Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (David Michael Smith)

Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire
Author	David Michael Smith
Publisher	Monthly Review Press
First published	2023
Source	Anna's Archive

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to all the researchers who responded to my inquiries and shared their expertise while I was writing this book. Many thanks to Mikaela Morgane Adams, Jeffrey S. Adler, Fred Anderson, George Reid Andrews, Andy Baker, Francisco Balderrama, Douglas A. Blackmon, Peter K. Brecke, D. Brian Burghart, Donald S. Burke, Colin G. Calloway, E. Ann Carson, Stephen K. Cusick, James P. Daughton, James Downs, Douglas R. Egerton, James Fenske, Elsa Gelpi, Dina Gilia-Whitaker, Arline Geronimus, Erik Gilbert, Thavolia Glyph, Peter C. Gøtzsche, Sandra Elaine Greene, Gerald Horne, Robert Gudmestad, Joseph Hanlon, Jeffrey Hilgert, Joseph E. Inikori, Robin D. G. Kelley, Martin Klein, Bruce Lanphear, Patrick Manning, Emily Marquez, Stephen Majeski, Keith Meyers, Joseph Miller, Vicente Navarro, Jeffrey Ostler, Gary Potter, Robert Proctor, Daniel T. Reff, George Andrews Reid, Richard Reid, Rebecca Reindel, Andrés Reséndez, Javier Rodriguez, Nigel Rollins, Randolph Roth, Francisco A. Scarano, Michael Schroeder, Nancy Shoemaker, David Stark, David A. Swanson, Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Russell Thornton, Fred A. Wilcox, and Brian Glyn Williams.

It is worth emphasizing that none of these researchers is responsible for the analysis and conclusions in this book, and the responsibility for any errors is entirely mine. I also want to thank Greg Broyles, Angelita Chapa, Patty Harlan, Folko Mueller, Paul Mullan, Tracy Orr, Pat Thompson, and Fred A. Wilcox for reading and providing feedback on various chapters. My greatest debt is to Rona E. Smith, my wife, who encouraged me to write this book, read earlier versions of the chapters, and shared important ideas for improving them. It is no exaggeration to say that this book would not have been written without Rona’s steadfast support.

Introduction

For generations, capitalists, politicians, and pundits have promoted the doctrine of U.S. exceptionalism. Scores of millions of people in this country have embraced what Christian Appy has called “the central tenet of American national identity—the broad faith that the United States is a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.”1 To be sure, many Indigenous people, people of African descent, workers, and others have not accepted this “broad faith,” but its reach and endurance has been widely recognized. However, as Sidney Lens pointed out half a century ago, U.S. exceptionalism has always been “a myth of morality,” and “America the benevolent … does not exist and never has existed.”2 In the 1960s and 1970s, mass movements against racism and the wars in Southeast Asia exposed this myth to tens of millions of people. In the decades that followed, the deteriorating conditions of workers, growing inequality, increasingly dysfunctional governance, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the persistence of police brutality, the opioid crisis, and climate change further undermined this dogma. More recently, the resurgence of white supremacy, the erosion of U.S. primacy in the world, the transformation of the Republicans into a far-right party, the rise of Donald Trump, the hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and the fascist-led attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, have led many more people to abandon their illusions about this country.

That the United States is a colonialist and imperialist country—an empire—can hardly be questioned. The conquest and near-extermination of several hundred Indigenous nations by European and U.S. settlers provided the land on which the contiguous United States was built, and Native peoples continue to live in colonial conditions, deprived of sovereignty and self-determination. The United States also colonized Liberia, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the eastern Samoan Islands, the Philippines, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Panama, which Washington carved out of Colombia to build a transoceanic canal, and Cuba were U.S. protectorates for decades. The United States recognized the independence of Liberia in 1847 and the Philippines in 1946 and admitted Alaska and Hawaii as states in 1959 but refused to relinquish the Panama Canal Zone until 1999 and still occupies forty-five square miles of land and water at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Today the United States officially includes not only the fifty states and the District of Columbia but also 574 federally recognized Indigenous nations, the commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, the inhabited territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and nine uninhabited islands and atolls in the Pacific and the Caribbean.3 Residents of Washington, DC, the commonwealths, and the inhabited territories do not have full representation in Congress. Indeed, as the U.S. Department of the Interior has stated, the commonwealths and inhabited territories are areas “in which the United States Congress has determined that only selected parts of the United States Constitution apply.”4 The people of American Samoa are not even recognized as U.S. citizens. The “freely associated states” of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau are U.S. protectorates.5

In addition to its long history of conquest and colonization, the United States has always energetically exploited other peoples’ resources, markets, and labor. The enslaved labor of people of African descent fueled early U.S. economic development and the Industrial Revolution. By the 1820s, U.S. merchants were shipping opium from Turkey to China so they could sustain imports of tea, spices, porcelain, and nankeen. As Greg Grandin has noted, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 “announced to European empires that Latin America fell under Washington’s exclusive sphere of influence.”6 In the mid-nineteenth century, the mounting need to export surplus products led the U.S. Empire to threaten and use violence against China, Japan, and Korea. In the last quarter of the century, intensifying industrial development and agricultural production contributed to unprecedented economic growth. By the 1890s, U.S. businesses were shipping steel, iron, oil, and agricultural machinery to foreign markets, and the export of capital had begun. During that decade, the United States replaced Britain as the world’s largest economy. In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney, referring to South America, claimed that “the United States is sovereign on this continent.”7 In stark contrast, after acquiring most of Spain’s colonies in 1898, the United States demanded an “Open Door” for U.S. trade and investment in China and did not even consult its government.

The U.S. Empire’s imperatives of expansion and accumulation have dramatically grown in the era of modern imperialism, and so has its exploitation of the resources, markets, and labor of people in other countries. As Grandin has explained, in the early decades of the twentieth century “American corporations and financial houses came to dominate the economies of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, as well as large parts of South America.”8 To protect its investments and promote its interests, the empire militarily intervened in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and invaded and occupied Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

Industry, agriculture, and trade grew significantly when the United States funded and armed, and then joined the Entente Powers during the First World War. Afterward, the United States invaded Soviet Russia, supported the Guomindang regime in China, and welcomed European fascism as a bulwark against communism—entering the Second World War only because the Axis powers threatened its own imperialist interests. By 1945, the United States had become the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world. Since then, the imperium has vigorously sought to obtain the oil, strategic materials, and other resources it requires and to keep, in the words of Harry Magdoff, “as much as possible of the world open for trade and investment by the giant multinational corporations.”9

These imperatives led to unrelenting confrontation with the Soviet Union and other socialist states—at horrific human expense. The later collapse of most of these states, which occurred partly because of U.S. actions over the decades, made the world a more dangerous place as the empire found itself to be the sole superpower and moved to establish its presence in those and other lands. Since 1945, the United States has fought devastating large-scale wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. It has launched proxy wars on four continents, routinely attacked countries, overthrown and installed governments, destroyed popular movements, assassinated foreign leaders, engaged in economic sabotage, and supported its allies’ violent domestic repression and acts of war against other nations. The only country to ever use atomic bombs, the United States has deployed nuclear weapons around the world, developed ominous plans “to win a nuclear war,” and brought humanity to the brink of nuclear holocaust on several occasions.10 Today, the empire has a network of client states encompassing about 40 percent of the world’s countries, about eight hundred foreign military bases, and more than 200,000 military personnel and contractors deployed in about 140 countries.11 But the rise of China, the return of Russia, and the mounting economic, social, and political crises at home make clear that the United States’ “unipolar moment” is already fading.12

Although there have long been activists and writers willing to challenge the myth of U.S. exceptionalism, new scholarly work in recent decades has powerfully illuminated some of the ugliest dimensions of U.S. history and contemporary society. This research has significantly contributed to the literature on settler colonialism and genocide against Indigenous people, white supremacy and the oppression of Black people, U.S. imperialism and its perpetual wars, the uniquely high level of violence in this country, and other grave threats to public health. However, a great deal more must be said about the almost unimaginable loss of life resulting from U.S. capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism over the centuries. Although there has been considerable debate over the size of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere before 1492, an estimate of the total number of deaths caused by colonialism and genocide throughout the present-day United States has not yet been published. Writers have expressed different views on the overall loss of life caused by the transatlantic slave trade, but an assessment based on historical information about each stage of that dreadful saga has not yet been developed. The Maafa, or great disaster, was only the beginning of five centuries of brutality and injustice experienced by people of African descent.13

The scourge of fatal workplace injuries and occupational diseases that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and continues today has received only limited scholarly attention. But there is ample historical and contemporary evidence that vast numbers of workers perished from occupational injuries and diseases in the past century and a half.

Although there is now a remarkable literature on U.S. imperialism, the total number of deaths in U.S. wars, military interventions, and other hostile actions abroad is still not known. Similarly, the cumulative human costs of other forms of state and social violence, the profit-driven proliferation of dangerous drugs and other unsafe consumer products, the automobile-centered transportation system, the commodified and often dangerous health care system, and environmental pollution in this country have not been gauged. This author knows of no study that comprehensively surveys all these forms of mass deaths and demonstrates their centrality and significance in U.S. history and contemporary U.S. society.

This book aims to help fill these gaps in the critical, counter-hegemonic literature on the United States. I argue that the prehistory, formation, expansion, and global ascendancy of the U.S. Empire have required endless holocausts at home and abroad. I also develop informed and reasonable, if rough or very rough, estimates of the loss of life in each one. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “holocaust” as “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale,” and an unrelenting, endless succession of such catastrophes lies at the heart of U.S. history and U.S. society today.14 Far from being occasional, unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise benevolent or benign historical record, different kinds of large-scale annihilation of human life have made this country what it is. Indeed, though most capitalists, politicians, and pundits will never admit it, these endless holocausts have been indispensable in the rise of the wealthiest and most powerful imperium in the history of the world. Tragically, they have also resulted in the deaths of almost unimaginable numbers of people from the European colonial period to the present.

In this book, I examine diverse holocausts for which the U.S. Empire is responsible or shares responsibility. Some of these mass deaths have resulted and continue to result from large-scale violence, which is often viewed as “the intentional use of physical force or power.”15 The holocausts suffered by Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, and the victims of U.S. militarism worldwide have involved widespread carnage, to be sure. But even in these cases, many fatalities have occurred because of disease, starvation, and related causes. Other forms of mass deaths have not been engendered by violence as traditionally defined. Instead, they are large-scale instances of what Frederick Engels viewed as “social murder,” that is, deaths caused by deprivation of the “necessaries of life” and the imposition of conditions in which people cannot survive.16 These various kinds of social murder are not inevitable but are rooted in U.S. capitalism. In the following chapters, I explore mass deaths resulting from both far-reaching violence and social murders.

Chapter 1, “The Indigenous Peoples Holocaust,” analyzes the near-annihilation of Native peoples in the lands that became the United States, from the early sixteenth century to the present. Chapter 2, “The African American Holocaust,” assesses the catastrophic human costs of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and subsequent anti-Black oppression in this country. Chapter 3, “The Workers Holocaust,” investigates the mass deaths from workplace injuries, occupational diseases, and anti-labor violence since the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 4, “From Colonial Wars to Global Holocausts,” examines the immense human toll of U.S. wars, military interventions, and support for repression and fascism abroad through the end of the Second World War. Chapter 5, “The Holocausts of Pax Americana I,” explores the enormous loss of life in other countries resulting from U.S. imperialism between 1945 and 1980. Chapter 6, “The Holocausts of Pax Americana II,” analyzes the extensive carnage in other countries brought about by U.S. imperialism since 1980. Chapter 7, “Other Holocausts at Home and Abroad,” investigates the stunning number of U.S. lives lost because of the U.S. Empire’s wars and other forms of violence as well as the mass deaths caused by dangerous drugs, tobacco, unsafe consumer products, automobiles, the health care system, and pollution.

Altogether, I estimate that the U.S. Empire is responsible or shares responsibility for close to 300 million deaths. The almost inconceivable loss of life in these endless holocausts arguably makes this country exceptional, though in a strikingly different way than its apologists intend. As this book makes clear, this succession of catastrophes will continue as long as the imperium exists. And as its primacy erodes, the U.S. ruling class may act like a “wounded beast” and commit heinous new crimes against the peoples of the world—including the people of this country—to maintain as much wealth and power as possible.17 Although this book focuses on manifold forms of mass deaths, it also points to an extraordinary history of resistance by Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, workers, people in other nations brutalized by U.S. imperialism, and democratic-minded people around the world. Everyone who supports the dismantling of the empire can draw inspiration from this history of resistance.

The Indigenous Peoples Holocaust

Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women; they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back, whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven. Back! Back, ay, into the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! —TECUMSEH, ADDRESS IN TUCKAUBATCHEE, 1811

David Stannard has used the expression “American Holocaust” to refer to the historically unprecedented number of deaths caused by European and U.S. settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Stannard has argued that this was “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.”1 It may also be viewed as the most horrific genocide in history.2 Some contemporary scholars believe that the Indigenous population of the present-day United States and the hemisphere declined between 90 and 95 percent between 1492 and 1900.3 As Russell Thornton and other researchers have explained, wars, genocidal violence, enslavement, land expropriation, forced removals and relocations, diseases, destruction of food sources, dietary changes, malnutrition, elimination of traditional ways of life, erasure of identity, and reduced birth rates contributed to this cataclysmic demographic collapse in what is today the United States.4 Although many Indigenous nations have survived and experienced a demographic recovery since 1900, various forms of violence, poor health conditions rooted in colonialism and racism, and related forms of oppression persist, and the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust continues today.5

The Americas before the Europeans

As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has emphasized, centuries before the arrival of Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus), the Indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere had built “great civilizations” whose “governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed.”6 These diverse societies ranged from the Maya of Central America, the Runa (Incas) of western South America, and the Mexicas (Aztecs) of Mexico, to the Haudenosaunees (Iroquois), Tsalagis (Cherokees), Diné (Navajo) in the lands that became the United States. North America was a “continent of nations and federations of nations.”7 Most Native people lived in towns and successfully farmed, while others were nomadic hunters or hunter-gatherers.8 A sophisticated network of roadways connected different nations and facilitated trade.9 Although Indigenous peoples in the present-day United States did not have written languages, their laws, poetry, song, dance, and ceremonies articulated their history “in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s.”10 Howard Zinn has pointed out that in these lands “human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe.”11

THE EUROPEAN QUEST FOR WEALTH AND THREAT TO INDIGENOUS CIVILIZATIONS

An important component of what Lens called “the myth of morality” is the fiction that the settlement of the English colonies that became the United States is largely a story of oppressed people seeking freedom from religious and political persecution.12 The historical reality is strikingly different. In the first place, as Gerald Horne has pointed out, “The United States is the inheritor of the munificent crimes of not only London but Madrid, too.”13 The Spaniards were the first Europeans to conquer, colonize, and plunder some of the lands that today constitute the U.S. Empire. Some people who settled in the English colonies of North America had indeed experienced repression at home, and many more had suffered extreme privation. Signally, though, their rulers—like those in Spain and the other European countries that laid claim to vast territories in the Western Hemisphere—were primarily interested in the accumulation of wealth and the expansion of state power. It was the quest for gold, silver, and a route to the Far East that could restore trade in silk and spices that led to the initial European invasion of what came to be known as the Americas.14

Karl Marx wrote in the first volume of Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America [and] the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the Indigenous population of that continent” were among the “chief moments of primitive accumulation” that gave rise to modern capitalism.15 After arriving in the Western Hemisphere, the Europeans invoked the “Doctrine of Discovery” to claim these lands. This doctrine was articulated in a series of late fifteenth-century papal decrees and used to justify the conquest and colonization of much of the planet in the centuries that followed.16 The Europeans’ aims brought them into direct, violent conflict with Indigenous peoples in the Americas, as they would in the Pacific islands, Asia, and Africa. But the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the near-extermination of Indigenous peoples became the indispensable foundation for establishing and expanding European colonies and creating and expanding the U.S. Empire.

THE SIZE OF THE INDIGENOUS POPULATION

The island that the Taino (Arawak) people called Guanahani in the present-day Bahamas where Colón landed in 1492 was not heavily populated. But when his expedition reached the Caribbean island they named Hispaniola, they found tens of thousands of people.17 In the next several decades, Spanish invaders encountered millions upon millions of Indigenous people in the lands that we know today as Mexico, Central America, and South America.18 Estimates of the pre-contact Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere range from a low of 8.4 million made by Alfred Kroeber in 1939 to a high of 145 million made by Henry Dobyns in 1988.19 Stannard has estimated that approximately 100 million Native people lived in the Americas in 1492, and Ward Churchill has suggested that the number may have been about 125 million.20 For decades, Russell Thornton estimated that the population in the hemisphere was about seventy-five million, but recently he indicated that the actual number might have been closer to sixty million.21 In 2019, scientists and geographers studying the ecological impact of the first century of European colonization also estimated that the pre-contact Native population was about sixty million.22 However, this assessment may be too low, and a rough estimate of sixty-five million for the hemisphere may be prudent.23

The Indigenous population of North America north of present-day Mexico was significantly smaller than in lands to the south. However, as William Denevan has shown, even here the landscape was not “primarily pristine, virgin, a wilderness, nearly empty of people.”24 Estimates for what became the coterminous United States range from a low of 720,000 made by Alfred Kroeber in 1939 to a high of fifteen million made by Dunbar-Ortiz in 2014.25 Douglas Ubelaker has concluded that the pre-contact population in today’s contiguous United States was approximately two million.26 Thornton’s view is that more than five million Indigenous people lived here.27 Although some researchers agree with Ubelaker’s estimate, James Wilson has noted that Thornton’s estimate is probably “the nearest to a generally accepted figure.”28 In addition, the combined Native populations of Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawai‘i likely numbered about eight hundred thousand, so the total Indigenous population of the present-day United States was probably close to six million.29

CONQUEST, COLONIZATION, AND DISEASE

In the 1960s and 1970s, the renewal of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for sovereignty and self-determination focused public attention on the catastrophe of settler colonialism. Some commentators sought to deny or minimize the colonizers’ genocidal intentions by largely attributing the near annihilation of Native peoples to new diseases.30 Stannard has criticized this line of argument:

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans … caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent—a sad, but both inevitable and “unintended consequence” of human migration and progress.… In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s Native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.31

For Stannard, it was the terrible synergy of “microbial pestilence” and “purposeful genocide” that killed so many.

In recent decades, most researchers have acknowledged the impact of smallpox, measles, typhus, and other new diseases on Indigenous populations while emphasizing other aspects of colonialist devastation. Today many investigators reject Dobyns’s conclusion that smallpox and other “virgin soil” epidemics swept across North America throughout the sixteenth century.32 Thornton’s view that the early “medical conquest” of Native peoples generally “paved the way” for “military conquests and colonizations” in the present-day United States has also been challenged.33 It increasingly appears that the widespread transmission of new diseases usually did not precede the invaders but accompanied them.34 Moreover, David S. Jones explains, “It was the turbulence of colonization and not genetic liability that created Indians’ devastating susceptibility to imported pathogens.”35 Current documentary and archaeological evidence do not permit final conclusions on the early history of Native depopulation in these lands, the comparative lethality of disease and violence, or the complete dimensions of the demographic collapse. However, it is possible to outline the broad contours of the Indigenous Peoples’ Holocaust in this country and develop an informed and reasonable, if rough, estimate of the total loss of life.

