An Eighteenth-Century Critique of Eurocentrism: Samuel Johnson and The Plight of Native Americans
p. 207-220
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1This essay orginated in a challenge. I had been invited to speak about Samuel Johnson to a secondary school literature class in which there were several Native American students from the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona,1 and so I had to ask myself: How could I introduce a figure like Johnson to such a mixed class, none of whom (it quickly emerged) had even heard of Samuel Johnson? What, especially given the cultural politics of the 1990s, would interest Native American students about Johnson? What texts of his could I set them to read that would speak particularly to them? To the uninitiated, even among the thoroughly Eurocentric middle-class students I have for years been teaching at elite institutions like Harvard University and Barnard College, Johnson can seem terribly formidable and offputting. An arch-Tory and pro-monarchist who argued strenuously against the American Revolution; a devout Christian and staunch supporter of the Anglican Church who at his death left dozens of unpublished sermons and prayers; a social and cultural conservative who wrote hundreds of moral essays and "talked for victory" even in dinner-party conversation; the century's pre-eminent authority onlanguage and so far the dominant literary critic of his time that he earned such nicknames as "The Literary Colossus," "Ursa Major," "Dictionary Johnson," and (perhaps most tellingly) "The Literary Dictator"—Was Johnson not in fact the paradigm of the confident, self-righteous, expansive, and often ruthless European civilization that had collided so forcefully with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, beginning with Columbus in the 1490s?
2From the answers to those questions emerged this essay and, I hope, a fresh vantage point on a writer who, despite the vagaries of his reputation, has more to say to the heterogeneous readerships of our time than perhaps any other English author of the eighteenth century. At a time when our awareness of postcolonial issues is increasing dramatically, it is startling, and somewhat dismaying, to discover how far we have forgotten that someone like Samuel Johnson could be a severe critic of European expansionism and colonialism in the New World, and that over his career he was consistently sympathetic to native peoples and outraged at the misery and injustice inflicted upon them by Europeans. In his view, as he wrote in 1775, Christopher Columbus was a mere adventurer who was "scorned and repulsed as a wild projector" by most of the monarchs from whom he sought patronage; "nor" (Johnson went on) "has any part of the world yet had reason to rejoice that he found at last reception and employment."2 In seeking to understand the mind that could so lament the whole European encounter with America, this essay will first examine some of Johnson’s comments on the issue as recorded by Boswell, and then offer a survey of the key texts in which Johnson published his views on European colonialism and the plight of native Americans.
3Two factors made it inevitable that someone in Johnson's position would take up the topic of native Americans. The first was the historic moment. By the eighteenth century European interests, and therefore European wars, extended up and down the Americas and throughout the seas adjoining them. For a journalist and miscellaneous writer like Johnson, coverage of and comment on a prolonged conflict such as the Seven Years' War (which in America is rather revealingly referred to as the "French and Indian War") was unavoidable. With the general public's hunger for news about events in the New World came an interest in the history of the European presence, and so writers like Johnson also found themselves commissioned to write historically oriented works such as his "Life of Sir Francis Drake" (Gentleman’s Magazine, 1740-41) and his Introduction to a collection of voyage and discovery narratives called The World Displayed (1759-60).3
4Beyond the reality of historic events in the New World, the second factor was an ongoing philosophical debate in the Old World, about whether the simple life of "savages" (as indigenous peoples, whether noble or not, were usually called) wasn't superior to the complexities of European civilization. In part because this debate took many different forms and in its origins predated Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with whose name it is so often reductively connected) by decades, it is important to clarify Johnson's position at the outset. However sympathetic Johnson could be to the sufferings of native peoples, however enraged at the barbarities of their European oppressors, he could never be mistaken for a Rousseauvian romantic. Of this, Boswell provides more than ample proof.
5In 1769, for example, Boswell records a conversation in which he deliberately drew Johnson out on the topic. Over dinner one evening, Boswell says, "I attempted to argue for the superior happiness of the savage life, upon the usual fanciful topicks". The dialogue proceeded from there:
Johnson: "Sir, there can be nothing more false. The savages have no bodily advantages beyond those of civilised men. They have not better health; and as to care or mental uneasiness, they are not above it, but below it, like bears. No, Sir; you are not to talk such paradox: let me have no more on't. It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct. Lord Monboddo, one of your Scotch Judges, talked a great deal of such nonsense. I suffered him; but I will not suffer you."
