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gdog (1)


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You answer is very much just the tip of the iceberg as to the "violation" of captured white women. Rape was only a part of it. To think otherwise is to view the historical context myopically through a lens limited to modern values and sensibilities, and even then only in so far as it is able to cast scorn on those values. What you fail to mention is that captured women (and children) would often be "adopted" into the native tribe. Whether or not they would be treated as equals with the other women or would be the tribal pariahs would be a matter that came down to the rank as well as inclination of the warrior in the tribe who took them captive, and by captive I mean a kind of slave to be broken down and remolded by the captor. But worse than slave for one key reason: the damnation of the immortal soul. It was still a known idea, although the triumph of abolitionism through the Civil War had largely drummed it out of popular culture even in the South, which now had more immediate issues of radical reconstructionism and carpetbagging to deal with. Slavery existed in concert with Christianity. Saving savage souls was doing good works. And murdering or raping slaves was not normal or openly accepted behavior (despite modern fixations - fixations having no capacity to judge "normal" from what is an outlier vs. a common occurrence - a lottery ticket winner makes us forget the 10,000 losing lottery tickets we've tossed in the bin!) So back to this scene - while enslavement of others in "Christian goodness" to take on responsibility for baptizing them and educating them in Christian morality would have been acceptable to someone of Hatfield's background, so too would the enslavement of a Christian into a situation where their soul would come to damnation have been worse than death. To commit the sin of murder himself, Hatfield would have been saving Mrs. Mallory's soul from hell had she taken up with the Apache and lived as a hethen. This theme is also at the resolution of The Searchers. View all replies >