10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912
Through an analysis of two lesser-known works, Summer on the Lakes (1844) and The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets (1829),the essay aims to investigate the ways in which two American thinkers, Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Child, used literature as a means of resistance against American expansionist policies and as an instrument for portraying, addressing and resolving racial conflict at U.S. borders during two crucial moments in antebellum American history.
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Addressing Racial Conflict in Antebellum America: Women and Native Americans in Lydia Maria Child’s and Margaret Fuller’s Literary Works
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Serena Mocci
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Addressing Racial Conflict in Antebellum America: Women and Native Americans in Lydia Maria Child’s and Margaret Fuller’s Literary Works
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




 Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America: Women and
   Native Americans in Lydia Maria Child’s and Margaret Fuller’s
                                               Literary Works

                                                  Serena Mocci

                Submitted: October 8, 2019 – Accepted: December 16, 2019 – Published: March 2, 2020



                                                      Abstract

       Through an analysis of two lesser-known works, Summer on the Lakes (1844) and The First Settlers
       of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets (1829),the essay aims to
       investigate the ways in which two American thinkers, Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Child, used
       literature as a means of resistance against American expansionist policies and as an instrument for
       portraying, addressing and resolving racial conflict at U.S. borders during two crucial moments in
       antebellum American history.
       Keywords: Margaret Fuller; Lydia Maria Child; Women Reformers; Nineteenth Century; Native
       Americans; Expansionism.




Serena Mocci: University of Bologna (Italy)
 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3001-3948
 serena.mocci2@unibo.it;  https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/serena.mocci2/en
Serena Mocci is currently a PhD student in Global Histories, Cultures and Politics at the Department of Histo-
ries and Cultures, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, where she is working on a research project
entitled American Exceptionalism, Expansionism and Reforms in Margaret Fuller’s and Lydia Maria Child’s Po-
litical Thought. Between 2015 and 2017 she worked as a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Historical Society
(Boston, USA) and at the Centre for Gender History of Glasgow University (Scotland, UK). In 2019 she was a Visit-
ing Scholar at the Department of History of Columbia University (New York City, USA). Her main research inter-
ests include American transcendentalism, Atlantic abolitionism and the relationship between women reformers
and the American political culture in the nineteenth century.



Copyright © 2020 Serena Mocci                                                                                Art. #9912
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.                                                        p. 1
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Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                                          USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




1 Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Debate on Native Americans’ Lot
      — Between Assimilation and Extinction
In December 1829, when the newly elected president, Andrew Jackson, addressed Congress to ask for
the removal of Native Americans beyond the Mississippi River, the Indian Question,1 as the ‘problem’
of Native American presence within the U.S. territory was called, was already part of a long-term de-
bate that spanned the entire history of the country. Only ten years earlier, President James Monroe
had signed the Civilization Fund Act, a program that paternalistically allocated tens of thousands of
dollars a year to the literacy of Native American children and the teaching of agricultural techniques
to adult Indians with the goal of “civilizing” and integrating them into U.S. society. The underly-
ing idea was that without a proper process of assimilation supported by government policies, Native
Americans would be doomed to extinction. In 1828, the election of a frontier man as president, who
had managed to rise to the top of the political arena thanks to his military success in the country’s
recent expansionist wars, made peaceful coexistence between the Natives and the Americans on the
American soil even more unattainable. Indeed, as Laura L. Mielke has pointed out, “politicians and
members of benevolent societies increasingly argued […] that such efforts to save American Indians
from extinction through education were undermined by the pupils’ proximity to the corrupting ele-
ments of non-Native culture. Thus, removal policy signaled a desire to secure land for eager settlers
and to shore up U.S. territory in the wake of conflicts with France, Spain, and Britain and a rejection
of the belief that American Indians could become ‘civilized’ while directly contending with a rapidly
expanding Euro-American population.”2
     American women reformers played a leading role in this debate. Although Mary Hershberger ex-
tensively illustrated how, since the ratification of the Indian Removal Act by the Senate in 1830, women
have used petitions as the main means of resistance against American expansionist policies,3 female
authorship in terms of advocacy for Native American rights needs further analysis. Studying this
kind of literature4 allows us to understand the means available to women to make their voices heard
in the context of gender-based social restrictions. At a time when the cult of motherhood and domes-
ticity5 excluded women from taking part in the public life of the country, they used literature as an


1.   On the Indian Question see, among others, Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lans-
     ing: Michigan State University Press, 1967); Bernard Sheenan, Seeds of Extinction. Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American
     Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government
     and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: An-
     drew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties. The History of a Political
     Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism
     in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Anthony F.C. Wallace, Jefferson and the
     Indians. The Tragic Fate of First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ronald N. Satz, American Indian
     Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002); Susan M. Ryan, “Benevolent Violence. Indian
     Removal and the Contest of National Character,” in The Grammar of Good Intentions. Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benev-
     olence, ed. Susan M. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 25–45; Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land:
     Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

2.   Laura L. Mielke, Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (Amherst: University of Mas-
     sachusetts Press, 2008), 1.

3.   Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal
     of American History, 1(1999): 15–40.

