The Discovery of America Part 4

The six groups here enumerated--Dakota, Mandan, p.a.w.nee, Maskoki, Algonquin, Iroquois--made up the great body of the aborigines of North America who at the time of the Discovery lived in the lower status of barbarism. All made pottery of various degrees of rudeness. Their tools and weapons were of the Neolithic type,--stone either polished or accurately and artistically chipped. For the most part they lived in stockaded villages, and cultivated maize, beans, pumpkins, squashes, sunflowers, and tobacco. They depended for subsistence partly upon such vegetable products, partly upon hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, the women generally attending to the horticulture, the men to the chase. _Horticulture_ is an appropriate designation for this stage in which the ground is merely scratched with stone spades and hoes. It is incipient agriculture, but should be carefully distinguished from the _field agriculture_ in which extensive pieces of land are subdued by the plough. The a.s.sistance of domestic animals is needed before such work can be carried far, and it does not appear that there was an approach to field agriculture in any part of pre-Columbian America except Peru, where men were harnessed to the plough, and perhaps occasionally llamas were used in the same way.[52] Where subsistence depended upon rude horticulture eked out by game and fish, it required a large territory to support a spa.r.s.e population. The great diversity of languages contributed to maintain the isolation of tribes and prevent extensive confederation. Intertribal warfare was perpetual, save now and then for truces of brief duration.

Warfare was attended by wholesale ma.s.sacre. As many prisoners as could be managed were taken home by their captors; in some cases they were adopted into the tribe of the latter as a means of increasing its fighting strength, otherwise they were put to death with lingering torments.[53] There was nothing which afforded the red men such exquisite delight as the spectacle of live human flesh lacerated with stone knives or hissing under the touch of firebrands, and for elaborate ingenuity in devising tortures they have never been equalled.[54]

Cannibalism was quite commonly practised.[55] The scalps of slain enemies were always taken, and until they had attained such trophies the young men were not likely to find favour in the eyes of women. The Indian's notions of morality were those that belong to that state of society in which the tribe is the largest well-established political aggregate. Murder without the tribe was meritorious unless it entailed risk of war at an obvious disadvantage; murder within the tribe was either revenged by blood-feud or compounded by a present given to the victim's kinsmen. Such rudimentary _wergild_ was often reckoned in wampum, or strings of beads made of a kind of mussel sh.e.l.l, and put to divers uses, as personal ornament, mnemonic record, and finally money.

Religious thought was in the fetis.h.i.+stic or animistic stage,[56] while many tribes had risen to a vague conception of tutelar deities embodied in human or animal forms. Myth-tales abounded, and the folk-lore of the red men is found to be extremely interesting and instructive.[57] Their religion consisted mainly in a devout belief in witchcraft. No well-defined priestly cla.s.s had been evolved; the so-called "medicine men" were mere conjurers, though possessed of considerable influence.

[Footnote 52: See Humboldt, _Ansichten der Natur_, 3d ed., Stuttgart, 1849, vol. i. p. 203.]

[Footnote 53: "Women and children joined in these fiendish atrocities, and when at length the victim yielded up his life, his heart, if he were brave, was ripped from his body, cut in pieces, broiled, and given to the young men, under the belief that it would increase their courage; they drank his blood, thinking it would make them more wary; and finally his body was divided limb from limb, roasted or thrown into the seething pot, and hands and feet, arms and legs, head and trunk, were all stewed into a horrid mess and eaten amidst yells, songs, and dances." Jeffries Wyman, in _Seventh Report of Peabody Museum_, p. 37. For details of the most appalling character, see b.u.t.terfield's _History of the Girtys_, pp. 176-182; Stone's _Life of Joseph Brant_, vol. ii. pp. 31, 32; Dodge's _Plains of the Great West_, p. 418, and _Our Wild Indians_, pp. 525-529; Parkman's _Jesuits in North America_, pp. 387-391; and many other places in Parkman's writings.]

