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Thomas Jefferson and the Indians “We shall all be Americans”: Thomas Jefferson and the Indians Peter S. Onup In early June, 1781, in one of his last official acts as governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson thanked his “brother” Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, the leader of the Kaskaskias, for his visit to Virginia and called for continued peace and friendship between their peoples. Three years earlier George Rogers Clark had seized the old French settlement at Kaskaskia, effectively extending Virginia’s jurisdic- tion through the Illinois country. An aggressive British presence in Detroit jeopardized Virginia’s control, however, forcing the Ameri- cans to enlist as many Indian allies in the region as possible. “I have joined with you sincerely in smoking the pipe of peace,” Jefferson told Ducoigne, “it is a good old custom handed down by your ances- tors, and as such I respect and join in it with reverence. I hope we shall long continue to smoke in friendship together. We, like you, are Americans, born in the same land, and having the same interests.” The most compelling “interest”of all true “Americans”was the elim- ination of British influence in the backcountry.’ Shortly after meeting with Ducoigne, Jefferson retired from office and began writing his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Celebrating his state’s glorious prospects, Jefferson offered a pow- erful rebuttal to the claims of the Comte du Buffon and other Euro- pean natural philosophers that the New World’s inferior natural endowment inevitably led to the degeneracy of animal species, includ- ing humans. Toward the end of a long section on Virginia’s “Pro- ductions, Mineral, Vegetable and Animal” (Query VI), Jefferson described the natural genius of the continent’s indigenous peoples, echoing the benevolent sentiments of his address to the Kaskaskia chief. ”Peter S. Onuf is Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of Histo- ry, University of Virginia, Charlottesille. This essay will be incorporated into the author’s forthcoming book, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nation- hood, to be published by University Press of Virginia. The author is grateful for the helpful comments of Francis G. Hutchins, Jan Lewis, Lindsay Robertson, Leonard Sadosky, and Bernard W. Sheehan. ‘Thomas Jefferson (cited hereafter as TJ), Speech to Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, Charlottesville, [ca. 11 June, 1781, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (cited hereafter as Jeferson Papers), eds. Julian P. Boyd et al. (27 vols. to date, Princeton, N.J., 1950-1, VI, 60. On TJ’s sponsorship of Clark’s unsuccessful expedition, see Dumas Malone, Jef ferson the Virginian: Vol. I, Jefferson and His Time (Boston, 19481, 333-36. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, XCV (June, 1999).0 1999, Trustees of Indiana University. 104 Indiana Magazine of History Uncorrupted by civilization, native Americans reflected man’s true nature. Their “keen sensibility,” affection for their children, capacity for “strong and faithful” friendship, and unsophisticated “moral sense of right and wrong” preserved social order without com- pulsion or coercion.2For Jefferson the Indians were natural repub- licans who showed that society did not depend on submission to the authority of a governing class but was instead the spontaneous expres- sion of man’s sociable nature. Despite the implied invitation to Ducoigne and other Indian leaders, Jefferson’s generous assessment of Indians’ human potential did not lead to the construction of a durable multi cultural political order in the New World. On the contrary, Jeffersonian “philanthropy” provided the moral and intellectual rationale for the removal of Indi- ans across the Mississippi under President Andrew Jack~on.~When Jefferson celebrated the human potential of native peoples, he embraced the binary opposition of “savagery” and “civilization,”situating Indi- ans at an earlier stage of historical development and displacing them from the present moment. In fact, the Indian population of the set- tled region of Virginia was at its lowest ebb since the advent of English settlement. Receding across space, Indians, like the artifacts Jeffer- son assiduously collected, seemed to be relics of a distant past-or per- haps of his own ~hildhood.~For the time being, of course, native peoples such as the Kaskaskias remained a vital and strategically important presence in the hinterland. But Jefferson anticipated that the same historical drama would be enacted in the West that he and his forefathers had witnessed in Virginia. In stipulating a universal human nature, Jeffersonians explained cultural differences in terms of a grand historical narrative, with mankind moving progressively from a savage to a civilized state. In September, 1824, less than two years before his death, Jefferson looked back on the “march of civilization advancing from the sea coast” westward, a movement that would inevitably consign Indians to the dustbin of history, unless they joined the white man’s world: Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Moun- tains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering them- ‘TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (1785; reprint, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1954), 59-60,93. 3Mydiscussion here is deeply indebted to Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinc- tion: Jeffrsonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973). See also Bernard W. Sheehan, “The Indian Problem in the Northwest: From Con- quest to Philanthropy,” in Launching the “Extended Republic”: The Federalist Era, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 19961, 190-222; Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages ofAmerica: A Study of the Indian and the Zdea of Ciui- lization (Baltimore, 1953); and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978). ‘Jeffrey L. Hantman and Gary Dunham, “The Enlightened Archaeologist,” Archaeology, XLVI (May/June, 1993),44-49. Jefferson and the Indians 105 -DAN ROBEIN JEFFERSON’SINDIAN HALLAT MONTICELLO Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts selves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our fron- tiers 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 civi- lization, 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 cre- ation to the present day.5 In this philosophic vista, sentimental bonds of “friendship” predi- cated on a universal human nature gave way to the inexorable and impersonal forces of historical change. Indeed, the Indians’ natural gifts, their human potential, made them responsible for either falling in step with the march of civilization or falling by the wayside. There was “room enough” in this “chosen country,” Jefferson told his countrymen in his First Inaugural Address, “for our descen- dants to the thousandth and thousandth generati~n.”~But there was ’TJ to William Ludlow, Monticello, September 6, 1824, in The Writings ofThomas Jefferson, eds. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (20 vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-1904), XVI, 74-75. 6TJ,First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, in Jefferson Writings,ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), 494. 106 Indiana Magazine of History no room for the “aboriginal inhabitants” who resisted the tide of set- tlement and civilization, Jefferson explained in his Second Inaugu- ral four years later. Progress exacted human costs that the sentimental Jefferson was prepared to acknowledge “with the commiseration their history inspires,” for the Indians, “endowed with the faculties and the rights of men,” remained an example for American republicans, even as they resisted white encroachments: breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores; without power to divert, or habits to con- tend against, they have been overwhelmed by the current, or driven before it; now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter’s state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals.’ Of course, civilization of the natives proved to be an elusive goal. Indeed, Jefferson suggested that the Indians best expressed their true nature-their fundamental equality with Europeans-by resist- ing and falling before the torrent of white migration, a great natu- ral force that cleared the way for civilization. The American Revolution was pivotal in the grand sweep of Jef- ferson’s historical narrative. It gave birth to a new American people who were entitled, as Jefferson proclaimed in the Declaration of Inde- pendence, “to assume among the powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station” and who could rightfully claim lands bartered away by Indian peoples.*‘You find us, brother, engaged in war with a powerful nation,” Jefferson informed Ducoigne in 1781. The war had started “as a family quarrel between us and the English, who were then our brothers.” We began as a single people, Jefferson declared, whose “forefathers were Englishmen, inhabitants of a lit- tle island beyond the great water. Being distressed for land,” the first Virginians exercised their natural right of emigration “and set- tled here. As long as we were young and weak,”Jefferson explained, “the English whom we had left behind, made us carry all our wealth to their country, to enrich them; and, not satisfied with this, they at length began to say we were their slaves, and should do whatever they ordered us.” The Revolution was set in motion by this betrayal of familial ties.
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