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The dialogue about Indian Removal, carried out, in part, through articles and essays such as those just referenced, form an important context for understanding the poetry of the period that frequently took the Inca as a subject. In general, much of the verse depicting the Inca was unquestionably romantic and frequently sentimental. Noble but failed resistance to Spanish greed and aggression, Incan lovers who sacrifice themselves for one another, tyrannical treatment and the near saintly suffering of it, and the promises and failures of cultural, social, and racial amalgamation are frequently represented in poems that often circulated in the same newspapers and magazines as the previously referenced essays and articles. The fact that much of this literature is either sentimental or sensational is important—for it is in the affective registers of this poetry that much of its political and cultural work is done. A survey of several poems of the period gives evidence of this work—of the promise it held for helping Americans identify themselves in contradistinction to the Spanish of Black Legend, and of its all too frequent exacerbation of the injustices that marked settler colonialism.

“The Inca’s Daughter,” written by none other than “Walter Whitman” and published in the Long Island Democrat on May 5th, 1840—roughly 15 years before his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass—serves as an interesting example.⁷ “The Inca’s Daughter” narrates a scene in which an imprisoned Incan princess, who has apparently just survived torture on the rack, denounces her captors and then commits suicide rather than suffer further degradations. The sense that this poem may be as much a commentary addressed to contemporary readers as a historical drama about the Inca is heightened by the descriptive language Whitman employs in the poem. For example, despite being an Incan princess, Whitman also calls her an “Indian maiden.” Similarly, although initially introducing the Spaniards as “dark-brow’d,” he transitions to calling them simply “white lords” and “palefaces.” Moreover, no mention of “Inti” the sun god of the Inca is made, but reference to the Algonquin god “Manitou” is. Collectively, such references blend the drama of the Inca with that of the native peoples of Eastern America with whom Whitman’s readers were familiar, blurring the distinction between Spanish and contemporary American colonialism.

Even more important, however, is the way in which the poem increasingly includes readers as the target of the address the princess makes just prior to her suicide. This begins with the princess’s aforementioned denunciation, which starts in the third stanza of the poem and goes on to occupy the majority of its remainder. The princess opens by asserting her nobility and claiming her right to autonomy through a series of questions: “And I—a Daughter of the Sun—Shall I ingloriously live?/Shall a Peruvian monarch’s child become the white lord’s slave?”—questions she answers herself by saying, “No: I’d not meet my father’s frown in the free spirit’s place of rest,/Nor seem a stranger midst the bands whom Manitou has blest” (Whitman 1840). This direct address of the princess to the Spaniards not only challenges the idea that it is right for her to suffer in this way but it also serves to create a sense of intimacy between the speaker and the reader, who are imaginatively present to witness that address as it is being delivered. This sense of intimacy is heightened at the poem’s climax, when the princess exclaims, “Now, paleface, see! The Indian girl can teach thee how to bravely die:/Hail! Spirits of my kindred slain, a sister ghost is nigh!” This poetic phrase addresses readers even more straightforwardly than before, reaching out directly to them with a command to “now” “see” themselves as included among the “palefaces” looking at her. This sense of the reader’s inclusion is heightened by the subsequent use of the word “thee,” a collective form of second person address (essentially the archaic version of “you”), which invites any “palefaced” reader to linguistically include himself or herself as part of the collective addressed. With the reader apostrophically drawn into the poem, the princess then shocks them as she takes “a poisoned arrow” and with “hand…clenched and lifted high” plunges it into herself and dies (Whitman 1840).

By ending in this fashion, Whitman’s poem neither prophesies a way forward nor justifies certain forms of social engineering; rather, it works to traumatize readers with the thought that they are complicit in the death of native peoples, standing by as silent witnesses even if they are not active participants in those peoples’ demise. At the same time that this seems to suggest that even those living far from the drama of Indian Removal are culpable for the injustices they are suffering under settler colonialism, the fact that the poem ends with the death of the Indian maiden also suggests that the time for action has passed, that the damage has been done, and that the sins committed through interaction with native people have had lamentable but irreversible consequences. In suggesting this, Whitman essentially ignores the fact that native peoples remained a collection of robust nations throughout the period, albeit struggling to maintain cultural coherence and political relevance in the face of Jacksonian policies and attitudes. In fact, by treating their “disappearance” or removal as having already occurred, he essentially erases native peoples from the scene, clearing the way for further acts of aggression by characterizing the drama as concluded rather than ongoing and capable of being changed or even reversed. It is a seeming contradiction that, in the words of Kirsten Silva Gruesz, represents both an early “complicity in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny…[and] a profound ambivalence about it” (Gruesz 2002, p. 121).⁸