[Footnote 54: One often hears it said that the cruelty of the Indians was not greater than that of mediaeval Europeans, as exemplified in judicial torture and in the horrors of the Inquisition. But in such a judgment there is lack of due discrimination. In the practice of torture by civil and ecclesiastical tribunals in the Middle Ages, there was a definite moral purpose which, however lamentably mistaken or perverted, gave it a very different character from torture wantonly inflicted for amus.e.m.e.nt. The atrocities formerly attendant upon the sack of towns, as e. g. Beziers, Magdeburg, etc., might more properly be regarded as an ill.u.s.tration of the survival of a spirit fit only for the lowest barbarism: and the Spanish conquerors of the New World themselves often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpa.s.s. See below, vol.

ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's _Our Wild Indians_, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and writes with fairness and discrimination.

In truth the question as to comparative cruelty is not so much one of race as of occupation, except in so far as race is moulded by long occupation. The "old Adam," i. e. the inheritance from our brute ancestors, is very strong in the human race. Callousness to the suffering of others than self is part of this brute-inheritance, and under the influence of certain habits and occupations this germ of callousness may be developed to almost any height of devilish cruelty. In the lower stages of culture the lack of political aggregation on a large scale is attended with incessant warfare in the shape in which it comes home to everybody's door. This state of things keeps alive the pa.s.sion of revenge and stimulates cruelty to the highest degree. As long as such a state of things endures, as it did in Europe to a limited extent throughout the Middle Ages, there is sure to be a dreadful amount of cruelty. The change in the conditions of modern warfare has been a very important factor in the rapidly increasing mildness and humanity of modern times. See my _Beginnings of New England_, pp. 226-229. Something more will be said hereafter with reference to the special causes concerned in the cruelty and brutality of the Spaniards in America. Meanwhile it may be observed in the present connection, that the Spanish taskmasters who mutilated and burned their slaves were not representative types of their own race to anything like the same extent as the Indians who tortured Brebeuf or Crawford. If the fiendish Pedrarias was a Spaniard, so too was the saintly Las Casas. The latter type would be as impossible among barbarians as an Aristotle or a Beethoven. Indeed, though there are writers who would like to prove the contrary, it may be doubted whether that type has ever attained to perfection except under the influence of Christianity.]

[Footnote 55: See the evidence collected by Jeffries Wyman, in _Seventh Report of Peabody Museum_, pp. 27-37; cf. Wake, _Evolution of Morality_, vol. i. p. 243. Many ill.u.s.trations are given by Mr. Parkman. In this connection it may be observed that the name "Mohawk" means "Cannibal." It is an Algonquin word, applied to this Iroquois tribe by their enemies in the Connecticut valley and about the lower Hudson. The name by which the Mohawks called themselves was "Caniengas," or "People-at-the-Flint." See Hale, _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, p. 173.]

[Footnote 56: For accounts and explanations of animism see Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, London, 1871, 2 vols.; Caspari, _Urgeschichte der Menschheit_, Leipsic, 1877, 2 vols.; Spencer's _Principles of Sociology_, part i.; and my _Myths and Mythmakers_, chap. vii.]

[Footnote 57: No time should be lost in gathering and recording every sc.r.a.p of this folk-lore that can be found. The American Folk-Lore Society, founded chiefly through the exertions of my friend Mr. W. W. Newell, and organized January 4, 1888, is already doing excellent work and promises to become a valuable aid, within its field, to the work of the Bureau of Ethnology.

Of the _Journal of American Folk-Lore_, published for the society by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., nine numbers have appeared, and the reader will find them full of valuable information. One may also profitably consult Knortz's _Marchen und Sagen der nordamerikanischen Indianer_, Jena, 1871; Brinton's _Myths of the New World_, N. Y., 1868, and his _American Hero-Myths_, Phila., 1882; Leland's _Algonquin Legends of New England_, Boston, 1884; Mrs. Emerson's _Indian Myths_, Boston, 1884. Some brief reflections and criticisms of much value, in relation to aboriginal American folk-lore, may be found in Curtin's _Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland_, pp.

12-27.]

But none of the characteristics of barbarous society above specified will carry us so far toward realizing the gulf which divides it from civilized society as the imperfect development of its domestic relations. The importance of this subject is such as to call for a few words of special elucidation.

[Sidenote: Ancient Law.]