4.   See also Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American. Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill:
     University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and
     the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Cheryl J. Fish, Black and White Women’s Travel
     Narratives. Antebellum Explorations (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Susan L. Roberson, Antebellum American
     Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Gerald J. Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary
     Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

5.   On the relationship between nineteenth-century women’s rights movements, domesticity and the public sphere see,
     among others, Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, 2(1966): 151–174; Ellen
     Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cor-
     nell University Press, 1978); Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–
     1920,” The American Historical Review, 3(1984): 620–647; Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about
     Domesticity, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Nicole Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference: The



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912                                                                                      2
Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




instrumental way of overcoming the ideology of separate spheres and entering into American public
discourse.
    The paper aims to investigate Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) and Lydia Maria
Child’s The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets (1829) in
order to show the limits of the humanitarian approach of women reformers dealing with the Indian
Question. Born and educated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in New England, the liberal
cradle of American culture and philosophy and the home of radical white abolitionism, during their
long career as writers and journalists both Fuller and Child were attentive observers and insightful
interpreters of the political events and social conflicts that in the first half of the century were shaking
the American continent. While Fuller was one of the pioneers of American feminism, and Child was
one of the most important abolitionist women in the Garrisonian circle, they both dealt with the Na-
tive American question using similar literary tools, yet providing very different, and often conflicting,
interpretations and solutions. The paper explores the ways in which the two women reformers used
literature as a tool to portray, address and resolve racial conflict at the U.S. borders during two crucial
moments in antebellum American expansionist history. The focus is on how Fuller’s and Child’s nar-
ratives entangle with complex issues of imperial expansion and how, through their works, they joined
a multifaceted debate on racial conflict between the settlers and the Native Americans whose con-
cepts often reaffirmed a presumed American exceptionalism filled with racist paradigms and patterns
of white supremacism.
    In general, it can be argued that, however radical they might be, in many cases the leading Amer-
ican intellectuals of the antebellum period did not deviate much from the assumptions, which were
well rooted in American political tradition, that the United States had been chosen by God as the model
and leading country for all the nations of the world that aspired to a future of freedom and equality.
Although many of them challenged the idea of Manifest Destiny and questioned the American ex-
pansionist project, they often carried out their criticism “in terms every bit as destinarian as those of
the most extreme expansionists.”6 If Euro-Americans perceived themselves as the elected people, it
logically followed that the Native Americans had to be wild and inferior, and therefore, destined to
disappear before the progress brought by the white man. In particular, the approach employed by
Northern politicians and intellectuals had its roots in the myth of the “Noble Savage” of Rousseau.
Moreover, it was influenced by and fully blended in the pseudo-scientific theories that justified the
existence of racial hierarchy: Euro-Americans were clearly at its top; Blacks and Indians, on the other
hand, were at the bottom. President Jackson’s Secretary of War, Lewis Cass, stated in 1830 that the
Cherokees lived in a state of nature. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, only two years after the ratifica-
tion of the Indian Removal Act, commented that “[S]o inferior a race must perish shortly … That is the
very fact of their inferiority.”7 Moreover, Henry David Thoreau, in his notebooks on Indian matters,
claimed that there was “a vast difference between a savage & civilized people,” and this was the main
reason why the American Indians were destined to be “exterminated at last by the white man’s im-
provements.”8 According to the Concord philosopher, “the history of the white man is a history of
improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation.”9


     Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997);
     Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997);
     Sylvia D. Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North
     Carolina Press, 1998); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Uni-
     versity of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of
     North Carolina Press, 1998); Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature, 3(1998): 581–606; Catherine Clinton,
     The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999); Raffaella Baritono, Il senti-
     mento delle libertà. La dichiarazione di Seneca Falls e il dibattito sui diritti delle donne negli Stati Uniti di metà Ottocento (Torino:
     La Rosa, 2001); Etsuko Taketani, U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861 (Knoxville: University of
     Tennessee Press, 2003); Tiffany K. Wayne, Women’s Roles in Nineteenth-century America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007).

6.   Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York, Hill and Wang, 1995), 48.

7.   Quoted in Joshua David Bellin, “Native American Rights,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, eds. Sandra Harbert
     Petrulionis, Laura Dassow Walls, and Joel Myerson (Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012).

8.   Ibid.

9.   Ibid.



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Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                                        USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




    It is, therefore, necessary to highlight why Native Americans witnessed much less enthusiasm re-
garding the defense of their cause, while advocates of nineteenth-century reform movements opposed
continental expansion mainly because it would further the extension of slave territories. As Joshua
David Bellin has clearly pointed out considering the transcendentalist movement of the Bostonian
area, “though major figures […] read widely on Indians, traveled among them, and harbored a lifelong
fascination with them, their admiration did not lead to advocacy. Though some of the Transcen-
dentalists kept on talking about issues relating to the Indians, the talk did not come through in their
actions.”10 Indeed, the fact that Native Americans were the focal point of interest of a large number
of U.S. reformers, and the subject of many anthropological and ethnographic studies, does not in any
way imply that their cause was pursued on political grounds.



