The West Street shop where we meet made conversation possible in two ways

2.2. Assimilation and Interracial Marriage in Lydia Maria Child’s The First Settlers of New-England
The second work under consideration, The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets (1829), was written by Lydia Maria Child during a crisis in Georgia between the Cherokees and the white settlers, which, in 1830, led to the ratification by the Senate of the Indian Removal Act under Jackson’s presidency.
This book, printed by Munroe & Francis, a small publishing house in Boston, was not her first at- tempt to address the Native Americans’ cause. Child, who had the opportunity to get in direct contact with some Indian tribes during her childhood that was spent in Maine, from the early 1820s devoted much of her intellectual efforts to defending Native peoples throughout her life. In addition to the articles published in magazines for young readers, (such as The Juvenile Miscellany, the first success- ful American children’s magazine that she edited), her first historical novel, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times. By an American (1824) describes the origins of American history from a female point of view. It portrays the interracial marriage between a young Puritan woman and a Native American man and represents her first attempt to undermine the traditional exceptionalist Puritan historical narrative on the founding of the United States. Worthy of mention are also the many articles she published in the Massachusetts Journal, a radical political newspaper founded by her husband David, which became a channel of opposition⁴⁵ to the Indian Removal Act and even brought him, in 1831, a personal letter of thanks from the Cherokee Indian Chief John Ross.⁴⁶
Although it appears to be a book dedicated to a younger audience, The First Settlers of New-England reveals its great political relevance because it is actually a revisionist history of American colonization David Lee Child’s articles published in the Massachusetts Journal claimed the Cherokees’ right to sovereignty of the land but, arguing that “these native proprietors must disappear from the scenes of human action,” they implicitly accepted the assumption that the Indians were destined to extinction. After Child’s marriage to David, described by the biographer Karcher as a “political partnership,” the editorial policy of the Journal changed in support of the claims of the Cherokees and, more generally, of the right of all Indians to life and possession of land without any reference to the “vanishing Indian” myth. According to Karcher, this can be seen as a sign of the great influence that Child had on her husband and on the editorship of the magazine. Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 12–13.
In the letter, written on February 11, 1831, John Ross thanks David Lee Child “for the honorable and generous feelings you have expressed in sympathy for the sufferings of the poor Cherokees.” John Ross, “Letter to David Lee Child,” February 11, 1831, Papers of Lydia Maria Child, ca. 1827–1878, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
that highlights the contradictions underlying the creation of the nation and the devastations carried out by English Puritans.
In the introduction, Child explained the many reasons why she wrote this book. By using a histor- ical approach, she aimed to show readers that Indians had welcomed the Pilgrim Fathers in a friendly and courteous way. She criticized much of the historiography,⁴⁷ which was “desirous of proving the origin of the war to have been just.”⁴⁸ “The Indians have been strangely misrepresented, either through ignorance or design, or both; and men have given themselves little trouble to investigate the subject.”⁴⁹ According to Child, a major issue with historiography was that sources were written by the winners, so they only told and documented part of the truth, as seen in the following quotation:
We receive all our information from those who committed the guilty deed, and therefore must conclude that nothing is left untold that would in any measure lessen the odium of these dark transactions, or lessen the offences of our ancestors.
Her goal, she clearly stated, was also to illustrate the positive characteristics of the Native Americans and to prove, “from the most authentic records,” that the treatment they received by those she defined as “the usurpers of their soil” was “in direct violation of the religious and civil institutions which we have heretofore so nobly defended and by which we profess to be governed.” According to Child, the United States had “the finger of scorn” pointed at it, “for having so grossly violated the principles which form the basis of our government.” “This crooked and narrow-minded policy which we have adopted in reference to the Indians,” she affirmed, referring to the Indian Removal Act, “will assuredly subject us to the calamitous reverses which have fallen on other nations, whose path to empire has been marked by the blood and ruin of their fellow-men.” Therefore, according to Child, it was precisely the Indian Question that revealed to the American people the underlying contradictions of their country, which was created by proclaiming the principles of freedom and equality of all citizens and, instead, was expanding through repeated wars of extermination and colonization. The government’s attitude towards the Native Americans would lead the country to its ruin.⁵¹
What led to the colonization of the Americas, according to Child, was exclusively the Europeans’ “strong desire to possess the land and drive out the heathen inhabitants.”⁵² Thus, she explicitly chal- lenged the religious foundations of American exceptionalism, advocated by the Puritans, described as belonging to “a sect” who believed they were “a chosen people, and, like the Israelites, authorized by God to destroy or drive out the heathen, as they styled the Indians.”⁵³ The first settlers “believed it to be for the glory of God to take away the lives of his creatures.”⁵⁴ They demolished “social happiness and confidential intercourse,” gave “force and scope to the most hateful passions”⁵⁵ and allied with each other to fight their common enemy, the Indians, “regardless of the precepts of our benign Master, and the ties which bind man to his fellow beings.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, in the same manner as the desire for conquest had been the foundation for the establishment of the American colonies, according to Child “this disposition has been transmitted to their descendants.
that highlights the contradictions underlying the creation of the nation and the devastations carried out by English Puritans.
In the introduction, Child explained the many reasons why she wrote this book. By using a histor- ical approach, she aimed to show readers that Indians had welcomed the Pilgrim Fathers in a friendly and courteous way. She criticized much of the historiography,⁴⁷ which was “desirous of proving the origin of the war to have been just.”⁴⁸ “The Indians have been strangely misrepresented, either through ignorance or design, or both; and men have given themselves little trouble to investigate the subject.”⁴⁹ According to Child, a major issue with historiography was that sources were written by the winners, so they only told and documented part of the truth, as seen in the following quotation:

