An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz)

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Author	Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher	ReVisioning American History
First published	2014
Type	Book
Source	https://annas-archive.org/md5/d53c4488ae58e78b055abeb0fb582d97

Introduction: This Land

We are here to educate, not forgive.

We are here to enlighten, not accuse.

—Willie Johns, Brighton Seminole Reservation, Florida

Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—“from California … to the Gulf Stream waters”—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today.

It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself—the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, over-heated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.

What historian David Chang has written about the land that became Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: “Nation, race, and class converged in land.” Everything in US history is about the land—who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (“real estate”) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.

US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.

Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth we’ve been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues.

Teaching Native American studies, I always begin with a simple exercise. I ask students to quickly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained independence from Britain. Invariably most draw the approximate present shape of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific—the continental territory not fully appropriated until a century after independence. What became independent in 1783 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic shore. When called on this, students are embarrassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call this a Rorschach test of unconscious “manifest destiny,” embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming inevitability of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent had previously been terra nullius, a land without people.

Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” celebrates that the land belongs to everyone, reflecting the unconscious manifest destiny we live with. But the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. Many were slave owners who desired limitless land for lucrative cash crops. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.

In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.

Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. That part of the origin story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the “Doctrine of Discovery.” According to a series of late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European nations acquired title to the lands they “discovered” and the Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it. As law professor Robert A. Williams observes about the Doctrine of Discovery:

Responding to the requirements of a paradoxical age of Renaissance and Inquisition, the West’s first modern discourses of conquest articulated a vision of all humankind united under a rule of law discoverable solely by human reason. Unfortunately for the American Indian, the West’s first tentative steps towards this noble vision of a Law of Nations contained a mandate for Europe’s subjugation of all peoples whose radical divergence from European-derived norms of right conduct signified their need for conquest and remediation.

The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence onward, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a world system of colonization. “Columbia,” the poetic, Latinate name used in reference to the United States from its founding throughout the nineteenth century, was based on the name of Christopher Columbus. The “Land of Columbus” was—and still is—represented by the image of a woman in sculptures and paintings, by institutions such as Columbia University, and by countless place names, including that of the national capital, the District of Columbia. The 1798 hymn “Hail, Columbia” was the early national anthem and is now used whenever the vice president of the United States makes a public appearance, and Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on any territory ever claimed by the United States.

Traditionally, historians of the United States hoping to have successful careers in academia and to author lucrative school textbooks became protectors of this origin myth. With the cultural upheavals in the academic world during the 1960s, engendered by the civil rights movement and student activism, historians came to call for objectivity and fairness in revising interpretations of US history. They warned against moralizing, urging instead a dispassionate and culturally relative approach. Historian Bernard Sheehan, in an influential essay, called for a “cultural conflict” understanding of Native–Euro-American relations in the early United States, writing that this approach “diffuses the locus of guilt.” In striving for “balance,” however, historians spouted platitudes: “There were good and bad people on both sides.” “American culture is an amalgamation of all its ethnic groups.” “A frontier is a zone of interaction between cultures, not merely advancing European settlements.”

Later, trendy postmodernist studies insisted on Indigenous “agency” under the guise of individual and collective empowerment, making the casualties of colonialism responsible for their own demise. Perhaps worst of all, some claimed (and still claim) that the colonizer and colonized experienced an “encounter” and engaged in “dialogue,” thereby masking reality with justifications and rationalizations—in short, apologies for one-sided robbery and murder. In focusing on “cultural change” and “conflict between cultures,” these studies avoid fundamental questions about the formation of the United States and its implications for the present and future. This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.

Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino.” The multicultural approach emphasized the “contributions” of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus credited with corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, Thanksgiving, and even the concepts of democracy and federalism. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism.

With multiculturalism, manifest destiny won the day. As an example, in 1994, Prentice Hall (part of Pearson Education) published a new college-level US history textbook, authored by four members of a new generation of revisionist historians. These radical social historians are all brilliant scholars with posts in prestigious universities. The book’s title reflects the intent of its authors and publisher: Out of Many: A History of the American People. The origin story of a supposedly unitary nation, albeit now multicultural, remained intact. The original cover design featured a multicolored woven fabric—this image meant to stand in place of the discredited “melting pot.” Inside, facing the title page, was a photograph of a Navajo woman, dressed formally in velvet and adorned with heavy sterling silver and turquoise jewelry. With a traditional Navajo dwelling, a hogan, in the background, the woman was shown kneeling in front of a traditional loom, weaving a nearly finished rug. The design? The Stars and Stripes! The authors, upon hearing my objection and explanation that Navajo weavers make their livings off commissioned work that includes the desired design, responded: “But it’s a real photograph.” To the authors’ credit, in the second edition they replaced the cover photograph and removed the Navajo picture inside, although the narrative text remains unchanged.

Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought for survival as peoples. The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous peoples are erased. But Indigenous nations, through resistance, have survived and bear witness to this history. In the era of worldwide decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century, the former colonial powers and their intellectual apologists mounted a counterforce, often called neocolonialism, from which multiculturalism and postmodernism emerged. Although much revisionist US history reflects neocolonialist strategy—an attempt to accommodate new realities in order to retain the dominance—neocolonialist methods signal victory for the colonized. Such approaches pry off a lid long kept tightly fastened. One result has been the presence of significant numbers of Indigenous scholars in US universities who are changing the terms of analysis. The main challenge for scholars in revising US history in the context of colonialism is not lack of information, nor is it one of methodology. Certainly difficulties with documentation are no more problematic than they are in any other area of research. Rather, the source of the problems has been the refusal or inability of US historians to comprehend the nature of their own history, US history. The fundamental problem is the absence of the colonial framework.

Through economic penetration of Indigenous societies, the European and Euro-American colonial powers created economic dependency and imbalance of trade, then incorporated the Indigenous nations into spheres of influence and controlled them indirectly or as protectorates, with indispensable use of Christian missionaries and alcohol. In the case of US settler colonialism, land was the primary commodity. With such obvious indicators of colonialism at work, why should so many interpretations of US political-economic development be convoluted and obscure, avoiding the obvious? To some extent, the twentieth-century emergence of the field of “US West” or “Borderlands” history has been forced into an incomplete and flawed settler-colonialist framework. The father of that field of history, Frederick Jackson Turner, confessed as much in 1901: “Our colonial system did not start with the Spanish War [1898]; the U.S. had had a colonial history and policy from the beginning of the Republic; but they have been hidden under the phraseology of ‘interstate migration’ and ‘territorial organization.’”

Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.

The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention adopted in 1948: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The terms of the genocide convention are also useful tools for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era. In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

killing members of the group;

causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life

calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In the 1990s, the term “ethnic cleansing” became a useful descriptive term for genocide.

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of US Americans.

Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention. In the case of the British North American colonies and the United States, not only extermination and removal were practiced but also the disappearing of the prior existence of Indigenous peoples—and this continues to be perpetuated in local histories. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O’Brien names this practice of writing Indians out of existence “firsting and lasting.” All over the continent, local histories, monuments, and signage narrate the story of first settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first dwelling, first everything, as if there had never been occupants who thrived in those places before Euro-Americans. On the other hand, the national narrative tells of “last” Indians or last tribes, such as “the last of the Mohicans,” “Ishi, the last Indian,” and End of the Trail, as a famous sculpture by James Earle Fraser is titled.

Documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; the post–Civil War era of the so-called Indian wars in the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period, all of which are discussed in the following chapters. Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children … during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” As Patrick Wolfe has noted, the peculiarity of settler colonialism is that the goal is elimination of Indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers. That project is not limited to government policy, but rather involves all kinds of agencies, voluntary militias, and the settlers themselves acting on their own.

In the wake of the US 1950s termination and relocation policies, a pan-Indigenous movement arose in tandem with the powerful African American civil rights movement and the broad-based social justice and antiwar movements of the 1960s. The Indigenous rights movement succeeded in reversing the US termination policy. However, repression, armed attacks, and legislative attempts to undo treaty rights began again in the late 1970s, giving rise to the international Indigenous movement, which greatly broadened the support for Indigenous sovereignty and territorial rights in the United States.

The early twenty-first century has seen increased exploitation of energy resources begetting new pressures on Indigenous lands. Exploitation by the largest corporations, often in collusion with politicians at local, state, and federal levels, and even within some Indigenous governments, could spell a final demise for Indigenous land bases and resources. Strengthening Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination to prevent that result will take general public outrage and demand, which in turn will require that the general population, those descended from settlers and immigrants, know their history and assume responsibility. Resistance to these powerful corporate forces continues to have profound implications for US socioeconomic and political development and the future.

There are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous communities and nations, comprising nearly three million people in the United States. These are the descendants of the fifteen million original inhabitants of the land, the majority of whom were farmers who lived in towns. The US establishment of a system of Indian reservations stemmed from a long British colonial practice in the Americas. In the era of US treaty-making from independence to 1871, the concept of the reservation was one of the Indigenous nation reserving a narrowed land base from a much larger one in exchange for US government protection from settlers and the provision of social services. In the late nineteenth century, as Indigenous resistance was weakened, the concept of the reservation changed to one of land being carved out of the public domain of the United States as a benevolent gesture, a “gift” to the Indigenous peoples. Rhetoric changed so that reservations were said to have been “given” or “created” for Indians. With this shift, Indian reservations came to be seen as enclaves within state’ boundaries. Despite the political and economic reality, the impression to many was that Indigenous people were taking a free ride on public domain.

Beyond the land bases within the limits of the 310 federally recognized reservations—among 554 Indigenous groups—Indigenous land, water, and resource rights extend to all federally acknowledged Indigenous communities within the borders of the United States. This is the case whether “within the original or subsequently acquired territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits of a state,” and includes all allotments as well as rights-of-way running to and from them. Not all the federally recognized Indigenous nations have land bases beyond government buildings, and the lands of some Native nations, including those of the Sioux in the Dakotas and Minnesota and the Ojibwes in Minnesota, have been parceled into multiple reservations, while some fifty Indigenous nations that had been removed to Oklahoma were entirely allotted—divided by the federal government into individual Native-owned parcels. Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:

In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its original size.

As a result of federal land sales, seizures, and allotments, most reservations are severely fragmented. Each parcel of tribal, trust, and privately held land is a separate enclave under multiple laws and jurisdictions. The Diné (Navajo) Nation has the largest contemporary contiguous land base among Native nations: nearly sixteen million acres, or nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, the size of West Virginia. Each of twelve other reservations is larger than Rhode Island, which comprises nearly eight hundred thousand acres, or twelve hundred square miles, and each of nine other reservations is larger than Delaware, which covers nearly a million and a half acres, or two thousand square miles. Other reservations have land bases of fewer than thirty-two thousand acres, or fifty square miles. A number of independent nation-states with seats in the United Nations have less territory and smaller populations than some Indigenous nations of North America.

Following World War II, the United States was at war with much of the world, just as it was at war with the Indigenous peoples of North America in the nineteenth century. This was total war, demanding that the enemy surrender unconditionally or face annihilation. Perhaps it was inevitable that the earlier wars against Indigenous peoples, if not acknowledged and repudiated, ultimately would include the world. According to the origin narrative, the United States was born of rebellion against oppression—against empire—and thus is the product of the first anticolonial revolution for national liberation. The narrative flows from that fallacy: the broadening and deepening of democracy; the Civil War and the ensuing “second revolution,” which ended slavery; the twentieth-century mission to save Europe from itself—twice; and the ultimately triumphant fight against the scourge of communism, with the United States inheriting the difficult and burdensome task of keeping order in the world. It’s a narrative of progress. The 1960s social revolutions, ignited by the African American liberation movement, complicated the origin narrative, but its structure and periodization have been left intact. After the 1960s, historians incorporated women, African Americans, and immigrants as contributors to the commonweal. Indeed, the revised narrative produced the “nation of immigrants” framework, which obscures the US practice of colonization, merging settler colonialism with immigration to metropolitan centers during and after the industrial revolution. Native peoples, to the extent that they were included at all, were renamed “First Americans” and thus themselves cast as distant immigrants.

The provincialism and national chauvinism of US history production make it difficult for effective revisions to gain authority. Scholars, both Indigenous and a few non-Indigenous, who attempt to rectify the distortions, are labeled advocates, and their findings are rejected for publication on that basis. Indigenous scholars look to research and thinking that has emerged in the rest of the European-colonized world. To understand the historical and current experiences of Indigenous peoples in the United States, these thinkers and writers draw upon and creatively apply the historical materialism of Marxism, the liberation theology of Latin America, Frantz Fanon’s psychosocial analyses of the effects of colonialism on the colonizer and the colonized, and other approaches, including development theory and postmodern theory. While not abandoning insights gained from those sources, due to the “exceptional” nature of US colonialism among nineteenth-century colonial powers, Indigenous scholars and activists are engaged in exploring new approaches.

This book claims to be a history of the United States from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective but there is no such thing as a collective Indigenous peoples’ perspective, just as there is no monolithic Asian or European or African peoples’ perspective. This is not a history of the vast civilizations and communities that thrived and survived between the Gulf of Mexico and Canada and between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. Such histories have been written, and are being written by historians of Diné, Lakota, Mohawk, Tlingit, Muskogee, Anishinaabe, Lumbee, Inuit, Kiowa, Cherokee, Hopi, and other Indigenous communities and nations that have survived colonial genocide. This book attempts to tell the story of the United States as a colonialist settler-state, one that, like colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules. Indigenous peoples, now in a colonial relationship with the United States, inhabited and thrived for millennia before they were displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated.

This is a history of the United States.

Follow the Corn

Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale.

—Charles C. Mann, 1491

Humanoids existed on Earth for around four million years as hunters and gatherers living in small communal groups that through their movements found and populated every continent. Some two hundred thousand years ago, human societies, having originated in Sub-Saharan Africa, began migrating in all directions, and their descendants eventually populated the globe. Around twelve thousand years ago, some of these people began staying put and developed agriculture—mainly women who domesticated wild plants and began cultivating others.

As a birthplace of agriculture and the towns and cities that followed, America is ancient, not a “new world.” Domestication of plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approximately the same period, around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in the Americas, all based on corn: the Valley of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and eastern North America. The other early agricultural centers were the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River systems, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Yellow River of northern China, and the Yangtze River of southern China. During this time, many of the same human societies began domesticating animals. Only in the American continents was the parallel domestication of animals eschewed in favor of game management, a kind of animal husbandry different from that developed in Africa and Asia. In these seven areas, agriculture-based “civilized” societies developed in symbiosis with hunting, fishing, and gathering peoples on their peripheries, gradually enveloping many of the latter into the realms of their civilizations, except for those in regions inhospitable to agriculture.

The Sacred Corn Food

Indigenous American agriculture was based on corn. Traces of cultivated corn have been identified in central Mexico dating back ten thousand years. Twelve to fourteen centuries later, corn production had spread throughout the temperate and tropical Americas from the southern tip of South America to the subarctic of North America, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean on both continents. The wild grain from which corn was cultivated has never been identified with certainty, but the Indigenous peoples for whom corn was and is their sustenance believe it was a sacred gift from their gods. Since there is no evidence of corn on any other continent prior to its post-Columbus dispersal, its development is a unique invention of the original American agriculturalists. Unlike most grains, corn cannot grow wild and cannot exist without attentive human care.

Along with multiple varieties and colors of corn, Mesoamericans cultivated squash and beans, which were extended throughout the hemisphere, as were the many varieties and colors of potato cultivated by Andean farmers beginning more than seven thousand years ago. Corn, being a summer crop, can tolerate no more than twenty to thirty days without water and even less time in high temperatures. Many of the areas where corn was the staple were arid or semiarid, so its cultivation required the design and construction of complex irrigation systems—in place at least two thousand years before Europeans knew the Americas existed. The proliferation of agriculture and cultigens could not have occurred without centuries of cultural and commercial interchange among the peoples of North, Central, and South America, whose traders carried seeds as well as other goods and cultural practices.

The vast reach and capacity of Indigenous grain production impressed colonialist Europeans. A traveler in French-occupied North America related in 1669 that six square miles of cornfields surrounded each Iroquois village. The governor of New France, following a military raid in the 1680s, reported that he had destroyed more than a million bushels (forty-two thousand tons) of corn belonging to four Iroquois villages. Thanks to the nutritious triad of corn, beans, and squash—which provide a complete protein—the Americas were densely populated when the European monarchies began sponsoring colonization projects there.

The total population of the hemisphere was about one hundred million at the end of the fifteenth century, with about two-fifths in North America, including Mexico. Central Mexico alone supported some thirty million people. At the same time, the population of Europe as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million. Experts have observed that such population densities in precolonial America were supportable because the peoples had created a relatively disease-free paradise. There certainly were diseases and health problems, but the practice of herbal medicine and even surgery and dentistry, and most importantly both hygienic and ritual bathing, kept diseases at bay. Settler observers in all parts of the Americas marveled at the frequent bathing even in winter in cold climates. One commented that the Native people “go to the river and plunge in and wash themselves before they dress daily.” Another wrote: “Men, women, and children, from early infancy, are in the habit of bathing.” Ritual sweat baths were common to all Native North Americans, having originated in Mexico. Above all, the majority of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had healthy, mostly vegetarian diets based on the staple of corn and supplemented by wild fish, fowl, and four-legged animals. People lived long and well with abundant ceremonial and recreational periods.

Up from Mexico

As on the two other major continental landmasses—Eurasia and Africa—civilization in the Americas emerged from certain population centers, with periods of vigorous growth and integration interspersed with periods of decline and disintegration. At least a dozen such centers were functioning in the Americas when Europeans intervened. Although this is a history of the part of North America that is today the United States, it is important to follow the corn to its origins and briefly consider the peoples’ history of the Valley of Mexico and Central America, often called Mesoamerica. Influences from the south powerfully shaped the Indigenous peoples to the north (in what is now the United States) and Mexicans continue to migrate as they have for millennia but now across the arbitrary border that was established in the US war against Mexico in 1846–48.

The first great cultivators of corn were the Mayans, initially centered in present-day northern Guatemala and the Mexican state of Tabasco. Extending to the Yucatán peninsula, the Mayans of the tenth century built city-states—Chichen-Itzá, Mayapán, Uxmal, and many others—as far south as Belize and Honduras. Mayan villages, farms, and cities extended from tropical forests to alpine areas to coastal and interior plains. During the five-century apex of Mayan civilization, a combined priesthood and nobility governed. There was also a distinct commercial class, and the cities were densely populated, not simply bureaucratic or religious centers. Ordinary Mayan villages in the far-flung region retained fundamental features of clan structures and communal social relations. They worked the nobles’ fields, paid rent for use of land, and contributed labor and taxes to the building of roads, temples, nobles’ houses, and other structures. It is not clear whether these relations were exploitative or cooperatively developed. However, the nobility drew servants from groups such as war prisoners, accused criminals, debtors, and even orphans. Although servile status was not hereditary, this was forced labor. Increasingly burdensome exploitation of labor and higher taxes and tribute produced dissension and uprisings, resulting in the collapse of the Mayan state, from which decentralized polities emerged.

