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THE HAIRLESS INDIAN

Savagery and Civility before the Civil War

AMERICANS TEND TO remember Thomas Jefferson for many things, but his thoughts about hair removal are not generally among them. Nevertheless, Jefferson expressed a studied opinion on the matter in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). He turned to hair in a long passage enumerating the distinctions he detected between “the Indians” and “whites”:

It has been said that the Indians have less hair than the whites, except on the head. But this is a fact of which fair proof can scarcely be had. With them it is disgraceful to be hairy on the body. They say it likens them to hogs. They therefore pluck the hair as fast as it appears. But the traders who marry their women, and prevail on them to discontinue this practice, say, that nature is the same with them as with the whites.¹

Were Indian bodies naturally hairy like those of settlers from Europe, only appearing otherwise due to some strange habit? Or were Indian bodies irrevocably different from those of whites? Jefferson was far from the only eighteenth-century observer preoccupied with this enigma, or with the absence of “fair proof” of an answer.² From the 1770s through the 1850s, the enigma of Native depilatory practices preoccupied European and Euro-American missionaries, traders, soldiers, and naturalists. Scores of commentators pondered whether the continent’s indigenous peoples had less hair by “nature” or whether they methodically shaved, plucked, and singed themselves bare (figure 1.1).

Rarely distinguishing between the diverse indigenous peoples of the Americas in this regard (instead lumping geographically and linguistically dissimilar groups together as “Indians”), white writers both famous and now forgotten sought to explain the smooth faces and limbs that they viewed as typical of the original “Americans.”³ Cornelis de Pauw, for instance, saw the complete absence of beard as one of the distinctive physiological characteristics of Indian bodies.⁴ In contrast, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark concluded that Chopunnish men “extract their beards” like “other savage nations of America,” while Chopunnish women further “uniformly extract the hair below [the face].”⁵ In 1814, the renowned German explorer Alexander von Humboldt conceded that even the most “celebrated naturalists” had failed to resolve whether the Americans “have naturally no beard and no hair on the rest of their bodies, or whether they pluck them carefully out.”⁶

These were hardly idle musings. For European and North American observers, such questions of natural order entailed consequential questions of political order: whether Indians might be converted to European ways of life, or whether some fundamental, unalterable difference rendered assimilation impossible. The French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s famous Histoire naturelle held to the latter position, asserting that “the peculiar environment of the New World” had “stunted” the peoples he called aborigines, making it unlikely that they could ever be “admitted to membership in the new republic.”⁷ As the Pennsylvania-born naturalist and traveler William Bartram posed the problem in 1791, at issue in Indian hairlessness was whether Indians might be persuaded to “adopt the European modes of civil society,” or whether they were inherently “incapable of civilization” on whites’ terms.⁸ Body hair encapsulated these debates. More than one writer claimed rights of dominance over Indian lands because, as Montesquieu explained, Native men possessed “scanty beards.”⁹ In this context, Jefferson himself well understood the stakes of his discussion: Native peoples’ inherent rights to self-determination.¹⁰

Figure 1.1. George Catlin’s 1832 portrait of Náh-se-ús-kuk, eldest son of Black Hawk. Catlin, like other white travelers and naturalists of the period, was preoccupied with the smooth skin of Native peoples. (Reproduced with permission of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.)

With Andrew Jackson’s election to the U.S. presidency in 1828, the question of Indian governance moved to the forefront of federal policy. Jackson’s proposal to forcibly “remove” remaining southeastern Indians west of the Mississippi provoked fierce opposition. Nonetheless, thousands of U.S. troops were sent to Georgia, resulting in the immediate beatings, rapes, and murders of countless Cherokees, and the eventual deaths of thousands more on the Trail of Tears. By 1837, most members of the five southeastern nations had been relocated through what historian Daniel Heath Justice has characterized as a “ruthless and brutal terrorism campaign.”¹¹ With the expansionist policies ushered in with the election of James Polk in 1844, Native peoples living in California, the Southwest, and the Northwest were subjected to similar federal jurisdiction.¹²

Whether or not white writers explicitly addressed these political developments, their perspectives on Indian body hair—the crux of debates over the nature of Indian racial character—necessarily engaged larger, ongoing disputes over the sovereignty of Native governments, the sanctity of treaties, and the appropriate use of federal force. The historical import of those disputes cannot be overstated. “If slavery is the monumental tragedy of African American experience,” Tiya Miles writes, “then removal plays the same role in American Indian experience.”¹³ White assertions of Indian beardlessness contributed to a body of racial thought that helped to buttress those policies and practices of physical removal.¹⁴ As the Pequot intellectual William Apess summarized in 1831, “the unfortunate aborigines of this country” have been “doubly wronged by the white man”: “first, driven from their native soil by the sword of the invader, and then darkly slandered by the pen of the historian. The former has treated him like beasts of the fores[t]; the latter has written volumes to justify him in his outrages.”¹⁵

