François René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Travels in America. Richard Switzer translation. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969.
In July 1791, Chateaubriand left for the newly-founded United States on a fishing vessel chartered for seminarians from Saint-Sulpice heading for Baltimore. He aspired to find the nonexistent ‘passage’ through the American Northwest to “the Polar Sea.” (“In France there is courage; courage deserves success, but deserving it does not always ensure it,” he now admits.) Like most French explorers, “lone men abandoned to their own devices and their own genius,” unaided “by the government or private companies,” Chateaubriand had no companions after he set foot on the dock.
The France he left still had a king; Chateaubriand had served in the Royal regiment for several months during the winter of 1790-91. But “the revolution was proceeding rapidly: the principles on which it was founded were mine”—mostly derived from Rousseau—but “I detested the violence which had already dishonored it”; in America he sought “an independence more in conformity with my tastes, more in sympathy with my character.” He knew that many refugees from the revolution had already fled to the “land of liberty,” Ohio; “nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power to a republican world.” And more: “This continent unknown to the rest of the world through all ancient times and through many centuries of modern times; the first savage destiny of this continent, and its second destiny since the arrival of Christopher Columbus; the domination of the European monarchies shattered in this New World; the old society ending up in the young America; a republic of a kind unknown then, announcing a change in the human mind and the political order; the part my homeland had in producing these events; these seas and these shores owing part of their independence to the French flag and French blood; a great man coming forth in the midst of discord and wilderness; Washington living in a flourishing city in the same place where a century earlier William Penn had bought a bit of land from some Indians; the United States sending back to France across the ocean the revolution and the liberty which France had supported with its arms; finally, my own plans, the discoveries that I wanted to attempt in these native solitudes, which extended their vast kingdom behind the narrow empire of a foreign civilization—those are the things which confusedly occupied my mind.”
The young man wisely brought with him a letter of introduction to George Washington from the Marquis de La Rouairie, whom the General had known as “Colonel Armand,” having fought alongside him during the American revolutionary war. He took a stagecoach to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, “rolling along the highways of the New World, where I knew no one, where I was known to no one at all,” along a terrain disagreeably flat and featureless. Philadelphia, however, proved “a beautiful city with wide streets” along the Delaware River, which “would be an impressive river in Europe” but “not remarkable in America.” Still, even a fine American city lacked the distinction of its European counterparts. There were few monuments and no old ones. “Protestantism, which sacrifices nothing to imagination and which is itself new, has not raised those towers and domes which which the ancient Catholic religion has crowned Europe. Almost nothing at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, rises above the mass of walls and roofs. The eye is saddened by this level appearance”—what his older brother’s yet unborn nephew, Alexis de Tocqueville, would consider one aspect of democracy in America. “The United States gives rather the idea of a colony than of a nation; there one finds customs, not mores. One has the feeling that the inhabitants do not have their roots in the ground. This society, so fine in the present, has no past; the cities are new, the tombs date from yesterday…. There is nothing old in America save the forests, children of the earth, and liberty, mother of all human society; that is, in itself, worth many a monument and ancestor.”
The experience of American liberty shocked the twenty-three-year-old aristocrat, who had taken his republicanism from reading “the ancients,” schooling himself on “the rigidity of the early Roman manners.” On the contrary, in Philadelphia he saw “the elegance of dress, the luxury of carriages, the frivolity of conversations, the disproportion of fortunes, the immorality of banks and gaming houses, the noise of dance-halls and theaters.” He might as well have been “in an English town,” under a monarchic regime. “I did not know that there was another liberty, daughter of the enlightenment of an old civilization, a liberty whose reality the representative republic has proved. It is no longer necessary to plow one’s little field, reject art and science, have ragged nails and a dirty beard, in order to be free.” American liberty began to liberate him from Rousseau. And indeed he would return to France in the summer of 1792 after reading of Louis XVI’s arrest, fighting with the Army of Princes against the too-Rousseauian Jacobins, who had revealed themselves as no friends of liberty, ancient or modern.
President Washington—according “to my ideas at the time,” Cincinnatus—did not disappoint. In him “I found the simplicity of the old Roman,” unpretentious, with “an air that was calm and cold rather than noble.” Neither, however, did Washington overawe him; “I admire [greatness of soul] without being crushed by it” while greatness of fortune “inspires me more with pity than with respect.” At table, he “listened to me with a sort of astonishment” when Chateaubriand described his project. The well-bred young man saved the moment by exclaiming, “It is less difficult to discover the Northwest Passage than to create a people as you have done,” earning himself an invitation to dine again the next evening. This time, the conversation turned to the French Revolution, Washington showing his guests a key to the Bastille, sent him by Lafayette. “If Washington had seen the conquerors of the Bastille in the gutters of Paris as I did, he would have had less faith in his relic. The seriousness and the force of the revolution were not in those bloody orgies.”
“Such was my meeting with this man who liberated a whole world. Washington descended into the tomb before a bit of fame could be attached to my name; I passed before him as the most unknown individual; he was in all his brilliance, and I in all my obscurity. My name did not perhaps remain a whole day in his memory. Yet how happy I am that his gaze fell upon me! I have felt warmed by it for the rest of my life: there is a power in the gaze of a great man.”
