But by far the most famous and important of the Huron-Iroquois were those that followed the northern shore of Lake Ontario into the valley of the St. Lawrence. In that direction their progress was checked by the Algonquin tribe of Adirondacks, but they succeeded in retaining a foothold in the country for a long time; for in 1535 Jacques Cartier found on the site which he named Montreal an Iroquois village which had vanished before Champlain's arrival seventy years later. Those Iroquois who were thrust back in the struggle for the St. Lawrence valley, early in the fifteenth century, made their way across Lake Ontario and established themselves at the mouth of the Oswego river. They were then in three small tribes,—the Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas,—but as they grew in numbers and spread eastward to the Hudson and westward to the Genesee, the intermediate tribes of Oneidas and Cayugas were formed by segmentation.[45] About 1450 the five tribes—afterwards known as the Five Nations—were The Five Nations. joined in a confederacy in pursuance of the wise counsel which Hayowentha, or Hiawatha,[46] according to the legend, whispered into the ears of the Onondaga sachem, Daganoweda. This union of their resources combined, with their native bravery and cunning, and their occupation of the most commanding military position in eastern North America, to render them invincible among red men. They exterminated their old enemies the Adirondacks, and pushed the Mohegans over the mountains from the Hudson river to the Connecticut. When they first encountered white men in 1609 their name had become a terror in New England, insomuch that as soon as a single Mohawk was caught sight of by the Indians in that country, they would raise the cry from hill to hill, "A Mohawk! a Mohawk!" and forthwith would flee like sheep before wolves, never dreaming of resistance.[47]
After the Five Nations had been supplied with firearms by the Dutch their power increased with portentous rapidity.[48] At first they sought to persuade their neighbours of kindred blood and speech, the Eries and others, to join their confederacy; and failing in this they went to war and exterminated them.[49] Then they overthrew one Algonquin tribe after another until in 1690 their career was checked by the French. By that time they had reduced to a tributary condition most of the Algonquin tribes, even to the Mississippi river. Some writers have spoken of the empire of the Iroquois, and it has been surmised that, if they had not been interfered with by white men, they might have played a part analogous to that of the Romans in the Old World; but there is no real similarity between the two cases. The Romans acquired their mighty strength by incorporating vanquished peoples into their own body politic.[50] No American aborigines ever had a glimmering of the process of state-building after the Roman fashion. No incorporation resulted from the victories of the Iroquois. Where their burnings and massacres stopped short of extermination, they simply took tribute, which was as far as state-craft had got in the lower period of barbarism. General Walker has summed up their military career in a single sentence: "They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent."[51]
The six groups here enumerated—Dakota, Mandan, Pawnee, Maskoki, Algonquin, Iroquois—made up the great body of the aborigines of North America who at the time of the Discovery lived in the lower status of barbarism. All made pottery of various degrees of rudeness. Their tools and weapons were of the Neolithic type,—stone Horticulture must be distinguished from field agriculture. either polished or accurately and artistically chipped. For the most part they lived in stockaded villages, and cultivated maize, beans, pumpkins, squashes, sunflowers, and tobacco. They depended for subsistence partly upon such vegetable products, partly upon hunting and fishing, the women generally attending to the horticulture, the men to the chase. Horticulture is an appropriate designation for this stage in which the ground is merely scratched with stone spades and hoes. It is incipient agriculture, but should be carefully distinguished from the field agriculture in which extensive pieces of land are subdued by the plough. The assistance of domestic animals is needed before such work can be carried far, and it does not appear that there was an approach to field agriculture in any part of pre-Columbian America except Peru, where men were harnessed to the plough, and perhaps occasionally llamas were used in the same way.