Thirty years ago, when Sir Henry Maine published that magnificent treatise on Ancient Law, which, when considered in all its potency of suggestiveness, has perhaps done more than any other single book of our century toward placing the study of history upon a scientific basis, he began by showing that in primitive society the individual is nothing and the state nothing, while the family-group is everything, and that the progress of civilization politically has consisted on the one hand in the aggregation and building up of family-groups through intermediate tribal organizations into states, and on the other hand in the disentanglement of individuals from the family thraldom. In other words, we began by having no political communities larger than clans, and no bond of political union except blood relations.h.i.+p, and in this state of things the individual, as to his rights and obligations, was submerged in the clan. We at length come to have great nations like the English or the French, in which blood-relations.h.i.+p as a bond of political union is no longer indispensable or even much thought of, and in which the individual citizen is the possessor of legal rights and subject to legal obligations. No one in our time can forget how beautifully Sir Henry Maine, with his profound knowledge of early Aryan law and custom, from Ireland to Hindustan, delineated the slow growth of individual owners.h.i.+p of property and individual responsibility for delict and crime out of an earlier stage in which owners.h.i.+p and responsibility belonged only to family-groups or clans.

[Sidenote: The patriarchal family not primitive.]

[Sidenote: "Mother-right."]

[Sidenote: Primitive marriage.]

[Sidenote: The system of reckoning kins.h.i.+p through females only.]

In all these brilliant studies Sir Henry Maine started with the patriarchal family as we find it at the dawn of history among all peoples of Aryan and Semitic speech,--the patriarchal family of the ancient Roman and the ancient Jew, the family in which kins.h.i.+p is reckoned through males, and in which all authority centres in the eldest male, and descends to his eldest son. Maine treated this patriarchal family as primitive; but his great book had hardly appeared when other scholars, more familiar than he with races in savagery or in the lower status of barbarism, showed that his view was too restricted. We do not get back to primitive society by studying Greeks, Romans, and Jews, peoples who had nearly emerged from the later period of barbarism when we first know them.[58] Their patriarchal family was perfected in shape during the later period of barbarism, and it was preceded by a much ruder and less definite form of family-group in which kins.h.i.+p was reckoned only through the mother, and the heads.h.i.+p never descended from father to son. As so often happens, this discovery was made almost simultaneously by two investigators, each working in ignorance of what the other was doing. In 1861, the same year in which "Ancient Law" was published, Professor Bachofen, of Basel, published his famous book, "Das Mutterrecht," of which his co-discoverer and rival, after taking exception to some of his statements, thus cordially writes: "It remains, however, after all qualifications and deductions, that Bachofen, before any one else, discovered the fact that a system of kins.h.i.+p through mothers only, had anciently everywhere prevailed before the tie of blood between father and child had found a place in systems of relations.h.i.+ps.

And the honour of that discovery, the importance of which, as affording a new starting-point for all history, cannot be overestimated, must without stint or qualification be a.s.signed to him."[59] Such are the generous words of the late John Ferguson McLennan, who had no knowledge of Bachofen's work when his own treatise on "Primitive Marriage" was published in 1865. Since he was so modest in urging his own claims, it is due to the Scotch lawyer's memory to say that, while he was inferior in point of erudition to the Swiss professor, his book is characterized by greater sagacity, goes more directly to the mark, and is less enc.u.mbered by visionary speculations of doubtful value.[60] Mr. McLennan proved, from evidence collected chiefly from Australians and South Sea Islanders, and sundry non-Aryan tribes of Hindustan and Thibet, that systems of kins.h.i.+p in which the father is ignored exist to-day, and he furthermore discovered unmistakable and very significant traces of the former existence of such a state of things among the Mongols, the Greeks and Phoenicians, and the ancient Hebrews. By those who were inclined to regard Sir Henry Maine's views as final, it was argued that Mr.