Chateaubriand brings out the character of that greatness by comparing Washington to the other great man he met—Buonaparte, as he calls him, refusing to write the imperial name, Napoleon, with which the parvenu grasped at legitimacy. The Vicomte’s return to France from England in 1802 came when the Emperor granted a general amnesty to the political exiles. A year later, when The Genius of Christianity appeared, Chateaubriand found himself in favor, as his book comported well with the ruler’s courtship of the Catholic Church. But the following year Napoleon arranged the execution of Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis-Antoine, the Duke of Enghien, on false charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. Chateaubriand broke with him and soon found himself relegated to internal exile, away from Paris. “If one compares Washington to Buonaparte, man to man, the genius of the first seems less soaring than that of the second.” Washington was no Alexander, no Caesar, no lion or eagle among men. “He defend[ed] himself with a handful of citizens on a land without memories and without fame, in the restricted circle of the domestic hearths”; “he does not place his foot on the necks of kings” after defeating the greatest generals of his time, “rush[ing] from Memphis to Venice and from Cadiz to Moscow” across Europe and beyond it.
Washington “acts slowly: one could say that he feels he is the envoy of future liberty and that he is afraid to compromise it. It is not his own destiny this hero of another sort bears, it is that of his country; he does not allow himself to toy with what does not belong to him.” His battle trophy was the United States of America. “Buonaparte has no trait of this grave American,” wishing “only to create renown for himself” and “hold[ing] himself responsible only for his own fate” in a mission he knows “will be short.” In “crushing [the anarchy] of the Revolution “he stifles liberty and finally loses his own liberty on the last field of battle.” Prometheus-like, chained to the rock of Elba, “as long as he struggles against death,” Europe “does not dare to lay down its arms”; once he died, “what did the citizens have to mourn?” “Washington raises a nation to independence; a retired magistrate, he peacefully falls asleep beneath his paternal roof amidst the regrets of his compatriots and the veneration of all peoples.”
As a result of their lives, “the republic of Washington still exists” in 1827, when Chateaubriand published his Travels. “The empire of Buonaparte is destroyed.” Whereas “the name of Washington will spread with liberty from age to age,” marking “the beginning of a new era of mankind,” “the name of Buonaparte will also be repeated by future generations, but it will be attached to no blessing and will often serve as authority for oppressors, great or small.” [1] “Buonaparte could also have enriched the public domain: he was acting on the most civilized, the most intelligent, the bravest, the most brilliant nation of the earth. What would be the rank he would occupy today in the universe if he had joined magnanimity to what he possessed of the heroic, if combining Washington and Buonaparte at the same time, he had named liberty the heir of his glory!” But “in his eyes men were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his.” As the pharaohs of Egypt “placed their funeral pyramids not in the midst of flourishing countrysides but in the sterile sands,” where they “rise like eternity in solitude,” so “Buonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image.”
From Philadelphia Chateaubriand journeyed to New York, “a gay, populous, and commercial city,” then to Boston “to salute the first battlefield of American liberty.” Later, in Albany, who finally met a man who talked sense to him about his proposed adventure. “Mr. Swift made some very reasonable objections.” I needed companions and equipment, and “even if I were fortunate enough to cross so much wilderness without accident, I would arrive in frozen regions where I would perish from cold or hunger.” “He advised me to begin by acclimating myself, by making an excursion first into the interior of America, learning Sioux, Iroquois, and Eskimo, living some time among the Canadian scouts and the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company.” Annoyed but sobered, Chateaubriand hired a guide and horses, heading first for Niagara Falls, then to Pittsburgh and Ohio—without abandoning his hopes for find the Northwest Passage, later on.
Among the Iroquois near Albany, he met M. Violet, a “dancing master among the savages,” who played a fiddle while the Indians “jumped like a band of demons,” men and women “daubed like sorcerers, their bodies half naked, their ears slit, ravens’ feathers on their heads and rings in their noses.” “It was a rather strange thing for a disciple of Rousseau to be introduced to primitive life with a ball given for Iroquois by a former kitchen boy of General Rochambeau.” More somberly, Chateaubriand conversed with the Sachem of the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois nation, who “complained of the Americans, who would soon leave to the people whose ancestors had welcomed them, not even enough earth to cover their bones.” Later, Chateaubriand remarks that “the nations that peopled [Lake Erie’s] shores were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago,” refusing to make his hosts into mere victims, recognizing that what was soon to be done to them, more or less peacefully, they had done to others, violently.
The Indians themselves already had “taken on something” of European manners, with horses and flocks, cabins “filled with furniture and utensils bought at Quebec, Montreal Niagara, Detroit, or the cities of the United States.” “Hospitality is the last primitive virtue remaining to the Indian in the midst of the vices of European civilization”; “once received in a cabin, one became inviolable,” as “the hearth had the power of the altar,” “mak[ing] you sacred.” In those homes, the children were “never punished,” obeying grandparents and mothers but not fathers. The children nonetheless remain unspoiled. “If the savage child obeys no one, no one obeys him: there lies the whole secret of his joy and his reason,” since if they were to demand anything of their parents they would simply be ignored. They pay attention to their fathers not as patriarchs but as exemplars, each boy “studying the arts that he sees his father practicing.” “They are neither noisy, annoying, nor surly; they have in their appearance something serious like Happiness, something noble, like independence.” Were we Europeans to attempt to raise children this way, “we would have to start by relieving ourselves of our vices.”
