"Whether it was Samuel Johnson favoring the civilized amenities, a German encyclopedist defending religious orthodoxy, or persons afraid of proposed political reforms, all [supporters of existing institutions] could agree on the nastiness of man in his natural state as exemplified by existing primitive peoples [at the end of the 18th c.]. In fact, the whole dispute over the degeneracy of the American Indian must be viewed as an attack upon the Noble Savage idea and therefore as part of the larger struggle in the realm of ideas over the possibilities of political and social reform in the latter half of the eighteenth century" (Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 78).

"Although the providential interpretation of history was an ancient one, the New England Puritans presumed that they were God's most recently chosen people and therefore viewed their journeying to the New World as the latest phase of His plans for the preservation of the true religion rediscovered in the Reformation" (ibid. 82).

"Except for a few examples among eighteenth-century accounts, the Noble Savage in the United States is really a nineteenth-century fashion. [...] American authors and artists of the Eastern United States only conceived of the Indian as noble after that section of the country had eliminated its Indian problem" (ibid. 88)