Mayan culture astonishes all who study it, and it is often compared to Greek (Athenian) culture. At its core was the cultivation of corn; religion was constructed around this vital food. The Mayan people developed art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, employing a variety of materials, including gold and silver, which they mined and used for jewelry and sculpture, not for use as currency. Surrounded by rubber trees, they invented the rubber ball and court ball games similar to modern soccer. Their achievements in mathematics and astronomy are the most impressive. By 36 BC they had developed the concept of zero. They worked with numbers in the hundreds of millions and used extensive dating systems, making possible both their observations of the cosmos and their unique calendar that marked the passage of time into the future. Modern astronomers have marveled at the accuracy of Mayan charts of the movements of the moon and planets, which were used to predict eclipses and other events. Mayan culture and science, as well as governmental and economic practices, were influential throughout the region.

During the same period of Mayan development, the Olmec civilization reigned in the Valley of Mexico and built the grand metropolis of Teotihuacán. Beginning in AD 750, Toltec civilization dominated the region for four centuries, absorbing the Olmecs. Colossal buildings, sculptures, and markets made up the Toltec cities, which housed extensive libraries and universities. They created multiple cities, the largest being Tula. The Toltecs’ written language was based on the Mayan form, as was the calendar they used in scientific research, particularly in astronomy and medicine. Another nation in the Valley of Mexico, the Culhua, built the city-state of Culhuacán on the southern shore of Lake Texcoco, as well as the city-state of Texcoco on the eastern shore of the lake. In the late fourteenth century, the Tepanec people rose in an expansionist drive and subjugated Culhuacán, Texcoco, and all their subject peoples in the Valley of Mexico. They proceeded to conquer Tenochtitlán, which was located on an island in the middle of the immense Lake Texcoco and had been built around 1325 by the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs who had migrated from northern Mexico (today’s Utah). The Aztecs had entered the valley in the twelfth century and been involved in toppling the Toltecs.

In 1426, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán formed an alliance with the Texcoco and Tlacopan peoples and overthrew Tepanec rule. The allies proceeded to wage war against neighboring peoples and eventually succeeded in gaining control over the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs emerged as dominant in the Triple Alliance and moved to bring all the peoples of Mexico under their tributary authority. These events paralleled ones in Europe and Asia during the same period, when Rome and other city-states were demolished and occupied by invading Germanic peoples, while the Mongols of the Eurasian steppe overran much of Russia and China. As in Europe and Asia, the invading peoples assimilated and reproduced civilization.

The economic basis for the powerful Aztec state was hydraulic agriculture, with corn as the central crop. Beans, pumpkins, tomatoes, cocoa, and many other food crops flourished and supported a dense population, much of it concentrated in large urban centers. The Aztecs also grew tobacco and cotton, the latter providing the fiber for all cloth and clothing. Weaving and metalwork flourished, providing useful commodities as well as works of art. Building techniques enabled construction of enormous stone dams and canals, as well as fortress-like castles made of brick or stone. There were elaborate markets in each city and a far-flung trade network that used routes established by the Toltecs.

Aztec merchants acquired turquoise from Pueblos who mined it in what is now the US Southwest to sell in central Mexico where it had become the most valued of all material possessions and was used as a means of exchange or a form of money. Sixty-five thousand turquoise artifacts in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, are evidence of the importance of turquoise as a major precolonial commodity. Other items were also valuable marketable commodities in the area, salt being close to turquoise in value. Ceramic trade goods involved interconnected markets from Mexico City to Mesa Verde, Colorado. Shells from the Gulf of California, tropical bird feathers from the Gulf Coast area of Mexico, obsidian from Durango, Mexico, and flint from Texas were all found in the ruins of Casa Grande (Arizona), the commercial center of the northern frontier. Turquoise functioning as money was traded to acquire macaw and parrot feathers from tropical areas for religious rituals, seashells from coastal peoples, and hides and meat from the northern plains. The stone has been found in precolonial sites in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska, where the Wichitas served as intermediaries, carrying turquoise and other goods farther east and north. Crees in the Lake Superior region and communities in what is today Ontario, Canada, and in today’s Wisconsin acquired turquoise through trade.

Traders from Mexico were also transmitters of culture and features such as the Sun Dance religion in the Great Plains, and the cultivation of corn by the Algonquin, Cherokee, and Muskogee (Creek) peoples of the eastern half of North America were transmitted from Central America. The oral and written histories of the Aztecs, Cherokees, and Choctaws record these relations. Cherokee oral history tells of their ancestors’ migrations from the south and through Mexico, as does Muskogee history.

Although Aztecs were apparently flourishing culturally and economically, as well as being militarily and politically strong, their dominance was declining on the eve of Spanish intrusion. Being pressed for tribute through violent attacks, peasants rebelled and there were uprisings all over Mexico. Montezuma II, who came to power in 1503, might have succeeded in his attempt to reform the regime, but the Spanish overthrew him before he had the opportunity. The Mexican state was crushed and its cities leveled in Cortés’s three-year genocidal war. Cortés’s recruitment of resistant communities all over Mexico as allies aided in toppling the central regime. Cortés and his two hundred European mercenaries could never have overthrown the Mexican state without the Indigenous insurgency he co-opted. The resistant peoples who allied with Cortés to overthrow the oppressive Aztec regime could not yet have known the goals of the gold-obsessed Spanish colonizers or the European institutions that backed them.

The North

What is now the US Southwest once formed, with today’s Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua, the northern periphery of the Aztec regime in the Valley of Mexico. Mostly an alpine, arid, and semiarid region cut with rivers, it is a fragile land base with rainfall a scarce commodity and drought endemic. Yet, in the Sonora Desert of present-day southern Arizona, communities were practicing agriculture by 2100 BC and began digging irrigation canals as early as 1250 BC. The earliest evidence of corn in the area dates from 2000 BC, introduced by trade and migration between north and south. Farther north, people began cultivating corn, beans, squash, and cotton around 1500 BC. Their descendants, the Akimel O’odham people (Pimas), call their ancestors the Huhugam (meaning “those who have gone”), which English speakers have rendered as “Hohokam.” The Hohokam people left behind ball courts similar to those of the Mayans, multistory buildings, and agricultural fields. Their most striking imprint on the land is one of the most extensive networks of irrigation canals in the world at that time. From AD 900 to 1450, the Hohokams built a canal system of more than eight hundred miles of trunk lines and hundreds more miles of branches serving local sites. The longest known canal extended twenty miles. The largest were seventy-five to eighty-five feet across and twenty feet deep, and many were leak-proof, lined with clay. One canal system carried enough water to irrigate an estimated ten thousand acres. Hohokam farmers grew surplus crops for export and their community became a crossroads in a trade network reaching from Mexico to Utah and from the Pacific Coast to New Mexico and into the Great Plains. By the fourteenth century, Hohokams had dispersed, living in smaller communities.

The famed Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon on the Colorado Plateau—in the present-day Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah—thrived from AD 850 to 1250. Ancestors of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Anasazi constructed more than four hundred miles of roads radiating out from Chaco. Averaging thirty feet wide, these roads followed straight courses, even through difficult terrain such as hills and rock formations. The highways connected some seventy-five communities. Around the thirteenth century, the Anasazi people abandoned the Chaco area and migrated, building nearly a hundred smaller agricultural city-states along the northern Rio Grande valley and its tributaries. Northernmost Taos Pueblo was an important trade center, handling buffalo products from the plains, tropical bird products, copper and shells from Mexico, and turquoise from New Mexican mines. Pueblo trade extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far east as the Great Plains, and as far south as Central America.

Other major peoples in the region, the Navajos (Diné) and Apaches, are of Athabascan heritage, having migrated to the region from the subarctic several centuries before Columbus. The majority of the Diné people did not migrate and remain in the original homeland in Alaska and northwestern Canada. Originally a hunting and trading people, they interacted and intermarried with the Pueblos and became involved in conflicts between villages engendered by disputes over water usage, with Diné and Apache groups allied with one or another of the riverine city-states.

The island peoples of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Basin were an integral part of the cultural, religious, and economic exchanges with the peoples from today’s Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Water, far from presenting a barrier to trade and cultural relations, served as a means of connecting the region’s peoples. Precolonial Caribbean cultures and cultural connections have been very little studied, since many of these peoples, the first victims of Columbus’s colonizing missions, were annihilated, enslaved and deported, or later assimilated enslaved African populations with the advent of the Atlantic slave trade. The best known are the Caribs, Arawaks, Tainos, and the Chibchan-speaking peoples. Throughout the Caribbean islands and rim are also descendants of Maroons—mixed Indigenous and African communities—who successfully liberated themselves from slavery, such as the Garifuna people (“Black Caribs”) along the coast of the western Caribbean.

From the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and south to the Gulf of Mexico lay one of the most fertile agricultural belts in the world, crisscrossed with great rivers. Naturally watered, teeming with plant and animal life, temperate in climate, the region was home to multiple agricultural nations. In the twelfth century, the Mississippi Valley region was marked by one enormous city-state, Cahokia, and several large ones built of earthen, stepped pyramids, much like those in Mexico. Cahokia supported a population of tens of thousands, larger than that of London during the same period. Other architectural monuments were sculpted in the shape of gigantic birds, lizards, bears, alligators, and even a 1,330-foot-long serpent. These feats of monumental construction testify to the levels of civic and social organization. Called “mound builders” by European settlers, the people of this civilization had dispersed before the European invasion, but their influence had spread throughout the eastern half of the North American continent through cultural influence and trade. What European colonizers found in the southeastern region of the continent were nations of villages with economies based on agriculture and corn the mainstay. This was the territory of the nations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw and the Muskogee Creek and Seminole, along with the Natchez Nation in the western part, the Mississippi Valley region.

To the north, a remarkable federal state structure, the Haudenosaunee confederacy—often referred to as the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy—was made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk Nations and, from early in the nineteenth century, the Tuscaroras. This system incorporated six widely dispersed and unique nations of thousands of agricultural villages and hunting grounds from the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic, and as far south as the Carolinas and inland to Pennsylvania. The Haudenosaunee peoples avoided centralized power by means of a clan-village system of democracy based on collective stewardship of the land. Corn, the staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably in this matrilineal society by the clan mothers, the oldest women from every extended family. Many other nations flourished in the Great Lakes region where now the US-Canada border cuts through their realms. Among them, the Anishinaabe Nation (called by others Ojibwe and Chippewa) was the largest.

The peoples of the prairies of central North America spanned an expanse of space from West Texas to the subarctic between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Several centers of development in that vast region of farming and bison-dependent peoples may be identified: in the prairies of Canada, the Crees; in the Dakotas, the Lakota and Dakota Sioux; and to their west and south, the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. Farther south were the Ponca, Pawnee, Osage, Kiowa, and many other nations, with buffalo numbering sixty million. Territorial disputes inevitably occurred, and diplomatic skills as well as trade were highly developed for conflict resolution.

In the Pacific Northwest, from present-day Alaska to San Francisco, and along the vast inland waterways to the mountain barriers, great seafaring and fishing peoples flourished, linked by culture, common ceremonies, and extensive trade. These were wealthy peoples living in a comparative paradise of natural resources, including the sacred salmon. They invented the potlatch, the ceremonial distribution or destruction of accumulated goods, creating a culture of reciprocity. They crafted gigantic wooden totems, masks, and lodges carved from giant sequoias and redwoods. Among these communities speaking many languages were the Tlingit people in Alaska and the salmon-fishing Salish, Makah, Hoopa, Pomo, Karok, and Yurok people.

The territory between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains in the West, now called the Great Basin, was a harsh environment that supported small populations before European colonization, as it does today. Yet the Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, and Ute peoples there managed the environment and built permanent villages.

Governance

Each Indigenous nation or city-state or town comprised an independent, self-governing people that held supreme authority over internal affairs and dealt with other peoples on equal footing. Among the factors that integrated each nation, in addition to language, were shared belief systems and rituals and clans of extended families that spanned more than one town. The system of decision making was based on consensus, not majority rule. This form of decision making later baffled colonial agents who could not find Indigenous officials to bribe or manipulate. In terms of international diplomacy, each of the Indigenous peoples of western North America was a sovereign nation. First the Spanish, French, and British colonizers, and then the US colonizers, made treaties with these Indigenous governments.

Indigenous governance varied widely in form. East of the Mississippi River, towns and federations of towns were governed by family lineages. The male elder of the most powerful clan was the executive. His accession to that position and all his decisions were subject to the approval of a council of elders of the clans that were represented in the town. In this manner, the town had sovereign authority over its internal affairs. In each sovereign town burned a sacred fire symbolizing its relationship with the spirit beings. A town could join other towns under the leadership of a single leader. English colonists termed such groupings of towns “confederacies” or “federations.” The Haudenosaunee people today retain a fully functioning government of this type. It was the Haudenosaunee constitution, called the Great Law of Peace, that inspired essential elements of the US Constitution. Oren Lyons, who holds the title of Faith-keeper of the Turtle Clan and is a member of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs, explains the essence of that constitution: “The first principle is peace. The second principle, equity, justice for the people. And third, the power of the good minds, of the collective powers to be of one mind: unity. And health. All of these were involved in the basic principles. And the process of discussion, putting aside warfare as a method of reaching decisions, and now using intellect.”

The Muskogees (Creeks), Seminoles, and other peoples in the Southeast had three branches of government: a civil administration, a military, and a branch that dealt with the sacred. The leaders of each branch were drawn from the elite, and other officials were drawn from prominent clans. Over the centuries preceding European colonialism, ancient traditions of diplomacy had developed among the Indigenous nations. Societies in the eastern part of the continent had an elaborate ceremonial structure for diplomatic meetings among representatives of disparate governments. In the federations of sovereign towns, the leading town’s fire represented the entire group, and each member town sent a representative or two to the federation’s council. Thus everyone in the federation was represented in the government’s decision making. Agreements reached in such meetings were considered sacred pledges that the representatives made not only to one another but also to the powerful spirit looking on. The nations tended to hold firm to such treaties out of respect for the sacred power that was party to the agreements. Relations with the spirit world were thus a major factor in government.

The roles of women varied among the societies of eastern North America. Among the Muskogees and other southern nations, women hardly participated in governmental affairs. Haudenosaunee and Cherokee women, on the other hand, held more political authority. Among the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras, certain female lineages controlled the choice of male representatives for their clans in their governing councils. Men were the representatives, but the women who chose them had the right to speak in the council, and when the chosen representative was too young or inexperienced to be effective, one of the women might participate in council on his behalf. Haudenosaunee clan mothers held the power to recall unsatisfactory representatives. Charles C. Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, calls it “a feminist dream.”

According to the value system that drove consensus building and decision making in these societies, the community’s interest overrode individual interests. After every member of a council had had his or her say, any member who still considered a decision incorrect might nevertheless agree to abide by it for the sake of the community’s cohesion. In the rare cases in which consensus could not be reached, the segment of the community represented by dissenters might withdraw from the community and move away to found a new community. This was similar to the practice of the nearly one hundred autonomous towns of northern New Mexico.

Stewards of the Land

By the time of European invasions, Indigenous peoples had occupied and shaped every part of the Americas, established extensive trade networks and roads, and were sustaining their populations by adapting to specific natural environments, but they also adapted nature to suit human ends. Mann relates how Indigenous peoples used fire to shape and tame the precolonial North American landscape. In the Northeast, Indigenous farmers always carried flints. One English observer in 1637 noted that they used the flints “to set fire of the country in all places where they come.” They also used torches for night hunting and rings of flame to encircle animals to kill. Rather than domesticating animals for hides and meat, Indigenous communities created havens to attract elk, deer, bear, and other game. They burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entice greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both. Mann describes these forests in 1491: “Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak.” Inland a few miles from the shore of present-day Rhode Island, an early European explorer marveled at the trees that were spaced so that the forest “could be penetrated even by a large army.” English mercenary John Smith wrote that he had ridden a galloping horse through the Virginia forest. In Ohio, the first English squatters on Indigenous lands in the mid-eighteenth century encountered forested areas that resembled English parks, as they could drive carriages through the trees.

Bison herds roamed the East from New York to Georgia (it’s no accident that a settler city in western New York was named Buffalo). The American bison was indigenous to the northern and southern plains of North America, not the East, yet Native peoples imported them east along a path of fire, as they transformed forest into fallows for the bison to survive upon far from their original habitat. Historian William Cronon has written that when the Haudenosaunee hunted buffalo, they were “harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating.” As for the “Great American Desert,” as Anglo-Americans called the Great Plains, the occupants transformed that too into game farms. Using fire, they extended the giant grasslands and maintained them. When Lewis and Clark began their trek up the Missouri River in 1804, ethnologist Dale Lott has observed, they beheld “not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans.” Native Americans created the world’s largest gardens and grazing lands—and thrived.

Native peoples left an indelible imprint on the land with systems of roads that tied nations and communities together across the entire landmass of the Americas. Scholar David Wade Chambers writes:

The first thing to note about early Native American trails and roads is that they were not just paths in the woods following along animal tracks used mainly for hunting. Neither can they be characterized simply as the routes that nomadic peoples followed during seasonal migrations. Rather they constituted an extensive system of roadways that spanned the Americas, making possible short, medium and long distance travel. That is to say, the Pre-Columbian Americas were laced together with a complex system of roads and paths which became the roadways adopted by the early settlers and indeed were ultimately transformed into major highways.

Roads were developed along rivers, and many Indigenous roads in North America tracked the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado Rivers, the Rio Grande, and other major streams. Roads also followed seacoasts. A major road ran along the Pacific coast from northern Alaska (where travelers could continue by boat to Siberia) south to an urban area in western Mexico. A branch of that road ran through the Sonora Desert and up onto the Colorado Plateau, serving ancient towns and later communities such as those of the Hopis and Pueblos on the northern Rio Grande.

From the Pueblo communities, roads eastward carried travelers onto the semiarid plains along tributaries of the Pecos River and up to the communities in what is now eastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and West Texas. There were also roads from the northern Rio Grande to the southern plains of western Oklahoma by way of the Canadian and Cimarron Rivers. The roads along those rivers and their tributaries led to a system of roads that followed rivers from the Southeast. They also connected with ones that turned southwestward toward the Valley of Mexico.

The eastern roads connected Muskogee (Creek) towns in present-day Georgia and Alabama. From the Muskogee towns, a major route led north through Cherokee lands, the Cumberland Gap, and the Shenandoah Valley region to the confluence of the Ohio and Scioto Rivers. From that northeastern part of the continent, a traveler could reach the West Coast by following roads along the Ohio River to the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missouri, and along the Missouri westward to its headwaters. From there, a road crossed the Rocky Mountains through South Pass in present-day Wyoming and led to the Columbia River. The Columbia River road led to the large population center at the river’s mouth on the Pacific Ocean and connected with the Pacific Coast road.