It was on a river somewhere near Lake Superior, alone in nature and not with human beings ‘white’ or ‘red’ that Chateaubriand could at last, if briefly, fall into a Rousseauian reverie, as he recorded in his diary at the time. “The sky is pure over my head, the water limpid under my boat, which is flying before a light breeze…. Primitive liberty, I find you at last! I pass as that bird who flies before me, who travels haphazardly, who has only an embarrassment of riches among the shadow. Here I am as the Almighty created me, the sovereign of nature, born triumphantly by the waters, while the inhabitants of the rivers accompany my course…. Is it on the forehead of society or on mine that is engraved the immortal seal of our origin? Run and shut yourselves up in your cities; go and subject yourselves to your petty laws; earn your livelihood by the sweat of your brow, or devour the pauper’s bread; slaughter one another over a word, over a master; doubt the existence of God, or adore him in superstitious forms. I shall go wandering in my solitudes.” He had the wit and the realism to add, “Without the mosquitoes, this place would be very agreeable.”
Men fight over such natural beauty and fertility. In Kentucky, “for more than two centuries the nations allied with the Cherokees and those allied with the Iroquois nation fought each other over hunting rights there. No tribe dared settle on this battlefield.” But “will the European generations be more virtuous and freer on these shores than the American generations they have exterminated?” No: slaves will “till the soil under the whip of the master in this wilderness where man paraded his liberty,” with “the riches of the soil bring[ing] about new wars.” Still, there remains the wilderness itself, where “fireflies shone in the darkness and were eclipsed when they crossed a moonbeam.” “The traveler’s reverie is a sort of plenitude of the heart and emptiness of the mind which allows one to enjoy his existence in repose: it is by thought that we trouble the felicity which God gives us: the soul is peaceful; the mind is troubled.” The older Chateaubriand simply comments, “The 36 years that have passed since my trip have brought much enlightenment and changed many things in the Old and the New World; these years have necessarily modified the ideas and rectified the judgments of the writer.”
How so? Chateaubriand continued his researches in the intervening decades. More than half of his book consists of his discoveries in the books of others—his narrative of the North American voyage drifting off after his account of Kentucky, like the rivers there. He seems to have been determined more to preserve and publicize knowledge of the vanishing Indians than of the rising Americans, perhaps assuming that the Americans would take care of themselves. As an ardent reader, if no longer a disciple, of Rousseau, he finds the American Indians more interesting than the American Europeans or their African slaves. As a professional writer, he may also have an eye on the interests of his own readers. As of the 1820s, Chateaubriand could still write that his account of the Indians’ ways of life “shows America as it is today.” Only a few years later, Tocqueville would reverse his great kinsman’s emphasis, calling attention not to the Indians, whose aristocratic moeurs would die with them, nor even to the American Founders (although he took considerable care to describe their handiwork, the U.S. Constitution), but to the way of life of what he called the world’s “sample democracy,” in whose civil-social equality he saw the future of both republicanism and despotism in the modern world.
Regarding the “manners” of the Indians, Chateaubriand corrects Rousseau. “There are two equally faithful and unfaithful ways of painting the savages of North America.” You might “speak only of their laws and their manners, without entering into details of their bizarre customs and their habits which are often disgusting to civilized men.” If so, “all you will see will be Greeks and Romans, for the laws of the Indians are grave and their manners often charming.” Alternatively, you might reverse this approach, looking solely at the Indians’ customs and habits, ignoring their law and manners. “Then you will see only the smoky, filthy cabins to which retires a kind of monkey endowed with human speech.” But are you sure that your European ancestors were any better? A Roman writer “complained of being forced to listen to the language of the German and to frequent the Burgundian who rubbed his hair with butter” (not unlike the experience of cultivated persons in the America of the 1950s, forced to listen to barbaric slang and to frequent youths who dosed their hair with Vitalis). “Indeed, I do not know if the hut of old Cato in the land of the Sabines was much cleaner than that of an Iroquois. Sly Horace might leave us some doubts on that score.” To invoke our contemporary language, Chateaubriand is no ‘racist.’
He also recognizes ‘diversity’: “If one gives the same traits to all the savages of North America, the portrait will be unrealistic; the savages of Louisiana and Florida differed in many ways from the savages of Canada.” He will generalize without losing sight of particulars.
In considering any regime, one wants to know who rules. Generally speaking, “age is the source of authority” among the Indian nations and tribes. “The older a man is, the greater his influence”; the Great Spirit being eternal, He is the patriarch of patriarchs. The families patriarchs rule perpetuate themselves initially by an engagement ritual, whereby the family of the young man proceeds from the elder’s cabin to the cabin of the girl’s mother. They consult her dreams. If favorable, the wedding will proceed; if unfavorable, the dreams may be “conjur[ed] away” by “hanging a red necklace on the neck of an idol of oak.” Chateaubriand adds, “Among civilized men too, hope has its red necklaces and idols.” After that, “a considerable wait ensures before the conclusion of the marriage,” as “the prime virtue of the savage is patience,” the virtue of hunters and warriors, who stalk their prey, and of gatherers and farmer, who wait upon the seasons. Closer to nature than the civilized man, the savage has no timepieces to rule him. “Whatever the young man’s passion, then, he is obliged to affect an air of indifference and to await the orders of the family,” occupying his time by building a new cabin.