A somewhat more direct call to action is found in the poem “The Peruvian Inca,” attributed simply to “Robertson,” and published in 1827 in the quarterly magazine of the Massachusetts Peace Society, The Friend of Peace. This 24-line poem narrates the capture and execution of Atahualpa, the Incan emperor at the time of Pizarro’s arrival. In doing so, it works to challenge readers who, like the Spanish, may have used religion as the justification of settler colonialism. Shortly before his execution, the poem depicts Atahualpa as being visited by a priest who “promised heaven” if Atahualpa converted. Atahualpa’s response stands as a scathing indictment of Spanish behavior during the colonization of the Inca. He asks, “are there any Spaniards in that place?” and then, upon hearing the priest answer affirmatively, proclaims, “If it be so,/Upon my word, I will not go/Where one of that inhuman crew/Can find a place” (Robertson 1827, p. 384). Apparently, the duplicitous and cruel behavior of the Spanish toward the Inca has undermined the priest’s ability to evangelize him, simultaneously eroding the foundation of one of the three central pillars (god, gold, and glory) justifying Spanish colonization. However, the poem does not end there; rather, the author targets Christian readers, addressing them apostrophically and even more directly than the Incan princess in Whitman’s poem. “Ye Christians, hear!/And boast no more of your religion, stained with gore;/Reflect—and ere abroad you roam,/Effect a due reform at home!” (Ibid). These closing lines draw the history of the Inca into the present and urge readers to apply it to contemporary circumstances, namely the treatment of contemporary native people who, like Atahualpa and the Inca, were frequently being evangelized and condemned at one and the same time under settler colonialism. Such a situation, the poet emphatically claims, unquestionably calls for “due reform.” Ending as it does, this poem freights its readers, especially its Christian readers, with an affective charge of shame, guilt, and culpability, as Whitman’s did. It suggests to its readers that they risk occupying the same tenuous moral ground as the Spanish, and that they must tread carefully or risk alienating native peoples to the point where further evangelization will be impossible—something that would, much as it had potentially done for the Spanish, undermine much of the American justification for many of their actions relating to native peoples. Such affective castigation invites the reader to reflect critically on the actions taken relative to native peoples and, in this instance, to consider what “reform” might look like.

The lack of specificity regarding “reform” blunts what might otherwise be a progressive call to action on behalf of native peoples. In fact, by leaving readers focused on effecting a “due reform at home” as opposed to in the halls of Congress, in their state assemblies, or in their local communities, the poem leaves room for readers to assume that the work that must take place is intimate, focused perhaps more on the self and family than on political or social engagement of any kind. While such a sentiment may seem on one level to be an improvement over the otherwise aggressive expulsion of native peoples and bodies from the American landscape, it fails to advance a call acknowledging or advocating for native peoples’ rights to cultural and political sovereignty, or considering native peoples as worthy of respect and autonomy. In the words of Laura Mielke, such a text operates via a “sympathy [that], in this construction, could alleviate wrongs” but ultimately does “not solve them because it could not provide sufficient basis for peaceful coexistence” (Mielke 2008, p. 4). In fact, it seems just as likely that a reader might leave the poem preoccupied with maintaining relationships with native peoples positive enough to enable their ongoing evangelization, as opposed to being motivated to support them in their desires for cultural and social autonomy. Thus, the poem just as easily reinforces the idea of the cultural superiority of white people and justifies the presence of whites as an evangelizing and thus “civilizing” force in supposedly “savage” native spaces, as it does challenge the practices of settler colonialism.

Robertson’s and Whitman’s poems, written at the beginning of and then at the height of Indian Removal, respectively, sit comfortably in a larger canon of poems that are ostensibly about the Inca but simultaneously serve to help American readers navigate their relationship to Native American peoples, settler colonial practices, and the shadow of the Spanish Black Legend. From poems such as George Yellet’s four-canto, 110-section “The Maid of Peru: A Poetic Romance,” to “Dirge for the Last Inca” by James S. Buckingham, to the scores of poems written by more anonymous writers, such as “The Ruins of Pachacamac” by Julia, “Ancient Peruvian Burial” by H., “Montezuma: or, The Spaniards in America” by Delta, and “Temple of the Muses” (unknown), this canon sought to use the Inca as a historical corollary to comment on America’s colonial relationship to native peoples from a variety of ideological perspectives.⁹ As mentioned earlier, the close of the 1840s was accompanied by an appreciable decline in the practice of recurring to the Inca to navigate the US relationship to native peoples in the contemporary moment; however, the practice did not vanish entirely. In fact, even as references to the Inca began to decline, they were still recurred to as the nation transitioned from eastern to western removal in what would become the next chapter in the saga of removal and settler colonialism in America, namely the California Genocide—precipitated in large measure by the gold rush of 1849.¹⁰ In 1850, the Family Favorite and Temperance Journal published “The Miner’s Dream,” written by an author using the pseudonym Trismegist. In the poem, a gold rush miner dreams of a “noble palace of gold which the ancient Spaniards sought.” In it, “on a glittering throne the Inca sat” surrounded by “guards [that] wore golden plumes,” and “helmets [that] shone like suns.” The miner, clearly desirous of the wealth seen around him, is addressed by the Inca who unexpectedly proclaims, “‘I give thee all!’… ‘my palace, my guard, my throne, –/And the river’s bed, and the mountain’s side, their treasures are thine alone.’” The Inca, presumably Atahualpa, then fades from the dream as the miner finds himself musing on the charms of “his old New England home,” and ultimately wakes to thoughts of “his wife, and his child, and his home.” The poem ends with the miner recognizing the value of these “treasures of the heart” and, taking his “bag of [gold] dust” he travels south to the Isthmus of Panama, and ultimately makes his way back to New England “by way of Chagres”—the Spanish town on the gulf side of the isthmus where most of the gold looted from the Inca was prepared for shipment to Spain (Trismegist 1850, p. 107).

