[767] Report of the Superintendent of Indian Trade, January 16, 1809, American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 756; for the act of 1806 see Annals of Congress, 9th Congress, 1st session, 1287-90.
Another group of restrictions worked injury to the factory system through their failure to accommodate the habits and desires of the Indian. To trade with the government the Indian must come to the factory. The private trader took his goods to the Indian. The red man was notably lacking in prudence and thrift, and was careless and heedless of the future. He was, too, a migratory being, his winters being devoted to the annual hunt, which frequently carried him several hundred miles away from his summer residence. Before setting out on such a hunt he must secure a suitable equipment of supplies. Since he never had money accumulated, this must be obtained on credit and be paid for with the proceeds of the ensuing winter's hunt. The factor was prohibited, for the most part, from extending such credit; the private trader willingly granted it, and furthermore he frequently followed the Indian on his hunt to collect his pay as fast as the furs were taken. In such cases as the factor did extend credit to the Indian, the private trader often succeeded in wheedling him out of the proceeds of his hunt, leaving him nothing with which to discharge his debt to the factor.
The greatest advantage, perhaps, enjoyed by the private trader involved at the same time the most disgraceful feature connected with the Indian trade. From the first association of the Indian with the white race his love of liquor proved his greatest curse. The literature of the subject abounds in narrations of this weakness, and the unscrupulous way in which the white man took advantage of it. For liquor the Indian would barter his all. It constituted an indispensable part of the trader's outfit, and all of the government's prohibitions against its use in the Indian trade were in vain, as had been those of the French and British governments before it. The Indians themselves realized their fatal weakness, but although they frequently protested against the bringing of liquor to them, they were powerless to overcome it. The factor had no whisky for the Indian, and consequently the private trader secured his trade.
The remedy for this state of affairs is obvious. Either the government should have monopolized the Indian trade, at the same time extending the factory system to supply its demands; or else the factory system should have been abandoned and the trade left entirely to private individuals under suitable governmental regulation. The former course had been urged upon Congress at various times, but no disposition to adopt it had ever been manifested. The time had now arrived to adopt the other alternative. Soon after Thomas Hart Benton entered the Senate he urged upon Calhoun, then Secretary of War, the abolition of the factory system. Calhoun's opinion of the Superintendent of Indian Trade, Thomas L. McKenney, was such that he did not credit Benton's charges of gross mismanagement, and accordingly he refused to countenance the proposition.[768] This refusal led Benton to make an assault upon the system, in the Senate.[769] In this two advantages favored his success: as the inhabitant of a frontier state he was presumed to have personal knowledge of the abuses of the system he was attacking; and as a member of the Committee on Indian Affairs he was specially charged with the legislative oversight of matters pertaining to the Indians.
[768] Benton, Thirty Years View, I, 21.
[769] For the debate see Annals of Congress, 17th Congress, 1st session, I, 317 ff. For the documents see American State Papers, Indian Affairs, II, passim.
Benton believed and labored to show that the original purpose of the government trading houses had been lost sight of; that the administration of the system had been marked by stupidity and fraud; that the East had been preferred to the West by the Superintendent of Indian Trade in making purchases and sales; in short that the factory system constituted a great abuse, the continued maintenance of which was desired only by those private interests which found a profit therein. In view of all the circumstances of the situation his conclusion that the government trading houses should be abolished was probably wise; but the reasons on which he based this conclusion were largely erroneous. His information was gained from such men as Ramsey Crooks, then and for long years a leader in the councils of the American Fur Company. This organization had a direct interest in the overthrow of the factory system. Its estimate of the value of the latter was about as disingenuous as would be the opinion today of the leader of a liquor dealers' organization of the merits of the Prohibition party. In view of the charges of Crooks it is pertinent to inquire why, if the factory system was so innocuous, the American Fur Company was so eager to destroy it; and if a monopoly of the fur trade was so repugnant to the sense of fairness why was Crooks willing to see his company replace the government of the United States in the enjoyment of that monopoly?[770]
[770] Chittenden, American Fur Trade of the Far West, I, 18.
Benton's charge of fraud on the part of the superintendent and the factors failed to convince the majority of the senators who spoke in the debate, and the student of the subject today must conclude that the evidence does not sustain them. There was more truth in his charges with respect to unwise management of the enterprise; but for this Congress, rather than the superintendent and factors, was primarily responsible. It is evident, too, that in spite of his claim to speak from personal knowledge, Benton might well have been better informed about the subject of the Indian trade. One of his principal charges concerned the unsuitability of the articles selected for it by the superintendent. But the list of items which he read to support this charge but partially supported his contention.[771] Upon one item, eight gross of jews'-harps, the orator fairly exhausted his powers of sarcasm and invective. Yet a fuller knowledge of the subject under discussion would have spared him this effort. Ramsey Crooks could have informed him that jews'-harps were a well-known article of the Indian trade. Only a year before this tirade was delivered the American Fur Company had supplied a single trader with four gross of these articles for his winter's trade on the Mississippi.[772]
[771] Annals of Congress, 17th Congress, 1st session, I, 319.