NATIVE AMERICANS IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND AND THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM by ...

457 Pages·2011·2.6 MB·English

NATIVE AMERICANS IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND
AND THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM
by
JOSEPH PRICE MOORE III
A dissertation submitted to the
Graduate School-New Brunswick
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in History
Written under the direction of
Allen Howard, Ph.D.
And approved by
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
New Brunswick, New Jersey
MAY 2011
Abstract of the Dissertation
Native Americans in Colonial New England and the Modern World-System
By JOSEPH PRICE MOORE III
Dissertation Director:
Dr. Allen Howard
This dissertation explores through what means, and with what effects on their societies,
Native Americans in colonial New England were incorporated into the capitalistic Modern
World-System. To do so, it draws from a wide range of primary sources, including a
database of over 600 “Indian Deeds” collected from throughout New England. To these raw
materials, the dissertation applies French neo-Marxist structuralist theories and
Wallersteinian and post-Wallersteinian World-System theories. One particular original
contribution is an hypothesis applying the theories of articulation-of-modes-of-production
and social reproduction for how Indians were drawn into the fur trade and lost many of their
lands to whites as a consequence. Also investigated herein is the step-by-step subsumption
of the lives of the Indians under the colonial governmental structures and the exploitation of
Indians, once separated from their means of production, as “servants” by English colonists.
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Preface and Acknowledgments
This dissertation owes a great deal -- how much can scarcely be overstated – to
Frances Jennings and his powerful little book, The Invasion of America: Indians,
Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest.1 I dedicate it to his memory. Published when its
author had reached the ripe old age of 57, after a life devoted to progressive political activism
and laboring in the educational trenches, “Invasion of America” did not pull any punches or
mince any words about the underlying reality of what had actually happened in the formative
colonial years of what would eventually become the United States of America. Jennings
took pleasure in ripping through the sanctimonious self-justifications of the early English
invaders and of the later-day filiopiestic historians who had been all-too-willing to accept the
pronouncements of their forebears at face value. Calling them out as “invaders” of a land
belonging to other peoples, rather than “settlers” – as if the land to which they came were
ready and empty -- was in and of itself a major blow in favor of truth-telling. With the zeal
and persistence of an investigative reporter like his contemporary I. F. Stone, Jennings dug
through the old dusty documents. Revered Founding Fathers and City-on-a-Hill-Builders
like John Winthrop were nailed as the sanctioners of horrible atrocities when the Indians
stood in the way of their material interests in the fur trade and land jobbing schemes. The
Apostle to the Indians, John Eliot, often commended for his dedication to fulfilling the
avowed holy mission of the Puritans, was skewered as an accomplice in a “missionary
racket” to extract money from English donors and to curry favor with English politicians
whose support was sorely needed for Massachusetts Bay against its colonial rivals. On the
1 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel
Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina
Press, 1975).
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other hand, along with validating the cause of the beleaguered Indians, Jennings had some
favorable things to say not only about the pacifist Quakers and other non-Puritan dissenters
in Rhode Island but also, to some degree, for those bete noires of the Puritan colonists, Sir
Edmund Andros and the Commissioners appointed by the King to investigate and rectify
Puritan misdeeds. In short, icons were taken down from their longstanding places of honor
and smashed, and the treatment of early American history was shaken up and turned upside
down (or, more properly, turned right-side up). Agree or disagree with the specifics proffered
in the book, historians of early America have not been able to write about it in the same way
since Jennings published it. Even if unmentioned, it still remains the proverbial elephant in
the professional drawing room.
When I first opened the pages of The Invasion of America some twenty-five years
ago, at the recommendation of a friend, I was already in a mental space that was quite
receptive to what Jennings had to say. The lies and deceptions of our elected political
leaders around the Vietnam War, exposed in the Pentagon Papers and in other sources, and
compounded by the Watergate Affair, had totally undermined my faith acquired from high
school civics classes in the honesty and purity of American values. I had come to see – as
I still see in the aftermath of the Iraq War and all the lies and deceptions of the Bush Regime
and now with a disappointing Obama – its professions of noble purposes at home and abroad
as largely reprehensible hypocrisy and sanctimonious cant to provide ideological cover and
rationalization for aggressive and exploitative economic motives. Jennings helped to
enlighten me that this type of behavior was not some recent kind of deviation or perversion
from genuine American values but, sad to say, had been operative from the very beginnings
of our history and culture. His book is truly radical, in the original sense of that term of
“going to the root.”
