The fourth difference between European and Indian leaders was that,
unlike the European monarchs with whose powers the settlers were famil-
iar, the werowances did not “own” even a part of their kingdoms. No matter
how powerful or popular they were, they had no right to dispose of land,
which was regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole people. But
it was convenient, indeed crucial, for the English settlers to believe that a
“chief ” had this right, since they, and the Americans after the Revolution,
bribed or forced chiefs to sell them the communal lands.
Rights over land among most Indian groups divided into two separate
but compatible categories: usually by decision of a clan or village, an indi-
vidual acquired, often for his lifetime,useof a given piece of land. This
right was more or less what in English law is known as usufruct rather than
ownership. As Lewis H. Morgan wrote, “No person in Indian life could
obtain the absolute title to land, since it was vested by custom in the tribe as
one body, and they had no conception of what is implied by a legal title in
severalty with power to sell and convey the fee.” For Indians, “ownership”
of a given plot amounted to a sort of trusteeship.
Even the Dutch and Swedish colonists who recognized Indian titles
did not really comprehend the Indian concept; nor did William Penn.
Penn, who has rightly been considered the most humane of the English
proprietors, did not grasp, and certainly did not want to grasp, the Indian
idea of collective ownership. Other English and colonial authorities com-
pletely disregarded it and ultimately forced the Indians to accept, even if
they did not understand, something like the English legal definition—so
that between 1630 and 1767, the one society of the Delawares turned over
nearly 800 deeds of lands to incoming whites. With the Indians, at least at
first, allowing whites to use their land did not entail alienating it but more
or less corresponded to hospitality.
How did the Indians’ concept of ownership fit into their concept of
their role on earth? This was not a question most whites asked, but at least
some of the missionaries did. The Indians, wrote the Moravian missionary
John Heckewelder, who lived among them for fifteen years from 1771 to
1786, believed that:
the Great Spirit...made the earth and all that it contains for the com-
mon good of mankind; when he stocked the country that he gave them18 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA