Blackhawk and the Ethics of Honor

While Blackhawk’s “autobiography” clearly has so much going on, I was (unsurprising given my rant about ethics in last week’s class) most struck by what J. Gerald Kennedy calls the Sauk warrior’s method of “comparative national ethics.”  Initially reading this terminology in the introduction, I thought “comparative cultural ethics” might make more sense.  However, after reading the whole text, I might propose a Foucaultian word meld: natio-cultural, cultonational…something like that.  Blackhawk’s ethical framework indeed draws from cultural belief and practice, but the man is also preoccupied with the preservation of the Sauk “nation,” and that term is repeated throughout the text and used interchangeably with his “people.”  Granted, this may be more a tactic to avoid word repetition or choice translation by the ever-present translator and editor, Leclaire and Patterson respectively.  Yet while Blackhawk’s ethical framework is arguably nationally comparative, particularly at the end when visiting other cities, I would argue that our narrator puts forth ethical principles discerned by reason and motivated by honor, two concepts difficult to place within an either/or relationship with nation or culture.

Blackhawk’s appeals to reason and individual moral discernment are certainly worth further attention, but I am particularly interested in how his comparison’s between American and Sauk conduct speak to a sense of honor. In The Honor Code, culturally-minded ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah theorizes honor, even in the context of a practical, Kantian ethics, as crucial in understanding why one nation or culture would both inflict injustice on another and later cease to do so: “One way to begin to grasp why honor matters to ethics is to recognize the connections between honor and respect; for respect and self-respect are clearly central human goods, too, things that add to eudaimonia, helping us to live well” (xv).  At different battles, negotiations, and other encounters with settler Americans, Blackhawk repeatedly offers respect and honor to their “war chiefs” while lamenting the lack of respect given to his people.  We see such a comparison while Blackhawk reflects on having been given a ball and chain during his incarceration under General Atkinson (White Beaver): “If I had taken him prisoner on the field of battle, I would not have wounded his feelings so much, by such treatment—knowing that a brave war chief would prefer death to dishonor!  But I do not blame the White Beaver for the course he pursued—it is the custom among white soldiers, and, I suppose, was part of his duty” (88).  The larger ethical problem of a group of people violently and nefariously grabbing land from long time inhabitants to appease a settler’s mentality fueled by manifest destiny should be fairly easily discerned on material and rights-based grounds.  Mark Rifkin analyzes this problem succinctly in his account of the 1804 treaty process.  However, Blackhawk goes even further to a sense of individual honor that is not offered him in the same measure he offers it to his adversaries.  At seemingly every turn, and even sometimes while at war, Blackhawk strives first to honor the individual he is encountering and offers them the respect he is often denied himself.  While he is never officially recognized as the sole representative of his nation or culture—and his reflections on Democracy in light of Keokuk’s rise to power are fascinating—Blackhawk sees the recognition of individuals within those collective constructs as more important than the cultivation of a preserved collective.  In other words, he is absolutely concerned with the preservation of his people and their culture, but he also demands to be seem as an individual dealing with other individuals who make individual decisions that affect nation(s) of people.

The Top Hat and the Headdress

I hope my colleagues will forgive the quite literally 11^th hour post, but this material was really so engrossing that I found it difficult to put my finger on one aspect to convey here briefly.  In his article “Cultural Nationalism, Westward Expansion and the Production of Imperial Landscape: George Catlin's Native American West,” Gareth John theorizes the “ambivalent” depictions of Native Americans in Early American painting, and specifically the landscape painting of George Catlin as “a constituent component of an ambivalent imperialist iconography depicting American westward expansion and Indian policy during the first half of the nineteenth century” (176).  As with the long-raging debate in postcolonial studies over the “problematics” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or in US literature of Huckleberry Finn, Catlin’s paintings reject an easy characterization of the depictions as celebrating hegemony or lamenting its horrific results.  