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Focusing on the New England region, The Invasion of America detailed how Native
Americans,2 like more recent colonized peoples in Asia and Africa fighting for their freedom
in the mid-20th Century, were drawn willy nilly into the market system and subjected to its
“laws of motion” during the tumultuous 17th Century and how their appropriated lands and
labors contributed to the overall processes of capitalist accumulation for European monarchs,
land-barons and merchants. Jennings analogized these processes with the Enclosure
Movement inflicted on peasants contemporaneously in Europe (ironically inducing some of
its Anglo-Saxon and Celtic victims to bail-out and head to the “New World” where they
participated in the same sort of economic processes, but from the other side as enclosers
rather than the enclosed). Thus, with Jennings, at various points we can readily discern a
Marxian historical materialist approach to these materials. Jennings had evidently read and
assimilated the penultimate section on “Primitive Accumulation” in Das Kapital in which
Marx described how capital was brought into the world dripping with blood and dirt from
every pore. But, as behooved someone who perforce had to make his living and support a
family under the frightful McCarthyite purges of academia and elsewhere in the workplace
that had transfixed American public life and paralyzed many erstwhile left-wing scholars
during the previous couple of decades while he was conducting his research and publishing
an occasional paper, Jennings does not make this philosophical debt or connection to
Marxism explicit in his great book.
Jennings, nonetheless, as The Invasion of America demonstrates, had moved well-
beyond one of the major premises of “Orthodox Marxism.” In the context of tearing apart
2 The choice of which term or terms to use when referring to the indigenous peoples of the Western
Hemisphere can lead one into a political and ideological minefield. Mainly I use the term “Indians” in this
dissertation rather than “Native Americans” or some other, while cognizant of its problematic nature, because
that is what the indigenous peoples in this region under consideration mainly use to refer to themselves today.
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the Western ideological construct of “Progress” that relegated “Indians” to the status of
“savages” or of people who were still supposedly stuck within the “primitive” evolutionary
stage of “barbarism,” Jennings singled out Morgan’s famous work on the Iroquois – and
Engels, too, who had drawn extensively from Morgan in his “Origins of the Family, Private
Property and the State” – in his trenchant criticisms of the whole lot. On the other hand,
Jennings seems to have been little aware, if at all, that there were also strong currents stirring
among Marxists during the Sixties, particularly in France, to cleanse Marxism of this
teleology, derived from Hegel, that it shared with 19th and 20th Century bourgeois
Enlightenment thought. Most important in this regard were the French Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser and his various acolytes among a new generation of structuralist
anthropologists, historians, literary theorists and other engaged intellectuals. Nor could
Jennings conceivably have been aware of the neo-Marxist World-Systems theories, also
largely structuralist in approach, associated with the U.S.-based scholar Immanuel
Wallerstein and his followers – in as much as Wallerstein’s book that laid the foundation
stones for that intellectual school, the first volume of The Modern World-System, did not
appear in print until 1974, the same year as Jennings’s own book. Both schools of left-wing
thought would provide interesting new theoretical tools for comprehending the birth pangs
and subsequent development of the capitalist mode of production and its “articulation” – to
employ a favorite term among the Althusserians – with non-Western, colonized peoples.
In the boot tracks of Francis Jennings, what I am setting out to do in the pages that
follow is to apply these theoretical tools and frameworks, where they can be used or modified
to fit, to the Indians’ loss of land and liberty. The opening chapter of the dissertation
explores the aforementioned theories and how they may have been applied already, if they
have, to indigenous peoples under the impact of colonialism. Here I also propose a sort of
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synthesis of what I think is useful from both kinds of sources. Chapter Two applies these
neo-Marxist theories of political economy to the pre-contact indigenous societies in the
Northeastern United States with a focus on those areas of Algonquian-speaking Indians that
became the colonies of New England. Chapters Three and Four deal with the European
invasion and how the political economies of many of the Indians in that region became
articulated to the capitalist mode of production through the fur trade leading thereby to the
loss of much of their lands to the white invaders and settlers. Chapter Five explores the
related extension of Puritan controls over the bodies and minds of the indigenous peoples
through the political and legal processes. The final chapter, Chapter Six, shows how many
of the Indians who remained behind in New England fell into the conditions of “servitude”
and became sources of capitalist accumulation. In each instance, inspired by the
methodology of the Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf’s masterwork of history writ large,
Europe and the People Without History, I try to show how there was both accommodation
and resistance from the indigenous peoples in the making of this part of our modern world.3
I like “doing” theory, and I do not think my critical description of these theories and
its proposed application to Native Americans in New England has been duplicated elsewhere.
