If lions had painters! This proverbial saying applies with equal force to the American Indians. They have no historians among them, no books, no newspapers, no convenient means of making their grievances known to a sympathising world. Why, then, should not a white man, a Christian, who has spent among them the greatest part of his life, and was treated by them at all times with hospitality and kindness, plead their honest cause, and defend them as they would defend themselves, if they had but the means of bringing their facts and their arguments before an impartial public?
Those who have never taken the pains to enquire into the real character and disposition of the American Indians, naturally suppose, that a people who have no code of laws for their government, but where every man is at liberty to do what he pleases, where men never forget or forgive injuries, and take revenge in their own way, often in the most cruel manner, and are never satisfied until they have been revenged, must of course be barbarians and savages; by which undefined words is understood whatever is bad, wicked, and disgraceful to human nature. Imagination is immediately at work to paint them as a species of monsters, to whom cruelty is an appetite; a sort of human-shaped tigers and panthers, strangers to the finer feelings, and who commit acts of barbarity without any excitement but that of their depraved inclination, and without even suspecting that there are such things in nature as virtue on the one hand and crime on the other.
But nothing is so false as this picture of the Indians. The worst that can be said of them is, that the passion of revenge is so strong in their minds, that it carries them beyond all bounds. But set this aside, and their character is noble and great. They have no written laws, but they have usages founded on the most strict principles of equity and justice. Murder with them is punished with death. It is true, that as was the case not many centuries ago among the most civilised nations of Europe, the death of a man may be compounded for with his surviving relations; if, however, they do not choose to accept of the terms offered, any one of them may become the executioner of the murderer.
Thieves are compelled to restore what they have stolen, or to make satisfactory amends to the injured party; in their default, their nearest relations are obliged to make up the loss. If the thief, after sufficient warning, continues his bad practices, he is disowned by his nation, and any one may put him to death the next time that he is caught in the act of stealing, or that it can be clearly proved to have been committed by him. I have given two instances of the kind in a former chapter,[248] and I recollect another which will put what I have said in the strongest light. I once knew an Indian chief, who had a son of a vicious disposition, addicted to stealing, and who would take no advice. His father, tired and unable to satisfy all the demands which were made upon him for the restitution of articles stolen by his son, at last issued his orders for shooting him the next time he should be guilty of a similar act.
As to crimes and offences of an inferior nature to murder and theft, they are left to the injured party to punish in such manner as he thinks proper. Such are personal insults and threats, which among those people are not considered as slight matters. If the will and intention of the aggressor appear to be bad; if the insult offered is considered as the forerunner of something worse; or, as the Indians express themselves, if the “murdering spirit” is “alive” within him who offers or threatens violence to another, they think themselves justified in preventing the act meditated against them; in such a case, they consider the killing the aggressor as an act of necessity and self defence. Yet it is very rarely, indeed, that such punishments are inflicted.[249] The Indians, in general, avoid giving offence as much as possible. They firmly believe that bad thoughts and actions proceed from the evil spirit, and carefully avoid every thing that is bad.
Every person who is well acquainted with the true character of the Indians will admit that they are peaceable, sociable, obliging, charitable, and hospitable among themselves, and that those virtues are, as it were, a part of their nature. In their ordinary intercourse, they are studious to oblige each other. They neither wrangle nor fight; they live, I believe, as peaceably together as any people on earth, and treat one another with the greatest respect. That they are not devoid of tender feelings has been sufficiently shewn in the course of this work. I do not mean to speak of those whose manners have been corrupted by a long intercourse with the worst class of white men; they are a degenerate race, very different from the true genuine Indians whom I have attempted to describe.
If any one should be disposed to think that I have exaggerated in the picture which I have drawn of these original people, as they call themselves, I appeal to the numerous impartial writers who have given the same testimony respecting them. What says Christopher Columbus himself of the American Indians in his letters to his sovereign? “There are not,” says he, “a better people in the world than these; more affectionate, affable, or mild. They love their neighbours as themselves.”
Similar encomiums were passed on them by some of the first Englishmen who came to settle in this country. The Reverend Mr. Cushman, in a sermon preached at Plymouth in 1620, says: “The Indians are said to be the most cruel and treacherous people in all those parts, even like lions; but to us they have been like lambs, so kind, so submissive and trusty, as a man may truly say, many Christians are not so kind and sincere.”
The learned Dr. Elias Boudinot, of Burlington, in New Jersey (a man well remembered as one of the most eminent leaders of the American Revolution),[250] in a work[251] which, whatever opinion may be entertained of the hypothesis that he contends for, well deserves to be read, for the spirit which it breathes and the facts that it contains, has brought together in one view, the above and many other authorities of eminent men in favour of the American Indians, and in proof that their character is such as I have described. I shall not repeat after him what Las Casas, William Penn, Bryan Edwards, the Abbé Clavigero, Father Charlevoix and others, have said on the same subject; those numerous and weighty testimonies may be found in the work to which I have referred.[252] But I cannot refrain from transcribing the opinion of the venerable author himself, to which his high character, his learning, and independence, affix a more than common degree of authority.