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             Return to Table of Contents Selecting bands of Indians as the model for displays of resistance to a central authority—whether the national government, as in the Whiskey Rebellion, the banks, or the rent collectors—carried strong messages of Americanness and otherness at the same time. WORKS CITED
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Throughout the original colonies, before and after the American Revolution, whites took on the costumes and some of the rituals and social organization of Indians. Groups of young white males bonded together for two main reasons. Settlers deployed Indian devices as a way of organizing themselves in opposition to those denying them title to the lands they had developed. Meanwhile, in urban commercial communities, elites demonstrated their wit and invention by learning how to dress, sing, dance, and even orate in Indian style as members of fraternities that drew on Indian influences. On occasion, the city fraternal organizations were called upon to act as hosts for actual Indian groups as they came to the city in some official capacity. This led to the anomalous situation of play Indians and real Indians ceremonializing with each other. This article describes both kinds of white Indians from New York State. If we are to credit the reports of early American travelers and letter writers, the citizens of the new nation vigorously maintained European traditions of rough music—both the skimmington and the more uniquely American tarring and feathering and riding on a rail—for quick frontier justice and sometimes to have a little neighborly fun, as well. Unsurprisingly, the settlers were hungry for freehold land. They felt it their god-given right to “improve” the land—legitimated through the “empty lands” or vacuum domicilium argument—cutting down the trees, gathering the stones in the field, erecting fences out of what was gathered, and plowing long straight furrows. When possible, they wanted a new arrival to get started on his own enterprise, knowing that whatever the neighbors could do, it would raise the value of their own land—if they ever were able to achieve ownership. Through the house-raisings, bees, and other frolics that called neighboring farmers and then they expected to own it. But claiming the land, improving it, and prospering proved extremely difficult, especially in the upper reaches of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Connecticut rivers. These were lands that had rival claimants: expansive Yorkers, the Jerseyites, pious Pennsylvanians, and wild Yankees from Connecticut. Alan Taylor’s Pulitzer prize–winning book, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995), tells the story vigorously. More than occasionally, brushfire wars broke out between two or more of the claimant parties. But all agreed that the real enemy were the manor lords, land companies, and landlords, all of whom would deny ownership of the land, even if one side were able to burn down the dwellings and blockade houses of the others. And each party seems to have attempted to enlist the help of an Iroquois leader and his braves. Many of the Indian leaders prevailed upon were indiscriminate as to who they were killing and scalping. This was the situation that led to such historical horror stories as the Battle of Minisink and the Yankee-Pennamite Wars.
The controversy over land was compounded by the different logics of the settlers. Some claimed ownership through title ultimately traceable to monarchical fiat, others through English parliamentary disposition, and still others through hereditary entitlements established before the territory was British or American. In the end, those who felt most strongly were those who held no title whatsoever: the squatters and renters who thought they would be able to hang on to a farm through what today is called “sweat equity,” that is, by actual physical improvements to which they could point. And it was these renters and squatters who proved to be the most jealous of their rights and the most active in banding together to assert them. Whites, wearing the hunting outfit of the pioneers, which they had adapted from the Iroquois and Algonquins who constituted most of the indigenous population, learned war tactics from the Indians and went even further, forming themselves into their own quasi-tribal organizations. In times of open skirmishes, they called themselves by many local names: Calico Indians, Shirt Boys, Green Mountain Boys, and White Indians. They made noises to suggest that, like the Iroquois themselves, they would battle to protect their land rights. They met secretly, developed “Indian” names, code words, and shibboleths by which they could recognize each other when they met. Thus, they were playing Indians—but seriously (Deloria 1998). Sometimes, at the point at which the different state governments pursued these claims, these vigilante groups received encouragement to fight from the landowners and their agents, the speculators. Often the farmers themselves got caught between rival claimants, making it all the more difficult for them to obtain