Peoples who live according to nature must view war differently than civilized peoples do. “In Europe they marry in order to escape the military laws; among the savages of North America no one could marry before having fought for the homeland. A man was not judged worthy of being a father until he had proved that he could defend his children.” This “manly custom” means that a man isn’t eligible for marriage unless he is a warrior and that “a warrior did not begin to enjoy public consideration until the day of his marriage,” until he shows readiness to procreate in peace, to perpetuate the nation in addition to defending it. Polygamy and even permission to “offer their wives and daughters to strangers” aim at strengthening families, not at weakening them, as such practices would do in Europe. “They think that they will make their family happier by changing the paternal blood”—a sort of controlled radicalization of the incest prohibition, the protection against inbreeding. To the Indians, such practices have a spiritual dimension, too, as they believe “it is the father who creates the child’s soul; the mother engenders only his body.” They choose the names of their children from the maternal line, intending the child to take “the place of the woman whose name he has received,” giving “life, so to speak, to the ancestors,” “communicat[ing] a kind of immortality to the ancestors, by supposing them present in the midst of their posterity” and “augment[ing] the attention the mother gives childhood by reminding her of the attention given hers,” with “filial tenderness redoubl[ing] maternal love.”
The intention of linking those alive to those who are dead—of maintaining the bonds of families, of tribes, and of nations across generations—also accounts for the extraordinary “veneration for the dead” seen among the American Indians. “Lawful property is recognized only where the ancestors are buried,” which is why Indians show such revulsion against selling their lands. “Shall we say to our fathers: Arise, and follow us to a foreign land?” [2] Chateaubriand attributes this conviction to one of the differences between savage and civilized peoples. “Civilized peoples have monuments of letters and arts to preserve the memories of their homelands”—great cities, with their “palaces, towers, columns, obelisks,” expanses of cultivated fields, written chronicles. “The savages have nothing of all that.” Even their “traditional songs vanish with the last memory that retains, them, with the last voice that repeats them. Therefore for the tribes of the New World there is only one monument: the tomb. Take away from the savages the bones of their fathers, and you take away from them their history, their law, and even their gods; in the eyes of posterity you strip these men of the proof of their existence as well as the proof of their nothingness.”
Indeed, “the true God makes Himself felt even in the false religions, and the man who prays is worthy of respect,” as the Indians show themselves worthy in their celebrations of marriage, funerals, and harvests. For the Indians as for “the ancient Greeks and most primitive peoples,” religious observance comes less in the form of words than of action, in dancing. “They dance to receive a guest, to smoke a peace pipe; they dance for the harvest; they dance for the birth of a child; they dance above all for the dead.” They dance for the hunt and the dance for a war, when the procession of warriors is followed by the march of “the medicine man, the prophet or augur interpreter” of dreams. Upon returning from a military expedition, “heads, hearts, mutilated members, and bleeding scalps are hung on pikes planted on the ground. They dance around these trophies, and the prisoners who are to be burned are present at the spectacle of these horrible pleasures.” In Shakespeare’s plays depicting then-recent English history, the heads of dead captains were exhibited on the heads of pikes.
It is almost needless for Chateaubriand to say that the Indians lack modern science. Looking at the night sky, they “scarcely know anything other than the north star,” which “serves as their guide at night.” They know their territorial surroundings intimately, however, and if they would “ban from the treatment of the ill the superstitious customs and the quackery of the priests, they would know all the essentials of the art of healing,” as their knowledge of herbal medicine “is almost as advanced among them as among the civilized peoples.” Chateaubriand has some (uncharacteristically Voltairean) fun describing the ministrations of the ‘medicine men.’ With respect to childbirth they take the opposite view of ‘the moderns’: Faced with a “difficult birth,” they “suffocate the mother, who, struggling against death, delivers her fruit by the effort of a last convulsion. They always inform the woman in labor before having recourse to this means; she never hesitates to sacrifice herself.” Indeed, when demanding respect for ‘indigenous cultures,’ egalitarians frequently overlook such customs, among which is the common feature of the four principal Indian languages, namely, the use of “two genders, the noble gender for the men, and the nonnoble gender for the women and male or female animals.” “In saying of a coward that he is a woman, the word woman is made masculine; in saying of a woman that she is a man, the word man is made feminine.”
The way of life common to all the Indian nations and tribes is warfare. “War is the great affair of the savages and the foundation of their politics; it has about it something more legitimate than war among civilized peoples because it is almost always declared for the very existence of the people who undertake it: it is a matter of preserving hunting lands or fields appropriate for farming. But by the very reason that the Indian applies himself to the art which causes death only in order to live there result from it implacable furies among the tribes: they are fighting over the family feuds. The hatreds become individual; as the armies are not large and each enemy knows the name and the fact of his enemy, they also fight fiercely through antipathies of character and by individual resentments; these children of the same wilderness carry into their external quarrels something of the animosity of civil disputes.” Warriors compose one-fifth of the community, with fifteen being “the legal age of military service.”