2 Margaret Fuller, American Expansionism and Native Americans’
       Extinction
This is precisely the case with Summer on the Lakes, the story of the journey that Margaret Fuller un-
dertook in the summer of 1843, together with her friend Sarah Clarke, into what was then called the
“American Northwest,” the Great Lakes area, visiting Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago
and the plains of Illinois and Wisconsin. The text, which was revised and updated by Fuller through
additional research11 carried out at Harvard College Library, was published in 1844.
    From the very first pages of her travel narrative, she described a society that was gradually taking
shape before her eyes, a “great and growing world”12 in which rhythm flowed quickly, “the torrent of
emigration swell[ed] very strongly,”13 and life was governed by very different rules compared to Eu-
rope or the old states in New England. Although the motto of “go ahead” turned into “warlike invasion”
and showed “the rudeness of conquest,” according to Fuller, this was a process of creative destruction
and, therefore, it only represented a necessary step in the creation of a new order, an egalitarian so-
ciety that would ensure material and spiritual prosperity to all settlers. “I trust by reverent faith,” she
stated, that “a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked from this chaos.”14 Fuller believed that she was
witnessing a growing democratic society in the West, “a pleasant society” made up “of the families
who live along the banks of this stream upon farms” which, coming “from various parts of the world,”
“have in common the interests of a new country and a new life,”15 contrary to the artificial comforts
of Europe and Eastern America, that she defined as societies “of struggling men.” According to Fuller,
the West was a place “where nature still wore her motherly smile and seemed to promise room not
only for those favored or cursed with the qualities best adapting for the strifes of competition, but for
the delicate, the thoughtful, even the indolent or eccentric. She did not say, Fight or starve; nor even,
Work or cease to exist.”16 However, as Jeffrey Steele has pointed out,




10. Ibid.

11.   Fuller is known as the first woman allowed to access and carry out research at Harvard College Library. Among her sources,
      which she explicitly mentions in the course of the book, we find some travel narratives and memories by former pioneers
      of that area, such as the colonial American explorer Jonathan Carver (1710–1780), the explorer Alexander Henry (1739–1824),
      the American painter and writer George Catlin (1796–1872), the English author and diplomat Sir Charles Augustus Murray
      (1806–1895), the geographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) and his wife Jane Schoolcraft (1800–1842), the Anglo-Irish
      writer Anna Brownell Jameson (1794–1860), the renowned writer Washington Irving (1783–1859), the Irish revolutionary
      aristocrat Lord Edward Fitzgerarld (1763–1798), the historian James Adair (1709–1783), the Superintendent of Indian Affairs
      Thomas L. McKenney (1785–1859), the English abolitionist Morris Birkbeck (1764–1825) and the Scottish poet and author
      Anne Grant (1755–1838). Fuller explicitly states that she will refer to the books “which may be found in the library of
      Harvard College.” Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844), 242.

12. Ibid, 110.

13. Ibid, 113.

14. Ibid, 28.

15. Ibid, 60–61.

16. Ibid, 60.



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         Beginning her travels with high expectations, she found that her journey toward freedom
         could not be separated from an increasing sense of the oppression experienced by oth-
         ers.17

    Fuller witnessed the oppression suffered by women pioneers, mothers, wives and daughters of the
settlers, whose choice to leave for the West had been exclusively dictated by the need to follow their
men: “The great drawback upon the lives of these settlers, at present, is the unfitness of the women
for their new lot. It has generally been the choice of the men, and the women follow, as women
will, doing their best for affection’s sake, but too often in heartsickness and weariness.” According to
Fuller, pioneer women were unfit for frontier life because of the type of education they had received
in Europe and New England, which had made them mere “ornaments of society,” because it had given
them “neither the strength nor skill now demanded.”18 It is for this reason that they could not live
in harmony with nature. In Fuller’s considerations, therefore, it is precisely women’s condition, and
the inadequacy of the American educational system, that indicate the contradictions of the life in the
West. They represent the starting point for a broader reflection on women’s rights that Fuller would
finalize in 1845 through the publication of her well-known feminist manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth
Century.
    In addition to pioneer women, Fuller focused her attention on another group that had been heav-
ily affected by the U.S. expansionist project: Native Americans. In her writing, she addressed the tra-
ditional wilderness/civilization duality associated with the supposed ontological distinction between
Native Americans and Euro-Americans. When she found herself describing, in the very first pages
of her travel narrative, the sublime feeling that the view of the Niagara Falls aroused in her, she un-
derlined the indissoluble bond between American Nature and Native Americans, who were “shaped
on the same soil.”19 Since her first encounter with the Indians, often called “naked savages,”20 Fuller
stated that what differentiated them from the settlers was their deep connection with the “wilderness,”
that was the wild, boundless and primordial nature that contrasted with “the rudeness of the white
settlers,” a primitive, unnoble and artificial roughness that was destroying the uncontaminated nature
of the West.21
    Fuller rejected the process of territorial expansion that, starting under Jefferson’s administration
and furthered in 1840 by the Manifest Destiny ideology,22 had progressively taken territories from Na-
tive Americans and justified the atrocities committed on the basis of pseudo-religious racial and racist



17.   Jeffrey Steele, Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia: University of Mis-
      souri Press, 2001), 140.

18. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, 61–62.