APOCALYPSE FROM THE CARIBBEAN TO SOUTH AMERICA

The apocalyptic consequences of the European invasion became clear soon after Colón’s arrival on Hispaniola in late 1492.36 The Spaniards began enslaving thousands of Taino people and forcing them to work in gold mines and on plantations.37 Bartolomé de Las Casas, a conquistador turned priest, condemned the invaders’ widespread murder and torture.38 Fernández de Oviedo, a conquistador who became the official historian of Spain’s Caribbean colonies, admitted that he and his compatriots were responsible for “innumerable cruel deaths … as uncountable as the stars.”39 Although some analysts have suggested that smallpox erupted on Hispaniola in 1507, there is little evidence of this.40 However, violence, enslavement, exhaustion, famine, and disease reduced the island’s population to about 250 people by 1540.41 Colón’s lieutenant, Juan Ponce de León, established the Spanish colony on the island of Puerto Rico in 1508 and became its governor. Here, too, violence, slavery, and diseases were catastrophic. When the first recorded smallpox epidemic broke out in the Spanish colonies in 1518, its impact in Puerto Rico was significant. Between twenty to fifty thousand Tainos on the island had died by 1544, the first casualties of European colonialism in the lands that later became part of the U.S. Empire.42

Hernán Cortés’s invasion of the Mexicas in 1519–1521, Pedro de Alvarado and Cristóbal de Olid’s subjugation of most of the Maya in the 1520s, and Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro’s conquest of much of the Runa in the 1530s unleashed hell on a much larger scale. Warfare, genocidal violence, enslavement, and famine combined with smallpox and other “firestorms of disease” to produce as many as forty million deaths in present-day Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Chile by the late 1560s.43 Diseases brought by Europeans also killed sizeable numbers of Indigenous people in what are now Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil.44 In their 2019 study, the scientists and geographers assessing the environmental effects of European colonization estimated that approximately 56 million Native people died in the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1600.45 These researchers found that this “Great Dying” led to the significant “regrowth of the natural habitat,” the removal of vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the cooling of the global climate.46

EARLY EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND VIOLENCE IN THE PRESENT-DAY UNITED STATES

During the sixteenth century, European invasion and settlement of the lands that became the United States were much more limited. However, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) explored present-day Newfoundland and Labrador, New England, and perhaps Long Island in 1497–98.47 Hundreds of other European explorers, traders, and adventurers visited the Atlantic and Pacific coasts during the next hundred years and sometimes made contact with Indigenous peoples.48 In 1501, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real sailed along the coast of Newfoundland and Maine and kidnapped about fifty Native people.49 In 1524, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano sailed along Long Island and later met with a delegation of Wampanoag and Narragansett people. He also encountered the Indigenous peoples of present-day Rhode Island and either the Abnakis or Penobscots of present-day Maine.50 The following year, the Portuguese explorer Estêvão Gomes visited what is now New England and New York, captured dozens of Native people, and took them to Spain.51 Verrazano and Gomes also met members of the Powhatan Confederacy when sailing along the coast of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.52 The Europeans who encountered various Indigenous peoples may well have left deadly pathogens behind.53

In 1513, Ponce de León landed on the Atlantic coast of the land he called La Florida. He hoped to enslave Indigenous people and transport them to Caribbean plantations but met with resistance and fled. He returned with two hundred men and arrived near present-day Port Charlotte in July 1521, but the Calusa people repulsed their landing. About eighty Spaniards were killed or died of their wounds, including Ponce de León, and twice as many Calusas may have perished.54 Smallpox epidemics did not erupt afterward, as some scholars have suggested, but the violence and disruption caused by the Spaniards probably left the Calusas more vulnerable to already existing diseases.55 In 1526, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and several hundred Spaniards, along with about a hundred enslaved African people, established a settlement called San Miguel de Gualdape, possibly at the mouth of the Savannah River near present-day Tybee Roads, Georgia. Vázquez de Ayllón died of illness soon afterward, and the settlement was threatened by inclement weather, food shortages, internal dissension, a revolt by the enslaved Africans, and disease—most likely malaria.56 After the settlers took over a local Indigenous village and consumed its food supplies, its inhabitants fought back, resulting in the collapse of the settlement and the flight of 150 Spanish survivors.57

In May 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez, the Spanish governor of Cuba, landed with about three hundred armed men near present-day Tampa Bay, Florida, searching for gold and other riches. Their ships were destroyed by a hurricane, and resistance by Indigenous peoples, starvation, and illness—perhaps malaria but possibly typhoid, dysentery, or other diseases—wiped out most of the Spaniards. After using rafts to return to the Gulf from the Florida interior, Narváez and many others were lost in a storm. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and about eighty compatriots survived but were shipwrecked near Galveston Island in present-day Texas. New bouts of disease killed many of the survivors.58 Soon afterward, Indigenous people in the area began to die, chiefly from a “dysentery-type disease” that could have been caused by the Spaniards “defecating and urinating in local drinking water or in aquatic areas where Indigenous peoples gathered clams or oysters.”59 The first known epidemic in present-day Texas, probably cholera, struck the Karankawa people in 1528.60 During the next six years, only Cabeza de Vaca and three others survived near-starvation and enslavement by Coahuiltecan people as they wandered through present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona on their long trek toward Spanish settlements in what is now Mexico.61

SPANISH INVASIONS OF THE SOUTHEAST AND THE SOUTHWEST

In May 1539, Hernando de Soto brought about six hundred soldiers, enslaved Indigenous and African people, two hundred horses, and three hundred pigs to present-day Tampa Bay. For the next four years, de Soto’s expedition traveled through what is now Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana while looking for gold.62 As the Spaniards proceeded, they invaded Native villages, stole their food, and enslaved more people.63 They also left a trail of Indigenous bodies in their wake, beginning with about forty Timucas killed in the battle of Two Lakes in Florida in September 1539.64 In October 1540, de Soto’s forces killed as many as three thousand Mobile warriors led by Tascalusa in a battle at Mabila in present-day Alabama.65 Fighting in what is today Mississippi and other areas in 1541–42 resulted in hundreds more Native deaths.66 De Soto became ill and died in May 1542. Less than half of his expedition survived and reached Spanish settlements in present-day Mexico in September 1543.67 The expedition did not introduce smallpox or measles, but it resulted in widespread destruction and destabilization, increased local susceptibility to existing diseases, and likely spread malaria throughout the region.68 These developments marked the beginning of a significant decline of the Native population in the Southeast during the following century and a half.69

In July 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado arrived in what is today New Mexico with about 350 soldiers and about 1,300 Indigenous allies. They entered the lands of the Pueblo peoples searching for gold and proceeded to destroy thirteen villages and kill several hundred inhabitants within a year.70 Coronado then led his expedition into what are now Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kansas but never found gold and returned to present-day Mexico in 1542. There is no evidence that Coronado’s forces brought European diseases with them, but the Spaniards’ devastation and disruption, along with the spread of existing diseases, reduced the Pueblo population from about fifty thousand in 1540 to forty thousand during the next six decades.71 In May 1598, Juan de Oñate brought four hundred Spaniards into the area to establish a permanent settlement and begin the process of colonization. In January 1599, after inhabitants of Acoma resisted, the Spaniards sacked the town, killed about eight hundred people, and enslaved many others.72 In the winter of 1601, the Spaniards burned three Tompiro towns and killed about nine hundred people.73 With the onset of colonization, smallpox, measles, and other European diseases also began to appear and soon proved to be devastating.74

THE FIRST PERMANENT SPANISH AND ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS

Shortly after French colonizers founded Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, in 1564, they began suffering from diseases. As Paul Keaton has remarked, by this time “malaria had likely become endemic in Florida from previous European invasions.”75 The following year, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés led about eight hundred Spaniards in destroying Fort Caroline and establishing St. Augustine as the first permanent European settlement in what is today the continental United States. The Timucuas fought against the Spanish conquest of their lands, and their armed resistance to occupation continued for years. After Menéndez and his forces left a garrison and mission in southwestern Florida, a brief détente with the Calusas ended, and more warfare ensued.76 Violence, forced tribute and enslavement, destabilization, hunger, and trauma proved to be deeply destructive to Native communities. Soon after St. Augustine was founded, many Indigenous people began dying from a mysterious disease that may have been typhus. Malaria and other existing diseases took a toll as well.77 Smallpox had also arrived, but what Paul Kelton has called “the limited extent of Spanish colonialism” precluded major outbreaks at the time.78 Much worse was to come in the next century.

The English established a colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is today North Carolina in 1585, but it did not survive for long. Inadequate food supplies, conflict with local Indigenous people, and disease contributed to this failure and the disappearance of more than a hundred colonizers after 1587.79 Francis Drake’s relief expedition to Roanoke Island the previous year may well have brought typhus, but limited contact with Native inhabitants there likely precluded a catastrophic epidemic.80 When English settlers founded Jamestown in present-day Virginia in 1607, they encountered the Powhatan Confederacy of perhaps 15,000 people.81 Another ten thousand or more Indigenous people also lived in the area.82 Whether Native nations here had suffered massive depopulation from European epidemics in the preceding century is a subject of debate among researchers.83 But the historical record of death and destruction at the hands of English settlers after 1607 is not in dispute. Ill-supplied and unable to provide for themselves amid terrible drought and bitter winters, the Jamestown colonizers soon faced starvation.84 Members of the confederacy led by Wahunsonacock (Powhatan) saved the colony by providing food to the settlers. However, the colonizers soon began stealing their corn and attacking their villages.85

EARLY WARS, ENSLAVEMENT, AND DISEASE IN THE SOUTHEAST

The Powhatans ended trade with the settlers and laid siege to Jamestown, which resulted in 160 deaths from hunger and disease in the winter of 1609–10. Scores of other settlers and Powhatan people were killed in battle before hostilities ended in 1614.86 An epidemic, possibly related to malnutrition, erupted in 1617 and resulted in many more deaths among Native people than settlers.87 War broke out again in 1622. Now led by Opechancanough, the confederacy’s attacks on several English settlements along the James River left about 350 people dead.88 The colonizers, in turn, poisoned about two hundred Indigenous people at what was announced as a peace conference in 1624.89 The following year, the settlers killed about one thousand Pamunkey members of the confederacy and destroyed their town.90 A treaty in 1632 ended the fighting but not for long. In 1644, as the colonizers expanded their domain, Opechancanough’s forces attacked them and killed between four hundred and five hundred people.91 The settlers, now numbering about eight thousand, struck back forcefully, killing Opechancanough and destroying the Powhatan resistance.92

The subsequent growth of English settlements in Virginia and Maryland was disastrous for local Indigenous nations. Continuing violence, trauma, starvation, and disease led to many more Native deaths.93 Conflict with Susquehannock (Conestoga) people and the rebellion against colonial authorities led by Nathaniel Bacon resulted in about three hundred deaths in Virginia in 1676–77.94 By this time, English settlers had been trading guns and manufactured goods for deerskins and people captured by Native allies for more than two decades.95 The relentless demand for labor in the Europeans’ Atlantic colonies led to the growth of this slave trade.96 As Kelton has noted, by 1698 “a thriving exchange network linked British colonies and Native communities from the James to the Savannah and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.”97 The slave trade significantly changed “the social landscape” and the enormously increased “volume of human traffic” provided a new conduit for spreading acute infectious disease.98 What Kelton calls the Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic of 1696 killed tens of thousands of Native people throughout the region by 1700.99 By the turn of the century, only about two thousand Powhatans and other Indigenous people remained alive in Virginia.100 The combined horrors of colonialism likely caused more than a hundred thousand Native deaths in the Southeast between 1685 and 1715.101

EARLY WARS, ENSLAVEMENT, AND DISEASE IN THE NORTHEAST

In 1608, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec. For almost a century, French traders exchanged “guns, metal and glass goods, brandy, and foodstuffs” for moose hides and, more recently, pelts with the Mi’kmaq nation of what is today Nova Scotia.102 Dietary change, malnutrition, excessive alcohol consumption, and increased susceptibility to disease had killed thousands—more likely, tens of thousands—of Mi’kmaqs by the early 1610s.103 The subsequent expansion of the French fur trade with the Wendat (Huron) in present-day Ontario led to the spread of disease and the arming of these Native allies for attacks on the Haudenosaunee confederacy, some of whom lived in what is today New York State. In the 1630s, smallpox killed as many as ten thousand Wendats, and hundreds of others died in battles.104 About ten thousand Haudenosaunee people also perished from smallpox in the same decade.105 The Wendats eventually lost their ancestral homelands, and many of them migrated to other lands, including the present-day United States.106 After the Inoca (Illinois) Confederacy began trading goods and captives with the French, they lost between 7,500 and 17,500 people to calamitous epidemics and war with the Haudenosaunees and Mesquakies (Fox).107 Many members of these nations also died in wars with the French and their Native allies.108

In 1620, English settlers founded Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts. Four years before their arrival, an acute epidemic had killed thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of Wampanoag, Pawtucket, Abnaki, and Massachuset people along the coast.109 In 1624, the Dutch established a settlement at New Amsterdam in what is now Manhattan. In 1630, the English founded Massachusetts Bay Colony near present-day Boston. Three years later, a smallpox epidemic devastated the Indigenous nations in the areas near the English settlements and the Pequots and Mohegans in what became Connecticut and the Haudenosaunees in present-day New York State. Tens of thousands of Native people died, as did a much smaller number of settlers.110 Other diseases followed, as did violent conflicts. After Pequots killed an English trader during a commercial dispute with the Dutch in 1634, Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders refused to accept restitution and exploited the crisis to seize additional Pequot lands. The colonizers launched what Dunbar-Ortiz has called “a hideous war of annihilation.”111 The Pequot War of 1636–37 resulted in 1,500 to 1,800 Native deaths.112

Between 1643 and 1645, Dutch settlers sought to exterminate Lenapes (Delawares) and other Indigenous peoples who resisted encroachments on their land and refused to pay tribute. Along with English and Mohawk allies, the Dutch killed more than 1,600 Lenapes.113 In 1675, the Wampanoag chief Metacom led his nation, the Narragansetts, and the Nipmucks in a sustained assault on the English colonies in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.114 During what became known as King Philip’s War, the settlers recruited Native allies and formed the first ranger forces to engage in “wilderness warfare” against their Indigenous enemies.115 Colonial officials began paying bounties for the scalps of Native men, women, and children.116 Metacom’s forces threatened the survival of these colonies but were eventually defeated. About six thousand Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck people were killed, and about three thousand settlers died before the war finally ended.117 The historic defeat suffered by these Indigenous peoples opened the door to the expansion of the New England colonies during the next half-century.118 The ensuing loss of Native peoples’ “land base … hunting grounds, and fisheries” led to more poverty, malnutrition, and vulnerability to disease.119 By the end of the century, New England’s Indigenous population had declined from at least 70,000 in 1600 to about 12,000.120

THE DESTRUCTION OF NATIVE PEOPLES IN NUEVO MÉXICO AND LA FLORIDA

Five years after King Philip’s War began, the Pueblo peoples in Santa Fe de Nuevo México revolted against the Spanish colonizers. For eight decades, these invaders had subjected the Pueblo to violence and abuse, required tribute or labor from them, promoted the slave trade, and benefited from their impoverishment.121 During this time, smallpox, typhus, and other diseases had greatly diminished the Native population.122 When the Pueblo rose up in 1680, they lost about three hundred people but killed about four hundred Spaniards and forced the surviving settlers to flee to El Paso.123 Nine years later, soldiers led by the Spanish governor attempted to reconquer the region. They destroyed the main village, Tsiya (Zia), and killed about six hundred inhabitants but were not strong enough to reconquer the other towns and had to withdraw.124 However, in 1692, a new Spanish governor returned with three hundred troops, attacked the town of Jemez, and killed eighty-four people.125 The Spaniards violently repressed other Indigenous resistance and reestablished control of the region by 1696.126 Only about 15,000 Pueblo people remained alive at the end of the seventeenth century.127

In Spanish Florida, the growth of missions and trade proved to be deadly for Indigenous communities in the seventeenth century.128 The Spaniards did far more than proselytize the many Timucuas, Apalachees, and Guales they reached. As in the Southwest, the Spaniards required tribute and labor by Natives, which, combined with dietary changes, malnutrition, and poor health, reduced their resistance to diseases.129 At the same time, Spanish colonialism also “removed buffer zones that had previously separated the Timucuas, the Apalachees, and the Guales” and these communities “became links in a chain of supplies traveling to and from St. Augustine,” and from other countries and other colonies.130 This transformation of the “social landscape” in Florida fostered the transmission of European pathogens to Indigenous communities, and the results were devastating.131 Beginning in 1617, smallpox and other epidemics struck Natives repeatedly, killing perhaps scores of thousands.132 Decades later, slave raids by English settlers from the Carolina colony and their Indigenous allies struck new blows against the Natives of Florida.133 By the mid-eighteenth century, the Timucuas, Apalachees, Guales, and other original inhabitants of Florida had been virtually wiped out.134

FROM KING WILLIAM’S WAR TO THE YAMASEE WAR

Many Indigenous people died during the four colonial wars fought by England (Britain after the Act of Union in 1707), France, and Spain for control of North America between 1689 and 1763. During King William’s War of 1689–97, the first colonial war between the English and the French, between two thousand and six thousand members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy perished when French and allied Native forces destroyed their villages during the conflict.135 Hundreds of other Indigenous peoples allied with France also died.136 By the time that representatives of forty Indigenous nations met in Montreal in 1701 to end long-standing hostilities among themselves and with the French, war and diseases had already substantially reduced their numbers.137

During Queen Anne’s War of 1702–1713, which pitted the English against the Spaniards and the French, Native peoples “suffered the greatest.”138 In 1703–1704, English settlers and Muscogee (Creek) allies killed more than 1,100 Apalachee people in Spanish missions in Florida and enslaved several thousand others.139 As Gary Clayton Anderson has pointed out, the war “left virtually all of Spanish Florida in ruins and the lands of the Indians nearly vacated.”140 In 1712, a contingent of French troops and several hundred Ottawa and Potawatomi fighters near Detroit killed about one thousand Mesquakies and Mascoutens, whom they viewed as potential British allies.141 By then, the Tuscaroras in North Carolina had begun to fight back against the British settlers who were seizing more of their lands and spreading deadly diseases.

