The question was one that allured many of the earlier Spanish writers like Herrera and Torquemada. Among the earlier English discussions is that of Wm. Bourne in his Booke called the Treasure for Travellers (London, 1578), where a section is given to “The Peopling of America.” The most famous of the early discussions of the various theories was that of Gregorio Garciá, a missionary for twenty years in South America, who reviewed the question in his Origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo (Valencia, 1607).[1567] He goes over the supposed navigations of the Phœnicians, the identity of Peru with Solomon’s Ophir, and the chances of African, Roman, and Jewish migrations,—only to reject them all, and to favor a coming of Tartars and Chinese. Clavigero thinks his evidences the merest conjectures. E. Brerewood, in his Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions (London, 1632, 1635), claimed a Tartar origin. In New England, where many were believers in the Jewish analogies, it is somewhat amusing to find not long after this the quizzical Thomas Morton, with what seems like mock gravity, finding the aboriginal source in “the scattered Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”[1568] The reader, however, is referred to other sections of the present volume for the literature bearing upon the distinct ethnical connections of the early American peoples.
The chief literary controversy over the question began in 1642, when Hugo Grotius published his De Origine Gentium Americanarum Dissertatio (Paris and Amsterdam, 1642).[1569] He argued that all North America except Yucatan (which had an Ethiopian stock) was peopled from the Scandinavian North; that the Peruvians were from China, and that the Moluccans peopled the regions below Peru. Grotius aroused an antagonist in Johannes de Laet, whose challenge appeared the next year: Joannis de Laet Antwerpiani notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii de origine gentium Americanarum: et observationes aliquot ad meliorem indaginem difficillimæ illius quæstionis (Amsterdam, 1643).[1570] He combated his brother Dutchman at all points, and contended that the Scythian race furnished the predominant population of America. The Spaniards went to the Canaries, and thence some of their vessels drifted to Brazil. He is inclined to accept the story of Madoc’s Welshmen, and think it not unlikely that the people of the Pacific islands may have floated to the western coast of South America, and that minor migrations may have come from other lands. He supports his views by comparisons of the Irish, Gallic, Icelandic, Huron, Iroquois, and Mexican tongues.
To all this Grotius replied in a second Dissertatio, and De Laet again renewed the attack: Ioannis de Laet Antwerpiani responsio ad dissertationem secundam Hvgonis Grotii, de origine gentium Americanarum. Cum indice ad utrumque libellum (Amsterdam, 1644).[1571]
De Laet, not content with his own onset, incited another to take part in the controversy, and so George Horn (Hornius) published his De Originibus Americanis, libri quatuor (Hagæ Comitis, i. e. The Hague, 1652; again, Hemipoli, i. e. Halberstadt, 1669).[1572] His view was the Scythian one, but he held to later additions from the Phœnicians and Carthaginians on the Atlantic side, and from the Chinese on the Pacific.
For the next fifty years there were a number of writers on the subject, who are barely names to the present generation;[1573] but towards the middle of the eighteenth century the question was considered in The American Traveller (London, 1741), and by Charlevoix in his Nouvelle France (1744). The author of an Enquiry into the Origin of the Cherokees (Oxford, 1762) makes them the descendants of Meshek, son of Japhet. In 1767, however, the question was again brought into the range of a learned and disputatious discussion, reviving all the arguments of Grotius, De Laet, and Horn, when E. Bailli d’Engel published his Essai sur cette question: Quand et comment l’America a-t-elle été peuplée d’hommes et d’Animaux? (5 vols., Amsterdam, 1767, 2d ed., 1768). He argues for an antediluvian origin.[1574] The controversy which now followed was aroused by C. De Pauw’s characterization of all American products, man, animals, vegetation, as degraded and inferior to nature in the old world, in an essay which passed through various editions, and was attacked and defended in turn.[1575] An Italian, Count Carli, some years later, controverted De Pauw, and using every resource of mythology, tradition, geology, and astronomy, claimed for the Americans a descent from the Atlantides.[1576] It was not till after reports had come from the Ohio Valley of the extensive earthworks in that region that the question of the earlier peoples of America attracted much general attention throughout America; and the most conspicuous spokesman was President Stiles of Yale College, in an address which he delivered before the General Assembly of Connecticut, in 1783, on the future of the new republic.[1577] In this, while arguing for the unity of the American tribes and for their affinity with the Tartars, he held to their being in the main the descendants of the Canaanites expelled by Joshua, whether finding their way hither by the Asiatic route and establishing the northern Sachemdoms, or coming in Phœnician ships across the Atlantic to settle Mexico and Peru.[1578] Lafitau in 1724 (Mœurs de Sauvages) had contended for a Tartar origin. We have examples of the reasoning of a missionary in the views of the Moravian Loskiel, and of a learned controversialist in the treatise of Fritsch, in 1794 and 1796 respectively.[1579]
