not very perceptible in European civilization lead to such results, it is easy to understand what must happen when the most perfected civilization of Europe enters into contact with Indian barbarism.

[w. ] On a detached sheet: “Put the piece from Jefferson on Logan to prove capacity of the Indians. See Notes On Virginia, p. 153.”

[20. ] See, in the Legislative Documents, 21st Congress, n. 89, the excesses of all kinds committed by the white population on the territory of the Indians. Sometimes the Anglo-Americans settle on one part of the territory, as if land was lacking elsewhere, and troops from Congress must come to expel them; sometimes they carry away the livestock, burn the houses, cut down the fruit of the natives or use violence against their persons.

All these documents provide evidence that each day the natives are victims of abuse by force. Normally the Union maintains an agent among the Indians charged with representing it; the report of the agent for the Cherokees is found among the documents that I am citing; the language of this official is nearly always favorable to the savages. “The intrusion of whites into the territory of the Cherokees,” he says, p. 12, “will cause the ruin of those who live there leading a poor and inoffensive existence.” Further along you see that the state of Georgia, wanting to narrow the limits of the Cherokees, proceeds to a boundary marking; the federal agent remarks that, having been made only by the whites and without full hearings, the boundary marking has no value.

[21. ] In 1829, the state of Alabama divides the territory of the Creeks into counties and submits the Indian population to European magistrates.

In 1830, the state of Mississippi classes the Choctaws and the Chickasaws with the whites and declares that those among them who take the title of chief will be punished with a fine of 1,000 dollars and a year in prison.

When the state of Mississippi thus extended its laws over the Choctaw Indians who lived within its limits, the latter assembled together; their chief showed them what the claim of the whites was and read to them some of the laws to which the whites wanted to subject them. The savages declared with one voice that it would be better to plunge again into the wilderness. (Mississippi Papers.)

[22. ] The Georgians, who find themselves so bothered by the nearby presence of the Indians, occupy a territory that still does not number more than seven inhabitants per square mile. In France, there are one hundred sixty-two individuals in the same space.

[23. ] In 1818, Congress ordered that the territory of Arkansas would be visited by American commissioners, accompanied by a deputation of Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws. This expedition was commanded by Messrs. Kennerly, McCoy, Wash Hood and John Bell. See the different reports of the commissioners and their journal in the papers of Congress, n. 87, House of Representatives.

[x. ] Note not included in the chapter, but which appears in the manuscript in this place:

Extract from a speech given before a town meeting of Philadelphia, 11 January 1830:

Can a government founded on the celebrated statement of the rights of man that accompanies our Declaration of Independence consent shamelessly to violate among others those very rights for which it then fought? If dependent nations have been able to declare themselves independent, how can we refuse to allow nations that are already independent to remain so? Is the people that abuses its power in order to exercise tyranny externally a sincere friend of liberty? And would it not be tyrannical to drive a nation from its partially cultivated lands and from its homes and to send it to create a new settlement in the wilderness, where greed will not long allow it to remain in peace, if we are to judge the future by the past? Amid the discouragement that they must feel, will the Indians even have the energy to undertake what we expect of them?

The expulsion of the Moors from Spain is universally considered an act of tyranny. The Moors, however, were the sons of the former conquerors and the former enemies of the religion and mores of Spain. The Cherokees are in no way the enemies of the people of the United States.

This note is found with others in a copy that is not in Tocqueville’s hand. A note on the jacket of the section on the Indians explains the origin of the copies: “To dictate or copy before thinking about correcting.” The copies remaining in this jacket consist of unpublished fragments and notes.

[[*]. ] See the instructions of the Secretary of War to Generals Cannall [Carroll (ed.)] and Goffre [Coffee (ed.)], dated 30 May 1830.

There are 75,000 Indians to transport.

[[*]. ] See Journey of Long, vol. II.

[24. ] You find, in the treaty made with the Creeks in 1790, this clause: “The United States solemnly guarantee to the Creek Nation, all their lands within the limits of the United States to the westward and southward of the boundary described in the preceding article.”