During the Tuscarora War of 1711–13, more than 220 settlers and soldiers and thirty-five Yamasee allies perished.142 About 1,400 Tuscaroras and allied Corees died, and another thousand were enslaved.143 Most Tuscarora survivors migrated to New York and became part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.144 The Yamasees, who had already lost many people to smallpox and other epidemics, soon learned that their alliance with the colonizers provided little benefit.145 After settlers and speculators began taking control of their lands in South Carolina and colonial traders’ fraud and brutality mounted, the Yamasees acted to defend themselves. During the Yamasee War of 1715–18, they joined with Muscogees, Catawbas, Apalachees, and other Indigenous peoples to attack colonial settlements. Together, the Indigenous forces killed about four hundred settlers, but about three hundred Yamasees died or were enslaved.146 Yamasee survivors fled to what is now Georgia and Florida. The massive Indigenous depopulation in the Southeast largely ended the British trade in captured Natives and led them to increasingly rely on the labor of enslaved Africans.147

NEW FRENCH AGGRESSION FROM THE GREAT LAKES TO MISSISSIPPI

A decade after the Yamasee War, French colonizers and their allies struck new blows against Indigenous people in present-day Wisconsin, Illinois, and Mississippi. Although the Mesquakies had made peace with the French in 1716, the colonizers refused to free enslaved members of their nation or abandon the lucrative slave trade.148 In turn, the Mesquakies renewed their interference with the French fur trade in the Mississippi Valley and areas to the West.149 In 1727, the French encouraged their Inoca, Anishinaabe (Ojibway), and Ottawa allies to launch new slave raids against these old enemies, and a new war began.150 In 1730, French troops and Native fighters massacred about five hundred Mesquakies in what is now Illinois.151 The following year, another three hundred died at the hands of France’s Indigenous allies.152 In sum, several thousand Mesquakies had died by the early 1730s.153 The few survivors joined the Sauk people, and both nations then migrated to the land that became Iowa.154 In present-day Mississippi, war erupted in 1729 when the Natchez people refused the French Louisiana commander’s order to abandon their main village so he could expand his plantation. Natchez fighters burned a French fort and killed more than 230 settlers, but the French soon counterattacked with the help of artillery and Choctaw allies. By early 1730, several hundred Natchez people had died, and the survivors were defeated and forced to leave their lands.155

NEW EPIDEMICS AND EUROPEAN CONFLICTS OVER NATIVE LANDS

British settlers established the colony of Georgia in 1732. The Spaniards considered this an illegal occupation of their land, and tensions mounted. Before long, both groups of colonizers were appealing to the Tsalagis in Georgia for support. Governor James Oglethorpe’s soldiers and their Indigenous allies began attacking Spanish plantations in northern Florida and killing Native people and escaped enslaved people.156 At the same time, new waves of disease were decimating Indigenous communities across the continent. In 1731–32, a new smallpox epidemic killed many Haudenosaunees and forced others to migrate and settle near Massachusetts and New Hampshire.157 In the mid-1730s, smallpox struck the Great Lakes region, killing about two thousand Anishinaabes and about 75 percent of the Arikaras.158 Smallpox reportedly killed several thousand Tsalagis in the Carolinas in 1738–39.159 A series of smallpox epidemics also erupted in what is now California and Texas and caused many deaths in the 1730s and the following decades.160

KING GEORGE’S WAR AND THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

The War of Jenkins’s Ear between Britain and Spain erupted in 1739 and was the prelude to King George’s War between Britain and France, 1744–48.161 These two conflicts were bloody and Indigenous people were not “unscathed in body or goods,” though the total number of their deaths in this conflict remains unknown.162 The French and Indian War of 1754–63, part of the Seven Years’ War and the final colonial war between Britain and France, proved disastrous for Indigenous people. Abenakis, Mi’kmaqs, Anishinaabes, Ottawas, Lenapes, Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots, and other Native nations supported the French, though some of these nations withdrew from the conflict in 1758. Although divided over the war, most Haudenosaunees joined the Catawbas and other Indigenous peoples to back the British.163 Tsalagis initially fought alongside the British but turned against them after repeated attacks by their ostensible allies.164 The offering of bounties for scalps in some British colonies encouraged frontiersmen to join local militias and ranger groups and kill as many Native people as possible.165

Hundreds of Tsalagis died violently, and many more perished from disease and starvation during the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760–61, “a distinct conflict within the Seven Years’ War.”166 By the mid-1760s, the Tsalagi population had declined by about two thousand during the previous two decades.167 How many Anishinaabes, Menominees, Potawatomis, and Ho-Chunks (Winnebagos) died in combat is unknown, but more than 750 Catawbas and three hundred Menominees died from the smallpox epidemic, which the French and Indian War helped to spread.168 The total number of Indigenous deaths from violence or disease during the war likely exceeded three thousand.169 Britain’s victory made it the predominant power in the eastern part of North America. But in the aftermath of the French defeat, the Ottawa chief Obwandiyag (Pontiac) launched a formidable rebellion to prevent British expansion in the Great Lakes region. Potawatomies, Wyandots, Anishinaabes, Kickapoos, Miamis, Senecas, and other local Native nations joined the Ottawas in what was called Pontiac’s War.170 The conflict lasted from 1763 to 1765 and resulted in the deaths of perhaps 2,500 British settlers and soldiers and untold numbers of Native people.171 Unable to defeat Obwandiyag and his allies, the British negotiated a peace treaty and issued the Proclamation of 1763, which pledged to prohibit colonial settlement west of a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains.172

THE COLONIZATION OF CALIFORNIA, THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, AND HAWAI‘I

When the Spaniards established their first mission in San Diego in 1769, the Indigenous population of California was approximately 310,000.173 This population declined to about 245,000 during the next six decades because of enslavement and violence by the missions, reduction of food supplies, diseases, and physical and social disruptions.174 The Native population of the Pacific Northwest was approximately 180,000 in the mid-1770s when smallpox appeared, perhaps conveyed by Spanish expeditions landing along the coast.175 About 25,000 Indigenous people in the area likely died from the disease in the next several years.176 In the mid-1770s and early 1780s, smallpox also killed an estimated 13,000 Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras in the Great Lakes region, approximately 10,000 Native people on the Plains, about 9,000 Pueblo and Nermernuh (Comanche) people in New Mexico, and thousands of other Indigenous people in present-day Texas and Arizona.177 Thousands of miles away, the arrival of British explorer James Cook in Hawai‘i in 1778 unleashed diseases that reduced the population of about 683,000 by almost 485,000 in a little more than four decades.178

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

During the War of Independence from 1775 to 1783, both the insurgents and the British Crown sought support from Native peoples. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was divided. Most Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas joined British and Loyalist troops while Oneidas and Tuscaroras aligned with the insurgents. The Tsalagis were also split, with some backing the Crown and others seeking peace with the rebels. Shawnees, Wyandots, Miamis, Chickasaws, and Choctaws supported the British, but Stockbridge Mohegans and Potawamis fought with the pro-independence forces.179 Like the previous European colonial wars, the War of Independence was devastating for several Indigenous nations. In 1776–77, colonial militias destroyed dozens of Tsalagi towns and killed hundreds of their people in Tennessee.180 One hundred or more Haudenosaunee warriors died in a battle against U.S. soldiers in Oriskany, New York, in 1777.181

The new U.S. government signed a peace treaty with the Lenapes to obtain their support during the conflict but did not honor it for long, setting an ominous precedent.182 In 1778, Major General John Sullivan’s troops burned dozens of Haudenosaunee towns in New York and killed between 473 and 580 people.183 The loss of their homes and food supplies led to thousands of other Haudenosaunee deaths.184 In March 1782, a Pennsylvania militia massacred almost one hundred Lenape people in Gnadenhütten, Ohio, and the colonizers committed other massacres elsewhere.185 Close to six thousand Indigenous people died because of the War of Independence.186

U.S. EXPANSIONISM AND WAR IN THE OLD NORTHWEST, KENTUCKY, AND TENNESSEE

The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war and recognized the independence of the United States. But as Dunbar-Ortiz has emphasized, this “did not end military actions against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained violent colonization of the continent.”187 Although Russia established a settlement in Alaska in 1784 and Spain still claimed much of North America, it was the United States, “the first new nation” to free itself from European rule, that successfully built a new empire in the following decades.188

The newly independent U.S. government immediately demanded land cessions from the Haudenosaunees and Indigenous nations in the Ohio River Valley. In the mid- and late-1780s, large numbers of U.S. settlers moved into the western frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania, the Old Northwest Territory ceded by Britain, the part of Virginia now known as Kentucky, and other areas inhabited by Native peoples.189 In response to the demands for land cessions and the influx of settlers, about a dozen Indigenous nations formed an alliance to defend themselves and their homes.190 Although a small number of Native leaders signed concessionary treaties with the U.S. government, most did not, and some began attacking settlers.191 In 1786–87, U.S. soldiers and militias burned several Indigenous towns and killed hundreds of their people in Ohio country.192

By 1789, Miami, Shawnee, and other Native fighters had killed approximately 1,500 settlers in the region.193 President George Washington ordered a massive military campaign that led to a conflict known as Little Turtle’s War, or the Northwest Indian War of 1790–95. In two battles in Indiana Territory in late 1790, the Miamis led by Little Turtle and the Shawnees led by Blue Jacket defeated U.S. forces sent to subdue them, killing more than 180.194 The following year, a large Native army killed more than six hundred soldiers and militia and about two hundred camp followers at the U.S. post at the Wabash River in Ohio.195 Indigenous warriors usually prevailed in intermittent skirmishes during the next two years. But in 1794, General “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s troops destroyed Shawnee villages and fields and killed noncombatants along the way.196 The U.S. forces defeated their adversaries at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near present-day Toledo.197 All told, the United States lost more than one thousand lives during the conflict, and the Indigenous peoples lost more than three hundred.198 Most vanquished nations agreed to peace terms in 1795 and sold much of their land to the United States, but Native resistance in the region was not extinguished.199 Many more Indigenous people had died fighting the settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee from 1787 to 1795.200

GROWING THREATS TO NATIVE PEOPLES IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Indigenous population of the coterminous United States had declined to about 600,000.201 War and disease took an additional huge toll in the first few decades of the new century. A new smallpox epidemic in 1801–1802 ravaged much of the central part of the continent, killing many Omahas, Poncas, Otos, Arikaras, Hidatsas, Mandans, Crows, and other Natives. The epidemic spread to the Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, and Texas as well, and thousands of Indigenous people died in these areas in the next several years.202 By this time, as Dunbar-Ortiz explains, land speculators aiming to profit from “sales of occupied Indigenous lands,” slave owners requiring “vast swaths of land for cash crops,” and settlers seeking new lands fueled a new era of relentless U.S. expansionism.203 During his two terms as president, Thomas Jefferson threatened violence, authorized bribes, and exploited mounting Native problems with debt and alcohol to obtain about 200,000 square miles of Indigenous lands through thirty-two treaties.204 Moreover, after purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, Jefferson began to support the removal of Native peoples from the southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi River.205

THE WARS OF 1812

As in the War of Independence, Indigenous people fought on both sides of the War of 1812. More fought alongside British soldiers than with U.S. troops, largely because Washington’s unrelenting drive to expel Natives from their lands led to “two parallel wars” between 1810 and 1815—one in the Old Northwest, and one in the Southeast.206 In the Ohio Country, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh led an alliance that included Miamis, Sauks, Mesquakies, Potawomis, Wyandots, Ho-Chunks, and other Indigenous peoples.207 Determined to defend their lands, this alliance began to attack U.S. settlements and military forces. In November 1811, soldiers and militia members defeated Tecumseh’s forces at Tippecanoe Creek in present-day Indiana. Almost 120 combatants died in the battle.208 Indigenous fighters killed more settlers in the first half of 1812, but some Native nations were afraid to join his alliance. After the War of 1812 began, Tecumseh aligned with the British. His forces seized Fort Dearborn near present-day Chicago, helped the British capture Detroit, and killed a total of about five hundred U.S. soldiers, militia members, and settlers.209 But Tecumseh died in the Battle of the Thames in Ontario in October 1813. Thousands of other Indigenous warriors and noncombatants perished in the coming year, while others returned to their homes afterward, concluding that the much larger and better armed U.S. forces could not be defeated.210

THE CREEK WAR AND THE INVASION OF FLORIDA

The Creek War of 1813–14 in the Southeast was also a ferocious conflict. Militant Muscogees, called Red Sticks because of their red war clubs, began attacking settlers in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee in 1812. They also attacked Muscogee accommodationists aligned with the U.S. government.211 The Red Sticks found considerable support among the Seminoles and communities of African Americans who had escaped slavery in northern Florida.212 In August 1813, the Red Sticks destroyed Fort Mims in present-day Alabama, killing as many as three hundred soldiers and settlers while losing as many as two hundred fighters.213 Three months later, soldiers and militia members killed about five hundred militant Muscogees in two battles. Between late November 1813 and late January 1814, U.S. forces and Muscogee allies killed another five hundred Red Sticks.214 In March 1814, General Andrew Jackson’s forces killed more than eight hundred Muscogee fighters, women, and children at Tohopeka, or Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama.215 Jackson’s approval of the murder of noncombatants and mutilation of Native bodies made clear that he was indeed “a genocidal sociopath.”216 Altogether, around two thousand Red Sticks died in combat, and many others died from starvation and disease during the war, while about seven hundred U.S. soldiers and settlers perished.217 Between 7,500 and 11,000 Native people died because of disease, combat, and related causes in the Wars of 1812.218 The subsequent peace treaty required the Muscogees—including those allied with the United States—to cede approximately 36,000 square miles in Georgia and Alabama.219

As Jeffrey Ostler has noted, the defeat of the Indigenous peoples in the Old Northwest and the Southeast “accelerated the process of western settlement and encouraged ever more aggressive designs on the territory of Native nations.”220 The U.S. government soon turned its attention to the Seminoles, African Americans, and Red Stick refugees in northern Florida. Officials in Washington were determined to crush Indigenous resistance, re-enslave the Black people, and replace the Spanish as the dominant power in Florida.221 In July 1816, soldiers and sailors and Muscogee allies attacked Negro Fort, a fortress inhabited largely by African Americans and some Seminoles. The destruction of Negro Fort was the opening battle in the First Seminole War of 1816–18 and resulted in more than 270 African American and Seminole deaths.222 In November 1817, after a few other small but deadly confrontations, the Seminoles killed forty-six soldiers and family members on a boat on the Apalachicola River.223 In the spring of 1818, Jackson’s troops and allies destroyed several Seminole towns, killed about forty Indigenous people in a Red Stick village on the Econfina River, and seized two Spanish forts.224 Spain ceded Florida to the United States the following year.

THE FORCED REMOVAL OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES FROM THE EASTERN UNITED STATES

Although Russia had established Fort Ross north of San Francisco in 1812 and begun to exploit Native peoples’ labor, its reach was quite limited, and it withdrew from the area in 1841.225 In 1821, the people of Mexico won their independence from Spain, yet this hardly entailed liberation for the Indigenous peoples there.226 However, the most significant threat to the Native population on the continent continued to come from the expanding U.S. Empire. Dunbar-Ortiz has explained:

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.227

Support for the relocation of all Indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi River grew in this country. Southern political leaders wanted Native lands to “build the slave labor empire” and “use enslaved people to produce cotton for global markets.”228 Northern political leaders supported the removal of Indigenous peoples from their region because their “free labor empire” required new lands for “speculators, canal developers, miners, and farmers”—and for “discontented urban workers.”229

Jackson became president in 1829 and was committed to the expulsion of Natives from their remaining lands in the East. After Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, approximately 64,000 Choctaws, Muscogees, Seminoles, Tsalagis, and Chickasaws were forcibly relocated from their remaining lands in the Southeast to the Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory.230 About 24,000 Wyandots, Ottawas, Ohio Senecas, Potawatomis, Miamis, Sauks, Mesquakies, Ho-Chunks, Shawnees, Anishinaabes, Kickapoos, and other Indigenous peoples were compulsorily removed from their homelands in the North and resettled in various locations west of the Mississippi River.231 Although about 85 percent of the Native people in the Southeast were forcibly relocated, only about 50 percent in the North suffered the same fate.232 Slaveholders believed they needed to deport all Indigenous people from the South, but capitalists, speculators, and farmers in the North could tolerate some Native communities.233 The forced relocations proved calamitous for virtually all the affected Indigenous peoples.

TRAILS OF TEARS AND DEATH

One Choctaw chief described the removal of his people from Mississippi to present-day Oklahoma in 1831–33 as a “trail of tears and death.”234 Approximately 2,500 Choctaws died from exposure, malnutrition, and disease while being deported or soon afterward.235 In 1832, a group of Sauks, Mesquakies, and allies led by the Sauk leader Black Hawk fought against their forced relocation from Illinois and Wisconsin. The Black Hawk War lasted several months and resulted in the deaths of as many as six hundred Indigenous people and about seventy U.S. fighters but did not prevent the Natives’ removal.236 The deportation of most Muscogees from Alabama occurred between 1834 and 1836, and Washington relied on state militia members and volunteers to capture or kill those who had fled to southern Alabama and western Florida. Approximately 4,500 Muscogees died during the removal process.237 In Florida, the Seminoles’ resistance to forced removal led to the Second Seminole War between 1835 and 1842. About two thousand soldiers, militia members, and noncombatants died.238 But the much larger U.S. forces killed about seven hundred Seminoles, deported sizeable groups amid the hostilities, and finally prevailed.239 As many as 1,300 Seminoles died while being removed from their homeland.240

The U.S. government began relocating Tsalagi people from their remaining lands in Georgia and Alabama in 1834, but most of the removal occurred in 1838–39. About two thousand died in internment camps awaiting deportation, and others perished on the trip to what is today northeast Oklahoma.241 Members of this nation later named the journey Nunna daul Tsunyi, which means “The trail where we cried.”242 Approximately five thousand Tsalagis died during the removal or shortly after arrival.243 The deportation of the Chickasaws in 1838 occurred during a smallpox epidemic and led to as many as six hundred fatalities.244 Altogether, the removal of the Native nations in the South resulted in more than 14,000 deaths.245 The forced relocation of the Native nations in the North, which involved considerably smaller numbers of people and took place over two decades, produced about three thousand fatalities.246 Many more deaths followed the removals. By 1860, the relocated southern Native nations had lost another ten thousand people, and the relocated northern Native nations had lost another nine thousand people.247 In addition, about three thousand Omahas, Oto-Missourias, Osages, Ioways, and Kanzas (Kaws) who already lived in what Ostler has called “zones of removal” perished between the 1840s and 1860.248

DISEASE, WAR, AND GENOCIDE: THE GREAT PLAINS, TEXAS, AND CALIFORNIA

War and disease brought by the colonizers were also laying waste to Indigenous nations in other parts of the continent. By the 1830s, the Nermernuh population had already declined by approximately twenty thousand in the previous several decades, primarily because of disease.249 In the early 1830s, as many as ten thousand Pawnees died in an epidemic.250 Then a massive outbreak of smallpox occurred along the Missouri River between 1836 and 1840 and spread to other regions.251 The Mandans were almost entirely wiped out, and losses were suffered by Piegans, Blackfeet, Bloods, Akiraras, Hidatsas, Pawnees, Osages, Crows, Assiniboines, Kiowas, Ho-Chunks, and the Sioux peoples.252 Farther south, the epidemic also killed many Apaches, Nermernuhs, and Cayuses, and reached New Mexico and Texas.253 Altogether, at least 17,000 Indigenous people, and possibly thousands more, died from smallpox in the central part of the continent between 1836 and 1840.254 In the 1830s, an outbreak of malaria killed perhaps 18,000 Chinooks and Kalapuyas in present-day Oregon.255

The Indigenous population of present-day Texas may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands before the European invasion but was reduced to between forty and fifty thousand by 1830.256 The spread of new diseases; wars with Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. settlers; malnutrition; and starvation had contributed to much of the depopulation.257 ,Some Native nations had become extinct or migrated by this time, but others had arrived in the area.258 In the 1820s and 1830s, hostile settlers forced the Karankawas and Tonkawas out of the lower Brazos and Colorado River valleys, killing about a hundred in the process.259 In 1836, the rebellion against Mexico by settlers and enslavers from the United States succeeded, and the Republic of Texas was created. Two years later, Texas president Mirabeau Lamar announced a campaign to exterminate or expel Indigenous peoples.260 The Texas Army and the newly formed Texas Rangers defeated and expelled the Kickapoos in 1838 and the Tsalagis and their allies in 1839. Several hundred Natives died during the fighting and subsequent flight.261 Caddos and Wichitas were also forced to leave their homelands. In 1839–40, Texas forces attacked the Nermernuhs, Kiowas, and Apaches, killing hundreds and leaving even larger numbers to die from exposure or starvation.262 Aggression against Natives continued after Texas became part of the United States in 1845.

