Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
231-240 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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231) . . . the character and religion of . . . [America's] inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy. (John Marshall, Johnson v. M'Intosh, 1823 )
232) Therefore, I approve the more decidedly of the opinion of those who say that the cause of the Spaniards is just when they make war upon the Indians, who practiced abominable lewdness even with beasts, and who ate human flesh, slaying men for that purpose. For such sins are contrary to human nature, and the same is true of other sins recognized as such by all except . . . brutes and brutish men. And against such men, as Isocrates says, war is made as against brutes. (Alberico Gentili, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 196. )
233) Some of [Ralph] Lane's cruelty to the Indians may have been silently censored, which meant that the next group of colonists would have had less than realistic expectations about their possible relationship with Americans around them. (Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Totowa: Rowman & Litterfield, 1984: 104. )
234) Conquest, colonization, and remediation of radically divergent peoples were mandated by a law that appealed to a Eurocentric conception of human reason and by tactics of convenience that viewed a Christianized savage as a safe savage. (Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 198. )
235) This then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful: their land [the Indians' land] is spacious and void, and there are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it, but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc. As the ancient patriarchs therefore removed from straiter places into more roomy, where the land lay idle and waste, and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them (as Genesis 13:6, 11, 12, and 34:21, and 41:20), so it is lawful now to take a land which none useth, and make use of it... It being then, first, a vast and empty chaos; secondly, acknowledged the right of our sovereign king; thirdly, by a peaceable composition in part possessed of divers of his loving subjects, I see not who can doubt or call in question the lawfulness of inhabiting or dwelling there. (Robert Cushman, "Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America," qtd. in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985: 41-44.)
236) When Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, went out to the three quarters of the old world, Ham to Africa, Shem to Asia, Japhet to Europe, did each claim a quarter of the world for his residence? Suppose Ham to have spent his time fishing or gathering oysters in the Red Sea, never once stretching his leg in a long walk to see his vast dominions, from the mouth of the Nile, across the mountains of Ethiopia and the river Niger to the Cape of Good Hope, where the Hottentots, a cleanly people, now stay; or supposing him like a Scots pedlar, to have traveled over many thousand leagues of that country: would this give him a right to the soil? In the opinion of some men it would establish an exclusive right. (Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Indian Atrocities. Cincinnati, 1867: 62-72. )
237) All lawful magistrates in the world, both before the coming of Christ Jesus and since (excepting those unparalleled typical magistrates of the church of Israel), are but derivatives and agents immediately derived and employed as eyes and hands, serving for the good of the whole: hence they have and can have no more power than fundamentally lies in the bodies or fountains themselves, which power, might, or authority is not religious, Christian, &c., but natural, humane, and civil. (Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenant of Persecution, qtd. in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985: 199-200. )
238) A man that is willing to open his eyes may easily see that though the government of the civil magistrate do extend no further than over the bodies and goods of his subjects, yet he may, and ought to, improve that power over their bodies and goods, to the good of their souls...The bodies and goods and outward estates of men may expect a blessing when their souls prosper...If it seem a monstrous thing in the eyes of the Discusser to imagine that the good estate of the church, and the well-ordering of the ordinances of God therein, should concern the civil good of the commonwealth, it may well seem monstrous to him to imagine that the flourishing of religion is the flourishing of the civil state, and the decay of religion is the decay and ruin of the civil state. (John Cotton, The Bloody Tenant Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb, qtd. in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985: 201-6. )
239) Nevertheless, examining literature of justification in this period is not the only crucial step in the process of reading the history of New England. Perhaps more revealing is unearthing the often obscured literature of non-justification, written namely by Roger Williams during the period between 1620 and 1675. He, too, was a man of faith and possessed firm conviction in his beliefs. Yet his life's work and writings did not contribute to nor result in the more pressing tragedy of the dispossession of the Indians due to the white man's simplistic rationale of conquest. Instead, Williams diverges from his contemporaries in thought, word, and deed by challenging the settlers' early forms of interaction and communication with the Indians; establishing a more direct way of dialoguing with the Indians (via learning their language); engaging in public debates via letters with renowned scholars, preachers, and community leaders over separation between church and state; and professing his truth regarding freedom of religion and individual expression, despite the ultimate cost or consequence. (Kristina Fennelly, Lehigh University )
240) Although there is little talk of tragedy in this volume, we know that more than half of the original party died during the first year at Plymouth[....]Another tragedy is only presaged here, in the white man's facile rationalization of his usurpation of lands which had long been used by Indians. (Dwight B. Heath, ed., Mourt's Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Bedford: Applewood Books, 1963: viii. )
