To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals

Abstract

Thomas N. Ingersoll's history of Indian-white “mixed bloods” between early contact and about 1840 is timely, encyclopedic in scope, and deeply researched. Yet it is flatly unconvincing. Its thesis is that “white” Americans—beginning with colonial elites, then expanding over two centuries to include Jacksonian Democrats—discouraged white-Indian unions and rejected the legitimacy of those unions that did form, primarily out of fear of appearing “blackened” to Europe. This argument fails to convince on three fronts: first, because of a lack of evidence that whites in any period dwelt on isolated European dismissals of them as “mixed” or that antebellum whites were particularly worried about being contaminated by Indian “blood”; second, because it exaggerates whites' conflation of “Indians” and “blacks”; and third, because it downplays the influence of land struggles in white perceptions of mixed bloods. Although Ingersoll finds some isolated incidents of Europeans deriding Americans as “mixed,” he provides hardly any examples that Americans cared about these sentiments. In accounting for the rejection of Indian-white hybridity by “respectable” colonists, it would have made more sense for Ingersoll to have focused on their fear of descending into savagery, their disappointment about the Indians' rejection of European “civility,” their surprise that Indians who did adopt European ways marshaled those reforms to defend Indian autonomy, and their recognition that “mixed” people generally identified with Native society. Though Ingersoll acknowledges these trends, he somehow concludes that white prejudice against mixed bloods grew disproportionately out of a concern with European opinion.