CHAPTER II.

THEORIES OF SAVAGE LIFE AND THE STATE OF NATURE.

The impulse to live among the savages, so frequently alluded to by writers in the latter part of the century, will be discussed first of all in connection with such persons, if there were any, who actually made this daring and picturesque social experiment. Convenience, however, rather than sentiment or philosophy, was doubtless the original ground on which this novel mode of existence was adopted. Many instances of traders and others marrying among the Indians, and finding the life there to their taste, could readily be found, proving little more than that the easy indolence of such an existence was sufficient with some to make up for any inconvenience it may have occasioned. Lawson's account of the happiness resulting from these Indian marriages may perhaps be taken as fairly representative. 'We often find,' he says, 'that English men, and other Europeans that have been accustomed to the conversation of these savage women, and their way of living, have been so allured with that careless sort of life, as to be constant to their Indian wife, and her relations, as long as they lived, without ever desiring to return again amongst the English, although they had very fair opportunities of advantages amongst their countrymen; of which sort I have known several." Somewhat later, 1766, we find an account of eighteen young white women taking young Indian chiefs for husbands,2 and the year fol

2

1Op. cit., p. 302.

"In the Scots Magazine, 28 (1766). 218, appears the following statement: 'London, April 5. By letters from Fort Johnson we learn, that eighteen young white women have lately been married to as many young Indian chiefs; and that Sir William Johnson gives all possible encouragement to intermarriages with the Indians, which has long been practiced by every other nation in America but the English.' For a fuller account of Sir William Johnson and his relations with the Indians, cf. Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe 1. 172-4, 390-3.

lowing forty others making a similar choice, from which circumstances the reader is at liberty to draw his own conclusions as to the part played by sentiment or expedience.

The superiority of the savage life seems somehow to receive additional support when it is brought out that although the European frequently prefers to remain among the Indians, the reverse is never the case. Such passages as the following from Pehr Kalm illustrate what many admirers of the Indian had asserted: the white man who has lived in the forest longs to return there, so that neither tears, entreaties, nor material advantages can again bind him to the unwelcome burdens of civilization; the Indian, on the other hand, if he by any chance has lived in a community of Europeans, is by no means satisfied with his condition; he still prefers the freedom of the woods:3

It is likewise remarkable, that a great part of the people they had taken during the war and incorporated with their nations, especially the young people, did not choose to return to their native country, though their parents and nearest relations came to them and endeavoured to persuade them to it, and though it was in their power to do it. The licentious life led by the Indians, pleased them better than that of their European relations; they dressed like the Indians, and regulated all their affairs in their way. It is therefore difficult to distinguish them, except by their colour, which is somewhat whiter than that of the Indians. There are likewise examples of some Frenchmen going amongst the Indians and following their way of life. There is on the contrary scarce one instance of an Indian's adopting the European customs; but those who were taken prisoners in the war, have always endeavoured to come to their own people again, even after several years of captivity, and though they enjoyed all the privileges, that were ever possessed by the Europeans in America.

More significant, however, in connection with the currents of eighteenth-century thought is the experiment of one

Travels into North America (English translation, London, 1770-71) 3. 153-4. A similar statement is made by Colden, pp. 203-4.

Priber, who tried to establish a Utopia among the Cherokee Indians of South Carolina. Affectation, or the desire for novelty, qualities common among so many of the later admirers of the savage state, appear not to have been the guiding motives in the case of Priber. For many years he had aimed to establish a communistic republic, with complete freedom and equality, even to the abolition of marriage and other social obligations, and, having failed of his purpose in both France and England, he had, in the year 1733, come to the forests of America to make his great experiment. He chose for the scene of his ideal commonwealth the principal Cherokee town, Great Tellico, and there set about forming a confederation of all the southern Indians, which he called the 'Kingdom of Paradise.' Surprising as it may seem, he appears to have made some headway in carrying out this remarkable project. First of all, he tried to gain the Indian's good will by adopting their ways. 'Being a great scholar he soon made himself master of their tongue, and by his insinuating manner indeavoured to gain their hearts, he trimm'd his hair in the Indian manner and painted as they did going generally almost naked except a shirt and a flap.' General Oglethorpe described him as a 'very odd kind of man,' one who, 'ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed and painted himself, with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives.'