title to their farms. Many of the more prosperous settlers were forced to [pay] a number of states or land company claimants, simply to clear a title. Moreover, when the Revolution began, they found themselves fighting a European war in which they had little interest, understanding that they would inevitably be the losers when their crops and cattle were commandeered. They knew that in these national and international conflicts, it was the small farmer who was going to wind up the loser, no matter who signed the treaties (Kim 1987). The nation emerged during the period when the very notion of the public citizen came to play a central role in everyday life. An outgrowth of commercial enterprise, “public man” emerged as a person of property and substance. These were men who invested a good deal in projecting power and responsibility by going into public and displaying their roles as reluctant but willing leaders. Public settings—courts, taverns and lodges, and other places of assembly— provided the arenas in which they demonstrated their mastery over the approved power practices of their day: parades, speeches, debates, and legal and political discussions. In many kinds of voluntary associations, from the secret and apparently spontaneous gatherings of the Calico Indians to the more formal organizations like various fire brigades and local military regiments, white male Americans freely chose to announce themselves as a new breed of citizen. Clubs and other such organizations broke out all over the colonies in the first generation of the eighteenth century: groups like Benjamin Franklin’s Junto and Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Tuesday Club, in addition to the introduction of freemasonry. Many of these clubs developed into the Committees of Correspondence and the Sons of Liberty after the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. Whether they were carrying out frontier justice, organizing in the face of a perceived common enemy, or simply gathering to have fun, these voluntary groups emerged throughout the colonies well before the formal separation from Great Britain. Many other bands of costumed or disguised young men mobilized to comment on perceived misbehavior within the community or on failures in equity imposed from outside. In mock parades, parodies of patriotic oratorical events, and especially in hangings and burnings in effigy, rallying around the Liberty Pole, the players made fun as they had fun. By developing a wide range of voluntary associations, from the occasional come-one–come-all work party to the more formal organization of the brigade, the lodge, and the band, early Americans put on display the ideal of freehold property used for agricultural purposes. In the countryside, the community of working players reenacted settlement itself. These gregarious practices soon came to be thought of as both American and traditional. I The Anti-Rent War of the 1840s was a local example of such banding outbreaks. Indeed, it was common throughout the states for young men to costume and comport themselves as Indian warriors in blood brotherhoods that roamed the countryside. One old-timer recalled:. . . leather caps something like a bag with holes cut for the eyes, nose, and mouth. There were horns on the caps, and a fringe around the neck, and a cow’s tail tied on behind, and I don’t know what-all. Oh! those caps were hideous looking things—perfectly infernal—and no two were alike. The Indians had blouses of striped calico, belted at the waist, and some of them had pants of the same material or of red flannel. (Johnson 1922, 22)When the Calico Indians mounted their campaign, they drew on tactics used by the other “Indian” resistance groups. As they explained in their public documents, the Calico Indians were protest masqueraders, like the Mohawks of the Boston Tea Party (Christman 1961, 92). These mobilized bands availed themselves of symbols of disorder—motley costumes and noisemakers—to dramatize a socially confrontational stance. Ordinarily, they came together for holidays, roaming the town and countryside, pausing at doors and gates where they offered a little performance, bringing with them luck and good cheer. Often called “antics and horribles,” they keyed the neighborhood that something wild was about to take place, usually in fun. To this day, many small-town festivities are called the parade of the “antiques and horribles” or Callithumpian Bands, or they use the old German term, Belsnicklers. The ancestors of these apparently spontaneous bands were the youth groups found throughout Europe: the apprentices of the crafts guilds and the novices of the confraternities. By custom, these young men were given a yearly time at which they were encouraged to turn the world upside down. The liberties taken on such occasions included not only seizing and often inverting everyday symbols of power, but making satiric social and political commentary. Through mock trials, effigy hangings and burnings, and performing libels (plays in which the misdeeds of the local gentry were commented upon), they carried the power to taunt, disorient, and entertain wherever they clowned.