The tribal council decides on war, although their resolution “binds no one” and “taking part is purely voluntary.” In preparing for that war, the military chief or sachem withdraws from the community for two days and the women are forbidden to approach the warriors, “although they may speak” to the sachem, “whom they visit in order to obtain from him a portion of the booty taken from the enemy, for the savages never doubt the success of their enterprises.” Only then do the warriors approach him, telling their plan of battle. As in so much else, the warriors sing, vaunting over the atrocities they intend to commit. (“I shall cut off the fingers of my enemies with my teeth; I shall burn their feet and then their legs.” Cole Porter would have no place.) The warrior’s song also extols “his own honor” and the honor of his family. His audience responds in kind: “Nothing is as noble, nothing is as handsome” as the warriors; “they have all the qualities and all the virtues.” Chateaubriand adds that “the Spartans had this custom too.” In keeping with this military ethos, in wartime “the natural indolence of the savages is suddenly replaced by an extraordinary activity; the gaiety and martial ardor of the young men communicate themselves to the nation. There are established kinds of workshops for the manufacture of sleds and canoes”—a rare instance of manufacturing industry in a martial civil society. The one check on a military expedition is religious. If the medicine man, or even one of the warriors, suffers from an unpropitious dream the action is called off. Thus “absolute liberty and unenlightened religion govern” hand-in-hand.
On the battlefield, the warriors taunt their rivals, calling each other “limping, cross-eyed, short; these words inflicted on the self-esteem augment their rage,” with “the frightful custom of scalping the enemy heighten[ing] the ferocity of the combat.” “This trophy is often taken with such skill that the brain is left uncovered without having been penetrated by the point of the instrument.” Honor, ferocity, battle-trophies and spoils: the thumotic character of the Indians’ regimes slights rational strategy, as “it is rare for the victors to pursue the vanquished”; they would rather “stay on the battlefield to strip the dead, to bind up the prisoners, to celebrate the triumph with songs and dances” and to “mourn the friends they have lost.” The corpses themselves are a valuable source of protein. As for the prisoners, the women “have a fine privilege” of saving them by “adopting them as brothers or husbands,” especially if the women “have lost brothers or husbands in the battle.” Once adopted, a defeated warrior never betrays his saviors, showing “no less ardor than his new compatriots in bearing arms against his former nation,” to the extent of killing his father or his son in the next battle. Unsaved prisoners are burned alive, as proposed in the battle hymns; alternatively, they might merely be enslaved. There are some variations among the nations when it comes to prisoners, however. “The Iroquois, renowned moreover for their cruelty towards prisoners of war, had a custom one would almost say was borrowed from the Romans, which bore evidence of the genius of a great people: they incorporated the conquered nation into their own nation without making them slaves; they did not even force then to adopt their laws; they only subjected them to their customs.”
The work of Christian missionaries has softened some of these severities. “It was in the name of a God sacrificed by men that the missionaries obtained the abolition of human sacrifice. They planted the cross in place of the torture stake, and the blood of Jesus Christ redeemed the blood of the prisoner.” In reaction, “the Sachems, rigid partisans of the old customs, deplored that humaneness, a degeneration they said, of the old virtue.” O tempora, O mores. More generally, the influence of Christianity has “wiped out” the practice of worshipping the sun and its concomitant use of public sacrifices. Indians have retained their Manitous, typically a bird, fish, or other animal, although sometimes an inanimate object, chosen by each person and held as sacred to him. “The hunter is careful never to kill or wound the animal he has chosen for Manitou.” This is in keeping with the Indians’ animism, whereby not only men but animals are said to have souls animated by “divine intelligence.” Surrounded by nature, the Indians have no understanding of nature as philosophers understand it; they believe that natural objects can change their shapes, like Ovids who take their poetry as knowledge.
As indicated in the description of warfare, “dreams play a great role in the religion of the savage; their interpretation is a science, and their illusions are held for realities.” With a remaining trace of Rousseau, Chateaubriand comments, “Among civilized peoples, it is often the contrary: the realities are illusions.” “You can find in all that enough religion, falsehood, and poetry, to learn, to be led astray, and to be consoled.”
Respecting politics, Chateaubriand corrects the mistaken claim that American Indians have no governments, their lives never having left the level of the family and its patriarch. In fact, “among the savages are to be found all the types of governments known to civilized peoples, from despotism to republic, passing through monarchy, limited or absolute, elective or hereditary.” They have also discovered federalism—necessary because the extent of their territories makes it impossible to govern far-flung tribes within a given nation from a central location, when it comes to routine matters. Human beings are indeed political animals, as “men need to protect themselves against the arbitrary before fixing the relations with one another”; for this reason, “political laws are born spontaneously with man and are established without antecedents” and are “found among the most barbarous hordes.”
By contrast, civil laws such as laws governing private property and criminal law are formed not by necessity but by customs, and were initially enforced by families. “Vengeance was justice: natural law prosecuted among the uncivilized that which public law reaches among the civilized.”
All the North American Indian nations share some political characteristics. As mentioned, they are divided into tribes. Each tribe has a hereditary chief and a military chief, whose right to rule derives from election, “as among the old Germanic peoples.” Each tribe has its own name and emblems, the latter used as insignia in war and seals on treaties. As in ancient Greece and Rome, names of both tribes and individuals derive from some circumstance of their lives or some distinctive characteristic, e.g., Beaver Killer, Broken Leg, Beautiful Voice.