One difficulty present here involves the absence of photographic confirmation of Catlin’s depictions, evidence that we might compare with his painting in order to discern the shape of his visual distortion, if there in fact is one. John also points to Catlin’s commitment to realism, and certainly the artist was trying to show the veracity of his images by incorporating physical artifacts into his enormous exhibition. Interestingly, although Aaron’s Huey’s photographs might not have as much leg work to complete in order to convince 21^st Century viewers that they convey the “real” life of Pine Ridge residents, I see a comparison between the audio supplements to Huey’s photographs as confirming or complicating the Lakota narrative and Catlin’s artifacts.  Both inclusions attempt to convince viewers of the authenticity of what they are looking at; both also run the risk of indicting the unavoidable authorial subjectivity in depicting the “other” in the first place—the problem of representation.

I find one of Catlin’s painting particularly reflects the ambivalence of these paintings. In Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light) Going to and Returning from Washington, 1837–39 (below), Catlin combines both landscape and Native American subject to produce this comparative and, again, ambivalent image. 

The chief becomes the general, the pipe becomes the cigarette, the tall-standing figure becomes the leisurely fellow leaning back on his umbrella, the multiple feathers of Pigeon’s Egg Head’s headdress become the top hat with one single feather, the dyed red guinea fowl feather which might have caught his eye at the Washington milliner shop or might have been a gift from a politician.  The description from the Smithsonian website sees these contrasts conveying a clear message, “His tribesmen rejected his descriptions of the white man's cities, and his persistence in telling ’evil lies’ eventually led to his murder. Catlin's message—civilization destroys Indian culture—doesn't get much clearer than this.”  While I agree that Catlin does not offer these images in celebration of Pigeon’s Egg Head’s assimilation, I wonder about the fact that the chief is shown by himself and not with, say, the individuals who likely encouraged (or manipulated) him to take on the trappings of American Military garb. Does this lay the blame for assimilation squarely on the chief, showing his new manner as a sign of his weakness against the temptations of “civilization,” as the Smithsonian has it?  The background of these paintings also display differences. While the ground both versions of the chief stands on remains the same, the sky above the district shows more smog and cloudiness that that over the tepees.  He seems to have brought the smoke of the city with him in the form of the cigarette. I have raised more questions than answers, but thinking back on the artifacts that accompanied Catlin’s exhibition, I wonder if the painting leaves at least one question unanswered that can never be: Who now has Pigeon’s Egg Head’s headdress and pipe?

Three Weddings and One Divorce

Among the numerous facets at work in Hobomok (historically, theologically, nationally, domestically, politically…hell, even agriculturally), I was most struck by the intentionality that becomes evident in reading Child’s reckoning of the differences between the Puritan and American Indian cultural rites, particularly the weddings.  In her introduction to the novel, Carolyn Karcher underscores Child’s interest in anthropological cultural comparison having written History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations, and while that much larger work was published ten years after Hobomok, these interests are quite evident in Child’s first published work.

Three weddings occur in the text: Sally Oldham to John Collier (C. 9), Mary Conant to Hobomok (C. 12), and finally Mary Conant to Charles Brown (C. 20).  It seems unnecessary to point out the obvious differences among these three ceremonies, but the attention to detail Child offers with each scene seemingly points to a commitment to the benefits of depicting cultural difference.  While Charles and Mary’s marriage in the end resolves culturally complicated marriage plot, I find the first two weddings a bit more interesting in their comparison.  Continuing her critique of Puritan patriarchy (and Puritan everything else for that matter), Child has Reverend Higginson preach the opposite of a celebratory marital homily and, instead, foment quasi-exegetically on the discernment and obedience one must keep in beginning life together, lest you be coupled with the devil like the papists and old may-pole Morton.  It is the type of passage seemingly meant to underscore the obsession over theological resoluteness at the expense of acknowledging something like the happy occasion of two young people falling in love and beginning their shared life together.

By stark contrast, the wedding that takes place much later in Hobomok’s wigwam does not feature such a homily: 

“The oldest Indian then uttered some short harangues, in which he dwelt upon the duty of a husband to hunt plenty of deer for his wife, to love her, and to try to make her happy; and that the wife should cook his vension [sic] well, that he might come home to his wigwam with a light heart” (125).  

