University of Virginia Library

VII
THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO

SHORTLY after I went back to Hampton Institute,
in 1879, to take a further course of
study, General Armstrong, the head of that
institution, decided to try the experiment of bringing
some Indian boys from the Western states and giving
them an opportunity, along with the Negro, to get
the benefits of the kind of education that Hampton
Institute was giving. He secured from the reservations
something over one hundred wild, and for
the most part entirely unlettered, Indians, and then
he appointed me to take charge of these young men.
I was to live in the same building with them, look
after the discipline, take charge of their rooms, and
in general act as a sort of "house father" to them.

This was my first acquaintance with the Indians.
I do not know that I had ever seen an Indian previous
to this time, although I had read something of them
and had become greatly interested in their history.
During the few years that I was in charge of these
Indian boys I had an opportunity to study them close
at hand, and to get an insight into their characters.
At the same time I had an opportunity to compare

them, in their studies, in their deportment, and in
their conduct generally, with the Negro boys by
whom they were surrounded. Within a short time
I noticed that, in spite of the great differences between
them, each race seemed to have acquired a
genuine regard and respect for the other. This is
the more remarkable from the fact that the Indian,
as he comes from the reservations, is very proud;
feels himself superior to the white man, and is very
doubtful about the value of the white man's civilisation
that he has been sent to study. Of course,
he naturally feels very much superior to the Negro,
for one reason because he knows that the Negro
has been at one time held in slavery by the white
man.

At this time I had no idea of the close and intimate
relations into which the Indian and the Negro had
been brought at various times and in various places
during the history of their life together in the Western
world. The association of the Negro with the Indian
has been so intimate and varied on this continent,
and the similarities as well as the differences of their
fortunes and character are so striking, that I am
tempted to enter at some length into a discussion of
the relations of each to the other, and to the white
man in this country.

Recently I heard a story which illustrates to a
certain extent what these relations of the three races
are at the present time. The story was told me by

a teacher who had in his class a certain number of
Indians and an equal number of Negroes. They
had been together for some time, and had managed
to get pretty well acquainted with one another. One
day, while the teacher was discussing with them some
facts in their history in which he referred to the contribution
that each of the races had made to the
civilisation in this country, he called upon one of the
Indians to tell the class what seemed to him the good
qualities of the Negroes, as he understood them.
This young Indian seemed to have discovered a
number of valuable qualities in the Negro. He
referred to his patience, to his aptitude for music,
to his desire to learn, etc. Then the teacher called
upon one of the Negro students to tell what
qualities he had discovered in the Indian that he
regarded as admirable and worth cultivating. He
referred to his courage, to his high sense of honour,
and to his pride of race. After this, the teacher called
upon any one in the class to stand up and tell them
in what respects he thought the white man was
superior. The teacher waited for a few moments,
but no member of the class rose. Then he spoke
again to the class, asking them if there was no one
there who was willing and able to say a word for the
white race. But, to his surprise, not one of the class
had a word to say.

This comparatively trivial incident illustrates, I
suspect, pretty well the relations that now exist in this

country between the three races—the Indian, the
Negro, and the white man. One of the first things
that a student of another race learns, when he begins
to study the history, the literature, and the traditions
of the Anglo-Saxon, is the superiority which that race
has, or feels it has, over all others. No doubt these
boys, both the Indian and the Negro, had been made
to feel this superiority. It had led them, perhaps, to
have a special interest in one another, and given each
a desire to discover and note the qualities that were
rare and valuable in the other. They had never
learned to note the valuable qualities in the white race,
because they had been made to feel that the white
race did not need, and perhaps did not deserve, their
sympathy. It was to me an interesting illustration of
the way in which all the dark-coloured people of this
country, no matter how different in disposition or in
temperament they may be, are being drawn together
in sympathy and interest in the presence of the prejudice
of the white man against all other people of a
different colour from his own.

As a matter of fact, the Negro and the Indian have
been in very close and very intimate association in
America from the first. The Negro was introduced
as a labourer in the West Indies, in the first instance,
to take the place of the native Indian, who was the
first slave in America. But Indian slavery in the
West Indies, South America and in North America
did not by any means cease upon the first appearance

of Negro slavery. After the Spaniards had used up
nearly all the native population of the islands of Cuba
and Haiti, in working the mines, they sent out
slave-raiders to the coasts of Florida, to the other
West Indies, and to the coast of South America to
get Indian slaves, particularly from the stronger
Carib tribes. During the long wars between the
Spanish in Florida and the English in the Carolinas,
in which Indians took part on both sides, many
hundreds of Indian prisoners were shipped as slaves
to the West Indies.