Corn

North America in 1492 was not a virgin wilderness but a network of Indigenous nations, peoples of the corn. The link between peoples of the North and the South can be seen in the diffusion of corn from Mesoamerica. Both Muskogees and Cherokees, whose original homelands in North America are located in the Southeast, trace their lineage to migration from or through Mexico. Cherokee historian Emmet Starr wrote:

The Cherokees most probably preceded by several hundred years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swung in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles north of the mouth of the Missouri River as indicated by the mounds… . The Muskogees were probably driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northwestern tribal invasions of the ninth or preceding centuries. This is evidenced by the customs and devices that were long retained by the Creeks.

Another Cherokee writer, Robert Conley, tells about the oral tradition that claims Cherokee origins in South America and subsequent migration through Mexico. Later, with US military invasions and relocations of the Muskogee and Cherokee peoples, many groups split off and sought refuge in Mexico, as did others under pressure, such as the Kickapoos.

Although practiced traditionally throughout the Indigenous agricultural areas of North America, the Green Corn Dance remains strongest among the Muskogee people. The elements of the ritual dance are similar to those of the Valley of Mexico. Although the dance takes various forms among different communities, the core of it is the same, a commemoration of the gift of corn by an ancestral corn woman. The peoples of the corn retain great affinities under the crust of colonialism.

This brief overview of precolonial North America suggests the magnitude of what was lost to all humanity and counteracts the settler-colonial myth of the wandering Neolithic hunter. These were civilizations based on advanced agriculture and featuring polities. It is essential to understand the migrations and Indigenous peoples’ relationships prior to invasion, North and South, and how colonialism cut them off, but, as we will see, the relationships are being reestablished.

Culture of Conquest

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of prior accumulation.

—Karl Marx, from “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Capital

How it Began

The late anthropologist Edward H. Spicer wrote that the initial Europeans who participated in colonization of the Americas were heirs to rich and ancient cultures, social relations, and customs in their lands of origin, whether Spain, France, Holland, or England. In the passage to the Americas and encountering the Indigenous inhabitants, they largely abandoned the webs of European social relations. What each actually participated in was a culture of conquest—violence, expropriation, destruction, and dehumanization.

Spicer’s observation is true, but the culture of conquest didn’t start with Europeans crossing the Atlantic. European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several centuries before that. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Europeans conducted the Crusades to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, leading to unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few. This profit-based religion was the deadly element that European merchants and settlers brought to the Americas. In addition to seeking personal wealth, colonizers expressed a Christian zeal that justified colonialism. Along with that came the militaristic tradition that had also developed in western Europe during the Crusades (literally, “carrying of the cross”). Although the popes, beginning with Urban II, called for most of the ventures, the crusading armies were mercenary outfits that promised the soldiers the right to sack and loot Muslim towns and cities, feats that would gain them wealth and prestige back home. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, the papacy began directing such mercenaries to crush domestic “enemies” in their midst, as well—pagans and commoners in general, especially women (as ostensible witches) and heretics. In this way, knights and noblemen could seize land and force the commoners living on it into servitude. Historian Peter Linebaugh notes that whereas the anti-Muslim Crusades were attempts to control the lucrative Muslim trade routes to the Far East, the domestic crusades against heretics and commoners were carried out to terrorize poor people and at the same time to enlist them in the lucrative and adventurous yet holy venture: “Crusading was thus a murderous device to resolve a contradiction by bringing baron and commoner together in the cauldron of religious war.”

The first population forcibly organized under the profit motive—whose labor was exploited well before overseas exploitation was possible—was the European peasantry. Once forced off their land, they had nothing to eat and nothing to sell but their labor. In addition, entire nations, such as Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Bohemia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia, were colonized and forced under the rule of various monarchies. The Moorish Nation and the Sephardic Jewish minority were conquered and physically deported by the Castilian/Aragon monarchy from the Iberian Peninsula—a long-term project culminating in group expulsions beginning in 1492, the year Columbus sailed to America.

The institutions of colonialism and methods for relocation, deportation, and expropriation of land had already been practiced, if not perfected, by the end of the fifteenth century. The rise of the modern state in western Europe was based on the accumulation of wealth by means of exploiting human labor and displacing millions of subsistence producers from their lands. The armies that did this work benefited from technological innovations that allowed the development of more effective weapons of death and destruction. When these states expanded overseas to obtain even more resources, land, and labor, they were not starting anew. The peoples of the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, and the Andes were the first overseas victims. West and South Africa, North America, and the rest of South America followed. Then came all of Africa, the Pacific, and Asia.

The sea voyages of European explorers and merchants in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first of their kind. These voyagers borrowed the techniques for long-distance sea travel from the Arab world. Before the Arabs ventured into the Indian Ocean, Inuits (Eskimos) plied the Arctic Circle in their kayaks for centuries and made contacts with many peoples, as did Norse, South Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvian, and Melanesian and Polynesian fishing peoples of the Pacific. Egyptian and Greek knowledge of the seas most likely extended beyond the Mediterranean, into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Western European seagoing merchants and the monarchies that backed them would differ only in that they had developed the bases for colonial domination and exploitation of labor in those colonies that led to the capture and enslavement of millions of Africans to transport to their American colonies.

Land as Private Property

Along with the cargo of European ships, especially of the later British colonizing ventures, came the emerging concept of land as private property. Esther Kingston-Mann, a specialist in Russian land tenure history, has reconstructed the elevation of land as private property to “sacred status” in sixteenth-century England. The English used the term “enclosure” to denote the privatization of the commons. During this time, peasants, who constituted a large majority of the population, were evicted from their ancient common lands. For centuries the commons had been their pasture for milk cows and for running sheep and their source for water, wood for fuel and construction, and edible and medicinal wild plants. Without these resources they could not have survived as farmers, and they did not survive as farmers after they lost access to the commons. Not only were the commons privatized during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were also transformed into grazing lands for commercial sheep production, wool being the main domestic and export commodity, creating wealth for a few and impoverishment for the many. Denied access to the former commons, rural subsistence farmers and even their children had no choice but to work in the new woolen textile factories under miserable conditions—that is, when they could find such work for unemployment was high. Employed or not, this displaced population was available to serve as settlers in the North American British colonies, many of them as indentured servants, with the promise of land. After serving their terms of indenture, they were free to squat on Indigenous land and become farmers again. In this way, surplus labor created not only low labor costs and great profits for the woolens manufacturers but also a supply of settlers for the colonies, which was an “escape valve” in the home country, where impoverishment could lead to uprisings of the exploited. The sacred status of property in the forms of land taken from Indigenous farmers and of Africans as chattel was seeded into the drive for Anglo-American independence from Britain and the founding of the United States.

Privatization of land was accompanied by an ideological drive to paint the commoners who resisted as violent, stupid, and lazy. The English Parliament, under the guise of fighting backwardness, criminalized former rights to the commons. Accompanying and facilitating the privatization of the commons was the suppression of women, as feminist theorist Silvia Federici has argued, by conjuring witchcraft. Those accused of witchcraft were poor peasant women, often widows, while the accusers tended to be wealthier, either their landlords or employers, individuals who controlled local institutions or had ties to the national government. Neighbors were encouraged to accuse one another. Witchcraft was considered mainly a female crime, especially at the peak of the witch hunts between 1550 and 1650, when more than 80 percent of those who were charged with witchcraft, tried, convicted, and executed were women. In England, those accused of witchcraft were mostly elderly women, often beggars, sometimes the wives of living laborers but usually widows. Actions and local occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included nonpayment of rent, demand for public assistance, giving the “evil-eye,” local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths of children. Also among the telltale actions were practices related to midwifery and any kind of contraception. The service that women provided among the poor as healers was one of a number of vestiges from pre-Christian, matrilineal institutions that once predominated in Europe. It is no surprise that those who had held on to and perpetuated these communal practices were those most resistant to the enclosure of the commons, the economic base of the peasantry, as well as women’s autonomy.

The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their descendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry. English settlers brought witch hunting with them to Jamestown, Virginia, and to Salem, Massachusetts. In language reminiscent of that used to condemn witches, they quickly identified the Indigenous populations as inherently children of Satan and “servants of the devil” who deserved to be killed. Later the Salem authorities would justify witch trials by claiming that the English settlers were inhabiting land controlled by the devil.

White Supremacy and Class

Also part of the Christian colonizers’ outlook was a belief in white supremacy. As an 1878 US Protestant evangelical hymn suggests—“Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?”—whiteness as an ideology involves much more than skin color, although skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism in the United States. White supremacy can be traced to the colonizing ventures of the Christian Crusades in Muslim-controlled territories and to the Protestant colonization of Ireland. As dress rehearsals for the colonization of the Americas, these projects form the two strands that merge in the geopolitical and sociocultural makeup of US society.

The Crusades in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal today) and expulsion of Jews and Muslims were part of a process that created the core ideology for modern colonialism—white supremacy—and its justification for genocide. The Crusades gave birth to the papal law of limpieza de sangre—cleanliness of blood—for which the Inquisition was established by the Church to investigate and determine. Before this time the concept of biological race based on “blood” is not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian Europe or anywhere else in the world. As scapegoating and suspicion of Conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) and Moriscos (Muslims who had converted to Christianity) intensified over several centuries in Christian-controlled Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre was popularized. It had the effect of granting psychological and increasingly legal privileges to “Old Christians,” both rich and poor, thus obscuring the class differences between the landed aristocracy and land-poor peasants and shepherds. Whatever their economic station, the “Old Christian” Spanish were enabled to identify with the nobility. As one Spanish historian puts it, “The common people looked upwards, wishing and hoping to climb, and let themselves be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour, dignity, glory, and the noble life.” Lope de Vega, a sixteenth-century contemporary of Cervantes, wrote: “Soy un hombre, aunque de villana casta, limpio de sangre y jam / de hebrea o mora manchada” (I am a man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood).

This cross-class mind-set can be found as well in the stance of descendants of the old settlers of British colonization in North America. This then is the first instance of class leveling based on imagined racial sameness—the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa. As Elie Wiesel famously observed, the road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom. Historian David Stannard, in American Holocaust, adds the caveat that the same road led straight through the heart of America. The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed and distributing confiscated lands and properties of Moors and Jews in Iberia, of the Irish in Ulster, and of Native American and African peoples.

Great Britain, emerging as an overseas colonial power a century after Spain did, absorbed aspects of the Spanish racial caste system into its colonialist rationalizations, particularly regarding African slavery, but it did so within the context of Protestantism, which imagined a chosen people founding and raising a New Jerusalem. The English did not just adapt the habits and experiences of Spanish colonization; they had their own prior experience, which actually constituted overseas imperialism. During the early seventeenth century the English conquered Ireland and declared a half-million acres of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never before attempted to remove so large an Indigenous population and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A “wild Irish” reservation was even attempted. The “plantation” of Ulster was as much a culmination of, as it was a departure from, centuries of intermittent warfare in Ireland. In the sixteenth century, the official in charge of the Irish province of Munster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, ordered that

the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he [Gilbert] incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his owne tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem… . [It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and friends.

The English government paid bounties for the Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as “white” as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.

At that conjuncture, both in the Christian Crusades against Muslims and England’s invasion of Ireland, the transition from religious wars to the genocidal mode of colonialism is apparent. The Irish under British colonial rule, well into the twentieth century, continued to be regarded as biologically inferior. During the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by social Darwinism, some English scientists peddled the theory that the Irish (and all people of color) had descended from apes, while the English were descendants of “man,” who had been created by God “in his own image.” Thus the English were “angels” and the Irish (and other colonized peoples) were a lower species, which today US “Christian Identity” white supremacists call “mud people,” inferior products of the process of evolution. The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settlement in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583. In the lead-up to the formation of the United States, Protestantism uniquely refined white supremacy as part of a politico-religious ideology.

Terminal Narratives

According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to European invasion, warfare, and material acquisitiveness than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory, and he writes that “epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.” Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principal reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.

Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged questions.

US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors … which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.” Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa, and Asia. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement. Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility. These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.

Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought depopulation in the Pacific Islands, Australia, western Central America, and West Africa. Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts Nations—in late-eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish, while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.

Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.

Anthropologist Michael V. Wilcox asks, “What if archaeologists were asked to explain the continued presence of descendant communities five hundred years after Columbus instead of their disappearance or marginality?” Cox calls for the active dismantling of what he terms “terminal narratives”—“accounts of Indian histories which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of Indigenous peoples.”

Gold Fever

Searching for gold, Columbus reached many of the islands of the Caribbean and mapped them. Soon, a dozen other soldier-merchants mapped the Atlantic coast from the northern Maritimes to the tip of South America. From the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mercenaries, criminals, and peasants. They seized the land and property of Indigenous populations and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the “New World” between Spain and Portugal with a line drawn from Greenland south through what is now Brazil. Called the Doctrine of Discovery, it claimed that possession of the entire world west of that line would be open to Spanish conquest and all east of it to Portuguese conquest.

The story is well known. In 1492, Columbus sailed with three ships on his first voyage at the behest of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castille. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 had led to the merger of their kingdoms into what would become the core of the Spanish state. Columbus planted a colony of forty of his men on “Española” (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and returned to Spain with Indigenous slaves and gold. In 1493, Columbus returned to the Caribbean with seventeen ships, more than a thousand men, and supplies. He found that the men he had left on the first trip had subsequently been killed by the Indigenous inhabitants. After planting another settlement, Columbus returned to Spain with four hundred Arawak slaves. With seven ships, Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1498, reaching what is now Venezuela, and he made a fourth and final voyage in 1502, this time touching the Caribbean coast of Central America. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and charted the Pacific coast of the Americas. Juan Ponce de León claimed the Florida peninsula for Spain in 1513. In 1521, following a three-year bloodbath and overthrow of the Aztec state, Hernando Cortés proclaimed Mexico as New Spain. Parallel with the crushing of Mexican resistance were Ferdinand Magellan’s explorations and charting of the Atlantic coast of the South American continent, followed by Spanish wars against the Inca Nation of the Andes. In both Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors confiscated elaborate artwork and statuary made of gold and silver to be melted down for use as money. During the same period, the Portuguese laid waste to what is today Brazil and began a thriving slave trade that would funnel millions of enslaved Africans to South America, beginning the lucrative Atlantic slave trade.

The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

Cult of the Covenant

For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it and to thy seed forever.

—Genesis 13:15

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

—Genesis 17:7

Myth of the Pristine Wilderness

With the onset of colonialism in North America, control of the land was wrenched away from the Indigenous peoples, and the forests grew dense, so that later European settlers were unaware of the former cultivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape. Abandoned fields of corn turned to weeds and bushes. Settlers chopped down trees in New England until the landscape was nearly bare. One geographer notes, “Paradoxical as it may seem, there was undoubtedly much more ‘forest primeval’ in 1850 than in 1650.” Anglo-Americans who did observe Native habitat management in action misunderstood what they saw. Captain John Palliser, traveling through the prairies in the 1850s, complained about the Indians’ “disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than useless reasons.” In 1937, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup claimed that the “open, park-like woods” written about in earlier times had been, “from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America” and could not have been the result of human management.

In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them. By the early seventeenth century, when British colonists from Europe began to settle in North America, a large Indigenous population had long before created “a humanized landscape almost everywhere,” as William Denevan puts it. Native peoples had created town sites, farms, monumental earthworks, and networks of roads, and they had devised a wide variety of governments, some as complex as any in the world. They had developed sophisticated philosophies of government, traditions of diplomacy, and policies of international relations. They conducted trade along roads that crisscrossed the landmasses and waterways of the American continents. Before the arrival of Europeans, North America was indeed a “continent of villages,” but also a continent of nations and federations of nations.

Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs. Historian Francis Jennings was emphatic in addressing what he called the myth that “America was virgin land, or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages”:

European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population.

This is so simple a fact that it seems self-evident.

The Calvinist Origin Story

All modern nation-states claim a kind of rationalized origin story upon which they fashion patriotism or loyalty to the state. When citizens of modern states and their anthropologists and historians look at what they consider “primitive” societies, they identify their “origin myths,” quaint and endearing stories, but fantastic ones, not grounded in “reality.” Yet many US scholars seem unable (or unwilling) to subject their own nation-state’s founding story to the same objective examination. The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world. It is one of the few states founded on the covenant of the Hebrew Torah, or the Christian borrowing of it in the Old Testament of the Bible. Other covenant states are Israel and the now-defunct apartheid state of South Africa, both of which were founded in 1948. Although the origin stories of these three covenant states were based on Judeo-Christian scripture, they were not founded as theocracies. According to the myths, the faithful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and support a godly society, and their god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.

The influence of the scriptures was pervasive among many of the Western social and political thinkers whose ideas the founders of the first British colonies in North America drew upon. Historian Donald Harman Akenson points to the way that “certain societies, in certain eras of their development,” have looked to the scriptures for guidance, and likens it to the way “the human genetic code operates physiologically. That is, this great code has, in some degree, directly determined what people would believe and when they would think and what they would do.” Dan Jacobson, a citizen of Boer-ruled South Africa, whose parents were immigrants, observes that,

like the Israelites, and their fellow Calvinists in New England, [the Boers] believed that they had been called by their God to wander through the wilderness, to meet and defeat the heathen, and to occupy a promised land on his behalf… . A sense of their having been summoned by divine decree to perform an ineluctable historical duty has never left the Boers, and has contributed to both their strength and their weakness.

Founders of the first North American colonies and later of the United States had a similar sense of a providential opportunity to make history. Indeed, as Akenson reminds us, “it is from [the] scriptures that western society learned how to think historically.” The key moment in history according to covenant ideology “involves the winning of ‘the Land’ from alien, and indeed evil, forces.”

The principal conduit of the Hebrew scriptures and covenant ideology to European Christians was John Calvin, the French religious reformer whose teachings coincided with the advent of the European invasion and colonization of the Americas. The Puritans drew upon Calvinist ideology in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as did the Dutch Calvinist settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in founding their South African colony during the same period. Calvinism was a Protestant Christian movement with a strong separatist political component. In accord with the doctrine of predestination, Calvin taught that human free will did not exist. Certain individuals are “called” by God and are among the “elect.” Salvation therefore has nothing to do with one’s actions; one is born as part of the elect or not, according to God’s will. Although individuals could not know for certain if they were among the elect, outward good fortune, especially material wealth, was taken to be a manifestation of election; conversely, bad fortune and poverty, not to speak of dark skin, were taken as evidence of damnation. “The attractiveness of such a doctrine to a group of invading colonists … is obvious,” Akenson observes, “for one could easily define the natives as immutably profane, and damned, and oneself as predestined to virtue.”

Since another sign of justification was a person’s ability to abide by the laws of a well-ordered society, Calvin preached the obligation of citizens to obey lawful authority. In fact, they should do so even when that authority was lodged in poor leaders (one of the seeds for “my country right or wrong”). Calvin led his Huguenot followers across the border into Geneva, took political control of the city-state, and established it as a republic in 1541. The Calvinist state enacted detailed statutes governing every aspect of life and appointed functionaries to enforce them. The laws reflected Calvin’s interpretation of the Old Testament; dissenters were forced to leave the republic, and some were even tortured and executed.