The treaty concluded in July 1791 with the Cherokees contains what follows: “The United States solemnly guarantee to the Cherokee nation, all their lands not hereby ceded. If any citizen of the United States, or other person not being an Indian, shall settle on any of the Cherokees’ lands, such person shall forfeit the protection of the United States, and the Cherokees may punish him or not, as they please.” Art. [7 and (ed.)] 8.

[y. ] Note of Tocqueville on a small sheet of paper not part of the manuscript: “It is admitted by all, says Mr. Everett in his speech, that the Indians are not able to live under the laws of the states. The Indians say it; the government says it. The states do not deny it. Clearly the laws of whites have not been made for the Indians; we and they are in agreement on this point.”

[25. ] That does not prevent promising it to them in the most formal manner. See the letter of the President addressed to the Creeks, 23 March 1829 (Proceedings of the Indian Board in the City of New York, p. 5): “Beyond the great river Mississippi, [. . . (ed.) . . .]—your father has provided a country large enough for all of you [. . . (ed.) . . .]. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours for ever.”

In a letter written to the Cherokees by the Secretary of the War Department, 18 April 1829, this official declares to them that they must not deceive themselves about retaining the enjoyment of the territory that they occupy at the moment, but he gives them this same positive assurance for the time when they will be on the other side of the Mississippi (same work, p. 6). As if the power that he now lacked would not be lacking in the same way then!

[26. ] To have an exact idea of the policy followed by the particular states and by the Union vis-à-vis the Indians, you must consult: 1. the laws of the particular states relating to the Indians (this collection is found in the legislative documents, 21st Congress, n. 319); 2. the laws of the Union relating to the same subject, and in particular that of 30 March 1802 (these laws are found in the work of Mr. Story entitled: Laws of the United States); 3. finally, to know what the current state is of the relations of the Union with all of the Indian tribes, see the report made by Mr. Cass, Secretary of War, 29 November 1823.

[27. ] 19 November 1829. This piece is translated word for word.

[z. ] In the manuscript: “. . . of our country and rights?”

[28. ] But the Spanish must not be honored for this result. If the Indian tribes had not already been settled on the soil by agriculture at the moment of the arrival of the Europeans, they would have undoubtedly been destroyed in South America as in North America.

[a. ] Several of these ideas already appear in a letter from Tocqueville to his mother, dated 25 December 1831, from Mississippi (YTC, BIa1, reproduced in OCB, VII, pp. 99-106). In a travel note after this letter, and dated 3 January 1832, Tocqueville remarks:

Why of all the European races of the New World is the English race the one that has most preserved the purity of its blood and has least mingled with the native races? Apart from powerful reasons drawn from national character, from temperament, a particular cause of difference exists. Spanish America was peopled by adventurers attracted by thirst for gold, and who, transplanted alone on the other side of the Atlantic, found themselves forced in a way to contract unions with the women of the countries they inhabited. The English colonies were peopled by men who fled their country out of religious passion, or whose goal, by coming to the New World, was to live there by cultivating the land. They came with women and children and were able at once to form a complete society (pocket notebook 3, YTC, BIIa, and Voyage, OC, V, 1, p. 192).

[29. ] See among others the report made by Mr. Bell in the name of the Committee of Indian Affairs, 24 February 1830, in which it is established, p. 5, by very logical reasons, and where it is proved very learnedly that: “The fundamental principle, that the Indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of soil, or sovereignty, has never been abandoned expressly or by implication.” That is to say that the Indians, by virtue of their ancient possession, have acquired no right of either property or sovereignty, fundamental principle that has never been abandoned, either expressly or tacitly.

While reading this report, written moreover by a skillful hand, you are astonished by the facility and ease with which, from the first words, the author gets rid of arguments founded on natural right and reason, that he calls abstract and theoretical principles. The more I consider it, the more I think that the only difference that exists between the civilized man and the one who is not, in relation to justice, is this: the one contests in the judicial system the rights that the other is content to violate.