George Washington launched "the most extensive effort in American history to find some better solution to the Indian problem than continual
fighting," as James Thomas Flexner said in WASHINGTON: THE INDISPENSABLE MAN. The elements of the U.S.A.'s first Indian policy were treaties and "civilization," i.e., offering white culture to red men. This, said Flexner, "may well have been the most impractical idea that Washington ever seriously espoused."

Impractical, perhaps, but kindly intended. Indians would learn to live like White Americans and blend into the white American mainstream.
Paternalistic, yes, but not racist.  Washington believed that Indians could
be dealt with at some level as equals--through treaties and fair dealing.
He also believed European civilization generally superior to Indian ways. He felt duty-bound to offer higher white civilization to the Indians and he expected them to leap at the chance and become main-stream American farmers.

Like our first President, our seventh, Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), had also dealt with Indians: both as allies and as enemies. Unlike Washington, Jackson turned himself into a political racist. A racist believes someone  else to be racially, genetically inferior. Unlike George Washington, the racist becomes convinced that there is nothing his racial inferiors can do to improve their condition. He is therefore justified in making them slaves. In their day Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis and others,  judged whites, any whites, eternally superior to any red men and to all black men alike. Before them Colonial authorities had invoked Aristotle to justify their enslaving first Indians and then Negroes. The first persons enslaved by European colonizers were red, not black. In 1539 Hernando de Soto brought bloodhounds, iron collars and chains to Florida to enslave Indians.

Scholars make careers  studying black-red interaction. Dip  into a vast literature starting at the rich internet site:

http://www.tngenweb.org/tncolor/underdog.htm/.

Pre-colonial American Indians do not seem to have been racist. Indians
probably lumped blacks and Europeans together as "foreign human beings." It was our own white ancestors who taught Indians to be racist. Some Federally funded demonstration farms "civilizing" Indians were based on slave labor. Cherokees and others quickly adopted white practice and staffed their own plantations with black slaves. Government agents wrote that the Cherokees owed their rapid economic rise to mastery of  slave plantation agriculture. Yet the record shows that Indians were kinder, far more egalitarian masters of black slaves than were their white neighbors. For African and Indian tribal cultures had much in common.

White Christian ministers among the Indians acknowledged that blacks
contributed both to  secular civilizing and to Christianizing of their red
owners. This was especially true among Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws. We read of two black slaves teaching  their Cherokee mistress to spell and to read the Bible. We hear of several black prophets and preachers to Indians. Cudjo, a former slave, recalled his master, North Carolina Cherokee Chief Yonaguska: "He never allowed himself to be called 'master,' for he said Cudjo was his brother, and not his slave." In 1838-39 a thousand black slaves like Cudjo and their families marched the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. They had rejected General Jessup's offer to be freed if they would separate from their Indian masters and surrender to him.

-OOO-

for INDEPENDENT TORCH