After having gained the Indians' confidence, he taught them the use of weights and measures, and also tried to show them the importance of preserving their liberties by retaining the possession of their lands. Something of his influence over them may be inferred from the fact that 'he easily formed them into a nominal republican government

In this sketch of Priber and his Utopian venture, I make no claim to originality, having taken all my material from a study by Verner W. Crane, 'A Lost Utopia of the American Frontier,' Sewanee Review, 27 (1919). 48-61.

crowned their old Archi-magus, emperor, after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high sounding titles for all the members of his imperial majesty's red court, and the great officers of state; which the emperor conferred upon them, in a manner according to their merit. He himself received the honourable title of his imperial majesty's principal secretary of state, and as such he subscribed himself, on all the letters he wrote to our government, and lived in open defiance of them.'

How far Priber succeeded in realizing this Utopian form of society, where all was to be according to the law of nature, would be difficult to determine from any accounts that have come down to us. At all events, the failure of his scheme came not, as one would expect, from internal dissensions, but rather from external interference. The white settlers, blind to the lofty aims of the social reformer, but keenly alive to the complications that might arise from a successful Indian federation-associated in their minds with the imperial ambitions of the French, and the intrigues of the Jesuits-set about the capture of the man who was causing all the mischief. But this proved not so easy, as the man found who was sent to seize him in the town-house of Great Tellico. The fidelity of his Indian friends was a factor to be reckoned with. 'One of the head warriors rose up, and bade him forbear, as the man he intended to enslave was become a great beloved man, and become one of their own people.' Not long after, however, under other circumstances, the English effected his arrest, and he died in prison, his social experiment frustrated, and the book he was to have published (then in manuscript) probably destroyed at the same time.

Although the 'Kingdom of Paradise' was, as Professor Crane calls it, only a 'lost Utopia' of the American frontier, it is nevertheless highly significant in its relation to the whole eighteenth-century current of philosophic exoticism and social idealism. It is of course impossible to mention social

or political tendencies of the period that preceded the French Revolution without thinking of Jean Jacques Rousseau;5 and while it is obviously outside my present purpose to give any extended account of Rousseau or Rousseauism, it is necessary to point out briefly his influence in developing the cult of the noble savage.

First of all, it cannot be maintained that Rousseau in any sense invented the noble savage: what he did was rather to popularize and give philosophic explanation to a conception already, as it were, in the air, a notion familiar to the public of his time, and half believed, by some at least, to have its foundation in reality. Rousseau's contribution to the movement was not, indeed, in any new praises of savage virtue (he did not of course pretend to have any first-hand knowledge of them), but rather in the formulation of a plausible, if somewhat striking and paradoxical, philosophic theory to account for phenomena already noted by innumerable writers on America.

Had not Montaigne, the Jesuit fathers, and innumerable poets, philosophers, and romancers, all, amid many contradictions to be sure, sung the praises of the brave and generous Indian, roaming free in his native wilds, uncontaminated by the vices and follies of European society? But how was this to be reconciled with the authority of tradition-the Christian revelation, the doctrine of original sin, and other beliefs essential to virtue and happiness?

The Jesuits had pictured the Indian as endowed with the most splendid 'natural' virtues: had he not the fortitude of the martyr? did he not despise worldly possessions as much

"For an extended discussion of Rousseau's supposed primitivism, with an attempt at exact analysis of his social theories, the reader is referred to an article by Lovejoy in Modern Philology for Nov., 1923, pp. 165-186.

⚫ Chinard discusses the Jesuit accounts of the Indians in L'Amérique et le Rêve Exotique, particularly pp. 122-150.