These practices seem to have migrated with the English settlers, especially those making common cause in the face of outside officialdom. Historians studying the relationship between riots, rebellions, and revolution in the colonies regard these mobbings as common. For instance, historian Pauline Maier says of eighteenth-century life, “Americans accepted the existence of popular uprisings with remarkable ease.” She continues, “In certain circumstances . . . the people would rise up almost as a natural force, as night follows day, and this phenomenon often contributed to the public welfare. The colonists’ attitude depended in large part upon a tradition of popular uprisings that also shaped the forms of popular force during the revolutionary era” (Maier 1972, 3). In New York, as in other colonies, if the groups forming themselves came together spontaneously, the practices themselves were anything but spontaneous inventions. The white Indian bands seized the night and built their scare techniques from the guerrilla tactics learned the hard way by settlers over the years. The secrecy of the white Indian bands, their disguise, and their attacks were rationalized as historically sanctioned resistance exercised by those concerned with the “ancient liberties.” Like the Boston Mohawks, far from being dressed in Native American garb, they clothed themselves in sheets and blankets and women’s dresses of various sorts, masking or darkening their faces against recognition during the night. Like the Wild Man or Green Man of European celebrations, Indian figures represented something like the spirit of the land. This was a technique widely found in European festive costumes—to appear or to represent the earliest indigenous peoples now lost to the land, or to appear as one or another kind of stranger who has wandered in from the East, as Moors, Turks, or East Indians. The calico cloth in the Calico Indians’ name, in fact, was the multicolored, inexpensive cotton fabric originally imported from India and first known as Calcutta cloth or Calicut, suggesting an oriental origin. As they have been described, only the anonymity afforded by the disguise distinguished the maskers. No two costumes were alike in color, style, or decoration, and their arms were makeshift and varied— muskets, pistols, spears, hatchets and axes, cheese knives, bits of scythes, and clubs. Some of the chiefs of tribes were distinguishable by long dresses like women’s nightgowns. Otherwise the disguise was so complete that anecdotes were told about parents talking for hours with their own sons and struggling sisters being overwhelmed by the unwelcome caresses of their own brothers, without the slightest suspicion of their identity (Christman 1961: 92–3). Whether because of sheeting, netting, or some other facial cover, their voices were muffled in the manner of holiday mummers. Perhaps they also held pieces of wood in their mouths, like the White Indians of Maine. They came to know each other by their disguises, the names of the captains often deriving from the color of the costume they wore: “Yellow Jacket,” “Black Hawk,” “Red Jacket,” etc. The impulse was to make themselves strange, to exoticize in order to intensify their scare tactics. As described by Thomas Slaughter, the Calico Indians saw themselves as “Friends of Liberty,” as opposed to the representation of outside authority, “Friends of Order” (1986, 19). Noise, yelling and speaking through masks, helter-skelter movement, strange costumes, coordinated madcap behavior: all of these make up the traditional practices of charivari or rough music. This was in the minds of those who came together as Calico Indians when faced with the need to organize resistance against the rent collectors. Later they took on the other techniques of the town: mocking order by making order, they imitated the muster without real military paraphernalia, using the weapons of Indians as well as agricultural implements for threatening purposes. Volunteers made themselves aware of their shared concerns— according to Allan Kulikoff, “to prevent the landlords from executing their threats.” The men were to come out only in response to the “legal hounds” seeking to collect the rents. They were to appear only on certain occasions in such disguises that only the participants would know who were actually involved. Then they would dissolve themselves as quickly, so that the impression was given that they existed only for the purpose of achieving “judicial or legislative redress” (Kulikoff 1992, 40). Allan Kulikoff continues, discussing the complex land proprietorship arrangements, “At the outset of settlement, few pioneers owned land. Instead they squatted on the land owned by others,” only later establishing freeholding rights or moving on. Yet their reputation and any other social claims relied on land ownership. They regarded their improvements to the land in social as well as economic terms: that is, they made claims for the status of independent farmers and, in time, of gentlemen, whether or not they actually held the land themselves. In this move, they tied themselves to outside market interests. Often, to achieve social advancement in the eyes of their neighbors, they not only produced surpluses, but also built mills or factories of some sort for processing and storage. These farmer-entrepreneurs, then, established trade relations with merchants elsewhere. Their reputation and any other social claims relied on their ability to claim land ownership, yet as many settlers discovered, they still had to protect their lands from those creditors—often the families of those who had led them into this enterprise—even when they achieved freeholder status (Kulikoff 1992, 40). They attempted, through careful husbandry, to sidestep the problems attending debt by providing as much of their own