For a long time a price was fixed on every Indian
prisoner that should be brought into Charleston and
the enslavement of the Indians, according to an early
historian of the colony, "was made a profitable
branch of trade." Not only were Indian slaves
shipped to the West Indies but large numbers of
them were sold into the New England colonies from
South Carolina. For instance, in 1708 an Indian boy
brought thirty five pounds, and an Indian girl brought
fifteen pounds at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1710.
So large, in fact, was, at one time, this traffic in
Indian slaves between the southern and the northern
provinces that in 1712 a law was passed in Massachusetts
prohibiting the importation of Indian
servants or slaves; the reason given for this measure
in the preamble to the law is the bad character of
the Indian: "being of malicious, surley, and very
ungovernable." This law was directed especially

against the Southern Indians, the Tuscaroras and
others, of whom 800 were made prisoners as a result
of a war which expelled that tribe from the Carolinas.
Similar laws were passed by Pennsylvania in
1712, New Hampshire in 1714, and Connecticut
and Rhode Island in 1715.[1]

When the French troops fought and destroyed the
Natchez Indians, under Governor Perier, in 1731,
forty male Indians and four hundred and fifty
women and children were sent to San Domingo, where
they were sold as slaves. At the close of the Pequot
War in New England something like two hundred
of the Indians that remained were sent to the Bermuda
Islands and exchanged for Negro slaves. An
extensive trade in Indian slaves was carried on for
many years with the coast of Venezuela.

During all this time, for a hundred years or more,
the Indian and the Negro worked side by side as
slaves. In all the laws and regulations of the Colonial
days the same rule which was applied to the
Indian was also applied to the Negro slaves. For
instance, in Bishop Spangenberg's "Journal of
Travel in North Carolina," written in 1752, it is
stated that the law declared "whoever marries a
Negro, Indian, mulatto, or any other person of
mixed blood, must pay a fine of fifty pounds." In
all other regulations that were made in the earlier
days for the control of the slaves, mention

is invariably made of the Indian as well as the
Negro.

Gradually, however, as the number of Negro slaves
increased the Indians and their descendants who were
held in slavery were absorbed into and counted with
the body of the Negro slaves. I venture to say that
the amount of Indian blood in the American Negro
is very much larger than anyone who has not investigated
the subject would be inclined to believe.
Very frequently I have noticed Indian features very
distinctly marked in the students who have come to
us, not only from the Southern states, but also from
Cuba, Porto Rico, and the other West Indian islands.
In some parts of South America this amalgamation
of the two dark-skinned races has gone very much
further than it has elsewhere. The Negro maroons
of Dutch and British Guiana, who have established
little republics of their own back in the mountainous
parts of those two states are very largely mixed with
Indians. Most of the inhabitants of Panama, I
understand, like some of their Central American
neighbours, are of mixed blood, the various
elements being the Spanish, Indian, and the Negro.
In some of the villages of the Atlantic coast side of the
Isthmus of Panama Negroes largely outnumber the
natives with whom they have intermingled to form
the present population. In several of the other
islands of the West Indies, where Negroes make up
nearly the whole population, there are still distinct

traces among them, of remnants of the Indian race
that formerly inhabited these islands, as, for instance,
in the islands of St. Vincent and Dominica.

A number of the Negroes of the United States, I
might add, who have become prominent in one direction
or another, are known to have Indian blood in
their veins. I have heard it said, for instance, though
I do not know it to be true, that Frederick Douglass
had some Indian blood. It is pretty well known
that Crispus Attucks, the leader of the Boston
Massacre, was a runaway slave with considerable
Indian blood in his veins. Paul Cuffe, the noted
Negro skipper, who took the first shipload of Africans
back to Africa, and who therefore deserves the honour
of being the first actual coloniser of Africa by
American Negroes, was a man of Indian ancestry.
Among the Negroes in our day who are of Indian
ancestry I might mention T. Thomas Fortune, who
always speaks with pride of the fact that he has in
his veins the fighting blood of his Seminole ancestors.

I remember hearing Mr. Fortune say that he had
in his veins Negro, Indian, and Irish blood, and that
sometimes these antagonistic strains fell to warring
with each other, with very interesting results.

In many other ways besides their connection with
slavery, the Indian and the Negro have been brought
together in this country. In Louisiana, at different
times, the Negroes fought with the white man against
the Indians. At other times, the Indians conspired

with the Negro slaves against the white man in an
effort to throw off the yoke of slavery. In 1730 the
Chickasaw Indians conspired with some of the slaves
of New Orleans to destroy the whole white population.
The conspiracy was discovered, however, and the
leader, Samba, and seven other Negro leaders were
broken on the wheel to pay the penalty for their
crime. In Alabama the Negroes fought with the
whites against the Indians.

