Plotting the Natchez Massacre: Le Page du Pratz, Dumont de Montigny, Chateaubriand

6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 3 of 187   University of Oregon Plotting the Natchez Massacre Le Page du Pratz, Dumont de Montigny, Chateaubriand J’étais encore très jeune, lorsque je conçus l’idée de faire ‘l’épopée de l’homme de la nature,’ ou de peindre les Mœurs des Sauvages, en les liant à quelque événement connu. Après la découverte de l’Amérique, je ne vis pas de sujet plus intéressant, surtout pour des François, que le massacre de la colonie des Natchez à la Louisiane, en . Toutes les tribus indienne conspirant, après deux siècles d’oppression, pour rendre la liberté au Nouveau-Monde, me parurent offrir au pinceau un sujet presque aussi heureux que la conquête du Mexique. —François-René Chateaubriand, Preface to Atala () I was still very young when I conceived the idea of composing an epic on the Man of Nature, or delineating the manners of the savages by connecting them with some well-known event. Next to the discovery of America, I could not find a more interesting subject, especially for the French, than the massacre of the colony of the Natchez in Louisiana, in  [sic]. All the Indian tribes conspiring, after two centuries of oppression, to restore liberty to the New World, seemed to me to furnish a subject nearly as happy as the conquest of Mexico. —Quoted in Chateaubriand, The Natchez : Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 In introducing the novella that launched him to literary fame, Chateaubriand declared that the Natchez massacre offered an epic tableau that in all the history of America was comparable only to the battle between Cortes and Montezuma. The comparison may seem preposterous, a symptom of the author’s notoriously melodramatic and self-aggrandizing persona. After all, Atala did not fulfill this epic pretension. Although the novella’s hero, Chactas, is a Natchez, the story does not portray the Natchez massacre. Chateaubriand’s ‘‘epic on the Man of Nature’’ was instead Les Natchez, the epic romance that he had begun writing in exile in London in {  6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 4 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   the s, but did not publish until . Atala was an immediate success in Europe, and Caleb Bingham’s translation, Atala, or The Love and Constancy of Two Savages in the Desert (Boston, ), found wide readership and influence in the United States (Seelye ). But Les Natchez remains littleread, a lost epic for France’s lost colonies in North America. To appreciate Les Natchez one must recover the literature of French colonial Louisiana that dramatized the events at Natchez as the tragic outcome of an alliance between a native nation and a colonial power linked by a common destiny of loss and regret. The uprising of the Natchez nation, which actually occurred on  November , not , took the lives of about  French colonists (out of a total in the Natchez area of about , including slaves), and destroyed a settlement that had been established barely  years before.1 It left unscathed the colonial capital, New Orleans, and the initial French Louisiana forts at Mobile and Biloxi. The eminent Franco-Americanist Gilbert Chinard wrote in his preface to Les Natchez that Chateaubriand ‘‘magnifié un banal incident des guerres coloniales de la France et transformé un soulèvement local en une guerre d’indépendence’’ (; ‘‘magnified a banal incident from the French colonial wars and transformed a local rebellion into a war of independence’’). The romantic notion of not merely the Natchez but ‘‘all the Indian tribes conspiring’’ to overthrow the European colony was a myth common in colonial history writing.2 But this is no reason to disregard Chateaubriand’s work. Epic imperial history has always worked to turn minor battles into major events, and in the words of ethnologist John R. Swanton, probably the foremost expert on the Natchez, they ‘‘so strongly appealed to French imaginations . . . that this tribe has been surrounded by a glamour similar to that which until recently enshrouded the Aztec of Mexico and the Quichua of Peru’’ (). Because the Natchez and French Louisiana were both defeated in colonial wars, they both have been largely forgotten. It is necessary to imagine an alternative historiography of eighteenth-century North America in which the Natchez Massacre and its literary portrayals retain an epic significance. Chateaubriand specified that the Natchez massacre was epic ‘‘above all for the French.’’ If French Louisiana had endured through the nineteenth century or had made the transition to a postcolonial nation, the Natchez and their war of resistance might well have been mythologized to the same degree as Montezuma’s confrontation with Cortes and Metacom’s, or ‘‘King Philip’s,’’ uprising in 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 5 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  colonial New England. And had this occurred, a literature was available to support the myth, one every bit as rich as those supporting the U.S. and Mexican traditions. This study of the Natchez ‘‘massacre’’ and its historical dramatizations aims not only to recover a long-ignored French colonial literature of Louisiana, but to reveal what Hayden White called the ‘‘emplotment’’ of historical events into meaningful narratives. What began as a local uprising by the Natchez became an epic revolutionary struggle that spoke to an Age of Revolution nearly a century later. Because the uprising was relatively small in scale, and the number of historical treatments of it limited, it will be possible to fully document the accretion of literary devices on top of the initial historical accounts. As White wrote, ‘‘Historical situations are not inherently tragic, comic, or romantic. . . . How a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian’s subtlety in matching up a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with meaning’’ (). The eighteenth-century historians of the Natchez uprising, culminating in Chateaubriand, added elements of all three genres, as we shall see. But we will need to begin with some historical context, the stage setting for the Natchez tragedy. French Louisiana had begun in – with the explorations of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who had made a name for himself in battles with the English in Hudson’s Bay and New England, and his brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. They established a post near modern Biloxi, Mississippi, and, after the mouth of the Mississippi river was finally located, a new capital for the colony at New Orleans in . The French set a goal of connecting their posts on the Great Lakes and in the Illinois country into a trade network that would control the river’s entire basin. The fur trade was most significant at first, as in Canada, but there were high hopes for other products. The Company of the West, granted to Antoine Crozat in  and later taken over by John Law and renamed the Company of the Indies, sold shares in its concessions on the Mississippi, and there were rumors of rich silver mines upstream. Natchez, with rich agricultural land and a bluff safely above the floods and miasmas of the bayous, became the focus of a speculative boom in France, leading to the Mississippi Bubble of  that made Law’s name infamous. After the crash, the potential for settlement at Natchez remained, but then the events of  burst that bubble too. As Daniel Usner concluded in a recent essay, 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 6 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   ‘‘The French-Natchez Borderlands in Colonial Louisiana,’’ after  ‘‘the commercial potential of Louisiana took a backseat to its geopolitical function . . . and the complex interplay of adaptation and resistance that had characterized this cultural borderland was long forgotten’’ (). For an interesting parallel with English colonial history, the Natchez uprising might be compared to the Virginia massacre of . On March nd of that year, the Algonquians of the Powhatan confederacy attacked and killed some  English, out of a total population in the colony of around . Like Natchez, Jamestown was a fledgling settlement less than two decades old, which had been established by a private company chartered by the king, and promoted by investors (or ‘‘adventurers’’) in the metropolitan capital. Both uprisings constituted a public relations crisis for the companies, and prompted a series of bloody retaliatory raids by the colonizers, as well as published propaganda in the metropoles that either branded the Natives as ‘‘savages’’ deserving extermination, or offered reassuring visions of Indian subordination. It is possible to interpret the story of Pocahontas rescuing John Smith, first told in Smith’s Generall Historie of Viriginia (), as an attempt to assuage some of the fears aroused by the Virginia massacre. In both cases, the massacre threatened the colony’s leadership. In  King Louis XV removed colonial Governor Périer and revoked the charter of the Company of the Indies. In  James I revoked the charter of the London Company and turned Virginia into the first English royal colony. The Natchez massacre is virtually forgotten today and it was not well publicized in its time. While the Jamestown ‘‘massacre’’ and later King Philip’s War were both amply documented in periodicals, books, and pamphlets published in London and New England, French New Orleans had no printing presses in the s, and coverage in France was limited. Two accounts of the uprising appeared in Paris in , but the first full history of Louisiana to include it did not appear until .3 Then, starting in the s as France fought England for dominance in North America, Louisiana’s published history was broken up and sold for parts to English readers. Charlevoix’s Histoire et déscription générale de la Nouvelle France avec le Journal Historique d’un Voyage fait par ordre du Roi dans l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris: Nyon fils, ), which tells of his visit to Natchez in  and devotes a chapter (livre ) to the massacre and its aftermath, appeared right at the start of the War of Austrian Succession. A piece of wartime pro- 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 7 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  paganda published in London in  excerpted from Charlevoix’s book passages that offered strategic intelligence, and claimed that ‘‘the French Ministry . . . endeavor all in their Power to prevent copies of it from coming to us.’’ An anonymous writer in Boston in the same year translated from Charlevoix an appendix about Québec, the target of New England military raids.4 A full translation of the Journal d’un Voyage, Charlevoix’s narrative of his travels from Québec across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi, appeared in London in  to satisfy English readers’ desires for a guide to the exploitation of the lands that Britain had just won in the Seven Years’ War. A similar fate befell the works of the two major Louisiana writers who dramatized the massacre, the ones whom Chateaubriand used as sources and are the focus of this study, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz and Jean François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny. Le Page du Pratz was in his twenties in  when he joined a group of some  colonists on a ship from La Rochelle bound for Louisiana. Du Pratz described himself as an architect with training in mathematics and engineering, but while in Louisiana he also claimed expertise in medicine, collecting specimens of hundreds of native plant remedies, or ‘‘simples,’’ for transport to Paris.5 He also appears to have developed a close relationship with a Chitimacha woman, whom he was given as a slave by her father, the tribe’s chief, and who later bore him children (Histoire de la Louisiane : –; Giraud ). In  he moved upstream to Natchez and acquired three large parcels of land from the Indians he called not ‘‘sauvages’’ but ‘‘naturels.’’ For eight years he lived alongside the Natchez, learned to speak their language, and conversed with their leaders and tribal historians. In  he returned to New Orleans, where Governor Périer persuaded him to take up management of the Company’s plantation, later the ‘‘habitation du Roi’’ in Louisiana. He thus escaped a likely death in the uprising by the tribe he knew so well. He returned to France in . Dumont was born in Paris on  July , a younger son of an ‘‘avocat au parlement de Paris,’’ that is, a prominent magistrate. He was educated at a Jesuit college, or grammar school, and went into the military. He served in Québec in –, and then sailed to Louisiana in  with a commission as a lieutenant, and responsibility to guard five hundred transportees being sent to the colony. Soon after his arrival he unwittingly insulted Bienville, the popular ‘‘Father of Louisiana’’ who was then in his first stint as governor, and thereby began an enmity that he pursued through all his writings. 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 8 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   While in Louisiana Dumont adopted the nickname Montigny, and then transformed his surname from ‘‘Dumont, dit Montigny’’ where dit means ‘‘called,’’ to ‘‘Dumont de Montigny’’ as if he were of the landed gentry. He traveled extensively around Louisiana, from the Red River to the upper Tombigbee, sometimes serving as an engineer, sometimes in dereliction of his military orders. He lived at Natchez from  to , leaving for New Orleans, he claimed, on the day before the uprising. He later participated in an unsuccessful  military expedition led by Bienville against the Chickasaw, long-standing foes of the French. He sailed back to France in .6 The two colonists’ published texts, du Pratz’s Histoire de la Louisiane () and Dumont’s Mémoires Historiques sur la Louisiane (), are the most important histories of colonial Louisiana (Charlevoix’s being devoted to all of New France, including Canada). Even though the books appeared a quarter-century later, the events at Natchez in  remained central to their plots of the colony’s history. Each devoted several chapters to a detailed, dramatic narrative of the uprising, the events which precipitated it, and the sieges, pursuits, and escapes of the Natchez that continued through . The two writers agreed on most circumstantial details, but differed in how they cast blame for the revolt and for the French soldiers’ rather weak efforts at retaliation. Unfortunately, the two books have been almost completely ignored by Anglophone scholars in the United States; they are losers of an imperial and linguistic competition, and neglected classics of colonial American literature. The only available English translation of Le Page du Pratz was published by T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt in London in , the very year that England took title to Louisiana and Québec, and reprinted in . The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina rhetorically claimed Louisiana’s history for the English by changing the title of du Pratz’s book, rearranging its chapters, cutting more than half the text, and adding a long preface asserting the importance of the Mississippi Valley to the British: ‘‘The countries here treated of, have not only by right always belonged to Great-Britain, but part of them is now acknowledged to it by the former usurpers: and it is to be hoped, that the nation may now reap some advantages from those countries . . . by learning from the experience of others, what they do or are likely to produce, that may turn to account to the nation’’ (ii–iii). The translation also included four chapters from Dumont’s Mémoires Historiques, about 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 9 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  tobacco, indigo, and the mineral resources of Louisiana. These were the only parts of that work to appear in English, until the mid-nineteenth century, when Benjamin Franklin French published a partial translation in his five-volume Historical Collections of Louisiana.7 As the abridged translation indicates, the French loss of Louisiana after the Seven Years’ War was a blow from which Dumont’s and Le Page du Pratz’s books would never recover. But even in the s they faced challenges—from one another. The two authors carried on a kind of mimetic rivalry, hurling accusations of plagiarism and misrepresentation that were all the more bitter because the two were competing for authority over the same material. Le Page du Pratz’s first publication was a series of  articles in the Paris Journal Oeconomique from September  to February . When Dumont’s book appeared later in , it lambasted the ‘‘descriptions chimériques et imaginaires, telles que celles que l’on a pu voir insérées dans le Journal Oeconomique par un écrivain peu exact et mal instruit’’ (ix; ‘‘chimerical and imaginary descriptions such as those that we have seen inserted into the Journal Oeconomique by a sloppy and misinformed writer’’). Later in the book, however, Dumont identified Le Page du Pratz by name in a footnote as ‘‘un de mes amis, que j’ai connu dans ce pays, où il a demeuré comme moi’’ (:; ‘‘a friend of mine, whom I knew in that land, where he has lived, as I have’’) and claimed that he had loaned him his manuscript before the Journal Oeconomique articles appeared. Dumont also quoted long passages from those articles, concerning the origins of the Natchez peoples, only to ridicule the theories as fantastic fictions, calling them at one point ‘‘une mauvaise copie de Robinson’’ (: ; ‘‘a bad copy of Robinson [Crusoe]’’). For his part, Le Page du Pratz in Histoire de la Louisiane copied without attribution long passages from Dumont’s Mémoires about the retaliatory raids against the Natchez, some of which took place after he had returned to France (see Carpenter ). He also cast doubt on the writings of authors who ‘‘n’écrivent que sur des ouï-dire, ou qui ne savent point la langue du pays dont ils écrivent l’histoire’’ (: xv; ‘‘write only on hearsay, or who know nothing of the langauge of the land of which they are writing the history’’), oblique but clear references to Dumont and the Natchez language. Among the small group of scholars who have studied the two texts, most favor Le Page du Pratz. Jean Delanglez and Marc Villiers du Terrage scorn Dumont in part because of his antipathy to Bienville, the colony’s heroic leader, and Joseph Treagle defends Le Page du Pratz by 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 10 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   calling his rival a drunkard and ‘‘roistering scapegrace’’ (introduction to History of Louisiana, xvi). It is fruitless to try to pass judgment on these accusations. Both men reveal enough about their actions to arouse the distaste of a modern reader. As for the question of plagiarism, it is possible that each writer had access to the manuscripts of the other. And in representing the Natchez uprising, they together contributed to its dramatic emplotment. Dumont also wrote, prior to his Mémoires, a ,-line epic, ‘‘Poème en vers touchant l’établissement de la province de la Loüisiane connue sous le nom du Missisipy avec tout ce que s’y est passé depuis  jusqu’à ; Le massacre des François au poste des Natchez, les Mœurs des Sauvages, leurs dances, leurs Religions, enfin ce qui concerne le pays en général’’ or ‘‘Verse poem on the establishment of the province of Louisiana, known by the name of Mississippi, with all that occurred there from  to ; the massacre of the French at the Natchez post, the customs of the Indians, their dances, their religions, and finally all that concerns the land in general.’’ This text, first edited and published by Villiers du Terrage in , devotes the first of its four cantos to the Natchez massacre, part of the fourth to ethnographic descriptions of the Natchez, and the second and third to military expeditions against the Chickasaws, who were suspected of collaborating with and sheltering the Natchez rebels. Dumont’s versifying was weak at best, but as narrative the poem reads well, and as corroboration for the Mémoires Historiques it is quite valuable, for he wrote most of it while still in Louisiana, whereas the Mémoires was composed in France in  (Delanglez, ‘‘Louisiana Poet-Historian,’’ ) and then edited for publication by the Abbé le Mascrier, who cut and rearranged the manuscript that is today held in the Ayer collection at the Newberry Library. In the Poème, Dumont’s ham-fisted use of epic devices, his invocation of the muses and recourse to epithets like ‘‘César’’ for his heroes, Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis and colonial Governor Etienne Périer, suggest that he saw the Natchez massacre and his adventures in Louisiana as worthy of grand literary treatment, even if his effort remained unpublished, and the topic had to wait another  years to find a writer with the talents of Chateaubriand. Dumont’s Poème might be compared with the Historia de la Nueva México of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, as long epic poems celebrating campaigns of genocide against Native villages. Dumont, however, was conscious of the failings of the French leadership, and brought a mock-epic, 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 11 of 187 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  even hudibrastic tone to many scenes. He expressed his contempt for Bienville’s command of an expedition against the Chickasaw with a mock-epic comparison to Moses: On pourrait comparer, avec un coeur ouvert, Notre armée défilant, à ce peuple au désert Conduit par ce grand chef, nommé le grand Moïse, Si ce n’est, pour parler avec toute franchise, Qu’il étoit à leur tête, et le nôtre au milieu. () One might compare, with an open heart Our marching army, to those people in the desert Led by that great chief, called Moses Except, to be totally frank, He walked at their head, and ours in mid-rank. And when the French besiege the Natchez after the uprising, one French soldier tries to show his contempt for the enemy, but suffers horribly for it: . . . Brinville, Avoit été choisi pour pointer le canon; Il eut un grand malheur à cette occasion, Car, voulant se moquer de l’ennemi sauvage Leur montrer son c . . . [cul] nud; il eut, pour son partage, Une balle dedans qui lui causa le mort. () Brinville had been chosen to aim the cannon; He had a great misfortune on this occasion, For, wishing to mock the Indian enemies By mooning them, he received his death From a ball shot into his naked butt. Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Dumont’s and Le Page du Pratz’s books competed head to head as histories of Louisiana, but when read in their entirety the texts are quite different, and suggest contrasts between the two writers. Though Dumont harbored secret ambitions as an epic poet, his Mémoires are quite prosaic in style. The first volume consists of  short chapters on the geography, climate, plants, and animals of Louisiana, and  of ethnography of the Indians, including the annual Natchez corn feast described in greater detail by Le Page du Pratz. His colonial history in the latter part of the 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 12 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   second volume refers more often than Le Page du Pratz’s to individual French officers and colonists, but omits names and speeches of individual Natchez. Dumont insisted that everything he wrote of he saw firsthand, and refrained from the theoretical speculation about Natchez customs and comparisons to classical sources that Le Page du Pratz employed. Le Page du Pratz’s three-volume work opens with the narrative of his journey to Natchez, and a self-congratulatory account of his role in a – conflict with the tribe. After several chapters describing the incredible fertility and mineral wealth of the Arkansas region, Le Page du Pratz devotes his second volume to the natural history of Louisiana, and though in outline this material is much like Dumont’s first volume, his ethnography is more complex, and extends through the first hundred pages of the third volume by including the origin myth of the Natchez tribe and the theory of Amerindian prehistory that Dumont had disputed. His narrative history of the Natchez uprising comes in the middle of volume . Le Page du Pratz did not attempt an epic poem about the Natchez massacre, but his narrative endows it with the elegance and drama of the Inca Garcilaso’s La Florida, a literary style superior to that of most other colonial histories. The Natchez leaders are not ‘‘savage’’ antagonists but complex characters whose actions are motivated by internecine rivalries and expressed in eloquent speeches. Moreover, by individuating the Natchez leaders and explaining the tribe’s social organization, his book provides the evidence to support my interpretation of the uprising. ‘‘The Natchez data display to us a culture remarkably unique and different from other known American cultures in many important respects. In its most peculiar and important traits of politico-social organization it is more comparable to Old World that to other known American cultures’’ () wrote anthropologist William MacLeod. Like Old World cultures, the Natchez had a titled aristocracy, the Soleils, or Suns, and a hereditary nobility. Their elites were, literally, ‘‘Noble Savages.’’ Le Page du Pratz explained this titled aristocracy in volume , chapter , ‘‘Cérémonies du mariage’’: ‘‘La Noblesse est divisée en Soliels, en Nobles & Considérés’’ (: ; ‘‘The Nobility is divided into Suns, Nobles, and Honoreds’’). The commoners were called ‘‘Puants,’’ or Stinkards, a term of contempt, Le Page du Pratz explains, but one that he uses frequently nonetheless. The Suns were the Natchez royalty, and their status was enshrined in the tribe’s origin myths. Dumont explained that the royal lineage began with ‘‘Oüachill- 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 13 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  Tamaïll, c’est-à-dire, une Femme Soleil, ou Femme Blanche’’ (:; ‘‘a Female Sun, or White Woman’’), and Le Page du Pratz that ‘‘il y a un trèsgrand nombre d’années il parut parmi nous un homme avec sa femme qui descendit du Soliel’’ (: ; ‘‘a long time ago there appeared among us a woman who descended from the sun’’). By ‘‘descended’’ he did not mean that the sun itself was parent of one or both of the pair, as in some versions of the Earthdiver creation myth in Native America, but only that ‘‘ils étoient encore si brillans que l’on n’eut point de peine à croire qu’ils venoient du Soleil’’ (: ; ‘‘they were so brilliant that one had no trouble believing that they had come from the Sun’’), much like the figural association of the French king with the sun. This couple became the ancestral founders of a royal lineage, maintained matrilineally through the succession of ‘‘Femmes Blanches,’’ White Women or female Great Suns. Natchez kinship rules therefore combined a patriarchal authority familiar to European observers (for as Le Page du Pratz wrote, ‘‘L’autorité paternelle . . . n’est encore moins inviolable & sacrée que le préeminence des hommes’’ (: ; ‘‘paternal authority is no less inviolable and sacred than the preeminence of the men’’) with a radically unfamiliar matrilineal succession and strict exogamy. All Suns were obliged to marry Stinkards. And while daughters of a female sun ‘‘sont soleilles à perpetuité sans souffrir aucune altération dans leur dignité’’ (: ; ‘‘are Suns for life without suffering any alteration in their dignity’’), the male descendants dropped to the next lower caste. The son of the Grande Soleille, or female Great Sun, would be anointed as Grand Soleil, male Great Sun and ruler of the tribe, but his wife would be a Stinkard, and his sons and daughters mere Nobles. These children too would marry Stinkards. Their offspring, the Grand Soleil’s grandchildren, would be Honoreds, and his great-grandchildren Stinkards. Du Pratz wrote that the Soleils were ashamed at seeing ‘‘sa posterité confondue dans le bas peuple’’ and ‘‘ils ne souffrent jamais que l’on en instruise les Etrangers; ils ne veulent pas qu’on les conoisse pour être de leur race’’ (: ; ‘‘their posterity confounded with the commoners. . . they never inform Foreigners of this; they do not wish to recognize them as being of their own blood’’), and that only the Scythians, told of by Herodotus, shared this peculiar custom (:). In a bizarre anticipation of the nineteenthcentury Louisiana Creole elite disowning the illegitimate offspring of their quadroon mistresses, the Natchez Suns concealed the vulgar status of their great-grandchildren. Moreover, in asserting the royal pretensions of the 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 14 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   Natchez suns, Le Page du Pratz made them, by the rules of Aristotle, fit subjects for tragedy. But who were the victims of this tragedy? In December , when the news of the uprising reached New Orleans, panic seized the colony. Although Natchez was over a hundred miles north, one-tenth of the entire colony’s white population had been killed there (Hall ). French colonial leaders moved quickly toward a military retaliation, and promoted the idea of a vast conspiracy behind the uprising. An Indian plot against the French was the first step in the historical emplotment of the events. The existence of such a conspiracy linking many Indian tribes justified a massive retaliation, and might help explain why the Natchez uprising had not been prevented. Governor Périer’s first act was to dispatch a force of African and Native slaves to slaughter the Chaouacha, a small village near New Orleans that had taken no part in the uprising. His letters boasted that his retaliatory siege of Natchez-occupied Fort Rosalie in January and February  was successful, when in fact most of the Natchez escaped at night across the Mississippi (du Pratz : –). Périer claimed that without his quick response ‘‘the general conspiracy would have had its full effect’’ (Mississippi Provincial Archives : ), indirectly admitting that the conspiracy was not evident. He also wrote that when he learned of the uprising from the first refugees to arrive in New Orleans on