Washington’s Indian policy assumed Native assimilability but African innate inferiority

Evidence

Together with his secretary of war Henry Knox, Washington devised a federal policy that would avoid “exterminating” Native people and focus instead on civilizing them, as this seemed the most humanitarian and effective way to bring them under U.S. authority and foster their eventual assimilation. The architects of the early American state were Age of Enlightenment thinkers who believed that Indigenous people had the intelligence and ability to assimilate into proper society, unlike Africans, whom they viewed as innately insufficient. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 478

Categorization

• XREF: The Enlightenment’s differential assessment of Native vs. African capacity is a load-bearing plank in the 1619 reframing thesis — central to the reader’s stated goal of separating the reframing argument from contested empirical claims.