food, clothing, and equipment as possible, but as they achieved greater status, they were under greater social obligations to display themselves in an appropriate manner. This was the so-called “middle way” of the Scottish Enlightenment stadialists. Their four-stage model for the advancement of civilization was often associated with Thomas Jefferson. However, Jefferson recognized the pressures within the system itself to intensify an involvement with international markets, both by extending exports and by public personages buying more of the foreign goods associated with gentility. While the complex of manners associated with achieving gentlemanly status was more openly on display in the plantation South, the rules of civil conduct developed in the Old World by the elites there were just as desired by the prominenti widespread in the middle states and New England. An important feature of this manners system turned on the ability of the land owners to display their power of ownership by demanding acts of deference from their less powerful neighbors. In the “manor counties” of New York, those controlled by the Dutch families originally granted the land, such moments arose at the traditional turn of the seasons, when the patroons might hold public entertainments. (See Anon. 1888 for a report of one such occasion.) Alternately, attempts were made to elaborate the ritual submission of the Rent Days, a time during which renters were supposed to come to the manor house to make their payment in money or kind. By the 1840s, however, such medieval-style displays undoubtedly were less often celebrated as the ethos of social and personal independence took hold throughout the middle states. Gordon Wood summarizes the attraction of genteel status in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American country dweller: “Beneath all [the] strenuous efforts to define gentility” and to lay claim to such a status as the head of a family, “lay the fundamental classical characteristic of being free and independent.” In a world that was in the process of redefining freedom in terms of dependencies, “the liberality for which gentlemen were known connoted freedom—freedom from material want, freedom from the caprice of others, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from having to work with one’s hands.” Wood continues, “The gentry’s distinctiveness came from being independent in a world of dependencies” (Wood 1992, 33 ). An important by-product of the creation of the very idea of the public throughout the West in the eighteenth century was the development of these popular voluntary associations. The Sons of Liberty and even the Freemasons provided the means by which private individuals could take on public roles as they assembled in parades and on other public occasions. As previously mentioned, these organizations of white men came together to eat, drink, and exercise their wits. By establishing a set of mysterious practices, some of these groups intensified the social bonding involved, especially as they let themselves be known as members of a secret society. These secrets were commonly attached to an invented past. Membership was experienced through an initiation that called for the recitation of the mysteries, a parading of the power objects symbolizing the groupness of the group, and drinking toasts to the political or military heroes of the day. They often wrote elaborate poems or songs making fun of each other and making slurs against polical leaders attempting to gain power. The strange costuming, and the secrecy and the connections of the groups to this replayed version of the past, endowed these organizations with an aura of exotic cultural difference, the deep meanings of which they kept secret. Nevertheless, they openly paraded themselves at civic celebrations, wearing their most exotic paraphernalia. One of the most regular of these was the calling together of the volunteer brigades in the muster. Before the American Revolution, the muster called for the gathering of able-bodied men drawn together for protective action against common enemies. Those rich enough to ride and uniform themselves were able to parade before the less grandly equipped brigade. The muster dramatized the voluntary character of membership in local militias and the ability of the general populace to participate openly in this display, no matter what role was played by the individual. The disorganized or unruly crowds, drawn to the event because of the pageantry, often established their own counterparades from the sidelines, joining in or making fun of the ceremony as they chose. The most unruly elements of the community, the ragtag boys, commonly were young men who had not yet married or established their own households. They employed the customary devices of their own particular ancestors, the holiday guisers or mummers, wearing castoff clothing, pieced together robes, or blankets and masks—wild costumes seemingly tossed together for the occasion— and using many different devices to alter their identifying characteristics, especially their ways of talking. Like their ancestors, the Levellers in England, they carried ridiculous weapons, such as pitchforks or hay rakes and various pieces of metal. II Selecting bands of Indians as the model for displays of resistance to a central authority—whether the national government, as in the Whiskey Rebellion, the banks, or the rent collectors—carried strong messages of Americanness and otherness at the same time. Jefferson, Adams, even Washington helped in developing a political message that made this possible, by accepting the eighteenth-century vision of civilization, which privileged rational, small-holding, independent agricultural enterprise. Thus, Indians were denied their position in the modern world because, while they may have known some