Federal agents graded Native assimilation by adoption of Black slavery

Evidence

Over the next two decades, until his death in 1816, Hawkins was the chief civilian enforcer of this plan, a role that saw him traveling frequently to the nations under his charge to survey their progress toward cultural change. His notes on these visits indicate that while Native people were experimenting with Black slavery, many were not yet doing so precisely as he had intended. The agent recorded these failings, including Native women who were marrying Black captives and Native men who were working in fields alongside the people they were enslaving. While Hawkins found a number of Creek and Cherokee people exhibiting “no economy or management” during his visits, he did find one person deemed “industrious” as early as 1796. That man, Hawkins recorded, was worthy of such praise for having sixty-one enslaved people, more than two hundred horses, four hundred cattle, and three hundred hogs. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 486