Post by mdenney on Apr 16, 2007 23:39:57 GMT -5
2.
Indians. Rather, they represented extensions and reinforcements of colonialism,
conquest, and domination.
As David Fowler, Kathleen Brown, and Martha Hodes have pointed out,
however, white Americans were much more threatened by interracial sex and
marriage that involved white women and nonwhite men. Where there was a
higher incidence of such liaisons, as in Virginia and Maryland, colonies and
states were much more likely to pass laws against interracial marriage.12 When
white women and nonwhite men engaged in sexual relationships or married,
they violated the colonial, racial, and patriarchal order. Within this order,
Jacobs: Marriage between White Women and Native American Men 31
white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated
peoples, including American Indians and African Americans. By law,
white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men,
therefore, a nonwhite man who “possessed” a white woman undermined the
gendered and racialized dominance of white men. The children of such unions
also threatened the social order, especially since southern colonies had conveniently
passed laws establishing that children followed the condition of their
mothers. Thus a union between a white woman and a nonwhite man could allow
a child of a “Negro” or Indian man to be legally white.
In the history of the mainland United States, forty-two states, colonies, or territories
passed laws against marriage between people categorized as belonging
to different races. Most legislatures focused on relationships between whites
and “Negroes” or “mulattos,” but three colonies and fourteen states prohibited
marriages between whites and Indians. Louisiana and North Carolina also
banned marriages between Indians and “Negroes.” Twelve states or territories
forbid marriages between “Orientals” and whites.13 Yet if laws against interracial
marriage were not as common for Indian-white couples as for black-white
couples, social taboos could be as powerful as legislative acts in shaping the
lives of white women and their Indian husbands or lovers.
In the colonial era in American history there was widespread opposition to
marriage between white women and Native American men. In fact, it was assumed
that, as Brian Dippie explains, “The white woman would ordinarily be
the unwilling victim in a union consummated through force—that is, as the
captive ravished by her Indian captor, her body defiled, her spirit still pure.”14
According to historians Native Americans did use captivity to avenge the
deaths in war of tribal members or to replace lost family members. Some captives
were tortured and put to death; others were ritually adopted and could
become full-fledged members of the tribe. Captive girls and young women
were more likely to be adopted than killed, and many went on to marry and
raise families among their captors. English colonists were surprised and
alarmed by the numbers of English captives who chose to remain with their Indian
captors, even when given the chance to be “redeemed.” In one famous
case in 1703, Eunice Williams was captured at age seven along with her entire
family from Deerfield, Massachusetts. At age sixteen she married a converted
Catholic Mohawk Indian from the Kahnawake Mission in Canada and the
couple had at least two daughters who married Indian men. Until her death at
age ninety-five, Eunice “preferred the Indian mode of life, and the haunts of
Indians, to the unutterable grief of her father and friends.” 15
Significantly, white opposition in the colonial period to marriages between
32 frontiers/2002/vol. 23, no. 3
white women and Indian men seemed to have centered more on differences of
religion than on conceptions of race or skin color. Eunice Williams’s family
objected to her marriage to a Mohawk man more because he did not share the
Puritan religion than because he was Indian. Her family repeatedly sought to
“redeem” her, that is, to bring her back into the Puritan fold.16 From the late
eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, however, new objections by
whites surfaced that were based more on a belief in insurmountable biological
and physical differences between Indians and whites. This change in attitudes
is well illustrated in an episode that occurred in Cornwall, Connecticut, in the
1820s. Two young Cherokee men, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, had converted
to Christianity and been sent to study at the Cornwall Foreign Mission
School. Both men fell in love with and eventually married white women. The
townspeople were incensed and demanded that the Foreign Mission School
close. After their wedding Ridge and his bride, Sarah Northrup, had to be hustled
into a coach and at every station stop from Cornwall back to Cherokee
country in present-day Georgia crowds of angry people jeered the young
couple. The editor of one Connecticut newspaper remarked that some people
believed Sarah “ought to be publicly whipped, the Indian hung, and the [girl’s]
mother drown’d.” Once news of Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold’s engagement
leaked out, Harriet had to be hidden in a neighbor’s house for protection.
