“Had You No Lands of Your Own?”: Seeking Justice in The Female American (1767)

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Acknowledgments

I thank Lynne Fallwell, Hannah Friedman, Charles Grair, Sara Guengrich, Matt Hooley, Sara Spurgeon, Laura Stevens, and Keira Williams for their thoughtful comments.

Notes

¹ “American” then referred to indigenous inhabitants of the American continent. Because the novel uses “Indian,” I follow that when discussing the novel and the British perspective.

² For instance, John Shebbeare’s Lydia (1755), Arthur Young’s History of Emmera In the Works Cited, the title of Young’s book is The Adventures of Emmera (1767), and Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) all depict Natives as foils to the main narrative. The dying Indian trope, inaugurated by William Warton’s 1756 “The Dying Indian,” depicted Indians’ deaths as merely occasions for sensibility. See Flint 29–31 and Fulford 30.

³ Examples range from Dryden’s Indian Queen (1665) and Indian Emperour (1667) to Voltaire’s Alzire, ou les americains (1736; trans. 1736) and Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une peruvienne (1747; trans. 1748).

⁴ I cite the 1766 third edition, which appeared closest to this novel’s publication.

⁵ Schumann and Schweizer document this crucial role throughout their book. See also Kelton.

⁶ John Oliphant claims such publicity evidences “a wide and serious public interest in Indian affairs” but notes that in 1765 enough spectacle surrounded Indian visitors that it was made unlawful to bring Indians to England without a license (13, 17).

⁷ For example, H. Howard’s “A New Humorous Song on the Cherokee Chiefs” (1762) is headed with portraits of the three Cherokees and claims that British women find them sexually attractive: the last stanza includes the lines P–s.” “A soft Female Hand, the best Weapon I ween is, / To strip down the Bark of a Cherokee P–s.”

⁸ See the London Gazette for the full text and Calloway 92–98 for more on the Proclamation.

⁹ “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and there by makes it his Property” [emphasis in the original] (Locke 288). Although many Native American tribes did practice agriculture, Locke uses “several Nations of the Americans [i.e., Indians]” (297) as the paradigmatic example of people who cannot own property because they supposedly do not labor. Similarly, Pownall claims that Indians are naturally “not landworkers, but hunters; not settlers, but wanderers. They would therefore, consequently, never have … any idea of property in land, of that property which arises from a man’s mixing his labour with it” [emphasis in the original] (157). Laura Stevens also notes Locke’s relevance (Poor Indians 46).

¹⁰ Unfortunately, few records of The Female American’s reception survive, as Burnham and Freitas’s introduction and Appendix E document. Since the first edition’s title page specifically identifies the Nobles’ circulating libraries, and since the novel had two further editions, we should not take the dismissive reviews as definitive of the novel’s reception.

¹¹ Critics arguing that the novel critiques colonial ideology include Betty Joseph; Laura M. Stevens, “Reading”; and Kristianne Kalata Vaccaro. Critics reading the novel as endorsing colonization include Elizabeth Bohls, Scarlet Bowen, Janina Nordius, Roxann Wheeler, and Stephen Wolfe. Eve Tavor Bannet identifies questions raised but not answered by the novel (184–85).

¹² These are often treated as the only historical possibilities for Native groups, too (Konkle 33).

¹³ See also the statement variously attributed to Turtle’s Heart and to Shingas: “You marched your armies into our country, and built forts here, though we told you, again and again, that we wished you to remove. My Brothers, this land is ours, and not yours” (qtd. in Parkman 286).

¹⁴ On the significance of treaties in colonial history, see Frederick Hoxie and Maureen Konkle.

¹⁵ Sankar Muthu shows that in the late eighteenth century a cluster of political thinkers used this idea to argue for the fundamental humanity of colonized peoples in order to attack imperialism.

¹⁶ Scarlet Bowen reads this monument as privileging Christianity, claiming that the urn “figure[s] native peoples as empty spiritual vessels” (190). But the urn was a standard image on cenotaphs, and nothing suggests that it represents Indians.

¹⁷ Her dress thus matches the iconography of America in prints of the time (McMurran 326).

¹⁸ Roxann Wheeler explains that “clothing was another category of difference that Europeans saw as crucial to their own … identity… . apparel assumed a new general importance based on colonial and imperial experiences” (17).

¹⁹ Unca Eliza’s adoption of Indian clothing differs significantly from Philip Deloria’s “playing Indian” and Shari Huhnsdorf’s “going native.” Both scholars discuss white people adopting Native ways to create American national forms of identity. Since Unca Eliza is never fully white and is not concerned with American national identity, neither scholar’s ideas fit this novel.

²⁰ Teuton argues that “New challenges to tribal living invite citizens to revise their collective understanding of the nation to meet their interpretative needs, as they organize a shared vision of land and social value” (44); the novel’s final community has just such a “shared vision.”

²¹ Elizabeth Bohls, citing an unpublished, unavailable paper, reads Unca Eliza’s marriage as repeating her mother’s conversion (104), but since the marriage seems perfunctory and is accompanied by Winkfield’s acceptance of Indian ways and an Indian marriage ceremony, it reads much more like a conversion on Winkfield’s part.

²² As Richter explains, Native “response[s] to crime tend to stress restoration for the victim rather than punishment of the offender” (64).