McLennan's facts were of a sporadic and exceptional character. But when the evidence from this vast archaic world of America began to be gathered in and interpreted by Mr. Morgan, this argument fell to the ground, and as to the point chiefly in contention, Mr. McLennan was proved to be right. Throughout aboriginal America, with one or two exceptions, kins.h.i.+p was reckoned through females only, and in the exceptional instances the vestiges of that system were so prominent as to make it clear that the change had been but recently effected. During the past fifteen years, evidence has acc.u.mulated from various parts of the world, until it is beginning to appear as if it were the patriarchal system that is exceptional, having been reached only by the highest races.[61] Sir Henry Maine's work has lost none of its value, only, like all human work, it is not final; it needs to be supplemented by the further study of savagery as best exemplified in Australia and some parts of Polynesia, and of barbarism as best exemplified in America. The subject is, moreover, one of great and complicated difficulty, and leads incidentally to many questions for solving which the data at our command are still inadequate. It is enough for us now to observe in general that while there are plenty of instances of change from the system of reckoning kins.h.i.+p only through females, to the system of reckoning through males, there do not appear to have been any instances of change in the reverse direction; and that in ancient America the earlier system was prevalent.

[Footnote 58: Until lately our acquaintance with human history was derived almost exclusively from literary memorials, among which the Bible, the Homeric poems, and the Vedas, carried us back about as far as literature could take us. It was natural, therefore, to suppose that the society of the times of Abraham or Agamemnon was "primitive," and the wisest scholars reasoned upon such an a.s.sumption. With vision thus restricted to civilized man and his ideas and works, people felt free to speculate about uncivilized races (generally grouped together indiscriminately as "savages") according to any _a priori_ whim that might happen to captivate their fancy. But the discoveries of the last half-century have opened such stupendous vistas of the past that the age of Abraham seems but as yesterday. The state of society described in the book of Genesis had five entire ethnical periods, and the greater part of a sixth, behind it; and its inst.i.tutions were, comparatively speaking, modern.]

[Footnote 59: McLennan's _Studies in Ancient History, comprising a reprint of Primitive Marriage_, etc. London, 1876, p. 421.]

[Footnote 60: There is much that is unsound in it, however, as is often inevitably the case with books that strike boldly into a new field of inquiry.]

[Footnote 61: A general view of the subject may be obtained from the following works: Bachofen, _Das Mutterrecht_, Stuttgart, 1871, and _Die Sage von Tanaquil_, Heidelberg, 1870; McLennan's _Studies in Ancient History_, London, 1876, and _The Patriarchal Theory_, London, 1884; Morgan's _Systems of Consanguinity_ (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol.

xvii.), Was.h.i.+ngton, 1871, and _Ancient Society_, New York, 1877; Robertson Smith, _Kins.h.i.+p and Marriage in Early Arabia_, Cambridge, Eng., 1885; Lubbock, _Origin of Civilization_, 5th ed., London, 1889; Giraud-Teulon, _La Mere chez certains peuples de l'antiquite_, Paris, 1867, and _Les Origines de la Famille_, Geneva, 1874; Starcke (of Copenhagen), _The Primitive Family_, London, 1889. Some criticisms upon McLennan and Morgan may be found in Maine's later works, _Early History of Inst.i.tutions_, London, 1875, and _Early Law and Custom_, London, 1883. By far the ablest critical survey of the whole field is that in Spencer's _Principles of Sociology_, vol. i.

pp. 621-797.]

[Sidenote: Original reason for the system.]

[Sidenote: The primeval human horde.]

[Sidenote: Earliest family-group: the clan.]

[Sidenote: "Exogamy."]

If now we ask the reason for such a system of reckoning kins.h.i.+p and inheritance, so strange according to all our modern notions, the true answer doubtless is that which was given by prudent ([Greek: Pepnymenos]) Telemachus to the G.o.ddess Athene when she asked him to tell her truly if he was the son of Odysseus:--"My mother says I am his son, for my part, I don't know; one never knows of one's self who one's father is."[62] Already, no doubt, in Homer's time there was a gleam of satire about this answer, such as it would show on a modern page; but in more primitive times it was a very serious affair. From what we know of the ideas and practices of uncivilized tribes all over the world, it is evident that the sacredness of the family based upon indissoluble marriage is a thing of comparatively modern growth. If the s.e.xual relations of the Australians, as observed to-day,[63] are an improvement upon an antecedent state of things, that antecedent state must have been sheer promiscuity. There is ample warrant for supposing, with Mr.