Boswell: "But, Sir, does not Rousseau talk such nonsense?"
Johnson: "True, Sir; but Rousseau knows he is talking nonsense, and laughs at the world for staring at him."
Boswell: "How so, Sir?"
Johnson: "Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense. But I am afraid, (chuckling and laughing) Monboddo does not know that he is talking nonsense." (30 September 1769)
6Much of the bite in Johnson's remarks is the result of his toying with Boswell, deliberately fencing with him when he senses Boswell trying to steer him into making a quotable utterance on some topic or another.
7On other occasions, when faced with the silly excesses of what might be called the "back-to-nature sentimentalists," Johnson could erupt with derision. In 1773, according to Boswell, Johnson chastised one such person he thought should know better. Boswell reports a conversation that distantly anticipates a cultural fantasy such as the film Dances with Wolves represents in our own time:
A leamed gentleman who holds a considerable office in the law, expatiated on the happiness of a savage life; and mentioned an instance of an officer who had actually lived for some time in the wilds of America, of whom, when in that State, he quoted this reflection with an air of admiration, as if it had been deeply philosophical: "Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of Nature, with this Indian woman by my side, and this gun with which I can procure food when I want it: what more can be desired for human happiness?"
8In the next sentence one can almost see Boswell clutching himself with glee, as he turns with eager anticipation to record Johnson’s response. Says Boswell,
It did not require much sagacity to foresee that such a sentiment would not be permitted to pass without due animadversion.
Johnson: "Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff: it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim,—Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?" (21 April 1773)
9From someone who believed that the pleasures of London were inexhaustible ("When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life"4) and that the full tide of human experience could best be observed at Charing Cross, these conversational ripostes are scarcely surprising.
10More telling, perhaps, are those conversations in which Johnson approached the subject more seriously. In discussing the question "whether the State of marriage was natural to man" with General Paoli in 1772, Johnson showed his belief that all people, whether "civilized" or "savage," share a common human nature. Johnson argued that it was "so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that... all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and all the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together." To this General Paoli responded "that in a State of nature a man and woman uniting together would form a strong and constant affection, by the mutual pleasure each would receive; and that the same causes of dissention would not arise between them, as occur between husband and wife in a civilized State." Johnson resisted such romantic projections. He insisted on seeing non-European peoples as fundamentally the same as Europeans, informed psychologically by the same desires and weaknesses. To Paoli's idealization he responded: "Sir, they would have dissensions enough, though of another kind. One would choose to go a hunting in this wood, the other in that; one would choose to go a fishing in this lake, the other in that; or, perhaps, one would choose to go a hunting, when the other would choose to go a fishing; and so they would part" (31 March 1772).
11While at the level of individual human nature Johnson steadfastly refused to allow the Indians to be, in effect, dehumanized, as the objects of some European fantasy of prelapsarian innocence, he nonetheless strongly believed in the superiority of European civilization to poorer and more primitive societies, whether those of native Americans or of indentured peasants in the Outer Hebrides. At his best, he strived for something like an anthropological objectivity. In a conversation of 1783 about the survival rates of sickly children in different societies, for example, Boswell records Johnson as refusing to credit any theory that some peoples are innately superior, physically, to others. Instead Johnson sees the harsh conditions of survival as mitigated to different degrees by societies according to their respective levels of technological, economic, and social development:
Johnson: ".... A great traveller observes, that it is said there are no weak or deformed people among the Indians; but he with much sagacity assigns the reason of this, which is, that the hardship of their life as hunters and fishers does not allow weak or diseased children to grow up. Now had I been an Indian, I must have died early; my eyes would not have served me to get food. I indeed could now fish, give me English tackle; but had I been an Indian I must have starved, or they would have knocked me on the head, when they saw I could do nothing." (20 April 1783)
12On still another occasion Johnson argued that the limitations of oral cultures, such as those of the Maoris or Tahitians, made them less knowledgable about history and less interesting than more advanced (print) cultures: "What can savages tell, but what they themselves have seen? Of the past, or the invisible, they can tell nothing" (29 April 1776).
