Noble Savage - Benjamin Franklin's Remarks Concerning The Savages of North America

Benjamin Franklin's Remarks Concerning The Savages of North America

"The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distressed for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . and restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust with what we call civil Society." — Benjamin Franklin marginalia in Matthew Wheelock, Reflections, Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies, 1770

Benjamin Franklin, who had negotiated with the Indians during the French and Indian War, protested vehemently against the Paxton massacre that took place at Conestoga, in western Pennsylvania, of December 1763, in which white vigilantes massacred Indian women and children, many of whom had converted to Christianity. Franklin himself personally organized a Quaker militia to control the white population and "strengthen the government". In his pamphlet Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784), Franklin deplored the use of the term "savages" for native Americans: “Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs”. Franklin used the massacres to illustrate his point that no race had a monopoly on virtue, likening Paxton Men to "Christian White Savages'". Franklin cried out to a just God to punish those who carried the Bible in one hand and the hatchet in the other: 'O ye unhappy Perpetrators of this Horrid Wickedness!'" Franklin praised the Indian way of life, their customs of hospitality, their councils, which reached agreement by discussion and consensus, and noted that many white men had voluntarily given up the purported advantages of civilization to live among them, but that the opposite was rare.

Franklin's writings on American Indians were remarkably free of ethnocentricism, although he often used words such as "savages," which carry more prejudicial connotations in the twentieth century than in his time. Franklin's cultural relativism was perhaps one of the purest expressions of Enlightenment assumptions that stressed racial equality and the universality of moral sense among peoples. Systematic racism was not called into service until a rapidly expanding frontier demanded that enemies be dehumanized during the rapid, historically inevitable westward movement of the nineteenth century. Franklin's respect for cultural diversity did not reappear widely as an assumption in Euro-American thought until Franz Boas and others revived it around the end of the nineteenth century. Franklin's writings on Indians express the fascination of the Enlightenment with nature, the natural origins of man and society, and natural (or human) rights. They are likewise imbued with a search (which amounted at times almost to a ransacking of the past) for alternatives to monarchy as a form of government, and to orthodox state-recognized churches as a form of worship.

Though retrospectively it may seem to us that Franklin may have idealized the Indians to make a rhetorical point, the phrase "noble savage" never appears in his writings.