19. Ibid, 5.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid, 18.

22. On the relationship between American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and nineteenth-century expansionism see,
    among others, Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Gloucester:
    P. Smith, 1958); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York: Vintage
    Books, 1966); Allan O. Kownslar, Manifest Destiny and Expansionism in the 1840’s (Boston: Heath and Company, 1967); Byron
    E Shafer, ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Amy Ka-
    plan, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: Amer-
    ican Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism:
    A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996); William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire. American Expansion
    from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996); Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny
    and Empire. American Antebellum Expansionism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997); Walter A. McDougall,
    Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Gregory
    H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997); Thomas Hietala,
    Manifest Design. American Exceptionalism & Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric
    Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); James Q. Wilson
    and Peter H. Schuck, eds., Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (New York, PublicAffairs, 2008);
    Daniele Fiorentino, “Eccezionalismo, identità nazionale e interdipendenza: nuove sintesi italiane sulla storia degli Stati
    Uniti d’America,” Mondo contemporaneo: rivista di storia, 2(2009): 177–190; Mario Del Pero, Libertà e Impero. Gli Stati Uniti e il
    mondo, 1776–2016 (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2017).



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arguments,23 as follows: “I know that the Europeans who took possession of this country, felt them-
selves justified by their superior civilization and religious ideas. Had they been truly civilized or Chris-
tianized, the conflicts which sprang from the collision of the two races, might have been avoided.”24
Nevertheless, at the heart of Fuller’s argument, in addition to the myth of the “Noble Savage” was that
of “the vanishing Indian,” which manifested itself in her firm belief that the Native Americans were
doomed to extinction before the advance of the superior white race. Although rejected and criticized
in its destructive violence, the colonization of wilderness by the white man was considered by Fuller as
written in destiny and as bearer of a new historical phase of progress, therefore, not only inevitable but
also desirable. Despite the Indians’ disappearance being “inevitable, fatal”25 as their living in a world
of “ignominious servitude and slow decay,”26 Fuller stated, “we must not complain, but look forward
to a good result […] the white settler pursues the Indian, and is victor in the chase.”27 The Natives,
according to Fuller, were aware of the imminent end of their people and had resignedly accepted that
“the power of fate is with the white man.”28
     Bellin suggests that the gender inequality that Fuller perceived in Indian societies could have rein-
forced her conviction that their extinction “was not only inevitable but also proper.”29 Despite the fact
that there were female chiefs among the Indians, she argued that they had no real power of decision or
control: “It is impossible to look upon the Indian women, without feeling that they do occupy a lower
place than women among the nations of European civilization.” However, compared to their “white
sisters,” “who have more aspiration and refinement, with little power of self-sustenance,” according to
Fuller “they suffer less” because “they inherit submission, and the minds of the generality accommo-
date themselves more or less to any posture […] But their place is certainly lower.”30 Although Indian
women seemed to occupy a lower position in society than white women, Fuller found that the two
groups shared a common experience of subordination. Like their white ‘sisters,’ Indian women “have
great power at home” but, she argued, “this power is good for nothing, unless the woman be wise to
use it aright. Has the Indian, has the white woman, as noble a feeling of life and its uses, as religious
a self-respect, as worthy a field of thought and action, as man? If not, the white woman, the Indian
woman, occupies an inferior position to that of man. It is not so much a question of power, as of priv-
ilege.”31 Once again, the argument about the condition of women, this time Indian women, provided
the starting point for broader reflection on the patriarchal system and a critique of male privilege that
permeated the entire American society, including the Native Americans.
     Despite the fact that she portrayed Indian morality as noble and representative of a virtuous peo-
ple, and their potential distance from virtuous behavior as an effect of the influence of European
colonization, Fuller could not free herself from nineteenth-century racial stereotypes on Indian infe-
riority when she pointed out that “their moral code” was not as “refined as that of civilized nations.”32
She insisted on the qualitative difference between the white settlers and the Indians, describing them
as belonging to two different stages of evolution within a hierarchy of human races. In stating that by
becoming civilized, men moved away from nature while perfecting their intellectual faculties and thus
affirming that “the civilized man” had “a larger mind” even though he possessed “a more imperfect




23. See Reginald Horsman, “Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” American Quarterly,
    2(1975): 152–168, and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Har-
    vard University Press, 1981).

24. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, 234.

25. Ibid, 47.

26. Ibid, 173.

27. Ibid, 47.

28. Ibid, 115.

29. Bellin, “Native American Rights.”

30. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, 179.