13However much Johnson exaggerated for effect or played "Devil's advocate," his conversation makes abundantly clear his refusal to romanticize native peoples and thus makes all the more remarkable, when we turn to his published writings, the intensity of his criticism of European cruelty and oppression. As early as 1740, in the "Life of Sir Francis Drake" he compiled from various primary sources and serialized in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Johnson repeatedly interrupts the narrative to digress on the wrongs done the natives by European conquerors. Thus of St. Jago in the Verde Islands, which Drake and his crew merely pass by en route, Johnson pauses to note that on this island the Portugese had gradually "established themselves", having, he says,
claimed a Superiority over the original Inhabitants, and harrassed them with such Cruelty, that they obliged them to fly to the Woods and Mountains, and perish with Hunger, or to take arms against their oppressors, and under the Insuperable Disadvantages with which they contended, to die almost without a Battle in defence of their natural Rights and ancient possessions.5
14Johnson’s use of the term "natural rights" signals his belief—regardless of the developmental differences between any two societies—in universal principles that apply equally to all nations and all people.
15At other points in his narrative of Drake’s expeditions, Johnson takes pains to explain episodes of what is undeniably treacherous and murderous behavior by a native people. Drake encounters a people on the coast of South America "of whom," Johnson writes,
Magellan left a very terrible Account, having described them as a Nation of Giants and Monsters; nor is his Narrative entirely without Foundation, for they are of the largest Size, tho' not taller than some Englishmen; their Strength is proportioned to their Bulk, and their Voice loud, boisterous, and terrible.6
16Knowing that the story he is about to recount (of feigned friendship and then a murderous ambush) will do these people no credit, Johnson prefaces the account with some historical speculation about what might have made these people so:
What were their Manners before the arrival of the Spaniards, it is not possible to discover; but the Slaughter made of their Countrymen, perhaps without Provocation, by these cruel Intruders, and the general Massacre with which that Part of the World had been depopulated, might have raised in them a Suspicion of all Strangers, and by Consequence made them inhospitable, treacherous, and bloody.
17The pattern repeats itself in a later episode on the Pacific Coast of South America when, after a day of friendly trading and talk, the natives next day ambush Drake's company with a force of 500, killing or wounding every single man—including Drake himself—before being driven off. Johnson comments: "No Reason could be assigned for which the Indians should attack them with so furious a Spirit of Malignity, but that they mistook them for Spaniards, whose Cruelties might very reasonably incite them to Revenge, whom they had driven by incessant Persecution from their Country, wasting immense Tracks of Land, by Massacre and Devastation."7
18Interspersed with his account of Drake's adventures and his indictment of past cruelties to the Indians are other passages in which Johnson shows both a scientific and a humane interest in these peoples. In one, he describes the custom among an Indian tribe of elaborately painting their bodies and then compares it to the customs of the Picts in Britain and other ancient peoples in Europe. In another, Johnson discourses about the underlying sameness of the human quest for happiness:
It is, perhaps, a just Obervation, that, with regard to outward Circumstances, Happiness and Misery are very equally diffused thro'all States of human Life. In civilized Countries where regular Policies have secured the Necessaries of Life, Ambition, Avarice, and Luxury, find the Mind at Leisure for their Reception, and soon engage it in new Pursuits; Pursuits that are to be carried on by incessant Labour, and whether vain or successful, produce Anxiety and Contention. Among Savage Nations, imaginary Wants find, indeed, no Place, but their Strength is exhausted by necessary Toils, and their Passions agitated not by Contests about Superiority, Affluence, or Precedence, but by perpetual Care for the present Day, and by fear of perishing for want of Food.8
19It is impressive to find Johnson, in these early ruminations about the lives of South American Indians, beginning to work up the themes of human desire and restlessness that were to drive his later major works such as The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Rasselas (1759).
20A skeptic might suggest that both the adventurer Drake and his biographer Johnson had incentives to emphasize the atrocities of the Spanish in the New World: Drake to influence his Queen and her policies, Johnson to please his readers at a time when England and Spain were once again at war. Both motives are undeniable. But a deeper truth about Johnson’s antipathy to such cruelty and exploitation emerges fifteen years later, in his writings about the Seven Years' War for the Literary Magazine and other periodicals.9 Here Johnson so far overcame mere patriotism, or the temptation to curry favor with a pro-war public and its government, that his persistent criticism of the war against France got him removed from the editorship of the Literary Magazine—which he had founded—within its first year.
21Foremost among these writings is an essay Johnson wrote on the recent history leading up to the present conflict, "An Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain," published in the first issue of the Literary Magazine in May 1756.10 To Johnson, the Seven Years' War was an obscene and avaricious struggle between two powerful European nations fighting over vast territories in North America and the Caribbean to which neither had any legitimate claim.11 Johnson's sympathy for the dispossessed Indians—regardless of whether France or England had treated them more badly—is everywhere evident. Both the English and French colonies in North America had been established, he writes, "according to the European principles which allow nothing to the natives of these regions" (147). He traces the roots of the war back to the moment when the various European settlements, which had been confined to the coastline, began to expand inland, the colonists operating on the presumption that (in Johnson's words) "as the colony increases, they may take lands as they shall want them, the possession of the coasts excluding other navigators [from the interior], and the unhappy Indians having no right of nature or of nations" (148).
22In the same essay, Johnson revisits the topic of Spanish atrocities against the Indians, with no less disapproval, but now with an eye also to its implications as a history lesson for the British government. Clearly framing his rhetoric to appeal over the heads of the British government to the King himself, Johnson writes:
If the Spaniards, when they first took possession of the newly diæcovered world, instead of destroying the inhabitants by thousands, had either had the humanity or the policy to have conciliated them by kind treatment, and to have united them gradually to their own people, such an accession might have been made to the power of the king of Spain, as would have made him far the greatest monarch that ever yet ruled in the globe; but the opportunity was lost by foolishness and cruelty, and now can never be recovered. (136-37)
23Equating the humane and kind treatment of native peoples with good policy and the attainment of world power, Johnson shrewdly appeals to darker human instincts in pursuit of a more enlightened policy.
24Johnson also rises above nationalism. Throughout the essay he characterizes the British colonists in North America as far more oppressive than the French. To this fact Johnson attributes a great strategic advantage enjoyed by the French. "Their great security is the friendship of the natives," Johnson observes, and then he proceeds to analyze this advantage in terms that are less those of the militarist than of the moralist:
To this advantage they [the French] have certainly an indubitable right; because it is the consequence of their virtue. It is ridiculous to imagine, that the friendship of nations, whether civil or barbarous, can be gained and kept but by kind treatment; and surely they who intrude, uncalled, upon the country of a distant people, ought to consider the natives as worthy of common kindness, and content themselves to rob without insulting them. The French, as has been already observed, admit the Indians, by intermarriage, to an equality with themselves, and those nations, with which they have no such near intercourse, they gain over to their interest by honesty in their dealings. Our factors and traders having no other purpose in view than immediate profit, use all the arts of an European counting-house, to defraud the simple hunter of his furs.
25Thus managing to suggest, with this flourish of the double-edged rhetorical weapon, as much about his contempt for the modem European mercantile economy as his anger at the exploitation of the Indians in America, Johnson closes his essay with a sonorousness worthy of Edmund Burke: "These are some of the causes of our present weakness; our planters are always quarreling with their governor, whom they consider as less to be trusted than the French; and our traders hourly alienate the Indians by their tricks and oppressions, and we continue every day to shew by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous" (150).
26Later in 1756 Johnson devoted a section of another anti-war essay, "Observations on the Present State of Affairs" (Literary Magazine, Aug. 1756) to a careful analysis of how the various treaties the English had made with the Indians were really a devious tool of exploitation.12 These treaties are essentially invalid, Johnson argues, because they were originally either "extorted by violence, or induced by fraud" and thereafter the Indians "were lured or frighted into compliance." What are such treaties, Johnson asks rhetorically, "but new modes of usurpation, but new instances of cruelty and treachery?" Yet such fraudulent claims are the basis on which the war is being fought. In Johnson's words, "The French and English quarrelled about the boundaries of their settlements, about grounds and rivers to which, I am afraid, neither can shew any other right than that of power, and which neither can occupy but by usurpation, and the dispossession of the natural lords and original inhabitants" (186). Johnson can't leave the subject without expressing his contempt for the colonists who have forced these treaties on the Indians. It is to the colonists' corrupt practices that, he says, "are to be attributed all the cessions and submissions of the Indian princes, if indeed [he adds suspiciously] any such cessions were ever made, of which we have no witness but those who claim from them." "And there is no great malignity," he concludes, "in suspecting, that those who have robbed have also lied" (187).
