Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
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Such distinctions had to come from somewhere.
THE IDEA THAT perceived distinctions between peoples could be shaped by deliberate effort—that racial characteristics might be cultivated and transmitted—dominated U.S. Indian policy in the first decades of the republic. As Henry Knox, the nation’s first secretary of war, argued to Congress in 1789, while “it has been conceived to be impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America,” evidence of Indian improvement is clear from “the progress of society, from the barbarous ages to its present state of perfection.”35 Belief that Indians could “progress” from savagery through barbarism to civilization shaped early federal policy—even as that policy bobbed between treating Native men as capable of entering legal agreements and treating them as requiring paternalistic protection.36
But by 1819, white settlers in the young republic had largely filled the tens of millions of acres already seized from Native peoples. Public pressure for cession of additional land grew accordingly.37 Resistance to white colonization was met with claims that Indians were “intellectually and morally incapable of forming true governments,” and investigations of the inherent “deficiencies” of Indian bodies came to the fore.38 Increasingly in agreement that Indians were less hairy than whites, white observers focused their debate on whether the relative hairlessness of Indians resulted from “careful extirpation,” as Smith would have it, or some more “imperishable” anatomical trait.39
Observers remained divided, for example, over whether Indian men were able to permanently end beard growth by repeatedly extracting it at the onset of puberty. In his 1841 account of travels into Native American territory, George Catlin declared that among tribes that made no efforts to imitate whites, most men “by nature are entirely without the appearance of a beard.” Of those with some beard growth, “nineteen out of twenty” eradicated it permanently by “plucking it out several times in succession, precisely at the age of puberty.”40 Others joined Catlin in proposing that Indians were able to “arrest” the involuntary growth of hair at puberty through deliberate labor.41 The Slovenian missionary Frederic Baraga disputed accounts that portrayed the “Indians as a naturally beardless people,” and asserted that Indian hair growth ceases because “young men take the greatest care to pull out or burn the first fuzz which covers their chins.”42 Eugene Blandel, a young soldier with the westward-pushing U.S. Army, conveyed a similar idea in an 1856 letter to his family: “[N]one of these Indians wears a beard. All hair on the face is pulled out by the roots, as soon as it makes its appearance, so that it never grows again.”43
Whites’ preoccupation with the nature of Indian bodies also pervaded their descriptions of which tools, if any, Indians used to remove their hair. The Natchez of the lower Mississippi were said to pluck with clamshells or copper tweezers, the Sanpoil of Eastern Washington to use bone or wooden tweezers, and the Assiniboine to use “small wire tweezers of their own make.”44 The Pennsylvania natural historian Samuel Stehman Haldeman conveyed an account of an indigenous woman shaving a child’s head with a “shark’s tooth fastened to the end of a stick” and of men shaving with two shells—“one being placed under some of the beard, the other used to cut or scrape above.”45 Members of the Iroquois Confederacy were said to have special instruments “for the purpose of plucking,” save for “a very small number, who, from living among white people, have adopted their customs.” Iroquois who live with whites, one military surgeon noted, “sometimes have razors.”46 Exasperated with the repeated claim that “the Indians are beardless by nature and have no hair on their bodies,” in 1818 the Reverend John Heckewelder declared that the idea should be “exploded and entirely laid aside.” “I cannot conceive how it is possible for any person to pass three weeks only among those people,” he snorted, “without seeing them pluck out their beards, with tweezers made expressly for that purpose” from sharpened mussel shells or brass wire. These tweezers “they always carry with them in their tobacco-pouch, wherever they go, and when at leisure, they pluck out their beards or hair above their foreheads,” with quick strokes “much like the plucking of a fowl.” The “oftener they pluck out the hair, the finer it grows afterwards, so that at last there appears hardly any, the whole having been rooted out.”47 The most remarkable aspect of Indian hairlessness, other observers concurred, was that Indian men and women so methodically and ceaselessly removed their body hair, which they viewed as a “deformity” or “vulgarity.”48
The emphasis on continual, painstaking cultivation of the body evident in these accounts is noteworthy, given that whites generally depicted Indians as particularly averse to labor. (Recall Buffon’s insistence that Indian activities were limited to those directed by bestial appetites, or Robertson’s condemnation of Indians’ constitutional torpor.)49 With respect to body hair, though, the Indian was said to be exceedingly diligent, ready to subject his chin to the “repeated pains” of extractions “nearly every day of his life.”50 The Indian’s alleged willingness to suffer in this regard was a point of ethnographic fascination, even consternation, as Jefferson emphasized in his remarks on white traders’ Indian wives. Surely no “civilized” person would be so peculiarly invested in plucking, shaving, and singeing.
ATTENTION TO THE “mutilations” of Indian hair removal began to wane as Indian assimilation and resistance moved to the margins of national political discussion. Responsibility for Indian affairs was transferred from the War Department to the new Department of the Interior in 1849, and most whites slowly ceased regarding the status of the continent’s indigenous peoples as a significant military concern.51 Preoccupation with Indian beards appears to have receded accordingly. Although the enigma of Indian hair removal continued to surface from time to time—as late as 1849, French traveler Ernest De Massey wrote of the beardless peoples he encountered in California, “I cannot say whether this is natural or the result of some method of hair-removal”52—by midcentury the locus of political attention had shifted to southern slavery and an emerging industrial order.53
Yet even as whites’ fascination with Indian hair removal receded, comparative studies of body hair, brought to the fore by Indian removal, remained a central tool of racial classification. With the ascendance of a distinctly “American school” of ethnology in the 1830s and 1840s, comparative assessments of hair proliferated. Dedicated to the proposition that different races derived from multiple, distinct origins, American-school ethnologists stressed the methodological rigor that they brought to their taxonomies. Recognizing the threat that their work posed to Genesis, ethnologists like Josiah Clark Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Samuel George Morton sought to counter arguments for a single creation with the “patient examination of facts.” Detailed measurement of hair shape, texture, and amount featured prominently in these efforts. Microscopic evaluations of hair were said to reveal fundamental distinctions between races and fundamental similarities between so-called lower races and other animals. These claims then were used to support the continuing enslavement of men, women, and children of African descent.54
One of the most influential of these ethnologists, the Philadelphia microscopist and lawyer Peter A. Browne, applied his various physiological classifications of “pile” to a variety of disputes in the mid-nineteenth century: legal questions of individual racial character, medical classifications of lunacy, and ethnological debates over the “origin of the aborigines of America.”55 In one well-circulated 1853 treatise, Browne endorsed the continuation of slavery on the basis of his discernment of “three distinct species of human beings” characterized by hair type. Citing Jefferson’s earlier comparisons of “whites” and “Indians” to buttress his claims, Browne selected samples of each of those types—cylindrical (“a full-blood Choctaw Indian”), oval (“his Excellency General George Washington”), and eccentrically elliptical (“a pure Negro”)—and examined them with new tools designed to measure and compare hair: the trichometer, the discotome, and the hair revolver.56 In another widely reprinted lecture, Browne offered his examination of differences in “national pile” as a complement to Morton’s famous studies of skulls, Samuel Haldeman’s studies of the organs of speech, and Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens’s studies of skin color—all of them “sister sciences” dedicated