We receive all our information from those who committed the guilty deed, and therefore must conclude that nothing is left untold that would in any measure lessen the odium of these dark transactions, or lessen the offences of our ancestors.⁵⁰

Her goal, she clearly stated, was also to illustrate the positive characteristics of the Native Americans and to prove, “from the most authentic records,” that the treatment they received by those she defined as “the usurpers of their soil” was “in direct violation of the religious and civil institutions which we have heretofore so nobly defended and by which we profess to be governed.” According to Child, the United States had “the finger of scorn” pointed at it, “for having so grossly violated the principles which form the basis of our government.” “This crooked and narrow-minded policy which we have adopted in reference to the Indians,” she affirmed, referring to the Indian Removal Act, “will assuredly subject us to the calamitous reverses which have fallen on other nations, whose path to empire has been marked by the blood and ruin of their fellow-men.” Therefore, according to Child, it was precisely the Indian Question that revealed to the American people the underlying contradictions of their country, which was created by proclaiming the principles of freedom and equality of all citizens and, instead, was expanding through repeated wars of extermination and colonization. The government’s attitude towards the Native Americans would lead the country to its ruin.⁵¹

What led to the colonization of the Americas, according to Child, was exclusively the Europeans’ “strong desire to possess the land and drive out the heathen inhabitants.”⁵² Thus, she explicitly chal- lenged the religious foundations of American exceptionalism, advocated by the Puritans, described as belonging to “a sect” who believed they were “a chosen people, and, like the Israelites, authorized by God to destroy or drive out the heathen, as they styled the Indians.”⁵³ The first settlers “believed it to be for the glory of God to take away the lives of his creatures.”⁵⁴ They demolished “social happiness and confidential intercourse,” gave “force and scope to the most hateful passions”⁵⁵ and allied with each other to fight their common enemy, the Indians, “regardless of the precepts of our benign Master, and the ties which bind man to his fellow beings.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, in the same manner as the desire for conquest had been the foundation for the establishment of the American colonies, according to Child “this disposition has been transmitted to their descendants.
She mentioned the case of the Cherokees, who had adopted “our arts, our religion, and husbandry,” established an ever-growing school system, founded a bilingual magazine, turned to agriculture and trade, established a public road system, adopted the Christian religion as the “religion of the nation” and, above all, implemented a republican constitution based on the U.S. model, and argued that the American government should allow them “to retain what is left of their native inheritance.”⁶⁵ Accord- ing to Child, they had been deceived by Americans because they had to give up a considerable part of their land, which was being definitively stolen from them, along with all the improvements they had made over the past thirty years, described as follows: “they are now urged to quit their territory, with all their improvements, and retire to the western wilds, where they must erelong miserably perish, to gratify the insatiable cupidity of the Georgians.” However, it is clear that Child reaffirmed tradi- tional racial hierarchies and patterns of white supremacism when she argued that, by bargaining with the officers of George Washington, “their venerated father,” and embracing American customs and traditions, the Cherokees became “a civilized community.”⁶⁶
Child stated that the Indian Removal Act was “a policy of death and desolation” and “a system of cruelty, fraud, and outrage, which has no parallel.”⁶⁷ She quoted the words of the Ohio congressmen Samuel Finley Vinton and John Woods, who had denounced the precarious conditions in which Native Americans lived as a result of the various removals that had been carried out in previous decades by the American government.

While we are talking about our justice, our generosity, our feelings of humanity for the Indians—in the same breath we say, that our citizens—that the American People—with ruthless violence and injustice are trampling the weak remnant of these once powerful nations in the dust. If we cannot protect them within the limits of our State Governments, in sight of our Courts of Justice, and within reach of the arm of the laws, we cannot protect them when placed beyond the limits of any organized civil government.⁶⁸

Moreover, Child pointed out,

”I devoutly trust that our Government will not gain pusillanimously compromise with the sordid avaricious Georgians, and bargain their honour and integrity for being allowed to compel, in their own way, the unfortunate Indians to abandon their country, which had been most solemnly guarantied to them and their posterity.⁶⁹

Child trusted that, when men understood the wrongs committed against the Indians, they would awake from the torpor of indifference, which she judged to be the great evil of her time and would join the cause of the Native Americans. She claimed to be “cheered by the hope, that men of talents and integrity, when they find that no hostile design was projected against the white men, until every pacific overture had failed of success, will be aroused from the torpid indifference with which they have hitherto witnessed the unexampled fate of the Indians, and nobly and fearlessly stand forward in their defence.”⁷⁰ In this process, American children and youths, whom the book addresses, played a leading political role, as such they should understand their moral obligation towards a country that had betrayed the principles underlying its foundation. Consequently, Child wrote:

I ardently hope that this unvarnished tale, which I have offered to view, will impress our youth with the conviction of their obligation to alleviate, as much as is in their power

If the children who read Child’s narrative were “able to incite a general interest in their favour” among their “young friends,” “we may confidently expect that the rising generation will strive to me- liorate their condition.