Nevertheless, grand theorizing aside -- and the gentle reader can take it or leave it as they
may see fit without offending the author and choose to skip over the opening chapter lightly
if they wish -- the empirical “meat” of this study, where it hopefully breaks some new ground
of that sort, is in its compilation and analysis of Indian deeds from throughout the New
England colonies. Some six hundred of these deeds, in toto or in part, in which Indians
transferred ownership of land to English-speaking colonists have been assembled from a
3 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982).
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wide range of published and unpublished sources and entered into a computer database
(Microsoft Access) and included on an accompanying CD-ROM. This research takes-off
from the hope Jennings expressed in his chapter on “The Deed Game” that further archival
digging would aid in elucidating the various specific circumstances through which Indians
lost their land. The Indian deeds make their textual debut in Chapters Three and Four, after
the discussion in Chapter Two of the political economy of the pre-contact Indians of our
region. Through using the Indian deeds, along with related sources, I think I have made
some original contributions to a greater historical understanding of what befell the Indians,
and I invite comments on that by other scholars. Work with these deeds is only in the early
stages. An Indian Deeds Project will continue as an endeavor beyond this dissertation, and
I am sure that there is much more yet to be gleaned from a close reading and careful analysis
of their outwardly dry and often formulaic pages. Even though the process of going through
out-of-print books (many of which are now thankfully scanned and full-searchable on
Google) and microfilms can be exceedingly tedious, uncovering more of these deeds – which
started midway through my research for the dissertation as a whole – has become a fun sort
of chase. The historical detective work of trying to piece clues from them together with clues
from other primary sources to shed light on what really happened continues to engage me.
It was at Rutgers University that I made my first serious acquaintance with the
aforementioned theories, first while participating in a seminar on African history and, then,
while conducting a guided independent study – both with Professor Allen Howard. For his
original stimulus and for his ongoing kindly support through thick and thin with this
dissertation, through all its false starts and misdirections, and for his friendship, I am deeply
grateful. The Rutgers History Department and the Center for Historical Analysis ably
maestroed by Professor John Gillis proved to be a stimulating environment during my two
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years of campus residency, for which I am also thankful. Contact with other mature students
in the program, especially the late Ron McGee was highly enjoyable and thought-productive.
I don’t think I would have had a similar experience in any other doctoral program. Also,
gone but never forgotten is E. P. Thompson, who despised Althusser – I can only wonder if
he would have forgiven me -- but taught me the importance of agency as well as of structure.
His work inspired me with the calling to rescue the “losers” of history from “the enormous
condescension of posterity.” Another old Rutgers faculty I would like to thank specifically
is Calvin Martin – wherever he might be these days. While my theoretical approach is
considerably different from his own in Keepers of the Game, Professor Martin opened me
up to the key place the fur trade played in transforming Indian societies and, moreover, to the
need to think about it outside of the proverbial theoretical box. I would also like to give
thanks to the other members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Camilla Townsend, Dr. Paul
Clemens and my outside reader, friend and theory buddy, Dr. Matt Hannah. Last but
certainly not least, much gratitude to my long-suffering life-partner and soul-mate, Judith
Sargent. Yes, it’s finally done, and our life together can go on, through new twists and turns,
toward different horizons! As the poet saith, “Grow old with me. The best is yet to be.”
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Table of Contents
Page
ABSTRACT ii
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii-ix
CHAPTER 1: Neo-Marxist Theory and Its Uses 1-87
CHAPTER 2: The Northeastern Indigenous World-System 88-168
CHAPTER 3: People “Meet Up”/Social Structures “Articulate” 169-222
CHAPTER 4: From Wampum to Beaver to Indian Deeds 223-281
CHAPTER 5: The Political of the Political Economy 282-333
CHAPTER 6: Indians as “Servants” in a World Economy 334-386
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS 386-391
APPENDIX A: Sample Indian Deed 392-393
APPENDIX B: Guidelines to the Use of the CD-ROM 394-395
BIBLIOGRAPHY 396-445
CURRICULUM VITAE 446
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