In California, malaria and smallpox killed about 60,000 Indigenous people in the 1830s and early 1840s.263 What Sherburne Cook called “endemic disease, armed conflict, and destruction of food supply” caused another 40,000 deaths by the mid-1840s.264 The gravely reduced Native population of about 145,000 suffered even more catastrophe after the U.S. government, pursuing its putative “manifest destiny,” wrested control of California from Mexico during the War of 1846–48.265 The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about 80,000 new settlers to the territory before it became a state two years later.266 By 1860, more than 362,000 people lived in California, but the Indigenous population was rapidly declining.267 As Benjamin Madley has documented, between 1846 and 1873, soldiers, militia members, vigilantes, and individuals killed between 9,492 and 16,094 Native people “and probably many more.”268 Madley has rightly described these intentional killings as “an American genocide.”269 This horrific violence, the destruction of villages and food supplies, forced relocations, enslavement, and diseases resulted in approximately 115,000 Indigenous deaths during this period. The Achumawi, Atsugewi, Klamath, Ataxum (Luiseño), Maidu, Modoc, Nongatl, Paiute, Pomo, Shasta, Tolowa, Wintu, Wiyot, Yana, Yuki, Yurok, and other peoples sustained grave losses. By 1873, only about 30,000 Native people remained alive in California.270

In the decade and a half before the Civil War, other Native peoples languished because of conquest and colonization. When U.S. soldiers and settlers arrived in the New Mexico Territory in 1846, Pueblo and Diné people opposed them. U.S. troops and artillery quickly crushed the new Pueblo Revolt in Taos, killing about two hundred Indigenous people.271 Hundreds more died when smallpox struck the area again in 1852.272 Diné fighters in present-day Arizona and New Mexico engaged U.S. forces in small-scale combat between 1846 and 1860, and hundreds on both sides were killed.273 In present-day Oregon and Washington, the influx of settlers led to massacres and mounting violence in the late 1840s and the early 1850s.274 Measles, smallpox, and other diseases further decimated the Indigenous population there in the 1850s.275 During the Rogue River War of 1855–56, Takelmas, Tutunis, and their allies fought the invaders in southern Oregon but were defeated. About 250 Indigenous people and about a hundred settlers and soldiers died in the conflict.276 In the mid- and late-1850s, U.S. troops also fought Lakotas (Sioux) in present-day Wyoming; Nermernuhs and Kiowas in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas; and the remaining Seminoles in Florida. Hundreds more died in these confrontations.277

During the Civil War of 1861–65, the U.S. government fought against not only southern secessionists but also western Indigenous peoples who impeded the consolidation of its continental empire.278 Washington’s wars against the Apaches and Yavapais in Arizona and New Mexico began in 1861 and continued for the next twenty-five years. In the first decade alone, more than 1,750 Apaches, Yavapais, and allies were killed, and more than 450 U.S. soldiers and settlers lost their lives.279 In Minnesota in 1862, Dakota (Sioux) warriors led by Taoyetaduta (Little Crow) began attacking the settlers taking their farmland, forcing them onto small reservations, and condemning them to hunger.280 The Dakotas killed an estimated eight hundred settlers and soldiers in just a few months while losing perhaps 150 of their own people.281 A large U.S. military force soon suppressed the uprising, and President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in December 1862, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.282 Several hundred others died of starvation and disease while being relocated from Minnesota to the Dakota Territory in 1863.283 During the next two years, when U.S. troops pursued and engaged Dakota and Lakota combatants, as many as seven hundred Indigenous people and 110 soldiers and settlers died.284

By the fall of 1862, Shoshones, Paiutes, and Bannocks had been attacking settlers along the Oregon and California Trails for a decade, and the U.S. government acted to defend its westward expansion.285 In January 1863, a California militia massacred approximately 350 Shoshones in their village on the Bear River in Idaho, and hostilities ended later that year.286 But the larger, deadlier Snake War began several months later, and the Paiutes, Shoshones, and Bannocks fought U.S. forces in southwestern Idaho, central and southeastern Oregon, northwestern Nevada, and northeastern California.287 Approximately a thousand Indigenous people and two hundred settlers and soldiers were killed before the war ended five years later.288 By the late 1860s, more than two thousand people had died because of conflicts in Oregon in the previous two decades.289 In 1863–64, a regiment led by Kit Carson finally ended the resistance of the Diné people in Arizona and New Mexico. U.S. soldiers killed about three hundred fighters, burned their crops, and killed their livestock.290 With many people “freezing and starving,” the majority of Diné surrendered.291 More than eight thousand Diné people were forced to march three hundred miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation in eastern New Mexico. About two hundred people died during the relocation, and approximately three thousand died at Bosque Redondo, mainly from disease and malnutrition.292 Those who survived were allowed to return to their ancestral lands in 1868.

After silver was discovered in traditional Indigenous hunting grounds in Colorado, the state government acted to forcibly remove local nations. In 1864, the Colorado Cavalry massacred at least 137 Tsetchestahase (Cheyenne) people and twenty-six Arapahos at Sand Creek, Colorado, which began the Cheyenne War.293 The Sand Creek Massacre led to a large mobilization of Lakota, Tsetchestahase, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Nermernuh warriors against U.S. and Confederate forces across the plains from the Dakota Territory to Texas.294 From 1866 to 1868, Lakota Chief Mahpíya Lúta (Red Cloud) led the resistance against the construction of U.S. forts in Wyoming. The fighting resulted in the deaths of more than 240 U.S. people and more than 125 Natives.295 The U.S. government subsequently abandoned the forts, which the Lakotas and Tsetchestahases then burned. In November 1868, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and soldiers under his command massacred more than one hundred Tsetchestahases living on a reservation near the Washita River in what is now Oklahoma.296 More than 1,100 Native people, soldiers, and settlers had perished during the Cheyenne War by the end of the decade.297

In the summer and fall of 1869, Piegans killed fifty-six white miners in the Montana Territory, and the U.S. Army quickly took revenge.298 In January 1870, soldiers massacred 173 Piegans in a village near the Marias River.299 In April 1871, U.S. and Mexican civilians and Indigenous allies massacred 144 Apaches at Aravaipa in the Arizona Territory.300 Renewed resistance by the Apaches and Yavapais in present-day Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico led to the deaths of more than two hundred Indigenous people and more than five hundred U.S. and Mexican soldiers and settlers during the next several years.301 The Red River War of 1874–75 erupted in response to U.S. settlers slaughtering buffalo herds on the southern Plains. Tsetchestahase, Kiowa, and Nermernuh fighters conducted raids in western Kansas, north Texas, and New Mexico before being defeated by the U.S. Army and Texas Rangers. More than eighty Indigenous fighters and dozens of noncombatants were killed, and about two hundred settlers, soldiers, and Texas Rangers died.302 As Micheal Clodfelter noted, “The Red River War effectively ended frontier warfare on the southern Plains.”303 A quarter-century later, the U.S. Census listed only 470 Native people in Texas.304

In 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, and an influx of settlers and miners ensued. When the Lakota people refused to sell their sacred hunting grounds to the federal government, soldiers launched “preemptive strikes” to seize control of those lands.305 Thus began the Sioux War of 1876–77. When the Lakota people and their Tsetchestahase allies left their reservations to defend these lands, U.S. troops confronted them, and a series of violent encounters ensued. Dozens of Indigenous and U.S. combatants died in the first skirmishes.306 In June 1876, Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull) and Tasunke Witco (Crazy Horse) led Lakota warriors, along with Tsetchestahase and Arapaho fighters, in a massive assault on Custer’s troops near the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory. More than 260 soldiers, including Custer, and as many as one hundred Indigenous fighters perished.307 However, U.S. soldiers prevailed in the smaller battles that followed, and scores more Native people died.308 The Indigenous peoples’ resistance was overcome and the United States took possession of the Black Hills. Tatanka Yotanka and some Lakotas fled to Canada. Tasunke Witco surrendered in May 1877 and was killed in detention a few months later.309

That same year, many Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) people in Oregon refused the U.S. demand to move to a reservation in the Idaho Territory. Chief Joseph led several hundred warriors, women, and children on a 1,700-mile journey to Canada, where they hoped to find refuge.310 They fought soldiers and settlers intermittently as they traversed Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Approximately two hundred soldiers and settlers died, and more than two hundred Nimi’ipuu people perished along the way before they surrendered and were deported.311 In 1878, seventy-eight Bannocks and Paiutes and about forty soldiers and settlers died in battles in Oregon and Idaho.312 By the end of the century, only 35,000 to 40,000 Indigenous people remained alive in the Pacific Northwest, a decline of at least 140,000 since the mid-1770s.313 U.S. military actions against the Tsetchestahase people in Kansas and Nebraska in 1878–79 and against the Nuu-ci (Ute) people in northwestern Colorado in 1879 led to scores of additional deaths.314 Between 1881 and 1886, Nana and Goyaale (Geronimo) led Apache warriors into combat against U.S. and Mexican troops in Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. An estimated 630 fighters and noncombatants perished in the conflict.315 After the destruction of buffalo by U.S. forces, approximately six hundred Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) people starved in the northern Plains during the winter of 1883–84.316

By the late 1880s, Indigenous peoples in the United States had almost been annihilated. Largely confined to reservations, surviving Natives continued to suffer because of poverty, disease, the destruction of traditional ways of life, and the erasure of identity. Increasingly, white people forcibly took Indigenous children from their families and sent them to boarding schools that aimed to “kill the Indian and save the man.”317 Amid such misery and hopelessness, Natives on dozens of reservations participated in a religious resistance movement known as the Ghost Dance. Initiated by a Paiute mystic named Wovoka in Nevada, this movement urged them to perform the Ghost Dance, which, as Dunbar-Ortiz observed, “promised to restore the Indigenous world as it was before colonialism, making the invaders disappear and the buffalo return.”318 Many Lakota and Dakota people embraced the Ghost Dance, and Tatanka Yotanka, who had returned from Canada five years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, strongly supported it.319

U.S. government officials feared that the Ghost Dance movement might lead to the renewal of armed resistance by Indigenous peoples.320 As a result, U.S. and allied forces moved against Tatanka Yotanka and against Natives still living outside reservations, who were derided as “fomenters of disturbance.”321 Following government orders, Lakota police at the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota attempted to arrest Tatanka Yotanka in December 1890 and fatally shot him when his supporters resisted.322 Seven Ghost Dancers and six police also died in this incident.323 Numerous Lakotas fled their reservations, and soldiers were dispatched to force their return. On December 29, 1891, U.S. troops massacred as many as three hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee.324 This infamous atrocity marked the end of major Indigenous opposition to conquest and colonization. However, some limited but deadly skirmishes occurred during the next three decades.

In 1898, Anishinaabes on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota killed six soldiers and a Native police officer who were protecting loggers cutting pine logs on their land.325 In 1907, a dispute over the dipping of sheep turned into a confrontation near Fort Defiance, Arizona, which left three Diné dead and a dozen others sent to military prison.326 Two years later, allegations of theft of a wagon of smoked meat in Hickory Ground, Oklahoma, led to local deputies killing several Muscogees and their African American neighbors. Two deputies also died in the conflict.327 In 1911, a group of Paiutes left their reservation in Nevada and killed four settlers. A posse tracked down the Paiutes and killed nine of them, suffering one fatality.328

In 1914–15, Paiute and Nuu-ci people fought briefly against settlers and Diné policemen in Utah and Colorado before surrendering to soldiers. A total of six people died.329 In 1918, a band of Yaquis briefly fought U.S. forces in Bear Valley, Arizona, resulting in the death of the Yaqui leader.330 In 1923, Chief Posey led a small number of Paiute and Nuu-ci people in another conflict with settlers in Utah. The Native fighters were defeated, and Chief Posey later died from wounds suffered in battle.331

The Indigenous population in this country reached its nadir during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The Census Bureau reported that the number of Native people in the coterminous United States was approximately 237,000 in 1900.332 The Apalachee, Calusa, Erie, Guale, Karankawa, Massachuset, Mobile, Susquehannock, Timucua, Tompiro, Wappinger, Yahi Yana, Yamasee, Yazoo, and other Indigenous nations had been driven to extinction.333 By 1900, only about 28,000 Indigenous people remained in Alaska, and by 1920 just under 24,000 Native people were alive in Hawai‘i .334 As noted earlier in this chapter, the Tainos of Puerto Rico had been all but wiped out by the mid-sixteenth century. Thus, in the lands that became the United States, the Native population of about six million in 1492 was reduced to less than 300,000 at the dawn of the twentieth century.335

Finally, the Native population in this country and the hemisphere began to grow again in the early twentieth century.336 In 2018, the U.S. Census Bureau identified almost 6.8 million people as American Indians and Alaska Natives.337 There are also more than 560,000 Native Hawaiians living in this country.338 As Thornton has pointed out, the demographic recovery of the Native population in the United States has been significant, but “much of the increase in the number of American Indians” in recent decades “was a result of changing racial definitions from one census to another.”339 Today, at least 54 million Indigenous people live throughout the Western Hemisphere.340

Although the “Indian Wars” have ended, the Indigenous Holocaust has not.341 Various forms of violence have continued to destroy Native lives. Thousands of Indigenous men served in the U.S. armed forces during the twentieth century, and many lost their lives in the empire’s wars abroad. At least 360 Native Americans and possibly hundreds more died in action in the First World War. Approximately 550 perished in the Second World War. About 104 died in the Korean War, and about 226 were killed in the Vietnam War. At least three died in the Persian Gulf War, approximately thirty perished in the Afghanistan War, and about forty-three died in the Iraq War.342

Between 1900 and 2006, there were fifty-eight executions of Indigenous persons, bringing the official total since 1639 to 464.343 In the 1920s, white racists murdered scores of Osage people in Oklahoma in a far-reaching criminal conspiracy after the discovery of oil on their reservation earned them scores of millions of dollars.344 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, renewed Native resistance led to the occupation of Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee and efforts to defend Lakota people against corrupt tribal leaders supported by the federal government.345 Washington and its allies were responsible for the deaths of more than sixty Indigenous activists fighting for sovereignty and self-determination during this period.346

Today police kill about twenty Indigenous people each year, a per capita rate that exceeds that of African Americans.347 Native people are now incarcerated at four times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, and scores die each year in jails and prisons.348 Homicide rates are about four times higher for Indigenous peoples than for non-Hispanic white people.349 Untold thousands of Indigenous women have gone missing in the past several decades, many of whom were murdered.350 And Native people have the highest suicide rate in the United States.351

Vastly larger numbers of Indigenous people have perished since 1900 as a result of diseases, deprivation, and other perils inherent in the “colonial condition” and institutionalized racism.352 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mortality rate among Native peoples in the coterminous United States was about 58 percent higher than that of the white population.353 The forced enrollment of scores of thousands of Native children in assimilationist boarding schools continued well into the twentieth century, and as many as 40,000 died from inadequate food and clothing, disease, and abuse, exposure after escaping, and related causes.354 In 1916, approximately 60 percent of all Indigenous children died within the first five years of life.355 At least eight thousand Indigenous people died from the Spanish flu in the continental United States in 1918–19.356 In 1924, a new federal law recognized Indigenous people as citizens but did not guarantee their right to vote or significantly improve their lives.357 Hundreds of Diné men who mined uranium in the western United States between the 1940s and the 1980s died from radiation exposure.358 Native fatalities caused by residing near abandoned uranium mines, toxic dumps, and other environmental dangers have not been counted but are likely considerable.359

In 1957, data on five leading causes of death among Natives indicated that their excess mortality rate was more than 60 percent.360 Although the creation of the Indian Health Service led to some improvements in the 1960s and 1970s, limited funding for medical services has contributed to deteriorating conditions for Indigenous peoples since then.361 In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the mortality rate among Indigenous peoples in the continental United States is about 46 percent higher than that of non-Hispanic whites, and the mortality rate among Native Hawaiians is more than 40 percent higher than that of whites.362 Indigenous infants are twice as likely to die in their first year as white infants.363 Native children between the ages of one and four years die at almost three times the rate of other children.364 Indigenous people die from diabetes, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and accidents at least three times the national rate, and their rate of deaths from heart disease, influenza and pneumonia, and tuberculosis exceeds that of the general population.365

The vast numbers of Native deaths that occur each year because of disease, deprivation, and related conditions should be understood as social murders. As Engels wrote in 1845:

When society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.366

The federal government did not collect mortality statistics for the entire United States until 1933, Indigenous deaths have not always been recorded, and many Native decedents have been misidentified as members of another racial or ethnic group.367 Nonetheless, available information on mortality rates and estimates of the total number of Native deaths since the 1930s makes it possible to estimate the minimum number of excess deaths during this period.

The concept of “excess” deaths refers to the difference between the actual number of Native deaths and the number of deaths that would have occurred if Natives experienced the same death rate as whites.368 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that approximately 329,000 Native deaths occurred in the continental United States and Alaska between 1999 and 2019.369 About 46 percent of this total, more than 151,300, were excess deaths. If the same excess death rate is applied to the approximately 362,000 Indigenous people who were alive in the coterminous United States and Alaska in 1930 but, with rare exceptions, died before 1999, it appears that there were over 166,500 excess deaths in this cohort.370 In sum, at least 317,000 excess Indigenous deaths have occurred in the continental United States since 1930. This estimate is quite conservative because it uses the more recent 46 percent excess mortality rate and does not include the excess deaths of Native Hawaiians during this period. Uncounted thousands of additional excess deaths must have occurred in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

As late as the mid-1970s, about 25 percent of Native children were routinely taken away from their parents and placed in foster or adoptive homes or boarding schools.371 As in previous generations, white authorities sought to promote assimilation, not the welfare of the children.372 Between 1970 and 1976, physicians sterilized about 25 percent of Indigenous women of childbearing age.373 As Brianna Theobald has remarked, “Some of these procedures were performed under pressure or duress, or without the women’s knowledge or understanding.”374 About sixty of the 175 Native languages still in use in 1998 disappeared in the next two decades.375 More recently, state and federal officials have violated the lands and traditional ways of life of the Lakota people to build the Dakota Access Pipeline in South Dakota and done the same to the Carrizo/Comecrudo nation to build sections of Trump’s border wall in South Texas.376 Racist stereotypes of Native peoples continue to permeate the media, and some professional and college sports teams continue to use racist names and mascots.377

However, there is growing public awareness of the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust. Thousands of people from diverse backgrounds joined the water protectors at Standing Rock in 2016–17.378 And by 2019, seven states and more than 130 cities were honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day.379 One poll indicated that 79 percent of college students support this change.380 Ironically, these positive developments come amid mounting evidence of the assimilation of Native peoples into the society that almost exterminated them. The 2010 census revealed that 44 percent of those labeled American Indians and Alaska Natives reported multiracial ancestry.381 Approximately 62 percent of those identifying as Native Hawaiian also claim mixed heritage.382 In addition, almost 60 percent of Indigenous people in this country are marrying people from different national, racial, and ethnic groups.383 More than 70 percent now live in metropolitan areas.384 As Thornton has warned, “If these trends continue, both the genetic and tribal distinctiveness of the total Native American population will be greatly lessened.”385

How many people have perished in the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust in the present-day United States during the past five centuries? The total number of Native people who died in these lands because of invasion, conquest, colonialism, and related forms of oppression will never be known. Nonetheless, an informed and reasonable estimate can be advanced. If the Native population in what later became the coterminous United States was more than five million in 1492 and declined to about 237,000 in 1900, the loss of Indigenous lives in this country would initially appear to be around five million people. However, as Thornton has emphasized,

Such a population decline implies not only that some 5 million American Indians died during the 400 years but also that, in fact, many times the approximate figure of 5 million died, as new but ever numerically smaller generations of American Indians were born, lived, and died.386

In his books and articles, Thornton has not estimated the total number of Native deaths in this country, but he has recently suggested that perhaps twelve million Indigenous deaths occurred in the present-day coterminous United States between 1492 and 1900.387

To this staggering number must be added almost 800,000 deaths in Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawai‘i by 1900 and well over 300,000 excess deaths in the continental United States since the 1930s.388 In sum, the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust in what is now the United States may be estimated to have taken more than thirteen million lives, and it continues today. This horrific toll is only a small portion of the number of Native deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere since 1492. In addition to the approximately fifty-six million who died throughout the Americas by 1600, millions more died in “new but ever numerically smaller generations” during the next three centuries.389 Still others have perished because of state violence or social murders since 1900. It may be roughly estimated that between seventy million and eighty million Indigenous people have died because of colonialism, racism, and capitalism in the Western Hemisphere.390 Tragically, the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust in this country was only the first of the endless holocausts that have made the U.S. Empire what it is today.

The African American Holocaust

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ADDRESS IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, 1852

In the early sixteenth century, the massive decline of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere forced the European colonizers to begin importing captive people from Africa to labor for them.1 Marx observed in Capital that, like the oppression of Indigenous people in the Americas, “the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins” was one of the “chief moments of primitive accumulation” that made capitalist production possible.2 For 350 years, the wealth produced by enslaved Black people enriched Europe and its colonies, including the lands that became the United States. This wealth helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, fostered the global ascendancy of these regions, and contributed to the “Great Divergence” between wealthy and poor nations.3

As David Brion Davis has emphasized, the transatlantic slave trade “ranks as one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity.”4 The Maafa resulted in a catastrophic loss of life in Africa, the Americas, and the present-day United States.5 Vast numbers of Black people born in this country and other parts of the Western Hemisphere died because of the brutality and harshness of life under slavery.6 Many more have perished in the United States since the end of slavery because of various forms of white supremacist violence, poor health conditions rooted in racism, convict labor, mass incarceration, criminal homicides, participation in imperialist wars, and related forms of oppression.7 Despite some important social and political progress in the twentieth century, the African American Holocaust continues today.

