THE HOPI OF the North American Southwest believed in a god of war they called the Heart-of-the-Sky God, or Sotuqnangu. Pueblo societies had another god of war, a powerful eaglelike supernatural figure known as Knifewing. Many societies, of course, have had gods of war of one kind or another. Ares and Athena served the function for the Greeks, Mars and Minerva for the Romans. But Sotuqnangu and Knifewing were different. They were gods of scalping—the practice of cutting flesh and hair from the skulls of enemy warriors and keeping the mass of tissue as a trophy of war. Sotuqnangu was thought by the Hopi to have invented scalping. Knifewing was often pictured with a scalp hanging from his terrible wing.
Scalps were not the only war trophies taken by American Indians, but they were the easiest to take. They could be cut quickly from the head of a fallen enemy (usually after death, though not always). Scalps could be carried easily without slowing down a hasty retreat to safety. When conditions permitted, many Indians took other body parts from their conquered foes as well. In pre-contact California, virtually every identifiable tribe took severed heads as trophies. The Mohegans in what is today Connecticut cut the fingers and toes from their captive enemies’ extremities. Among the Hopi, women took the heads of conquered enemies and fed their male children scraps of the flesh to invest them with supernatural bravery. The Apache, the Cheyenne, the Sioux, and the Ute madenecklaces from the fingertips and hand bones of their captives, often setting the human remains alongside animal claws and teeth in a show of power and fearlessness. Iroquoian peoples between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes engaged in ritual cannibalism,eating the hearts of captives tortured to death after battle.
Anglo-American behavior was often just as startling, of course. The English had displayed the heads of rebels and heretics on London Bridge well into the seventeenth century. In 1798, Protestant Loyalists roasted the heads of live Irish rebels; courts sentenced leaders of the United Irishmen to death and ordered their heads impaled on spikes and displayed in town centers. A doctor in the U.S. Army in the 1830s cut off the head of a Seminole Indian chief, embalmed it, and hung it on his children’s bed as a punishment for disobedience. As late as the 1860s, governors in the western United States paid bounties for Indian scalps. And in the 1870s, the U.S. Army shipped the heads of dead Indians to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C.
Yet for the founding fathers and the European colonists who preceded them, Indian warfare seemed so savage as to have no law at all. Theirs were the atavistic customs of those whom Jefferson’s Declaration had excoriated as the “merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” At Ghent in 1814, John Quincy Adams repeated Jefferson’s formulation from almost thirty years earlier, accusing the British of complicity with Indians whose“known rule of warfare is the indiscriminate torture and butchery of women, children, and prisoners.” Adams’s view was shared by virtually everyone in white America. The Indians, they believed, had no rules of war.
But white Americans were wrong. There were rules for Indian wars. In many ways, the Indians’ rules were more effective at constraining war’s violence than their European analogues. The difficulty was that Indian ways of ordering war were very different from the ones to which European colonists and their descendants were accustomed. For two centuries and more, Europeans had organized their ideas about the laws of war around a sharp distinction between crime and war. The European view was that killing soldiers in war was not murder and thus not subject to punishment. It was this immunity from punishment that underlay the rights of the prisoner of war. By the late eighteenth century, European jurists rooted the protection of noncombatants in the same distinction between war and crime; attacks on noncombatants were outside the immunity conferred on soldiers by the state of war.
American Indian groups made no such distinction. Among the Iroquoian peoples of the eastern woodlands, for example, a form of armed conflict known as “mourning war” was neither war nor criminal law enforcement, at least not as those concepts were understood by Europeans. In mourning wars, Indians sought to replenish spiritual losses caused by deaths in their own ranks. The principal aim was to take captives, who would either be adopted into the tribe as substitutes for the dead or tortured and killed in ritual satisfaction for lost members. Either adoption or execution could satisfy the spiritual needs of a warring Iroquoian village.
The mourning war had no room for the prisoner of war as the European tradition had developed it. Some prisoners—most often, though not exclusively, women and children—would be adopted into the capturing tribe. Others—usually male warriors—would be subject to excruciating forms of torture killing. Victims would be placed on a raised platform and cut with red-hot knives and firebrands. If they wilted too soon, they would be revived with food and rest before the torturers resumed their work. Victims’ limbs would be cut off, their bodies disemboweled, and their genitals mutilated. Scraps of the victim’s body would be ritually consumed. In the Iroquoian ritual, just prior to death the captive was scalped and hot sand poured into the wound on his skull before a warrior dispatched him with a knife to the chest.
Frontier conflicts engrained such images in the nightmares of white settlers for more than two centuries. Captured American soldiers such as Colonel William Crawford, who was ritually burned, tortured, scalped, and then killed by Delaware Indians in 1782, quickly became martyrs to what Americans saw as Indian savagery. Indeed, from the European-influenced view widely held among whites in the United States, the Indian way of organizing warfare was so horrific and foreign that it did not seem like a way of organizing armed conflict at all.
Yet Indian ritual torture was not arbitrary. It had social significance for the torturer and the tortured alike. For the captor, torturing captives served as a kind of spiritual replenishment and as a celebration of the supernatural. The captive, in turn, derived honor from the experience of being tortured. As one historian has put it, Indian warriors “earned posthumous esteem by bearing themselves stoically under the ordeal.”
