Preface

Jefferson was an enigma in his own time, revered by some, reviled by others. Today, two hundred years later, he is an enigma with charisma, fascinating to the public and the scholarly world alike. His image looms over us from a cliff in the Black Hills and from the Memorial in Washington; visitors throng his house and gardens at Monticello, where he longed to live among his books, even though he perennially sought public office. His inspiring one-liners, most notably "all men are created equal" and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," have taken on a life of their own, attaining meanings far removed from what Jefferson himself likely intended. In our own time, Thomas Jefferson has become a culture-hero, the American Prometheus, our version of the universal Trickster, that morally ambiguous mythic being who steals fire from the gods and brings the arts, sciences, and social institutions to the world.

Joseph Ellis has called Jefferson the American Sphinx, and, along with other biographers, has noted his many inconsistencies. Jefferson's advocacy of national independence, minimal government, and maximal individual freedom has been hailed as the world's charter for democracy and also as the authority for isolationism, states' rights and nullification, and revolutionary militias. He has been praised as a critic of slavery and condemned as a hypocritical slave-owning racist. His relationship with a black slave, Sally Hemings, his wife's half-sister and the mother of one or more of his own children, has been characterized as a long-term union of mutual affection and respect, as an example of sexual exploitation by a master who refused to emancipate his concubine or her children while he lived, and as an unthinkable association for a gentleman of virtue. And, with respect to Native Americans, Jefferson appears both as the scholarly admirer of Indian character, archaeology, and language and as the planner of cultural genocide, the architect of the removal policy, the surveyor of the Trail of Tears.

The fascination with Jefferson has grown, perhaps, because he embodied some of the major dilemmas of American culture--fault-lines in the national character where differing views on how to share the spaces of the world grind together. He evokes an awareness of classic problems in a democracy: what to do about slavery; how to deal with ethnic differences; how to define the proper balance between freedom and governance; how to preserve agrarian values in an increasingly industrial world; how far to expand the nation's boundaries; how to manage an emerging commercial empire's foreign affairs, by defensive isolation or aggressive alliance building; how to decide on war and peace; how to balance the budget while promoting the national interest; how to respond to the conflicting claims of religion and science. On some of these issues, Jefferson was at times a shape-shifter, articulating one policy in public only to execute another in private, or later publicly. In no domain of his life as a philosopher-politician-official do such dilemmas appear more conspicuously than in his relations with Native Americans.

This is a book about Jefferson's attitudes, beliefs, and behavior toward the Indians. It does not pretend to be a survey of Native American cultures of his time or a compendium of tribal histories. I have tried to be fair in assessing Jefferson's conduct in Indian affairs, but viewed from the late twentieth century, some of his actions appear to be hypocritical, arbitrary, duplicitous, even harsh. Certainly some of the unintended consequences of his policies of civilization, removal, and protection of frontier populations against Indian retaliation for encroachments and atrocities were catastrophic for the Indians. Thomas Jefferson played a major role in one of the great tragedies of recent world history, a tragedy which he so elegantly mourned: the dispossession and decimation of the First Americans.

In the chapters that follow, we trace the development of Jefferson's ambivalent attitudes toward Indians and the hardening of these attitudes into presidential policy. The Introduction tells the story of Jefferson and John Logan, the Great Mingo, the eloquent Indian whose tragic fate symbolized for Jefferson, and for generations of readers, the coming doom of the red race. Chapter 1 describes the business world in which Jefferson grew up, a world of real estate speculators, including his father's friends, obsessed with obtaining Indian land. Chapter 2 examines Jefferson's political rhetoric toward Native Americans during the Revolution; his experiences as war governor led him to depict the Indians first as cruel enemies and then as friendly neighbors. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with Jefferson's proposals for scholarly studies of Indian languages, cultures, and ancient origins. Chapter 6 takes up the Federalist program for "civilizing" the Indians, which Jefferson observed in the 1790s, adopted when he became President, and found difficult to implement. In Chapters 7, 8, and 9 we follow Jefferson's Indian policy as President: purchasing Indian lands, establishing peace and trade with the tribes of the Louisiana Territory, and encountering opposition to the civilization program from Native American religious and political reformers. The last chapter brings him back to his philosophical labors in the quiet study at Monticello, and the Conclusion considers the legacy of his dealings with the First Americans.

Throughout, we find the same theme recurring, the self-serving Jeffersonian conception of Native Americans that is revealed in the carefully edited story of Logan which he presented to the world in 1785 in Notes on the State of Virginia: the Indians as noble but doomed savages, tragically slaughtered in wars precipitated by a few murderous frontiersmen and a few vengeful warriors, a surviving remnant yearning to be civilized but fated to lose their land to a deserving white yeomanry.