[52] Where subsistence depended upon rude horticulture eked out by game and fish, it required a large territory to support a sparse population. The great diversity of languages contributed to maintain the isolation of tribes and prevent extensive confederation. Intertribal warfare was perpetual, save now and then for truces of brief duration. Warfare was attended by wholesale massacre. Perpetual warfare. As many prisoners as could be managed were taken home by their captors; in some cases they were adopted into the tribe of the latter as a means of increasing its fighting strength, otherwise they were put to death with lingering torments.[53] There was nothing which afforded the red men such exquisite delight as the spectacle of live human flesh lacerated with stone knives or hissing under the touch of firebrands, and for elaborate ingenuity in devising tortures they have never been equalled.[54] Cannibalism was quite commonly practised.[55] The scalps of slain enemies were always taken, and until they had attained such trophies the young men were not likely to find favour in the eyes of women. The Indian's notions of morality were those that belong to that state of society in which the tribe is the largest well-established political aggregate. Murder without the tribe was meritorious unless it entailed risk of war at an obvious disadvantage; murder within the tribe was either revenged by blood-feud or compounded by a present given to the victim's kinsmen. Such rudimentary wergild was often reckoned in wampum, or strings of beads made of a kind of mussel shell, and put to divers uses, as personal ornament, mnemonic record, and finally money. Religious thought was in the fetishistic or animistic stage,[56] while many tribes had risen to a vague conception of tutelar deities embodied in human or animal forms. Myth-tales abounded, and the folk-lore of the red men is found to be extremely interesting and instructive.[57] Their religion consisted mainly in a devout belief in witchcraft. No well-defined priestly class had been evolved; the so-called "medicine men" were mere conjurers, though possessed of considerable influence.
But none of the characteristics of barbarous society above specified will carry us so far toward realizing the gulf which divides it from civilized society as the imperfect development of its domestic relations. The importance of this subject is such as to call for a few words of special elucidation.
Thirty years ago, when Sir Henry Maine published that magnificent treatise on Ancient Law, which, when considered in all its potency of suggestiveness, has perhaps done more than any other single book of our century toward placing the study of history upon a scientific basis, Ancient Law. he began by showing that in primitive society the individual is nothing and the state nothing, while the family-group is everything, and that the progress of civilization politically has consisted on the one hand in the aggregation and building up of family-groups through intermediate tribal organizations into states, and on the other hand in the disentanglement of individuals from the family thraldom. In other words, we began by having no political communities larger than clans, and no bond of political union except blood relationship, and in this state of things the individual, as to his rights and obligations, was submerged in the clan. We at length come to have great nations like the English or the French, in which blood-relationship as a bond of political union is no longer indispensable or even much thought of, and in which the individual citizen is the possessor of legal rights and subject to legal obligations. No one in our time can forget how beautifully Sir Henry Maine, with his profound knowledge of early Aryan law and custom, from Ireland to Hindustan, delineated the slow growth of individual ownership of property and individual responsibility for delict and crime out of an earlier stage in which ownership and responsibility belonged only to family-groups or clans.