agricultural techniques, they did not share the values of intensive clearing, cleaning up the landscape, and long-row agriculture. Somehow, a creole character had to be arrived at, one that was both European and indigenous, a mixed breed without the risk of mixed breeding. This occurred as the public sphere developed in democratic early America, in various forms of dramatic play and display. At the calling of the muster the Revolution itself was reenacted. But with the founding in the 1780s of the Society of Cincinnati, honoring the proud mounted figure of Washington as the reluctant citizensoldier and made up of officers in parade regalia riding their horses, inevitably the foot soldier made his own parade. A good deal of the archaic vocabulary of mob members as Others might reappear through counterparades and demonstrations. Perhaps more symbolically resonant were those dramatic and often theatrical forms that emerged in this new national environment, forms that featured whites in blackface (in the minstrel show) or dressed as Indians (in the medicine show and later the wild west show).To this list of Native Others and In- Betweeners, other kinds of mixed breeds were added, including the anomalous peoples who continued to live by frontier ways or using frontier technology: voyageurs and other frontier francophones; vaqueros and other animal tenders; squatters; all people of the road and the river, who had to maintain the portability of their culture; and the plain folks of the frontier, insofar as they maintained the Old World traditions as devices of resistance to modernity. They availed themselves, then, of the rhetoric of the arcane and the ancient in order to carry out their modern task of dramatizing their rejection of the old order of dependencies. Drawing on Old World forms of resistance, they nevertheless spoke for a new kind of ordering, one based on the motive of profit growing from their own talents and labors. By taking on the roles of the earliest inhabitants of the land, they were able to launch arguments for natural rights that were really quite removed from any of the perspectives of the ancien régime. III At the same time as the Anti-Rent War was being waged in Delaware and Sullivan counties, in Buffalo, young lawyer Lewis Henry Morgan got together with others of a romantic literary persuasion to found the Order of the Gordian Knot, with all of the secret practices and paraphernalia of the urban secret societies. After a chance meeting in 1844 with Ely Parker, a Seneca teenager fluent in English and Seneca, Morgan’s interest in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) increased. The two young men became friends, and Parker introduced Morgan to others on the Tonawanda reservation near Akron, New York.Now addressing the contemporary problems of Indian life, they changed the group’s name to the Grand Order of the Iroquois and began to develop a set of rituals, using the Haudenosaunee’s own terms. They also revised their founding myth to focus on the manner in which the six tribes of the Iroquois nation were transformed into the six strands that formed the original Gordian knot, which they now called the “Grand Knot of the Iroquois.” Their new chartering story began with the clan of Gordius making its way to America, ending, of course, with the model society formed in the fraternal organization. The ritual they developed for their meetings began with an invocation of the Indian gods and a peroration on the failures of the U.S. government to develop an adequate Indian policy, followed by a reenactment of a purification rite that seems to have come from the wood’s edge ceremony used by many Algonquin groups. Morgan does not seem to have known that the development of this fraternal organization replicated that of the Loyal Order of St. Tammany before and during the American Revolution— Tammany being the Lenni-Lenape chief who came to be designated as the titular saint of America in the face of Saints George, Patrick, and David (Abrahams 2002). Morgan was to go on to work with Parker, making repeated visits to the council fire and observing the most important Iroquois ceremonies, ostensibly to teach them to fellow members of the Grand Order. Even though the imitation of Indian ceremonies remained a part of that organization’s basic meeting strategy, Morgan himself spent ever greater time and gave deeper thought to Haudenosaunee ways. As the history of anthropological studies in America now recalls, the serious study of indigenous peoples based on observation and careful description can be traced to Morgan’s efforts. The Grand Order of the Iroquois was, like the Calico Indians, a consciously invented voluntary community made up of white males searching for ways of expressing a masculine enterprise. They are no more nor no less authentic than any other such voluntary organization: the Freemasons, Elks, Moose, Ancient Order of the Red Men, even the Boy Scouts. In choosing to model themselves on Indian bands, they were self-consciously fashioning and refashioning themselves, developing ways of toughening themselves, Indian style. By placing themselves in the hierarchical arrangement of Indian chief and braves, they brought to bear the deepest paradoxes of the Revolution: a loyal and rank-conscious people became radicalized around the idea of representation and choice. They both had political ends in mind, although the Grand Order was concerned with governmental policy, while the Calico Indians simply wanted to achieve ownership of the property they had developed. “Calico Indians: Festive Play in Acts of Resistance” by Roger D. Abrahams was published in Voices Vol. 32, Fall-Winter 2006. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now. HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP |
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