Africa before the Europeans

In 1500, Africa was home to a population of perhaps one hundred million people who lived in many different kingdoms, states, and tribes.8 Significant achievements in science, mathematics, engineering, and architecture occurred in ancient Egypt long before the rise of Greece and Rome.9 Other large, highly developed African societies arose later: Kush, Axum, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kongo among them.10 As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has pointed out, “The first iron technology in the world was developed in Africa.”11 Like many Indigenous peoples in North America, African farmers were skilled and productive.12 The continent was well endowed in natural resources, its diverse regions were traversed by trade routes, and commerce fostered by sub-Saharan and Arab merchants was significant.13 Gold exports from West Africa, Ghana, Mali, and Songhay helped promote economic development in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.14 Although many African peoples did not have written languages, their distinctive oral communications and histories were highly effective.15 Other African peoples had been using written languages for thousands of years.16 By the fourteenth century, the Islamic madrassa, known as the University of Sankore in Timbuktu, was a prominent center of learning that housed an extraordinary library.17

Slavery was traditional and widespread in Africa. Alexander Ives Bortolot has explained that “private land ownership was largely absent from precolonial African societies, and slaves were one of the few forms of wealth-producing property an individual could possess.”18 Ruling elites and tribal groups generally fought to extend their control over people and resources, and enslavement through war and raids was a long-standing characteristic of African life.19

As various researchers have remarked, enslaved people in Africa were traditionally given some rights, and their treatment generally was not as heinous as that suffered by those who were forcibly transported to other lands.20 Nonetheless, it was still bondage.21 The Arab slave trade, which began in the seventh century and lasted 1,200 years, forcibly transported between nine million and twelve million Africans to Muslim North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, islands in the Indian Ocean, and the Indian subcontinent.22

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Portuguese traders began shipping African captives to Europe in 1444, chiefly for use as domestic servants.23 By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were transporting Black people to the Atlantic islands off the western coast of Africa.24 Shortly after papal decrees articulated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” new Vatican edicts and a treaty between Spain and Portugal gave Spain the exclusive right to explore and trade with the “new world”—except for present-day Brazil—and gave Portugal the exclusive right to explore and trade with Africa and other non-Christian regions of the “old world.”25 These two countries would dominate the transatlantic slave trade for the next century and a half.26 Spain began sending enslaved Africans from Europe to Hispaniola in 1501.27 As the large-scale depopulation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas unfolded and the colonizers’ need for enslaved labor grew, Madrid contracted with Lisbon to deliver Africans to the Caribbean.28 In 1526, the Portuguese transported enslaved people from Africa directly to the Caribbean for the first time.29 In the years that followed, Portugal transported millions of Black people to various colonies in the Western Hemisphere.30 Many died in Africa during Portuguese military interventions to establish colonies and dominate local states.31 In the following centuries, a much larger number perished as the Netherlands, Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Brandenburg (Prussia), the United States, and Brazil joined in the transatlantic slave trade.32 While traditional African slavery and the Arab slave trade continued, the transatlantic trade fostered the transformation of slavery into a mode of production on much of the continent.33 Martin Klein observed: “Slave trading and slave production became the most important economic activities for many African states.”34

A Dutch ship’s delivery of about twenty Africans to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 is widely but incorrectly regarded as the origin of slavery in what is today the United States. More than a century earlier, in 1512, the Spaniards had begun transporting enslaved Africans from Europe to Puerto Rico.35 Vázquez de Ayllón brought about a hundred of the enslaved to his ill-fated settlement in present-day Georgia in 1526, and their revolt helped to bring about its collapse.36 In 1528, an enslaved African named Estevanico survived Narváez’s doomed voyage to present-day Tampa Bay and accompanied Cabeza de Vaca and two other survivors on their arduous six-year journey to Spanish settlements in what is now Mexico.37 In May 1539, Black people held in bondage accompanied de Soto’s expedition in what is today the southeastern United States.38 After the first permanent Spanish city was founded in St. Augustine in 1565, slave labor played a major role in the economic development of Spanish Florida.39 British colonists initially treated Black people like indentured servants, but race-based slavery developed within a few decades.40 The Dutch began importing African captives to New Amsterdam (New York City) in 1626.41 As labor shortages grew and the limits of indentured European servants became clearer, the British began transporting larger numbers of Africans to their colonies in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland.42 The French began importing African captives to the Louisiana Territory in 1710.43 Paul Lovejoy has noted, “In the Americas, the primary purpose of slave labor was the production of staple commodities—sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, cotton, gold, and silver—for sale on world markets.”44

THE NUMBER OF AFRICANS FORCIBLY TRANSPORTED TO THE AMERICAS

Various researchers have estimated that between fifteen and twenty million Africans were forcibly deported to the Western Hemisphere between 1501 and 1867.45 However, in The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, a seminal work published in 1969, Philip Curtin critically interrogated these appraisals and developed a significantly lower estimate. Curtin calculated that approximately 9.5 million Africans had been imported to the Western Hemisphere and acknowledged that this assessment was only “within a range of possibility” and subject to revision.46 Curtin also said that perhaps 12 to 15 percent of those transported from Africa had died during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean.47 This meant that about eleven million Africans had originally been deported from their continent.48 Many scholars have praised Curtin for rejecting previous larger estimates based on speculation and developing estimates based on concrete historical information such as shipping records, supply records, and port and colony documents.49 However, debate and controversy over the number of enslaved and transported Africans did not subside. Ibrahima Baba Kake has criticized “revisionists” like Curtin, who, when writing about the transatlantic slave trade, “minimize both its scale and its consequences.”50 The Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney famously argued:

Any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on surviving records is bound to be low because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data).51

In addition, Joseph E. Inikori has challenged Curtin’s data and methodology, pointing out that the records Curtin studied did not include information on all slave ship voyages and suggested that the number of people forcibly removed from Africa could be much higher than he estimated.52 In the decades following the publication of Curtin’s book, new information about previously unknown slave ship voyages was discovered, and a great deal of new research has been conducted on the transatlantic slave trade.

More recently, David Eltis and David Richardson, working with a database that includes information on about 35,000 known transatlantic slave voyages, have estimated that about 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Western Hemisphere between 1500 and 1867.53 Eltis and Richardson have found that approximately 1.8 million died during the Middle Passage, and about 10.7 million arrived alive.54 The deaths on the voyage were largely the result of disease, malnutrition, dehydration, violence, physical abuse, despair, and suicide.55 As many as 100,000 died in revolts aboard slave ships or on African coasts.56 Other deaths occurred when slave ships sank.57 Some researchers consider the work by Eltis and Richardson to be the gold standard on the transatlantic slave trade.58

In contrast, Inikori, Yves Benot, and Nelly Schmidt have offered estimates of total deportations ranging from fifteen to eighteen million.59 These writers may prove to be right in the future. As Lovejoy wrote about Curtin’s allowance for adjustments to his own estimate, “The cautious historian expects that upward revision is more probable than downward.”60 Nonetheless, the Eltis-Richardson estimate of 12.5 million provides a helpful, if conservative, starting point for assessing the horrific loss of life associated with the transatlantic slave trade.

Over the centuries, most Black captives were transported to Brazil and the Caribbean.61 Eltis and Richardson have estimated the number directly transported from Africa to mainland North America over the centuries to be only around 391,000.62 In addition, approximately 72,000 Africans were brought to mainland North America from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica and Barbados, between 1619 and 1807.63 About fifty thousand Black people were also transported to Puerto Rico.64 In sum, more than half a million Africans arrived in the present-day United States.65 They represented a little over 5 percent of the total number brought to the Western Hemisphere and were primarily disembarked in the Carolinas-Georgia area, the Chesapeake, the northern United States, and the Mississippi-Florida area.66

ESTIMATES OF DEATHS IN THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

The death toll from the transatlantic slave trade in Africa, the Western Hemisphere, and the lands that became the United States was nothing less than a holocaust. Curtin has pointed out:

The cost of the slave trade in human life was many times the number of slaves landed in the Americas. For every slave landed alive, other people died in warfare, along the bush paths leading to the coast, awaiting shipment, or in the crowded and unsanitary conditions of the Middle Passage. Once in the New World, still others died on entering a new disease environment.67

Rodney has also contended that the overall mortality figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa.68 As Johannes Postma has remarked, Black people caught up in the slave trade “found death at every stage of their ordeal and, on the average, must have had a very short life expectancy.”69

A century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that approximately fifty million Africans died in their native lands or “on the high seas” during the transatlantic slave trade.70 Woodrow Borah has estimated that thirty million died in Africa or during the Middle Passage.71 Stannard has concluded that the total number of Africans who died in all stages of the transatlantic slave trade was between thirty million and sixty million.72 In contrast, other researchers have acknowledged the significant loss of life during the Middle Passage but eschewed efforts to estimate the total number of deaths resulting from this extraordinary crime against humanity. Curtin, for example, believed that “most of these losses are not measurable.”73 Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman insisted that because scholars do not have the same kinds of records for other stages of the slave trade as they do for the Middle Passage, “we cannot answer questions about the overall mortality in the transatlantic slave trade.”74 Indeed, Klein has criticized “some recent scholars” for their “quite extraordinary figures” on the total number of African deaths.75

These conclusions by Curtin, Klein, and Engerman are unpersuasive. The 1.8 million deaths that occurred during the Middle Passage are clearly the best-documented fatalities of the transatlantic slave trade, and, indeed, comparable records do not exist for the much larger numbers of deaths that occurred in the other stages of the Maafa. Nonetheless, there is considerable historical information and contemporary research on the African wars and raids that produced most captives for the slave trade, the forced marches of captives from the interior to the coast, their imprisonment in barracoons while waiting to be forced onto slave ships, the period between their arrival in the Western Hemisphere and their transfer to slaveholders, their so-called seasoning in the Americas, and their subsequent experience of servitude. If one begins with the well-documented number of people forcibly taken out of Africa, works back through the prior stages of their captivity, and then considers the Middle Passage and subsequent stages of captivity and enslavement in the Western Hemisphere, it is possible to develop informed and reasonable estimates of the total loss of African lives associated with the transatlantic slave trade.

DEATHS ON MARCHES TO SLAVE FORTS AND IN BARRACOONS

The approximately 12.5 million people transported from Africa were the survivors of a much larger group that suffered grievous losses while marching from the point of capture to the slave forts on the West African coast and while awaiting transportation to the Americas. The distance traveled in many marches was often hundreds of miles and, in some cases, over a thousand miles. The time required to complete these marches ranged from weeks to months.76 The captives were generally barefoot and chained together, and they were often required to carry heavy loads as they marched.77 The rigor of these forced marches, exposure to new disease environments and epidemics, dietary change, and the psychological impact of enslavement combined to produce many deaths.78 Often captives who fell ill were killed or left to die along the way. Human skeletons were frequently found along the routes by those who followed.79 When captured Africans arrived at the slave forts on the coast, they faced new dangers from diseases brought by the Europeans, the harshness of imprisonment in barracoons for months or even a year, and inadequate food and water. Captives who were not accepted by the European slave traders were sometimes executed or left to die.80

Patrick Manning’s estimate that four million captives died while still in Africa is far too low.81 The British abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton estimated in 1839 that approximately half of all captured Africans died before leaving the continent.82 Some contemporary researchers have reached similar conclusions. Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and colleagues also concluded that about half of those captured “never even made it to the slave ships.”83 Joseph C. Miller has estimated that about 50 percent of the Africans captured in the continent’s interior died during the long march to the Angolan coast or while imprisoned in barracoons.84 Jan Hogendorn has estimated that about 50 percent of those captured in Central Sudan perished on the journey to coastal West Africa.85 If, as Eltis and Richardson have maintained, about 12.5 million Africans were deported from their homeland, and if this number represented only about half of those enslaved, then it may be estimated that approximately 25 million Africans were originally captured, and 12.5 million of them died between capture and embarkation.86

DEATHS IN WARS AND RAIDS

Many other deaths resulted from the wars and raids that captured people who were later sold to European, U.S., and Brazilian slave traders.87 Some armed conflicts were undoubtedly motivated more by political considerations than the drive to obtain and sell slaves.88 But the development of the transatlantic slave trade fueled the proliferation of wars and raids, and they became endemic in much of West and Central Africa.89 With the spread of firearms acquired from slave traders, the attacks also became more lethal.90 Many died while resisting capture, and many who fled the fighting later died from disease or starvation because their crops, livestock, and homes had been destroyed.91 In addition, many enslavers died from armed resistance or diseases that spread through troop concentrations.92 Lovejoy has noted: “Deaths at the point of enslavement had a significant impact on the demography of the trade, but there is little information on the scale of such deaths.”93

Although some prominent researchers have expressed the view that it is not possible to estimate the total number of these deaths,94 there is sufficient historical information to develop a rough appraisal of this loss of life.95 The British abolitionist Thomas Cooper estimated in 1787 that “for one slave procured, ten at least are slaughtered.”96 Such a large ratio of captures to deaths surely did not occur everywhere in West and Central Africa for the duration of the transatlantic slave trade.The prominent eighteenth-century slave trader John Newton wrote: “Though they do not bring legions into the field, their wars are bloody. I believe the captives reserved for sale are fewer than the slain.”97 In 1839, Buxton estimated that at least one to two Africans were killed for each one captured and enslaved.98 The nineteenth-century German explorer Gustav Nachtigal found that Bornu raiders lost three or four people to deaths and escapes for each captive taken.99 More recent research by Dennis D. Cordell has indicated that deaths at the point of capture in Central Africa ranged from 10 to 60 percent.100 Miller has estimated that “overall loss rates in raids or wars” approximated 50 percent in Angola during most of the transatlantic slave trade but dramatically declined “late in the history of the trade” as enslavement through judicial and commercial processes became more typical.101 Adu Boahen, Jacob F. Ade Ajayi, and Michael Tody emphasize that “as many people were killed as were caught” in these wars and raids, and Michaela Alfred-Kamara has reached the same conclusion.102

TOTAL DEATHS IN AFRICA AND ON THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

If about 80 percent of the twenty-five million Africans captured during more than three and a half centuries were seized in wars and raids, and if at least one African died for each one captured in this way, the number of deaths in wars and raids was approximately twenty million. This may well be a conservative estimate of those killed at the point of capture, and it does not include the deaths from disease or starvation suffered by survivors or the deaths among the aggressors.103 When these twenty million fatalities are added to the estimated 12.5 million who died between capture and transport to the Western Hemisphere, it appears that a total of at least 32.5 million people perished in Africa because of the transatlantic slave trade. When the 1.8 million deaths during the Middle Passage are added to the deaths in Africa, the total number is 34.3 million, which is close to Borah’s estimate of thirty million Africans lost in their homeland and on slave ships.

DEATHS AFTER ARRIVAL AND DURING SEASONING

More death awaited the approximately 10.7 million captured Africans who survived the Middle Passage. After reaching the Americas, slave ships often remained in harbors for weeks before the captives were sold to local slaveholders. About 5 percent of the Black people who arrived alive perished from diseases or other causes before they left the ships.104 What Lorena S. Walsh has described as “the only extant North American quantitative study” found that 5.4 percent of Africans brought to Virginia between 1710 and 1718 perished before being sold.105 The loss of 5 percent of African captives shortly after arrival in the Western Hemisphere amounted to approximately 535,000 additional deaths and left about 10,165,000 Africans alive.

Significantly more perished during “seasoning,” the period of one to three years in which newly enslaved people began arduous physical labor and tried to become acclimated to their new environment. Slaveholders’ violence and abuse, exposure to new diseases, overwork, harsh labor conditions, and suicide resulted in a mortality rate that has been estimated at between 33 percent and 50 percent during seasoning.106 In the study reviewed by Walsh, almost one-third of the Black people enslaved by one Virginia planter between 1733 and 1742 died within three years.107 If about one-third of newly enslaved people died during the seasoning process, that amounts to more than 3.35 million deaths, leaving approximately 6.8 million alive.

SUBSEQUENT PREMATURE DEATHS OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE

Many of the enslaved who survived seasoning later died prematurely as a result of their enslavement. Many enslaved people who worked on Caribbean sugar plantations perished within eight to ten years, and most who labored in Brazil’s gold mines died within ten to twelve years.108 Death rates among the enslaved in the Caribbean and Brazil were higher than in the present-day United States, primarily because of poorer diets and the more rapid spread of disease in tropical environments.109 But as Walsh has remarked, “Here ‘lower’ is indeed a relative term, one that describes something less than complete demographic catastrophe, but that tends to obscure exceedingly foreshortened life chances throughout much of coastal North America.”110 Walsh has pointed out that the death rates in rice-growing districts in the Carolinas may have resembled those in sugar-producing areas in the Caribbean.111 In Walsh’s review “less than half” of the enslaved people in her study were alive after a decade.112 For Walsh, records of slaveholdings with “proportionally few survivors … in the older age groups” suggest “dismally limited life chances” for most enslaved Africans.113 Individuals in their early fifties were often described as “very old,” and those in their sixties “were rare indeed.”114 Of the approximately 6.8 million enslaved people who remained alive after seasoning, it can be estimated that about 50 percent of them—3.4 million people—perished as the result of bondage within ten to fifteen years of arrival in the Western Hemisphere.

THE HUMAN TOLL OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

When the deaths during the Middle Passage, the interval between arrival and sale to slaveholders, the seasoning process, and the following decade are added together, the total is more than nine million. Thus, an estimate of the total loss of life in the transatlantic slave trade can be advanced. When the more than nine million deaths in the Middle Passage and the Americas are added to the approximately 32.5 million deaths in Africa, it appears that a total of more than 41.5 million people lost their lives as a direct result of the slave trade. For every person who arrived alive in the Western Hemisphere, more than three had perished in Africa, and almost 70 percent of those who survived the Middle Passage were no longer alive a decade and a half later. This estimate of more than 41.5 million African deaths falls below the estimate of fifty million by Du Bois but exceeds the low-end estimate of 30 million deaths by Stannard. Future research may well disclose an even larger human toll. As only a little more than 5 percent of all captive Africans were sent to the present-day United States, it can be said that this part of the slave trade was associated with the deaths of more than two million people.115

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN POPULATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Maafa was only the beginning of the African American Holocaust. The number of Black people forcibly transported to the lands that later became the United States remained small during most of the seventeenth century but grew to about 28,000 by 1700.116 In 1730, the African American population was more than 91,000, and by 1750, it had increased to about 236,000.117 By 1770, there were about 460,000 people of African descent in these lands, about two-thirds native-born.118 By the end of the eighteenth century, more than one million Black people were in the newly independent United States. About 80 percent had been born there, and almost 90 percent were enslaved.119 What demographers call “natural reproduction” distinguished the enslaved population in the present-day United States from its counterparts in the Caribbean and Brazil.120 Nonetheless, extremely high mortality rates persisted among people transported from Africa, and slavery exacted a grave toll among native-born Black people throughout the eighteenth century.