In all these brilliant studies Sir Henry Maine started with the patriarchal family as we find it at the dawn of history among all peoples of Aryan and Semitic speech,—the The patriarchal family not primitive. patriarchal family of the ancient Roman and the ancient Jew, the family in which kinship is reckoned through males, and in which all authority centres in the eldest male, and descends to his eldest son. Maine treated this patriarchal family as primitive; but his great book had hardly appeared when other scholars, more familiar than he with races in savagery or in the lower status of barbarism, showed that his view was too restricted. We do not get back to primitive society by studying Greeks, Romans, and Jews, peoples who had nearly emerged from the later period of barbarism when we first know them.[58] Their patriarchal family was perfected in shape during the later period of barbarism, and it was preceded by a much ruder and less definite form of family-group in which kinship was reckoned only through the mother, and the headship never descended from father to son. As so often happens, this discovery was made almost simultaneously by two investigators, each working in ignorance of what the other was doing. In 1861, the same year in which "Ancient Law" was published, "Mother-right." Professor Bachofen, of Basel, published his famous book, "Das Mutterrecht," of which his co-discoverer and rival, after taking exception to some of his statements, thus cordially writes: "It remains, however, after all qualifications and deductions, that Bachofen, before any one else, discovered the fact that a system of kinship through mothers only, had anciently everywhere prevailed before the tie of blood between father and child had found a place in systems of relationships. And the honour of that discovery, the importance of which, as affording a new starting-point for all history, cannot be overestimated, must without stint or qualification be assigned to him."[59] Such are the generous words of the late John Ferguson McLennan, who had no knowledge of Bachofen's work when his own treatise on "Primitive Marriage" was published in 1865. Since he was so modest in urging his own claims, it is due to the Scotch lawyer's memory to say that, while he was inferior in point of erudition to the Swiss professor, Primitive marriage. his book is characterized by greater sagacity, goes more directly to the mark, and is less encumbered by visionary speculations of doubtful value.[60] Mr. McLennan proved, from evidence collected chiefly from Australians and South Sea Islanders, and sundry non-Aryan tribes of Hindustan and Thibet, that systems of kinship in which the father is ignored exist to-day, and he furthermore discovered unmistakable and very significant traces of the former existence of such a state of things among the Mongols, the Greeks and Phœnicians, and the ancient Hebrews. By those who were inclined to regard Sir Henry Maine's views as final, it was argued that Mr. McLennan's facts were of a sporadic and exceptional character. But when the evidence from this vast archaic world of America began to be gathered in and interpreted by Mr. Morgan, this argument fell to the ground, and as to the point chiefly in contention, Mr. McLennan was proved to be right. The system of reckoning kinship through females only. Throughout aboriginal America, with one or two exceptions, kinship was reckoned through females only, and in the exceptional instances the vestiges of that system were so prominent as to make it clear that the change had been but recently effected. During the past fifteen years, evidence has accumulated from various parts of the world, until it is beginning to appear as if it were the patriarchal system that is exceptional, having been reached only by the highest races.[61] Sir Henry Maine's work has lost none of its value, only, like all human work, it is not final; it needs to be supplemented by the further study of savagery as best exemplified in Australia and some parts of Polynesia, and of barbarism as best exemplified in America. The subject is, moreover, one of great and complicated difficulty, and leads incidentally to many questions for solving which the data at our command are still inadequate. It is enough for us now to observe in general that while there are plenty of instances of change from the system of reckoning kinship only through females, to the system of reckoning through males, there do not appear to have been any instances of change in the reverse direction; and that in ancient America the earlier system was prevalent.
If now we ask the reason for such a system of reckoning kinship and inheritance, so strange according to all our modern notions, Original reason for the system. the true answer doubtless is that which was given by prudent (ΠεΠνυμένος) Telemachus to the goddess Athene when she asked him to tell her truly if he was the son of Odysseus:—"My mother says I am his son, for my part, I don't know; one never knows of one's self who one's father is."[62] Already, no doubt, in Homer's time there was a gleam of satire about this answer, such as it would show on a modern page; but in more primitive times it was a very serious affair. From what we know of the ideas and practices of uncivilized tribes all over the world, it is evident that the sacredness of the family based upon indissoluble marriage is a thing of comparatively modern growth. If the sexual relations of the Australians, as observed to-day,[63] are an improvement upon an antecedent state of things, The primeval human horde. that antecedent state must have been sheer promiscuity. There is ample warrant for supposing, with Mr. McLennan, that at the beginning of the lower status of savagery, long since everywhere extinct, the family had not made itself distinctly visible, but men lived in a horde very much like gregarious brutes.