selling rum to the Indians. The trade, once denounced by a colonial legisla-
ture as “abominable filthyness,” was actually abominably profitable. Rum
was a by-product of the molasses made on the West Indies sugar planta-
tions and became one of the earliest and most successful colonial indus-
tries. At least 140 distilleries were converting molasses into more than
25,000 tons of rum a year by 1770.
Subversion of the Indians was a subtle process involving not only guns
and rum but a variety of other trade goods on which the Indians became
dependent. Fur capes were replaced by imported cloth, stone tools by steel,
and clay pots by iron. As each new item became standard, the Indians for-
got how to make the things that had formed their traditional material cul-
ture. Finally, as Skiagunsta, the war chief of the Lower Cherokee, said,
“The clothes we wear we cannot make ourselves. They are made for us. We
use their ammunition with which to kill deer. We cannot make our guns.
Every necessary of life we must have from the white people.” The Mohawks
coined a name for Europeans,asseroni,or “ax-maker”—and sadly con-
cluded that they could no longer dress themselves in skins but required
English “strouds” or Belgian “duffles.”
This process, of course, was slow, but the colonists were in a hurry. Since
more distant Indian societies had not yet collapsed, they rediscovered a strat-
egy that had been developed 2,000 years earlier in China. Much as the
American colonists considered Indians barbarians, the Chinese considered
all non-Chinese barbarians, but they recognized that barbarians could be
useful. Those who lived closest, the “inner barbarians,” had as much reason
as the settled people to fear the wilder “outer barbarians.” So the Chinese
used them as a human wall. Much the same strategy was adopted by the
Romans, who enrolled the relatively pacified Gauls to keep the wilder
Germans at bay. Faced with a similar challenge in the seventeenth century,
American colonists reinvented the ancient strategy. An act by the legislature
of Virginia in 1656 ordered a force of its militia to march against the “many
western and inland Indians” with “all the neighboring Indians... as being
part of the articles of peace concluded with us.” To protect the “nearby bar-
barians” who might help fend off the “outer barbarians,” Carolina in 1680
created a zone extending 200 miles from Charleston where Indians were not
to be enslaved or massacred.
Sometimes in America, as in Rome and China, the strategy did not
194 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA