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. Yet the result was notthe anarchy the imagined war of all against all that social contracttheorists invoked to justify the coercive authority of the early modernstate.On the contrary, Jefferson suggested, the natural affection and so-ciability that sustained peace and harmony in lawless Indian commu-nities constituted an attractive alternative to coercive state power.Itmight well be asked whether no law, as among the savage Americans,or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans, submits man to thegreatest evil. As one who has seen both conditions of existence, Jef-ferson voted for lawlessness: The sheep are happier of themselves, thanunder care of the wolves. 15The logical corollary of Jefferson s familial conception of Indian soci-ety was that it could not survive over an extensive domain. The Sav-ages recognized instinctively that great societies cannot exist without We Shall All Be Americans 25government and therefore break them into small ones. 16 But thesesmall, self-contained family-societies were poorly equipped to resist theencroachments and seductions of powerful European and Americanneighbors.The Indians could only sustain their way of life as long asthey had access to the vast supply of undeveloped land that a primitivehunting economy required and that isolated them from each other andthe world.Jefferson s Edenic view of indigenous societies thus reinforcedhis sentimental identification with the Indians even as it explained andjustified their displacement.But there was trouble in paradise, and not simply because of the en-croachments of the modern world.Jefferson s idealized account of theIndians society-without-government reflected the profound ambiva-lence at the core of his sentimental politics.First, the choice between too much law and no law was not a genuine one for Americans, whowere supposed to submit happily to laws of their own making undertheir new republican governments.As an enlightened, republican impe-rialist, Jefferson was the great enemy of despotic rule, where law was thecommand of supposedly superior beings, but not of great societies.The Revolutionary challenge was to perfect republican governmentsthat would preserve liberty and the sanctity of republican familieswhile enabling Americans to participate in, and contribute to, the pro-gress of civilization.This meant establishing ever more perfect unions,thus expanding the sphere of their republican empire, not retreatinginto a more primitive, isolated, and lawless state.Under republican gov-ernments the rule of law defined and protected the domestic sphere, se-curing the ambit of natural virtue and sociability that proved so vulner-able for the Indians.Indian lawlessness did not reflect any natural incapacity.As Jeffersonassured his friend Chastellux, the Indian was in body and mind equalto the whiteman. 17 Yet, despite their natural genius, Indian men wouldresist the regime of law because of their profound attachment to maleprerogatives.If Indian men were natural republicans, exhibiting in theirdealings with one another the manly virtues Jefferson celebrated in theNotes, the tyranny they exercised over their women made them naturalaristocrats of the most brutal sort.18 The very premise of Indian culture,the regime of the manners that preserved order in their lawless soci-26 We Shall All Be Americanseties, was male supremacy, a perversion of the consensual conjugalunion that constituted the foundation of a just and lawful social order.19Jefferson s belief in the capacity of individual Indians for civil life thusjustified his unwillingness to recognize the collective rights of Indiancommunities, for these communities were based on force, not consent.Tragically, brave Indian men demonstrated this capacity for reason andchoice in their willful resistance to white civilization.The tragedy wasnot simply that such resistance was hopeless, but that Indians chose todefend unnatural prerogatives, not natural rights.Indian men could only be virtuous, and only then in their relationswith one another, when they were left alone.In Jefferson s view anyform of social or political organization among the Indians that Ameri-can Revolutionaries encountered could only reflect the demoralizing ef-fects of contact with Europeans.Far from promoting the progress oftheir civilization, adaptations to European diplomacy and warfarestripped Indians of their natural virtues, transforming them into the merciless Indian Savages Jefferson excoriated in the Declaration.Thenatives moral degradation was a function of their unnatural dependen-cy on an English father who had betrayed his children, red and white.But while American patriots resisted George s tyranny, standing up fortheir rights and assuming the separate and equal station to which theLaws of Nature and of Nature s God entitle them, their native broth-ers served as the mindless instruments of the king s wrath, rioting in an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. 20Jefferson s rage against the Indians proceeded from sentimental iden-tification.21 These wretches were not ordinary enemies to be treatedwith the moderation and restraint that the law of civilized nations en-joined.The Indians were at once too close, brothers born in the sameland, indistinguishable from whites in their uncultivated state, and, intheir perverse and obdurate opposition to the progress of civilization,too different to be welcomed into the family of nations.In more benignmoments Jefferson could nostalgically evoke childhood attachments orproject paternalistic solicitude for his childlike charges.But when Indi-ans made war on the Americans, it was as if they had violated sometaboo.Now that they had commenced war against us, Jefferson toldhis childhood friend John Page in August 1776, Congress was justified We Shall All Be Americans 27in pushing the war into the heart of their country. But Jefferson wouldnot be satisfied with a mere reprisal that was proportionate to the origi-nal injury. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them re-mained on this side the Misisippi
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