THE MURDER, TORTURE, AND ABUSE OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Untold numbers of enslaved people were killed outright or died from physical abuse by slaveholders or overseers. Tom Costa has noted, in Virginia in 1705, “A sweeping new law allowed planters to discipline enslaved people to death or, in some cases, to kill runaways without penalty.”121 This law also permitted the dismemberment of enslaved people who were deemed “incorrigible.”122 Some other British colonies passed similar laws.123 Johnson, Smith, and colleagues have pointed out,

It was not uncommon to see a man’s, woman’s, or child’s back crisscrossed with raw scars, not uncommon to see Africans hobble about with missing feet, to see a ragged stump where a hand should be. It was not uncommon to see their eyes swollen shut, their hands bound in rusty iron contraptions, their bones broken. It was not uncommon to hear that someone alive was now dead, someone who had dared to stand tall before his master and say, in his own language, No. No more.124

Moreover, as Derek N. Kerr has observed: “Countless fugitive slaves were killed in pursuit with no written records of their deaths occurring,” and others likely died from exposure, starvation, or disease during their flight from bondage.125

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RESISTANCE AND REBELLIONS BY ENSLAVED PEOPLE

The horrors of slavery led to numerous acts of resistance, efforts to organize rebellions, and—occasionally—major uprisings in the colonies that later became the United States.126 The first uprisings against the British in Virginia occurred in 1663 and 1687. They were suppressed and their leaders were put to death.127 An uprising in Newton, Long Island, in 1708 resulted in the deaths of seven whites and the subsequent execution of four Africans.128 A rebellion in New York City in 1712 led to the deaths of at least nine whites and the execution of twenty-one enslaved people.129 A planned uprising in Charleston in 1720 was discovered before it occurred, and at least several Black people were hanged or burned alive.130 A large planned rebellion in Norfolk and Princess Anne counties in Virginia in 1730 was similarly crushed before it broke out, and four Africans were put to death.131 The discovery of imminent uprisings in New Orleans in 1730 and 1732 led to the execution of more than a dozen insurgents by the French colonial authorities.132 The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 resulted in the deaths of twenty-five settlers and fifty enslaved people.133 Rumors of a “Great Negro Plot” in New York City in 1741 led to the execution of about thirty-four people, including four white abolitionists.134 In 1767 in Alexandria, Virginia, enslaved Africans poisoned their overseers, and several rebels were executed.135 In 1774 in St. Andre’s Parish, Georgia, several people held in bondage killed four colonists. At least two of the insurgents were burned alive afterward.136

LIGHT FROM BONDAGE DURING THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

During the British colonists’ War of Independence between 1775 and 1783, some nine thousand to ten thousand African Americans—free and enslaved—served in the revolutionary army, navy, state militias, or non-combat capacities.137 How many of these lives were lost during the war is unknown because surviving records did not identify U.S. casualties by race.138 Signally, after Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation in late 1775 promising freedom to enslaved people who would support British forces, as many as 60,000 fled to the British army lines.139 As Gary B. Nash has pointed out, this was the largest rebellion by Black people up to this point in North American history.140 Thousands of the enslaved fought with the British forces or performed labor for them.141 Perhaps 25,000 who had sought British protection died of smallpox and other diseases during the war.142 Others were recaptured by U.S. slaveholders. When the fighting ended, 15,000 or more Blacks left North America with the British.143 However, many remained enslaved by departing Loyalists, and thousands who relocated to the British Caribbean islands died because of yellow fever and hurricanes in the late 1780s.144

THE SUPPRESSION OF SLAVE RESISTANCE AND REBELLIONS AFTER INDEPENDENCE

In 1786, militia members and Catawba allies destroyed a maroon community with a population of about a hundred in Bell Isle, Georgia. The escapees had taken food from local plantations, defended themselves with arms, and sparked fears of a large uprising among slaveholders. The assault on the community killed up to a dozen people, and one of its leaders was subsequently executed.145 In 1792, six enslaved African Americans attacked a member of a slave patrol in Northampton County, Virginia. Three of the assailants were quickly apprehended and executed.146 The next year, three Blacks were executed in Albany, New York, for setting fire to several buildings.147 In 1795, dozens of enslaved people revolted in Point Coupee Parish in then-Spanish Louisiana. About twenty-five died in the uprising, and about twenty-five more were captured and executed.148 That same year, escapees killed an overseer near Wilmington, North Carolina. Slave patrols subsequently killed five escapees; four more were captured and executed.149 As many as twenty-two Blacks and whites died in armed conflicts in Prince William County and Southampton County, Virginia, in 1797 and 1799.150 In addition to 621 executions for various reasons during the eighteenth century, hundreds of African Americans died in acts of resistance, efforts to organize uprisings, and rebellions against slavery.151

SOCIAL MURDERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Africans transported to the present-day United States as well as their descendants perished in vast numbers in the eighteenth century. The descendants of enslaved people generally experienced childhoods with inadequate nutrition, decades of hard labor, various forms of abuse and neglect, the frequent loss of family and friends, stress caused by unrelenting racism, and poor health conditions.152 Despite the paucity of records, it is possible to estimate the minimum number of social murders of native-born enslaved African Americans.153 About half of those born into slavery in the nineteenth century died before the age of five—twice the mortality rate of the white population—and it is likely that this excess death rate was approximately the same in the eighteenth century.154 For each of the 720,000 native-born enslaved African Americans alive at the end of the eighteenth century, about the same number died in their first five years. If enslaved children had experienced the same mortality rate as white children at this time, their death toll would have been about 360,000. This rough estimate of a minimum of 360,000 excess deaths is likely conservative because it does not account for excess deaths of enslaved African American adults and because the life prospects of free African Americans were not necessarily better.155

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN POPULATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The nineteenth century witnessed significant growth of the African American population. By 1860, more than 4.4 million Black people lived in the United States. Almost all were native-born, and almost 90 percent were enslaved.156 The African American population increased to almost nine million by the end of the nineteenth century.157 Between 1774 and 1804, all the northern states moved to abolish slavery, though it did not entirely disappear there until around 1840.158 After the War of Independence, the United States joined the ranks of slave-trading countries. Eric Foner has emphasized:

In the run-up to [the War of Independence], Congress banned the importation of slaves as part of a broader non-importation policy.… Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the war and lost the largest number of slaves.159

Although the transatlantic slave trade was increasingly recognized as a crime against humanity and even some southern states passed legislation banning participation, South Carolina and Georgia imported approximately a hundred thousand African captives between 1783 and 1807.160 Notwithstanding the outlawing of the slave trade that began in 1808, approximately fifty thousand Black people were brought to this country in the decades that followed.161 The Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the United States, arrived in 1860 in Mobile Bay, Alabama.162

U.S. PARTICIPATION IN THE ILLEGAL SLAVE TRADE WITH CUBA AND BRAZIL

Some U.S. capitalists, slaveholders, and politicians were deeply involved in the illegal trafficking of Africans to Cuba and Brazil.163 Between 1790 and 1867, more than 780,000 African captives arrived in Cuba.164 Between 1800 and 1850, approximately 2.1 million arrived in Brazil.165 Dale T. Graden has explained: “The transatlantic slave trade of the first half of the nineteenth century flourished partially due to the involvement of U.S. merchants and the capital of U.S. investors.”166 From 1815 to 1860, as many as a thousand U.S.-built ships, sold or leased to “known slave traders,” carried more than one million Black people to Cuba and Brazil.167 Dry foods, alcohol, muskets, gunpowder, and other vital provisions made in the United States and Europe were sold to slave depots on the west coast of Africa. U.S. consuls and naval officers provided diplomatic cover for the illegal trafficking and helped slave ships evade capture by British naval patrols.168 As a result, the United States was partly responsible for roughly 3.7 million deaths in Africa, Cuba, and Brazil during the illegal transatlantic slave trade.169 As Stephen Chambers has noted, complicity in the suffering and servitude of Africans forcibly transported to Cuba and Brazil enriched many U.S. capitalists and slaveholders and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. Empire.170

THE SECOND MIDDLE PASSAGE

During the first half of the nineteenth century, about one million Blacks were forcibly relocated from the Upper South—Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky—to the Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.171 The number of enslaved people involved in this “second Middle Passage” far exceeded the number of captives originally brought from Africa to mainland North America.172 As Ira Berlin has pointed out, this process was driven by “a seemingly insatiable demand for cotton and an expanding market for sugar.”173 Edward E. Baptist has explained that cotton “was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution” and “the returns from the cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy.”174 During the first two decades of the century, slaveholders moving west and south brought most of the people they had enslaved with them.175 Over time, a massive slave trade developed as enslavers in the Upper South contracted with “a new group of merchants whose sole business became the trade in human beings.”176 About two-thirds of those deported to the Deep South were victims of this new internal slave trade.177 Many enslaved people were transported by flatboats, steamboats, and trains, and many were forcibly marched.178 The longest part of this “Slave Trail of Tears” stretched for a thousand miles, and coffles. men in chains, often walked for ten hours a day or more, marshaled by slave drivers with guns and whips.179 Berlin has emphasized that this “second Middle Passage” continued until the Civil War began and was “traumatic and often deadly.”180 Uncounted thousands died from violence, exhaustion, exposure, and diseases.181

MURDER, TORTURE, AND ABUSE OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Although slaveholders often claimed that economic self-interest precluded the abuse of enslaved people, the writings of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and others have eloquently attested to the horrors of bondage.182 The American Anti-Slavery Society reported in 1839 that the enslaved were

frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine, etc. poured over the gashes to increase the torture … they are often stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats … they are often hunted with blood hounds and shot down like beasts, or torn in pieces by dogs … they are often suspended by the arms and whipped and beaten till they faint, and when revived by restoratives, beaten again till they faint, and sometimes till they die … their ears are often cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones broken, their flesh branded with red hot irons … they are maimed, mutilated, and burned to death over slow fires.183

The number of enslaved people murdered outright or who died because of beatings, floggings, or torture during the nineteenth century is unknown but was undoubtedly substantial.184 Another kind of grotesque abuse occurred when gynecology pioneer J. Marion Sims and other white surgeons performed experimental surgery on enslaved Black women and infants without consent or anesthesia.185

FLIGHT FROM BONDAGE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

From 1830 until 1860, between thirty thousand and 150,000 people of African descent escaped from servitude.186 Sometimes they were aided by the Underground Railroad, which Foner has described as “an interlocking series of local networks.”187 Many eventually found freedom in the Northeast or in Canada. But many others were captured and either killed or harshly punished and returned to bondage. Still others perished from exposure, disease, starvation, or racist violence.188 Beginning in the 1820s, the American Colonization Society, supported by slaveholders, other white supremacists, and the U.S. government, transported between 12,000 and 13,000 African Americans to its new colony in Liberia.189 About 4,500 had been born free, and the rest had been “emancipated from slavery on the condition that they leave the country.”190 Approximately two thousand died on the way to Liberia or shortly after arrival, primarily because of disease.191

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RESISTANCE AND REBELLIONS BY ENSLAVED PEOPLE

More than a thousand African Americans perished during the nineteenth century because they participated in acts of resistance, efforts to organize uprisings or rebellions against slavery, or because they formed maroon communities.192 Hundreds of enslaved people planned to join Gabriel’s Rebellion near Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, but they were betrayed, and the uprising was crushed before it began. Gabriel Prosser and approximately thirty-four others were executed.193 Other substantial revolts were suppressed in rural Virginia and North Carolina in 1802, and at least fifty-two Black people were put to death afterward.194 Inspired by the successful Haitian Revolution of 1804, more than five hundred enslaved people participated in a highly organized rebellion in the German Coast region near New Orleans in present-day Louisiana in 1811. U.S. soldiers and slaveholders’ militia drowned the rebellion in blood, killing or executing sixty-six insurgents at the site of the battle.195 Other participants in the uprising were tried and executed later, and the total number of African American deaths was likely about one hundred.196 After the War of 1812 began, about four thousand Black people escaped bondage in Virginia and Maryland and sought refuge with the British forces, who promised them freedom and resettlement. Some of the newly emancipated African Americans joined the British Colonial Marines, fought against the U.S. Army, and participated in the burning of the White House.197

In 1816, a plot to burn slaveowners’ homes and launch an uprising near Camden, South Carolina, was betrayed and thwarted. Six leaders of the planned rebellion were executed.198 Around the same time, state militia destroyed two maroon communities in that state, killing or capturing all their members.199 The destruction of Negro Fort in northern Florida by U.S. forces in 1816 resulted in more than 270 African American and Seminole deaths.200 Three years later, a conspiracy to set fire to buildings in Augusta, Georgia, and ignite a rebellion was disclosed to local authorities and suppressed. Afterward, several insurgents were put to death.201 In 1822, Denmark Vesey, who was born into bondage but had purchased his freedom, planned a rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina. Hundreds of enslaved African Americans joined him, but a few participants betrayed them. Vesey and thirty-six enslaved people were subsequently condemned and executed.202 The following year, militias destroyed maroon communities in Norfolk County, Virginia, and near Pineville, South Carolina, killing some Black people at the time and executing others afterward.203 In 1826, seventy-seven African Americans transported down the Ohio River by enslavers for sale in the Deep South escaped confinement, killed five white men on the boat, and fled to Indiana. All of them were later captured, and five were executed.204

In 1829 and 1830, fires thought to be set by enslaved people destroyed or partly destroyed buildings in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Maryland.205 An 1829 rebellion in a coffle being brought south from Maryland resulted in two enslavers’ deaths in Virginia and six African Americans’ subsequent capture and execution.206 An 1830 assault by North Carolina militia killed as many as sixty Blacks who had escaped slavery and were reportedly planning an uprising.207

In 1831, scores of enslaved people and a few free African Americans supported Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. The insurgents killed fifty-seven slaveholders and their family members before the uprising was crushed.208 Virginia militia and racist mobs responded by killing more than a hundred Black people, many of whom were not involved in the rebellion.209 In addition, Turner and about nineteen other insurgents were executed.210 In 1837, after plans for a rebellion near Alexandria, Louisiana, were betrayed, nine enslaved people and three free African Americans were executed, and seven other enslaved people were killed by vigilantes.211 In 1848, seventy-five armed enslaved people fled Fayette County, Kentucky, intending to reach freedom. However, battles with white pursuers resulted in two deaths, and three leaders of the escape were hanged.212

As mounting tensions over slavery moved the country closer to civil war, enslaved people’s resistance and efforts to organize rebellions continued, and panic among slaveholders and other white people mounted.213 In 1856, the discovery of a planned uprising in Colorado County, Texas, led to the severe whipping of two hundred African Americans, the subsequent death of two from their wounds, and the execution of three reported leaders.214 That same year, Tennessee authorities discovered that enslaved ironworkers were preparing for a rebellion, hanged nine at the Cumberland River Iron Works, and executed nineteen more in Dover.215 In 1858, near Coffeeville, Mississippi, an armed slave revolt on the plantation owned by the widow of former President James K. Polk was violently suppressed.216 In 1859, five African Americans joined John Brown, two of his sons, and other white abolitionists in the historic raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Ten of the participants were killed or died from injuries, and several others, including Brown, were executed.217 Brown was prescient when he wrote, “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.”218 The following year, Alabama officials killed at least twenty-five African Americans and four whites suspected of planning an uprising in four towns.219 Between mid-1861 and mid-1863, pro-slavery forces in Mississippi executed as many as two hundred African Americans whom they viewed as subversive.220

MILITARY SERVICE AND FLIGHT FROM BONDAGE DURING THE CIVIL WAR

During the Civil War between 1861 and 1865, approximately half a million enslaved people escaped to freedom and sought protection behind U.S. military lines.221 This was undoubtedly the largest slave rebellion in the history of the United States. Although President Abraham Lincoln initially opposed military service by African Americans, high Union casualties and the need for more troops led him to reverse his position by late 1862. Subsequently, more than 200,000 Black men, most of them escaped enslaved people, served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the conflict.222 As Lincoln later said, “Without the military help of the Black freedmen, the war against the South could not have been won.”223 But they paid a heavy price for their service. About ten thousand died in combat or from injuries, another thirty thousand died from infections and diseases, and almost thirty thousand more were reported as missing.224 Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops massacred almost three hundred Black troops after they surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864.225 That same year, Confederate soldiers executed scores of African American prisoners of war at Saltville, Virginia.226 Other Black people also suffered greatly during the Civil War and its aftermath. In New York City in 1863, racist whites outraged by the draft, wealthy men’s evasion of military service, and competition for jobs with African Americans rioted for several days. Although official records listed about a hundred fatalities, approximately five hundred people—mainly African Americans—died.227 Racist riots in Boston and Detroit resulted in more Black deaths.228

As James Downs has pointed out, the Civil War also brought about “the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century.”229 Many more Union and Confederate soldiers died from diseases than from combat, and the half-million African Americans who had fled slavery suffered more than anyone. Downs has explained:

Disease and sickness had a more devastating and fatal effect on emancipated slaves than on soldiers since ex-slaves often lacked the basic necessities to survive. Emancipation liberated bondspeople from slavery, but they often lacked clean clothing, adequate shelter, proper food, and access to medicine in their escape toward Union lines.230

Many died while traveling to U.S. military camps, and many others died after arriving.231 Smallpox, dysentery, pneumonia, and other diseases claimed the lives of 150,000 or more formerly enslaved people during the Civil War.232 Approximately 350,000 other African Americans perished from disease in the years following the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865.233

THE RACIST REIGN OF TERROR AGAINST RECONSTRUCTION

The postwar project of reconstructing a more egalitarian social order in the South initially achieved a great deal. Between 1865 and 1870, new amendments to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery, promised all persons due process and equal protection of the laws, and extended voting rights to African American men.234 Black men and white allies were elected to local, state, and federal offices. The southern Republicans promoted integration, public education, and tax reform.235 However, as Douglas R. Egerton has emphasized, “White Democrats, an electoral minority in every southern state after the war, engaged in racial terrorism to restore the prewar social order.”236 In 1866, racist mobs killed forty-six Blacks and two whites in Memphis and thirty-seven Blacks and three white allies in New Orleans.237 In 1868, white supremacists murdered about two hundred African Americans in Opelousas, Louisiana.238 Throughout the South, many more died in smaller local attacks by mobs, small groups of vigilantes, and individuals, including racist police and deputies.239 In 1871, the Southern States Convention of Colored Men held in Columbia, South Carolina, reported that twenty thousand Blacks and white allies had been killed since the beginning of Reconstruction.240 In 1873, a white militia killed as many as 150 African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana.241 The following year, racists killed sixteen Black men in Trenton, Tennessee.242

In 1883, white supremacists overthrew the biracial local government in Danville, Virginia, and killed several African Americans.243 In 1886, an attack at the courthouse in Carroll County, Mississippi, left twenty-three Blacks dead.244 The next year, the state militia and white vigilantes murdered more than a hundred striking African American sugar workers and supporters in Thibodaux, Louisiana.245 In 1892, racists attacked three Black co-owners of the People’s Grocery in Memphis. When the victims of the assault fought back, they were arrested, jailed, and then lynched.246 In 1895, hundreds of unionized white dockworkers in New Orleans were laid off and replaced by non-unionized African Americans. The white workers launched an armed assault against the Black dockworkers and killed at least six of them.247 In 1898, a mob of about two thousand committed to restoring white supremacist rule in Wilmington, North Carolina, violently overthrew the biracial local government and murdered about sixty African Americans.248 Three decades after Appomattox, Robert Smalls, who escaped slavery, became a Union war hero, and served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, reported that 53,000 African Americans had been murdered.249 Egerton has noted that Smalls’s estimate is “entirely plausible.”250 This number of victims dwarfs the 2,600 people of African descent who were legally executed during the nineteenth century.251

MASS INCARCERATION AND CONVICT LABOR

What Douglas A. Blackmon has called “slavery by another name” deprived many African American men of their freedom—and even their lives—for several decades after the end of the Civil War.252 Between the 1870s and the late 1920s, several hundred thousand Black men were unjustly imprisoned after being convicted of charges such as “illegal voting,” changing jobs without the permission of a white employer, vagrancy, bigamy, and sexual relations with white women.253 Blackmon has emphasized,

Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers.…Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in Black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans.254

The proliferation of convict labor on public projects and the leasing of Black prisoners to privately owned factories, mines, plantations, lumber camps, and other businesses led to many fatalities. Some of these deaths resulted from industrial accidents, overwork, poor nutrition, and inadequate medical care, while others were murdered by overseers or other incarcerated men.255 Blackmon has cautioned that more research must be done before the total number of fatalities can be reliably estimated.256 But the number of deaths likely ran into the tens of thousands over six decades.257

THE RESTORATION OF WHITE SUPREMACIST RULE IN THE SOUTH

Egerton has observed that by the end of the nineteenth century “unremitting clandestine violence” had ended “the first progressive era in the nation’s history,” and the restoration of white supremacist rule in the South largely had been achieved.258 Lynchings and other racially motivated murders, which often occurred “in the presence of or with the complicity of law enforcement,” had become a heinous way to terrorize and subjugate African Americans.259

The combination of widespread convict labor and the super-exploitation inherent in sharecropping and tenant farming meant that the vast majority of Blacks in the South would live in conditions of “involuntary de facto servitude” for generations to come.260 New state laws, state constitutions, and local government measures deprived most Black men of the right to vote, hold public office, and serve on juries. African Americans were generally denied due process and equal protection of the laws, and a rigid new system of racial segregation was developed.261 Real freedom remained an aspiration but not a reality for almost nine million people.

