LITMIR.BIZ

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would have been the fate of the Southern portion of the British American possessions had the African not come?” — J. W. DuBose.1a

      At the founding of Santo Domingo its first town in 1496, the New World, from Canada to Argentina (excepting small areas in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru), was but one vast wilderness. Its most urgent need was labor — hard manual labor to fell forests, build roads, towns, and homes, grow crops, and work in the mines. Would the Spaniard have done these, asks Saco. He replied that they were adventurers in search of loot — gold, silver, precious stones — and were thus by nature unfitted for manual work. Besides, there seemed little reward then for industry of that kind. Robert Beverly of Virginia, writing as late as 1705, said, “The discouragements were enough to terrify any man.”² Life was tough. Forty-four of the Pilgrim Fathers died in their first winter in America and Governor Bradford said of the survivors, “scarce fifty remained and of these were only six or seven sound persons.” George Thorpe, a highly educated colonist thought, however, that despondency was the real cause. He said in 1621, “More do die here of the disease of the mind than of their body.”

      But even if the Spanish newcomers were diligent, Spain, of herself, could have done little. What with her continuous wars, she hadn’t the immigrants to spare. The only labor available was that of the Indians, whose enslavement began at once. And there were millions of them. Could they have been counted on? The blunt truth is that the first colonists, Spaniards and English, were able to do little with them. First, they were unfitted by their mode of life for the hard work needed of them. The male Indian was a hunter not a laborer. Hard work was left to the women. As Duke de la Rochefoucald-Liancourt wrote as late as the 1790’s, “Among the Indians the husband does not work at all; all the laborious services are performed exclusively by the wife.”^2a There hadn’t been any need among them for such labor as the whites demanded. What Beverly said of the Virginia Indians was generally true of all Indians. “They had escaped,” he said, “the first curse, of getting their bread by the sweat of their brows; for, by their pleasure, alone, they supplied all the necessities; namely by fishing, fowling, and hunting; skins being their only clothing … living without labor and only gathering the fruits of the earth.” This would be even more true of those in the warmer regions, settled by Spain. Thomas Jefferson didn’t think very highly of them either. He said they were “useless, expensive, ungovernable allies.”³

      The Spaniards considered Indians just one step above the beast. They called them gente sin razon. Finding them unwilling and useless laborers, they massacred them and fed their flesh to dogs. Las Casas’ account of this is one of the most horrifying of all documents on man’s inhumanity to man. They even sent Indians to be sold in Europe. Columbus, himself, took 400 for sale there in 1498.⁴

      The early American whites were almost as cruel. Connecticut whites massacred the Pequot Indians. Infants were torn from their mother’s breast and hacked to pieces. The heads of the parents were chopped off and kicked about in the streets. Governor Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same and terrible was the stink and stench thereof. But the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they (the whites) gave praise thereof to God.”

      Less than a century and a half after Columbus, the Indians were virtually extinct in such older colonies as Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Jamaica. Saco thinks that had their exclusive use continued they would all have perished everywhere.

      The failure of the Indian to fit into white civilization comes right down to our day. In 1958, when leaders, representing sixty-five tribes, met in a National Congress of American Indians in New York, one spokesman called his people “the sickest, poorest, least educated people in the United States today.”⁵ And at that, Indians are further advanced in the United States than anywhere else in the New World.

      The Navajos of Arizona live in filthy log huts with dirt floors, smoke holes, and old kerosene drums for stoves. Those of Great Falls, Montana, live in awful squalor. The Indians in Nevada lived below the level of the poorest I saw in any part of North Africa. Of course, thanks chiefly to oil, there are wealthy Indians in Oklahoma. In Montana are well-to-do cattlemen. But the general standard of the Indian, as I saw it, even now in New York State, is no higher than that of the average northern Negro a century ago. Besides, of the millions of Indians who were in the United States at the arrival of Ponce de Leon in 1512, there were in 1950 only 343,910, of which a very small percentage is of original stock.

      In all fairness, it must be said that it was largely the white man’s fault why the Indian didn’t get along with him or adopt his ways. The Indian to whom hospitality was a creed, welcomed the whites at first but soon found they had but one idea — loot. One of the first acts of the Pilgrim Fathers on touching American soil was to steal corn from them. Nathaniel Morton, their historian, tells how when the Pilgrims stopped at Provincetown and the Indians ran away, the Pilgrims, seeing “divers fair Indian baskets filled with corn” took them back to the ship as the Hebrew spies of the Bible did the grapes of Eschol.⁶ This was typical of all that followed. Mark Twain rightly said that the Pilgrims on landing “fell on their knees and then fell on the aborigines.” These “salvages,” as they called them, had no rights that a Christian European was bound to respect. Had the Pilgrims touched some European shore and seen there baskets of corn, wouldn’t they have considered that theft? Later they were to capture Indians and sell them as slaves in the West Indies.

      As a result Indians all over the New World developed an apartheid psychology. Patrick Henry tried to overcome that in Virginia by proposing intermarriage, but nothing came of it. Over all the two Americans, Indians still live to themselves. The Indian reservations in America foster this apartness even thought most of the dwellers there are only traditionally Indian. For instance, the Shinnecock Indians of Long Island, among whom I have been, are indistinguishable from Harlem Negroes. According to Virginia law, an Indian is only so on the reservation. The real cause of the Indian’s backwardness is his pride of race — the feeling that he is the first American. One finds a parallel between him and the poor whites of the Tennessee mountains (the hill-billies) and the poor barefooted whites of some British West India islands. The wretched poor-whites of Barbados—the Red-Legs—are extremely proud of their descent from the Irish slaves sent there by Cromwell and keep off to themselves.

      In short, events have proved Saco was right when he said that had Indian labor been depended on, the New World wouldn’t have been what it is.

       THE NORTH EUROPEAN

      Saco spoke chiefly of the South European and what he hadn’t done. What of the North European?

      He, too, lived in a greater or less degree of comfort at home. Thus it was only the most adventurous and desperate who would tear themselves away to go to a wild land. The discouragements, to quote Beverly again, were “enough to terrify any man that could live easy in England from going to provoke his fortune in a strange land.”⁷

      Gondomer, writing in 1612, said, “This colony (Virginia) is held in such bad repute that not a human can be found to go there in any way whatever.” He cites the case of two Negroes of London, brought before the Mayor for theft. The Mayor told them they could be hanged, but he would pardon them on condition that “they should go and serve the King and Queen in Virginia, they replied that they would much rather die on the gallows here and quickly than to die slowly so many deaths in Virginia.”⁸

      The first Englishmen who went to Virginia had positively no intention of settling there. Such a land was no place of abode for them.^8a They had fancied America was like India with plenty of gold, diamonds, and silk, and expected to return laden with loot. Which they didn’t. They called themselves “gentlemen adventurers” and would have scorned the kind of labor that settlement demanded.

       MOST EARLY SETTLERS WERE CONVICTS

      If then the colony was to be peopled, how could it be? Stockholders in the Virginia venture found the answer. Use it as a place of punishment. Ship the convicts and others of England’s unwanted there. Why hang a strong man for stealing a shilling or breaking into a shop when you could use his labor? In 1611, Governor Dale urged James I to banish all condemned

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