Brief Notes on Lewis Henry Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was
an upstate New York railroad lawyer, state legislator, and independent scholar
with no connection to museums or universities (he was at one point offered a
post at Cornell College but declined).
Morgan graduated in 1840 at age 22 from Union College, moved to
Rochester and began to practice law in 1844. He and some friends organized a social
and literary club that they called the Grand Order of Iroquois. As one of the leaders, and club constitutionalist,
he undertook inquiries into the organizational features of League of the Iroquois. In the course of this, he met Ely Parker
an educated and later prominent member of the Seneca tribe.
He corresponded widely, collected
and synthesized reports, but also traveled extensively. He developed an abiding interest in the
Iroquois and an activist on their behalf (he was made an honorary member of the
Seneca nation), and his first major volume was on the Iroquoisc Morgan earned
sufficient money from his law practice to retire in the 1860s and devote his full
time to scholarship. Morgan was
elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in
1879, two years before his death.
He left a large part of his trust to found a college for women at the University
of Rochester (no doubt in honor of his two daughters, who died of scarlet fever
while he was on a research trip in the American West in 1858, and whose loss he
mourned for the rest of his life).
One can divide and relate his
scholarship in terms of the three of his major works that relate most directly
to anthropology (A, C, and D below):
A. League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. (Rochester: Sage & Brother, 1851)
Five (and later, six) tribes
("nations") were confederated as the League of the Iroquois. Morgan
announces in the dedication that his research was done in collaboration with
Ely Parker. There are three aspects
of the book to note:
On the Iroquois:
"Before the American Revolution, a loose native confederation known
as the "Six Nations" lived south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake
Erie, within the territory claimed by the colony of New York. From east to west, the Six Nations were
the Mohawk (in the Mohawk valley), the Oneida and Tuscarora (both south of Lake
Oneida), the Cayuga and Onondaga (in the Finger Lakes region), and the
especially numerous Seneca (in the Genesee, Allegheny, and Niagara
valleys). Culturally similar, they
spoke similar languages belonging to the Iroquoian family; they occupied
villages that mixed a few traditional bark-roofed long-houses with many compact
log cabins. They lived by a
seasonal round of hunting, fishing, gathering, and horticulture (raising the
trinity of maize, beans, and squashes).
Their villages were modest in size—rarely inhabited by more than 300
people—and their population totaled about 9,000 on the eve of the American
Revolution."
B. The American Beaver and His Works
(1868)
Thomas Trautmann c
C. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity
of the Human Family (1871)
Morgan discovered in 1858 that
Ojibway Indians in Wisconsin and upper Michigan had a way of naming kin that
was formally similar to Iroquois, although descent was patrilineal. This set him off corresponding, collecting,
traveling through the West. He published
his results in 1871 in a mammoth volume that was an influential demonstration
that the customs of designating relatives have scientific significance and that
remains important for the data on terminological systems. He argued for a distinction between
descriptive and classificatory systems.
Morgan began thinking about this in
evolutionary terms, proposing a gMalayanh terminology (in which M and F = M/MB)
evolved into an Iroquoian terminology that distinguished cross-cousins
Continue [Trautmann's book is a biography of
this book (rather than of Morgan himself)]
Use Schneider's comments in 1968 volume (in Morgan
file) on the descriptive and classificatory distinction as he applied it first
to Iroquois and then modified it herec
Also note Rivers' modifications to Morgan's distinction
I. Promiscuous
Intercourse.
II. The
Intermarriage or Cohabitation of Brothers and Sisters.
III. The
Communal Family. (First Stage of
the Family.)
IV. The
Hawaiian Custom. Giving
V. The Malayan
form of the Classificatory System of Relationship.
VI. The Tribal
Organization. Giving
VII. The
Turanian and Ganowánian System of Relationship.
VIII. Marriage
between Single Paris. Giving
IX. The Barbarian
Family. (second Stage of the
Family.)
X. Polygamy. Giving
XI. The Patriarchal
Family. (Third Stage of the
Family.)
XII. Polyandria.
XIII. The Rise of Property
with the Settlement of Lineal Succession to Estates. Giving
XIV. The Civilized Family. (Fourth and Ultimate Stage of the
Family.) Producing
XV. The Overthrow of the
Classificatory System of Relationship, and the Substitution of the Descriptive.
This evolutionary development of terminologies indexed
not a straightforward social differentiation but rather moral improvement, as
the original state of "promiscuous intercourse" is progressively
circumscribed by marriage restraints.