27Sadly, Johnson and his kind were not heard, and the war continued to escalate. Two years later, in August 1758, Johnson was to offer a still more damning indictment of British conduct toward the Indians, this time thinly veiled as a fictionalized account by an imaginary French historian sometime in the future, trying to explain why the English had lost the war. Part of this "historian’s" explanation concerns treatment of the Indians:
The English, wherever they come, are sure to have the natives for their enemies; for the only motive of their settlements is avarice, and the only consequence of their success is oppression. In this war they acted like other barbarians, and, with a degree of outrageous cruelty, which the gentleness of our [i.e., the French] manners scarce suffers us to conceive, offered rewards by open proclamation to those who should bring in the scalps of Indian women and children. A trader always makes war with the cruelty of a pirate. (Idler 20 [26 August 1758])13
28Johnson’s protest against inhumanity toward the Indians and his opposition to the conduct of the war struck some as anti-English, even treasonous. During the American crisis in the 1770s, at least one writer was to remember this essay and use it to accuse Johnson of having been for many years deeply unpatriotic if not openly disloyal.14
29Against this background I would now like to focus on what seems to me the single most important text Johnson ever wrote on the plight of native Americans in the eighteenth century, Idler 81. (It is this essay, by the way, that I eventually chose as the reading for the class with the Navajo students in it.) Dated 3 November 1759, Idler 81 appeared when the war had been going on for almost four years, yet its style and voice are not those of conventional polemics. Using a device he had deployed scores of times in the Rambler and in earlier Idler essays to bring in the voices of women, teenagers, and other under-represented groups,15 Johnson fictionalizes a monologue by an Indian Chief standing on the plains of Quebec. As the Chief gazes over a landscape dominated by army encampments, night is falling and there is a meditative air faintly reminiscent of the opening of a poem like Gray's Elegy: "It was evening, the tents were pitched, he observed the security with which the troops rested in the night, and the order with which the march was renewed in the morning. He continued to pursue them with his eye till they could be seen no longer, and then stood for some time silent and pensive."
30At that point the Chief begins to speak and through his soliloquy, which fills the rest of the essay, Johnson presents us with his fullest and most empathic treatment of the American Indian experience. His voice charged with elegiac sadness, the Chief describes an idealized past, now lost:
My children (said he) I have often heard from men hoary with long life, that there was a time when our ancestors were absolute lords of the woods, the meadows, and the lakes, wherever the eye can reach or the foot can pass. They fished and hunted, feasted and danced, and when they were weary lay down under the first thicket, without danger and without fear. They changed their habitations as the seasons required, convenience prompted, or curiosity allured them, and sometimes gathered the fruits of the mountain, and sometimes sported in canoes along the coast.
31Coloured with touches of the pastoral tradition which in other contexts, such as his criticism of Milton’s "Lycidas," Johnson so disapproved, this idealization of America before European contact also draws on the classical idea of the golden age. Probably unconsciously, Johnson in these lines was echoing passages in Ovid, Virgil, and others.16
32The peace was shattered and the golden age ended, of course, when the Europeans arrived. To convey a sense of the experience from the Indians' point of view, Johnson stylizes and deliberately obscures parts of the description. He uses circumlocutions and familiar indigenous imagery (such as the distinctively American animal, the armadillo) to suggest the Chiefs struggles to describe foreign phenomena, such as armor and cavalry, for which he has no vocabulary:
Many years and ages are supposed to have been thus passed in plenty and security; when at last, a new race of men entered our country from the great ocean. They inclosed themselves in habitations of stone, which our ancestors could neither enter by violence, nor destroy by fire. They issued from those fastnesses, sometimes covered like the armadillo with shells, from which the lance rebounded on the striker, and sometimes carried by mighty beasts which had never been seen in our vales or forests, of such strength and swiftness, that flight and opposition were vain alike.