Although the US Constitution represents for many US citizens a covenant with God, the US origin story goes back to the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, named for the ship that carried the hundred or so passengers to what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620. Forty-one of the “Pilgrims,” all men, wrote and signed the compact. Invoking God’s name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had journeyed to northern “Virginia,” as the eastern seaboard of North America was called by the English, “to plant the First Colony” and did therefore “Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic” to be governed by “just and equal Laws” enacted “for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” The original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, adopted an official seal designed in England before their journey. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, “Come over and help us.” Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the US military veterans of the “Spanish-American War” (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed US soldier and a sailor, with a US battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.

In other modern constitutional states, constitutions come and go, and they are never considered sacred in the manner patriotic US citizens venerate theirs. Great Britain has no written constitution. The Magna Carta arguably comes close, but it does not reflect a covenant. US citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to their constitution from the English. From the Pilgrims to the founders of the United States and continuing to the present, the cultural persistence of the covenant idea, and thus the bedrock of US patriotism, represents a deviation from the main course in the development of national identities. Arguably, both the 1948 birth of the state of Israel and advent of Nationalist Party rule of South Africa were emulations of the US founding; certainly many US Americans closely identify with the state of Israel, as they did with Afrikaner-ruled South Africa. Patriotic US politicians and citizens take pride in “exceptionalism.” Historians and legal theorists characterize US statecraft and empire as those of a “nation of laws,” rather than one dominated by a particular class or group of interests, suggesting a kind of holiness.

The US Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the writings of the “Founding Fathers,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech are all bundled into the covenant as sacred documents that express the US state religion. An aspect of this most visible in the early twenty-first century is the burgeoning “gun lobby,” based on the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In the forefront of these Second Amendment adherents are the descendants of the old settlers who say that they represent “the people” and have the right to bear arms in order to overthrow any government that does not in their view adhere to the God-given covenant.

Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for their formal citizenship were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loyalty to the flag, and regarding those outside the covenant as enemies or potential enemies of the exceptional country that has adopted them, often after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in turn were often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect. The old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed (Indian) blood, before and after independence, in order to acquire the land. These are the descendants of English Pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French—Calvinists all—who took the land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for.

Settler Colonialism and the Ulster-Scots

The core group of frontier settlers were the Ulster-Scots—the Scots-Irish, or “Scotch-Irish,” as they called themselves. Usually the descendants of these Scots-Irish say their ancestors came to the British colonies from Ireland, but their journey was more circuitous than that. The Scots-Irish were Protestants from Scotland who were recruited by the British as settlers in the six counties of the province of Ulster in northern Ireland. The British had seized these half-million acres from Ireland in the early seventeenth century, driven the indigenous Irish farmers from it, and opened it to settlement under English protection. This coincided with the English plantation of two colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America and the beginning of settler colonialism there. These early settlers came mostly from the Scottish lowlands. Scotland itself, along with Wales, had preceded Ireland as colonial notches in the belt of English expansion. Britain’s colonization of Indigenous lands in North America was foreshadowed by its colonization of northern Ireland. By 1630 the new settlers in Ulster—21,000 Britons, including some Welsh, and 150,000 Lowland Scots—were more numerous than British settlers in all of North America at the time. In 1641, the indigenous Irish rebelled and killed ten thousand of the settlers, yet Protestant Scots settlers continued to pour in. In some formerly Irish areas, they formed a majority of the population. They brought with them the covenant ideology of Calvinism that had been the work of the Scotsman John Knox. Later John Locke, also a Scot, would secularize the covenant idea into a “contract,” the social contract, whereby individuals sacrifice their liberty only through consent. An insidiously effective example, the US economic system, was based on Locke’s theories.

So it was that the Ulster-Scots were already seasoned settler colonialists before they began to fill the ranks of settlers streaming toward the North American British colonies in the early eighteenth century, many of them as indentured servants. Before ever meeting Indigenous Americans, the Ulster settlers had perfected scalping for bounty, using the indigenous Irish as their victims. As this chapter and the following one show, the Scots-Irish were the foot soldiers of British empire building, and they and their descendants formed the shock troops of the “westward movement” in North America, the expansion of the US continental empire and the colonization of its inhabitants. As Calvinists (mostly Presbyterian), they added to and transformed the Calvinism of the earlier Puritan settlers into the unique ideology of the US settler class.

In one of history’s great migrations, nearly a quarter-million Scots-Irish left Ulster for British North America between 1717 and 1775. Although a number left for religious reasons, the majority were losers in the struggle over Britain’s Irish policies, which brought economic ruin to Ireland’s wool and linen industries. Hard times were magnified by prolonged drought, and so the settlers pulled up stakes and moved across the Atlantic. This is a story that would repeat itself time and time again in settler treks across North America, the majority of migrants ending up landless losers in the Monopoly game of European settler colonialism.

The majority of Ulster-Scot settlers were cash-poor and had to indenture themselves to pay for their passage to North America. Once settled, they came to predominate as soldier-settlers. Most initially landed in Pennsylvania, but large numbers soon migrated to the southern colonies and to the backcountry, the British colonies’ western borders, where they squatted on unceded Indigenous lands. Among frontier settlers, Scots-Irish predominated among settlers of English and German descent. Although the majority remained landless and poor, some became merchants and owners of plantations worked by slaves, as well as politically powerful. Seventeen presidents of the United States have been of Ulster-Scots lineage, from Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, to Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama on his mother’s side. Theodore Roosevelt characterized his Scots-Irish ancestors as “a stern, virile, bold and hardy people who formed the kernel of that American stock who were the pioneers of our people in the march westwards.” Perhaps as influential as their being presidents, educators, and businessmen, the Scots-Irish engendered a strong set of individualist values that included the sanctity of glory in warfare. They made up the officer corps and were soldiers of the regular army, as well as the frontier-ranging militias that cleared areas for settlement by exterminating Indigenous farmers and destroying their towns.

The Seven Years’ War between the British and the French (1754–63) was fought both in Europe and in North America, where the British colonists called it the French and Indian War because it was mainly a British war against the Indigenous peoples, some of whom formed alliances with the French. The British colonial militias consisted largely of frontier Scots-Irish settlers who wanted access to Indigenous farmland in the Ohio Valley region. By the time of US independence, Ulster-Scots made up 15 percent of the population of the thirteen colonies, and most were clustered in majority numbers in the backcountry. During the war for settler independence from Britain, most settlers who had emigrated directly from Scotland remained loyal to the British Crown and fought on that side. In contrast, the Scots-Irish were in the forefront of the struggle for independence and formed the backbone of Washington’s fighting forces. Most of the names of soldiers at Valley Forge were Scots-Irish. They saw themselves, and their descendants see themselves, as the true and authentic patriots, the ones who spilled rivers of blood to secure independence and to acquire Indigenous lands—gaining blood rights to the latter as they left bloody footprints across the continent.

During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, first-and second-generation Scots-Irish continued to pour westward into the Ohio Valley region, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. They were the largest ethnic group in the westward migration, and they maintained many of their Scots-Irish ways. They tended to move three or four times, acquiring and losing land before settling at least somewhat permanently. Scots-Irish settlers were overwhelmingly farmers rather than explorers or fur traders. They cleared forests, built log cabins, and killed Indians, forming a human wall of colonization for the new United States and, in wartime, employing their fighting skills effectively. Historian Carl Degler writes that “these hardy, God-fearing Calvinists made themselves into a veritable human shield of colonial civilization.” The next chapter explores the kind of counterinsurgent warfare they perfected, which formed the basis of US militarism into the twenty-first century.

The Calvinist religion of the Scots-Irish, Presbyterianism, was in numbers of faithful soon second only to those of New England’s Congregationalist Church. But on the frontier, Scots-Irish devotion to the formal Presbyterian Church waned. New evangelical offshoots refashioned Calvinist doctrines to decentralize and do away with the Presbyterian hierarchy. Although they continued to regard themselves as chosen people of the covenant, commanded by God to go into the wilderness to build the new Israel, the Scots-Irish also saw themselves, as their descendants see themselves, as the true and authentic patriots, entitled to the land through their blood sacrifice.

Sacred Land Becomes Real Estate

The land won through North American bloodshed was not necessarily conceived in terms of particular parcels for a farm that would be passed down through generations. Most of the settlers who fought for it kept moving on nearly every generation. In the South many lost their holdings to land companies that then sold it to planters seeking to increase the size of their slave-worked plantations. Without the unpaid forced labor of enslaved Africans, a farmer growing cash crops could not compete on the market. Once in the hands of settlers, the land itself was no longer sacred, as it had been for the Indigenous. Rather, it was private property, a commodity to be acquired and sold—every man a possible king, or at least wealthy. Later, when Anglo-Americans had occupied the continent and urbanized much of it, this quest for land and the sanctity of private property were reduced to a lot with a house on it, and “the land” came to mean the country, the flag, the military, as in “the land of the free” of the national anthem, or Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Those who died fighting in foreign wars were said to have sacrificed their lives to protect “this land” that the old settlers had spilled blood to acquire. The blood spilled was largely Indigenous.

These then were the settlers upon which the national myths are based, the ultimately dispensable cannon fodder for the taking of the land and the continent, the foot soldiers of empire, the “yeoman farmers” romanticized by Thomas Jefferson. They were not of the ruling class, although a few slipped through and later were drawn in by the ruling class as elected officials and military officers, thereby maintaining the facade of a classless society and a democratic empire. The founders were English patricians, slave owners, large land barons, or otherwise successful businessmen dependent on the slave trade and exports produced by enslaved Africans and on property sales. When descendants of the settler class, overwhelmingly Presbyterian or otherwise Calvinist Protestant, were accepted into the ruling class, they usually became Episcopalians, members of an elite church linked to the state Church of England. As we look at the bloody deeds of the settlers in acquiring and maintaining land, the social class context is an essential element.

Bloody Footprints

For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders… . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.

—John Grenier, The First Way of War

Within days of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, on May 2, 2011, it was revealed that the Navy SEAL team executing the mission had used the code name Geronimo for its target. A May 4 report in the New York Daily News commented, “Along with the unseen pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse and questions about what Pakistan knew, intelligence officials’ reasons for dubbing the Al Qaeda boss ‘Geronimo’ remain one of the biggest mysteries of the Black Ops mission.” The choice of that code name was not a mystery to the military, which also uses the term “Indian Country” to designate enemy territory and identifies its killing machines and operations with such names as UH-1B/C Iroquois, OH-58D Kiowa, OV-1 Mohawk, OH-6 Cayuse, AH-64 Apache, S-58/H-34 Choctaw, UH-60 Black Hawk, Thunderbird, and Rolling Thunder. The last of these is the military name given to the relentless carpet-bombing of Vietnam peasants in the mid-1960s. There are many other current and recent examples of the persistence of the colonialist and imperialist sensibilities at the core of a military grounded in wars against the Indigenous nations and communities of North America.

On February 19, 1991, Brigadier General Richard Neal, briefing reporters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, stated that the US military wanted to be certain of speedy victory once it committed land forces to “Indian Country.” The following day, in a little-publicized statement of protest, the National Congress of American Indians pointed out that fifteen thousand Native Americans were serving as combat troops in the Persian Gulf. Neither Neal nor any other military authority apologized for the statement. The term “Indian Country” in cases such as this is not merely an insensitive racial slur, tastelessly but offhandedly employed to refer to the enemy. It is, rather, a technical military term, like “collateral damage” or “ordnance,” that appears in military training manuals and is regularly used to mean “behind enemy lines.” It is often shortened to “In Country.” This usage recalls the origins and development of the US military, as well as the nature of US political and social history as a colonialist project. Furthermore, “Indian Country” is a legal term that identifies Native jurisdiction under US colonial laws but is also an important tool for Native nations to use in maintaining and expanding their land bases in the process of decolonization. “Indian Country,” the legal term, includes not only federally recognized reservation territories, but also informal reservations, dependent Native communities and allotments, and specially designated lands.

Roots of Genocide

In The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814, military historian John Grenier offers an indispensable analysis of the colonialist warfare against the Indigenous peoples of the North American territories claimed by Great Britain. The way of war largely devised and enacted by settlers formed the basis for the founding ideology and colonialist military strategy of the independent United States, and this approach to war is still in force in the twenty-first century. Grenier writes that he began his study with the goal of tracing the historical roots of the use of unlimited war by the United States, war whose purpose is to destroy the will of the enemy people or their capacity to resist, employing any means necessary but mainly by attacking civilians and their support systems, such as food supply. Today called “special operations” or “low-intensity conflict,” that kind of warfare was first used against Indigenous communities by colonial militias in Virginia and Massachusetts. These irregular forces, made up of settlers, sought to disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence through scouting and taking prisoners. They did so by destroying Indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering enemy noncombatant populations.

Grenier analyzes the development of the US way of war from 1607–1814, during which the US military was forged, leading to its reproduction and development into the present. US historian Bernard Bailyn calls the period “barbarous” and a “conflict of civilizations,” but Bailyn represents the Indigenous civilization as “marauders” that the European settlers needed to get rid of. From this formative period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic characteristics of the US way of war and thereby the characteristics of its civilization, which few historians have come to terms with.

In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During nearly two centuries of British colonization, generations of settlers, mostly farmers, gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution. Anglo-French conflict may appear to have been the dominant factor of European colonization in North America during the eighteenth century, but while large regular armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the Indigenous communities. Much of the fighting during the fifteen-year settlers’ war for independence, especially in the Ohio Valley region and western New York, was directed against Indigenous resisters who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of settlers with an independent government, as opposed to a remote one in Great Britain. Nor did the fledgling US military in the 1790s carry out operations typical of the state-centered wars occurring in Europe at the time. Even following the founding of the professional US Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the US conquest of the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley regions. Since that time, Grenier notes, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces.

The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to seek the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population. “In cases where a rough balance of power existed,” Grenier observes, “and the Indians even appeared dominant—as was the situation in virtually every frontier war until the first decade of the 19th century—[settler] Americans were quick to turn to extravagant violence.”

Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided colonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that rather than racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred: the out-of-control momentum of extreme violence of unlimited warfare fueled race hatred. “Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of ‘Indian haters,’ men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.” By then, the Indigenous peoples’ villages, farmlands, towns, and entire nations formed the only barrier to the settlers’ total freedom to acquire land and wealth. Settler colonialists again chose their own means of conquest. Such fighters are often viewed as courageous heroes, but killing the unarmed women, children, and old people and burning homes and fields involved neither courage nor sacrifice.

So it was from the planting of the first British colonies in North America. Among the initial leaders of those ventures were military men—mercenaries—who brought with them their previous war experiences in Britain’s imperialist, anti-Muslim Crusades. Those who put together and led the first colonial armies, such as John Smith in Virginia, Myles Standish at Plymouth, John Mason in Connecticut, and John Underhill in Massachusetts, had fought in the bitter, brutal, and bloody religious wars ongoing in Europe at the time of the first settlements. They had long practiced burning towns and fields and killing the unarmed and vulnerable. “Tragically for the Indian peoples of the Eastern Seaboard,” Grenier observes, “the mercenaries unleashed a similar way of war in early Virginia and New England.”

Settler-Parasites Create the Virginia Colony

The first Jamestown settlers lacked a supply line and proved unable or unwilling to grow crops or hunt for their own sustenance. They decided that they would force the farmers of the Powhatan Confederacy—some thirty polities—to provide them with food. Jamestown military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the settlers as well as provide them with land and labor. The leader of the confederacy, Wahunsonacock, entreated the invaders:

Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food? What can you get by war? … What is the cause of your jealousy? You see us unarmed, and willing to supply your wants, if you will come in a friendly manner, and not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy.

Smith’s threat was carried out: war against the Powhatans started in August 1609 and the destruction of the Powhatans became the order of the day. The war dragged on for a year until the English governor, Thomas West, ordered forces mobilized by George Percy, a mercenary who had fought in the Netherlands, “to take revenge” and destroy the Indigenous population. In his report following the assault, Percy gloated over the gruesome details of killing all the children. Despite the terrorizing tactics of the settlers, the Powhatans were able to protect their grain storage buildings and force the Jamestown settlers to shelter within their colonial fortress. Meanwhile the Powhatans organized a stronger confederacy. In 1622, they attacked all the English settlements along the James River, killing 350—a third of the settler population. Unable to eliminate the Indigenous population by force of arms, the colonists resorted to a “feedfight,” as Grenier identifies it—systematic destruction of all the Indigenous agricultural resources. A dozen years later an even greater conflict broke out, the Tidewater War (1644–46). Hardly a war, it consisted rather of settlers continuously raiding Indigenous villages and fields with the goal of starving the people out of the area. There followed three decades of peace, from which the settlers inferred that total war and expulsion of the Indigenous people worked. The few Indigenous families that remained in eastern Virginia were under the absolute dominance of the English. It was clear, Grenier points out, that “the English would tolerate Indians within and near their settlements provided they essentially neither saw nor heard them.” In the absence of Indigenous sources of food and labor, the colonists brought in enslaved Africans and indentured European servants to do the work.

By 1676, the settler population of Virginia had mushroomed and English tobacco farmers were encroaching on the lands of the Susquehannock people. When the Susquehannocks resisted, a war broke out that went badly for the English. In 1676, the Virginia House of Burgesses formed a mounted force of 125 men to range through a particular cluster of Indigenous villages and thereby overcome Susquehannock resistance. This was the immediate background of Bacon’s Rebellion, so beloved by populist US historians and those who search for the onset of racialized servitude in the British colonies. The rebellion occurred when Anglo settler-farmers along with landless indentured servants—both Anglo and African—took into their own hands the slaughter of Indigenous farmers with the aim of taking their land. The plantation owners who ruled the colony were troubled, to be sure, by the interracial aspect of the uprising. Soon after, Virginia law made greater distinction between indentured servants and slaves and codified the permanent status of slavery for Africans. The point is an important one, but there is a larger issue. Bacon’s Rebellion affected the development of genocidal policies aimed at the Indigenous peoples—namely, the creation of wealth in the colonies based on landholding and the use of landless or land-poor settler-farmers as foot soldiers for moving the settlement frontier deeper into Indigenous territories. That the rebellion’s leader, Nathaniel Bacon, was a wealthy planter reveals the relationship between the wealthy landed settlers and the poorer, often landless, settlers. Historian Eric Foner rightly concludes that the rebellion was a power play by Bacon against the Virginia governor William Berkeley and his planter allies, as Bacon’s financial backers included other wealthy planters opposed to Berkeley.

In the Name of God

What transpired up the coast in the founding and growth of the New England colony was different, at least at first. Just before the 1620 landing of the Mayflower, smallpox had spread from English trading ships off the coast to the Pequot fishing and farming communities on land, greatly reducing the population of the area the Plymouth Colony would occupy. King James attributed the epidemic to God’s “great goodness and bounty toward us.” Consequently, those who survived in the Indigenous communities had little means to immediately resist the settlers’ expropriation of their lands and resources. Sixteen years later, however, the Indigenous villages had recovered and were considered a barrier to the settlers moving into Pequot territory in Connecticut. A single violent incident triggered a devastating Puritan war against the Pequots in what the colony’s annals and subsequent history texts call the Pequot War.

