In late December of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who would become famous for writing Democracy in America, was on a steamboat traveling down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. On December 27 Sam Houston and two Cherokee boarded the boat in Arkansas, soon meeting de Tocqueville, who was well aware of Houston's notoriety and recorded their conversation.
Houston is the most emblematic figure of that period in American history between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, as recounted previously, representing a constellation of beliefs that don't neatly fit into any of today's categories. The French traveler was meeting Sam at a low point in his life. In early 1829 he'd been the newly elected governor of Tennessee and was also newly married to Eliza Allen, when she suddenly left the governor's house in the middle of the night, and refusing Houston's entreaties to return. The distraught Houston resigned and fled to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) to join his Cherokee friends, with whom he'd already lived with for three years as a teenager.
Marrying Tiana Rogers, a Cherokee widow, Houston embarked on an epic drinking spree, earning the nickname "Big Drunk". Tocqueville met him when Sam was part of a Cherokee lobbying delegation off to Washington DC, where Houston had served in Congress and was a friend of President Andrew Jackson who'd been his political mentor.
Tocqueville wrote of Houston, “His figure is athletic; everything about him indicates physical and moral energy,” and after writing of his downfall , “Since then, he has lived in the midst of the wilderness, half European, half savage.” He then recorded much of their conversation in a Q&A format:
Q: Have the Indians a religion?
A: Some of them have no belief in the immortality of the soul. But generally the Indians believe in a God who punishes or rewards the deeds of this life in the other world.
Q: Have they any form of worship?
A: The Osages, who live on the frontier of Mexico, pray every morning to the rising sun. The Creeks have no worship. It is only in times of great calamity, or before undertaking some great enterprise, that they devote themselves to some public manifestations of worship.
Q: What sort of government have the Indians?
A: Generally a patriarchal government. Birth makes the chiefs. Among the tribes which contact with Europeans has made more enlightened, they are elected.
Q: What is the status of women among the Indians?
A: Complete servitude. The women have to do all the unpleasant tasks, and live in great degradation.
In response to a question about the intelligence of Indians and blacks, Houston replied, according to this History Net article:
. . . that he believed both Indians and black people were as intelligent as whites, and he suggested that freedom spawns intelligence while slavery thwarts it. “The Indian is born free; he makes use of this freedom from his first steps in life,” Houston told Tocqueville. “Surrounded by dangers, pressed by necessities, and unable to count on anyone, his mind must be ever active to find means to ward off troubles and to maintain his existence. This necessity imposed on the Indian gives his intelligence a degree of development and ingenuity which are often wonderful.” Meanwhile, Houston added, the black man’s native intelligence is crippled by slavery: “The first notions of existence which he receives make him understand that he is the property of another, that care for his own future is no concern of his, and that the very power of thought is for him a useless gift of providence.”
As I've written elsewhere, Sam Houston was the greatest political defender of Indian rights in the pre-Civil War United States. While he was not an abolitionist, and owning slaves, he opposed the extension of slavery, and later secession. Sam was forced to resign as governor of Texas in 1861 when he refused to take an oath to the Confederacy, and freed his slaves when learning of the Emancipation Proclamation.
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