As first President of the United States (1789-1797), George Washington created our first official policy toward native Americans. What he and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, set up endured until President Andrew Jackson (1829 -1837) forcibly removed tribes westward over the Mississippi along "The Trail of Tears."

Washington had known Indians since he was a young surveyor on Virginia's frontier. Later he fought both with and against them in the French and Indian wars. By 1789 he had decided to deal with Indians on the basis of three deeply held beliefs.

--(1) Indians of the frontier were numerous, strong, good fighters and
would either threaten or cooperate with the fledgling United States of
America. They were too strong to be treated with disrespect.

--(2)  If Indians were inferior to Europeans, their deficiency was not
innate or racial. For Indians could learn anything. Like whites, Indians
were infinitely perfectible.

--(3) America could pay no higher tribute to Indians than by sharing
everything which had made European culture great. Hence the government offered Indians the choice of worshiping and farming like whites, being educated by whites and even attending white colleges. Indians would respond gratefully and over time voluntarily assimilate into the American mainstream.

TREATIES 
and 
CIVILIZATION.

Indian strength and ability to act in their own self-interest had won them the right to be treated as equals. Their leaders on the unsettled Western frontier could be trusted to make binding, mutually useful TREATIES with the American Federal Government.

"CIVILIZATION" was the second element of Washington/Knox Indian policy. White Americans would share with their less developed co-occupiers of North America the hard won blessings of Graeco-Roman-English culture. Those blessings included Freemasonry, the Christian way of explaining and worshiping God, transitioning from hunting to agriculture, literacy, music and politics. Once the Indians had practiced white arts, they would give over claims to huge tracts needed only for hunting and settle as individual families into American farming society.

Both Washington and Knox were Freemasons. They applauded the earlier opening of Masonic membership to Indians--a practice dating back at least to 1776. Numerous prominent Indians, including Tecumseh, joined lodges.

The content of early U.S.-Indian treaties was not only land rights and
compensation. There was also a regular commitment to material progress of the Indians. The 1791 Treaty of Holston, for example, stated: 

"That the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsman and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of hunters, the United States will, from time to time, furnish gratuitously the said nation with the implements of husbandry."

The U.S. supported  Ministers of the Gospel, who proved indispensable even in the secular civilizing of the Cherokee Nation. Missionaries and government agents introduced white practices to the Indians through such gifts as plows, breeding stock, gristmills, cloth, spinning tools and demonstration farms.

The fifth annual Trail of Tears Association's National Conference was held April 26 -29 in Cartersville, Georgia. Among the speakers were UNC-Chapel Hill professors Theda Perdue and Michael Green. This husband and wife team  studies, respectively, the Cherokee and the Creeks. They were asked what had motivated George Washington to create paternalistic but benign Indian policy, using treaties and civilization. Perdue and Green replied that Washington's policies were an outgrowth of his warmly embraced 18th Century Secular Enlightenment world-view.

Compared with what was to come in the Age of Jackson, Enlightenment doctrine about less developed peoples was non-racist. Backward people could and should be brought forward rapidly to  live lives indistinguishable from dominant white society. Honor, therefore, obliged White America to grant White Civilization to its Indian brothers.

-OOO-

for INDEPENDENT TORCH