McLennan, that at the beginning of the lower status of savagery, long since everywhere extinct, the family had not made itself distinctly visible, but men lived in a horde very much like gregarious brutes.[64]

I have shown that the essential difference between this primeval human horde and a mere herd of brutes consisted in the fact that the gradual but very great prolongation of infancy had produced two effects: the lengthening of the care of children tended to differentiate the horde into family-groups, and the lengthening of the period of youthful mental plasticity made it more possible for a new generation to improve upon the ideas and customs of its predecessors.[65] In these two concomitant processes--the development of the family and the increase of mental plasticity, or ability to adopt new methods and strike out into new paths of thought--lies the whole explanation of the moral and intellectual superiority of men over dumb animals. But in each case the change was very gradual.[66] The true savage is only a little less unteachable than the beasts of the field. The savage family is at first barely discernible amid the primitive social chaos in which it had its origin. Along with polyandry and polygyny in various degrees and forms, instances of exclusive pairing, of at least a temporary character, are to be found among the lowest existing savages, and there are reasons for supposing that such may have been the case even in primeval times. But it was impossible for strict monogamy to flourish in the ruder stages of social development; and the kind of family-group that was first clearly and permanently differentiated from the primeval horde was not at all like what civilized people would recognize as a family. It was the _gens_ or _clan_, as we find it exemplified in all stages from the middle period of savagery to the middle period of barbarism. The _gens_ or _clan_ was simply--to define it by a third synonym--the _kin_; it was originally a group of males and females who were traditionally aware of their common descent reckoned in the female line. At this stage of development there was quite generally though not universally prevalent the custom of "exogamy," by which a man was forbidden to marry a woman of his own clan. Among such Australian tribes as have been studied, this primitive restriction upon promiscuity seems to be about the only one.

[Footnote 62: [Greek: All' age moi tode eipe kai atrekeos katalexon, ei de ex autoio tosos pais eis Odyseos.

ainos gar kephalen te kai ommata kala eoikas keino, epei thama toion emisgometh' alleloisin, prin ge ton es Troien anabemenai, entha per alloi Argeion hoi aristoi eban koiles epi neusin ek tou d' out' Odysea egon idon out' eme keinos.

Ten d' au Telemachos pepnymenos antion euda toigar ego toi, xeine, mal' atrekeos agoreuso.

meter men t' eme phesi tou emmenai, autar egoge ouk oid'; ou gar po tis heon gonon autos anegno.]

_Odyssey_, i. 206.]

[Footnote 63: Lumholtz, _Among Cannibals_, p. 213; Lubbock, _Origin of Civilization_, p. 107; Morgan, _Ancient Society_, part iii., chap. iii. "After battle it frequently happens among the native tribes of Australia that the wives of the conquered, of their own free-will, go over to the victors; reminding us of the lioness which, quietly watching the fight between two lions, goes off with the conqueror." Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. p. 632.]

[Footnote 64: The notion of the descent of the human race from a single "pair," or of different races from different "pairs,"

is a curious instance of transferring modern inst.i.tutions into times primeval. Of course the idea is absurd. When the elder Aga.s.siz so emphatically declared that "pines have originated in forests, heaths in heaths, gra.s.ses in prairies, bees in hives, herrings in shoals, buffaloes in herds, men in nations" (_Essay on Cla.s.sification_, London, 1859, p. 58), he made, indeed, a mistake of the same sort, so far as concerns the origin of Man, for the nation is a still more modern inst.i.tution than the family; but in the other items of his statement he was right, and as regards the human race he was thinking in the right direction when he placed _mult.i.tude_ instead of _duality_ at the beginning. If instead of that extremely complex and highly organized mult.i.tude called "nation" (in the plural), he had started with the extremely simple and almost unorganized mult.i.tude called "horde" (in the singular), the statement for Man would have been correct. Such views were hardly within the reach of science thirty years ago.]

[Footnote 65: _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, part ii., chaps.

xvi., xxi., xxii.; _Excursions of an Evolutionist_, pp.

306-319; _Darwinism, and other Essays_, pp. 40-49; _The Destiny of Man_, -- iii.-ix.]

