396
INTRODUCTION.
It is related by Æsop, that a forester once meeting with a lion, they traveled together for a time, and conversed amicably without much differing in opinion. At length a dispute happening to arise upon the question of superiority between their respective races, the former, in the absence of a better argument, pointed to a monument, on which was sculptured, in marble, the statue of a man striding over the body of a vanquished lion. "If this," said the lion, "is all you have to say, let us be the sculptors, and you will see the lion striding over the vanquished man."
The moral of this fable should ever be borne in mind when contemplating the character of that brave and ill-used race of men, now melting away before the Anglo-Saxons like the snow beneath a vertical sun—the aboriginals of America. The Indians are no sculptors. No monuments of their own art commend to future ages the events of the past. No Indian pen traces the history of their tribes and nations, or records the deeds of their warriors and chiefs—their prowess and their wrongs. Their spoilers have been their historians; and although a reluctant assent has been awarded to some of the nobler traits of their nature, yet, without yielding a due allowance for the peculiarities of their situation, the Indian character has been presented with singular uniformity as being cold, cruel, morose, and revengeful; unrelieved by any of those varying traits and characteristics, those lights and shadows, which are admitted in respect to other people no less wild and uncivilized than they.
Without pausing to reflect that, even when most cruel, they have been practising the trade of war—always dreadful—as much in conformity to their own usages and laws, as have their more civilized antagonists, the white historian has drawn them with the characteristics of demons. Forgetting that the second of the Hebrew monarchs did not scruple to saw his prisoners with saws, and harrow them with harrows of iron; forgetful, likewise, of the scenes at Smithfield, under the direction of our own British ancestors; the historians of the poor untutored Indians, almost with one accord, have denounced them as monsters sui generis—of unparalleled and unapproachable barbarity; as though the summary tomahawk were worse than the iron tortures of the harrow, and the torch of the Mohawk hotter than the faggots of Queen Mary.
Nor does it seem to have occurred to the "pale-faced" writers, that the identical cruelties, the records and descriptions of which enter so largely into the composition of the earlier volumes of American history, were not barbarities in the estimation of those who practised them. The scalp-lock was an emblem of chivalry. Every warrior, in shaving his head for battle, was careful to leave the lock of defiance upon his crown, as for the bravado, "Take it if you can." The stake and the torture were identified with their rude notions of the power of endurance. They were inflicted upon captives of their own race, as well as upon the whites; and with their own braves these trials were courted, to enable the sufferer to exhibit the courage and fortitude with which they could be borne—the proud scorn with which all the pain that a foe might inflict, could be endured.
But they fell upon slumbering hamlets in the night, and massacred defenceless women and children! This, again, was their own mode of warfare, as honourable in their estimation as the more courteous methods of committing wholesale murder, laid down in the books.
But of one enormity they were ever innocent. Whatever degree of personal hardship and suffering their female captives were compelled to endure, their persons were never dishonoured by violence; a fact which can be predicated, we apprehend, of no other victorious soldiery that ever lived.
In regard, moreover, to the countless acts of cruelty alleged to have been perpetrated by the savages, it must still be borne in mind that the Indians have not been the sculptors—the Indians have had no writer to relate their own side of the story. There has been none "to weep for Logan!" while his wrongs have been unrecorded. The annals of man, probably, do not attest a more kindly reception of intruding foreigners, than was given to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth, by the faithful Massassoit, and the tribes under his jurisdiction. Nor did the forest kings take up arms until they but too clearly saw, that either their visitors or themselves, must be driven from the soil which was their own—the fee of which was derived from the Great Spirit. And the nation is yet to be discovered that will not fight for their homes, the graves of their fathers, and their family altars. Cruel they were, in the prosecution of their contests; but it would require the aggregate of a large number of predatory incursions and isolated burnings, to balance the awful scene of conflagration and blood, which at once extinguished the power of Sassacus, and the brave and indomitable Narragansets over whom he reigned. No! until it is forgotten, that by some Christians in infant Massachusetts it was held to be right to kill Indians as the agents and familiars of Azazel; until the early records of even tolerant Connecticut, which disclose the fact that the Indians were seized by the Puritans, transported to the British West Indies, and sold as slaves, are lost; until the Amazon and La Plata shall have washed away the bloody history of the Spanish American conquest; and until the fact that Cortez stretched the unhappy Guatimozin naked upon a bed of burning coals, is proved to be a fiction, let not the American Indian be pronounced the most cruel of men!