31. Ibid, 182. The author’s emphasis.

32. Ibid, 208.



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nature than the savage,”33 Fuller showed that her ideas were crammed with racist pseudo-scientific the-
ories that were taking shape throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, not only
did the American Indian race belong to a different state of human evolution, but it was also unable
to improve itself, as she wrote in verse in her poem, “Governor Everett Receiving the Indian Chiefs,”
which recalled the 1837 meeting held in Boston between Edward Everett, governor of Massachusetts,
and the Indian chiefs of the Sacs and the Foxes, defined as “an unimproving race.”34 Quoting directly
“the admirable speech of Governor Everett on that occasion,” and defining it as “the happiest attempt
ever made to meet the Indian in his own way,”35 she implicitly supported his assumption about a ter-
ritorial and cultural separation between the West and the East. Everett had described the former as
the native place of the Indians and the latter as that of the white settlers, deliberately not mentioning
the process of colonization that had pushed the Indians to the west of the Mississippi River:

       Brothers! you dwell between the Mississippi and the Missouri. They are mighty rivers.
       They have one branch far East in the Alleghanies, and the other far West in the Rocky
       Mountains; but they flow together at last into one great stream, and run down together
       into the sea. In like manner, the red man dwells in the West, and the white man in the
       East, by the great waters; but they are all one branch, one family; it has many branches
       and one head.36

    Appreciating Governor Everett’s speech, Fuller rejected any solutions that would entail a peaceful
coexistence between the two groups.
    Therefore, what did Fuller propose to solve in American racial conflict?
    First of all, she rejected interracial marriage. According to Fuller, the merging of races would not
bring an improvement but, on the contrary, a progressive degradation. Through amalgamation, both
the Indians and the settlers would lose their best qualities.

       Amalgamation would afford the only true and profound means of civilization. But nature
       seems, like all else, to declare, that this race is fated to perish. Those of mixed blood fade
       early, and are not generally a fine race. They lose what is best in either type, rather than
       enhance the value of each, by mingling. There are exceptions, one or two such I know of,
       but this, it is said, is the general rule.37

    Second, since she acknowledged that the disappearance of the Natives was already written in des-
tiny, there was not much more to be done for the Indians other than to “respect the first possessors
of our country.”38 Fuller did not take a political stand against American colonization and she did not
advocate the right of Native Americans to life, to sovereignty over the land and to self-determination.
Instead, she simply attempted to save the memory “of the lost grandeur of the race,”39 proposing the
recovery of American Indian history to be carried out by historians “of their own race”40 and the muse-
alization of their past. She seemed more interested in the remains of the Indians that she found rather
than in the description and understanding of their human, political and social conditions. Fuller felt
an urgency to preserve a mythical past, which she even compared to ancient Greece, rather than to
describe a present that did not please her. Her approach looks more like the effort of an antiquar-
ian who wants to preserve something that seems to almost be lost forever. The Indians had to be
‘saved’ not as bearers of inalienable rights, but because their memory was as an inseparable part of the


33. Ibid, 221.

34. Ibid, 188.

35. Ibid, 190.

36. Ibid, 192.

37. Ibid, 195.

38. Ibid, 213.

39. Ibid, 182.

40. Ibid, 232.



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Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




transcendent nature that the Western man called home. It is in this perspective that Fuller proposed
the collection of materials that belonged to the Indians, and their display in “a national institute” de-
signed for the whites, “containing all the remains of the Indians,” including “a collection of skulls from
all parts of the country.”41 In this way Fuller, adopting an attitude that Jeffrey Steele has defined as
“political sympathy”42 that, I argue, does not turn into political activism, reinforced racial stereotypes
and hierarchies that did nothing but reaffirm expansionist archetypes. Indeed, as Bellin has argued,
reproducing ethnographic discourses regarding the Indians as being naturally different, inferior and
destined to extinction, “Fuller trades political sympathy for racist necrology.”43 She wrote:

       I have no hope of saving the Indian from immediate degradation, and speedy death […]
       Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some masterly attempt to reproduce, in art or
       literature, what is proper to them, a kind of beauty and grandeur, which few of the every-
       day crowd have hearts to feel, yet which ought to leave in the world its monuments, to
       inspire the thought of genius through all ages.44



3 Assimilation and Interracial Marriage in Lydia Maria Child’s The First
      Settlers of New-England
The second work under consideration, The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods,
Narragansets and Pokanokets (1829), was written by Lydia Maria Child during a crisis in Georgia between
the Cherokees and the white settlers, which, in 1830, led to the ratification by the Senate of the Indian
Removal Act under Jackson’s presidency.
    This book, printed by Munroe & Francis, a small publishing house in Boston, was not her first at-
tempt to address the Native Americans’ cause. Child, who had the opportunity to get in direct contact
with some Indian tribes during her childhood that was spent in Maine, from the early 1820s devoted
much of her intellectual efforts to defending Native peoples throughout her life. In addition to the
articles published in magazines for young readers, (such as The Juvenile Miscellany, the first success-
ful American children’s magazine that she edited), her first historical novel, Hobomok, A Tale of Early
Times. By an American (1824) describes the origins of American history from a female point of view. It
portrays the interracial marriage between a young Puritan woman and a Native American man and
represents her first attempt to undermine the traditional exceptionalist Puritan historical narrative on
the founding of the United States. Worthy of mention are also the many articles she published in the
Massachusetts Journal, a radical political newspaper founded by her husband David, which became a
channel of opposition45 to the Indian Removal Act and even brought him, in 1831, a personal letter of
thanks from the Cherokee Indian Chief John Ross.46
    Although it appears to be a book dedicated to a younger audience, The First Settlers of New-England
reveals its great political relevance because it is actually a revisionist history of American colonization



41. Ibid, 233.

42. Steele, Transfiguring America, 158.

43. Bellin, “Native American Rights.”

44. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, 196.