33As he had done in all his earlier writings, Johnson emphasizes the violence and brutality of the Europeans. Here he distills it, in carefully balanced clauses, into a tradeoff between hot-blooded slaughter and cool, sadistic murder, with slavery the only possible alternative: "Those invaders ranged over the continent, slaughtering in their rage those that resisted, and those that submitted, in their mirth. Of those that remained, some were buried in caverns, and condemned to dig metals for their masters [and] some were employed in tilling the ground, of which foreign tyrants devour the produce."
34From this bloody history, the Chief proceeds to an analysis of more "civilized" behaviors by Europeans that also prove treacherous and hypocritical. Thus, in exposing the hypocrisy even of those colonists who claim to fight the Indians only in "self-defense," the Chiefs voice reaches a note of controlled but biting irony: "Some there are who boast their humanity, and content themselves to seize our chaces and fisheries, who drive us from every track of ground where fertility and pleasantness invite them to settle, and make no war upon us except when we intrude upon our own lands" (emphasis added).
35Through the Chief’s discourse, Johnson leaves virtually no category of European activity, no posture of European presence in America, untainted by hypocrisy and injustice. Even treaties and trading agreements are seen to be exploitative, as Johnson is at pains to prove in an analysis that is partly political and partly psychological. Speaking of the treaty-makers and traders who, in his words, "pretend to have purchased a right of residence and tyranny," the Chief shows their treaties to be more profoundly treacherous even than open violence:
Surely the insolence of such bargains is more offensive than the avowed and open dominion of force. What reward can induce the possessor of a country to admit a stranger more powerful than himself? Fraud or terror must operate in such contracts; either they promised protection which they never afforded, or instruction which they never imparted.... Their treaties are only to deceive, and their traffick only to defraud us.
36Thus the reasoned arguments about treaties as tools of exploitation, which Johnson made in his Literary Magazine essay of 1756, are reinforced here by the very human chords sounded in the Chiefs litany of persecution, entrapment, and resentment.17
37The root of Johnson’s objections, the principles on which his whole critique of European behavior is based, are revealed in the next passage. Again Johnson achieves an ironic edge as the Chief speaks in innocent circumlocutions about what readers recognize as Christian doctrine:
They have a written law among them, of which they boast as derived from him who made the earth and sea, and by which they profess to believe that man will be made happy when life shall forsake him. Why is not this law communicated to us? It is concealed because it is violated. For how can they preach it to an Indian nation, when I am told that one of its first precepts forbids them to do to others what they would not that others should do to them.
38Of the two wrongs described here, that of Christians violating their own creed in mistreating the Indians and that of their withholding the Christian faith from them, the former is more readily acknowledged by modem readers than the latter. In the secular postmodern era, even self-confessed humanists tend to see the desire to convert Indians to Christianity as another aspect of cultural imperialism.
39Not so for Johnson however. As a devout Christian, sincere and active in his beliefs, the withholding of the possibility of salvation, of the prospect of eternal life after death, was the darkest evil one human being could commit against another. Johnson said so explicitly in a letter of 1766 in which he argued on behalf of a project to translate the Bible into Gaelic for the benefit of Scottish Highlanders. He struggled to find language strong enough to convey the intensity of his belief and to castigate those who would oppose such projects. It is telling that in this letter he ultimately connects negligent Christians with the darkest image he knows, that of slaveholders in America:
He that voluntarily continues ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces; as to him that should extinguish the tapers of a light-house, might justly be imputed the calamities of shipwrecks.... To omit for a year, or for a day, the most efficacious method of advancing Christianity, in compliance with any purposes that terminate on this side of the grave, is a crime of which I know not that the world has yet had an example, except in the practice of the planters of America, a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.18
40Whatever one's personal response to such a belief, it seems clear that in the context of the eighteenth century the ideals of Christian humanism could drive one to many of the same conclusions about racism and imperialism as the ideas of "natural rights" and the "rights of man" held by secular Enlightenment theorists. In this sense, Johnson's critique of European oppression and cruelty in the New World is fully as radical as any offered by Godwin, Paine, Wollstonecraft, and their circles.