One of the most interesting and picturesque chapters
in the history of the warfare of the white man and
the Indian is that which relates the long struggle of
the Seminoles, who were mixed with and supported
by runaway Negroes from the plantations of Georgia
and the Carolinas, to maintain their independence
and preserve their territory. There is a pretty well
established tradition that the famous Seminole chief
Osceola, who, for a long time, had been their faithful
friend, finally turned against the whites, because his
Negro wife, who was the daughter of a fugitive slave,
was captured and sold across the border into slavery.

In a recent account of the last of the unconquered
Seminoles, who are still living in the Everglades
of Florida, I noticed reference to an Afro-Indian,
who apparently holds a position among these people
corresponding to that of a sheriff, since he is
described as executioner of the tribe.

The Cherokee Indians of Georgia were large slave-owners,
as were also the Creek Indians of Alabama.

When, in 1838, these Indians were compelled to move
westward to the Indian Territory they took a great
many of their Negro slaves with them. During the
Civil War the Indians of the Territory along with
The white people of the South, defended their right
to hold slave property, but the terms of peace freed
these slaves of the Indians as they did those of the
other Southern slave-holders, and since that time
the freedmen have been incorporated in the different
Indian nations of Indian Territory to which they
belonged as slaves.

So thoroughly have the Negroes and the Indians
intermingled in some of the Indian nations that in
travelling through the country nearly every Indian
you meet seems to be, if I may judge by my own
experience, either a Negro, or a white man.

A few years ago I visited that part of Oklahoma
that was formerly known as Indian Territory, and
I recall my feeling of disappointment and surprise
when I saw almost no Indians either at the railway
stations or in the towns that I visited, whereas I had
expected to see the streets thronged with them.
When I asked a man I met quite casually on the street
where the Indians had all gone, he replied that they
"were back in the hills."

"You know," he continued, "as soon as the Indian
sees a whitewashed fence he thinks it is time for him
to get out. He is afraid if he stays he will get civilised."

Now this is one respect in which the Negro, largely,

I believe, because he has passed through the condition
of slavery, differs from the Indian. The Negro
has learned, during his contact with the white man
in slavery, not to be afraid of civilisation. The
result is that as soon as he sees a whitewashed fence
he tries to get next to it.

The two races, the Indian and the Negro, have often
been compared to the disadvantage of the Negro.
I have frequently heard it stated that the Indian
proved himself the superior race by not submitting
to slavery. As I have already pointed out, it is not
exactly true that the Indian never submitted to
slavery. What is nearer the truth is that no race
which has not at some time or other submitted to
slavery of some kind never succeeded in reaching
a higher form of civilisation. It is just as true of
the Bushmen of South Africa, as it is of the Indian,
that they never submitted to slavery. The Bushmen,
like the Indian, were a hunter race that obstinately
refused to adapt themselves to new conditions, and
the result was that when they met a stronger people
in the Kaffir, of South Africa, they were hunted off
the face of the earth. The same thing, or something
like the same thing, happened in America. At the
time that the white people of New England and of
the Southern states were offering a bounty for every
Indian scalp they could obtain, they were sending
ships across the ocean to get Negro slaves to furnish
the necessary labour for opening up the country and

tilling the farm. At the time that the Indians were
fighting the white man in the Ohio valley they
relentlessly killed the white men they captured, and,
it is said, sometimes ate them, but spared the lives
of the Negro prisoners, in order to sell them to the
French settlers in Canada and the Mississippi valley.[2]

The fact is that, so far as the Indian refused to
become a slave of the white man, he deprived himself
of the only method that existed at that time for getting
possession of the white man's learning and the white
man's civilisation. To me it seems that the patience
of the Negro, which enabled him to endure the hardships
of slavery, and the natural human sympathy
of the Negro, which taught him, finally, to love the
white man and to gain his affection in return, was
wiser, if you can speak of it in such terms, than the
courage and independence of the Indian which prevented
him from doing the same.

In the long run it is not those qualities which
make a race picturesque and interesting, but rather
those qualities which make that race useful, that fit
it to survive and profit from contact with a civilisation
higher than its own. So far as I have been able to
learn, the white man, as yet, has never been able to

make the Indian of value, in any large way, in the
great task of civilisation. While the Negro, in
this country, at least, has steadily increased in numbers,
the Indian has steadily decreased, until at the
present time there are nearly ten million Negroes
and less than three hundred thousand Indians in the
United States. Not only has the Indian decreased
in numbers, but he has been an annual tax upon the
Government for food and clothing to the extent of
something like $10,000,000 a year, to say nothing of
the large amount spent in policing him. It has
been estimated that the entire amount expended by
the people of the United States is something more
than a billion dollars.[3]

The Negro, on the contrary, for two hundred and
fifty years, was brought to this country at an enormous
expense, and during that time, judging, at any rate,
by the prices which were paid for him, the value of

his services was constantly increasing. I venture to
predict that when the economic history of the Negro
comes to be written it will be found that, both in this
country and in Africa, the black man has proved himself
superior as a labourer to any other people in the
same stage of civilisation.

