AN UNCONTROLLABLE DISPOSITION OF PLAY

  “They have made William Freeman what he is, a brute beast; they don’t make anything else of any of our people but brute beasts; but when we violate their laws, then they want to punish us as if we were men.” -John De Puy The Report of the Trial of William Freeman 1847 

      The First Nations had only fired a gun or sharpened the edge of an ax a few generations prior to the Dutch alien’s arrival on the continent. Never again would they willingly return to the gut strung bow, flint tipped arrow or clam shell hoe. But neither would they recognize the necessity of technological autonomy that was required for the sustenance of their newly acquired consumer lifestyle. This is the mystery that is so difficult to unravel. 

     As history has vividly illustrated it became impossible for the Indian not to adapt the basic technologies like carpentry, blacksmithing or the loom as their own. But the eastern tribes ignored this impossibility and resisted the alien future. This would have disastrous results for the tribes. Within only a generation the European’s reliance on the Indian’s survival skills depleted to the degree that they were now comfortably on their own in the North American wilderness; while the Indian’s reliance on European product (liquor, blankets, guns, powder and ammunition) and the maintenance services required to sustain what were once luxuries, steadily increased. The Native population were at a distinct disadvantage in this rosy dawn of capitalism. 

     First and foremost was the acceptance of an uneven playing field evident in the unwillingness of the Europeans to share their technologies, as the Indians had gladly shared land, food and survival skills with them. The most glaringly obvious contradiction of historical Christendom is the twisted abandonment of The Golden Rule at every turn. Do what I say, not what I do, was more like it. Holding onto intellectual property was another mode of control over primitive clientele. The Chinese were able to maintain the mysteries of the silk worm for thousands of years. The English and Dutch took note. Once settlers secured land and planted crops, livestock thrived and the Indian was no longer indispensable for the whites to get through the hard winter. As the surveyor chains demarcated the straight lines of “property,” the increasingly marginalized neighbor soon became the unwanted enemy—in the way of settlement expansion. 

      Because technology was not shared and the Indian did not feel the necessity to steal it, there would be no Indian lumber mills, no Indian blacksmiths, no Indian gunsmiths, no  Indian pounders of nails, magicians of the forge or even distillers of spirits, popping up at the confluences. As industry and mechanization found it’s place on the frontier, only white trading outposts, plantations and caning factories, run by Europeans, would emerge. Basic trade commodities like peltry and ginseng came in one direction, while gins (steel traps), guns and powder, blankets, booze and war, went in the other; as the gap of the Columbian Exchange only widened. By the mid-19th century, whatever remnants of the once great Eastern agrarian, hunter gatherers remained in New York, they were usually dirt poor and always at a distinct disadvantage to whites with new guns, still houses, prisons, churches and saw mills.

      The U.S. is now ruled (yes ruled) by real estate developers like Kushner and Trump, who naively view geo-politics in terms of “Trump Heights” condominiums in Israeli occupied territory and North Korean “beach front property,” just waiting for corporate branding. All sins can be overlooked in return for low interest rates, a good view and control of the high ground. We’ll see what happens.     

      For the poor, sending one or more of your brood of children off to live and work for a well-heeled white stranger at a very young age was a fact of life for many mothers (white, black and Indian). It was a sad, but practical economic decision, something unthinkable to most, that too often had to be considered by a large, destitute family. In the worst of cases these domestic refugees were starved, worked, raped and abused. In the best circumstances they were well cared for, loved and educated by their white masters and mistresses. But the children were still captives, indentured into servitude, and for all intent and purpose, slaves…..”almost a member of the family.” Almost. The best any weeping mother could hope for was the exception to the rule—a benevolent white household.

    Soon after his father died, at the age of seven, William Freeman went to board as a “boy-servant” for an old army officer Captain Allen Warden. He was dismissed a year later for the laughable offense of, “an uncontrollable disposition for play with other color boys, rendering his services valueless.” What good was an eight year old who wanted to play, when he should be attending to the household duties of a grizzled old military man? In fact, whatever negative traits young William exhibited that did not conform to his servitude, were many times attributed to either his “colored” or “Indian” heritage. This was as if to say an eight year old white child would instinctively obey and serve at any master’s whim, due to an inherited white predisposition to pay attention to a boss. 

     Like Frederick Douglass, William Freeman was unable to shed his double edged “badge of degradation,” of Indian and African bloodlines, making him less than prime stock in the minds of many of these so-called benefactors. Unlike Douglass, he was illiterate. According to whites, black skin color was not only a signifier of sinister intent, it was a regrettable birth defect, something to be pitied. Being a “savage” Indian made it that much worse.

    The propagandists for both church and state, perpetuated this ideology of white supremacy in regard to both African Americans and Indians. Kept separate and decidedly unequal, “societies,” residential boarding schools and missionary movements held fast to the idea that the “other” could only be helped if they would accept white paternalism and willingly assimilate into frame housing and wage work. The first thing the “benefactors” did was cut hair, burn traditional clothes and dress the children as white. 

         No matter how hard they tried, white society would never be able to entirely convert out of the Indian or the African the perception of an intrinsically higher station on the evolutionary food chain, due to their non-white status. Ethnic pride would never be completely destroyed. Not from lack of trying. But white supremacists were successful in brain-washing both communities to believe they were inferior on the whole. Generational self-loathing and lingering denial of worth was implanted in the minds of many. Official “extermination” was called for in regard to the Indians and in most of the U.S., slavery flourished until the Civil War. One of the worst of the founding proselytizers, Thomas Jefferson, bemoaned what he considered the genetic defects, in both body and mind, of his African American slaves; all the while taking his beautiful young slave Sally Hemings to his bed and repeatedly impregnating her. By the 1840’s, Jeffersonian ideology and racist pseudo-science, was accepted wholeheartedly as the cornerstone of white supremacy. Although Jeffersonian apologists dismiss and compartmentalize his racism, the twisted brilliance of Jefferson has survived, reflected in more than the rambling brick architecture of Monticello.