Читать книгу Slavery and Silence - Paul D. Naish - Страница 11

Chapter 2

“Our” Aborigines

While pro-and antislavery Americans used Latin America in their own ways to suit their own interests, Americans of all stripes sought to distance themselves from the modern Indians, proving, pseudoscientifically, that the ancient Americans—those of Mexico as well as the great mound builders of North America and the civilized makers of South America—must have been white.¹ By linking themselves to the ancient, early nineteenth-century Americans distanced themselves from the modern, further enabling a safe space from which to project uncomfortable political discourse. Indeed, just as open discussions of Latin American slavery served as a means to say things about domestic bondage otherwise left unspoken, these archaeological speculations also operated as a form of displacement, a way of talking about the early republic by projecting modern attitudes back upon the ancient American past. “It would seem that the White race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth! … thus the youngest people, and the newest land, will become the reviver and the regenerator of the oldest,” crowed Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton in 1846.²

As Americans displaced their qualms about slave societies by attributing all manner of deformities onto living, breathing Latin Americans, they were simultaneously finding much to admire in ancient civilizations of Mexico. The American response to the discovery of those civilizations offers an intriguing counterpoint to prevailing stereotypes. Here contempt gives way to admiration and in so doing throws the dominant pattern of displacement into sharper relief. Long dead Mexicans were the archaeological exception to the living rule.

By turning back the clock, archaeologists used a distant time and space in order to make contemporary political arguments, to justify the removal of Indians, and to reconceive the relationship between Americans and their southern neighbors. The stakes were never higher. Countless lives were lost. And the fate of slavery, inextricably tied to the question of expansion, hung in the balance.

Figure 4. Although there are few mid-nineteenth-century visual representations of aboriginal earthworks in North America, a fascinating exception is the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley by John J. Egan (1850). First exhibited in Philadelphia, the artwork was featured as the centerpiece of a lecture series delivered throughout the Mississippi Valley. Archaeologists tried to establish a connection between the people who had built these mounds and the monuments of Mexico and Peru. John J. Egan, American (born Ireland), active mid-nineteenth century; Scene 24 from Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley; distemper on cotton muslin; overall: 90 in. x 348 ft. (228.6 x 10607.1 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust 34:1953.

Figure 5. Artist Frederick Catherwood illustrated John Lloyd Stephen’s accounts of his explorations of the Yucatan in the early 1840s (the 1844 illustration above depicts a pyramid at Tulum). His sketches, drawn in situ with exacting detail, made clear that there was little resemblance to North American mounds. Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, plate 24. Frederick Catherwood, 1844, Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In the decade following the Panama Congress, the risk of publicly opposing—even discussing—slavery rose higher and higher. The Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 convinced many white Americans of a direct connection between increasingly radical abolitionist agitation and servile insurrection. Silencing national disagreements over slavery seemed imperative. By 1835 an era of mob assaults on antislavery activists had begun and would continue to nearly the end of the decade. Horrified by this climate of suppression, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier expressed his outrage at Southern attempts to mute voices raised against the injustice of human bondage in the 1835 “Stanzas for the Times.” Complaining that he was forced to “speak but as our masters please,” Whittier protested that he was made a slave himself. To make his portrait of Southern depravity particularly vivid, he used imagery recalling the bloodthirsty Aztecs of Mexico to represent the desecration of the nation’s altar of liberty:

Of human skulls that shrine was made,

Round which the priests of Mexico

Before their loathsome idol prayed;

Is Freedom’s altar fashioned so?

And must we yield to Freedom’s God,

As offering meet, the negro’s blood?³

Many Americans had, by the 1830s, learned to scorn and despise the inept, mixed-race, would-be republicans south of the border and the native tribes—the Aztecs in particular—renowned for their cruelty. But one group of Latin Americans retained the admiration of antebellum Americans. They had been dead for hundreds of years.

In the 1810s and 1820s independence liberated Latin America from the absolutism and secrecy of Spanish rule, inviting the curious to dig for buried treasure. Accounts of discoveries almost forgotten since the time of the Spanish Conquest trickled out of Central and South America. Ruins of ancient temples and pyramids encountered in the Yucatan—often decorated with intricate carving—excited the interest of both scholarly and uneducated Americans fascinated by the nascent field of archaeology. Who could have built the wonders in Tulum, Copan, and Palenque? Certainly not the ancestors of the disreputable natives of the nineteenth-century Americas, reasoned U.S. nationalists.⁴ The brutal Aztecs encountered by the Spanish could not have been responsible, nor the alternately treacherous and lazy tribes of North America. The nineteenth-century Indians being rapidly displaced from their homelands were nomadic and improvident; they drifted from place to place, warring savagely with other tribes. The long-vanished builders of America’s ruined monuments—the great mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the pyramids of Central and South America—had been settled and civilized ‖ by whites.⁵

From the accounts of the conquistadores, U.S. readers knew that the Aztecs had displaced an earlier nation called the Toltecs: the nineteenth century would understand these Toltecs as migrants from Israel, Carthage, Wales, Egypt, or Scandinavia.⁶ According to early nineteenth-century theories, these people had crossed the Atlantic or Pacific in boats. In North America they built fortifications and serpent-shaped earthworks first glimpsed by nineteenth-century Americans as they moved west. In Central and South America the genius of these ancient peoples reached its apex in the great cities of the Yucatan and Peru. Then across the Behring Strait from Asia swarmed another race, the ancestors of modern Indians, like latter-day barbarians descending on Rome, massacring and driving off the people who first settled the continent.

