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-----Original Message-----
From: H-South Review Editor Ian Binnington [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 19 January, 2001 1:21 PM
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Subject: Crosspost: H-SHEAR Review, Grinde on Wallace, _Jefferson and
the Indians_


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (January, 2001)

Anthony F. C. Wallace.  _Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the
First Americans_.  Cambridge, Massachusetts and London:  Harvard University
Press, 1999. ix + 394 pp.  Notes, acknowledgements, list of illustrations,
list of documents, and index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00066-8.

Reviewed for H-Net by Donald A. Grinde, Jr. <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, University of Vermont

Anthropology, Native Americans and Jefferson: A Troubling Analysis

This work is an exploration of the troubled duality in Jefferson's
perceptions of American Indians.  The author ably details Jefferson's
interest in Native American vocabularies, burial grounds and Native
American cultures, but all of these interests were unfortunately in tandem
with Jefferson's ideas about westward expansion and Indian removal.  In
this tome, Wallace gives us an informed but limited analysis of the
contradictory aspects of Jefferson's sometimes positive and yet ethnocidal
and genocidal views about American Indians.

Wallace strength's in this work are in his ability to comprehend Native
American cultures and their interface with luminaries like Jefferson.  Too
often, American historians, imprisoned by their own monocultural views,
neglect to fully explore even the most fundamental aspects of the Native
American cultures on the other side of the frontier.  Wallace gives keen
insights into the American Indian scholar side of Jefferson as well as his
rhetoric of westward expansion.  We are also treated to a detailed analysis
of Jefferson's quest for American Indian vocabularies and explanations
about ancient Native American inhabitants.  In dealing with these
complicated ethnohistorical issues, Wallace is at best.

We are also given some analysis of Jefferson's ideas about
"civilizing"  American Indians.  However, Wallace gives only cursory
mention to Bernard Sheehan's _Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian
Philanthropy and the American Indian_ (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1973)  in his analysis of the "civilizing policies" and
this is unfortunate.  Often, Wallace clings too closely to his
anthropological roots when he seeks to understand the Indian policy and
intellectual sides of Jefferson in a historical context.  It is clear that
Wallace has not examined much of Jefferson's political theories and how
Native American people influenced them, since he fails even to address
Richard K. Matthews' statement in _The Radical Politics of Thomas
Jefferson;  A Revisionist View_ (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas
Press, 1984), p. 122 that "...the American Indian ... provides the
empirical model for Jefferson's political vision."  Similarly, scholarly
works that touch on the Jeffersonian period that are written by Native
Americans like Philip DeLoria's _Playing Indian_ (New Haven:  Yale
University Press, 1998) are omitted in his analysis.

When discussing the frontier, Wallace does not deal with pioneering works
in American Indian economic history like Linda Barrington, ed., _The Other
Side of the Frontier:  Economic Explorations into Native American History_
(Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999).  While Wallace bemoans
Jefferson's policies of land grabbing and its effects on American Indian
people, he never fully addresses the issues relating to Jefferson's
genocidal pronouncements.  On August 28, 1807, President Jefferson writes
to his Secretary of War (the primary administrator of Indian affairs in the
Jefferson administration), General Henry Dearborn, that "if we are
constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it
down until that tribe is exterminated."  Later in the letter to Dearborn,
Jefferson adds that "[I]n war, they will kill some of us; we will destroy
all of them."[1] Wallace makes no allusions to this quote in his analysis
and its obvious import for Jeffersonian Indian policies.  Is he skirting
the issue of Jeffersonian genocidal tendencies while feigning sympathy for
Native Americans?  Even if Wallace believes that Jefferson was not
genocidal towards American Indians, he must confront the blunt statement by
Jefferson to Dearborn that leads some historians towards a genocidal
interpretation of the Jefferson Administration.

Overall, Wallace gives us a general and well organized analysis into a side
of Jefferson that needs to be examined more fully and with sensitivity.  He
has ably delved into many of the dualities and racist assumptions that
haunted Jefferson in his day and even policy makers today.  But his
analysis is circumspect about important issues like genocide, ethnocide and
the impact of Native American ideas of democracy on Jefferson. Wallace's
book takes us a long way in understanding the ambiguous nature of Thomas
Jefferson's views on American Indians, but it is flawed by its inability to
deal with historical scholarship on this topic in the last generation or
so.  With that said, the reviewer still considers it a worthwhile read for
Jefferson scholars and Native American historians of the era.

Note

[1]. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Berg, eds., _The Writings of
Thomas Jefferson_, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Association, 1903-4), XI:345-46.

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