December , he ‘‘treated this conspiracy as a wild idea in order to reassure our colonists’’ (). The first published report of the Natchez uprising was a letter from missionary Mathurin Le Petit that appeared in the  edition of Lettres Edifiantes, a series of reports of Jesuit missionary activities in the Far East and the Americas. Le Petit covered up for the incompetence of Périer by describing the retaliatory siege as successful. Yet unlike Périer, Le Petit only indirectly referred to a conspiracy of several tribes to attack on the same fateful day. The Natchez ‘‘strike their blow sooner than they had agreed with the other confederate tribes’’ (). When they learn of the revolt, ‘‘The Tchactas [Choctaws], and the other savages being engaged in the plot with them . . . felt at their ease, and did not at all fear that they would draw on themselves the vengeance which was merited’’ (). Later during the siege the French hear the Natchez reproaching the Choctaw ‘‘for their perfidy, in declaring in favor of the French, contrary to the pledge they had given, to unite with them for our destruction’’ (). Le Petit referred to the conspiracy only for its failure, and Périer doth protest too much of its existence. Histo- 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 15 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  rians Delanglez and Villiers both believe that the conspiracy theory was an invention of Périer (Delanglez, ‘‘The Natchez Massacre and Governor Périer,’’ ; Villiers, introduction to Dumont, Poème). But Périer was a hero, a ‘‘César,’’ in the estimation of Dumont, and his Poème, his Mémoires, and Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire all lay primary blame for the uprising upon the commandant at Fort Rosalie, the Sieur de Chépar.8 When Chépar took over the post he supplanted the authority of Dumont, who according to his own account ‘‘avoit commondé dans le poste sous les yeux du sieur Brontin’’ (: ; ‘‘had commanded the post under the supervision of Mr. Brontin’’), the previous commandant. Dumont immediately complained to Governor Périer of Chépar’s injustices. Chépar was called to New Orleans to answer the charges, but Périer cleared him and he returned to Fort Rosalie. In the spring of , Chépar summoned the Sun of the Natchez town of Pomme Blanche (or ‘‘white apple’’), to demand that the Sun give up lands along St. Catharine’s Creek. Chépar claimed that he acted upon orders from New Orleans, another clue that Périer might have been ultimately responsible, but in any case his plans were similar to what other concessionaires had been doing under the Compagnie de l’Ouest, clearing land and planting tobacco and corn ‘‘d’y faire fortune en peu de temps’’ (: ; ‘‘to make a quick fortune there’’). The Sun replied ‘‘qu’il y avoit tres-long-temps que leur Nation étoit en possession de ce Village, & y demeuroit; que les cendres de leurs ancestres y reposoient, déposées dans le Temple qu’ils y avoient bâti’’ (: ; ‘‘that it has been a very long time that our nation has been in possession of this village, and lived here, that the ashes of our ancestors have lain here, in the Temple that they had built’’). The temple in each village was built atop a small mound, which many archaeologists believe to be related to the Mississippian mound complexes of a thousand years before, and the temple held the bones (not ashes of bones as Dumont suggests here) of the deceased chiefs (Galloway ). Although Dumont in his book showed much less sympathy for the Natchez than did Le Page du Pratz, he unequivocally condemned Chépar’s greed and arrogance. Chépar ignored the protocol that the French had observed at Natchez to settle only on vacant land, and he even threatened to capture the Sun and send him ‘‘down the river’’ to New Orleans as a galley slave. The Sun finally agreed to remove his village after the harvest, and to pay a tribute until then, but he was already, according to our authors, plotting to make Chépar pay dearly. 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 16 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   The existence of a Natchez ‘‘terrorist’’ plot was necessary for the historical emplotment of the massacre; it was needed both for political and literary reasons. If the uprising had been a spontaneous act by a Natchez mob, not only might it portend more such acts of resistance, but it would be impossible to know whom to blame for them. Neither tragic hubris nor poetic justice would be available. And our two authors give us both. In the midst of the uprising, the Natchez get their revenge upon Chépar: ‘‘le regardent comme un chien, indigne d’être tué par un brave homme, & ils font venir le Chef Puant, qui l’assomme d’un coup de massue’’ (Dumont :; ‘‘regarding him as a dog, unworthy of being killed like a brave man, they summoned the chief Stinkard, who clobbered him with one blow of a club’’). Chépar’s hubris was having ignored warnings of the revolt: ‘‘[H]e had put in irons seven colonists who had asked to assemble to forestall the disaster with which they were menaced’’ (Mississippi Provincial Archives :). Dumont was one of the seven, and in his Poème he added that the night before, Chépar had gone out drinking with the Natchez, and ‘‘Demanderent au chef, pour passer la nuitee, /Quelques filles sauvages, et elles accordées, / Ils coucherent ensemble.’’ (; ‘‘Demanded from the chief several Native girls to spend the night with; he was given them, and they slept together’’). The existence of a Natchez plot was again supported only by negative evidence—Chépar’s foolish refusal to believe in it. Dumont, motivated by his own grievances, gives us the most detail about Chépar, but only Le Page du Pratz quotes at length the speeches of the Natchez as they plan their response. Many ethnographic texts about Native America described councils of war, meetings of sage elders who considered pleas from bereaved women or offended men desiring vengeance upon an enemy. As Le Page du Pratz put it, ‘‘cette entreprise étant de la dernière consequence, elle demandoit beaucoup de sécret, des mesures solides & beaucoup de politique’’ (: ; ‘‘this enterprise being of the greatest consequence, it demanded total secrecy, solid planning, and careful politics’’). The Sun of the White Apple Village went to the Great Sun, who convened a meeting of vieillards, old men, who after six days reach a consensus that the only solution is the total destruction of the French. One of the elders rises and makes a speech that echoes the republican revolutionary rhetoric in Indian tragedies such as Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags. He denounces Natchez dependence on ‘‘Les Marchandises des François’’ (‘‘The wares of the French’’) which ‘‘débaucher les filles & 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 17 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  corrompre le sang de la Nation’’ (: ; ‘‘debauch the young women, and taint the blood of the nation’’). He likens dependence upon the colonists to slavery, ‘‘les François . . . les fouetteront comme ils fouettent leur Esclaves Noires: ne l’ont-ils pas déja fait à un de nos jeunes gens & la mort n’estelle pas préférable à l’esclavage?’’ (: ; ‘‘the French whip us as they whip their slaves; have they not already done so to one of our young men, and is not death preferable to slavery?’’) The first line may allude to intermarriage between the French and the royal blood of the Suns, while the second may recall how in an earlier conflict in –, the Natchez had surrendered up the body of Vieux Poil, a previous Sun of the Apple Village who was accused of killing a Frenchman.9 After a pause, the vieillard goes on to lay out the plan for the uprising, as it was later reported in the correspondence of the French officials. The Natchez will on the appointed day carry the payment of corn to Chépar, and then ask of a local Frenchman powder and shot in order to go hunting. A shot fired at the commandant’s house will be the signal to attack. The speech of this vieillard fits closely the rhetoric of defiance to colonization by non-white heroes of eighteenth-century drama and prose works, but is unusual insofar as the man who delivers it makes no other appearance in the story. In this regard, it anticipates the ‘‘Adieux du Vieillard’’ in Denis Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville of , which also decries how Europeans have ‘‘infecté notre sang’’ (; ‘‘infected our blood’’) in Tahiti.10 The speech arouses Natchez defiance by reproaching their temerity as much as by appealing to their political selfinterest. But the vieillard is neither the conspirator nor the military leader of the revolt that follows. His role is closer to that of the nativist prophets such as Nemattenew and Tenskwatawa the Shawnee Prophet, who assisted Opechancanough and Tecumseh in planning wars of resistance against colonization in  and . We never learn his name, however. The principles that justify the uprising are given a certain universal validity by making their exponent a type, rather than an individual, and his noble qualities became perhaps more appealing to the contemporary audience. But the figure of the vieillard precludes any heroic Natchez leader who might articulate principles of liberty and independence with the full rhetorical and political power that would soon be invoked by Indian tragic heroes such as Ponteach in Robert Rogers’s play by that title, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and revolutionaries like Patrick Henry. Likewise, in 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 18 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez (–), it is not one of the three Natchez leaders who delivers a rousing speech to the assembled tribes, but an unnamed shaman, ‘‘le jongleur des Natchez.’’ Le Page du Pratz does, however, explain the leadership vacuum, which is linked to the matrilinear kinship structures of the Natchez. Yakstalchil, the Grand Soleil whom Le Page du Pratz had known when he lived there, had died in , and the ‘‘Grand Soleil regnant étoit un jeune homme sans expérience’’ (: ; ‘‘Great Sun then reigning was a young man without experience’’). The Sun of the Apple Village, although he had only local authority, was able to convince this young regent to approve plans for an attack on Chépar and the French. Brontin, the previous commander of Fort Rosalie, had maintained good relations with Yakstalchil, and would not have dared to make the demands that Chépar had issued. Hence in Le Page du Pratz’s text, the most detailed account of the Natchez uprising, there is a Natchez chief behind the conspiracy, and he is possessed of tragic hubris. Yet his flaw lies not in his heroic ambitions for freedom, but in his lack of authority: ‘‘étant encore jeune, on se mocqueroit de lui; enfin que le seul moyen de conserver son autorité, étoit de se defaire des François par la voye & avec les précautions que les Vieillards avoit projettées’’ (: ; ‘‘being still young, they held him in contempt, and finally the only way to maintain his authority was to attack the French in the way and with the precautions that the elders had plotted’’). Among Indian tribes where ‘‘republican’’ or egalitarian social structures prevailed, that is, among most of the native peoples of North America, leaders maintained their power through persuasion and charisma, and such a scenario would have been impossible. But because the Grand Soleil held a hereditary title atop a strictly hierarchical order, he misjudged his true influence, and this tragic flaw led to a different sort of plot than applied in the revolts of Metacom, Pontiac, or Tecumseh. The conclusion of the vieillard’s speech introduces the most important trope in the emplotment of the Natchez massacre, the detail which afforded du Pratz, Dumont, and Chateaubriand the greatest potential for dramatizing and romanticizing the story of the uprising: . . . après avoir fait entendre aux autres Nations la nécessité de prendre ce parti violent, on leur laisseroit à chacune un paquet de Buchettes, qui seroit en pareil nombre que le leur, lequel marqueroit la quantité de jours qu’il y avoit à attendre jusqu’à celui auquel tous devoient frapper 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 19 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  à la fois: que pour ne point se tromper, il falloit être exact à tirer tous les jours une de ces Buchettes du paquet, la casser & la jetter au loin, & qu’un homme sage seroit chargé de ce soin. (:) . . . after having communicated to several Nations the necessity of taking this violent action, we shall send to them each a packet of sticks, equal in number to our own, which will mark the number of days that are to come before the one on which all must attack at once. So as there may be no mistake, it is necessary to take each day one of the sticks from the packet, to break it and throw it away, and a wise man will be charged with this duty. The use of the buchettes as tokens for counting the number of days until the planned attack reflects a belief in ‘‘savage innumeracy’’—the supposed incapacity of primitive peoples to think abstractly, or, at its extreme, to even have a system for counting beyond five or ten. The absurdity of this prejudice should be obvious. If the Natchez could count out the bundles of sticks, then they could certainly count the number of days the sticks represented. The trope has a long history in colonial America, however, and may have been picked up from oral legends colonists had passed along about earlier uprisings, notably the Pueblo Revolt of , in which the Native mastermind El Popé supposedly distributed cords of maguey fiber tied with knots representing the days left until their planned attack.11 Today Pueblo Indians annually celebrate this act of resistance with a marathon relay run carrying maguey cords among the Pueblos. Yet research by Angelico Chavez suggests that the story may have been a myth, as it probably was at Natchez. Neither Le Petit, Charlevoix, nor the correspondence of Périer or other officials mentioned the use of token sticks for planning the uprising. The story seems to have been invented to explain why there was not a coordinated uprising of many tribes, by explaining that the Natchez attacked too soon. For this primitive method of representation had a tragic flaw. As Dumont explained: ‘‘Ors le chef des Natchez, filant son entreprise, Vint un jour, à son temple, avec son jeune enfant, Qui, croyant que son père avec amusement Jetoit au feu ces bois, il en fit tout de mème; Le chef ne le vit pas . . .’’ () 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 20 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   ‘‘So the chief of the Natchez, following this plan, Came one day, to his temple, with his young child, Who, believing that his father was playing a game Throwing the stick into the fire, he did the same And the chief did not see him do it . . .’’ In Le Petit’s  account, the Natchez ‘‘strike their blow sooner than they had agreed with the other confederate tribes’’ (:), two days early, because they wish to plunder some French supply canoes which were preparing to depart upstream. But the buchettes and their theft is a much better motivated plot, and du Pratz and Chateaubriand then improved upon Dumont’s version, replacing the mischievous youngster with romantic femmes fatales. In du Pratz’s Histoire, the vieillard insists that none of the Natchez women be informed of the plan. The council of war likewise declares that ‘‘il fut défendu sous peine de la vie de parler de ceci à qui que ce fût,’’ but ‘‘il n’est pas nouveau dans tous les Pays du Monde, de voir les Sujets s’efforcer à pénétrer les secrets de la Cour’’ (: ; ‘‘it was forbidden under pain of death to speak of what they had done . . . it was nothing new, in this as in other parts of the world, to see subjects strive to penetrate the secrets of the court’’). Given the importance of the Female Suns in the Natchez royal ‘‘court,’’ it is no surprise that ‘‘Les seules Soleilles (ou Princesses) avoient droit dans cette Nation de demander pourquoi on se cachoit d’elles.’’ (: ; ‘‘The female Suns (or Princesses) had alone in this nation a right to demand why they were kept in the dark in this affair’’). The female Great Sun, Bras Piqué, or Tattooed Arm, mother of the untested Great Sun, perceives an uneasiness in her son, and grills him about what is brewing. The dialogue that ensues, to which Le Page du Pratz devotes four pages, is the climax of his dramatization of the uprising.12 She prevails upon her son by first reminding him that in their matrilineal system, he owes his power to her: ‘‘N’es-tu pas sorti de mes entrailles? . . . Serois-tu Soleil si tu n’étoit pas mon fils? As-tu déja oublié que sans mes soins tu serois mort il y a longtemps? Tout le monde t’a dit, & moi aussi, que tu es fils d’un François, mais mon propre sang m’est beaucoup plus cher que celui des étrangers. . . . As-tu jamais vû dans notre Nation un fils mépriser sa mère?’’ (: ; ‘‘Are you not from my own loins? . . . Would you be Sun if you were not my son? Have you already forgotten that without my care you would have been 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 21 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  dead a long time ago? Everyone tells you, and I do as well, that you are the son of a Frenchman, but my own blood is more dear to me than that of strangers. . . . Have you ever seen in our nation a son denounce his mother?’’) Bras Piqué tells her son that his father was a Frenchman, and he confirms it in his defensive reply: ‘‘Quoique l’on sçache que je suis fils d’un François, on ne s’est pas méfié de moi’’ (: ; ‘‘Although they know that I am the son of a Frenchman, they do not defy me’’). These lines offer a valuable clue to the identity of the unnamed and tragically weak young Great Sun. A document in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, dated , asserts that the Grand Soleil of the Natchez was the son of St. Cosme, a missionary sent to the Tamaroa tribe in Illinois in , who had gone downstream to Natchez shortly after that, and was killed by the Chitimachas, sometime between  and  (Surrey : ; Penicault –). The anonymous letter cites the confession of his ‘‘mistress’’ as proof.13 Although Le Page du Pratz does not identify the young regent by the name St. Cosme, the details of his text are consistent with it, and he alludes in a backhanded way to Bras Piqué’s liaison: ‘‘Ce fut un bonheur pour les François de ce qu’elle se crut ainsi méprisée; car je crois que la Colonie doit plutôt son salut au chagrin de cette femme, qu’au reste d’amour qu’elle avoit pour les François. Elle étoit déja fort agée, & son Amant étoit mort il y avoit quelques années’’ (: ; ‘‘I am persuaded the colony owes its preservation to the vexation of this woman rather that to any remains of affection she entertained for the French, as she was now far advanced in years, and her gallant dead some time’’). Because under Natchez kinship rules her legitimate mate would perforce be a Stinkard, a ‘‘gallant’’ (‘‘amant’’ in French) surely refers to a Frenchman, who if it were St. Cosme would put their children in their twenties by . Dumont, in his account of the death in  of the Sun who had been the chief ally of the French, Serpent Piqué, mentioned one ‘‘St. Côme’’ as among the younger Suns (: ). The paternity of St. Cosme may have been an open secret among Frenchmen in Louisiana, one that no writer wished to declare in print out of deference to the Church. Likewise, the early twentieth-century historians of Louisiana did not make the suggestion, although the entry for St. Cosme in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography does.14 St. Cosme’s own words only deepen suspicions that he may have had a Natchez mistress. His own published missionary relations cover only the period before he moved downstream to Natchez, but according to the Jesuit Father Gravier, who wrote a relation about the tribe 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 22 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   in , ‘‘Monsieur de St. Cosme informed me that the Natches were far from being as docile as the Tounika. They are polygamous, thievish, and Very depraved—the girls and women being even more so than the men and boys, among whom a great reformation must be effected before anything can be expected from them’’ (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, : ). As Le Page du Pratz insists that it was ‘‘the vexation of this woman rather than to any remains of affection she entertained for the French’’ which motivated her ‘‘avertir quelques filles qui aimoient les François’’ (: ; ‘‘to alert several young women who were in love with Frenchmen’’) and to steal a few of the token sticks, his plot develops a misogynist view of Bras Piqué as spiteful and jealous of her son’s power. ‘‘As-tu peur que je ne te rebute, & que je te fasse Esclave des François contre lesquels vous agissez?’’ (: ; ‘‘Are you afraid that I will betray you, and that I will make you a slave of the Frenchmen against whom you are acting?’’), she says, hinting at a knowledge of the planned uprising. ‘‘Le fils de cette Soleille fut pénétré du discours qu’elle venoit de lui faire les larmes aux yeux’’ (: ; ‘‘The son of this Female Sun was paralyzed by the words that she had just told him, with tears in her eyes’’). He avoids referring to the conspiracy, but indirectly confirms her hints: ‘‘Puisque tu as tout deviné . . . Tu en sçais autant que moi: fermes ta bouche’’ (: ; ‘‘Since you have divined everything . . . You know as much as I do; keep your mouth closed’’). Finally, Bras Piqué warns her son that the French are numerous and powerful; that if it were red men against whom he was planning an attack, she would not worry, but ‘‘les François ont des ressources que les Hommes rouges n’ont pas’’ (: ; ‘‘The Frenchmen have resources that the Red Men do not’’). Bras Piqué was captured after the French besieged the occupied Fort Rosalie, and was held as a prisoner in New Orleans. It was there, Le Page du Pratz writes at the very end of his account of the uprising, that he learned from her ‘‘toutes les menées des Natchez avant le jour du Massacre’’ (: ; ‘‘all the doings of the Natchez before the day of the massacre’’). As a prisoner of war, she would have had good reasons for creating a story in which she had favored the French. But if we trust Le Page du Pratz’s account, we might be reminded of an earlier meeting he had with the female Great Sun, when she came to offer him her daughter in marriage (: – ).15 Le Page du Pratz does not confirm that this Soleille was the same woman, and it is possible that the former was female Sun only of the village closest to his concession, not of the entire tribe. However, if it was 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 23 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  Bras Piqué, the daughter who had sought his hand in marriage would now be the princess whom the Natchez called ‘‘la Soleille Blanche, parce qu’elle étoit plus blanche & plus delicate que les autres’’ (: ; ‘‘the White Sun, because she was more white and more delicate than the others’’), whose whiteness could be literal as well as titular because she is the daughter of a Frenchman, and who, along with her mother, helps betray the conspiracy to the French. Bras Piqué’s theft of the sticks is the repetition of a sexual betrayal that has already occurred, and the young Sun St. Cosme is genetically compromised because he is the offspring of this affair. He is the ‘‘tragic mestizo,’’ if you will. The climax of du Pratz’s account of the massacre is in the conspiracy, rather than in the uprising itself, and the tragic flaws of Chépar and of Bras Piqué effectively negate one another. Bras Piqué tells ‘‘M. Massé SousLieutenant’’ (: ) at Fort Rosalie, who informs Chépar, but Chépar does not heed this or other warnings.16 She then ‘‘tiré du fatal Faisseau quelques buchettes’’ (: ; ‘‘took from the fatal bundle several sticks’’) but her theft is ultimately inconsequential. ‘‘Le Massacre devoit s’exécuter deux ou trois jours avant qu’il ne l’a été, mais les Natchez ayant appris qu’il devoit arriver une demie Galére chargée de Marchandises, remirent à exécuter leur projet à l’arrivée de ce Bateau’’ (: –; ‘‘The massacre was supposed to take place two or three days before it did, but the Natchez having learned that a small galley of merchandise was going to arrive, put off their plan until the arrival of the boat’’). Reversing Le Petit’s account, which claimed that the supply boat prompted the Natchez to attack two days sooner, du Pratz’s narrative hastens the attack and then postpones it again. Since the two events cancel each other out, their veracity cannot be ascertained. As a plot device, the token sticks are undermined by overdetermination. In a parallel fashion, the epic historical grandeur of the Natchez Massacre was undermined by the fact that the entire French colony fell, not to the Natchez, but to the English and later the Anglo-Americans. The Natchez drama had to wait for the French Revolution, and for Chateaubriand, to find its full epic treatment, and this treatment would emphasize the melancholy of loss for both Natchez and French. Because Chateaubriand’s own attitudes toward the Revolution changed markedly during his life, and because as a Romantic afflicted with a Wertherian ‘‘mal du siecle’’ he relished the anguish of being on the losing side, of being dispossessed, the political meaning of the uprising in Les Natchez is ambivalent. Chateaubriand 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 24 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   arrived in London in , nursing his Quixotic memories of his adventures in the United States in , and his wounds from battles against French revolutionaries in . His mood and motives in writing Atala and Les Natchez were conflicted. A recovering Rousseauvian, an aristocrat, and a defender of the French ancien regime, Chateaubriand found reasons to identify with the heroic resistance and the tragic demise of the Natchez, ‘‘noble savages’’ comparable to either party in the French Revolution. But as a patriot he also had to sympathize with the French colonists sent by that regime. His novelistic hero René is, like Chateaubriand himself, a refugee and renegade, in flight from and in opposition to his nation’s regime. His adoption by the Natchez does not secure for him a primitive paradise, but instead exacerbates his political ambivalence. David Quint has written in Epic and Empire that ‘‘to the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering’’ (). Les Natchez, which Quint curiously never mentions, complicates his genre definition by attempting to be both. Chateaubriand himself claimed in his preface that ‘‘j’avois encore changé le genre de la composition, en la faisant passer du roman à l’épopée’’ (; ‘‘I had also changed the species of the composition, by turning it from a romance to an epic’’ [: ]).17 The first half of the text is divided into  books, and employs a superabundance of epic devices and epithets. Book , in which Catherine Tekakwitha, the Iroquois saint, intervenes with the Virgin Mary to protect the Natchez, is the most preposterous of these. The second half, including the climactic episodes of the conspiracy and massacre, is a continuous narrative titled ‘‘Suite des Natchez’’ and stripped of most of the epic histrionics. While this inconsistent use of epic devices damages its literary coherence, the book’s interest finally lies precisely in these contradictions of its genres and its themes. Because it uses the Natchez massacre for its climax, it is an epic of the tribe’s defeat and of the French colony’s vengeful victory. But as a romance about the entire French colonial experience in North America, it follows René’s (and Chateaubriand’s) exile, wandering, and defeat. Les Natchez combines not only epic and romance, but revolutionary and reactionary, Native and Christian, in an uneasy, sometimes absurd mix. And its plot splits the Natchez uprising into two battles, creating a doubled, ambivalent account of the responsibility for the betrayal, violence, and sacrifice involved. Chateaubriand read Le Page du Pratz’s and Dumont’s texts, as well as 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 25 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  Carver, Bartram, Lafitau, and Lahontan, and he copied out of them countless ethnographic details for ‘‘delineating the manners of the savages’’ as the lines quoted in my epigraph claim. Michel Butor went so far as to call Les Natchez ‘‘le premier example d’une littérature fondée sur l’ethnographie’’ (; ‘‘the first example of a literature founded on ethnography’’). But as Gilbert Chinard’s careful scholarship has proved, Chateaubriand showed a remarkable tendency to get the facts wrong; to misplace and misuse the ethnography he read.18 The artifice of his documentation, the pseudoheroism of reducing life to text, is exposed in these errors. Chateaubriand never went to Natchez, never experienced Native American life, but he felt he had shared some of the pain and exile that he dramatized. The climax of Le Page du Pratz’s account of the massacre comes not on the battlefield, but in the formation of the plot and its betrayal by Bras Piqué. Likewise, the epic high point of Les Natchez is not the violent uprising, but the formation of the plot behind it, culminating in the affair of the token sticks. The conspiracy begins when all the Indian tribes of North American gather for a council of war on a cliff above Lake Superior. An epic review of the armies begins with the Iroquois and proceeds to Algonquins, Hurons, Abenakis, Powhatans, Creeks, Muscogulges, Seminoles, Cherokees, Yamassees, Chickasaws, and Illinois, and finally several western tribes culminating in the Sioux. Perhaps because this transcontinental conspiracy had no historical basis, Chateaubriand did not create a heroic Natchez chief to lead it. Although he appears to have understood the Natchez caste system from his reading of Le Page du Pratz, Chateaubriand did not place the royal family of Suns at the forefront of the tribe. If he did learn of St. Cosme, he probably refrained from putting him in the leader’s role because he did not wish to blacken the reputation of missionaries such as his own saintly