41By accumulated weight of emotional appeal and reasoned argument, the Chiefs speech moves inexorably toward a single conclusion: that the European presence in America is wrong—wrong in the past, wrong now, wrong at any time. This duly unfolds in the final paragraph of the essay. What surprises one, however, is the intensity with which Johnson invests the Chiefs imagined resentment. Looking on the war between France and England as a momentous opportunity for the Indians, the Chief urges his people to harden their hearts:
The time perhaps is now approaching when the pride of usurpation shall be crushed, and the cruelties of invasion shall be revenged. The sons of rapacity have now drawn their swords upon each other, and referred their claims to the decision of war; let us look unconcerned upon the slaughter, and remember that the death of every European delivers the country from a tyrant and a robber; for what is the claim of either nation, but the claim of the vulture to the leveret, of the tiger to the faun?
42There is nothing sentimentalized or pastoral about Johnson's Indian chief here: European blood is flowing and the Indians welcome it. Meanwhile the Chiefs speech closes with a righteous call to arms against the European oppressors: "Let us endeavour, in the mean time, [says the Chief] to learn their discipline, and to forge their weapons; and when they shall be weakened with mutual slaughter, let us rush down upon them, force their remains to take shelter in their ships, and reign once more in our native country." It is these lines that suggest how far Johnson, with his characteristic empathy and psychological understanding, has entered into the mind of his subject. Johnson seems almost to have lost, temporarily, a sense of his readership, which was of course thoroughly European in its makeup and unlikely to be sympathetic to what comes next. The final stage of the fantasy is the repulsion of all Europeans from America and the restoration of the land to its native peoples. The fantasy was wildly impossible, of course; long before Johnson's time European settlement and control in America had developed too far to be reversed. But what of the response of Johnson's readers, who must have been startled (to say the least) at such an essay? What if Johnson and writers like him had succeeded in fostering a new ethos among the public, that eventually persuaded policy-makers to curb expansion and treat indigenous peoples fairly? Of course that, too, is a fantasy, our fantasy, and perhaps the kind of necessary illusion we cling to whenever we hope that enlightened discourse might shape human events.
43Johnson did not limit his thinking just to the plight of native Americans. He intuitively understood the connections between European oppression of the Indians and the enslavement of Africans, and he pointedly drew that connection in several of his writings. If we look back at Idler 81, for example, we see the plight of Indians and Black slaves intertwined from the beginning. "When the sword and the mines have destroyed the natives," Johnson wrote, "they [the Europeans] supply their place by human beings of another colour, brought from some distant country to perish here under toil and torture." Fifteen years later, in Taxation No Tyranny (1775), Johnson was to enrage supporters of the American independence movement with his suggestion that the British harness the resentments of two wronged peoples in America, by restoring lands to the Indians and freeing the Black slaves, and then arming both to join in the fight against the colonial rebels.19
44But it is in another text of 1759, Johnson's innocuous-seeming "Introduction" to the collection of narratives called The World Displayed (1759-60), that he traces most completely the European exploration and conquest of Africa, in ways that exactly parallel his account of the European encounter with America. Though its implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it deserves to be read as a companion piece to Idler 81. The same themes, supported by example after horrible example, are developed: the European violence, treachery, and slavery, all without provocation; the dehumanization of Africans whom, to Johnson's fury, the Portugese "scarcely considered... as distinct from beasts"; the denial of any natural rights or rights of prior possession to the people; the failure to offer Christian education and baptism; the fraudulent treaties made under duress and duplicity; the conditioning of Africans to be suspicious and hostile by the experience of one cruel and treacherous European after another. At one point Johnson pauses to generalize that "The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast, but to gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right, and practise cruelty without incentive."20 By the time he has finished his review of the history of discovery leading up to the period covered in the book, Johnson can scarcely contain his sarcasm: "Such," he writes as he draws to a close, "was the State of Portugese navigation, when in 1492, Columbus made the daring and prosperous voyage, which gave a new world to European curiosity and European cruelty" (236). In short, throughout Johnson’s thought and writing, whatever virtues or achievements of European civilization he may extol (and he praises many), he clearly regarded its inhumane treatment of non-Europeans as by far its greatest evil.