The Puritan settlers, as if by instinct, jumped immediately into a hideous war of annihilation, entering Indigenous villages and killing women and children or taking them hostage. The Pequots responded by attacking English settlements, including Fort Saybrook in Connecticut. Connecticut authorities commissioned mercenary John Mason to lead a force of soldiers from that colony and Massachusetts to one of the two Pequot strongholds on the Mystic River. Pequot fighters occupied one of the forts, while the other one contained only women, children, and old men. The latter was the one John Mason targeted. Slaughter ensued. After killing most of the Pequot defenders, the soldiers set fire to the structures and burned the remaining inhabitants alive.

This kind of war was alien to the Indigenous peoples. According to their ways of war, when relations between groups broke down and conflict came, warfare was highly ritualized, with quests for individual glory, resulting in few deaths. Colonial wars inevitably drew other Indigenous communities in on one side or the other. During the Pequot War, neighboring Narragansett villages allied with the Puritans in hopes of reaping a large harvest of captives, booty, and glory. But after the carnage was done, the Narragansetts left the Puritan side in disgust, saying that the English were “too furious” and “slay[ed] too many men.” After having made the Pequots the enemy, the settlers set out to complete the destruction. Fewer than two hundred half-starved Pequots remained of the two thousand at the beginning of the war. Although they had ceased fighting and were without any means of defense, the settlers started a new attack on the Pequots. The colony commissioned the mercenary Mason and his murderous crew of forty men to burn the few remaining homes and fields. Puritan William Bradford wrote at the time in his History of Plymouth Plantation:

Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.

The other Indigenous nations of the region assessed what was in store for them and accepted tributary status under the colonial authority.

During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New England began the routine practice of scalp hunting and what Grenier identifies as “ranging”—the use of settler-ranger forces. By that time, the non-Indigenous population of the English colony in North America had increased sixfold, to more than 150,000, which meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous homelands. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called King Philip’s War. Wampanoag people and their Indigenous allies attacked the settlers’ isolated farms, using a method of guerrilla warfare that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating. The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as “skulking,” and responded by destroying Indigenous villages—again extirpation. But Indigenous guerrilla attacks continued, and so the commander of the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Indigenous tactics in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption. He petitioned the colony’s governor for permission to choose sixty to seventy settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed “wilderness warfare.” In July 1676, the first settler-organized ranger force was the result. The rangers—60 settlers and 140 colonized Indigenous men—were to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or subdue” the enemy, in Church’s words. The inclusion of Indigenous fighters on the colonists’ side has marked settler colonialism and foreign occupations ever since. The settler-rangers could learn from their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades, Church perfected his evolving method of annihilation.

"Redskins"

Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations. During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.

Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.” Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization—destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging, and scalp hunting—became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.

Colonial Expansion

Having cleared the Indigenous populations from much of the coastal region from New England to the Carolinas, another wave of settlers employed the same kind of warfare in establishing the colony of Georgia beginning in 1732. Technically, it was the part of Spanish-occupied Florida called Guale. From the time the first settlers squatted on Indigenous land in Georgia, rangers were in the forefront of ethnic cleansing, clearing the region for British settlement. Brigadier General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the Georgia colony, tried but failed to turn his own small regular army into rangers, so he commissioned Hugh Mackay Jr. to organize the regulars into a Highland ranger force. A settler agent for the Georgia colony, Mackay was a former British army officer and a Scots Highlander. The Highlanders were reputed to be tough, fearless fighters—in other words, brutal killers. It was unusual at the time to put a local militia officer in command of army regulars.

The Indigenous population of Georgia consisted primarily of the Cherokee Nation. The colonizers realized it would be impossible to persuade the Cherokees to accept or defend Georgia settlers if war broke out between Britain and Spain over British encroachment into Spanish Guale. Traders from Carolina had already brought smallpox and rum to the Cherokees, which had killed many in their villages and made them suspicious of all English people. Oglethorpe himself visited Cherokee towns but was rebuffed. Meanwhile Spanish agents were also trying to win over the Cherokees to fight on their side against the British. In the fall of 1739, on the verge of war, Oglethorpe won commitment from some Cherokee villages in exchange for corn, but he was aware that, like other Indigenous nations, the Cherokees would likely play one colonial power against the other for their own interests and could change sides at any moment. In December, English invasion farther into Spanish territory began. Anglo and Scots rangers and their Indigenous allies destroyed Spanish plantations and intimidated the Maroon communities in northern Florida composed of local Indigenous families and escaped African slaves from the British colonies. The rangers sacked and looted, burned and pillaged, while hunting scalps of Spanish-allied Indigenous people and runaway slaves. Lasting nearly a month, the operations ravaged Florida, in part because the Spanish put up little fight. During the 1740s, the British War Office and Parliament commissioned two companies of colonial rangers and authorized more than a hundred men for full-time duty in the Highland Rangers in Georgia. Ranging, looting, and scalp hunting continued.

War That Turns the Tide

The decade leading up to the outbreak of the French and Indian War (1754–63), known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War, saw conflict on the British-French frontiers in New England, New York, and Nova Scotia, all of which were well populated with Indigenous villages of various nations as well as French settlers called Acadians. A clash of interests among British settlers, Indigenous communities, and Acadians in the region of the present-day Canadian Maritime Provinces led to a four-year conflict that the British called King George’s War. Although Britain had gained nominal possession of Nova Scotia, it could not control the population of Acadians and the mixed communities of intermarried Acadians and Mi’kmaq and Malisset people. The Acadian-Indigenous villages insisted on neutrality in the British and French disputes, and the powerful Haudenosaunee confederacy supported them in that stance. But British imperialists wanted the land, and they permitted Anglo-American settlers to play a prominent role in the fighting, which included ranging and scalp hunting. By the end of the war, settler-rangers dominated the British military presence in Nova Scotia, setting off sustained Acadian-Indigenous resistance against British rule.

At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, while the British regular army and navy focused on French imperial positions in the Maritimes, the settler militia forces continued ranging against the Acadian-Indigenous villages, which led to an expulsion of the Acadians, sometimes known today as the Great Upheaval. In a period of weeks, British army forces and colonial militias forced four thousand noncombatants out of Nova Scotia, and at least half that number died in the Acadian diaspora. Some eight thousand escaped deportation by fleeing into the woods. The Acadians thus became the largest population of European settlers in North American history to be forcibly dispersed. This feat was accomplished with slaughter, intimidation, and plunder. By this time, there was no hesitation on the part of Anglo settlers to consider unarmed civilians of all ages as appropriate targets of violence.

Major General Jeffery Amherst—after whom Amherst, Massachusetts is named—commanded the British army in the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War. In 1759, Amherst appointed Major Robert Rogers, the seasoned leader of New England’s Rogers’s Rangers and perhaps the most famous and admired ranger in frontier lore, to lead a force of settler-rangers, British volunteers, and allied Stockbridge Indigenous scouts—all to be handpicked by Rogers. Amherst ordered them to attack a resistant Abenaki village in the St. Lawrence River Valley. Although Amherst ordered Rogers not to allow torture or killing of women or children, the commander would have known about these rangers’ reputation of sparing no one in their blood-drenched raids on Indigenous villages. In commissioning Rogers, Amherst effectively sanctioned settler-ranger counterinsurgent warfare. In general, the British military not only tolerated but made use of the settlers’ dirty war, in the Cherokee war, the subsequent French and Indian War, and in the effort to crush Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763, in which Amherst is best known for his support of using germ warfare against Indigenous people. “Could it not be contrived,” Amherst wrote to a subordinate officer, “to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” The colonel promised to do his best. Amherst then gave orders “to bring them [Pontiac’s forces and allies] to a proper Subjection” until “there was not an Indian Settlement within a thousand Miles of our Country.”

In the southern part of the French and Indian War, the British in 1760 found their war-making capacity overwhelmed by the Cherokee Nation. So here too they turned to rangers. In the spring, when the Cherokee Nation challenged British authority, Amherst rushed regular regiments to Charleston under the command of Colonel Archibald Montgomery with orders to punish the Cherokees as quickly as possible so the soldiers could return north and join in the imminent attack on Montreal. In previous wars against Indigenous nations, British commanders had assigned ranger groups specific missions, but in the Cherokee war, the British military forces, including regulars, would target noncombatants. A few months earlier, the North Carolina governor had conjured the strategy that would be used:

In Case a War must be proclaimed, the three Southern Provinces of Virginia and the Carolinas should exert their whole force, enter into and destroy all the [Cherokee] Towns of those at War with us, and make as many of them as we should take their Wives and Children Slaves, by sending them to the Islands [West Indies] if above 10 years old … and to allow 10 lbs sterling for every prisoner taken and delivered in each Province.

This was the plan adopted. Commander Montgomery was well aware that even with irregular warfare the military could not defeat the Cherokees in their own country and that he would need settlers and Indigenous allies serving as scouts and guides. He added to his troop strength three hundred settler-rangers, forty local militia members, and fifty Catawba allies. The Cherokee Nation had not succeeded in forming a confederation with the Muskogees or Chickasaws, so their villages were vulnerable. The first target was the autonomous Cherokee town of Estatoe, comprising some two hundred homes and two thousand people. Montgomery’s forces set all the homes and buildings afire, picking off individuals who tried to flee, while others who hid inside were burned alive. One after another, towns were set ablaze until the Cherokees organized a resistance strong enough to drive out the attackers. The British claimed to have crushed Cherokee resistance, but they had not, and the Cherokees laid siege to British forts. A year later, British forces struck again, this time even harder, and overwhelmed the Cherokees in their capital of Etchoe and destroyed it. The British then moved on to the other Cherokee towns, burning them too. During the month-long, one-sided battle of annihilation, the British razed fifteen towns and burned fourteen hundred acres of corn. Five thousand Cherokees were made homeless refugees, and the number of deaths remained uncounted.

Another weapon of war was alcohol, accelerating in the eighteenth century. In 1754, a Catawba leader known as King Hagler by English colonists petitioned the North Carolina authorities:

Brothers, here is one thing you yourselves are to blame very much in; that is you rot your grain in tubs, out of which you take and make strong spirits.

You sell it to our young men and give it [to] them, many times; they get very drunk with it [and] this is the very cause that they oftentimes commit those crimes that is offensive to you and us and all through the effect of that drink. It is also very bad for our people, for it rots their guts and causes our men to get very sick and many of our people has lately died by the effects of that strong drink, and I heartily wish you would do something to prevent your people from daring to sell or give them any of that strong drink, upon any consideration whatever, for that will be a great means of our being free from being accused of those crimes that is committed by our young men and will prevent many of the abuses that is done by them through the effect of that strong drink.

King Hagler continued to petition for years for an embargo on liquor without succeeding.

Britain’s victory at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 led to English domination of world trade, sea power, and colonial holdings for a century and a half. In the Treaty of Paris (1763) France ceded Canada and all claims east of the Mississippi to Britain. In the course of the war, Anglo settlers had gained strength in numbers and security in relation to Indigenous peoples just outside the British-occupied colonies. Even there, significant numbers of settlers had squatted on Indigenous lands beyond the colonies’ putative boundaries, reaching into the Ohio Valley region. To the settlers’ dismay, soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, King George III issued a proclamation that prohibited British settlement west of the Allegheny-Appalachian mountain barrier, ordering those who had settled there to relinquish their claims and move back east of the line. However, British authorities did not commit enough troops to the frontier to enforce the edict effectively. As a result, thousands more settlers poured over the mountains and squatted on Indigenous lands.

By the early 1770s, terror against Indigenous people on the part of Anglo settlers increased in all the colonies, and speculation in western lands was rampant. In the southern colonies especially, farmers who had lost their land in competition with larger, more efficient, slave-worked plantations rushed for western land. These settler-farmers thus set, as Grenier writes, “a prefigurative pattern of U.S. annexation and colonization of Indigenous nations across the continent for the following century: a vanguard of farmer-settlers led by seasoned ‘Indian fighters,’ calling on authorities/militias of the British colonies, first, and the U.S. government/army later, to defend their settlements, forming the core dynamic of U.S. ‘democracy.’”

The French and Indian War would later be seen as the trigger for independence of the settler population, in which the distinctly “American” nation was born. This mythology was expressed in the 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, in which the author—land speculator James Fenimore Cooper—created a usable settler-colonial history. Blockbuster Hollywood adaptations of the book in 1932 and 1992 reinforced the mythology. But the 1940 film, based on the best-selling novel Northwest Passage, which is considered a classic and remains popular due to repeated television showings, goes even further in portraying the bloodthirsty mercenaries, Rogers’s Rangers, as heroes for their annihilation of a village of Abenakis.

The Ohio Country

The settlers’ war for independence from Britain paralleled a decade of “Indian wars” (1774–83), all with settler-rangers using extreme violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goals of total subjugation or expulsion. The British governor of Virginia, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, sided with British settlers who wanted land in the Ohio Country (in part because he was himself a land speculator). In his view, no royal policy could prevent settlers’ seizure of Indigenous land. In early 1774, the Shawnee Nation in the Ohio Valley region responded to settler encroachment on its farmlands and hunting grounds by raiding illicit settlements and chasing out land surveyors. The settlers seem to have been waiting for just such an excuse to retaliate viciously. Dunmore commissioned 150 Virginia settler-rangers to destroy Shawnee towns, and he mobilized the Virginia militia to invade the Ohio Valley and to “proceed directly to their Towns, and if possible destroy their Towns and magazines and distress them in every other way that is possible.”

During “Lord Dunmore’s War,” Shawnees and other Indigenous peoples in what the Anglo separatists would soon call the Northwest Territory realized that they were in a life-or-death struggle with these murdering bands of settlers who were led by a wealthy land speculator, intent on destroying their nation and wiping them from the face of the earth. This realization led to another recurrent factor in the onslaught of European colonial ventures: the appearance of an accommodationist faction within the Shawnee Nation that accepted a humiliating peace agreement. Dunmore demanded all the Shawnee hunting grounds in what would later become, following US independence, the state of Kentucky. Although Virginia did not get all the land Dunmore demanded, Dunmore’s War was only the beginning of a three-decade war against the Shawnee Nation and its allies. That alliance was led militarily in its resistance by the great Tecumseh, born in 1768, who had grown up in the midst of unrelenting warfare against his people, along with his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as the Prophet and the movement’s spiritual leader.

Dunmore’s War pushed the Shawnees into an alliance with the British against the separatists in 1777. Indigenous warriors struck scattered squatter settlements throughout the Upper Ohio Valley region, driving hundreds of settlers from Shawnee territory. But the tide of war between the British and the separatists turned, allowing the Continental Congress to focus on the Ohio Country and organize an offensive to annihilate the Shawnee Nation. Five hundred separatist fighters, composed of both militiamen and regulars, waged a genocidal war. Rampaging against combatants and noncombatants alike, the ranger force fell on the staunchly neutral towns of the Delaware Nation, torturing and killing women and children. In one particularly twisted incident, the settler troops slaughtered a Delaware boy who had been bird hunting alone. A near-riot ensued among the troops over who had the right to claim the “honor” of the kill. The Continental Congress sent a thousand more fighters with orders to “proceed, without delay, to destroy such towns of hostile tribes of Indians as he [Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh] in his discretion shall think will most effectually chastise and terrify the savages, and check their ravages on the frontiers.” The Shawnees moved out of the way of the raiders to avoid the attacks, but the killing went on unabated.

The settlers’ escalation of extreme violence in the Ohio Country led to perhaps the most outrageous war crime, which showed that Indigenous conversion to Christianity and pacifism was no protection from genocide. Moravian missionizing among the ravaged Delaware communities in Pennsylvania had produced three Moravian Indian villages in the decades before the war for independence had begun. Residents of one of the settlements, named Gnadenhütten, in eastern Ohio, were displaced by British troops during fighting in the area, but were able to return to harvest their corn. Soon afterward, in March 1782, a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the command of David Williamson appeared and rounded up the Delawares, telling them they had to evacuate for their own safety. There were forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children in the group of Delawares. The militiamen searched their belongings to confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon, then announced that they were all to be killed, accusing them of having given refuge to Delawares who had killed white people. They were also accused of stealing the household items and tools they possessed, because such items should only belong to white people. Condemned to death, the Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, Williamson’s men marched over ninety people in pairs into two houses and methodically slaughtered them. One killer bragged that he personally had bludgeoned fourteen victims with a cooper’s mallet, which he had then handed to an accomplice. “My arm fails me,” he was said to have announced. “Go on with the work.” This action set a new bar for violence, and atrocities that followed routinely surpassed even that atrocity.

A year earlier, the Delaware leader Buckongeahelas had addressed a group of Christianized Delawares, saying that he had known some good white men, but that the good ones were a small number:

They do what they please. They enslave those who are not of their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who created us. They would make slaves of us if they could, but as they cannot do it, they kill us. There is no faith to be placed in their words. They are not like the Indians, who are only enemies while at war, and are friends in peace. They will say to an Indian: “My friend, my brother.” They will take him by the hand, and at the same moment destroy him. And so you will also be treated by them before long. Remember that this day I have warned you to beware of such friends as these. I know the long knives; they are not to be trusted.

How the Settlers Won Independence

Both the British and their settler separatist opponents realized that the key to victory on the southern frontier of the thirteen colonies was an alliance with the Cherokee Nation. Despite constant attacks on its villages and crops, and with refugees and disease, the enormous Cherokee Nation remained intact with a well-functioning government. To win the Cherokees to their side, British authorities provided weaponry and money to Cherokee towns while separatist representatives tried to persuade the towns to remain neutral by threatening their complete destruction. Neutrality was the most the settlers could hope for. The settlers’ viciousness toward Indigenous people caused them to be despised and spurred some Cherokees to take sides against them. A few Cherokee towns that had been hit hardest by settler-rangers responded by attacking squatter settlements, destroying several in the Carolinas in 1776. Following such attacks, separatists quickly announced their determination to destroy the Cherokee Nation. The North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress declared, “The gross infernal breach of faith which they [the Cherokees] have been guilty of shuts them out from every pretension to mercy, and it is surely the policy of the Southern Colonies to carry fire and Sword into the very bowels of their country and sink them so low that they may never be able again to rise and disturb the peace of their Neighbors.”

In the summer and fall of 1776, more than five thousand settler-rangers from Virginia, Georgia, and North and South Carolina stormed through Cherokee territory. William Henry Drayton, a leader of the Anglo separatists from Charleston, had met with the Cherokees in 1775. After the Cherokee attack that prompted the separatists’ 1776 scorched-earth campaign, he recommended that “the nation be extirpated, and the lands become the property of the public. For my part, I shall never give my voice for a peace with the Cherokee Nation upon any other terms than their removal beyond the mountains.” As Cherokees fled, abandoning their towns and fields, the soldiers seized, killed, and scalped women and children, taking no prisoners.