D. Ancient Society, or Researches in the
lines of Human Progress From Savagery Through barbarism to Civilization
(1877)
This was his third and most ambitious
major ethnological project, relating kinship terms and family forms in
developmental stages correlated to technology and political institutions. Morgan owed much to the jurist Sir Henry
Maine, who found two revolutions in the developmental trajectory of
Indo-European societies: from status to contract, and from political
organization based on kinship to organization based on "contiguity. Morgan conceived human progress as three
broad stages (Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization), the first two of which
were each subdivided into three periods.
Each ethnical period is, in Morgan's words, a "distinct
culture." He saw progress as
uniform across world because human endowments are similar. New forms of behavior, social structure,
and ideas originate as inventions and discoveries, and those societies which
lag behind were more or less isolated from the diffusion of innovations.
Among those who were much influenced
by Morgan's Ancient Society were Major John Wesley Powell. Originally a geologist, he traveled
widely in the 1860s, writing sympathetic ethnographic accounts of Native
American groups at a moment when the American West was a war zone. He, James Owen, James Moody and others
produced an important corpus of studies about Native American political organization. In 1879 he helped found and then
directed the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Marx and Engels studied copies of Ancient
Society that had been brought privately to England. Engels wrote a lengthy commentary, using
Morgan, on the origins of the family and property. This was later picked up by Leslie
White, who tried mightily to resurrect Morgan's work among American
anthropology and by Marvin Harris (in his formulations of cultural
materialism).
E. Houses and House-Life of the American
Aborigines (1881)
ADD references:
Leslie White
Thomas R. Trautmann
Tooker,
Elizabeth
1978 The League of the Iroquois: its
history, politics, and ritual. In Northeast, edited by Tooker, Elizabeth
and Trigger, Bruce G. Pp. 418-441.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press
1992 "Lewis
H. Morgan and his contemporaries," American Anthropologist 94 (2):
357-375.
William Fenton
source: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/RBK/PARKER.HTM
Ely Samuel Parker was born a member
of the Seneca Indian tribe in 1828; his first tribal name was Hasanowanda (gThe Readerh). His family had originally adopted the
Parker name for use when dealing with the white settlers in the area. His father was a Tonawanda Seneca chief
and a veteran of the War of 1812; his mother was descended from an Iroquois
prophet. Parker received his early
education from Baptist missionaries on the Seneca reservation; he later enrolled
for a time at Rochester High School.
He quit school at age 18 and devoted his time to furthering Indian
affairs in Washington, D.C. During this period, he came to know Lewis Henry
Morgan, and helped aid Morgan in his work League of the Iroquois, one of the
first studies of an Indian tribe.
In 1852, Parker became the sachem of his tribe and adopted the tribal
name Donehogawa, or gKeeper of the Western Door of
the Long House of the Iroquois.h In
the late 1850s, Parker studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
and began to work for the federal government, supervising public works
projects. During one such project
he befriended a local clerk, Ulysses S. Grant. Parker attempted to join the Army at the
outbreak of the Civil War, but could not be released from his construction
duties until 1862; even then, he could not get an Army commission due to his
Indian heritage. He was finally
commissioned as a captain of engineers in 1863, and later that year he became a
staff officer under Grant; Grant appointed Parker his military secretary the
next year. Parker was present at
Leefs surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 where he took down
Grantfs dictation concerning the surrender orders, as he was the only person in
the room calm enough to write.
Parker remained as Grantfs military secretary through 1869, eventually
ascending to the brevet rank of brigadier-general. He married Minnie Sackett
on December 25, 1867. Parker was
one of Grantfs first political appointments when he became President. Parker was named Commissioner of Indian
Affairs on April 13, 1869. During his tenure in officer, Parker sought to work
both for the United States government and the Indians he represented; however,
his attempts to bring justice to various tribes over land deals and treaties
earned him many enemies in the process.
He was accused of defrauding the government and was tried by the House
of Representatives in February 1871.
Although he was exonerated of all charges, Parker resigned from office
and went into business in New York City.
He did well in business; later in life, he held various positions within
the New York City Police Department.
He died on August 31, 1895.
Two years later, his remains were re-interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in
Buffalo, N.Y. on land that had once belonged to the Seneca tribe. The collection consists of mostly
manuscript material, including approximately 30 letters to or from Ely Parker;
legal and business material; two leather notebooks from the 1850s and 1860s;
and some items that were removed in January 1972 from the extra-illustrated
volume The Life of General Ely S. Parker by Arthur C. Parker. All correspondence has been indexed.
Last modified: 9/25/2002