The national councils consist of tribal chiefs, military chiefs, matrons, orators, medicine men, although they “vary according to the makeup of the peoples. Although “nations so simple should have nothing to debate in politics,” on the contrary council deliberations are often complex, covering treaties, embassies, alliances, elections, offers of mediation. “All these affairs are discussed with order; the reasons pro and con are clarified,” often with “a profoundness and judgment few statesmen in Europe would be capable of.”
As to the several regimes seen among the Indian nations, Chateaubriand begins with despotism, “such as is found among most of the peoples of Asia and such as there existed in Peru and Mexico.” Wherever they are established, such regimes may feature “luxury and administration” but at the cost of civilizational stagnation, as the tyrant “always keeps the right of life and death over his subjects, and they are careful to close themselves up within a mediocrity which excites neither the cupidity nor the jealousy of power.” Without reward for industry, “the genius of man” never “arrive[s] at liberty through enlightenment.” In North America, the Natchez nation, originally from Mexico, exemplify the despotic regime. Among the Natchez, the tyrant, likening himself to the sun, claimed ownership over the harvest, enabling him to control the distribution of wealth and to invent a “hierarchy of offices which involves a host of men in power through their complicity in oppression.” Each subject “saw himself obliged to bear to The Sun a part of his hunt or his catch,” to obey him without hesitation or compensation, and to submit to judgments by the Sun under laws the Sun ordained. His female counterpart, the Squaw Chief, took for herself “as many husbands and lovers as she wished”; “she then had the objects of her caprice strangled.” To keep the tribal chiefs satisfied with his rule, the Sun decreed “a general prostitution of the women, as it was practiced at certain Babylonian initiations.” Religious superstition was encouraged by priests intent on “fortify[ing] tyranny by the degradation of the people’s reason.” At the funerals of the chiefs more than 100 subjects were sacrificed in an act of mass suicide, their oppressors “abandon[ing] absolute power in life only to inherit the tyranny of death.”
Summarizing the general characteristics of the Natchez regime, Chateaubriand observes: “On one side naked men, the liberty of nature; on the other, demands without equal, a despotism that foes beyond the most formidable examples among civilized peoples. The primitive innocence and virtue of the political state in its cradle, the corruption and crimes of a decrepit government: what a monstrous combination!” Without private property, for which “the savage nations” have “an invincible aversion,” and with the crops stored in granaries controlled by the chief, the Natchez suffered. Once the public granary was destroyed and the public field was divided into family plots, each worked and harvested but not owned by a family, the Natchez began to prosper. As for the Sun and the Squaw Chief, they “were only remembrances of the past, remembrances useful to the peoples, with whom it is never good to destroy the authority of the ancestors.” The Natchez “continued to maintain the perpetual fire in the temple; they did not even touch the ashes of the old chiefs placed in that edifice because it is a crime to violate the asylum of the dead, and, after all, the dust of tyrants presents lessons as great as that of other men.”
The Muskogee nation (dominant partners with the Seminoles in the Creek confederation) has a limited monarchy. Their chief is called the Mico; he receives ambassadors and other foreigners and presides over the council, convoking to deliberate on questions of war and peace. Elected by the council of tribal elders and confirmed by the warriors, he “must have spilled blood in combat or have distinguished [him]self by force of reason, genius, or eloquence,” owing his power “only to his merit.” “In the council itself, where he receives so many honors, he has only his voice; all his influence is in his wisdom.” Mothers discipline their children by warning, “Be careful, the Mico sees you”—inculcating “the invisible despotism of virtue.” He wields the same “dangerous prerogative” as the Sun once held among the Natchez, control of the public granary; so far, he has not abused it.
The Mico and the council of elders reverse the functions of officers in limited monarchies seen among “civilized peoples,” with the Mico making the laws and the council executing them. “These savages thought perhaps that there was less peril in vesting a council of elders with the executive power than in putting this power in the hands of a single man,” while “a single man of mature age and of a reflective mind better elaborates laws than a deliberative body.” This arrangement has worked well but the council suffers from what Chateaubriand judges to be “a capital vice,” having placed itself “under the immediate direction of the grand medicine man, who leads it through fear of enchantments and through the interpretations of dreams.” The Muskogee priesthood thus “threatens to capture various powers.”
The warriors serve under a completely independent war chief. Consonant with their military way of life, the Muskogees “seized Florida after having wiped out” or having enslaved “the Yamasees, its first inhabitants.” They forced the Seminoles into confederation with them. “Inclined to idleness and feasting,” renowned for their poetry and music, they have slaves to cultivate the land, although a married slave’s children “regain their natural right” of liberty “by birth.” “The misfortune of the parents is not passed on to their posterity; the Muskogees did not want servitude to be hereditary: a fine lesson that savages have given to civilized men!”—most noticeably the European Americans who live nearby. This notwithstanding, the Yamasee remain “timid, silent, patient, abject” even in freedom: “Such is slavery,” which, “whatever its mildness…degrades the virtues.” “This Yamasee, former master of the Floridas, is still of the Indian race; he fought like a hero to save his country from the invasion of the Muskogees, but fortune betrayed him. What made such a great difference between the Yamasee of old and the Yamasee of today? Two words: liberty and servitude.” Europeans, take note.