In mid-1780, eighty Virginia separatist settler-rangers attacked the Shawnees in southern Ohio and spent a month destroying and looting their towns and fields. At the same time, the Cherokee Nation regained momentum in its resistance, raiding squatters’ settlements within its territory. In retaliation, North Carolina sent five hundred mounted rangers to burn Cherokee towns, with orders to “chastise that nation and reduce them to obedience.” During the winter of 1780–81, the separatist seven-hundred-man Virginia militia wreaked destruction again in the Cherokee Nation. On Christmas Day, the militia commander wrote to Thomas Jefferson, then a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, that a detachment had “surprised a party of Indians, [and taken] one scalp, and Seventeen Horses loaded with clothing and skins and House furnishings”—a clear sign that these were noncombatant refugees trying to flee. The commander also reported that his forces had thus far destroyed the principal Cherokee towns of Chote, Scittigo, Chilhowee Togue, Micliqua, Kai-a-tee, Sattoogo, Telico, Hiwassee, and Chistowee, along with several smaller villages.

All told, more than a thousand homes had been laid waste, and some fifty thousand bushels of corn and other provisions either burned or looted. At this point, the Virginia and North Carolina separatist authorities pooled their manpower and matériel and organized a force that effected a broad sweep of annihilation through the Cherokee towns, driving residents out into present-day middle Tennessee and northern Alabama, where they exterminated Indigenous families and burned down the towns in that area too.

Throughout the war between separatist settlers and the forces of the monarchy, armed settlers waged total war against Indigenous people, largely realizing their objectives. The Cherokees were forced to accept tributary status, yet the attacks continued. It would take nearly a half century after US independence was won to forcibly remove the Cherokee Nation from the South, but the effort was unrelenting. For the settlers squatting on Indigenous lands across the 1763 Proclamation Line of King George III, the wars waged by settlers during the war of independence were a continuation of those their ancestors and other predecessors had waged since the early seventeenth century. Some historians portray the British as the organizers of Indigenous resistance during this period. The separatist colonial oligarchy that drew up the Declaration of Independence in 1776 certainly took that view. Yet, as Grenier points out, the Indigenous people were well aware that negotiating with a faraway empire would yield much better outcomes than would dealing with the government of extermination-minded settlers.

The Haudenosaunee

On the western edge of the colony of New York, as in the southern colonies, settlers were invading and squatting on the territory of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) by the mid-1770s. As with the Cherokee Nation, the British and the separatists knew that the Haudenosaunee would be an important factor in their war, and, as with the Cherokee Nation, both parties sent representatives to the Haudenosaunee councils to appeal for their support. Each member nation of the confederacy had its own specific interests because each had had different experiences in the previous century and a half of British and French intrusion. Much of the French and Indian War had been fought in their territories, with Indigenous people doing most of the actual fighting on both sides. In 1775, the Mohawk Nation allied with the British against the separatist settlers. The Seneca Nation had early on considered the British to be an intractable enemy but with the separatist war looming was more afraid of the settlers, and so the Senecas followed the Mohawks’ lead into a British alliance. The Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga Nations did not choose sides. Only the Christianized Oneidas conceded support for the separatist settlers.

In response to the decisions by five of the Iroquois Nations, General George Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee, “to lay waste all the settlements around … that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed… . [Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected… . Our future security will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”

By 1779, the Continental Congress had decided to start with the Senecas. Three armies were mustered to scorch the earth across New York and converge at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their separatist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees. The separatist governments of the New York and Pennsylvania colonies offered rangers for the project, and, as an incentive for enlistment, the Pennsylvania assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps, without regard to sex or age. This combination of Continental Army regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged most of Seneca territory.

With the Iroquois Confederacy disunited regarding the war, the Continental Army forces were practically unimpeded in their triumphal and deadly march. In another scenario typically resulting from European and Anglo-American colonialism and neocolonialism, civil war erupted within the Iroquois Confederacy itself, with Mohawks destroying Oneida villages. The Oneidas could no longer give their separatist allies intelligence. “By 1781,” Grenier observes, “after three seasons of the Indian war, New York’s frontier had become a no-man’s-land.”

The Birth of a Nation

Our nation was born in genocide.… We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

The British withdrew from the fight to maintain their thirteen colonies in 1783, in order to redirect their resources to the conquest of South Asia. The British East India Company had been operating in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain’s colonization of the North American Atlantic Coast. Britain’s transfer to the United States of its claim to the Ohio Country spelled a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Britain’s withdrawal in 1783 did not end military actions against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained violent colonization of the continent. In negotiations to end the war, Britain did not insist on consideration for the Indigenous nations that resisted the settlers’ war of secession. In the resulting 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Crown transferred to the United States ownership of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and north of Spanish-occupied Florida. Muskogee Creek leader Alexander McGillivray expressed the general Indigenous view: “To find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies and divided between the Spaniards and Americans is cruel and ungenerous.”

The New Order

Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly deadly firepower. Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.

With the consolidation of the new state, the United States of America, by 1790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negotiate alliances with competing European empires against the despised settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nevertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the independent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival and created a legacy—a culture of resistance—that has persisted. By the time of the birth of the US republic, Indigenous peoples in what is now the continental United States had been resisting European colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspirations of the colonizers: total elimination of Native nations or survival. Precolonial Indigenous societies were dynamic social systems with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require cultural abandonment. On the contrary, the cultures used already existing strengths, such as diplomacy and mobility, to develop new mechanisms required to live in nearly constant crisis. There is always a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, including absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices, using the colonizer’s language, and intermarrying with settlers and, more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped African slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through individual assimilation.

A new element was added in the independent Anglo-American legal regime: treaty making. The US Constitution specifically refers to Indigenous nations only once, but significantly, in Article 1, Section 8: “[Congress shall have Power] to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” In the federal system in which all powers not specifically reserved for the federal government go to the states, relations with Indigenous nations are unequivocally a federal matter.

Although not mentioned as such, Native peoples are implied in the Second Amendment. Male settlers had been required in the colonies to serve in militias during their lifetimes for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities, the southern colonies included, and later states’ militias were used as “slave patrols.” The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these irregular forces into law: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The continuing significance of that “freedom” specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right.

US genocidal wars against Indigenous nations continued unabated in the 1790s and were woven into the very fabric of the new nation-state. The fears, aspirations, and greed of Anglo-American settlers on the borders of Indigenous territories perpetuated this warfare and influenced the formation of the US Army, much as the demands and actions of backcountry settlers had shaped the colonial militias in North America. Owners of large, slave-worked plantations sought to expand their landholdings while small farm owners who were unable to compete with the planters and were pushed off their land now desperately sought cheap land to support their families. The interests of both settler groups were in tension with those of state and military authorities who sought to build a new professional military based on Washington’s army. Just as the US government and its army were taking form, a number of settlements on the peripheries of Indigenous nations threatened to secede, prompting the army to make rapid expansion into Indigenous territories a top priority. Brutal counterinsurgency warfare would be the key to the army’s destruction of the Indigenous peoples’ civilization in the Ohio Country and the rest of what was then called the Northwest over the first quarter-century of US independence.

Total War in Ohio Sets the Stage

The first Washington administration was consumed by the crisis engendered by its inability to quickly conquer and colonize the Ohio Country over which it claimed sovereignty. During the Confederation period, before the US Constitution was written and ratified, the Indigenous nations in that region had access to a constant supply of British arms and had formed effective political and military alliances, the first of them forged by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant during the 1780s. Washington’s administration determined that only war, not diplomacy, would break up the Indigenous alliances. Secretary of War Henry Knox told the army commander of Fort Washington (where Cincinnati is today) that “to extend a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti.” These orders could not be implemented with a conventional army engaged in regular warfare. Although federal officers commanded the army, the fighters were nearly all drawn from militias made up primarily of squatter settlers from Kentucky. They were unaccustomed to army discipline but fearless and willing to kill to get a piece of land to grab or some scalps for bounty.

The army found the Miami villages they planned to attack already deserted, so they set up a base in one of the villages and waited for a Miami assault. But the assault was not forthcoming. When the commander sent out small units to find the Miamis, these search-and-destroy missions were ambushed and sent fleeing by allied Miamis and Shawnees under the leadership of Little Turtle (Meshekinnoqquah) and Blue Jacket (Weyapiersenwah). The deserted towns had been bait to lure the invaders into ambushes. The commander reported to the War Department that his forces had burned three hundred buildings and destroyed twenty thousand bushels of corn. Those were likely facts, but his claim to have broken up the Indigenous political and military organization was not accurate. Knox apparently knew that more than food and property destruction would be needed to quell resistance. He ordered the commanders to recruit five hundred weathered Kentucky mounted rangers to burn and loot Miami towns and fields along the Wabash River. They were to capture women and children as hostages to use as terms of surrender.

In carrying out these orders, the marauding rangers demonstrated what they could accomplish with unmitigated violence and a total lack of scruples and respect for noncombatants. They destroyed the Miamis’ two largest towns and took forty-one women and children captive, then sent warnings to the other towns that the same would be their lot unless they surrendered unconditionally: “Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.” Yet the Indians of the Ohio Country continued to fight, well aware of the likely consequences. The Seneca leader Cornplanter called the colonizers the “town destroyers.” He described how, during the destruction and suffering that troops wreaked on the western Iroquois, Seneca “women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.”

Despite the primary use of settler militias, President Washington insisted that the new government had to develop a professional army that would enhance US prestige in the eyes of European countries. He also thought that the cost of using mercenaries, at four times that of regular troops, was too high. But whenever regular troops were sent into the Ohio Country, the Indigenous resisters drove them out. Reluctantly, Washington resigned himself to the necessity of using what were essentially vicious killers to terrorize the region, thereby annexing land that could be sold to settlers. The sale of confiscated land was the primary revenue source for the new government.

In late 1791, the War Department notified Ohio squatters to call out their rangers for an offensive. Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne was charged with restructuring the units of the army under his command to function as irregular forces. Washington and other officials were aware that Wayne was unreliable and an alcoholic, but it appeared that such characteristics might be useful for the dirty war ahead. Between 1792 and 1794, Wayne put together a combined force of regulars with a large contingent of experienced rangers. He enthusiastically embraced such counterinsurgent tactics as destroying food supplies and murdering civilians.

Among the fifteen hundred mounted rangers in the first mission was the talented William Wells with his group of rangers. When he was thirteen, Wells had been captured by the Miamis and then had lived with them for nine years, marrying Little Turtle’s daughter. Under his father-in-law’s command, Wells had fought the invading settlers and the US Army. In 1792, Wells was chosen to represent the Miami Nation in a negotiation with the United States, but on arrival for talks he encountered a brother from the family he had been separated from for a decade. He was persuaded to return to Kentucky and served as a ranger for the US Army.

Wayne’s troops and rangers managed to enter the Ohio Country and establish a base they called Fort Defiance (in northwestern Ohio), in what had been the heart of the Indigenous alliance led by Little Turtle. Wayne then made an ultimatum to the Shawnees: “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of your blood.” The Shawnee leader Blue Jacket refused submission, and the US forces began destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men. On August 20, 1794, at Fallen Timbers, the main Shawnee fighting force was overpowered. Even after this US victory, the rangers continued for three days laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields. After creating a fifty-mile swath of devastation, the invading forces returned to Fort Defiance. The defeat at Fallen Timbers was a severe blow to the Indigenous nations of the Ohio Country, but they would reorganize their resistance during the following decade.

The US conquest of southern Ohio was formalized in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, a victory based on vicious irregular warfare. The nations of the region no longer had the British and the French and the settlers to play against one another, but rather were now faced with the determined imperialist thrust of an independent republic that had to coddle settlers if they were to recruit any into their service.

Tecumseh

Over the following decade, more settlers poured over the Appalachians, squatting on Indigenous lands, and even building towns, anticipating that the US military, land speculators, and civilian institutions would follow.

In the Ohio Country, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa began building a concerted Indigenous resistance in the early nineteenth century. From their organizing center, Prophet’s Town, founded in 1807, Tenskwatawa and his fellow organizers traveled throughout Shawnee towns calling for a return to their cultural roots, which had been eroded by the assimilation of Anglo-American practices and trade goods, especially alcohol. Abuse of alcohol (and drugs) is epidemic like diseases in communities subjected to colonization or other forms of domination, particularly in crowded and miserable refugee situations. This is the case in all parts of the world, not only among Native peoples of North America. Alcohol was an item in the tool kit of colonialists who made it readily and cheaply available. Christian missionaries often took advantage of these dysfunctional conditions to convert, offering not only food and housing but also discipline to avoid alcohol. But this was itself a form of colonial submission.

Significantly, Tecumseh did not limit his vision to the Ohio Country but also envisaged organizing all the peoples west to the Mississippi, north into the Great Lakes region, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. He visited other Indigenous nations, calling for unity in defiance of the squatters’ presence on their lands. He presented a program that would end all sales of Indigenous land to settlers. Only then would settlers’ migrations in search of cheap land cease and the establishment of the United States in the West be prevented. An alliance of all Indigenous nations could then manage Indigenous lands as a federation. His program, strategy, and philosophy mark the beginning of pan-Indigenous movements in Anglo-colonized North America that established a model for future resistance. Joseph Brant and Pontiac had originated the strategy in the 1780s, but Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged a pan-Indigenous framework made all the more potent by combining Indigenous spirituality and politics while respecting the particular religions and languages of each nation.

The evolving Indigenous alliance posed a serious barrier to continued Anglo-American squatting and land speculation and acquisitions in the trans-Appalachian region. With previous Indigenous resistance movements, such as those led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, during peace negotiations in the wake of ruinous US wars of annihilation, leaders of factions had become “agency chiefs” who agreed to land sales without the consent of those they purported to represent. The colonized communities had fallen into economic dependency on trade goods and federal annuities, incurring debts that led to the forfeiture of what land remained in their hands. The emerging younger generation was contemptuous of such chiefs, whom they perceived as selling out their people. Anglo-American settlers and speculators exerted increased pressure and issued new threats of annihilation, provoking anger and calls for retaliation but also a renewed spirit of resistance.

By 1810, new Indigenous alliances challenged squatter settlers in the Indiana and Illinois Territories at a time when war between the United States and Great Britain was looming. Fearing that the British would unite with the Indigenous alliances to prevent the US imperialist goal to dominate the continent, these settlers drafted a petition to President James Madison, demanding that the government act preemptively: “The safety of the persons and property of this frontier can never be effectually secured, but by the breaking up of the combination formed by the Shawnee Prophet on the Wabash.”

In 1809, Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, badgered and bribed a few destitute Delaware, Miami, and Potawatomi individuals to sign the Treaty of Fort Wayne, according to which these nations would hand over their land in what is now southern Indiana for an annual annuity. Tecumseh promptly condemned the treaty and those who signed it without the approval of the peoples they represented. Harrison met with Tecumseh at Vincennes in 1810, along with other delegates of the allied Shawnee, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Peoria, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Winnebago Nations. The Shawnee leader informed Harrison that he was leaving for the South to bring the Muskogees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws into the alliance.

Harrison, now convinced that Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, was the source of the renewed Indigenous militancy, reasoned that destroying Prophet’s Town would crush the resistance. It would present a clear choice to the many Indigenous people who supported the militant leaders: cede more land to the United States and take the money and trade goods, or suffer further annihilation. He decided to strike in Tecumseh’s absence. Having served as General Wayne’s aide-de-camp in the Fallen Timbers attacks, Harrison knew how to keep his regular army forces from being ambushed. He assembled Indiana and Kentucky rangers—seasoned Indian killers—and some US Army regulars. At the site of what is today Terre Haute, Indiana, the soldiers constructed Fort Harrison on Shawnee land—a symbol of their intention to remain permanently. The people in Prophet’s Town were aware of the military advance, but Tecumseh had warned them not to be drawn into a fight, because the alliance was not yet ready for war. Tenskwatawa sent scouts to observe the enemy’s movements. The US forces arrived on the edge of Prophet’s Town at dawn on November 6, 1811. Seeing no alternative to overriding his brother’s instructions, Tenskwatawa led an assault before dawn the following morning. Only after some two hundred of the Indigenous residents had fallen did the troops overpower them, burning the town, destroying the granary, and looting, even digging up graves and mutilating the corpses. This was the famous “battle” of Tippecanoe that made Harrison a frontier hero to the settlers and later helped elect him president.

The US Army’s destruction of the capital of the alliance outraged Indigenous peoples all over the Old Northwest, prompting fighters of the Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Potawatamis, and even Creeks from the South to converge on a British garrison at Fort Malden in Canada to obtain supplies with which to fight. Contrary to the false US assumption that Tecumseh was a mere tool of the British, he had been unwilling to enter into a British alliance because Europeans had proved so unreliable in the past. But now he spoke for unified and coordinated Indigenous-led war on the United States that the British could support if they wished but not control. President Madison, speaking to Congress in seeking a declaration of war against Great Britain, argued: “In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United States our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers—a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity.”

During the summer of 1812, the Indigenous alliance struck US installations and squatter settlements with little help from the British. The US forts at present-day Detroit and Dearborn fell. Among the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn, Kentucky ranger William Wells was killed and his body mutilated as that of a despised turncoat. In the fall, Indigenous forces attacked Anglo-American squatter settlements all over Illinois and Indiana Territories. The US rangers attempting to track and kill the Indigenous fighters found destroyed and abandoned Anglo-American settlements, with thousands of settlers driven from their homes. In response, Harrison turned the militias loose on Indigenous fields and villages with no restrictions on their behavior. The head of the Kentucky militia mustered two thousand armed and mounted volunteers to destroy Indigenous towns near today’s Peoria, Illinois, but without success. A reversal came in the fall of 1813, when Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the Thames and the Indigenous army was destroyed. Throughout the eighteen-month war, militias and rangers attacked Indigenous civilians and agricultural resources, leaving behind starving refugees.

Assault on the Cherokee Nation

In the unconquered Indigenous region of the Old Southwest, parallel resistance took place during the two decades following US independence, with similar tragic results, thanks to extirpative settler warfare. Tennessee (formerly claimed, but not settled, by the British colony of North Carolina) was carved out of the larger Cherokee Nation and became a state in 1796. Its eastern part, particularly the area around today’s Knoxville, was a war zone. The mostly Scots-Irish squatters, attempting to secure and expand their settlements, were at war with the resistant Cherokees called “Chickamaugas.” The settlers hated both the Indigenous people whom they were attempting to displace as well as the newly formed federal government. In 1784, a group of North Carolina settlers, led by settler-ranger John Sevier, had seceded from western Carolina and established the independent country of Franklin with Sevier as president. Neither North Carolina nor the federal government had exerted any control over the settlements in the eastern Tennessee Valley region. In the summer of 1788, Sevier ordered an unprovoked, preemptive attack on the Chickamauga towns, killing thirty villagers and forcing the survivors to flee south. Sevier’s actions formed a template for settler-federal relations, with the settlers implementing the federal government’s final solution, while the federal government feigned an appearance of limiting settler invasions of Indigenous lands.

