Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
271-280 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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271) In all your passages you [the Virginia colonists] must have Great care not to Offend the naturals if you Can Eschew it and imploy some few of our Company to trade with them for Corn and all Other lasting Victuals if you [they?] have any of this you must Do before that they perceive you mean to plant among them for not being Sure how your own Seed Corn will prosper the first Year to avoid the Danger of famine use and Endeavour to Store yourselves of the Countrey Corn. (Instructions from the the Virginia Company, qtd. in Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980: 104-5. )
272) We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be open-ness and love. (William Penn's speech to Indians, 1682) (hear commentary by Elsie Hamel)
273) Perhaps most important, Johnson's acceptance of the Doctrine of Discovery into United States law preserved the legacy of 1,000 years of European racism and colonialism directed against non-Western peoples . . . . The Doctrine of Discovery's underlying medievally derived ideology--that normatively divergent 'savage' peoples could be denied rights and status equal to those accorded to the civilized nations of Europe--had become an integral part of the fabric of United States federal Indian law . . . . While the tasks of conquest and colonization had not yet been fully actualized on the entire American continent, the originary legal rules and principles of federal Indian law set down by Marshall in Johnson v. McIntosh and its discourse of conquest ensured that future acts of genocide would proceed on a rationalized, legal basis. (Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 317. )
274) But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible, because they were as brave and as high spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence. (John Marshall, Johnson v. M'Intosh, 1823 )
275) [Promotion literature's] principal appeal made to the nobility and the gentry is the appeal to Renaissance virtu – to that combination of a well-rounded activity with the promise of immortal fame which is in part heroic and in part polite. (Howard Mumford Jones, "The Colonial Impulse: An Analysis of the 'Promotion' Literature of Colonization." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 90.2 [1946]: 134. )
276) Hakluyt's images not only serve as propaganda, but also reveal the hope, and even the faith, that the elect will triumph over evil, that England will subdue Spain, that Protestantism will curb the passions of the Catholic whore. (Jennifer Bess, "Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting." Explicator 55.1 [1996]: 4. )
277) The Welsh document to which the two refer, and from which the Madoc story is indeed reprinted in the Principall Navigations, is The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales of Caradoc of Llancarfan, published in 1584. Both texts thus contain the same upsetting news that America was not discovered by Columbus in 1492 but 322 years earlier by a Welsh seafarer and direct ancestor of Queen Elizabeth. Needless to say, both papal donation of the New World to Spain in 1493 (the bull Inter caetera) and the division of America between Spain and Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) were deprived of all legal foundation by this short Welsh document. (Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997: 25. )
278) [Hakluyt says in Discourse of Western Planting,] All the Indians need is a godly preacher, to rise to the challenge of "reducing of the infinite multitudes of these simple people that are in error, into the right and perfect way of their salvation." (H.C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co, 1979: 200. )
279) Hariot's revelation that the indigenous method of sowing corn yielded twice the crop the English were capable of became the most often repeated piece of information in subsequent tracts promoting the Carolina region. (Susan Schmidt Horning, "The Power of Image: Promotional Literature and Its Changing Role in the Settlement of Early Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 70.4 [1993]: 378. )
280) The law of religion is not the same as other laws. Faith is a special gift of God and Jesus Christ is foolishness among the heathen; but natural things are known naturally to all. Some kind of religion is natural, and therefore if there should be any whoe are atheists, destitute of any religious belief, either good or bad, it would seem just to war upon them as we would upon brutes. For they do not deserve to be called men, who divest themselves of human nature, and themselves do not desire the name of men, and such a war is a war of vengeance, to avenge our common nature. (Alberico Gentili, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 198. )