SOCIAL MURDERS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Although the African American population significantly expanded during the nineteenth century, so did the excess deaths attributable to poor nutrition, hard labor, abuse and neglect, the loss of family and friends, stress caused by racism, and poor health. As with the previous century, it is possible to estimate the minimum number of excess deaths suffered by native-born enslaved African Americans in the nineteenth century. For each of the approximately 3.9 million enslaved people alive in 1860, about the same number died in their first five years. If enslaved children had experienced the same mortality rate as white children during this time, their death toll would have been about 1.95 million. Like the appraisal of excess deaths among native-born enslaved African Americans for the previous century, this is likely a conservative estimate because it does not account for excess deaths of enslaved Black adults and because the life prospects of free Blacks were not necessarily better than those of enslaved people.262

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN POPULATION SINCE 1900

During the twentieth century, the African American population dramatically expanded. It grew from just under nine million in 1900 to more than fifteen million in 1950.263 It was more than 26.6 million in 1980 and about 36.5 million in 2000.264 By 2019, the population had reached more than 48 million.265 Black people have achieved some important social and political progress during the past 120 years but continue to suffer in many ways from systemic, institutionalized racism.266 Various forms of white supremacist violence and abuse, a new wave of mass incarceration, the disproportionate impact of criminal homicides, participation in U.S. wars abroad, excess mortality rates, and related forms of oppression have taken a terrible toll on Blacks in the United States since 1900. Ironically, even larger numbers have perished because of white supremacy than in previous centuries.

MURDERS BY MOBS, VIGILANTES, AND POLICE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The routinized murder of African Americans by white mobs, vigilantes, and police continued apace during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1900, a confrontation between white police officers and a Black man in New Orleans led to the deaths of at least a dozen African Americans and seven whites.267 In 1906, racist crowds in Atlanta killed two dozen Black people; several whites also died.268 In 1908, hate-filled whites in Springfield, Illinois, murdered seven African Americans.269 In 1910, whites killed as many as two hundred Black people in the Slocum Massacre in East Texas.270 In 1917, white mobs in East St. Louis, Missouri, attacked African Americans who were migrating from southern states in search of jobs. As many as 250 Blacks died.271 The same year, African American soldiers at Fort Logan in Houston participated in an armed uprising after enduring abuse from local police officers and other white people. Sixteen white police officers and civilians, along with four insurgents, were killed during the uprising, and nineteen Black soldiers were executed afterward.272

In 1918, racist whites rioted in Philadelphia after an African American moved into a largely white neighborhood. One Black and three whites died.273 The worst racist violence of the period occurred between April and November 1919, which James Weldon Johnson called the “Red Summer” because of the bloodshed throughout the country.274 In April, the death of two white police officers in a shoot-out in Carswell Grove, Georgia, led to lynching and attacks that took the lives of several Black people.275 In July, white mobs began attacking African Americans in Washington, DC, after police released a Black man accused of harassing a white woman. About forty people died in the conflict.276 A week later in Chicago, the death of a young African American man at a segregated beach led to armed conflict and the deaths of twenty-three Blacks and fifteen whites.277 In August, thirty to forty people died in Knoxville, Tennessee, when whites attacked an African American neighborhood after failing to find and lynch a biracial man accused of murdering a white woman.278 In September in Elaine, Arkansas, whites massacred 237 African Americans who were trying to organize a union for sharecroppers.279 Altogether, the “Red Summer” of 1919 resulted in several hundred deaths in dozens of cities and towns.280 But as Jesse J. Holland has explained, “Red Summer also marked a new era of Black resistance to white injustice, with African Americans standing up in unprecedented numbers and killing some of their tormentors.”281

In 1920, in Ocoee, Florida, Ku Klux Klan members and supporters killed as many as sixty African Americans to prevent them from voting and drive them off their land.282 The following year in Tulsa, after a young Black man was charged with assaulting a young white woman, about seventy-five armed African Americans marched to the local courthouse to prevent a lynching. A crowd of about fifteen hundred whites confronted them, shots were fired, and several people were killed. Thousands of whites then went on a rampage, burned and looted Black businesses and homes, and killed as many as three hundred African Americans.283 In 1922, three Black men in Kirven, Texas, were burned alive, and as many as twenty-seven other Black people were killed following the murder of a young white woman.284 In 1923, racist mobs burned down the African American town of Rosewood, Florida. At least eight people, Black and white, died during the violence.285 In 1925, an independent Detroit newspaper reported that police shot fifty-five Blacks, some of whom died, in the first half of the year alone.286

In 1935 and 1943, African Americans participated in what James Boskin has called “protest riots” in Harlem, damaging property and looting stores in reaction to injustice.287 The first occurred after false rumors spread that a young Black shoplifter had been brutally beaten; three people died. The second erupted after a police officer shot and wounded a young Black soldier; at least five people died.288 More traditional anti-Black riots led to thirty-four deaths in Detroit and three deaths in Beaumont, Texas, in 1943.289 In 1946, dozens of white supremacists shot to death George W. Dorsey, his pregnant wife, Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger Malcom, and his wife, Dorothy Malcom, in rural Walton County, Georgia.290 In 1948, several white men killed Isaiah Nixon, a Black veteran, after he defied threats and voted in a local primary election in Georgia.291 By 1950, the number of African Americans lynched since the turn of the century had grown to almost two thousand.292

VIGILANTE AND STATE VIOLENCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Although large-scale massacres such as in Slocum, East St. Louis, Elaine, and Tulsa declined after the midcentury, significant racist violence persisted. White supremacist vigilantes continued to murder Black people, and as public pressure mounted on the federal government and state governments to rein in mob violence, racist policing played an increasingly important role in their subjugation.293 Repression mounted in the 1950s and 1960s as African Americans organized to end segregation and obtain voting rights in the South. Approximately 125 civil rights activists and supporters perished at the hands of racists during these decades.294 These activists included voting rights organizers Henry and Henriette Moore, who died when their home in Florida was bombed on Christmas night, 1951, and Reverend George Lee, killed in Mississippi in 1955.295 The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 horrified much of the nation.296 The killing of truck driver Willie Edwards Jr. by Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama in 1957 was similarly tragic but less widely noticed.297 Herbert Lee, who was helping Black people register to vote, was killed in Mississippi in 1961.298 Medgar Evers, the state leader of the NAACP, was assassinated in the same state in 1963.299 Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all young Black girls, died when racists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham the same year.300 Ku Klux Klan members, including local deputies, murdered civil rights activists James Chaney, an African American, and Jewish New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, in Mississippi in 1964.301

Even as vigilante and police murders continued in the South, the murder and mistreatment of Black people by police in other parts of the country sparked protest riots and uprisings during much of the 1960s. In Harlem in 1964, a white off-duty officer’s killing of a fifteen-year-old young Black man resulted in demonstrations, street disturbances, and the death of a second Black man.302 Soon afterward, in Rochester, New York, outrage over police officers’ use of dogs during an arrest of an African American led to a riot in which four people died.303 In Alabama in 1965, state troopers beat and shot to death Jimmie Lee Jackson while he was protecting a civil rights march in Marion, and neo-Nazis murdered Willie Brewster in Anniston.304 Also, in 1965, Malcolm X was killed in Harlem by individuals who may have had ties to the FBI and the New York Police Department.305 The same year, in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, an altercation following a traffic stop by the California Highway Patrol sparked a six-day uprising that claimed thirty-four, almost entirely Black, lives.306

The African American freedom movement forced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The following decades witnessed the dismantling of de jure segregation, significant Black enfranchisement in the South, and the election of thousands of African Americans to government offices. However, white supremacist violence did not cease. In 1966, a racist gas station owner killed student civil rights activist Samuel Leamon Younge Jr. in Tuskegee, Alabama.307 In 1967, reports that Newark, New Jersey, police had beaten a Black cab driver led to unrest and the deaths of twenty-six people, mostly African Americans.308 Two weeks later, in Detroit, a police raid on an after-hours bar in the Black community ignited an uprising in which forty-three people died.309 In February 1968, state police killed three young Black men at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg during a protest against segregation.310 Two months later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. More than forty people died in the subsequent riots in over one hundred cities.311 Whether the alleged shooter who was convicted and imprisoned acted alone or was part of a conspiracy involving the FBI, Memphis police, and white supremacists who publicly called for King’s death remains unknown today.312 The FBI and local police killed at least thirty-four members of the Black Panther party by the early 1970s.313 By 1971, at least 228 people had died in more than 750 riots in the previous seven years.314

The suppression of the prisoners’ uprising at Attica, New York, in 1971 resulted in thirty-nine deaths.315 The same year, two people died during protests against racism in Wilmington, North Carolina.316 In 1972, a sheriff’s deputy killed two Black students at a protest at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.317 In 1979, neo-Nazis and Klan members killed five Black, Latino, and white communists at a demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina.318 After a jury acquitted four police officers in the beating death of Arthur McDuffie in 1980, riots erupted in Miami, and eighteen people died.319 Ku Klux Klan members lynched Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.320 The Philadelphia police killed eleven people when they bombed the home of the African American MOVE group in 1985.321 Three years later, neo-Nazis killed Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, in Portland, Oregon.322 In 1992, after a jury acquitted four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, an uprising in Los Angeles resulted in more than fifty deaths.323 A police killing sparked a riot in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1996.324 Virulent white supremacists killed James Byrd near Jasper, Texas, in 1998.325 Major protests occurred after the police killed Amadou Diallo in New York City in 1999.326

RACIST EXECUTIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

More than four thousand African Americans were convicted of capital crimes and executed during the twentieth century.327 Not only was the death penalty disproportionately meted out to Black people, but many of these convictions and executions were patently unjust, and the ultimate punishment continued to be what Noel A. Cazenave has called “a lethal form of racial terrorism and control.”328 Thomas Griffin, Meeks Griffin, and two other Black men were executed for the murder of a white man in South Carolina in 1915 after being framed by another suspect.329 Fortune Ferguson was thirteen years old when he was executed for rape in Florida in 1927.330 George Tinney Jr. was fourteen years old when he was executed for murder in South Carolina in 1944.331 Lena Baker was executed in Georgia in 1945 because she killed a white man in self-defense after he kidnapped and assaulted her.332 Tommy Lee Walker was executed for rape and murder in Texas in 1954 based on a coerced confession.333 William Tines was put to death for rape in Tennessee in 1960 after being convicted by a tainted jury without substantial evidence of guilt.334 Willie Darden was executed for murder in Florida in 1988 despite credible alibi evidence emerging after his trial.335 Despite overwhelming evidence of mental illness, Ricky Ray Rector was executed for murder in Arkansas in 1992 after Governor Bill Clinton refused to grant clemency.336 Brian Baldwin was executed for murder in Alabama in 1999 after being convicted solely because of a confession obtained through beatings and torture.337

TWENTIETH-CENTURY MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ON AFRICAN AMERICANS

Racist medical experiments also destroyed other African American lives in the twentieth century. From 1932 until 1972, the U.S. government was responsible for the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which four hundred Black male patients diagnosed with syphilis were left untreated. At least 128 men died from the disease or related complications.338 In the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army conducted experiments that deliberately exposed African Americans in Florida to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases.339 In the 1950s and 1960s, Black prisoners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Louisiana were used as research subjects to test pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products.340 Between 1960 and 1972, a University of Cincinnati radiologist exposed two hundred cancer patients, three-fourths of them African Americans, to previously discredited total body radiation. Dozens of patients died of radiation poisoning.341 Two decades later, Columbia University researchers injected young Black people with Fenfluramine, which Harriet A. Washington has identified as “half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen,” to test the hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.342

RACIST VIOLENCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Although capital punishment has become less common in recent years, Black people are still put to death disproportionately.343 Strikingly, Shaka Sankofa (Gary Graham), executed in Texas in 2000, and Troy Davis, executed in Georgia in 2011, were not guilty of the crimes for which they were condemned.344 Today, Black people are about three times more likely to be killed by law enforcement officers than white people.345 Even a short list of high-profile police killings of African Americans since 2000 is not that short. The dead include Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati in 2001; Corey Ward in Atlanta in 2002; Kendra James in Portland, Oregon, and Michael Pleasence in Chicago in 2003; Timothy Stansbury in New York City in 2004; James Brissette, Roland Madison, and Henry Glover in New Orleans in 2005; Sean Bell in New York City in 2006; David Willis in Savannah in 2007; Aaren Gwenn in North Chicago in 2008; Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2009; Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones in Detroit in 2010; Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. in White Plains, New York, in 2011; Alan Blueford in Oakland and Ramarley Graham in the Bronx in 2012; Deon Williams in Little Rock in 2013; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Ezell Ford in Los Angeles, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Akai Gurley and Eric Garner in New York City in 2014; Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2016; Aaron Bailey in Indianapolis and Jordan Edwards in Balch Springs, Texas, in 2017; Stephon Clark in Sacramento and Botham Jean in Dallas in 2018; Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado, and Atatiana Johnson in Fort Worth in 2019; Breonna Taylor in Louisville, George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, and Jonathan Price in Wolfe City, Texas, in 2020; and David Lee Tovar in San Jose, Jamal Sutherland in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in 2021.346

Law enforcement officers shot to death approximately 244 African Americans in 2020.347 Other Black people died that year because they were restrained, beaten, or tasered by police or fatally injured by police vehicles.348 Many of those killed were not armed with guns, and some of those who were armed were not threatening anyone when they died at the hands of police.349 Most Black deaths caused by law enforcement officers over the decades are far from reasonable.350 Although police records in the United States have always been incomplete and unreliable, it is likely that the total number of unnecessary and preventable killings of African Americans by police since the mid-nineteenth century runs into the tens of thousands.351

Brazen white supremacist vigilantes have also continued to murder African Americans during the past twenty years. The dead include Garry Lee near Pittsburgh in 2000; Eric Taylor in Massilon, Ohio, in 2002; as many as four people in New Orleans in 2005; Stephen Johns in Washington, D.C., and Selma Goncalves and Arlindo DePina Goncalves in Boston in 2009; Reginald Clark in Eureka, California, in 2010; James Craig Anderson in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2011; Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and Jordan David in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2012; nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Larnell Bruce Jr. in Portland, Oregon, in 2016; Richard Collins III in College Park, Maryland, and Timothy Caughman in New York City in 2017; MeShon Cooper in Shawnee, Kansas, and Vickie Lee Jones and Maurice Stallard in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2018; Quentin Hicks in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019; Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, in 2020; and Henry Tapia in Belmont, Massachusetts, in 2021.352

A NEW WAVE OF MASS INCARCERATION

A new wave of mass incarceration began in the mid-1970s, and the prisoner population dramatically expanded from around 300,000 to more than two million thirty years later.353 President Richard Nixon’s desire to target African Americans and white hippies inspired his call for a “war on drugs” and his demand to get “tough on crime.”354 The number of prisoners doubled during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.355 For decades, both Republican and Democratic politicians supported extremely long sentences for drug-related offenses and other crimes.356 Black people have been disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated in what Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow.”357

Alexander has persuasively argued that this mass incarceration is a racial caste system; other researchers have contended that the government’s class-based targeting of poor people explains the hugely disproportionate impact on African Americans.358 Today the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of its prisoners.359 Mass incarceration has proved deadly for many Blacks. Between 1981 and 2018, several thousand African American inmates died from suicide, homicide, accidents, and other non-natural causes in U.S. prisons and jails.360 Many other Black prisoners have died because of inadequate medical care.361

ROUTINE CRIMINAL HOMICIDES

Vast numbers of African Americans have been the victims of routine criminal homicides. As Randolph Roth has pointed out, homicide rates in the rural South soared in the late 1880s and 1890s. In those years, the South surpassed the Southwest as the most homicidal region in the United States. In addition, homicide rates among Blacks surpassed those among whites in both the North and the South. They remain higher to this day.362

Between 1900 and 2019, more than 1.5 million homicides occurred in this country, and Black people have suffered disproportionately from this enduring epidemic of social violence.363 Between 1980 and 2013 alone, there were approximately 262,000 homicides of African American men and hundreds of thousands of others occurred in the first eight decades of the twentieth century.364 Several thousand Black men, women, and children continue to be murdered each year, and homicide is the leading cause of death among young Black men.365

AFRICAN AMERICAN DEATHS IN IMPERIALIST WARS

Participation in U.S. wars abroad has taken a smaller but still tragic toll among African American soldiers, Marines, sailors, and Air Force personnel. In the First World War two hundred Black troops served in the racially segregated U.S. Allied Expeditionary Force, primarily in supply and labor units. Almost eight hundred died in combat, and more died from wounds, diseases, and related causes.366 About 500,000 African Americans served overseas in the still-segregated armed forces in the Second World War. More than seven hundred died in combat, and more died from other causes.367 The first racially integrated military units in U.S. history appeared during the Korean War, and between 3,200 and 5,000 Black service members died during this conflict.368 More than 7,200 African Americans died in the Vietnam War.369 More than 640 African Americans lost their lives in the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War.370 Black armed forces members have perished in other U.S. wars and military interventions. The number of Black veterans who have died from suicide, alcoholism, or drug abuse after their experiences in war has never been counted but is likely substantial.

SOCIAL MURDERS SINCE 1900

By far, the most significant human toll for African Americans since 1900 has been the staggering number of excess deaths, or social murders, caused by poor health conditions rooted in racism.371 Despite some important improvements in health and health care, Blacks continue to suffer from massive racial disparities. Today African American infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants.372 As Linda Villarosa has noted, this is “a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850.”373 The maternal mortality rate for Black women is three to four times higher than the rate for white women.374 African American death rates from cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, trauma, HIV, and COVID-19 also are higher than the rates for white people.375 The much higher levels of hunger, poverty, unemployment, low-wage work, inadequate housing, residential segregation, community disinvestment, neighborhood violence, and exposure to environmental pollution experienced by Black people contribute to poorer health and more precarious life prospects.376 Unequal access to health care and unequal treatment by doctors and other medical personnel also have profoundly harmful effects on many African Americans.377

What Mary R. Jackman and Kimberlee A. Shauman have called “the chronic, everyday injuries of racial discrimination and economic inequality” experienced by Black people are integrally linked to many serious health problems and vast numbers of premature deaths.378

Javier M. Rodriguez, Arline T. Geronimus, John Bound, and Danny Dorling have explained:

Racialization and its subsequent environmental, material, and health care constraints shape exposure to everyday challenges and coping options. Repeated and high-effort coping with social disadvantage and the contingencies of stereotyped social identity are now thought to contribute to a cumulative physiological toll across the life-course, or weathering.… Weathering reflects stress-mediated physiological damage and dysregulation across body systems. These can result in a relatively steeper age-gradient increase in high allostatic load, adverse health outcomes including early onset of hypertension, diabetes, and disability, and excess death from young through middle adulthood.379

In recent decades, researchers have been able to use the increasing amount of available related data to estimate the total number of excess deaths among African Americans. Robert S. Levine and his colleagues have concluded that approximately four million excess Black deaths occurred between 1940 and 2000.380 Rodriguez, Geronimus, Bound, and Dorling have estimated 2.7 million excess deaths among Blacks between 1970 and 2004.381 More recently, Jackman and Shauman estimated almost 7.7 million excess deaths among African Americans in the twentieth century.382 They also reported that well over one million such deaths happened between 2000 and 2014.383 In addition, almost 400,000 excess deaths likely occurred between 2015 and 2020.384 In sum, it appears that there have been more than nine million social murders among African Americans since 1900.

COUNTING THE DEAD

How many people of African descent have perished during the prehistory, formation, expansion, and global ascendancy of the U.S. Empire? As with the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust, the exact numbers will never be known. Again, the available historical information provides the basis for an informed and reasonable, if rough, estimate. The importation of African captives to the lands that became the United States, participation in the illegal transatlantic slave trade, various forms of white supremacist violence, poor health conditions rooted in racism, convict labor, mass incarceration, criminal homicides, participation in imperialist wars, and related forms of oppression have resulted in considerably more than 18 million Black deaths during the past five centuries. Moreover, this staggering number was only part of the broader holocaust that befell people of African descent who perished because of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and various forms of post-slavery oppression in the Western Hemisphere. It may well be that the total loss of Black lives in Africa and the Americas was comparable to the total loss of Indigenous lives—approximately seventy to eighty million—over the centuries.385 Like the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust in the present-day United States, the African American Holocaust continues today.

