Free American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan Page B

Living, have been so allured with that careless sort of Life, as to be constant to their Indian Wife, and her Relations, so long as they lived, without ever desiring to return again amongst the English,…of which sort I have known several.” It seems altogether probable that marriage was an avenue along which English Americans went native more often than Indians became civilized.
    The French married the Indians; the Spaniards enslaved them. If the English could not pursue the French method with enthusiasm, they were more assiduous in the Spanish one. Warfare has generally provided the justification for slavery. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the victorious party in a just war—and what war is not just in the eyes of the victor?—thought itself entitled to enslave its captured enemies. On this basis the settlers of America enslaved any Indians who made unsuccessful war against them. But the Indians were as unwilling to accept this blessing as any other the white man offered them. It was a fact that Indians did not make good slaves: they were too unruly. That fact did not prevent the English Americans from enslaving them. The Puritans of New England were as ready to do so as the planters of South Carolina. But neither in New England nor in South Carolina did people want to keep Indian slaves. Instead, they packed them aboard ships and sold them in the West Indies like so many wooden nutmegs. And lest this traffic should recoil upon themselves, the people of Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting the importation of Indian slaves, on the grounds that Indians were all “of a malicious, surley and revengeful spirit, rude and insolent in their behaviour, and very ungovernable.” Thus the enslaved Indians found no home among their captors, and slavery did not prove a successful means of introducing Indians into American civilization.
    Christianity, education, marriage, and slavery—all were pressed upon the Indians, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. All except marriage they rejected, and in marriage they generally won the upper hand. In the end the only part of the white man’s civilization they would accept was its material goods. They knew at a glance that guns were better than spears or arrows, iron hatchets than stone tomahawks, cloth than fur. Each of these things they cheerfully appropriated and fetched beaver skins for the English Americans in order to purchase them. In so doing, they had to alter many of their traditional ways and devote themselves more and more to trapping beaver, less and less to their customary handicrafts, but they managed to subordinate the new products to their own ends. Guns and hatchets were useful weapons for defense against their enemies, perhaps including the men who sold them to them. Cloth was only a more manageable and uniform kind of fur. The Indians thus appropriated the materials of the English and used them in their own way. They were not lured into the white man’s civilization by them.
    If, then, the English Americans did not exert themselves as much as they might have to assimilate the Indian, the fact remains that the Indians showed an extraordinary resistance to whatever efforts were made, an extraordinary refusal to accept the manners and methods of a people who were obviously more powerful than they. And we find this intransigence among Indians of every kind, among Westos and Creeks, Iroquois and Algonquians. Diverse as these different tribes may have been, they all possessed some quality that made white civilization unattractive to them.
    One must, therefore, look beyond their apparent diversity and seek the common element or elements in their ways of life, the elements that led them to reject so firmly the opportunities of white civilization. If we read the early accounts with this purpose in mind, one fact immediately presents itself: the early observers were all struck by the unusual kind of government that the different tribes