Far to the north, the Hurons and Iroquois live under “aristocratic republican” regimes. The Hurons supplement their tribal council with a hereditary chief, who rises to power through matrilineal succession. If war or disease extinguished a royal line, “the noblest matron of the tribe” chose the new chief; “the influence of women must have been considerable in a nation whose politics and whose nature gave them so many rights.” Whereas in Asia “the women are slaves and have no part in the government,” but “spared in general from the harshest work of the fields,” and among nations of German origin “the women were free, but they remained strangers to the acts of politics,” among Amerindian tribes women “participated in the affairs of state but were employed at those painful tasks which have devolved upon man in civilized Europe.” “Slaves and beasts of burden in the field and on the hunts, they became free and queenlike in the family assemblies and in the nation’s councils,” in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Gauls.
The Iroquois originated in the Huron nation, leaving it to settle on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. Initially “a peaceful agricultural nation,” they developed warlike characteristics in their struggles with the Adirondacks (now called the Algonquians), “a warlike hunter people” who scorned “the emigrating Hurons.” “Resolv[ing] to perish to the last man or to be free,” the Iroquois discovered in themselves “a warrior genius, which they had not suspected,” defeating the Algonquins, who then allied themselves with the Hurons and the French. After the Dutch arrived at Manhattan, the Iroquois acquired firearms, “in a short time” becoming “more skillful in operating those arms than the whites themselves.” An “implacable” war began, lasting “more than three centuries,” at the end of which “the Algonquins were exterminated and the Hurons reduced to a tribe taking refuge under the cannon of Quebec,” settling along the shores of what’s now called Lake Huron.
The Iroquois republic has three councils: the council of participants, the council of elders, and the council of warriors—a version of what Aristotle calls a mixed regime. The council of participants, the “supreme council,” represents families; representatives are elected by the women, “who often choose a woman to represent them.” The male-dominated council of elders served as a body to which decisions of the council of participants could be appealed. Thus, while “the Iroquois had thought that they should not be deprived of the aid of a sex whose unbounded and ingenious mind is very resourceful and is capable of acting on the human heart,” they “had also thought that the decrees of a council of women could be impassioned.” The council of elders “tempered and so to speak cooled” their decrees, serving also as “the moderator between the council of participants and the council composed of the body of young warriors,” another group of persons inclined to be impassioned.
Not every member of the councils enjoyed the right to speak in meetings. Instead, each tribe chose orators, individuals who had “made a particular study of politics and eloquence.” In Europe and (as Chateaubriand likely recalls) in France, giving such importance to designated rhetoricians “would be an obstacle to liberty.” Not so among the Iroquois, because the individual members of the councils never felt bound by the deliberation of the councils. Consent was based on deference to elders, not obedience to decrees. This way of life retained the spirit of liberty without undermining social and political order.
The Iroquois republic was federal as well as aristocratic. They divided their nation into five cantons, entitled to “make peace and war separately.” In case of disputes, neutral cantons offered “their good offices” to both sides. As a result of all these institutions, “the Iroquois were as famous for their politics as for their arms,” and this included foreign policy, where they deployed a balance-of-power strategy against the French and the English, although they usually favored the English, who counterbalanced the alliance of the Algonquins and the Hurons with the French.
“Such was the Iroquois before the shadow and the destruction of European civilization were extended over him.” Generally, Chateaubriand estimates, there are now no more than 400,000 Amerindians in North America. They remain valiant warriors. Only a decade earlier, seeing an opportunity during the War of 1812, the Creeks fought hard against the Americans, at times practicing cannibalism. Although he doesn’t seem to know about the Washington Administration’s earlier policy of regime change, he sees its effects: “These savages had made notable progress in civilization”—indeed, the Americans had numbered them among the “Five Civilized Tribes” in the southeast since the Founding period. This progress was especially noticeable in “the art of war,” as they used artillery with great effect. Politically, they had instituted a rather rough form of impeachment, “judging and put[ting] to death one of their Micos…for having sold lands to the whites without the participation of the national council.” Now, in 1827, the state of Georgia claims that it bought the “rich territory” of the Muskogees and the Seminoles; although “the American Congress has placed an obstacle before this claim…sooner or later the Creeks, the Cherokees, and the Chickasaws, pressed in the midst of the white populations of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, will be obliged to undergo exile or extermination.”
The future looks no better for the northern tribes and nations. Alcoholism, disease, and war, “which we have multiplied among the Indians, have precipitated the destruction of these peoples.” But these are not the sole reasons for Indian “depopulation.” “The Indian was not savage; the European civilization did not act on the pure state of nature; it acted on the rising American civilization; if it had found nothing, it would have created something; but it found manners and destroyed them because it was stronger and did not consider it should mix with these manners.” Catholicism, with its long experience in prudently melding Christianity with paganism, would have done better than Protestantism did in implementing such a strategy. “The Protestant governments of America occupied themselves little with the civilization of the savages; they thought only of trading with them. Now commerce, which increases civilization among peoples already civilized and among whom intelligence has prevailed over manners, produces only corruption among peoples whose manners are superior to their intelligence.” Having learned to barter with the Europeans for arms, alcohol, and trinkets, they declined. Dealings with these foreigners also deranged the Indians’ regimes, corrupting the delicately balanced councils when wars did not kill their leaders. By now, in the 1820s, most tribes “are simply led by a chief”; their councils are ineffectual. And with the establishment of American and English military outposts in tribal territories, Indians come to expect gifts and protection from these new ‘chiefs,” finally coming to “look upon [themselves] as a species inferior to the white.” “What need to govern oneself when one has only to obey?”
