The Cherokees have embraced many usages of civilization, and the Choctaws approach them. The Chickasaws, the other great tribe in Indian Territory, retain more of their old manners. In all these tribes Protestantism has gained a hearing and has a few church members; but there are strong pagan parties, and even among the Christian part there is undoubtedly a strong old heathen element beneath an outward conformity to Christianity. It was strongly urged on Congress a few years since to erect this tract into a recognized territory of Oklahoma, with a government like that of other Territories, preparatory to its admission as a State. The outbursts of savage fury between factions in the tribes, however, made men hesitate to give autonomy to them.
Investigation will, we think, show that crypto-paganism largely controls this mass of native Indians, and is the great obstacle to their improvement. It is, however, confined to themselves, and we do not find that even in New Mexico the whites of Spanish origin have, during their long residence near the pueblos, adopted to any extent the heathenish usages of those tribes. The isolation of the nations in Indian Territory has also prevented any great external influence. Thus this Indian crypto-paganism, though wide-spread and unbroken, seems doomed, unless taken in hand by some master-spirit.
The voodoo worship of the negroes shows greater vitality and diffusiveness. The slaves taken in early times to St. Domingo came from all parts of Africa, some from the fiercest tribes addicted to human sacrifices and cannibalism. They brought over their demonic worship, and by their force of character propagated it among the negroes generally. It became the great religion of the slaves, was secretly practised, and exercised a very powerful influence. As a secret society, with terrible forms of initiation and bloody rites, it became a power in Hayti, and has caused more than one revolution. Cases of the offering up of infants in sacrifice, and devouring the victims, were exposed a few years since, and numbers were arrested. Some were put to death, but the power of the organization was unbroken, and Soulouque, if we are not mistaken, was said to have owed his power to the voudoux.
St. Domingo was part French and part Spanish, and in time voodooism spread from the French portion of the island, where it seems to have originated, to the Spanish division, and thence to Cuba.
In this latter island it exists to this day, and has found votaries among the whites. A recent French traveller—Piron—describes a fearful scene which he witnessed in the house of a lady whom he never would have suspected of any connection with so monstrous a sect. A naked white girl acted as a voodoo priestess, wrought up to frenzy by dances and incantations that followed the sacrifice of a white and a black hen. A serpent, trained to its part, and acted on by the music, coiled round the limbs of the girl, its motions studied by the votaries dancing around or standing to watch its contortions. The spectator fled at last in horror when the poor girl fell writhing in an epileptic fit.[[4]]
While France held St. Domingo and Louisiana the intercourse between the two colonies was constant, and voodooism took root on the banks of the Mississippi soon after its settlement. The early historian of Louisiana, Le Page du Pratz, says: “The negroes are very superstitious and attached to their prejudices and to charms which they call grisgris. These should not be taken from them or spoken about; for they would think themselves ruined, were they deprived of them. The old negro slaves soon disabuse them.”[[5]] These old negroes were scarcely, it will be confessed, apostles to convert idolaters. In fact, their influence extended only to inducing the new-comers to practise their rites and use the symbols in secrecy.
Le Page du Pratz himself, in defeating a negro plot to massacre the colonists at New Orleans as the Indians had done at Natchez, found that they attributed their defeat to his being a devil—that is, possessing one more powerful than their own. The voodoo rites have been kept up in Louisiana from the commencement, and the power exercised by the priests and priestesses of this horrible creed is very great. Working in secret, with all the terrors of mystery and threats of bodily harm, it is just suited to the negro mind, and has spread over much of the South. As in Cuba and St. Domingo, the white children in many cases learn of it from their negro nurses, and the weak, as they grow up, never shake off its hold on their imagination. Human sacrifices are certainly offered in their infamous rites, and the escape of an old negro doomed to the sacrificial altar drew down upon the voodoos the police of New Orleans only a few years ago.
The Abbé Domenech[[6]]—whom we should hesitate to cite, were not his accounts here in conformity with numerous others—represents voodooism as having not only spread through Texas, but into Mexico where, in a depraved border community, its horrid rites and secret poisonings are carried on. His details as to the mode of worship in New Orleans—the nudity, the use of serpents, the dances—correspond with the accounts given from Cuba. Reports from Mobile attest its existence there with similar features.
Where voodooism prevails it has not only its adepts and votaries, but a large class who, full of terror, buy at exorbitant prices from voodoo priests charms against its spells.
The late war has given the negroes opportunities for education and a future, but the new prosperity has not broken the power of voodooism. Of a thing kept secret and hidden, which many will deny and more be ashamed of, it is not easy to get precise data or details. Yet from time to time revelations are made attesting its vitality. A negro member of the Louisiana Legislature, and a minister in one of the Protestant denominations, was reported within a few years as undergoing certain rites to free himself from the spell of a voodoo priestess. We may therefore easily infer that the negroes, being not only self-governing, but governing the whites in many parts by force of numbers, are not likely to be influenced so much by whites as by the crafty and aspiring among themselves. They will concentrate, and in their concentration this voodoo power cannot but increase and all vestiges of Christianity disappear. The field upon which it can work—the vast colored population of the South—is ready for it. Some may think the whole matter a shallow imposture that will soon die out before the effulgence of newspapers; but it really shows no signs of decline, and, if no cases have been unearthed which show such frightful enormities as those in Hayti, it is certainly attended with ceremonies which, for their very indecency and pampering of the worst vices, should cause it to be rooted out, even by those who would regard the direct worship of the devil as something with which the state cannot interfere.