Taken together, the volumes written about Indian body hair in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—none, so far as I have been able to locate, written by Native authors themselves—reveal the asymmetrical production of consequential standards and categories of difference. Like other “racial” differences, assessments of body hair at once reflected and supported emerging military and political regimes. But quite unlike skin color, skull size, and the myriad other anatomical characteristics used by naturalists and ethnologists to sort and rank people, body hair was both readily removable and remarkably idiosyncratic in its rate of return. Hair’s unusual visibility and malleability allowed numerous, conflicting interpretations. In the midst of violent contestation over Indian policy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those conflicting interpretations loomed large in American racial taxonomies.

It is worth emphasizing that these taxonomies are the product of European and Euro-American points of view. The few extant written accounts of Native attitudes toward hair, such as Jefferson’s (“They say it likens them to hogs”), are filtered through imperial lenses. Moreover, although the writers described here often mentioned both female and male hair removal, most of the debate over Indian depilation focused on male bodies, and specifically male beards. The absence of prolonged discussion of other parts of the body—such as the female pubic region—suggests an intriguing feature of early American natural history: with regard to body hair, at least, Indian men were the object of naturalists’ most meticulous deliberations. Given the partial nature of these accounts, they might best be approached not as conclusive descriptions of so-called Indian bodies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but as a window into the perceptions, anxieties, and curiosities of the dominant culture. Through that window we may observe a set of questions about the nature of difference that persist to our time: What explains variation in human bodies? How do particular environments influence the expression of heritable traits? What, in the end, is “race”?

THE USE OF hair as an index of political capacities has roots in Enlightenment natural philosophy. When Linnaeus introduced his famous system of taxonomical nomenclature in 1735, he began by asserting four distinct “varieties” of Homo sapiens. Hair color, type, and amount (“black, straight, thick,” “yellow, brown, flowing”) were the leading indicators of each variety, followed in turn by each group’s alleged political characteristics, such as “regulated by customs” or “governed by caprice.”¹⁶ Buffon similarly joined body hair to capacities for reason and civility when claiming that the absence of body hair on “the American savage” reflected a deeper lack of will and motivation. The Indians’ efforts represented not the deliberate exercise of reason but rather “necessary action” produced by animal impulse. “Destroy his appetite for victuals and drink,” he declared, “and you will at once annihilate the active principle of all his movements.”¹⁷ The political implications of this physiological inertia were clear to Buffon: “[N]o union, no republic, no social state, can take place among the morality of their manners.”¹⁸ Hairlessness was thus thought to indicate whether indigenous peoples might be treated as equal subjects, or whether some inherent “feebleness” precluded incorporation into “civilized” modes of life.¹⁹

These hierarchical distinctions were themselves steeped in humoral theories dating to the classical age. Humoral theory proposed that bodies were not bounded by the envelope of the skin but were instead profoundly permeable to diet, climate, sleep, lunar movements, and other external influences. Maintaining appropriate constitutional balance among the four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—necessitated careful exchange between inside and outside, hot and cold, wet and dry. One’s resulting “complexion,” including body hair, was thought to reveal the balance of humors within, a balance as much moral as physiological.²⁰ This humoral vision was racialized as well as gendered: for European women, a pale, porcelain complexion was particularly prized; while for men, lush beard growth was thought to imply a healthy constitution. Although fashions in white men’s whiskers varied across time, region, religion, occupation, and military status (Jefferson himself was generally clean-shaven, as were most U.S. presidents before Lincoln), most eighteenth-century naturalists echoed Galenic medical theory in equating thick beards with philosophical wisdom.²¹

Hence the moral and physiological question, Was the Indian’s seemingly smooth skin similarly subject to external influence? If so, which influences, exactly? Given the weighty political implications of their conclusions, European and Euro-American writers energetically debated the extent to which Indian complexion might be affected by food, weather, and mode of life. In a 1777 book used as a standard reference on Indians in both Europe and the United States until well into the nineteenth century, Scottish historian William Robertson concluded that the answer was no: the hairless skin of the Americans instead provided evidence of “natural debility.”²² “They have no beard,” he wrote in his History of the Discovery and Settlement of North America, “and every part of their body is perfectly smooth,” a “feebleness of constitution” mirrored in their aversion to “labour” and their incapacity for “toil.”²³ Robertson insisted that the “defect of vigour” indicated by the Indian’s “beardless countenance” stemmed not from rough diet or harsh environment but from an inherent “vice in his frame.”²⁴ Although “rude tribes in other parts of the earth” subsist on equally simple fare, he maintained, Indians alone remained “destitute of [this] sign of manhood.”²⁵