45. David Lee Child’s articles published in the Massachusetts Journal claimed the Cherokees’ right to sovereignty of the land
    but, arguing that “these native proprietors must disappear from the scenes of human action,” they implicitly accepted the
    assumption that the Indians were destined to extinction. After Child’s marriage to David, described by the biographer
    Karcher as a “political partnership,” the editorial policy of the Journal changed in support of the claims of the Cherokees
    and, more generally, of the right of all Indians to life and possession of land without any reference to the “vanishing Indian”
    myth. According to Karcher, this can be seen as a sign of the great influence that Child had on her husband and on the
    editorship of the magazine. Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
    (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 12–13.

46. In the letter, written on February 11, 1831, John Ross thanks David Lee Child “for the honorable and generous feelings you
    have expressed in sympathy for the sufferings of the poor Cherokees.” John Ross, “Letter to David Lee Child,” February 11,
    1831, Papers of Lydia Maria Child, ca. 1827–1878, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912                                                                                      8
Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                                          USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




that highlights the contradictions underlying the creation of the nation and the devastations carried
out by English Puritans.
    In the introduction, Child explained the many reasons why she wrote this book. By using a histor-
ical approach, she aimed to show readers that Indians had welcomed the Pilgrim Fathers in a friendly
and courteous way. She criticized much of the historiography,47 which was “desirous of proving the
origin of the war to have been just.”48 “The Indians have been strangely misrepresented, either through
ignorance or design, or both; and men have given themselves little trouble to investigate the subject.”49
According to Child, a major issue with historiography was that sources were written by the winners,
so they only told and documented part of the truth, as seen in the following quotation:

        We receive all our information from those who committed the guilty deed, and therefore
        must conclude that nothing is left untold that would in any measure lessen the odium of
        these dark transactions, or lessen the offences of our ancestors.50

    Her goal, she clearly stated, was also to illustrate the positive characteristics of the Native Americans
and to prove, “from the most authentic records,” that the treatment they received by those she defined
as “the usurpers of their soil” was “in direct violation of the religious and civil institutions which we
have heretofore so nobly defended and by which we profess to be governed.” According to Child, the
United States had “the finger of scorn” pointed at it, “for having so grossly violated the principles which
form the basis of our government.” “This crooked and narrow-minded policy which we have adopted
in reference to the Indians,” she affirmed, referring to the Indian Removal Act, “will assuredly subject
us to the calamitous reverses which have fallen on other nations, whose path to empire has been
marked by the blood and ruin of their fellow-men.” Therefore, according to Child, it was precisely the
Indian Question that revealed to the American people the underlying contradictions of their country,
which was created by proclaiming the principles of freedom and equality of all citizens and, instead,
was expanding through repeated wars of extermination and colonization. The government’s attitude
towards the Native Americans would lead the country to its ruin.51
    What led to the colonization of the Americas, according to Child, was exclusively the Europeans’
“strong desire to possess the land and drive out the heathen inhabitants.”52 Thus, she explicitly chal-
lenged the religious foundations of American exceptionalism, advocated by the Puritans, described as
belonging to “a sect” who believed they were “a chosen people, and, like the Israelites, authorized by
God to destroy or drive out the heathen, as they styled the Indians.”53 The first settlers “believed it to be
for the glory of God to take away the lives of his creatures.”54 They demolished “social happiness and
confidential intercourse,” gave “force and scope to the most hateful passions”55 and allied with each
other to fight their common enemy, the Indians, “regardless of the precepts of our benign Master, and
the ties which bind man to his fellow beings.”56 Furthermore, in the same manner as the desire for
conquest had been the foundation for the establishment of the American colonies, according to Child
“this disposition has been transmitted to their descendants.”57

47. Among the historiographical works cited by Child, I mention John Winthrop’s Journal, History of New England (1630–1649),
    William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England (1677), and Thomas Prince’s Chronological History
    of New England (1736).

48. Lydia Maria Child, The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets. As Related by a
    Mother to Her Children (Boston, Munroe and Francis, 1829), 138.

49. Ibid, 13.

50. Ibid, 58.

51. Ibid, III–IV.

52. Ibid, 22.

53. Ibid, 31.

54. Ibid, 90–91.

55. Ibid, 94.

56. Ibid, 137.

57. Ibid, 23.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912                                                                                      9
Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                        USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




    Also Child underlined that “the natives of this country are fast disappearing […] and will in all prob-
ability be soon blotted from the face of the earth.”58 However, contrary to Fuller’s beliefs, in Child’s
opinion this was neither a natural phenomenon nor written in destiny. Indeed, their disappearance
derived exclusively from the expansionist and destructive policies pursued by the U.S. government,
as Child states: “It is, in my opinion, decidedly wrong, to speak of the removal, or extinction of the
Indians as inevitable.”59 So, what solutions did Child offer for saving the Native Americans from the
ongoing process of extinction caused by the white settlers?
    Contrary to Fuller, who saw in the union between the Native Americans and the American settlers
the inevitable decadence of both races, Child supported interracial marriage as the only solution for
resolving the American racial conflict. She argues,

       There are many who affirm that by intermixing with the natives, the whites would have
       lost much of their peculiar character, and the result must have (of course) been highly
       detrimental; nevertheless, I am free to confess that in my opinion we should have gained
       more than would have been lost.

