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The Indian Censures the White Man: "Indian Eloquence" and American Reading Audiences in the Early Republic
Carolyn Eastman
Iappeal to any white man to say, if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not." With these words Logan, a Mingo Indian, began his 1774 speech, memorialized in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson argued that, though Logan's speech came from the mouth of a savage in a wild land where "letters have not yet been introduced," it was equal in eloquence to anything produced by centuries of European civilization. In his brief speech, Logan explains that he had been an advocate for peace throughout the bloody French and Indian War, so much so that "my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, 'Logan is the friend of white men.'" He had even considered moving closer to white settlements, he continues, until one white man's terrible actions changed the course of his life:
Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creatures. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.1
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Yet Americans did mourn for Logan. Propelled by Jefferson's effusive praise, the speech's final plea elicited such admiration that editors reprinted it hundreds of times. Nor was it the only Indian speech to garner attention for its eloquence. The figure of the eloquent Indian wronged by whites appeared in speeches, stories, and anecdotes throughout the literature of the early Republic. "Indian eloquence" reprised Logan's message from the mouths of Red Jacket, Speckled Snake, Farmer's Brother, and others, each of whom spoke with nobility and clarity when accusing the white man of treachery. Their speeches pointed out how frequently white Americans had stolen land, broken treaties, murdered Indian women and children, and proselytized a religion whose morality they seldom upheld themselves. Editors of all political persuasions reproduced these speeches (and, in fact, often invented them wholesale), suggesting that the speeches did not cloak the agenda of a specific political faction.2 Even more surprising, schoolchildren throughout the greater Northeast from Baltimore to Vermont memorized and recited Indian speeches in schools, alongside speeches by Cicero and George Washington, as an accepted component of learning how to read and comport themselves. What made Indian censure so prevalent in the American imagination during the early Republic? |
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Representations of the eloquent Indian in print and in schoolroom performance helped Americans identify as national subjects on several levels. They articulated a unique American history, shaped in part by generations of betrayal of the Indians. This history made Americans appear sharply different from their former British compatriots as well as from the Indians with whom they shared the land. By prompting their readers to feel a sense of collective responsibility, magazine and schoolbook editors also found in this story the possibility of redemption, a capacity for self-criticism that might further distinguish the American character from others. Examining the reiteration of American responsibility in print together with schoolchildren's ventriloquism of Indian censure offers a dramatic means of perceiving the extent to which oral and print media were deeply implicated in the process of forming a national identity. The way that Indian eloquence elaborated a unique American history thus created one of the nation's "foundational fictions," a widely circulated narrative that helped to construct a coherent sense of the American past, present, and future.3 |
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