[64] I have shown that the essential difference between this primeval human horde and a mere herd of brutes consisted in the fact that the gradual but very great prolongation of infancy had produced two effects: the lengthening of the care of children tended to differentiate the horde into family-groups, and the lengthening of the period of youthful mental plasticity made it more possible for a new generation to improve upon the ideas and customs of its predecessors.[65] In these two concomitant processes—the development of the family and the increase of mental plasticity, or ability to adopt new methods and strike out into new paths of thought—lies the whole explanation of the moral and intellectual superiority of men over dumb animals. But in each case the change was very gradual.[66] The true savage is only a little less unteachable than the beasts of the field. The savage family is at first barely discernible amid the primitive social chaos in which it had its origin. Along with polyandry and polygyny in various degrees and forms, instances of exclusive pairing, of at least a temporary character, are to be found among the lowest existing savages, Earliest family-group: the clan. and there are reasons for supposing that such may have been the case even in primeval times. But it was impossible for strict monogamy to flourish in the ruder stages of social development; and the kind of family-group that was first clearly and permanently differentiated from the primeval horde was not at all like what civilized people would recognize as a family. It was the gens or clan, as we find it exemplified in all stages from the middle period of savagery to the middle period of barbarism. The gens or clan was simply—to define it by a third synonym—the kin; it was originally a group of males and females who were traditionally aware of their common descent reckoned in the female line. "Exogamy." At this stage of development there was quite generally though not universally prevalent the custom of "exogamy," by which a man was forbidden to marry a woman of his own clan. Among such Australian tribes as have been studied, this primitive restriction upon promiscuity seems to be about the only one.
Throughout all the earlier stages of culture, and even into the civilized period, we find society organized with the clan for its ultimate unit, although in course of time its character becomes greatly altered by the substitution of kinship in the paternal, for that in the maternal line. By long-continued growth and repeated segmentation the primitive clan was developed into a more complex structure, in which a group of clans constituted a Phratry and tribe. phratry or brotherhood, and a group of phratries constituted a tribe. This threefold grouping is found so commonly in all parts of the world as to afford good ground for the belief that it has been universal. It was long ago familiar to historians in the case of Greece and Rome, and of our Teutonic forefathers,[67] but it also existed generally in ancient America, and many obscure points connected with the history of the Greek and Roman groups have been elucidated through the study of Iroquois and Algonquin institutions. Along with the likenesses, however, there are numerous unlikenesses, due to the change of kinship, among the European groups, from the female line to the male.
This change, as it occurred among Aryan and Semitic peoples, marked one of the most momentous revolutions in the history of mankind. It probably occurred early in the upper period of barbarism, or late in the middle period, after the long-continued domestication of animals had resulted in the acquisition of private property (pecus, peculium, pecunia) in large amounts by individuals. Effect of pastoral life upon property and upon the family. In primitive society there was very little personal property except in weapons, clothing (such as it was), and trinkets. Real estate was unknown. Land was simply occupied by the tribe. There was general communism and social equality. In the Old World the earliest instance of extensive "adverse possession" on the part of individuals, as against other individuals in the clan-community, was the possession of flocks and herds. Distinctions in wealth and rank were thus inaugurated; slavery began to be profitable and personal retainers and adherents useful in new ways. As in earlier stages the community in marital relations had been part of the general community in possessions, so now the exclusive possession of a wife or wives was part of the system of private property that was coming into vogue. The man of many cattle, the man who could attach subordinates to him through motives of self-interest as well as personal deference, the man who could defend his property against robbers, could also have his separate household and maintain its sanctity. In this way, it is believed, indissoluble marriage, in its two forms of monogamy and polygamy, originated. That it had already existed sporadically is not denied, but it now acquired such stability and permanence that the older and looser forms of alliance, hitherto prevalent, fell into disfavour. A natural result of the growth of private wealth and the permanence of the marital relation was the change in reckoning kinship from the maternal to the paternal line. This change was probably favoured by the prevalence of polygamy among those who were coming to be distinguished as "upper classes," since a large family of children by different mothers could be held together only by reckoning the kinship through the father. Thus, we may suppose, originated the patriarchal family. Even in its rudest form it was an immense improvement upon what had gone before, and to the stronger and higher social organization thus acquired we must largely ascribe the rise of the Aryan and Semitic peoples to the foremost rank of civilization.[68]