    Since, according to Child, interracial marriage would bring enhancement on both sides, what she
proposed was not a mere Americanization of the Natives, but a cultural and anthropological exchange
between the Indians and the white settlers that would bring, in addition to the salvation of Native
Americans, also a broader moral regeneration of the nation. It was precisely the Indian Question that
“involved the honour and humanity of our country.”60
    Furthermore, according to Child, interracial marriage between the descendants of the Puritans
and the Native Americans would have broader political relevance, not only in domestic politics but
also in international politics. It would save the country “from the hordes of vagrants, who have been
allured to our shores, like vultures by the scent of prey, that they might seize on the spoils of the natives
whom we have destroyed.”61 What Child was referring to are the working-class European immigrants
who endorsed Jackson’s Democratic Party and the slave traders of the South, in exchange for the right
to vote and a supposed formal equality. Furthermore, she supported a multiracial republic in which
the Native Americans had a strategic political role, because they also represented an instrument of
defense against the European proletarian threat.

       Though we might not be able to boast, ‘the glorious result of ten millions of white inhabi-
       tants,’ the red men who would have formed a part of our population, would have been to
       us a wall of defence; neither would the innocent blood we have so profusely shed, which
       cries aloud for vengeance, subject us to the fearful retribution which has fallen on the
       guilty nations who have established themselves on the ruins of their fellow men.62

    Child was addressing those who affirmed that it was impossible to carry out assimilation policies
because they believed that the Indians, as qualitatively inferior beings, were “incapable of becoming
a civilized people,”63 as well as fully exploiting the American lands, stating that:

       If it be admitted, that we have a right to take the land of the natives, because they do not
       improve it in the manner we think best; it goes to prove, that all, who do not possess houses
       or lands which they do not occupy themselves, especially grounds devoted to pleasure or
       hunting, may be compelled to resign them to those who have no settled habitations or
       possessions, and thus an equal distribution of property take[s] place, which would subvert
       all our institutions and incitements to industry or distinction.64

58. Ibid, 42.

59. Ibid, 281.

60. Ibid, 282.

61. Ibid, 65–66.

62. Ibid, 66.

63. Ibid, 259.

64. Ibid, 254.



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Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




     She mentioned the case of the Cherokees, who had adopted “our arts, our religion, and husbandry,”
established an ever-growing school system, founded a bilingual magazine, turned to agriculture and
trade, established a public road system, adopted the Christian religion as the “religion of the nation”
and, above all, implemented a republican constitution based on the U.S. model, and argued that the
American government should allow them “to retain what is left of their native inheritance.”65 Accord-
ing to Child, they had been deceived by Americans because they had to give up a considerable part of
their land, which was being definitively stolen from them, along with all the improvements they had
made over the past thirty years, described as follows: “they are now urged to quit their territory, with
all their improvements, and retire to the western wilds, where they must erelong miserably perish,
to gratify the insatiable cupidity of the Georgians.” However, it is clear that Child reaffirmed tradi-
tional racial hierarchies and patterns of white supremacism when she argued that, by bargaining with
the officers of George Washington, “their venerated father,” and embracing American customs and
traditions, the Cherokees became “a civilized community.”66
     Child stated that the Indian Removal Act was “a policy of death and desolation” and “a system of
cruelty, fraud, and outrage, which has no parallel.”67 She quoted the words of the Ohio congressmen
Samuel Finley Vinton and John Woods, who had denounced the precarious conditions in which Native
Americans lived as a result of the various removals that had been carried out in previous decades by
the American government.

       While we are talking about our justice, our generosity, our feelings of humanity for the
       Indians—in the same breath we say, that our citizens—that the American People—with
       ruthless violence and injustice are trampling the weak remnant of these once powerful
       nations in the dust. If we cannot protect them within the limits of our State Governments,
       in sight of our Courts of Justice, and within reach of the arm of the laws, we cannot protect
       them when placed beyond the limits of any organized civil government.68

    Moreover, Child pointed out,

       ”I devoutly trust that our Government will not gain pusillanimously compromise with the
       sordid avaricious Georgians, and bargain their honour and integrity for being allowed to
       compel, in their own way, the unfortunate Indians to abandon their country, which had
       been most solemnly guarantied to them and their posterity.69

    Child trusted that, when men understood the wrongs committed against the Indians, they would
awake from the torpor of indifference, which she judged to be the great evil of her time and would
join the cause of the Native Americans. She claimed to be “cheered by the hope, that men of talents
and integrity, when they find that no hostile design was projected against the white men, until every
pacific overture had failed of success, will be aroused from the torpid indifference with which they
have hitherto witnessed the unexampled fate of the Indians, and nobly and fearlessly stand forward
in their defence.”70 In this process, American children and youths, whom the book addresses, played
a leading political role, as such they should understand their moral obligation towards a country that
had betrayed the principles underlying its foundation. Consequently, Child wrote:

       I ardently hope that this unvarnished tale, which I have offered to view, will impress our
       youth with the conviction of their obligation to alleviate, as much as is in their power,


65. Ibid, 259–260. See also William G. McLoughin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University
    Press, 1986); and Theda Perdue, “The Conflict Within: Cherokees and Removal,” William L., ed., Cherokee Removal. Before
    and After (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 55–74.