In seeking to draw here a comparison between the
red man and my own race I do not believe it is
necessary for me to say that I am not influenced in
any way by racial prejudices against the Indian. I
think that when the first Indians were brought to
Hampton I was disposed to feel, as most of the students
did at that time, that since Hampton was
established for the benefit of the Negro, the Indian
should not have been permitted to come in. But it
did not take me long, after getting in personal contact
with individual Indians, to outgrow that prejudice.
During the time that I had these young men
under my charge, living in intimate daily contact
with them as I did, I learned to admire the Indian.

Perhaps all of us were more kindly disposed toward
the Indians as we learned that they, like ourselves, felt
that they had suffered wrongs and had been oppressed.
In this respect the presence of the Indians at Hampton
has been, I believe, a valuable experience to the
mass of the Negro students of the school. It taught
me at any rate, that other races than the Negro had
had a hard time in this country, and that was, and is, a
valuable thing for the young men of my race to know

and understand. Just so far as we, as a race, learn
that our trials and our difficulties are not wholly
exceptional and peculiar to ourselves; that, on the
contrary, other peoples have passed through the same
period of trials and have had to stand the same tests,
we shall cease to feel discouraged and embittered.
On the contrary, we shall learn to feel that in our
struggles to rise we are carrying the common burden
of humanity, and that only in helping others can we
really help ourselves. It was from my contact with
the Indian, as I remember, that I first learned the
important lesson that if I permitted myself to hate
a man because of his race I was doing a greater
wrong to myself than I could possibly do to him.

What is true of the Negro in comparison with the
Indian is equally true in his comparison with any
other primitive race. The fact seems to be, as I
have said elsewhere, that the Negro is the only race
that has been able to look the white man in the face
during any long period of years and not only live but
multiply.

So much has been said about Negro labour in
this country, and so much has been said about
Negro labour in Africa, that I feel disposed to
quote at some length here a statement of the late
Professor N. S. Shaler, formerly Dean of the
Lawrence Scientific School, of Harvard University.
Professor Shaler was not only a scientific man
of broad and deep culture, but he was also a

Southern man, and had abundant opportunity to
get the facts.

Professor Shaler says:

A little further on Professor Shaler compares the
Indian as a labourer with the Negro, pointing out
the superiority of the black over the red man in
this respect. It should be remembered in this
connection, however, that almost everywhere, in
Africa, the Negro before coming to America had

reached a higher stage of civilisation than the Indian.
He already had possession of some of the fundamental
industries, like agriculture and the smelting of ores,
while the system of slavery existing everywhere in
Africa had long accustomed large portions of the
population to the habit of systematic labour.

The Indians who first met the white man on this
continent do not seem to have held slaves until they
first learned to do so from him. It is interesting to
note also that Indian slavery, as practised by both
the white man and the Indian, seems to have maintained
itself among the French population in the
Mississippi valley and in Canada for a considerable
time after it had begun to die out in the English seaboard
colonies. Speaking of the Indian, as compared
with the Negro slave, Professor Shaler says:

Referring to what he calls "the failure of the white
man to take a larger share in the agriculture of the
South," Professor Shaler says of the Negro as a
farm labourer:

I have written at some length of the relations of the
Negro and the Indian in this country because these
relations are interesting in themselves and because
they show how thoroughly the Negro, by uniting himself
with the indigenous population of the country,
has knitted himself into the life and rooted himself in
the soil of America. I think I am perfectly safe in

saying that the Negro in America has a great deal
more of the blood of the original American in him
than any other race on this continent, other than
the native Indian himself. In fact, if we confine
ourselves to certain parts of the West Indies
and South America, the Negro is the only man who
can still be said to represent, by inheritance of blood,
the original American.

I have taken some pains to find out, as near as I
was able, from the imperfect statistics at hand, the
actual number of people of African descent in the
Western world. Including the ten million persons
of Negro blood in the United States, I believe I am
safe in saying that there are in North and South
America and the West Indies no less than twenty-one
million descendants of the original slaves who
were brought from Africa during the period of two
hundred and fifty years in which the slave-trade
existed.