Robertson was challenged on exactly that point by Samuel Stanhope Smith, later president of Princeton University. In the influential Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, Smith argued that apparent differences between white and Indian bodies were overblown. “The celebrated Dr. Robertson,” Smith chided in 1787, joined “hasty, ignorant observers” in claiming that “the natives of America have no hair on the face, or the body,” thus binding him “to account for a fact which does not exist.” Although “careless travelers” saw a “deficiency” of hair and presumed a “natural debility of constitution,” Indians were no different “from the rest of the human race” in this regard. As Smith concluded, the “hair of our native Indians, where it is not carefully extirpated by art, is both thick and long.”²⁶ In Smith’s perspective, the “common European error” that “the natives of America are destitute of hair on the chin, and body” was vile not simply because it revealed a striking observational ineptness but more importantly because it ran counter to Genesis. Smith stressed the influence of diet, grooming, and other habits on perceived differences in hair growth as a way to affirm scriptural teachings on the unity of creation.²⁷

As Smith’s essay on the causes of human variety suggests, lurking in descriptions of hair removal was a pressing concern: whether purposeful activity might effect lasting changes to physical form. From where did apparent differences between races, sexes, or species arise, if not from separate creations? The great German natural philosopher Johann Blumenbach, for instance, proposed that the “scanty” hair typical of “Americans” could indeed result from daily grooming. Repeated “mutilations” such as “extirpat[ing] the beard” and “eradicating the hair in different parts of the body,” he claimed, could result in more permanent differences in form.²⁸ For Blumenbach, Indian hair removal exemplified how human variation might be “occasioned by . . . artificial means.”²⁹ The English naturalist James Cowles Prichard flatly rejected this perspective. Declaring variation in the “quantity of hair that grows on the human body” (particularly the “deficiency” of hair “ascribed to all the American nations”) to be one of the “well-known differences between races,” Prichard scoffed at the idea that such persistent differences might be acquired by plucking and shaving.³⁰ Where Blumenbach and others “conjectured that the habit of pulling out the hair through many generations” may produce distinct varieties of people, hairlessness was far too general a trait “to be ascribed to so accidental a cause.”³¹ Instead, in a passage that augured Darwin’s controversial theory of sexual selection, Prichard argued that an “instinctive perception of human beauty . . . implanted by Providence” helped “direct” men in their marriages, ultimately shaping the divergent appearances of the human form. This providential love of beauty (which Prichard assumed to favor denuded skin) acts “as a constant principle of improvement,” akin to man’s selective breeding of particularly fine animal specimens. Prichard thus explained the relative hairlessness of humans through reference to a divinely implanted aesthetic preference.³² Prichard offered no indication of how Providence might account for the fact, as Blumenbach put it, that some parts of the human body, such as the armpit or groin, were evidently “more hairy than in brute animals,” or the equally confounding idea that Europeans might be hairier than Indians.³³ Smooth, hairless skin presented a conundrum in this regard, as it was at once one of the distinguishing characteristics of “the Indian” and also, in Blumenbach’s terms, one of the chief “diagnostic signs by which man differs from other mammals.”³⁴ Such distinctions had to come from somewhere.

THE IDEA THAT perceived distinctions between peoples could be shaped by deliberate effort—that racial characteristics might be cultivated and transmitted—dominated U.S. Indian policy in the first decades of the republic. As Henry Knox, the nation’s first secretary of war, argued to Congress in 1789, while “it has been conceived to be impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America,” evidence of Indian improvement is clear from “the progress of society, from the barbarous ages to its present state of perfection.”³⁵ Belief that Indians could “progress” from savagery through barbarism to civilization shaped early federal policy—even as that policy bobbed between treating Native men as capable of entering legal agreements and treating them as requiring paternalistic protection.³⁶

But by 1819, white settlers in the young republic had largely filled the tens of millions of acres already seized from Native peoples. Public pressure for cession of additional land grew accordingly.³⁷ Resistance to white colonization was met with claims that Indians were “intellectually and morally incapable of forming true governments,” and investigations of the inherent “deficiencies” of Indian bodies came to the fore.³⁸ Increasingly in agreement that Indians were less hairy than whites, white observers focused their debate on whether the relative hairlessness of Indians resulted from “careful extirpation,” as Smith would have it, or some more “imperishable” anatomical trait.³⁹