Facing the fierce resistance of Indigenous nations in the Ohio Country and the fighting between the Muskogee Nation and the state of Georgia, Washington’s administration sought to contain Indigenous resistance in the South. Yet now the settlers were provoking the Cherokees in what would soon be the state of Tennessee. Secretary of War Knox claimed to believe that the thickness of settlers’ development, converting Indigenous hunting grounds into farms, would slowly overwhelm the Indigenous nations and drive them out. He advised the squatters’ leaders to continue building, which would attract more illegal settlers. This disingenuous view ignored the fact that the Indigenous farmers were well aware of the intentions of the settlers to destroy them and seize their territories.

In the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell between the federal government and the Cherokee Nation, the United States had agreed to restrict settlement to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The several thousand squatter families who claimed nearly a million acres of land in precisely that zone were not about to abide by the treaty. Knox saw the situation as a showdown with the settlers and a test of federal authority west of the mountain chains, from Canada to Spanish Florida. The settlers did not believe that the federal government meant to protect their interests, which encouraged them to go it alone. In the face of constant attacks, the Cherokees were desperate to halt the destruction of their towns and fields. Many were starving, more without shelter, on the move as refugees, with only the Chickamauga fighters as a protective force fighting off the seasoned ranger-settler Indian killers. In July 1791, the Cherokees reluctantly signed the Treaty of Holston, agreeing to abandon any claims to land on which the Franklin settlements sat in return for an annual annuity of $100,000 from the federal government.

The United States did nothing to halt the flow of squatters into Cherokee territory as the boundary was drawn in the treaty. A year after the treaty was signed, war broke out, and the Chickamaugas, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe, attacked squatters, even laying siege to Nashville. The war continued for two years, with five hundred Chickamauga fighters joined by Muskogees and a contingent of Shawnees from Ohio, led by Cheeseekau, one of Tecumseh’s brothers, who was later killed in the fighting. The settlers organized an offensive against the Chickamaugas. The federal Indian agent attempted to persuade the Chickamaugas to stop fighting, warning that the frontier settlers were “always dreadful, not only to the warriors, but to the innocent and helpless women and children, and old men.” The agent also warned the settlers against attacking Indigenous towns, but he had to order the militia to disperse a mob of three hundred settlers, who, as he wrote, out of “a mistaken zeal to serve their country” had gathered to destroy “as many as they could of the Cherokee towns.” Sevier and his rangers invaded the Chickamaugas’ towns in September 1793, with a stated mission of total destruction. Although forbidden by the federal agent to attack the villages, Sevier gave orders for a scorched-earth offensive.

By choosing to attack at harvesttime, Sevier intended to starve out the residents. The strategy worked. Soon after, the federal agent reported to the secretary of war that the region was pacified, with no Indigenous actions since “the visit General Sevier paid the [Cherokee] nation.” A year later, Sevier demanded absolute submission from the Chickamauga villages lest they be wiped out completely. Receiving no response, a month later 1,750 Franklin rangers attacked two villages, burning all the buildings and fields—again near the harvest—and shooting those who tried to flee. Sevier then repeated his demand for submission, requiring the Chickamaugas to abandon their towns for the woods, taking only what they could transport. He wrote: “War will cost the United States much money, and some lives, but it will destroy the existence of your people, as a nation, forever.” The remaining Chickamauga villages agreed to allow the settlers to remain in Cherokee country.

In squatter settlements, ruthless leaders like Sevier were not the exception but the rule. Once they had full control and got what they wanted, they made their peace with the federal government, which in turn depended on their actions to expand the republic’s territory. Sevier went on to serve as a US representative from North Carolina and as governor of Tennessee. To this day, such men are idolized as great heroes, embodying the essence of the “American spirit.” A bronze statue of John Sevier in his ranger uniform stands today in the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol.

Muskogee Resistance

The Muskogee Nation officially had remained neutral in the war between the Anglo-American settlers and the British monarchy. Nonetheless, many individual Muskogees had taken the opportunity to raid and harass squatters within their national territories in Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. When the United States was formed, the Muskogee Nation turned to Spanish Florida for an alliance in trying to stop the flow of squatters into their territory. Spain had an interest in the alliance as a buffer to its holdings, which at the time included the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans. The squatters believed that the Muskogees and the Spanish officials, as well as the British, were in cahoots to keep them out of western Georgia and present-day Alabama and considered the Muskogee Nation to be the main barrier to their permanent settlement in the region, particularly Georgia. The Muskogees called the squatters ecunnaunuxulgee—“people greedily grasping after the lands of the red people.”

The federal government negotiated with the Muskogee Nation for a new boundary and for more settlements and trade, in exchange for $60,000 a year in goods. The squatters did everything they could to provoke the Muskogees to war, while ignoring the treaty’s provisions. They slaughtered hundreds of deer in the Muskogee deer parks, with the intention of wiping out the livelihood of Muskogee hunters, who also made up the resistance forces. But the War Department was complicit, using money due to the Muskogees under the treaty to divide them by bribing leaders (miccos) and thus isolating the insurgents from their communities. Eighty Muskogee fighters joined the Chickamaugas when they were still fighting, and together they attacked the Cumberland district of Tennessee in early 1792, while others struck Georgia squatters in Muskogee territory. It was then that Shawnee delegates, sent by Tecumseh, visited from the Ohio Country to encourage the Muskogees to drive the squatters from their lands, as the Shawnees had done successfully up to that time. Secretary of War Knox wrote to the federal agent in Georgia that he knew the Muskogee militants were “a Banditti, and do not implicate the whole nor any considerable part of that Nation. The hostilities of the Individuals arise from their own disposition, and are not probably dictated, either by the Chiefs, or by any Towns or other respectable classes of the Indians.”

By this time, in the process of the preceding British colonization and continuing with US colonization of the Muskogee Nation and other southeastern Indigenous nations, an Indigenous client class—called “compradors” by Africans, “caciques” in Spanish-colonized America—essential to colonialist projects, was firmly in place. This privileged class was dependent on their colonial masters for their personal wealth. This class division wracked the traditional relatively egalitarian and democratic Indigenous societies internally. This small elite in the Southeast embraced the enslavement of Africans, and a few even became affluent planters in the style of southern planters, mainly through intermarriage with Anglos. The trading posts established by US merchants further divided Muskogee society, pulling many deeply into the US economy through dependency and debt, and away from the Spanish and British trading firms, which had previously left their lands undisturbed. This method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of indigenous insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this manner. While most Muskogees continued to follow their traditional democratic ways in their villages, the elite Muskogees were making decisions and compromises on their behalf that would bear tragic consequences for them all.

Federal authorities in 1793 identified five hundred Muskogee towns where they believed the majority of insurgents resided. Secretary of War Knox called on the Georgia militia for federal service. The federal Indian agent notified the War Department that the settlers were set on assaulting the Muskogees and asked that a thousand federal troops be deployed to occupy the insurgent Muskogee towns. Although the War Department rejected that idea and war was postponed, the restless Georgian militiamen deserted after having rushed to the Muskogee territory to loot, burn, and kill, only to be forced to wait. Persistent squatter attacks on Muskogee farmers, traders, and towns continued.

During the winter of 1793–94, Georgia border squatters formed an armed group of landless settlers. The leader, Elijah Clarke, was a veteran Indian killer and had been a major general in the Georgia militia during the war of independence, in which he commanded rangers to destroy Indigenous towns and fields. As a US patriot hero, Clarke was certain that his former troops would never take up arms against him. Clarke and his rangers declared the independence of their own republic, but Georgia state authorities captured him and destroyed the rebel stronghold. Still, Clarke’s action sent a strong message to state and federal authorities that landless squatters were determined to take Indigenous lands. They would get the leader they needed for that purpose a decade later. Meanwhile, the elite of the Muskogee towns were successful in marginalizing the insurgents, while the federal government increased grants, and the wealthy class of Muskogees established trading posts, making whiskey cheaply available to impoverished Muskogees.

The Die Is Cast

The successful settler intrusion into western Georgia made Alabama and Mississippi the next objectives for the rapidly expanding slave-worked plantation economy, which, along with land sales of occupied Indigenous lands by private speculators, was essential to the US economy as a whole. The plantation economy required vast swaths of land for cash crops, even before cotton was king, leaving in its wake destroyed Indigenous national territories and Anglo settlers who would fight and die driving out the Indigenous communities yet remain landless themselves, moving on to the next frontier to try again. US colonization produced the subsequent hideous slavery-based rule of the Old Southwest, which would flourish for seven more decades. Unlike in the Ohio Country, the Washington administration avoided force and in doing so alienated settlers in the region. By preventing them from wiping out the Muskogees, the federal government was seen as the enemy, just as the British authority had been for an earlier generation of determined settlers. But that would soon change with the Muskogee War of 1813–14, narrated in the following chapter, in which, as Robert V. Remini puts it in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, “Tennessee frontiersman Andrew Jackson, commanding both regular Army troops and frontiersmen, personally guaranteed that the Creeks would feel the full brunt of total war.”

During 1810–15, then, two parallel wars were ongoing, one in the Ohio Country—the Old Northwest—which ended with the defeat of the Tecumseh-led alliance, and the other the war against the Muskogee Nation in 1813–14. Unlike the 1812–15 war between Britain and the United States, with which these wars overlapped, the situation did not return to things being as they had been before, but rather culminated in the elimination of Indigenous power east of the Mississippi. US conquest was not determined by the defeat of the British in battle in 1815, but rather by genocidal war and forced removal.

US leaders brought counterinsurgency out of the pre-independence period into the new republic, imprinting on the fledgling federal army a way of war with formidable consequences for the continent and the world. Counterinsurgent warfare and ethnic cleansing targeting Indigenous civilians continued to define US war making throughout the nineteenth century, with markers such as the three US counterinsurgent wars against the Seminoles through the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to Wounded Knee in 1890. Early on, regular armies had incorporated these strategies and tactics as a way of war to which it often turned, although frequently the regular army simply stood by while local militias and settlers acting on their own used terror against Indigenous noncombatants.

Irregular warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

The Last of the Mohicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic

The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In 1803, the Jefferson administration, without consulting any affected Indigenous nation, purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte. Louisiana comprised 828,000 square miles, and its addition doubled the size of the United States. The territory encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Pawnee, Osage, and Comanche, among other peoples of the bison. It also included the area that would soon be designated Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the site of relocation of Indigenous peoples from west of the Mississippi. Fifteen future states would emerge from the taking: all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; Minnesota west of the Mississippi; most of North and South Dakota; northeastern New Mexico and North Texas; the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans. The territory pressed against lands occupied by Spain, including Texas and all the territory west of the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. These would soon be next on the US annexation list.

At the time, many US Americans saw the purchase as a strategic means of averting war with France while securing commerce on the Mississippi. But it was not long before some began eyeing it for settlement and others proposing an “exchange” of Indigenous lands in the Old Northwest and Old Southwest for lands west of the Mississippi. Before turning to conquest and colonization west of the Mississippi, the slavery-based rule of the Southeast would be ethnically cleansed of Indigenous peoples. The man for the job was Andrew Jackson.

Career Building through Genocide

Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land. This trend of extermination became common in the twentieth century as the United States seized military and economic control of the world, capping five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism. The canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor (1871–90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, “The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world.” Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.

Andrew Jackson was an influential Tennessee land speculator, politician, and wealthy owner of a slave-worked plantation, the Hermitage. He was also a veteran Indian killer. Jackson’s family personified the Protestant Scots-Irish migration to the borderlands of empires. Jackson’s Scots-Irish parents and two older brothers arrived in Pennsylvania from County Antrim in Northern Ireland in 1765. The Jacksons soon moved to a Scots-Irish community on the North Carolina border with South Carolina. Jackson’s father died after a logging accident a few weeks before Andrew’s birth in 1767. Life was hard for a single mother and three children on the frontier. At age thirteen, with little education, Jackson became a courier for the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of independence from Britain. Jackson’s mother and his brothers died during the war, leaving him an orphan. He worked at various jobs, then studied law and was admitted to the bar in the Western District of North Carolina, which would later become the state of Tennessee. Through his legal work, most of which related to disputed land claims, he acquired a plantation near Nashville worked by 150 slaves. He helped usher in Tennessee as a state in 1796, then was elected as its US senator, an office he quit after a year to become a judge in the Tennessee Supreme Court for six years.

As the most notorious land speculator in western Tennessee, Jackson enriched himself by acquiring a portion of the Chickasaw Nation’s land. It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command of the Tennessee militia as a colonel and began his Indian-killing military career. After his brutal war of annihilation against the Muskogee Nation, Jackson continued building his national military and political career by tackling the resistant Seminoles in what are known as the Seminole Wars. In 1836, during the second of these wars, US Army general Thomas S. Jesup captured the popular Anglo attitude toward the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” By then Jackson was finishing his second term as the most popular president in US history to that date, and the policy of genocide was embedded in the highest office of the US government.

In the Southeast, the Choctaws and Chickasaws turned exclusively to US traders once the new US republic effectively cut off access to the Spanish in Florida. Soon they were trapped in the US trading world, in which they would run up debts and then have no way to pay other than by ceding land to creditors who were often acting as agents of the federal government. This was no accidental outcome but was foreseen and encouraged by Jefferson. In 1805, the Choctaws ceded most of their lands to the United States for $50,000, and the Chickasaws relinquished all their lands north of the Tennessee River for $20,000. Many Choctaws and Chickasaws thus became landless participants in the expanding plantation economy, burdened by debts and poverty.

The division of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation and the rise of Andrew Jackson as a result led to his eventual elevation to the presidency and carrying out of the final solution—elimination of all the Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi through forced removal. After the Choctaws and Chickasaws lost most of their territories, only the Muskogees continued to resist the United States.

The Muskogee Nation was a federation of autonomous towns located in the valleys of the many rivers that crisscross what are now the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of Georgia and Florida. The Lower Creeks inhabited and farmed in the eastern part of this region watered by the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola Rivers, while the Upper Creeks lived west of them, in the valleys of the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Alabama Rivers. Following US independence, the Muskogees were divided by settler colonialism. Lower Creek villages became economically dependent on settlers and emulated settlers’ values, including ownership of African slaves. This was largely due to two decades of diligent work on the part of US Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. He was in charge of the US government’s “civilization” project, lending the settler moniker “Five Civilized Tribes” to describe the great agricultural nations of the Southeast. Hawkins’s mission was to instill Euro-American values and practices in Indigenous peoples—including the profit motive, privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealth by a few, and slavery—allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the Muskogees. At the time of independence, hundreds of settlers were squatting illegally on lands of Muskogees of the Lower Creek towns, and that is where Hawkins concentrated, leaving the Muskogees up-river alone. However, traditionalists among the Upper Creeks, who had allied with Tecumseh and the Shawnee confederation, understood that they would be next, as they saw the twenty-year Hawkins project transforming some citizens of the Lower Creek towns into wealthy plantation and slave owners, while the majority became landless and poor.

Traditionalist fighters, called Red Sticks due to the color of their wooden spears, began an offensive against collaborating Upper Creeks and settlers that ended in civil war during 1813. The Red Sticks created chaos that affected Hawkins’s scheme, as they attacked anyone associated with his program. Their effectiveness, however, provoked a genocidal counteroffensive not officially authorized by the federal government, led by Andrew Jackson who was then head of the Tennessee militias. Jackson threatened to form his own mercenary army to drive the Muskogees “into the ocean” if the government failed to eradicate the insurgents. Although Jackson and his fellow Tennesseans made it clear that their goal was extermination of the Muskogee Nation, their rhetoric claimed self-defense. In a series of search-and-destroy missions over three months prior to the final assault on the Red Sticks, Jackson’s mercenaries killed hundreds of Muskogee civilians, pursuing without mercy even homeless and starved refugees seeking shelter and safety. By this point, the Red Sticks had killed most of the Muskogee Nation livestock both to deprive US soldiers of food and to rid Muskogee culture of the colonizers’ influence.

Both Shawnee fighters and Africans who had freed themselves from slavery allied with the Red Sticks. With all their families they set up a fortified encampment at Tohopeka at the Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama. Jackson proceeded to mobilize Lower Creek fighters and some Cherokee allies against the Red Sticks. In March 1814, with seven hundred mounted militiamen and six hundred Cherokee and Lower Creek fighters, Jackson’s armies attacked the Red Stick stronghold. The mercenaries captured three hundred Red Stick wives and children and held them as hostages to induce Muskogee surrender. Of a thousand Red Stick and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. Jackson lost forty-nine men.

In the aftermath of “the Battle of Horseshoe Bend,” as it is known in US military annals, Jackson’s troops fashioned reins for their horses’ bridles from skin stripped from the Muskogee bodies, and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given “to the ladies of Tennessee.” Following the slaughter, Jackson justified his troops’ actions: “The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders.… They have disappeared from the face of the Earth.… How lamentable it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the carcasses of the slain! But it is in the dispensation of that providence, which inflicts partial evil to produce general good.”

Horseshoe Bend marked the end of the Muskogees’ resistance in their original homeland. As historian Alan Brinkley has observed, Jackson’s political fortunes depended on the fate of the Indians—that is, their eradication.

The surrender document the Muskogee Nation was forced to sign in 1814, the Treaty of Fort Jackson, asserted that they had lost under “principles of national justice and honorable war.” Andrew Jackson, the only US negotiator of the treaty, insisted on nothing less than the total destruction of the Muskogee Nation, which the Muskogees had no power to refuse or negotiate. These terms of total surrender shocked the small group of Muskogee plantation and slave owners, who thought that they had been thoroughly accepted by the US Americans. They had fought alongside the Anglo militias against the majority Red Sticks in the war just concluded, yet all Muskogees were now to be punished equally. To no avail did the “friendlies” prostrate themselves before Jackson at the treaty meeting, begging that they and their holdings be spared. Jackson told them that the extreme punishment exacted upon them should teach all those who would try to oppose US domination. “We bleed our enemies in such cases,” he explained, “to give them their senses.” Military historian Grenier observes that “Jackson’s ‘bleeding’ of the Muskogees marks a culminating point in American military history as the end of the Transappalachian East’s Indian wars.… The conquest of the West was not guaranteed by defeating the British Army in battle in 1815, but by defeating and driving the Indians from their homelands.”

The treaty obliged surviving Muskogees to move onto western remnants of their homelands, and Jackson, far from being reprimanded for his genocidal methods, won a commission from President James Madison as major general in the US Army. The territory that would become Alabama and Mississippi now lay open to Anglo-American settlement, an ominous green light to the expansion of plantation slavery. The Muskogee War thus inscribed a US policy of ethnic cleansing onto an entire Indigenous population. The policy originated by Andrew Jackson in that war would be reconfirmed politically when he became president in 1828.