On the village green, in full view of both her hiding place and her parents’
home, two young men laid an effigy of Harriet on a funeral pyre; her own
brother lit the fire.17
In contrast, white American attitudes toward white men who took Indian
concubines or wives in the period before the Civil War were much more lenient.
The attitude toward such men was a sense of mild disapproval and sympathetic
understanding; since these men lived in remote frontier outposts
where there were few white women, they simply had to take Indian women as
last resorts.18 According to Richard Slotkin, white Americans gradually transformed
the white frontiersman who consorted with Indian women into a
“hero rather than a racial traitor.” Because these frontiersmen were so integral
to English colonization of the North American continent eventually their liaisons
with Indian women were excused and even largely ignored.19
In contrast, why were unions of white women and Indian men seen as so
scandalous and threatening? Clearly it was no longer a religious issue. John
Ridge and Elias Boudinot were practicing Christians who were training to convert
other Cherokees to Christianity. By the 1820s a notion had emerged that
there was an essential biological difference between Indians and whites, and it
made many whites recoil in disgust and dismay from such marriages. A white
woman who preferred a “savage” over one of her own “blood” upset the sup-
Jacobs: Marriage between White Women and Native American Men 33
posedly natural racial order, that the “civilized” white conqueror maintained
superiority over the “savage red-skinned” Indian.
Interracial relationships between white women and Indian men also threatened
predominant nineteenth-century American views of gender relations.
America still operated under the notion of the feme covert; when a woman
married she became entirely “covered” by her husband. Any property she
brought to the marriage as well as her legal identity became subsumed under
her mate’s. As Linda Kerber has shown, a married woman possessed no independent
relationship to the state; her position was constantly mediated
through that of her husband’s. Thus, to a society that adhered to the feme
covert, a white woman who married an Indian would become Indian. The local
Cornwall newspaper editor, in fact, argued that through marrying John
Ridge, Sarah Northrup “had thus made herself a squaw.”20 White men would
lose their patriarchal power over a white woman who married an Indian, and,
in the process, Indian men would gain a power and a prerogative that many
white men believed should be theirs alone. The status of any children born to
such interracial couples also troubled white Americans. As with the children of
white masters and their black slave women, it was assumed that the children of
white men and Indian women were Indian. But what of the children of white
women and Indian men? Should they follow the condition of their mother?
Should such mixed-race children be granted the status and privilege of whiteness?
Neither white nor Indian, such children made a mockery of racial categories,
revealing their instability and impermanence.
Yet not all white Americans subscribed to these views. A sizable number of
social activists and other public figures embraced a more environmentally and
culturally determined view of racial difference. In the meeting between white
women and Indian men, they suggested that Indian men might be positively
influenced to move toward “civilization.” Lydia Maria Child, abolitionist and
women’s rights advocate, published Hobomok in 1824. This novel was set during
the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which the heroine of
the story, Mary Conant, marries an Indian. Although Mary’s father disapproves
of her choice of mate, her white friend Sally believes Hobomok “was the
best Indian I ever knew. . . . He seems almost like an Englishman.”21Child’s
novel intimated that intermarriage between whites and Indians could serve as
a positive force for transforming Indians into Englishmen or whites. As a feminist,
Child did not adhere to the notion that a white woman who married an
Indian man would take on his condition, that is, become an Indian. Instead,
the woman would maintain her civilized position and serve as a guiding
influence on her Indian husband.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, Child’s belief that white
34 frontiers/2002/vol. 23, no. 3
women might civilize Indian men through marriage had gained greater currency.
After the Civil War a movement of white reformers emerged that had
become intensely interested in righting the wrongs that had been inflicted
upon American Indians. This group of reformers quickly became convinced
that isolating Native Americans on reservations was not the solution to the
“Indian problem.” Rather, they insisted, assimilation was the answer. If Indians
could be uplifted and civilized, they believed, the United States would no
longer have a significant number of impoverished, backward, and wronged
Indians. Rather, they represented extensions and reinforcements of colonialism,
conquest, and domination.