Father Aubry. Instead, he relied on a cast of characters representing different positions with regard to the conspiracy, and to René. The titular Grand Soleil is over  years old, remains unnamed, and plays no part in the uprising. The Grande Soleille, or Femme Blanche (though neither term is used for her), is Akansie, and her unnamed son would be the heir to the Sunship, except that she favors a usurper, the villain Ondouré, for whom she has a fatal passion. Ondouré, however, loves Céluta, the heroine and wife of René, whose daughter Amélie, born in Les Natchez, appears in the concluding chapter of Atala. Ondouré’s love is forbidden not only by René’s 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 26 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   prerogatives in the novel’s plot but presumably also by the Natchez rule of exogamy, for Céluta, the sister of the noble Natchez hero Outougamiz, is of course not a Stinkard. Ondouré succeeds at getting himself named ‘‘Edile,’’ or guardian of the young regent, a title Chateaubriand admits he adopted from classical Rome. He plans to marry an unnamed woman, then take Céluta as his concubine and manipulate the rules of descent in an effort to become Sun. His plans are resisted not only by Outougamiz and René but by the two sage vieillards, Chactas and Adario, who represent Natchez sentiment for and against the French. A scene in Book  resembles the harangue of the vieillard in Le Page du Pratz, except that is shared between the two. Adario begins by reminding the Natchez of the deaths they suffered in the wake of the invasions by de Soto and LaSalle, and of the folly of making peace with the French: ‘‘Hommes imprudents! La fumée de la servitude et celle de l’independence pouvoient-elles sortir du même calumet? Il faut une tête plus forte que celle de l’esclave, pour n’être point troublée par le parfum de la liberté’’ (; ‘‘Imprudent men! Can the smoke of slavery and that of independence proceed from the same pipe? It requires a stronger head than that of the slave not to be confused by the scent of liberty’’ [: ]). That he should conclude with ‘‘liberty’’ rather than ‘‘peace,’’ however, hints at Chateaubriand’s true agenda, which opposes the uprising, and makes the French its victims, dismissing the Natchez who perished in its aftermath. Adario invokes filiopiety to argue for war, ‘‘soyez dignes de vos pères, et le vieil Adario vous conduit des aujour’dhui aux batailles sanglantes’’ (; ‘‘prove yourselves worthy of your fathers, and this very day Adario will lead you to the bloody conflict’’ [: ]). On the following pages Chactas articulates the jeremiad part of the rhetoric of the vieillard, reproaching his countrymen for their dependence upon the French: ‘‘Je sais aussi les injustices des Blancs; mon cœur s’en est affligé. Mais sommes-nous certains que nous n’avons riens à nous reprocher nousmêmes. Avons-nous fait tout ce que nous avons pu pour demeurer libres?’’ (; ‘‘I am no stranger to the encroachments of the Whites: my heart is deeply afflicted by them. But are we sure that we have done nothing wherewith to reproach ourselves? Have we done all that we could have done to preserve our independence?’’ [: ]). The voice of peace carries the day, and the tribe decides to appease the demands of Chépar, as the Natchez in fact did for several months during the summer of . Between this early scene and the decisive council at Lake Superior are 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 27 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  more than  pages, or two-thirds of Les Natchez. Much of this, from the middle of Book  to Book , is devoted to Chactas’s narrative of his voyages to France, Chateaubriand’s opportunity for satire in the vein of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters or Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. Books  and  return to Louisiana and feature a preliminary battle between the French and the Natchez that is treated with more epic grandeur than is the final uprising of . This of course is in the epic first volume, but Chateaubriand may also have wished to employ these devices upon a battle in which the Natchez held the moral high ground. The conflict bears little resemblance to actual skirmishes in –. It is precipitated by an evil Muslim renegade, Febriano, who first plots with Ondouré and arouses a conspiracy among the African slaves, then goes to Chépar and betrays the plan, hinting that Adario, Chactas, and René are all in on it. When Chactas goes to Fort Rosalie with a calumet to try to defuse the conflict, Chépar takes him prisoner. Then Adario is also captured and sold into slavery, as were several actual Natchez leaders captured in the siege of February . In the aftermath of this battle, René is accused of conspiracy, even though he and Outougamiz were actually far away, at war against the Illinois. René turns himself in to the French in exchange for Adario’s release. Put on trial in New Orleans, he is sentenced to (re-)exile back in France. It is at this point that he receives a letter informing him of the death of his sister Amélie, which elicits the narrative of René. (The text of René and Chactas’s narrative of Atala were not actually reprinted in Les Natchez; their places in the narrative were simply indicated by notes.) After his release from prison Ondouré denounces René as a collaborator, and sends him to the Illinois with the calumet, as a ruse to get him away from Natchez during the uprising. René therefore does not attend the council on Lake Superior, although Outougamiz, his close friend and brother-in-law, does. It is Outougamiz who faces the dilemma between civic duty and personal loyalty characteristic of epics and of republican tragedies. He participates in an oath consecrating the conspiracy, but when Ondouré orders him to kill René, Outougamiz he says he cannot do so, even if it amounts to betraying his nation. During their fight against the Illinois, Outougamiz had saved René’s life and the two entered into sacred brotherhood, modeled on that of Achilles and Patroclus but holding the extra appeal of giving René’s marriage to Céluta, Outougamiz’s sister, the overtones of incest essential to high Romantic novels. Faced with betraying either his friend or his na- 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 28 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   tion, Outougamiz briefly contemplates suicide, but instead races back to Natchez and partly reveals the plot to Céluta. The young, beautiful Céluta replaces Bras Piqué in the romantic role as thief of the token sticks. She dresses up as a ghost, a spirit of a dead ancestor, so as to gain admittance to the temple where the bones of the ancestors are kept alongside the bundle of sticks, and steals eight of them. The theft is witnessed, but its interpretation is open to debate. Outougamiz, who opposes the uprising, treats the tokens as sacred and says Céluta’s actions are a sign that ‘‘Le Grand Esprit le désapprouve’’ (), while others insist that it go forward on the date planned. Hence, the theft of the token sticks is self-negating, as in du Pratz’s version. Céluta, echoing Pocahontas, betrays her tribe in an attempt to save the French colony. The plot and counterplot also echo events in the first volume where René was accused of betraying the colony by plotting with the Natchez to attack the French. Laura Murray has written of an ‘‘aesthetics of dispossession’’ in early national writings about Native Americans, of how a ‘‘romanticization of the ideas of dispossession, homelessness, and loss, served to mask historical differences’’ () between the losses of European colonists such as the French in Louisiana, and the more profound losses of colonized Natives. Though Murray conceived of the idea in relation to Washington Irving, it is germane to Chateaubriand as well. The romantic pathos of René is predicated not so much on his lovelorn exile (as in René) as on his being politically disowned by both French and Natchez: ‘‘pour les Natchez, l’impie René étoit le complice secret des mauvais desseins des François; pour les François, le traître René étoit l’ennemi de son ancienne patrie’’ (; ‘‘with the Natchez, the impious René was the secret accomplice of the hostile plans of the French; with the French, René, the traitor, was the enemy of his former country’’ [: ]). During his trial in New Orleans, his lawyer declares that he is no longer a Frenchman, and therefore immune from prosecution, and René himself provokes the court: ‘‘Je viens seulement vous déclarer que s’il y a quelque conspirateur parmi les Natchez, c’est moi, car je me suis toujours opposé à votre oppression’’ (: ‘‘I come only to declare that if there is a conspirator among the Natchez, it is me, because I will always put myself in opposition to your oppression’’ [: ]). Adario and Chactas were also innocent in the first uprising plotted by Febriano, and René eagerly sought the martyr’s role on behalf of the tribe. In the terminology of René Girard, René tries to become a sacrificial victim whose 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 29 of 187 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  death might bring about a truce in relations with the French. And like Girard, Chateaubriand was always thinking of classical tragedy. René, similar to Oedipus, is an outsider cast upon a monarchical nation and adopted into it, who rises to a position of power. He becomes the confidant of a blind seer (Chactas, whose blindness is also emphasized in Atala, as he recounts the events of his youth), and the rival of the pretender Ondouré. His horrifying crime of incest (with his sister rather than his mother) destroys his marriage to Céluta and symbolizes his political demise. His incest and outcast status also link him to the two St. Cosmes, one a missionary who may have had a child with a Natchez woman, and then was martyred, and his son, the shadowy Sun who appears to have led the uprising and subsequent flight of the Natchez. Ondouré, who tried to frame René for plotting the first attack on the French, finally kills him in the midst of the massacre, just hours after he had returned from the Illinois, too late to prevent the uprising for which, had he lived, he might have been blamed by the French.19 So René finds his martyrdom, at the hands of the Natchez. In the second half of the book, which Chinard believes was composed in the s, Chateaubriand reveals how his sentiments had changed since the first half and the s. He regrets the uprising, and has René try unsuccessfully to prevent it. Hence, Les Natchez becomes inconsistent not only stylistically, but ideologically. French writers developed the ‘‘plot’’ of the Natchez Massacre at first to help justify their reprisals against the tribe, then used it to invite a sympathetic identification with the Natchez, but finally the political dynamic of the conspiracy became subsumed in the histories of subsequent colonial wars and revolutions. And so the uprising that once was so meaningful for French writers is now a faint memory among both French and Anglo-Americans.  Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 . The term ‘‘massacre’’ is politically loaded, even as the name paired with it does not consistently refer to the victims or to the perpetrators, but sometimes merely to the place where it occurred. In this case, the violent retaliation by EuroAmerican colonials deserves the term ‘‘massacre’’ just as much as the initial revolt. In what follows, I shall use ‘‘uprising’’ rather than ‘‘massacre’’ or ‘‘revolt’’ or ‘‘rebellion,’’ so as to clarify that the native tribe acted to defend their lands, and were not the subjects of any sovereign political power. For the number of French lives lost in the initial uprising, see Delanglez, ‘‘Natchez Massacre,’’ –. 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 30 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53  }   :   ,   . For example, before King Philip’s War some New Englanders believed that all the Indians were planning to drive them back into the sea. William Hubbard wrote, ‘‘[T]here was a Design of a general rising of the Indians against the English, all over the Countrey, (possibly as far as Virginia, the Indians there making Insurrection this same year)’’ (: –), referring to Bacon’s Rebellion. . Le Mercure de France, Sept. , printed an account of the uprising by Périer de Salvert, the governor’s brother (see Giraud ), and the  installment of the Jesuit missionary relation series Lettres Edifiantes included the narrative by Father Mathurin le Petit. By contrast, there were  publications about King Philip’s War between  and . . The Importance and Advantage of Cape Breton (London: Knapton, ), quoted in Charles E. O’Neill, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Charlevoix’s Louisiana, xiv. An Account of the French Settlements in North America (Boston, ). . In the Nov.  issue of the Journal Oeconomique, independent of his ongoing series of articles about Lousiana, Le Page du Pratz published an article ‘‘Concernant le Desséchement des Marais, & le moyen de faire des levées solide, par M. Le Page du Pratz Ingénieur Machiniste & Hydraulique’’ (‘‘Concerning the draining of swamps, and the means for making solid levees, by Mr. Le Page du Pratz, Mechanical and Hydrological Engineer’’) that included a diagram and elaborate instructions for building a sort of crane for use in excavating ditches and building levees. The text claimed that he had used such a contraption at Fontenoi-leComte in Poitou, and received a prize for it from the Academie des Sciences. . The best biographical sketch of Le Page du Pratz is Joseph Treagle’s introduction to the reprint of the English translation of History of Louisiana. For Dumont, see Jean Delanglez’s ‘‘A Louisiana Poet-Historian, Dumont dit Montigny.’’ . Because these published English translations are abridged, I have translated quotations myself, although I have followed the  translation where possible. . This name is spelled variously in the primary documents: ‘‘Chépart’’ by Le Page du Pratz, ‘‘Chopart’’ by Dumont, and ‘‘Etcheparre,’’ ‘‘de Chepar,’’ and ‘‘Detchéparre’’ elsewhere. I have decided to follow Chinard and Chateaubriand’s spelling, ‘‘Chépar.’’ . Dumont’s Poeme says later ‘‘Le chef mort de la Pomme. / Qui, pour la paix première étoit décapité, / Peut dire que sa mort par ce coup fut vengée’’ (; ‘‘The late chief of Apple village, who lost his head for the sake of peace before, can now say that by this blow his death is avenged’’). . Moreover, Diderot’s French chaplain is invited by a local headman Orou to take to bed one of his daughters, much as du Pratz tells in an earlier episode that he was asked to marry a Natchez princess by her mother, the Female Great Sun. . Dumont’s Mémoires contains an account very close to the one from du Pratz quoted above, but without quoting any speech by a Natchez leader. Here is my translation: ‘‘They arrived at the barbaric solution, not only to massacre the commandant of the fort, but even to put to death all the French, and liberate the country. After this they sent in all directions, to all the different Nations around 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 31 of 187 Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Plotting the Natchez Massacre {  this province, the calumet of alliance, representing to them the tyranny that the French wanted to impose in removing them from their land, and asked for help against this usurpation and violence. The Choctaws were the first and the most eager to enter into this resistance; they were charged with destroying all the French on the lower river, and for the execution of this plan they set the day at the end of two moons, that the Commandant had designated. But because these peoples do not know how to count, as I remarked above, they distributed among them as many little sticks of wood, like matches, as there were days until the one that was destined for this bloody butchery. . . . Each morning the chief went to the temple to throw into the sacred fire one of these matches, of which the last was to mark the day of this frightful massacre’’ (: –). Dumont probably set the legend to paper first, as his manuscript dates to , and his Poème was likely written even earlier. . It is in direct quotations in the French original, while the English translator turned it into indirect discourse and abridged it; History of Louisiana –. . The fact that the document dates from , before the massacre, is significant. Surrey summarizes it: ‘‘Account of the Grand Soleil of the Natchez, son of a Frenchman (St. Cosme, missionary). St. Cosme’s mission to the Tamarois; his assassination by Tchutimachas; confession of his mistress. pp. BN mss fr : .’’ A Natchez leader identified as St. Cosme was still fighting the French when the tribe took refuge among the Chickasaw in January  (Woods ; Charlevoix’s Louisiana, –). Charlevoix’s account suggests that St. Cosme’s hereditary authority had been supplanted by another, unnamed Sun who reluctantly approved the plans for the uprising. Patricia Galloway (personal communication) proposed that St. Cosme may have been the Great Sun’s godfather and namesake. Jennifer Lamonte has explored the question of St. Cosme’s parentage in a conference paper, and shared her findings with me. His paternity could not of course have been known for sure, but there is sufficient evidence that some Louisianans believed the leader of the rebellious Natchez to be a mixed-blood son of the missionary. . To return to the analogy with the Virginia Massacre, Carl Bridenbaugh (–) asserts that its leader, Opechancanough, had been captured by Spanish Jesuits in Virginia in the s, converted to Catholicism, and baptized Don Luis de Velasco, giving him a cross-cultural missionary origin similar to St. Cosme’s. . For a full translation of this scene, see my website at http://darkwing.uoregon. edu/~gsayre/LPDP. . In his  Nouveaux Voyages en Louisiane, Jean-Bernard Bossu, who claimed to have visited Natchez in , copied some of this episode from Le Page du Pratz, but omitted any mention of Bras Piqué or of the counting sticks. Bossu wrote only that an unnamed young Natchez woman, motivated by her love for the French soldier Macé, informed him of the conspiracy. He told Chépar, but was put in irons. . My translations of quotations from Les Natchez are from the  edition. Curi- 6748 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 37:3 2002 / sheet 32 of 187  }   :   ,   ously, this was also abridged, omitting the titles of the  books, and some of the most ridiculous scenes in them, such as those in Book . . Chateaubriand’s use of names is especially comical. Chactas bears the name of the tribe that was a loyal ally of the French, and may have betrayed the Natchez in their revolt. Outougamiz bears a name used for the Fox Indians in early relations. He also refers to Ataentsic, a Huron tribal culture hero, as being worshipped by the Natchez. . The denouement of Les Natchez is as bloody as a Greek tragedy. Chactas dies innocently of old age before the uprising, ignorant of the plot. On the fateful November day, René arrives in time to embrace Céluta for the last time, before being slain by Ondouré. Then Outougamiz kills Ondouré, and later Mila and Céluta commit suicide by jumping off a waterfall, a traditional fate for lovelorn Indian maidens.   Tseng 2002.10.22 07:53 Bossu, Jean-Bernard. Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales (). Rpt. Nouveaux Voyages en Louisiane. Ed. Philippe Jacquin. Paris: Aubier Montaigne, . Bridenbaugh, Carl. Jamestown, –. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, . Butor, Michel. ‘‘Chateaubriand et l’Ancienne Amérique.’’ La Nouvelle Revue Française  (–): –; : –; : –. Carpenter, John. Histoire de la Littérature Française sur la Louisiane de  à . Paris: Nizet, . Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier. Charlevoix’s Louisiana: Selections from the History and the Journal. Ed. Charles E. O’Neill. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, . . Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale. Ed. Pierre Berthiaume. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, . . 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