The Upper Creek Muskogees who remained in Alabama surrendered to Jackson and ceded twenty-three million acres of their ancestral lands to the United States in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The Red Sticks, however, joined the resistant Seminole Nation in the Florida Everglades and three more decades of Muskogee resistance ensued. During this period, Anglo-American slave owners, and Andrew Jackson in particular, were determined to destroy the safe havens that Seminole towns offered to Africans who escaped from slavery. The Seminole Nation had not existed under that name prior to European colonization. The ancestral towns of the Indigenous people who became known as Seminoles were located along rivers in a large area of what is today Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and the Florida Panhandle. In the mid-eighteenth century, Wakapuchasee (Cowkeeper) and his people separated from the Coweta Muskogees and moved south into what was then Spanish-occupied Florida. As Spain, Britain, and later the United States decimated Indigenous towns throughout the Southeast, survivors, including self-emancipated Africans, established a refuge in Seminole territory in Spanish Florida in the Everglades. European incursions came in the form of military attacks, disease, and disruption of trade routes, causing collapse and realignments within and between the towns.

The Seminole Nation was born of resistance and included the vestiges of dozens of Indigenous communities as well as escaped Africans, as the Seminole towns served as refuge. In the Caribbean and Brazil, people in such escapee communities were called Maroons, but in the United States the liberated Africans were absorbed into Seminole Nation culture. Then, as now, Seminoles spoke the Muskogee language, and much later (in 1957) the US government designated them an “Indian tribe.” The Seminoles were one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” ordered from their national homelands in the 1830s to Indian Territory (later made part of the state of Oklahoma).

The United States waged three wars against the Seminole Nation between 1817 and 1858. The prolonged and fierce Second Seminole War (1835–42) was the longest foreign war waged by the United States up to the Vietnam War. The US military further developed its army, naval, and marine capabilities in again adopting a counterinsurgency strategy, in this case against the Seminole towns in the Everglades. Once again US forces targeted civilians, destroyed food supplies, and sought to destroy every last insurgent. What US military annals call the First Seminole War (1817–19) began when US authorities entered Spanish Florida illegally in an attempt to recover US plantation owners’ “property”: former African slaves. The Seminoles repelled the invasion. In 1818, President James Monroe ordered Andrew Jackson, then a major general in the US Army, to lead three thousand soldiers into Florida to crush the Seminoles and retrieve the Africans among them. The expedition destroyed a number of Seminole settlements and then captured the Spanish fort at Pensacola, bringing down the Spanish government, but it failed in destroying Seminole guerrilla resistance and the Seminoles did not agree to hand over any former slaves. “Armed occupation was the true way of settling a conquered country,” Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri said at the time, reflecting a popular blend of militarism and white-supremacist Christian identity. “The children of Israel entered the promised land, with implements of husbandry in one hand, and the weapons of war in the other.” The United States annexed Florida as a territory in 1819, opening it to Anglo-American settlement. In 1821 Jackson was appointed military commander of Florida Territory. The Seminoles never sued for peace, were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the United States, and although some were rounded up and sent in 1832 to Oklahoma, where they were given a land base, the Seminole Nation has never ceased to exist in the Everglades.

The Mythical Foundation of Settler Patriotism

Between 1814 and 1824, three-fourths of present-day Alabama and Florida, a third of Tennessee, a fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina became the private property of white settlers—all of the land seized from Indigenous farmers. In 1824, the first permanent US colonial institution was established. First named the Office of Indian Affairs and placed tellingly within the Department of War, the agency was transferred to the Department of Interior twenty-five years later following the annexation of half of Mexico. In making this transfer, the federal government showed overconfidence in assuming that armed Indigenous resistance to US aggression and colonization had ended. Such resistance would continue for another half century.

Whereas white supremacy had been the working rationalization for British theft of Indigenous lands and for European enslavement of Africans, the bid for independence by what became the United States of America was more problematic. Democracy, equality, and equal rights do not fit well with dominance of one race by another, much less with genocide, settler colonialism, and empire. It was during the 1820s—the beginning of the era of Jacksonian settler democracy—that the unique US origin myth evolved reconciling rhetoric with reality. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was among its initial scribes.

Cooper’s reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel The Last of the Mohicans has become the official US origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper “our national novelist.” Cooper was the wealthy son of a US congressman, a land speculator who built Cooperstown, named after himself, in upstate New York where he grew up. His hometown was christened all-American with the establishment of the National Baseball Hall of Fame there in 1936, during the Depression. Expelled from Yale, Cooper joined the navy, then married and began writing. In 1823, he published The Pioneers, the first book in his Leatherstocking Tales series, the other four being The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer (the last published in 1841). Each featured the character Natty Bumppo, also called variously, depending on his age, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, or Deerslayer. Bumppo is a British settler on land appropriated from the Delaware Nation and is buddies with its fictional Delaware leader Chingachgook (the “last Mohican” in the myth). Together the Leatherstocking Tales narrate the mythical forging of the new country from the 1754–63 French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans to the settlement of the plains by migrants traveling by wagon train from Tennessee. At the end of the saga Bumppo dies a very old man on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, as he gazes east.

The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, was a best seller throughout the nineteenth century and has been in print continuously since, with two Hollywood movies based on the story, the most recent made in 1992, the Columbus Quincentennial. Cooper devised a fictional counterpoint of celebration to the dark under-belly of the new American nation—the birth of something new and wondrous, literally, the US American race, a new people born of the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European, not biological merger but something more ephemeral, involving the dissolving of the Indian. In the novel, Cooper has the last of the “noble” and “pure” Natives die off as nature would have it, with the “last Mohican” handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the nativized settler, his adopted son. This convenient fantasy could be seen as quaint at best if it were not for its deadly staying power. Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what historian Francis Jennings has described as “exclusion from the process of formation of American society and culture”:

In the first place they [US historians] exclude Amerindians (as also Afro-Americans) from participation, except as foils for Europeans, and thus assume that American civilization was formed by Europeans in a struggle against the savagery or barbarism of the nonwhite races. This first conception implies the second—that the civilization so formed is unique. In the second conception uniqueness is thought to have been created through the forms and processes of civilization’s struggle on a specifically American frontier. Alternatively, civilization was able to triumph because the people who bore it were unique from the beginning—a Chosen People or a super race. Either way American culture is seen as not only unique but better than all other cultures, precisely because of its differences from them.

US exceptionalism weaves through much of the literature produced in the United States, not only the writing of historians. Although Wallace Stegner decried the devastation wrought by imperialism on Indigenous peoples and the land, he reinforced the idea of US uniqueness by reducing colonization to a twist of fate that produced some charming characteristics:

Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumberland Gap, Americans have been wanderers.… With a continent to take over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could not have avoided being footloose. The initial act of emigration from Europe, an act of extreme, deliberate disaffiliation, was the beginning of a national habit.

It should not be denied, either, that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Our folk heroes and our archetypal literary figures accurately reflect that side of us. Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of Moby Dick, all are orphans and wanderers; any of them could say, “Call me Ishmael.” The Lone Ranger has no dwelling place except the saddle.

The British novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence, who lived in northern New Mexico for two years, conceptualized the US origin myth, invoking Cooper’s frontiersman character Deerslayer: “You have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Historian Wai-chee Dimock points out that nonfiction sources of the time reflected the same view:

The United States Magazine and Democratic Review summed it up by arguing that whereas European powers “conquer only to enslave,” America, being “a free nation,” “conquers only to bestow freedom.” … Far from being antagonistic, “empire” and “liberty” are instrumentally conjoined. If the former stands to safeguard the latter, the latter, in turn, serves to justify the former. Indeed, the conjunction of the two, of freedom and dominion, gives America its sovereign place in history—its Manifest Destiny, as its advocates so aptly called it.

Reconciling empire and liberty—based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands—into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to “the people”—indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people—by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.

The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century—generations of young white men—the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of US American nationalism. Behind the legend was a looming real-life figure, the archetype that inspired the stories, namely, Daniel Boone, an icon of US settler colonialism. Boone’s life spanned from 1734 to 1820, precisely the period covered in the Leatherstocking series. Boone was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on the edge of British settlement. He is an avatar of the moving colonial–Indigenous frontier. To the west lay “Indian Country,” claimed through the Doctrine of Discovery by both Britain and France but free of European settlers save for a few traders, trappers, and soldiers manning colonial outposts.

Daniel Boone died in 1820 in Missouri, a part of the vast territory acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. When Missouri opened for settlement, the Boone family led the initial settlers there. His body was taken for burial in Frankfort, Kentucky, the covenant heart of the Ohio Country, Indian Country, for which the revolution had been fought and in which he had been the trekker superhero, almost a deity. Daniel Boone became a celebrity at age fifty in 1784, a year after the end of the war of independence. Real estate entrepreneur John Filson, seeking settlers to buy property in the Ohio Country, wrote and self-published The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, along with a map to guide illegal squatters. The book contained an appendix about Daniel Boone, purportedly written by Boone himself. That part of the book on Boone’s “adventures” subsequently was published as “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone” in the American Magazine in 1787, then as a book. Thereby a superstar was born—the mythical hero, the hunter, the “Man Who Knows Indians,” as Richard Slotkin has described this US American archetype:

The myth of the hunter that had grown up about the figure of Filson’s Daniel Boone provided a framework within which Americans attempted to define their cultural identity, social and political values, historical experience, and literary aspirations.… Daniel Boone, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson were heroes to the whole nation because their experiences had reference to many or all of these common experiences. “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a popular song that swept the nation in 1822–28, helped elect Andrew Jackson as President by associating him with Boone, the hero of the West.

Yet the Leatherstocking’s positive twist on genocidal colonialism was based on the reality of invasion, squatting, attacking, and colonizing of the Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created that reality. Rather, they created the narratives that captured the experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories that were surely instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide and set the pattern of narrative for future US writers, poets, and historians.

Commander and Chief

Andrew Jackson is enshrined in most US history texts in a chapter titled “The Age of Jackson,” “The Age of Democracy,” “The Birth of Democracy,” or some variation thereon. The Democratic Party claims Jackson and Jefferson as its founders. Every year, state and national Democratic organizations hold fund-raising events they call Jefferson-Jackson Dinners. They understand that Thomas Jefferson was the thinker and Jackson the doer in forging populist democracy for full participation in the fruits of colonialism based on the opportunity available to Anglo settlers.

Jackson carried out the original plan envisioned by the founders—particularly Jefferson—initially as a Georgia militia leader, then as an army general who led four wars of aggression against the Muskogees in Georgia and Florida, and finally as a president who engineered the expulsion of all Native peoples east of the Mississippi to the designated “Indian Territory.” As the late Cherokee principal chief Wilma Mankiller wrote in her autobiography:

The fledgling United States government’s method of dealing with native people—a process which then included systematic genocide, property theft, and total subjugation—reached its nadir in 1830 under the federal policy of President Andrew Jackson. More than any other president, he used forcible removal to expel the eastern tribes from their land. From the very birth of the nation, the United States government truly had carried out a vigorous operation of extermination and removal. Decades before Jackson took office, during the administration of Thomas Jefferson, it was already cruelly apparent to many Native American leaders that any hope for tribal autonomy was cursed. So were any thoughts of peaceful coexistence with white citizens.

It’s not that Jackson had a “dark side,” as his apologists rationalize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonialist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to constitute the core of US patriotism. The most revered presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama—have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people.

Jackson was a national military hero, but he was rooted in the Scots-Irish frontier communities, most of whose people, unlike him, remained impoverished. Their small farms were hard-pressed to compete with large plantations with thousands of acres of cotton planted and each tended by hundreds of enslaved Africans. Land-poor white rural people saw Jackson as the man who would save them, making land available to them by ridding it of Indians, thereby setting the pattern of the dance between poor and rich US Americans ever since under the guise of equality of opportunity. When Jackson was inaugurated in 1829, he opened the White House to the public, the majority in attendance being humble poor whites. Jackson was easily reelected in 1832, although landless settlers had acquired very little land, and what little they seized was soon lost to speculators, transformed into ever larger plantations worked by slave labor.

The late Jackson biographer Michael Paul Rogin observed:

Indian removal was Andrew Jackson’s major policy aim in the quarter-century before he became President. His Indian wars and treaties were principally responsible for dispossessing the southern Indians during those years. His presidential Indian removal finished the job.… During the years of Jacksonian Democracy, 1824–52, five of the ten major candidates for President had either won reputations as generals in Indian wars or served as Secretary of War, whose major responsibility in this period was relations with the Indians. Historians, however, have failed to place Indians at the center of Jackson’s life. They have interpreted the Age of Jackson from every perspective but Indian destruction, the one from which it actually developed historically.

Once elected president, Jackson lost no time in initiating the removal of all the Indigenous farmers and the destruction of all their towns in the South. In his first annual message to Congress, he wrote: “The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry.” This political code language barely veils the intention to forcibly remove the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole Nations, followed by all other Indigenous communities from east of the Mississippi River, except for the many who could not be rounded up and remained, without land, without acknowledgment, until the successful struggles of some of them for recognition in the late twentieth century.

The state of Georgia saw Jackson’s election as a green light and claimed most of the Cherokee Nation’s territory as public land. The Georgia legislature resolved that the Cherokee constitution and laws were null and void and that Cherokees were subject to Georgia law. The Cherokee Nation took a case against Georgia to the US Supreme Court. With Chief Justice John Marshall writing for the majority, the Court ruled in favor of the Cherokees. Jackson ignored the Supreme Court, however, in effect saying that John Marshall had made his decision and Marshall would have to enforce it if he could, although he, Jackson, had an army while Marshall did not.

While the case was working its way through the courts, gold was discovered in Georgia in 1829, which quickly brought some forty thousand eager gold seekers to run roughshod over Cherokee lands, squatting, looting, killing, and destroying fields and game parks. Under authority granted by the Indian Removal Act, passed by Congress in 1830, the United States drew up a treaty that would cede all Cherokee lands to the government in exchange for land in “Indian Territory.” The US government held Cherokee leaders in jail and closed their printing press during negotiations with a few handpicked Cherokees, who provided the bogus signatures Jackson needed as a cover for forced removal.

Trails of Tears

Not only the great southern nations were driven into exile, but also nearly all the Native nations east of the Mississippi were forced off their lands and relocated to Indian Territory, seventy thousand people in all. During the Jacksonian period, the United States made eighty-six treaties with twenty-six Indigenous nations between New York and the Mississippi, all of them forcing land sessions, including removals. Some communities fled to Canada and Mexico rather than going to Indian Territory. When Sauk leader Black Hawk led his people back from a winter stay in Iowa to their homeland in Illinois in 1832 to plant corn, the squatter settlers there claimed they were being invaded, bringing in both Illinois militia and federal troops. The “Black Hawk War” that is narrated in history texts was no more than a slaughter of Sauk farmers. The Sauks tried to defend themselves but were starving when Black Hawk surrendered under a white flag. Still the soldiers fired, resulting in a bloodbath. In his surrender speech, Black Hawk spoke bitterly of the enemy:

You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal. An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death and eaten up by the wolves.… We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger.

The Sauks were rounded up and driven onto a reservation called Sac and Fox.

Most Cherokees had held out in remaining in their homeland despite pressure from federal administrations from Jefferson on to migrate voluntarily to the Arkansas-Oklahoma-Missouri area of the Louisiana Purchase territory. The Cherokee Nation addressed removal:

We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our advantage to remove beyond the Mississippi. We think otherwise. Our people universally think otherwise.… We wish to remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or molestation. The treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties, guarantee our residence and our privileges, and secure us against intruders. Our only request is, that these treaties may be fulfilled, and these laws executed.

A few contingents of Cherokees settled in Arkansas and what became Indian Territory as early as 1817. There was a larger migration in 1832, which came after the Indian Removal Act. The 1838 forced march of the Cherokee Nation, now known as the Trail of Tears, was an arduous journey from remaining Cherokee homelands in Georgia and Alabama to what would later become northeastern Oklahoma. After the Civil War, journalist James Mooney interviewed people who had been involved in the forced removal. Based on these firsthand accounts, he described the scene in 1838, when the US Army removed the last of the Cherokees by force:

Under [General Winfield] Scott’s orders the troops were disposed at various points throughout the Cherokee country, where stockade forts were erected for gathering in and holding the Indians preparatory to removal. From these, squads of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every small cabin hidden away in the coves or by sides of mountain streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants, however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scene that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”

Half of the sixteen thousand Cherokee men, women, and children who were rounded up and force-marched in the dead of winter out of their country perished on the journey.

The Muskogees and Seminoles suffered similar death rates in their forced transfer, while the Chickasaws and Choctaws lost around 15 percent of their people en route. An eyewitness account by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of the day, captures one of thousands of similar scenes in the forced deportation of the Indigenous peoples from the Southeast:

I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which I have been describing; and I was the witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray.

At the end of the year 1831, whilst I was on the left bank of the Mississippi at a place named by Europeans Memphis, there arrived a numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas, as they are called by the French in Louisiana). These savages had left their country, and were endeavoring to gain the right bank of the Mississippi, where they hoped to find an asylum which had been promised them by the American government. It was then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice. The Indians had their families with them; and they brought in their train the wounded and sick, with children newly born, and old men upon the verge of death. They possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob was heard amongst the assembled crowd; all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and, plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam after the boat.

In his biography of Jackson, Rogin points out that this was no endgame: “The dispossession of the Indians … did not happen once and for all in the beginning. America was continually beginning again on the frontier, and as it expanded across the continent, it killed, removed, and drove into extinction one tribe after another.”

Against all odds, some Indigenous peoples refused to be removed and stayed in their traditional homelands east of the Mississippi. In the South, the communities that did not leave lost their traditional land titles and status as Indians in the eyes of the government, but many survived as peoples, some fighting successfully in the late twentieth century for federal acknowledgment and official Indigenous status. In the north, especially in New England, some states had illegally taken land and created guardian systems and small reservations, such as those of the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies in Maine, both of which won lawsuits against the states and attained federal acknowledgment during the militant movements of the 1970s. Many other Native nations have been able to increase their land bases.

The Persistence of Denial

Andrew Jackson was born to squatters under British rule on Indigenous land. His life followed the trajectory of continental imperialism as he made his career of taking Indigenous land, from the time of Jefferson’s presidency to the elimination of Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi. This process was the central fact of US politics and the basis for the US economy. Two-thirds of the US population of nearly four million at the time of independence lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean. During the following half century, more than four million settlers crossed the Appalachians, one of the largest and most rapid migrations in world history. Jackson was an actor who made possible the implementation of the imperialist project of the independent United States, but he was also an exponent of the Euro-American popular will that favored imperialism and the virtually free land it provided them.

During the period of Jackson’s military and executive power, a mythology emerged that defined the contours and substance of the US origin narrative, which has weathered nearly two centuries and remains intact in the early twenty-first century as patriotic cant, a civic religion invoked in Barack Obama’s presidential inaugural address in January 2009:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.

It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor—who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today.

Spoken like a true descendant of old settlers. President Obama raised another key element of the national myth in an interview a few days later with Al Arabiya television in Dubai. Affirming that the United States could be an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said: “We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power.”

The affirmation of democracy requires the denial of colonialism, but denying it does not make it go away.