We can of course detect strict gender roles in this ceremony, but the speech does appear to at least focus on the couple being wed, rather than other items such as, for example, the abhorrence of liturgical prayer. Moreover, while the likes of William Bradford and Governor Endicott are invited to the Oldham/Collier wedding, Hobomok and Mary’s wedding is not a political, community event.  Indeed, nobody in Salem even knows it has happened for 3 days, and while this can somewhat be attributed to the scandal of interracial marriage, this was such a closed circuit of communication that the community assumed Mary dead before considering such a thing had happened.  I DO wonder how to read the verbal exchanges between Mary and Hobomok leading up to the ceremony, where Mary seems fairly comatose and carrying “much the frightened expression of one walking in his sleep” (125).  While the ceremony seems somewhat more intimate in its procedure, Mary’s state rejects an easy reading of the ceremony as clearly preferable the Puritan wedding, just as the easy community acceptance of Hobomok’s divorce certificate and subsequent disappearance from the text raises questions regarding how respected our title character really is by the narrative.  Why are the “savage” culture’s laws of divorce held-up by the legal mechanism of a culture (the Puritans) where divorce would mean lifelong shame for an individual?

Baptists, Gradualism, and Azem

From the first suggestion from the editors that I should place Humanity in Algiers in the context of regional Baptist publications of the early 19th Century, I have only been able to read this account as a lapsed Baptist reader looking for some historical insight into what it used to mean to be Baptist.  What it means to be Baptist now often carries associations with racism, sexism (resistance to women in ministry), homophobia (as in Westboro Baptist Church), moral legalism, and a noted preoccupation with the afterlife at the expense of present human suffering.  Aside from the often overlooked distinction among contemporary Baptist denominations--some of which ordain women and even openly affirm gay church members--one must note the historical differences between the roughly “Northern” and “Southern” traditions galvanized in the 19th century; while northern congregations (now historically the American Baptists) would not ordain missionaries who owned slaves, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 partly on the grounds of the Biblical affirmation of slave ownership.  Over 40 years earlier, an anonymous writer submitted Humanity in Algiers for publication with Robert Moffit for a Baptist, even interracial, readership, and suddenly the question of slavery among Baptists in the 19th century becomes explicitly transnational.

Two aspects of Azem’s approach to slavery stand out to me in light of the Baptist response: faith in God’s providence and gradualism.  Lemuel Haynes, the influential African American Baptist minister noted in the introduction to Humanity in Algiers, was known, in addition to his staunch abolitionism, for his Calvinism.  According to several sources (including an early collection of Haynes’ writings collected by a Timothy Mather Cooley in 1836), many Baptists in the tri-state area were committed to the notion that God’s providence would ultimately end slavery in the US, and this theological emphasis perhaps accounts for the lack of political advocacy among Baptists sympathetic to abolition in the early 19th Century.  At various points in Humanity in Algiers, we see the characters, particularly in consideration the process for buying a slave’s freedom, say “in accordance with the laws of this country.” There is no mention of actually changing those laws, and so it often goes with a providential framework that is prone to place more emphasis on faith than action.  This is further reinforced by Azem’s decision, at the urging of Omri, not to run away from his master and “To have patience, and thou shalt be free.”

As the editors of the story note, Baptist abolitionists largely advocated for a gradualist approach to ending slavery, and we certainly see this reflected in the text.  Perhaps the most notable example comes when Omri, the architect behind Azem’s freedom, suggests that Azem serve each of Sequida and Selictor’s children for one year each in order to earn his manumission.  After Omri interprets Sequida’s dream and the family relents, the narrator underscores the speed at which Azem perceives his freedom coming: “The five years seemed to him but a day.”  One of the reasons I find the emphasis on gradualism so interesting involves the analogous debates, particularly among Baptists, during the US Civil Rights Movement in response to Jim Crow segregation.  Probably the most famous Baptist of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, Jr. intentionally focused his rhetoric against the gradualist argument in both Why We Can’t Wait and the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was in itself a specific response to the publicized advocacy for gradualism among clergy in Birmingham in 1963.  Theologically, King found the license for his political advocacy from, among others like Reinhold Niebuhr and Gandhi, the Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbush, whose idea of the “social gospel” emphasized the need for social action as opposed to an inactive commitment to providential prayer.  Humanity in Algiers, while still evidencing a detached and gradualist approach to abolition, provides evidence for the more nuanced approach to the horrors of slavery than historical Baptists are often given credit for, and I am thankful for the archival research that went into the recovery of this lost piece of literature that was undoubtedly consumed by US Baptist Christians as they discerned how to respond to the most pressing expression of human suffering in their time.