Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans.

Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. By Anthony F. C. Wallace. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi, 394. $29.95, ISBN 0-67400066-8.)

In Jefferson and the Indians, his study of Indian policy in the early national period, Anthony F. C. Wallace explains that Thomas Jefferson was quite transparent in laying out his plans for the Indians. Jefferson wanted peace with the native warriors, the gradual transfer of tribal lands to small farmers, whether white or Indian, and the transformation of native culture from its traditional communal order that rested on kinship to the modern social arrangements that formed the lives of European settlers. Jefferson usually made his intentions plain to the native peoples, but, when they resisted or failed to move at a pace he thought necessary, he resorted to methods that in our time are considered repugnant. In Wallace's words, Jefferson's actions appear "hypocritical, arbitrary, duplicitous, even harsh" (p. viii).

Jefferson could demonstrate "the ruthlessness of a benevolent zealot" (p. 19) in his dealings with the Indians. Should one find this surprising? Jefferson was, after all, a revolutionary who expected the tree of liberty to be refreshed regularly with the blood of patriots and tyrants. A man who would contemplate the desolation of half the earth rather than see the French Revolution fail would scarcely hesitate at the coercion and manipulation--for their own good and for the greater prosperity of the revolutionary republic--of people he considered to be hapless and primitive. This attitude was not at its base a moral but an intellectual failing. As Wallace notes, Jefferson really had no concept of ethnicity and consequently saw no inherent difficulty in the transculturation of the Indians. He had to discover the obduracy of culture in practice when the native people did not interpret their interests in the way that he did and persisted in allegiance to the old ways. Jefferson was not a tolerant man and did not brook opposition well. He saw the Indians in the same light that he appraised the Federalists and those elements in his own party who doubted the quality of his own leadership. The Federalists were monocrats who resisted both decency and the tide of a democratic future. The native people who refused to give up their land and rejected his offer to become farmers in the white man's mold acted foolishly and courted destruction. He could easily use fear as a useful instrument for the implementation of what he conceived to be justice for the Indians. Thus benevolence shaded into ruthlessness.

All this can be gleaned from Wallace's book, but he is not content to leave the story at that. The fate of the first Americans was not, as his subtitle announces, simply "tragic"--that is, an end that under the circumstances was unlikely to have been different. As with so much recent historical writing, Wallace' s account carries with it just a whiff of the sinister. He goes in search of villains. There is, for example, the author's treatment of Jefferson's interest in western lands. Although in the end Wallace concedes that among the heroic speculators of the day, Jefferson' s activities were small potatoes, he is at pains to discover a motive in them other than the quite common appetite for new lands that drove Virginia planters, burdened with a ruinous agriculture and the pressure of population, to seek new fields to cultivate. It is possible to doubt that, in aid of his land hunger, Jefferson needed--or that Lord Dunmore needed--to provoke war against the Indians. Dunmore and his agent John Connolly probably did instigate the fracas with the Shawnees in 1774, but, as Dunmore told Lord Dartmouth, the problems of the frontier had outrun imperial policy. There was certain to be trouble with the tribes as white settlers moved west and encroached on native lands, and no determination of the governments either in Westminster or in Williamsburg would stall the onslaught. None of this was a secret, except, perhaps, in England.

The consequences of the European settlement in the New World were so manifestly unfortunate for native tribes that historians have long sought a plausible alternative plot. Wallace's attempt achieves no more success than earlier efforts. After arguing convincingly that Jefferson's insistence on the total transformation of native culture was, to say the least, naive, he poses the question of whether there was a possibility for finding a version of the "middle ground" (p. 338). For Jefferson, however, the "middle ground" could never have been more than an intermediate stage on the way to civilization. Acceptance of any middle ground would be a serious obstacle to the realization of Jefferson's expectations if it led to the heavy use of alcohol by the native people or to the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet. Wallace contends that the solution to the problem lay in the natives' retaining the rest of their social and cultural arrangements intact while adopting the white man's technology. He believes that the absence of markets for western agricultural output made the creation of more frontier farmers impractical. Instead the Indian tribes should have been permitted to use European technology to continue (for how long is unclear) to harvest furs. Of course this would have meant the tribes' retention of extensive hunting grounds. In America at the time there was no constituency for any such scheme: state and national governments, settlers, and even reformers, who were sympathetic to the Indians, would not have countenanced the idea, and the Indians themselves would likely have found it a short-lived solution. Dependence on the market would have led them quickly to deplete their territories. The borders would have been in constant turmoil as settlers pressed into the tribal lands and the government proved incapable of defending the Indians. If Jefferson's policy was naive, what are we to think of this idea?

Wallace has written a thoughtful, comprehensive, and important reevaluation of a thorny subject. Despite a tendency to overreach his sources (in fact, the notes are a bit thin), his book is a welcome addition to a growing Jefferson literature.

BERNARD W. SHEEHAN Indiana University