As David Fowler, Kathleen Brown, and Martha Hodes have pointed out,
however, white Americans were much more threatened by interracial sex and
marriage that involved white women and nonwhite men. Where there was a
higher incidence of such liaisons, as in Virginia and Maryland, colonies and
states were much more likely to pass laws against interracial marriage.12 When
white women and nonwhite men engaged in sexual relationships or married,
they violated the colonial, racial, and patriarchal order. Within this order,
Jacobs: Marriage between White Women and Native American Men 31
white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated
peoples, including American Indians and African Americans. By law,
white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men,
therefore, a nonwhite man who “possessed” a white woman undermined the
gendered and racialized dominance of white men. The children of such unions
also threatened the social order, especially since southern colonies had conveniently
passed laws establishing that children followed the condition of their
mothers. Thus a union between a white woman and a nonwhite man could allow
a child of a “Negro” or Indian man to be legally white.
In the history of the mainland United States, forty-two states, colonies, or territories
passed laws against marriage between people categorized as belonging
to different races. Most legislatures focused on relationships between whites
and “Negroes” or “mulattos,” but three colonies and fourteen states prohibited
marriages between whites and Indians. Louisiana and North Carolina also
banned marriages between Indians and “Negroes.” Twelve states or territories
forbid marriages between “Orientals” and whites.13 Yet if laws against interracial
marriage were not as common for Indian-white couples as for black-white
couples, social taboos could be as powerful as legislative acts in shaping the
lives of white women and their Indian husbands or lovers.
In the colonial era in American history there was widespread opposition to
marriage between white women and Native American men. In fact, it was assumed
that, as Brian Dippie explains, “The white woman would ordinarily be
the unwilling victim in a union consummated through force—that is, as the
captive ravished by her Indian captor, her body defiled, her spirit still pure.”14
According to historians Native Americans did use captivity to avenge the
deaths in war of tribal members or to replace lost family members. Some captives
were tortured and put to death; others were ritually adopted and could
become full-fledged members of the tribe. Captive girls and young women
were more likely to be adopted than killed, and many went on to marry and
raise families among their captors. English colonists were surprised and
alarmed by the numbers of English captives who chose to remain with their Indian
captors, even when given the chance to be “redeemed.” In one famous
case in 1703, Eunice Williams was captured at age seven along with her entire
family from Deerfield, Massachusetts. At age sixteen she married a converted
Catholic Mohawk Indian from the Kahnawake Mission in Canada and the
couple had at least two daughters who married Indian men. Until her death at
age ninety-five, Eunice “preferred the Indian mode of life, and the haunts of
Indians, to the unutterable grief of her father and friends.” 15
Significantly, white opposition in the colonial period to marriages between
32 frontiers/2002/vol. 23, no. 3
white women and Indian men seemed to have centered more on differences of
religion than on conceptions of race or skin color. Eunice Williams’s family
objected to her marriage to a Mohawk man more because he did not share the
Puritan religion than because he was Indian. Her family repeatedly sought to
“redeem” her, that is, to bring her back into the Puritan fold.16 From the late
eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, however, new objections by
whites surfaced that were based more on a belief in insurmountable biological
and physical differences between Indians and whites. This change in attitudes
is well illustrated in an episode that occurred in Cornwall, Connecticut, in the
1820s. Two young Cherokee men, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, had converted
to Christianity and been sent to study at the Cornwall Foreign Mission
School. Both men fell in love with and eventually married white women. The
townspeople were incensed and demanded that the Foreign Mission School
close. After their wedding Ridge and his bride, Sarah Northrup, had to be hustled
into a coach and at every station stop from Cornwall back to Cherokee
country in present-day Georgia crowds of angry people jeered the young
couple. The editor of one Connecticut newspaper remarked that some people
believed Sarah “ought to be publicly whipped, the Indian hung, and the [girl’s]
mother drown’d.” Once news of Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold’s engagement
leaked out, Harriet had to be hidden in a neighbor’s house for protection.