Observers remained divided, for example, over whether Indian men were able to permanently end beard growth by repeatedly extracting it at the onset of puberty. In his 1841 account of travels into Native American territory, George Catlin declared that among tribes that made no efforts to imitate whites, most men “by nature are entirely without the appearance of a beard.” Of those with some beard growth, “nineteen out of twenty” eradicated it permanently by “plucking it out several times in succession, precisely at the age of puberty.”⁴⁰ Others joined Catlin in proposing that Indians were able to “arrest” the involuntary growth of hair at puberty through deliberate labor.⁴¹ The Slovenian missionary Frederic Baraga disputed accounts that portrayed the “Indians as a naturally beardless people,” and asserted that Indian hair growth ceases because “young men take the greatest care to pull out or burn the first fuzz which covers their chins.”⁴² Eugene Blandel, a young soldier with the westward-pushing U.S. Army, conveyed a similar idea in an 1856 letter to his family: “[N]one of these Indians wears a beard. All hair on the face is pulled out by the roots, as soon as it makes its appearance, so that it never grows again.”⁴³

Whites’ preoccupation with the nature of Indian bodies also pervaded their descriptions of which tools, if any, Indians used to remove their hair. The Natchez of the lower Mississippi were said to pluck with clamshells or copper tweezers, the Sanpoil of Eastern Washington to use bone or wooden tweezers, and the Assiniboine to use “small wire tweezers of their own make.”⁴⁴ The Pennsylvania natural historian Samuel Stehman Haldeman conveyed an account of an indigenous woman shaving a child’s head with a “shark’s tooth fastened to the end of a stick” and of men shaving with two shells—“one being placed under some of the beard, the other used to cut or scrape above.”⁴⁵ Members of the Iroquois Confederacy were said to have special instruments “for the purpose of plucking,” save for “a very small number, who, from living among white people, have adopted their customs.” Iroquois who live with whites, one military surgeon noted, “sometimes have razors.”⁴⁶ Exasperated with the repeated claim that “the Indians are beardless by nature and have no hair on their bodies,” in 1818 the Reverend John Heckewelder declared that the idea should be “exploded and entirely laid aside.” “I cannot conceive how it is possible for any person to pass three weeks only among those people,” he snorted, “without seeing them pluck out their beards, with tweezers made expressly for that purpose” from sharpened mussel shells or brass wire. These tweezers “they always carry with them in their tobacco-pouch, wherever they go, and when at leisure, they pluck out their beards or hair above their foreheads,” with quick strokes “much like the plucking of a fowl.” The “oftener they pluck out the hair, the finer it grows afterwards, so that at last there appears hardly any, the whole having been rooted out.”⁴⁷ The most remarkable aspect of Indian hairlessness, other observers concurred, was that Indian men and women so methodically and ceaselessly removed their body hair, which they viewed as a “deformity” or “vulgarity.”⁴⁸

The emphasis on continual, painstaking cultivation of the body evident in these accounts is noteworthy, given that whites generally depicted Indians as particularly averse to labor. (Recall Buffon’s insistence that Indian activities were limited to those directed by bestial appetites, or Robertson’s condemnation of Indians’ constitutional torpor.)⁴⁹ With respect to body hair, though, the Indian was said to be exceedingly diligent, ready to subject his chin to the “repeated pains” of extractions “nearly every day of his life.”⁵⁰ The Indian’s alleged willingness to suffer in this regard was a point of ethnographic fascination, even consternation, as Jefferson emphasized in his remarks on white traders’ Indian wives. Surely no “civilized” person would be so peculiarly invested in plucking, shaving, and singeing.