[Footnote 66: The slowness of the development has apparently been such as befits the transcendent value of the result.

Though the question is confessedly beyond the reach of science, may we not hold that civilized man, the creature of an infinite past, is the child of eternity, maturing for an inheritance of immortal life?]

[Sidenote: Phratry and tribe.]

Throughout all the earlier stages of culture, and even into the civilized period, we find society organized with the clan for its ultimate unit, although in course of time its character becomes greatly altered by the subst.i.tution of kins.h.i.+p in the paternal, for that in the maternal line. By long-continued growth and repeated segmentation the primitive clan was developed into a more complex structure, in which a group of clans const.i.tuted a _phratry_ or brotherhood, and a group of phratries const.i.tuted a _tribe_. This threefold grouping is found so commonly in all parts of the world as to afford good ground for the belief that it has been universal. It was long ago familiar to historians in the case of Greece and Rome, and of our Teutonic forefathers,[67] but it also existed generally in ancient America, and many obscure points connected with the history of the Greek and Roman groups have been elucidated through the study of Iroquois and Algonquin inst.i.tutions. Along with the likenesses, however, there are numerous unlikenesses, due to the change of kins.h.i.+p, among the European groups, from the female line to the male.

[Footnote 67: The Teutonic _hundred_ and Roman _curia_ answered to the Greek _phratry_.]

[Sidenote: Effect of pastoral life upon property and upon the family.]

This change, as it occurred among Aryan and Semitic peoples, marked one of the most momentous revolutions in the history of mankind. It probably occurred early in the upper period of barbarism, or late in the middle period, after the long-continued domestication of animals had resulted in the acquisition of private property (_pecus, peculium, pecunia_) in large amounts by individuals. In primitive society there was very little personal property except in weapons, clothing (such as it was), and trinkets. Real estate was unknown. Land was simply _occupied_ by the tribe. There was general communism and social equality. In the Old World the earliest instance of extensive "adverse possession" on the part of individuals, as against other individuals in the clan-community, was the possession of flocks and herds. Distinctions in wealth and rank were thus inaugurated; slavery began to be profitable and personal retainers and adherents useful in new ways. As in earlier stages the community in marital relations had been part of the general community in possessions, so now the exclusive possession of a wife or wives was part of the system of private property that was coming into vogue. The man of many cattle, the man who could attach subordinates to him through motives of self-interest as well as personal deference, the man who could defend his property against robbers, could also have his separate household and maintain its sanct.i.ty. In this way, it is believed, indissoluble marriage, in its two forms of monogamy and polygamy, originated. That it had already existed sporadically is not denied, but it now acquired such stability and permanence that the older and looser forms of alliance, hitherto prevalent, fell into disfavour. A natural result of the growth of private wealth and the permanence of the marital relation was the change in reckoning kins.h.i.+p from the maternal to the paternal line. This change was probably favoured by the prevalence of polygamy among those who were coming to be distinguished as "upper cla.s.ses," since a large family of children by different mothers could be held together only by reckoning the kins.h.i.+p through the father. Thus, we may suppose, originated the patriarchal family. Even in its rudest form it was an immense improvement upon what had gone before, and to the stronger and higher social organization thus acquired we must largely ascribe the rise of the Aryan and Semitic peoples to the foremost rank of civilization.[68]

[Footnote 68: Fenton's _Early Hebrew Life_, London, 1880, is an interesting study of the upper period of barbarism; see also Spencer, _Princip. of Sociol._, i. 724-737.]

It is not intended to imply that there is no other way in which the change to the male line may have been brought about among other peoples.

The explanation just given applies very well to the Aryan and Semitic peoples, but it is inapplicable to the state of things which seems to have existed in Mexico at the time of the Discovery.[69] The subject is a difficult one, and sometimes confronts us with questions much easier to ask than to answer. The change has been observed among tribes in a lower stage than that just described.[70] On the other hand, as old customs die hard, no doubt inheritance has in many places continued in the maternal line long after paternity is fully known. Symmetrical regularity in the development of human inst.i.tutions has by no means been the rule, and there is often much difficulty in explaining particular cases, even when the direction of the general drift can be discerned.

[Footnote 69: See below, p. 122.]