What if Europeans had never landed in the Americas? “Putting aside the great principles of Christianity, as well as the interests of Europe, a philosophical spirit could wish that the people of the New World had had the time to develop outside the circle of our institutions.” If so, “who knows whether we would not have seen one day land on our shores some American Columbus coming to discover the Old World?” Alternatively, “I wondered” if France had retained its colonies until the time the American English won their independence. “Would this emancipation have taken place? Would our presence on the American soil have hastened it or retarded it? Would New France itself have become free? Why not?” Chateaubriand thinks that France’s fortunes on continental Europe would have been better, with a place to send its excess population, a large market for its products, timber for its navy.” Instead, “we are excluded from the new universe where mankind begins anew.” “France has disappeared from North America like those Indian tribes with which she has sympathized and of which I glimpsed a few remains.”
“If I were to see the United States again today, I would no longer recognize it: there where I left forests, I would find plowed fields; there where I cleared a trail for myself through the brush, I would travel on highways. The Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio no longer flow in solitude; great three-masted vessels sail up them and more than 200 steamships animate their shores,” now dotted with cities. This new regime cannot but influence old Europe, whose scholars and writers initially “had not the least idea of the revolution which in the space of forty years took place in men’s minds.” But beyond the material riches of America, the “most precious” treasure has proved to be liberty; “each people is called upon to draw from this inexhaustible mine.” “The discovery of the representative republic in the United States is one of the greatest political events in the world. That event has proved…that there are two types of practical liberty One belongs to the infancy of nations; it is the daughter of manners and virtue—it is that of the first Greeks, the first Romans, and that of the savages of America. The other is born out of the old age of nations; it is the daughter of enlightenment and reason—it is this liberty of the United States which replaces the liberty of the Indian.” Only a few years later, Tocqueville would describe this as the replacement of aristocratic liberty with democratic liberty.
Chateaubriand wonders if America can “preserve her second kind of liberty.” It may well divide. “Has not a representative of Virginia already defended the thesis of the old Greek and Roman liberty with the system of slavery, against a representative of Massachusetts who defended the cause of modern liberty without slaves, such as Christianity has made it?” And are the western states, far removed from the Atlantic states, “not want a separate government,” too? Will “foreign immigration” not “destroy the homogeneity” of the Americans? And “will not the mercantile spirit dominate” Americans, making “self-interest begin to be the dominant national faith,” again to the destruction of the nation by civil or international war? Chateaubriand expects international war to come not from Europe but from the new republics of Spanish America, where republicanism has taken a very different form, inflected as it has been Spanish customs, ideas, principles, and prejudices, including a disinclination to educate the people. [3] “If the military spirit took hold of the United States, a great captain could arise,” and “liberty is not certain to preserve her patrimony under the guidance of victory,” any more than France had done, after the victories of Napoleon.
Even so, “liberty will never entirely disappear from America.” Ancient liberty, “daughter of manners,” proved more fragile than modern liberty, “daughter of Enlightenment.” Manners are readily corruptible by the advance of civilization itself, with its “brilliance and luxury.” Enlightenment still “shines after the ages of oppression and corruption,” fortifying itself with time; “thus it does not abandon the liberty it has produced,” being its “generative principle.” Chateaubriand holds out this hope, perhaps, more for Europe, still afflicted with the political descendants of Bonaparte and the Jacobins, than for America, whose dangers lay ahead.
Chateaubriand concludes with an account of the end of his trip. He returned to Europe in July 1792. “A simple argument between me and my conscience brought me back to the theater of the world.” He had left for the United States “full of illusions; France’s troubles were beginning at the same time as my life was beginning; nothing was finished in me or my country.” He never discovered the Northwest Passage and so “had not carried glory away from the midst of the forests where I had gone to seek it” but had rather “left it behind sitting on the ruins of Athens.” And so he ceased being a traveler in America and “returned to be a soldier in Europe.” This vocation of the sword failed him even as the vocation of the staff had done. There remained the vocation of the pen. His readers already knew that this was his true vocation, so he does not pause to say so.
Notes
- See Montesquieu: “Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates,” for the same observation regarding the legacy of tyrants who restore republicanism, or claim to restore, republicanism.
- See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City, for the same observation.
- Chateaubriand prefers not republicanism but “representative monarchy” as the regime appropriate for the much more heterogeneous populations of South America. “From the Negroes, Indians, and Europeans has come a mixed population, lethargic in that very gentle slavery which the Spanish manners establish wherever they reign.” Constitutional monarchs would serve such societies better, as that regime “destroys individual pretension to the executive power and unites order and liberty.” Unfortunately, already “talented people are rapidly disappearing” from the region. “A tiny Europe is being arranged patterned on mediocrity; to reach the new generations it will be necessary to traverse a desert.”
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