BENJAMIN SMITH BARTON
The earliest American with a scientific training to discuss the question was a professor in the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton, a man who acquired one of the best reputations in his day among Americans for studies in this and other questions of natural history. His father was an English clergyman settled in America, and his mother a sister of David Rittenhouse. It was while he was a student of medicine in Edinburgh that he first approached the subject of the origin of the Americans, in a little treatise on American Antiquities, which he never completed.[1580] His Papers relating to certain American Antiquities (Philad., 1796) consists of those read to the Amer. Philos. Soc., and printed in their Transactions (vol. iv.). They were published as the earnest of his later work on American Antiquities. He argues against De Pauw, and contends that the Americans are descended—at least some of them—from Asiatic peoples still recognized. The Papers include a letter from Col. Winthrop Sargent, Sept. 8, 1794, describing certain articles found in a mound at Cincinnati, and a letter upon them from Barton to Dr. Priestley. He in the end gave more careful attention to the subject, mainly on its linguistic side, and went farther than any one had gone before him in his New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philad., 1797; 2d ed., enlarged, 1798).[1581] The book attracted much notice, and engaged the attention in some degree of European philologists, and made Barton at that time the most conspicuous student on these matters in America. Jefferson was at that time gathering material in similar studies, but his collections were finally burned in 1801. Barton, in dedicating his treatise to Jefferson, recognized the latter’s advance in the same direction. He believed his own gathering of original MS. material to be at that time more extensive than any other student had collected in America. His views had something of the comprehensiveness of his material, and he could not feel that he could point to any one special source of the indigenous population.
During the early years of the present century old theories and new were abundant. The powerful intellect and vast knowledge of Alexander von Humboldt were applied to the problem as he found it in Middle America. He announced some views on the primitive peoples in 1806, in the Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift (vol. xv.); but his ripened opinions found record in his Vues de Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris, 1816), and the Asiatic theory got a conservative yet definite advocate.
Hugh Williamson[1582] thought he found traces of the Hindoo in the higher arts of the Mexicans, and marks of the ruder Asiatics in the more northern American peoples. A conspicuous littérateur of the day, Samuel L. Mitchell, veered somewhat wildly about in his notions of a Malay, Tartar, and Scandinavian origin.[1583] Meanwhile something like organized efforts were making. The American Antiquarian Society was formed in 1812.[1584] Silliman began his Journal of Arts and Sciences in 1819, and both society and periodical proved instruments of wider inquiry. In the first volume published by the Antiquarian Society, Caleb Atwater, in his treatise on the Western Antiquities, gave the earliest sustained study of the subject, and believed in a general rather than in a particular Asiatic source. The man first to attract attention for his grouping of ascertained results, unaided by personal explorations, however, was Dr. James H. McCulloh, who published his Researches on America at Baltimore in 1816. The book passed to a second edition the next year, but received its final shape in the Researches, philosophical and antiquarian, concerning the aboriginal history of America (1829), a book which Prescott[1585] praised for its accumulated erudition, and Haven[1586] ranked high for its manifestations of industry and research, calling it encyclopædic in character. McCulloh examines the native traditions, but can evolve no satisfactory conclusion from them as to the origin of the Americans. The public mind, however, was not ripe for scholarly inquiry, and there was not that in McCulloh’s style to invite attention; and greater popularity followed upon the fanciful and dogmatic confidence of John Haywood,[1587] upon the somewhat vivid if unsteady speculations of C. S. Rafinesque,[1588] and even upon the itinerant Josiah Priest, who boasted of the circulation of thousands of copies of his popular books.[1589] John Delafield’s Inquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of America (N. Y., 1839) revived the theory, never quite dormant, of the descent of the Mexicans from the riper peoples of Hindostan and Egypt; while the more barbarous red men came of the Mongol stock. The author ran through the whole range of philology, mythology, and many of the customs of the races, in reaching this conclusion. A little book by John McIntosh, Discovery of America and Origin of the North American Indians, published in Toronto, 1836, was reissued in N. Y. in 1843, and with enlargements in 1846, Origin of the North American Indians, continued down to 1859 to be repeatedly issued, or to have a seeming success by new dates.[1590]