66. Child, The First Settlers of New-England, V–VI.

67. Ibid, 262–263.

68. Ibid, 264.

69. Ibid, 281.

70. Ibid, IV–V.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912                                                                             11
Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                      USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




         the sufferings of the generous and interesting race of men whom we have so unjustly
         supplanted.71

    If the children who read Child’s narrative were “able to incite a general interest in their favour”
among their “young friends,” “we may confidently expect that the rising generation will strive to me-
liorate their condition.”72



4      Conclusion
Racial conflict is a constant element within U.S social and political history. Understanding the histori-
cal paths it has taken over the centuries and how it has shaped American society and politics, revealing
itself to be a catalyst of change, is crucial in order to shed new light on the intrinsic contradictions of
American political culture that, even today, remain partially unsolved.
    Looking into the history of American expansionism in relation to the Indian Question offers an
interesting perspective of analysis for understanding how racial conflict has been interpreted and ad-
dressed during the nineteenth century. Particularly fascinating are the ways in which nineteenth-
century American women used literary means politically to describe this conflict within and beyond
U.S. borders, offering interpretations and solutions that often differ, and even contrast, with each
other. At a time when the ideology of domesticity and the concept of Republican Motherhood were
the main theoretical foundations for the role of women in society, they used literature in an instru-
mental way to challenge the theory of separate spheres and influence public debates. Also, Margaret
Fuller and Lydia Maria Child, through their literary works, questioned the policies implemented by
various U.S. governments in the wake of an exceptionalistic nationalism that resulted in wars of ex-
termination and colonization at the expense of Native American populations. However, their books
reveal the limits of their humanitarian approach to the Indian Question.
    As mentioned above, both women criticized the process of colonization that had led to the con-
quest of American territory and denounced the atrocities and cruelties committed against the Native
Americans, who were described many times as being benevolent and welcoming towards the white
settlers. However, while Lydia Maria Child considered colonization to be a violation of the Indians’
rights to life and to the possession of the land of their ancestors, Margaret Fuller interpreted it as a
necessary step in the process of building a new egalitarian society that would provide physical and
spiritual prosperity for all Americans.
    Child viewed marriage between Native Americans and whites as a crucial instrument for resolving
American racial conflict since she perceived it as the only means that would guarantee the improve-
ment of both races, the reduction of crime and violence and, therefore, a moral regeneration of the
entire American society. Fuller, on the contrary, saw amalgamation as the cause of progressive degra-
dation for both sides, which, because of union, would lose the best characteristics of each. At the base
of their different approaches, there is a diverging interpretation regarding the Native populations’ lot.
Indeed, Fuller believed that the Indians, belonging to a lower stage in the hierarchy of races, were
destined to disappear in light of the progress brought by the ‘white man.’ Their extinction appeared
to be inevitable and part of an inexorable process written by destiny. It is for this reason that, besides
a moralistic sympathy, the question was not taken up at a political level but remained at a purely the-
oretical level according to her proposal of a musealization of the Native American culture that was
functional to the constitution of a white American memory, created for whites and built on the ashes
of a non-white people that was vanishing. Child, on the contrary, believed that the extinction of Native
Americans derived from the policies carried out by the U.S. government. Her struggle was political
and, therefore, she attributed a political meaning to interracial marriages.
    Both books are another confirmation of the intertwining of issues of race, gender and class in
American history. For both women, expansionism and the Indian Question were indicative of the
underlying fractures in American society that had torn the country apart, not only along the line


71.   Ibid.

72. Ibid, 44.



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Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                     USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




of race, but also that of gender and class. Although Fuller regarded the exploration of the West as
an opportunity to denounce gender inequality and the logic of a patriarchal system that governed
male-dominated Native American and white societies, Child exploited the subject to also point out
the problem of immigration and the emerging class conflict resulting from the European proletarian
threat.
    However, it is important to highlight the observation that the reasoning of both women was based
on the belief in an alleged qualitative difference between Native Americans and white settlers that
mirrored the wilderness/civilization dichotomy. Indeed, according to the two women, if one admitted
the possibility that Indians could become civilized, this could happen only if they embraced the habits
and customs of the whites, as in the case of the Cherokees as mentioned by Child, therefore, within
Eurocentric models. In most cases, Native Americans were described as pure and savage, part of that
wilderness that first colonization and later continental expansion were slowly destroying due to the
advance of the white man. From both texts emerges a more or less explicit white supremacism that
had deep roots in the European Enlightenment and that would contribute to influence the birth and
sedimentation of that scientific racism that, in particular, starting from the second half of the century,
would be used to justify all domestic and foreign policy decisions related to racial issues. A white
supremacism that only reinforced the imperialistic and expansionist logics that were meant to be
challenged.




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Addressing Racial Conﬂict in Antebellum America                                             USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9912                                                              16
