ABSTRACT
Positive views of “natural man” in America-either Indian or pioneer-stem from Rousseau’s concept of the Noble Savage, according to a commonplace that countless writers assert, and have been asserting for many years. This assertion, while persistent, is simply incorrect. The idea that a significant number of late eighteenth-century Europeans considered savages noble is a myth.1 Rousseau never used the phrase, and, despite all of the statements in the more than two centuries since the appearance of his Discourse on Equality (1755), which is generally cited as the source of the concept of the Noble Savage, he viewed savages as naïve rather than innocent, and certainly not noble, with that term’s aristocratic connotations, or in the broader sense of “(h)aving high moral qualities.”2 The “state of nature” as understood in the Enlightenment had become the America of the North American Indians prior to contact with Europeans in most English texts by the late eighteenth century. This locating of the natural state appears in major works by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and, to an extent, Rousseau. This chapter examines the emergence of “Americans” (and here I mean Americans of European descent) from a mixture of European culture and communion with the American state of nature conceptualized as a savage space.
