Introduction: Logan's Mourner

In his Notes an the State of Virginia, which Thomas Jefferson began writing in 1781 and first published in 1785, he inserted an English rendering of a speech by the Indian leader Tachnedorus, or John Logan. The address had been delivered to the victorious Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, on the occasion of the signing of a peace treaty with the Shawnees in 1774. It was the valedictory address of a defeated warrior.¹

Jefferson introduced Logan's Lament, as the speech came to be called, ostensibly as part of his refutation of the claim of the famous French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, that the American aborigines, like other products of the New World, were deficient in natural abilities in comparison with Europeans. An elegant writer but no speechmaker himself, Jefferson was an admirer of eloquence in any mode, and he declared that Logans speech was in no way inferior to the best examples of classical rhetoric, including Demosthenes and Cicero.²

The impact on the public of Jefferson's story of Logan the Great Mingo and of the speech itself was extraordinary. Its popularity derived in part from its succinct expression of an apocalyptic view of Indian history that was becoming increasingly prevalent in Jefferson's time, helped along in various ways by Jefferson himself. Logan, the last of his line, was symbolically the last of a dying race, consumed in the holocaust brought by the European invaders, tragically destined to become extinct, yet facing annihilation without surrender. He had sought, too late, to join the white man's world. Now, a doomed but unrepentant savage, he must die alone.

Logan's Lament has been endlessly reprinted, beginning with Washington Irving's Sketch Book and later in the McGuffey Readers, and has been memorized and recited by millions of schoolchildren. It still endures as an example of rhetorical excellence; a few of my own colleagues and students report learning it in their youth. At a small park in Ohio, on the site of the treaty-signing, there stands a memorial monument with Logan's speech inscribed in bronze. And below, another bronze plaque was added in 1979, a tribute by a class of fifth-grade students, honoring the brave Logan, who fought to defend his people.³ Even Jefferson's detractors, like the nineteenth-century historian Brantz Mayer, have conceded the power of Logan's words; in 1867 in a book devoted to questioning the veracity of Jefferson's account of the murder of Logan's family, Mayer admitted, "For ninety years 'Logan's speech' has been repeated by every school boy and admired by every cultivated person as a gem of masculine eloquence."⁴ Scholarly interest in Logan continues to this day, and the general image of the Indian as noble savage conveyed in the story of Logan and in other sections of Jefferson's Notes has animated a long tradition of American novel and drama.⁵

The immediate historical context of Logan's Lament was sketched by Jefferson in a prefatory passage in the Notes. The events he narrated there, and the circumstances that he did not reveal and perhaps even concealed, make the story of Logan and Lord Dunmore's War a paradigm for Indian-white relations, not only in Jefferson's time but for later generations as well. The story of Logan embodies a tragic, self-fulfilling philosophy of history that describes the process by which the fall of the Indian nations and the acquisition of their land would be accomplished, These themes come up again and again in Jefferson's career, both public and private, and form the leitmotif of his Indian policy.

Thus Jefferson's story of Logan, and Logan's Lament, may be regarded as an epitomizing event, to use anthropologist Raymond Fogelson's apt phrase--a narrative that encapsulates, in an account of a single salient happening, the attitudes, values, feelings, and expectations of a community about important, complex, ongoing historical processes. It serves as a rationalization of the past and a vision of the future, a paradigm of destiny, a parable of fate. And the spin that Jefferson gave the affair reveals the leanings of a political mind.⁶

Continue to The Story of Logan