However prolifically this remarkable assumption flourished in the reflexive racism of Jacksonian America during the 1830s and 1840s, it could not ultimately withstand the harsh sunlight of systematic observation nor the storms of serious scholarship. But for a period of twenty or twenty-five years, variations of this useful myth fit neatly into a historical moment when Americans intensively dispossessed Indians and mixed-race Mexicans from their land and installed in their place white settlers and their enslaved workforce. Great triumphs of past civilizations were considered de facto proof of the whiteness of their populations rather than demonstrations of nature’s democratic distribution of brilliance among all her people.⁷ With extraordinary economy, this line of analysis at once vindicated white supremacy, established an ancient connection between the inhabitants of North and South America, justified the appropriation of land occupied by nonwhite peoples, and mapped upon that land a space for immediate or potential cultivation by enslaved labor. Historian Sven Beckert refers to the conjoined forces “resting on the violent expropriation of land and labor” as “war capitalism.”⁸ Making clear the connection between Indian removal and the spread of slavery, Beckert writes, “The coercion and violence required to mobilize slave labor was matched only by the demands of an expansionist war against indigenous people.”⁹ Along with slavery, white Americans’ ability to obliterate Native American claims to the land, giving cotton planters total control over land and resources, set the United States apart from suppliers like India in the global marketplace.¹⁰ These linkages established a claim to the land now so unworthily occupied by usurping Indians.¹¹ Turnabout was fair play: in the dim past the Indians had driven off the original white settlers of the ancient world; in modern times the valuable patrimony would be reclaimed. If this story rested on the flimsiest of evidence, it gained credibility through endless repetition in a variety of formats.

The connections between early archeological studies, Indian removal, and racial pseudoscience were more often assumed than explicitly drawn. Analyzing the way these ideas intersected in support of one another reveals much about U.S. understandings of race at midcentury, ideas that would in turn inform views about slavery. But whereas many remarks about slavery were deliberately silenced in national conversation because they were too volatile, assumptions about the race of ancient Americans often went unmentioned because they were considered self-evident, hardly worth the trouble of defending.¹² Beliefs that racial differences were essential and unchangeable, that land occupied by inferior races might be conquered and cleansed, that the race-based, slave-dependent economy of the Market Revolution signaled not the emergence of a new stage of capitalism, but the restoration of an order rooted in and justified by history, all supported the status quo.¹³

Like so many other issues of the antebellum period, the nation’s steady absorption of land in the southwest was intimately connected to the expansion of slavery, though the connection was not always explicit.¹⁴ “[T]he expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre-Civil War United States,” writes historian Edward Baptist. “Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.”¹⁵ Expelling the Indian inhabitants was justified by prevarications, fanciful arguments, and occasionally legitimate concern for their welfare, but much of the mania was driven by the lust for their land. Eager for more senators who would dependably promote the peculiar institution, the South particularly welcomed the addition of new states invested in the plantation economy (“this cotton argument, as it is called, is a strong inducement with me for desiring the acquisition of Texas,” said U.S. representative Thomas Bayly in 1845. “It will give us the entire control of that great staple”).¹⁶ New England opposed southern expansion for a related reason: it feared the waning of its political influence as its densely populated states lost migrants to the west.

The process of occupying southwestern territory—first through the enforced removal of native peoples, then through the annexation of Texas, and finally through the spoils of the war with Mexico—was riven with controversy. During the 1830s politicians, particularly in areas where Indians were long gone, railed against the injustice and its inhumanity of driving the tribes from their homes. Citizens organized petition drives to protest.¹⁷ A glance at the way the centers of opposition overlapped with centers of abolitionism—among New Englanders and Pennsylvania Quakers particularly—confirms the connection between expansionism and the diffusion of slavery. As the equally controversial possibility of annexing Texas and fighting a war with Mexico seized the attention of the American public in the 1830s and 1840s, opponents of slavery criticized Southern expansionism. Abolitionist Theodore Sedgwick understood the annexation of Texas, whatever the reasons given in its defense, as “but another name for the perpetuity of slavery.”¹⁸ One Isaac C. Kenyon wrote ruefully in the North Star in 1848 that the United States “is at this moment spending an enormous amount of treasure and blood for the purpose of establishing in Mexico that singular kind of freedom which is the lot of her colored people at home.”¹⁹