45Let me return, finally, to the classroom where all this started, to a remark that one of the Navajo students made after reading Johnson's Idler 81 and discussing it in class. He hadn’t known, the student said, that any such works existed; he hadn't known that any "Anglos" (Americans of European descent) had ever held such ideas or written so sympathetically on behalf of his people. Such a response persuades me that Johnson deserves a new and wider readership, beyond the academic circles and dictionaries of quotations to which he is largely confined today. To the students I met, Johnson's moral sensitivity and imagination made him seem prescient. His writings about American Indians foreshadowed so many modem developments: the reconsideration of Columbus' real impact on the New World, the compensation of Indians for past wrongs, the restitution of lands and of governmental autonomy, the recovery and recognition of an Indian perspective on the history of the New World. All these compare favorably in modem eyes with Johnson's enlightened views expressed elsewhere in his writings on slavery, on women's education, and on charity towards socially ostracized groups such as prostitutes and alcoholics. On these as on so many other human issues, when we set out to address them we often find Johnson has already been there.
Notes de bas de page
1 The group of Native American students were enrolled in an advanced summer school for secondary students conducted every July at Oxford University (Pembroke and St. Peter’s colleges); they were top students from Tuba City High School, Tuba City, Arizona (located in the midst of the Navajo Indian Reservation) who were awarded scholarships funded by the Macy Foundation and other private benefactors.
2 Taxation no Tyranny (1775), reprinted in Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene, vol. 10 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1977) 421. For an example of a reader who resented Johnson's criticism of Columbus and, by extension, of European "progress," see [Anon.] Tyranny Unmasked: An Answer to a Late Pamphlet Entitled Taxation no Tyranny (London, 1775) 63-65.
3 "The Life of Sir Francis Drake," Gentleman's Magazine 10 (1740): 352; 389-96; 443-47; 509-15; 600-03 and 11 (1741): 38-44, reprinted in Early Biographical Writings of Dr Johnson, ed. J.D. Fleeman (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1973) 36-66. "Introduction," The World Displayed, vol. 1 (London, 1759) [iii]-xxxii, reprinted in Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven: Yale UP, 1937) 216-37. All further references are to these editions.
4 The quotation continues: "for there is in London all that life can afford." See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 20 September 1777.
5 "Life of Drake" 51.
6 "Life of Drake" 54.
7 "Life of Drake" 58.
8 "Life of Drake" 53-54 and 58.
9 See Greene, ed., Political Writings 116-300, where he reprints thirteen articles Johnson wrote for the Literary Magazine, Gentleman’s Magazine, and others between 1756 and 1761.
10 "Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain," Literary Magazine 1 (May 1756): 1-9, reprinted in Greene, ed. Political Writings 126-50.
11 For a fuller account of Johnson's views on the war, see Greene's introductions and notes in Political Writings, passim, and Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990) 154-83.
12 "Observations on the Present State of Affairs," Literary Magazine 1 (Aug. 1756): [161]-65, reprinted in Greene, ed., Political Writings 184-96.
13 Quoted from The Idler and The Adventurer, eds. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L.F. Powell, vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1963) 64-65.
14 [Dr. Joseph Towers,] A Letter to Dr. Samuel Johnson: Ocasioned by His Late Political Publications (London, 1775) 17.
15 For more on Johnson's efforts to introduce female and adolescent voices into the Rambler and Idler, see Basker, "Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers, and the Myth of Johnson's Misogyny," The Age of Johnson 3 (1990): 63-90 and "Corning of Age in Johnson's England: Adolescence in the Rambler," Les Ages de la vie en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Serge Soupel (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995) 197-212.
16 For classical treatments of the myth of the golden age and the succession of ages (bronze, iron, etc.) that followed, see: Hesiod, Works and Days 11. 109-20 and 139-55; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1. 89-142; Virgil, Georgics 1. 121ff. ; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5. 925-66. I am indebted to Dr. Roy Gibson of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University for much of this information.
17 "On the Present State of Affairs" 186-87.
18 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 13 August 1766.
19 Taxation No Tyranny 451-52. The seriousness of Johnson's suggestion is debatable and such ideas were circulating widely in 1775, but it is interesting nonetheless that versions of these policies were adopted by various British governors and commanders in 1775-76. See, for example, the furious debate in Parliament in January 1778, led by Edmund Burke, over Lord Dunmore’s enlistment of Indians and escaped slaves in the war in Virginia, as reported in the Scots Magazine 40 (Oct. 1778): 521-27.
20 "Introduction," The World Displayed 228.
Auteur
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James G. Basker
Barnard College-Columbia University
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