On the village green, in full view of both her hiding place and her parents’
home, two young men laid an effigy of Harriet on a funeral pyre; her own
brother lit the fire.17
In contrast, white American attitudes toward white men who took Indian
concubines or wives in the period before the Civil War were much more lenient.
The attitude toward such men was a sense of mild disapproval and sympathetic
understanding; since these men lived in remote frontier outposts
where there were few white women, they simply had to take Indian women as
last resorts.18 According to Richard Slotkin, white Americans gradually transformed
the white frontiersman who consorted with Indian women into a
“hero rather than a racial traitor.” Because these frontiersmen were so integral
to English colonization of the North American continent eventually their liaisons
with Indian women were excused and even largely ignored.19
In contrast, why were unions of white women and Indian men seen as so
scandalous and threatening? Clearly it was no longer a religious issue. John
Ridge and Elias Boudinot were practicing Christians who were training to convert
other Cherokees to Christianity. By the 1820s a notion had emerged that
there was an essential biological difference between Indians and whites, and it
made many whites recoil in disgust and dismay from such marriages. A white
woman who preferred a “savage” over one of her own “blood” upset the sup-
Jacobs: Marriage between White Women and Native American Men 33
posedly natural racial order, that the “civilized” white conqueror maintained
superiority over the “savage red-skinned” Indian.
Interracial relationships between white women and Indian men also threatened
predominant nineteenth-century American views of gender relations.
America still operated under the notion of the feme covert; when a woman
married she became entirely “covered” by her husband. Any property she
brought to the marriage as well as her legal identity became subsumed under
her mate’s. As Linda Kerber has shown, a married woman possessed no independent
relationship to the state; her position was constantly mediated
through that of her husband’s. Thus, to a society that adhered to the feme
covert, a white woman who married an Indian would become Indian. The local
Cornwall newspaper editor, in fact, argued that through marrying John
Ridge, Sarah Northrup “had thus made herself a squaw.”20 White men would
lose their patriarchal power over a white woman who married an Indian, and,
in the process, Indian men would gain a power and a prerogative that many
white men believed should be theirs alone. The status of any children born to
such interracial couples also troubled white Americans. As with the children of
white masters and their black slave women, it was assumed that the children of
white men and Indian women were Indian. But what of the children of white
women and Indian men? Should they follow the condition of their mother?
Should such mixed-race children be granted the status and privilege of whiteness?
Neither white nor Indian, such children made a mockery of racial categories,
revealing their instability and impermanence.
Yet not all white Americans subscribed to these views. A sizable number of
social activists and other public figures embraced a more environmentally and
culturally determined view of racial difference. In the meeting between white
women and Indian men, they suggested that Indian men might be positively
influenced to move toward “civilization.” Lydia Maria Child, abolitionist and
women’s rights advocate, published Hobomok in 1824. This novel was set during
the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which the heroine of
the story, Mary Conant, marries an Indian. Although Mary’s father disapproves
of her choice of mate, her white friend Sally believes Hobomok “was the
best Indian I ever knew. . . . He seems almost like an Englishman.”21Child’s
novel intimated that intermarriage between whites and Indians could serve as
a positive force for transforming Indians into Englishmen or whites. As a feminist,
Child did not adhere to the notion that a white woman who married an
Indian man would take on his condition, that is, become an Indian. Instead,
the woman would maintain her civilized position and serve as a guiding
influence on her Indian husband.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, Child’s belief that white
34 frontiers/2002/vol. 23, no. 3
women might civilize Indian men through marriage had gained greater currency.
After the Civil War a movement of white reformers emerged that had
become intensely interested in righting the wrongs that had been inflicted
upon American Indians. This group of reformers quickly became convinced
that isolating Native Americans on reservations was not the solution to the
“Indian problem.” Rather, they insisted, assimilation was the answer. If Indians
could be uplifted and civilized, they believed, the United States would no
longer have a significant number of impoverished, backward, and wronged