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THE HISTORY OF
STRATFORD
Golden Hill Indians THE HISTORY OF
STRATFORD
Wm. Howard Wilcoxson Establishing
Title to the Land FORREST MORGAN
Lifestyles, Government, Religion and WarIndian Titles and Mohegan Land TroublesSowheag, Uncas, and MiantonomoOwenoco, the Son of Uncas
THE
HOUSATONIC CHARD POWERS SMITH The
Promised Land ALEXANDER JOHNSTON
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FORREST MORGAN – INDIAN TITLES AND MOHEGAN LAND TROUBLES In discussing the question of their dispossession from the soil, there are two phases to be considered: One general to all Indians, one special to the Connecticut Indians. As to the former, they had no title to the soil themselves but occupancy, they recognized none in other tribes but the law of the strongest, and their occupancy itself had no boundary except the risk of being scalped by another and stronger tribe for intrusion. The whites had the same right to use the soil for purposes of livelihood as the reds; it was the misfortune of the latter that the uses of the former excluded a joint roaming tenancy, and made it needful for them to adopt the same means of livelihood or have no place to gain it. The Indian was not morally to blame for being an Indian: But to use the fact, as is so often done, as the major premise of an argument that the white man must therefore be blamable for being civilized, is wholly irrational. Again, there was no such entity as "the Indians," or "the Red Men," or the "Aborigines," with common rights and common interests as against white men: If the same class of reasoning were used about the Europeans or the Asiatics as a whole, its absurdity would be perceived. There were red tribes, independent of and hostile to all other red tribes: But what superior moral claim does the possession of a certain color of skin give them possession, either by occupation or conquest, above that of whites? The question must be individual, not general; and we must carefully discriminate between the Aborigines of America as an ethnological fact, and the Aborigines of any particular section, which is a question often impossible to determine, and when determined often leads to results the very opposite of those intended. There was no more solidarity of rights among Indians as a whole of interests; and the Indians themselves were the foremost to recognize the fact. A sterile wonder is often expressed that the Indians did not stand together against the whites: Why should they? It meant simply being scalped by other tribes. There was no result to stand together for; no common "Indian" civilization or mode of society to be preserved by driving off the whites, whom indeed they generally valued as their best protection against each other. The whites saved more Indians from being destroy by other Indians than they ever destroyed themselves. What interest had one tribe of Indians in assisting another tribe to slaughter whites, when victory simply meant that it would be slaughtered in turn? Was the privilege of being roasted by other tribes so precious a boon, above being slowly dispossessed of land, that they should shed their blood for it? In a word, "Indians" as such, had no future--could have none; it was because they had none that they were forced to give way to a social system that had one. It is absurd to suppose that the Creator has left his higher civilization no legitimate means of occupying the earth; and if it is equally wicked to dispossess savages by violence, to buy their land from them (they being ignorant of its value, unfit to have the money, and unable to make any use of it), and to occupy tracts they do not cultivate, we land in the absurd impasse that after a few roaming savages have once spread over a continent, no method but crime is left for better societies to take their place. As to the local question, it is much simpler. The Pequots were as much intruders pure and simple on the rights of the original occupants as the white themselves; they were indeed much more so, for they were mere invaders by violence, who had dispossessed part and cowed the rest of the Narragansett tribes here before them, while the whites were occupants by permission. Whether the Narragansetts were themselves invaders or no, we cannot tell, nor does it matter; for our purpose we grant them such. Then what title had this band of ferocious freebooters, the Pequots, who had been here very little longer than the whites to set up the claim (they never did, it is true, --that was left for modern sentimentalists) to prescriptive right of occupancy? It is to be noted that the real occupants, the Narragansett tribes, were friends of the whites, helped them exterminate the Pequots, and considered them protectors against their fierce conquerors. Does the mere fact that the Pequots were red, and that some sort of red men were on the continent earlier than the whites, confer such a moral sanctity on even barbarous conquest that it has a right to murder and torture peaceful cultivators? The logic is not obvious. This is not slaying a man of straw. The sentimental view persistently confounds the question of red men vs. white men, which we have just shown does not exist, with the question of a given band of white settlers vs. a given tribe of savages, which is the question our forefathers had to settle, and their settlement of which gives us a peaceful community in which to decry them and their work. What rights the Connecticut settlers had against a nonexistent abstraction called "the Indian" would seem to foolish an exercise even for schoolboys, were it not constantly declaimed by older people; what rights they had against a tribe of ferocious brigands who had proceeded them into the territory a few years, and who were committing unprovoked atrocities on them to drive them out, and dispossess the original occupants besides, will appear in the course of this work. If you
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ALEXANDER JOHNSTON
SOUTHPORT Colonial History of Pequot Swamp COLONIAL INDIAN ARCHIVES Hon. Ralph D.
Smith David D. Fields Sarah
Day Woodward Winthrop’s Journal |