ATTENTION TO THE “mutilations” of Indian hair removal began to wane as Indian assimilation and resistance moved to the margins of national political discussion. Responsibility for Indian affairs was transferred from the War Department to the new Department of the Interior in 1849, and most whites slowly ceased regarding the status of the continent’s indigenous peoples as a significant military concern.⁵¹ Preoccupation with Indian beards appears to have receded accordingly. Although the enigma of Indian hair removal continued to surface from time to time—as late as 1849, French traveler Ernest De Massey wrote of the beardless peoples he encountered in California, “I cannot say whether this is natural or the result of some method of hair-removal”⁵²—by midcentury the locus of political attention had shifted to southern slavery and an emerging industrial order.⁵³

Yet even as whites’ fascination with Indian hair removal receded, comparative studies of body hair, brought to the fore by Indian removal, remained a central tool of racial classification. With the ascendance of a distinctly “American school” of ethnology in the 1830s and 1840s, comparative assessments of hair proliferated. Dedicated to the proposition that different races derived from multiple, distinct origins, American-school ethnologists stressed the methodological rigor that they brought to their taxonomies. Recognizing the threat that their work posed to Genesis, ethnologists like Josiah Clark Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Samuel George Morton sought to counter arguments for a single creation with the “patient examination of facts.” Detailed measurement of hair shape, texture, and amount featured prominently in these efforts. Microscopic evaluations of hair were said to reveal fundamental distinctions between races and fundamental similarities between so-called lower races and other animals. These claims then were used to support the continuing enslavement of men, women, and children of African descent.⁵⁴

One of the most influential of these ethnologists, the Philadelphia microscopist and lawyer Peter A. Browne, applied his various physiological classifications of “pile” to a variety of disputes in the mid-nineteenth century: legal questions of individual racial character, medical classifications of lunacy, and ethnological debates over the “origin of the aborigines of America.”⁵⁵ In one well-circulated 1853 treatise, Browne endorsed the continuation of slavery on the basis of his discernment of “three distinct species of human beings” characterized by hair type. Citing Jefferson’s earlier comparisons of “whites” and “Indians” to buttress his claims, Browne selected samples of each of those types—cylindrical (“a full-blood Choctaw Indian”), oval (“his Excellency General George Washington”), and eccentrically elliptical (“a pure Negro”)—and examined them with new tools designed to measure and compare hair: the trichometer, the discotome, and the hair revolver.⁵⁶ In another widely reprinted lecture, Browne offered his examination of differences in “national pile” as a complement to Morton’s famous studies of skulls, Samuel Haldeman’s studies of the organs of speech, and Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens’s studies of skin color—all of them “sister sciences” dedicated to understanding the natural history of “man.”⁵⁷ (Morton himself, architect of American racial taxonomies, devoted several early pages of his influential Crania Americana to racial differences in hair type, number, and color.)⁵⁸

Figure 1.2. The “trichometer” developed by Peter A. Browne to assess typological differences in hair. (From Trichologia Mammalium [1853].)

This zeal for counting and analyzing hairs as a way to establish difference continued for generations, gaining strength alongside the institutionalization of the “human sciences.” Indeed, hierarchical concepts of race, sex, and species were given fresh heft by the consolidation of scientific organizations, professions, and agencies.⁵⁹ One such institution, the U.S. Sanitary Commission, was organized by the federal government after the outbreak of the Civil War. The commission’s primary objective was to maintain the vitality of Union troops. Recognizing the unusual opportunities presented by the vast number of volunteer soldiers, the commission also conducted a large-scale anthropometric survey of Union recruits. Commissioner Charles J. Stillé boasted that the results of the study would “afford the most important contribution of observations ever made in furtherance of ‘anthropology,’ or the science of man.”⁶⁰ In 1864, the well-known Boston mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould was tasked with systematizing the gargantuan collection of physical data, completing the statistical calculations, and publishing the eventual findings.⁶¹ In the resulting 613-page report, Gould took up the question, sparked by Peter Browne’s earlier studies, of “the relative amount of pilosity, or general hairiness of the body.”⁶²

As ever, establishing evidence of such intimate matters proved a challenge. Where Thomas Jefferson based his findings about hair on the reports of white traders involved with Indian women, Gould asked an officer deployed with the 25^th Army Corps on the Texan border to “avail himself of any opportunity . . . to observe the colored troops when unclothed.” Observations were to be recorded according to a standard scale: “[S]kin apparently smooth should be denoted by 0, and an amount of general hairiness equal to the maximum which he had ever seen or should see in a white man, should be called a 10.” The officer fulfilled the request expediently by “observing the men while bathing, which was an event of almost daily occurrence in the torrid climate near the mouth of the Rio Grande.”⁶³ On the basis of the officer’s figures, collected from more than twenty-one hundred soldiers, Gould concluded that there was “little, if any, difference between the white and black races” with respect to body hair.⁶⁴

Gould’s massive study, spawned by earlier anatomical classifications of hair, informed most American sciences of race in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁶⁵ Moreover, his observations, along with the earlier studies of George Catlin, would soon provide the evidence for Charles Darwin’s controversial theories—with lasting consequences for subsequent ideas about race, sex, and hair.