The Founders and Native Americans

Interestingly we see that white attitudes toward the Indian in the eighteenth century were largely sympathetic. The Founders did not consider Native Americans to be inherently inferior to the white man. Rather, they held that the primitive circumstances of the native were responsible for what was perceived to be his barbaric state. They were confident that education and civilization would raise the typical Indian to the level of the white man.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson praised the intelligence, courage, and integrity of the Indians. They are, he wrote, “formed in mind as well as in body on the same model as Homo sapiens Europaeus.” Jefferson rejected proposals to dispossess the Indians of their land on the pretext that they were savages or barbarians. Rather, Jefferson urged that whites include the Indians in American civilization. He expressed the hope that the Indians, rather than clinging to their old ways, would “incorporate with us as citizens of the United States.”

Indeed, several leading figures of the founding period, such as Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and Thomas Jefferson, proposed intermarriage between whites and Indians as a way to integrate the natives into the American mainstream. “What they thought impossible with respect to blacks,” political scientist Ralph Lerner writes, “was seen as highly desirable with respect to Indians.”

America’s first president, George Washington, respected the Indians. As a military officer defending the Virginia frontier, he considered the Indian tribes he encountered so formidable in warfare that in his view only other Indians could defeat them. Whenever possible, he did his best to ally with Indians.

As president, Washington was not opposed to trading with Indians or the purchase of Indian land, but he wanted these acquisitions to be secured by treaty, not by conflict. He insisted that white settlements bypass Indian territories, leaving them unmolested. “It was a vision,” historian Joseph Ellis writes, “in which the westward expansion of an American empire coexisted alongside the preservation of the original Americans.”

Source: Hillary’s America. The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016) by Dinesh ’Souza.