A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

The emergence of Andrew Jackson as a national political force during the 1824 contest for the presidency marked an important moment in the problematic saga of Indian Removal. Jackson, a pro-settler populist, would fail to win this time around, but an essential part of his platform was the removal of eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi—a subject that drew increasing interest as the decade progressed. Perhaps not unexpectedly, then, during this time period the popular press saw a dramatic uptick in mentions of native populations. Prior to the 1820s, the major native populations that were ultimately subjected to Jackson’s Indian Removal Act (1830) were infrequently mentioned in the period’s newspapers. However, during the 1820s, mentions of the various groups that made up the five “Civilized Tribes” increased by roughly 500%. Such interest was sustained throughout the 1830s until the 1840s, when removal of these groups wound to a close and the drama of many eastern tribes was relocated to a space less integral to white America.³ While these trends seem perhaps wholly unremarkable given the historical events of the late 1820s through the early 1840s, what is remarkable is that during this same period references to the Inca, an American indigenous nation that was historically, culturally, and politically divorced from Jackson’s Removal Act, nevertheless followed a nearly identical pattern. The public fascination with the Incan people—virtually nonexistent in the 1810s—became so pronounced by the 1830s that mentions of the Inca ultimately surpassed the number of mentions of the Choctaws themselves.⁴ Like the rest of the references to the eastern tribes, mentions of the Inca began to die off precipitously at the end of the 1840s.

While there are undoubtedly a whole host of factors contributing to the renewed and subsequent loss of interest in the Incan people, the fact that this interest so closely mirrors the broader cultural interest in the native nations affected by Indian Removal suggests that writers and readers of early to mid-century periodicals linked these two groups and their histories—culturally, ideologically, and simply imaginatively. For most Americans, the Inca were synonymous with the pinnacle of aboriginal civilization in the New World. They were known to have cultivated an agrarian society with complex social structures and dedicated centers for learning. The five “Civilized Tribes” targeted by the Removal Act had to more or less a degree shown a willingness to embrace colonial dress, education, and agricultural practices, and were perceived as demonstrating a similar interest in “advancing” their peoples (hence the ethnocentric appellation). This commitment to building and maintaining such a society was, however, only the most transparent of similarities that nineteenth-century white Americans saw between the Inca and these eastern tribes.

      In an 1840 appraisal of Samuel George Morton’s highly influential Crania Americana, a reviewer in the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery used the similarities between Incan skulls and those of the Eastern tribes as evidence to confirm the cultural similarities that he already imagined existed between them. His commentary thus links these tribes and the Inca through physiognomic traits while simultaneously distancing both groups from other Native people—people with whom these eastern tribes clearly shared closer genetic traits than with the Inca. In his estimation, the “Inca or modern Peruvian skull….is indicative…of having belonged to a superior stock of men—a stock well calculated to prove victors and conquerors, in warfare with the others” (Reviews 1840, p. 122). Similarly, he mentioned that “the [Seminole] head is indicative of no common capacity, and shows the Seminole to be a well-endowed variety of the American race. No wonder that…the conquest of them should be difficult….Without giving their measurements, we shall merely mention that the skulls of the Creek and Cherokees are on the same order as the Seminoles. And their history testifies that those two nations also are warlike and formidable….[However, T]he Indians of west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, are of an inferior order. This appears [i.e., is confirmed] from the following measurements…” (Reviews 1840, p. 124). Interestingly, Morton’s work not only offers readers imaginary genetic links between the Inca and these eastern tribes but also provides the explanation for the US government’s difficulty in suppressing or manipulating them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these same cranial measurements also become Morton’s foundation for asserting that it is nevertheless white America’s ultimate destiny to “conquer” if not “eradicate” such natives, as his largest cranial capacity measurements were reserved for whites.

In addition to the imagined genetic and cultural connections brokered through this phrenological pseudoscience, similarities in the political situation faced by the “Civilized Tribes” and the Inca were imagined as well. In 1826, The Boston Monthly Magazine published an article directly comparing the fate of the “Last of the Inca” with the fate of Native American people.⁵ The author suggests that there is a comparison to be made between the fate of “the Inca” once they found themselves part of “Spanish America” and “the Creeks, the Cherokees, and other tribes in the United States, who, hemmed in by our fixed population, have no resources but either to adopt the manners of the civilized neighbors, to be gradually extinguished, or to fly with the feeble remnants of their might beyond the Mississippi; and how striking is the relative consequence of the South Americans!”—whose continued resistance to Spanish authority is characterized as preserving their cultural, social, and political identity for a time, but ultimately leading to extinction (Last of the Incas 1826, p. 464). An article appearing in The American Monthly Magazine in 1830 again turns to the history of the Incan people to shed light on the current situation of the Cherokee in America. Essentially a defense of acculturation, the essay claims that men who support such ideas are like “the Spanish Las Casas of other days…interested in the experiment of Indian civilization….which do their hearts at least no discredit” (Cherokee Sovereignty 1830, p. 78). By invoking Las Casas in this manner, the writer not only lends a kind of moral credibility to those individuals who have been advocating for Cherokee rights while simultaneously working to civilize or acculturate them—as Las Casas had done for indigenous Americans—but he or she also invokes the specter of the Black Legend treatment of the Inca as well, a subtle warning to readers that America is treading a delicate line that, if crossed, threatens to mar their national reputation as deeply as the atrocities of the conquistadors had marred Spain’s. The author makes this point explicitly when condemning the way in which “the crown ratified the jurisdiction which Pizarro ‘asserted’ over [the Incan people],” even to the point of his “adjudg[ing] and effect[ing] the execution of the Peruvian Inca” (Ibid., p.82). As this article shows, the history of the Incan people was being mined to better understand not only the state of native peoples currently, but the moral dangers that white Americans faced as they sought to negotiate their dealings with them. The stakes, according to this article, couldn’t be higher, as any kind of repetition of actions similar to those of the Black Legend Spanish would imperil not only Americans’ moral rectitude, but their national character as well. This critique would have been especially withering because throughout the revolutionary period and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Black Legend of the Spanish was regularly invoked as perhaps the most monstrous example of how feudalistic forms of government corrupted humanity, denied natural rights, and subverted justice. As Eric Wertheimer has noted, this legend depicted the Spanish as acting out of a “rapacity and greed [that] seem to arise naturally from…[a] degraded social and cultural template,” actions that ultimately portrayed the native peoples they colonized “as New World martyrs of corrupt empire” (Wertheimer 1999, p. 20). The legend thus served in the cultural imaginary as “a way of appropriating history in order to bolster [American] national prospects [and identity] in the present” (Wertheimer, p. 32). On the heels of such use of the Black Legend, being equated to any degree with the Spanish conquistadors would have been a stinging blow for many—essentially charging them with a form of ideological treason. To rehearse the atrocities of the Spanish, it subtly suggests, would also be to suggest that there was very little difference between monarchical Spain and democratic America—a difference that Americans felt they had just fought at least two wars to establish and defend. Thus, the history of the Inca appeared as a valuable and crucially important touchstone for Americans to consider as they contemplated the course of action they should take relative