The logic of mourning war also imposed powerful restraints on the violence of Indian conflicts. Killing too many of the enemy would prompt a renewed cycle of warfare as the enemy sought to replace its own losses. In turn, deaths in battle always threatened to undercut the reason for going to war in the first place. Successful mourning wars required the maintenance of a fragile equilibrium, and when it worked properly the effect was to limit the destruction of native warfare. In seventeenth-century Rhode Island, Roger Williams observed that Indian war was “farre lesse bloudy, and devouring then the cruell Warres of Europe.”
Indeed, many Indians seem to have experienced shock and revulsion when confronted with the destructiveness of European ways of warfare. In the Pequot War of 1637, observers reported that the Pequots “stamped and tore the Hair from their Heads” when they saw the extent of the colonists’ devastation of their community. Even the colonists’ Narragansett allies joined in the protest: “it is naught,” they cried, “because it is too furious, and slays too many men.”
The internal logic of Indian ways of war was usually lost on European settlers and their descendants, however. In conflicts between European settlers and white Americans on the one hand and Indians on the other, the coexistence of these two very different rule schemes produced a rapid descent into virtually unlimited violence. Indians quickly abandoned whatever compunction they may have had about the destruction of entire towns. The historian Patrick Malone has documented the abandonment of traditional limits on warfare by the Wampanoag of New England in King Philip’s War in 1675, a development he traces to the effects of colonist behavior in the Pequot War four decades earlier. In the Wyoming Valley of northern Pennsylvania, Indian allies of the British during the Revolution burned and pillaged “hundreds of fields and farmhouses,” turning the “beautiful valley into a wasteland.”
Colonists and frontier settlers, in turn, set aside whatever norms they had about torture and dismemberment. Massachusetts Bay captain John Mason ordered his men to torture and kill a Pequot Indian he encountered at Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1637. “The reason,” he explained, “was, that they had tortured such of our men as they took alive.” In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Solomon Stoddard of Massachusetts wrote that if the Indians would “manage their warr fairly after the manner of other nations,” it would be “inhumane to persue them” in ways that were contrary to “Christian practice.” But as Stoddard saw it, the Indians “act like wolves, and are to be dealt withal as wolves.” In the 1760s, during Pontiac’s War, American settlers near Pittsburgh usedsmallpox-infected blankets to try to destroy the Delawares. The revolutionary war hero George Rogers Clark reported about the Indians in the Ohio Valley that “he would never spare man woman or child of them on whom he could lay his hands.” Colonel David Williamson’s Pennsylvania militia brought Clark’s dismaying vision to life in 1782 at Gnadenhutten when they herded nearly ninety Christianized Delaware Indians into two cabins and systematically beat them to death. By the 1830s such violence had become standard operating procedure in the regular army. The Army and Navy Chronicle—which was often at pains to emphasize the value of professional honor among the emerging officer corps—called for “nothing less than a war of extermination” against Indians in Florida and condemned the “mawkish philanthropy” of any who dared to suggest otherwise.
IN THE FORMAL literature of the laws of war, all of this frontier violence happened outside the law altogether. The humanitarian laws of armed conflict simply had no application to wars with those who seemed from the European view to act as savages.
Indians had not always been so treated by the law. The sixteenth-century Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria had argued that war with the Indians entailed “all the rights of war” in the European tradition. Hugo Grotius had little to say about American Indians, but his approach was similarly universal. In his view, the laws of nature and nations were derived from those axioms that “all men believe must be true.”
A century after Grotius, however, jurists began to carve out hard-and-fast exceptions for Indians who did not follow the European laws of war. “When we are at war with a savage nation,” Vattel wrote, “who observe no rules, and never give quarter, we may punish them in the persons of any of their people.” American jurists took Vattel a step further. Vattel’s approach treated Indians on the basis of their alleged conduct, not on the basis of their status. But the early American literature excluded Indians from the protections of the laws of war on the basis of their race and religion. Kent’s Commentaries explained that “the Christian nations of Europe, and their descendants on this side of the Atlantic” had “established a law of nations peculiar to themselves,” one rooted in “the brighter light, more certain truths, and the more definite sanction, which Christianity has communicated.” Continual and irregular war had (for Kent) left the American Indian in a “savage state” incapable of rising to the obligations required by the laws of war. Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law made the same assertion. The law of nations, he contended, “can only spring up among nations of the same class or family, united by ties of similar origin, manners, and religion.” As Wheaton understood them, the laws of nations had “entirely overlooked” the Indians.
On the frontier itself, however, the separation between the laws of war and Indian conflicts was never so neat. For the United States’ frontier militia, Indian conduct in war was not something outside the laws of war, regardless what jurists like Kent and Wheaton wrote. To the contrary, the laws of war provided a moral language with which to describe and condemn the practices of Indians in armed conflict. For the militia, the laws of war were not alien to Indian wars. They were one more reason to engage in such wars with the passion and ferocity for which Andrew Jackson was quickly becoming famous.