The poem is notable for several reasons. On the surface, it suggests that there are greater treasures to be had than gold—namely the love of family and a life of domesticity. Such an ennobling and antimaterialist sentiment nevertheless papers over some startling assertions, the import of which relies heavily upon the invocation of the Inca. In the context of the miner’s dream, the appearance of the Inca is remarkable. The Inca never controlled any part of what would become California, and so Atahualpa’s giving of this land to the miner only makes sense if we understand him as representing both the voice and will of native peoples in not only ancient Peru but modern-day California, as well. By invoking the Incan emperor, the poem therefore joins the ancient history of Peru to the modern history of California, and in doing so arguably joins the Spaniard’s thirst for gold and the miner’s. Nevertheless, in this moment, the miner’s fantasy (indeed, the fantasy of nearly all settler colonialists) is enacted, as the native voice proclaims him the owner of all that he desires—land, wealth, and power. The miner’s fantasy is that the native has not only functioned as a caretaker, holding wealth and resources until the moment the colonist appears, but having fulfilled this mission, the native vanishes without resistance and without conflict.

While this poem is unquestionably a call to reflection, it is notable that it asks readers to reflect on the value of domestic life compared to the value of monetary gain while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the pursuit of gold has destroyed the domestic lives of thousands of native peoples whose lands the miner and other 49ers now occupy. The miner’s inability to recognize the irony of this choice marks the transformation of Atahualpa into little more than a manifestation of the miner’s own desire. Divorced from his historical moment and geographical context, evacuated of his personal, tragic history, he has been reduced to the mouthpiece of settler colonialism, forced to bless a colonial enterprise not all that dissimilar from the one that resulted in his own death. In short, Atahualpa’s blessing of the colonial prospecting going on in California also comes dangerously close to blessing all such colonial enterprises—including that of Spain.

As a commentary on the interactions of white settlers and native peoples, this otherwise endearing proclamation of the value of home and family is perhaps the most blindly neglectful of all examples brought forward in this essay. It suggests that there is essentially nothing related to native peoples for white settlers and prospectors to concern themselves with—and perhaps never has been. Similar to much of the period’s Indian policy, which operated via removal and thus erasure of the native presence from now “white” spaces, this poem simply ignores rather than “make[s] explicit the contradictions implicit in American national ideology and social experience,” as perhaps Robertson and Whitman had done. Gone are Robertson’s calls for reform, absent is Whitman’s traumatization of his readers with the sense that they may be culpable for native peoples’ disappearance. According to this poem, there is, and perhaps has been since the days of Pizarro, an open invitation to occupy native peoples’ lands, and thus no moral conflict to navigate—no Black Legend to concern oneself with. The poem has served “to absorb such tensions and incorporate them into coherent and compelling narratives” that depict “the nation as a…union of virtuous citizens” in which native peoples are simply absent, forgotten, “vanished” (Scheckel 1998, p. 4). The moral quandaries and perils of earlier decades have been, in this poem, quite literally and willfully imagined away.

Taken together, these poems point toward the collective problem with the larger use of the Inca as a historical corollary during the period of Indian Removal. Certainly, images of the Inca were mobilized by individuals with different positions to support their cause—Robertson and Whitman to suggest that we had failed morally, “Trismegist” to condone colonial actions. Nevertheless, in using the history of the Inca as these writers did, they collectively demonstrate that the invocation of the Inca during the period was less about native peoples themselves—their ethical treatment at the hands of Americans and the responsibility of the American people to recognize these peoples’ political sovereignty and cultural autonomy—and more about coming to an understanding of how Americans should view themselves in light of the actions undertaken. Such a point is made all the more obvious by the fact that none of these writers ever allude to the fact that the descendants of the Inca did, in fact, remain a significant presence in South America at the time—to read these works, one would assume that the Inca themselves had vanished when remnants of their people, and their culture, persisted and persist to this day. In short, many of these literary expressions were essentially exercises in narcissism, as the invocation of the Inca was, at best, an opportunity for Americans to look into the mirror of history in an attempt to see how closely they resembled the Black Legend of yesteryear than an opportunity to mobilize themselves toward a more ethical treatment of native peoples and a more robust defense of those peoples’ inherent rights. In gazing at themselves so intently, it seems, they could remain both preoccupied with negotiating their own identity in relation to American colonial and imperial predecessors and still largely blind to the moral, ethical, and political obligations they had to the native nations around them.