The Workers Holocaust

Never has [the worker] been speeded up to the present pitch, nor thrown upon the industrial scrap heap so early as too old and exhausted for further use. Never has industry crippled and killed so many of those seeking to earn a livelihood on the land and with the machinery which others possess.

—SOLON DE LEON, THE AMERICAN LABOR YEAR BOOK, 1929

Indigenous peoples and people of African descent have suffered the most brutal forms of subjugation in the lands that became the United States. Vast numbers of other laborers from diverse national backgrounds have experienced less horrific but nonetheless harsh and sometimes deadly forms of exploitation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the lives of indentured servants were often “nasty, brutish, and short.”1 In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution profoundly transformed U.S. society but at an enormous human cost. The development of steamboats and railroads, the growth of manufacturing and mining, and the rise of giant factories contributed to unprecedented economic expansion.2 By 1870, most of the laboring population had become workers, selling their labor power to employers in exchange for wages.3 While the exploitation of workers has generated unprecedented wealth for the capitalist class and made possible the global ascendancy of the U.S. Empire, it has also produced a veritable holocaust. Workplace injuries and occupational diseases—new kinds of social murder—have claimed staggering numbers of lives for more than a century and a half.4 In addition, workers in the United States have endured the “bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.”5 U.S. capitalists and government officials have been responsible for the deaths of many workers in other countries as well.6 Notwithstanding some significant labor reforms in the twentieth century, the Workers Holocaust continues today.

INDENTURED SERVITUDE IN THE ENGLISH COLONIES

The English companies and settlers that colonized North America soon recognized the need for more labor, and indentured servitude originated as a solution to this problem.7 Destitute people in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany who hoped for better lives in the colonies signed contracts agreeing to perform unpaid labor, usually for four to seven years, in exchange for passage.8 England also deported tens of thousands of prisoners, who performed the first form of convict labor in these lands.9 Between 1630 and 1680, 50,000 of the 75,000 European immigrants to the Chesapeake Bay colonies were indentured servants.10 About half of the approximately 450,000 Europeans who voluntarily came to the English (later British) colonies before the War of Independence were indentured.11 Overwork, inadequate nutrition, and disease killed many of them, and suicides were not uncommon.12 Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil noted: “Half of all white servants in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland died within five years of their arrival.”13 Occasionally, indentured servants who rebelled against their employers or fled servitude were put to death. More frequently, those who displeased their employers were whipped or beaten.14 After the beginning of the eighteenth century, the predominance of indentured servants diminished, and labor by enslaved people of African descent became more common, but the practice continued for another hundred years.15

DEATHS ON CANALS, STEAMBOATS, AND TRAINS, 1820s–1860s

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded in the first half of the nineteenth century, early economic development projects undertaken by state governments and private companies took an awful human toll. In the 1820s, as many as a thousand workers, mainly Irish immigrants, perished from malaria, other diseases, and construction accidents while building the Erie Canal in New York State.16 In the mid-1830s, as many as eight thousand Irish immigrant workers died because of harsh labor conditions and a yellow fever epidemic during the construction of the Pontchartrain Canal in New Orleans.17 Hundreds of other workers, chiefly immigrants, died from cholera, other diseases, and workplace accidents during the construction of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Washington, DC, to Cumberland, Maryland, between 1828 and 1850.18 Hundreds died from cholera while building the Wabash and Erie Canal in Indiana in 1849–50.19 About two hundred died from the same disease while working on the St. Mary’s Canal in Michigan in 1854.20 In addition, steamboat tragedies caused by boiler explosions occurred regularly. The Helen McGregor exploded at the New Orleans dock and killed more than forty workers and other people in 1830.21 The Pulaski blew up off the coast of North Carolina in 1838, resulting in about a hundred deaths.22 The Lucy Walker exploded on the Ohio River near New Albany, Indiana, and killed at least fifty people in 1844.23 The worst steamboat tragedy occurred in 1865 when approximately 1,800 people died when the boilers on the Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis.24

As Mark Aldrich has emphasized, “Death rode the rails,” too.25 Aldrich has pointed out that “the slaughter of railroad employees began almost as soon as the first lines were built,” and the same can be said for passengers.26 The first railroad fatality occurred in 1832 when one of four people thrown from a train car near Quincy, Massachusetts, died.27 A derailment on the Boston and Worcester train in 1847 killed six passengers.28 About 913 workers, passengers, and other people died in New York railroad accidents between 1850 and 1852.29 The frequency of fatal train disasters soon increased.30 In 1853, 11 major collisions and derailments resulted in 121 deaths, and smaller accidents were “far more numerous.”31 In 1855, twenty-three people died when a train derailed near Burlington, New Jersey.32 About sixty-six people died in a head-on train accident at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1856.33 The mounting number of fatalities among railroad workers, passengers, and others led to the new “accidents, railroad” category in the 1860 census, which listed 599 deaths for the preceding year.34 Work and travel on railroads was significantly more dangerous in the United States than Britain.35 When a U.S. company undertook the construction of the Panama Railroad in Colombia, between six thousand and twelve thousand workers from Colombia, Jamaica, China, Ireland, and other countries died between 1850 and 1855.36

THE PERILS OF MANUFACTURING AND MINING, 1820s-1860s

In the early nineteenth century, textile mills became one of the first major industries in this country, “producing ready-made clothing from slave-harvested cotton.”37 M. T. Anderson has described the early mills as “the beating heart of America’s mass-production infancy.”38 Initially centered in New England, these mills primarily employed young women, who were paid low wages for long hours of difficult work. Textile workers were particularly susceptible to byssinosis, or brown lung disease, caused by exposure to cotton dust in poorly ventilated workplaces. They were also vulnerable to tuberculosis, other respiratory disorders, and accidental dismemberment.39 Although many employees recognized these workplace hazards, their principal demand during strikes in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1835 and in Pittsburgh in 1845 was the reduction of the twelve-hour workday.40 In 1845, women textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, forced the state legislature to hold hearings on the issue of weekly work hours, but the proceedings yielded no immediate benefits.41 Textile workers’ deaths caused by occupational diseases and fatal accidents were not investigated until much later. However, in 1860 the country’s attention turned to Lawrence, Massachusetts, when the Pemberton textile mill collapsed and killed 145 workers.42

The production of iron began during the colonial period and grew during the first half of the nineteenth century in Pennsylvania, New York, and northern New Jersey. The nation’s increasing need for power for “steam engines, furnaces, and forges” fostered the expansion of coal mining—and its dangers—in the first half of the nineteenth century.43 Between 1839 and 1859, eight mine explosions in Virginia and Pennsylvania led to about 176 deaths.44 By the 1850s and 1860s, doctors in coal mining areas had begun to recognize the deadly effects of “miner’s consumption” or “miner’s asthma” among patients who labored in the earth.45 An 1858 study indicated that the average chance of a Pennsylvania miner surviving for a dozen years was less than 50 percent.46

Other major industrial accidents began to occur in the United States before the Civil War. In 1850, the boiler in a hat manufacturing plant in New York City exploded and killed sixty-three workers.47 The following year, scores of workers died in a fire at a factory in Philadelphia.48 In 1854, seventeen workers perished in an explosion at an ammunition manufacturing plant in New York City.49 Another kind of danger emerged when police killed two tailors during a strike of three hundred workers in New York City in 1850 and police killed two railroad workers during a strike in Portage, New York, in 1851.50

THE TRANSPORTATION OF CHINESE LABORERS TO THE AMERICAS

As the illegal transatlantic slave trade declined in the mid-nineteenth century, labor shortages worsened in the Americas. The need for many new workers was also pressing in some parts of Southeast Asia and Africa. Between the mid-1840s and the mid-1870s, the United States joined Britain, Spain, Peru, Portugal, and France in transporting approximately 750,000 impoverished Chinese laborers to work in different countries.51 U.S. ships brought as many as 350,000 Chinese men to work on tobacco, coffee, and sugar plantations in Cuba, on cotton and sugar plantations and in guano pits of Peru, and on plantations in other nations.52 Robert J. Schwendinger has explained that these workers were procured “through deception, widespread kidnappings, and under the pretext of legitimate labor contracts.”53 Often they were crowded into barracoons in Chinese cities while awaiting transportation and whipped if they tried to escape.54 Once aboard the ships, they suffered from inadequate nutrition, virtually nonexistent sanitary facilities, and violence by crew members.55

Between 1847 and 1859, more than 7,500 Chinese workers died on U.S. ships traveling to Cuba, and uncounted others perished on U.S. ships going to Peru and other countries.56 After arrival in the Caribbean and South America, the workers transported by U.S. and European vessels often labored under extremely harsh conditions and were treated as if they were enslaved. More than two-thirds of the 100,000 to 150,000 Chinese workers who arrived in Peru died there, and many of the 150,000 who arrived in Cuba lost their lives as well.57 U.S. capitalists shared responsibility for the deaths of scores of thousands.58 In 1862, Congress outlawed U.S. participation in the sordid trade, but it continued illegally for more than another decade.59

INDUSTRIAL ADVANCES IN THE 1860s

The military exigencies of the Civil War required increased industrial development in the Union. As Benjamin T. Arrington has pointed out, “The Northern railroad companies boomed during the conflict.”60 Other Northern industries such as weapons manufacturing, iron production, leather goods, and textiles “grew and improved as the war progressed.”61 The growing use of reapers, threshing machines, and horse-drawn planters boosted Northern agricultural production.62 The Union’s industrial strength played a key role in its victory over the Confederacy.63 The loss of life during the Civil War and its aftermath was horrific, and rapid industrialization in the following decades led to an unprecedented number of deaths and grievous injuries in workplaces.64 In 1867, a train derailment near Angola, New York, killed forty-two employees and passengers.65 The same year, a boiler explosion in Philadelphia killed twenty-eight people.66 “Hundreds, perhaps thousands” of Chinese immigrant workers perished while building the final segment of the Transcontinental Railroad between Omaha and Sacramento before it was completed in 1869.67 That same year, about 179 miners died in an explosion at the Avondale coal mine in Pennsylvania, and forty-five workers died in a flash fire at the Yellow Jacket silver mine in Nevada.68 Reflecting the growing death toll in workplaces, new categories of “mining accidents,” “injuries by machinery,” and accidents from “falling bodies” were added to the 1870 census.69

“AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT CRISIS OF WORLD-HISTORICAL PROPORTIONS,” 1870–1900

In the decades after the Civil War, the expansion of railroads, mining, textile mills, ironworks, steel mills, factories, and mechanized production dramatically changed the United States. The wealth created by industrial workers, largely appropriated by the capitalist class, helped the country become an increasingly important economic power in the world.70 But by the 1870s and 1880s, the United States was experiencing what John Fabian Witt has called “an industrial accident crisis of world-historical proportions.”71 In the twenty-five years before the First World War, more than 75,000 railroad workers were killed on the job.72

Almost 43,000 miners lost their lives while working between 1884 and 1912.73 Some seven thousand workers died in boiler explosions in various industries between 1883 and 1907.74 Thousands perished in the timber industry over the decades.75 Thousands of Chinese American workers died from overwork, disease, and exposure while performing various kinds of labor in the western United States.76 Growing numbers of workers in other industries died as well. In 1878, a dust explosion at the Washburn flour mill in Minneapolis killed eighteen workers.77 In the following decade, fatal accidents in steel mills and other industrial workplaces accounted for about 20 percent of all male deaths in Pittsburgh.78 In Costa Rica, about five thousand workers employed by a U.S. company perished while building a major railroad in the mid-1880s.79

As the number of fatal occupational injuries soared and pressure on government by labor advocates grew, some state agencies began to investigate the dangers in workplaces. Reports by the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1881 and 1883 starkly depicted the grim reality, summarized more than a century later by the U.S. Department of Labor:

A boiler in a steam engine running a threshing machine exploded, killing three men and scalding a young boy. One man was thrown 80 feet through the air to his death; another had his head blown off, which landed grotesquely in a basket. A buzz-saw operator got caught in his machine and lost an arm and a leg. A year earlier he had lost his right arm in the same manner. An engineer trying to oil machinery while it was in motion was killed when his head was caught against a post by a heavy fly wheel, “grinding out his brains.” A boy in a printing house working at a press tried to straighten out an improperly placed sheet of paper and had several fingers crushed when he did not get his hand out of the way in time.80

The Minnesota Bureau of Labor Statistics reported similar tragedies in 1892.81

By the 1880s, the mounting wave of workplace deaths and injuries had aroused the grief and outrage of many people throughout the country.82 In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison told Congress that railroad workers faced “a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.”83 In 1891, the New Jersey Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industry reported that “the destruction of human life is much greater in the peaceful pursuits of industry than in war, and if it were possible to enumerate them, it will be found far greater than during the four years of destruction in the late Civil War.”84 The rate of fatal occupational injuries in the United States in the nineteenth century was significantly higher than in Britain, Germany, and France.85 However, the federal government did not issue comprehensive national statistical reports on workplace deaths for another century, and state agencies did not provide accurate, reliable estimates of industrial accident rates.86 Uncounted hundreds of thousands likely died in workplace accidents between 1850 and 1880. Eric Foner has estimated that approximately 35,000 workers died on the job annually between 1880 and 1900—a total of 700,000 for these two decades alone.87

THE GROWTH OF OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES, 1870–1900

Occupational diseases also increasingly endangered workers. As textile mills spread across the country, so did brown lung disease and other respiratory diseases.88 “Miner’s consumption” was gradually acknowledged as the most common cause of death among older miners.89 Workers who breathed tiny particles of mineral ore, rock, or sand—what David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have called “deadly dust”—often developed silicosis.90 This disease resulted in the deaths of not only miners but also quarry workers, foundry workers, nail manufacturing plant employees, granite cutters, brick workers, ceramic workers, glass workers, sandblasters, and other laborers.91 In addition, many coal miners developed coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung disease.92 Silicosis and black lung disease would cut short the lives of hundreds of thousands of coal miners during the next century.93 Lead poisoning also became a grave problem. As many as thirty thousand cases of lead poisoning may have occurred among miners and other workers in the lead deposits in Utah between 1870 and 1900.94 Workers in lead smelters, white lead factories, battery manufacturing plants, and other factories, along with painters, often became ill or died from lead poisoning.95 Many men and women also contracted tuberculosis in garment sweatshops and other workplaces.96 As Christopher C. Sellers has noted, “The explosion of industrial policyholders between the late 1870s and 1900—from 11,000 to 3.5 million—partly reflected worker anxieties about the financial impact of occupational diseases on themselves and their families.”97 Reliable statistics on deaths from occupational diseases in the late nineteenth century do not exist, but this loss of life was likely also enormous.98

ANTI-LABOR VIOLENCE, 1870–1900

By the late nineteenth century, workers also faced potential death or serious injury when they engaged in collective action to obtain a shorter work week, higher wages, and safer working conditions. During this period, the repression of workers by police officers, soldiers, company security agents, and private militias was often deadly. More than a hundred people died during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.99 Twenty Irish American miners—the famous “Molly Maguires”—were hanged in Pennsylvania between 1877 and 1879 on charges of murdering mine superintendents and foremen.100 In early May 1886, amid a national strike and other labor actions demanding the eight-hour day, police killed several workers at the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago. The next evening, as local workers protested in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown into the police ranks, killing several officers. Four anarchists were wrongfully executed for the bombing, and a fifth condemned prisoner committed suicide.101 May First later became an international workers holiday.102 In 1886, nine people died in the Southwest Railroad Strike.103 The following year the state militia and vigilantes massacred more than a hundred striking African American sugar workers and supporters in Thibodaux, Louisiana.104 Nine workers and seven Pinkerton agents died in the Homestead Steel Strike in Pittsburgh in 1892.105 During the national Pullman Strike of 1894, about thirty people were killed.106

“THE INDUSTRIAL SLAUGHTERHOUSE,” 1900–1930

In the early years of the twentieth century, “The United States was in the fifth decade of an accident crisis like none the world had ever seen and like none any Western nation has seen since.”107 U.S. capitalists’ drive for what the contemporary observer C. H. Mark called “international industrial supremacy” and domination of global markets produced a “stupendous loss” of life.108 As a series of massive workplace disasters occurred, the Cleveland Citizen lamented that the United States had become an “industrial slaughterhouse.”109 In 1900, a coal mine explosion in Scoville, Utah, killed at least two hundred workers.110 In 1902, 112 miners died in a gas and dust explosion at the Rolling Mill mine in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.111 Another coal mine explosion in Fraterville, Tennessee, killed 216 workers the same year.112 In 1903, 169 workers died in a mine explosion in Hanna, Wyoming.113 In 1905, a boiler explosion at the Grover Shoe Factory in Brockton, Massachusetts, killed fifty-eight people.114 Between mid-1906 and mid-1907, 546 workers died in industrial accidents in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, alone.115 In 1907, 362 workers died in a coal mine explosion in Monongah, West Virginia.116 The same year, 239 workers died in the Darr Mine disaster in Rostraver, Pennsylvania.117 Forty-three workers died between 1908 and 1913 while building the Los Angeles Aqueduct.118 In 1909, sixty-seven workers died because of a fire during the construction of a water intake tunnel for the City of Chicago.119

In 1910, coal mine explosions in Mulga and Palos, Alabama, took 124 lives.120 Also in 1910, 259 miners died in the Cherry Mine coal fire in Illinois, and a fire in a textile factory in Newark, New Jersey, killed 26 workers.121 In 1911, 146 young women workers died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City.122 That same year, 128 miners—primarily African American convict laborers—died in a mine explosion in Littleton, Alabama.123 A different kind of tragedy occurred on Christmas Eve in 1913, when seventy-three people, mostly children of striking copper miners, died in a stampede at the Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan, after a strikebreaker yelled “Fire!”124 In 1917, 168 miners died in an explosion at the Speculator mine in Butte, Montana.125 The following year, an explosion at a munitions depot near Sayreville, New Jersey, resulted in about one hundred deaths.126 In 1919, twenty-one people died when a giant molasses tank in Boston burst.127 In 1924, an explosion at a mine in Castle Gate, Utah, killed 172 workers, and an ammonium nitrate explosion at a nitration plant near New Brunswick, New Jersey, killed 20 workers.128 The United States continued to have far more major industrial accidents than any other country until well into the twenty-first century.129

The deaths resulting from these major calamities were only a small portion of the horrific loss of life in U.S. workplaces. In 1907 alone, almost 12,000 workers, passengers, and others died in railroad accidents.130 That year, more than 3,200 coal miners died on the job.131 Witt has emphasized:

Indeed, accidents were the leading cause of death among workers in hazardous industries as diverse as railroads, mining, metalwork, rubber work, shipping and canals, quarries, telegraph and telephones, electric lighting, brick- and tile-making, and terra-cotta work.132

By this time, untold thousands of workers had also died on the job in logging, woodworking, paper mills, meatpacking, painting, glass working, construction, oil, and other industries.133 I. M. Rubinow, a leading contemporary advocate for social insurance and health care for workers, described the scale of industrial deaths in the early twentieth century as “vastly greater” in the United States “than in any European country.”134 Labor leaders on both sides of the Atlantic condemned the much higher numbers of fatal occupational injuries here.135

Many more non-fatal industrial accidents also occurred each year. Arthur Reeves estimated in 1907 that there were about 500,000 workplace injuries each year.136 The following year, William H. Tolman estimated that approximately five million injuries had occurred in industrial and other accidents between 1897 and 1907.137 Today, some analysts believe that the annual number of serious industrial accidents in the early twentieth century may have been 700,000 or more.138 Although most injuries sustained in these accidents were not fatal, they contributed to the widespread recognition that the United States had become what one historian called the “land of disasters.”139 Workplace deaths and other industrial accidents became one of the most important social and political issues in the country, and awareness of the dangers of occupational diseases gradually increased.140 Responding to workers’ agitation and public outrage, President Theodore Roosevelt advocated the creation of workers’ compensation programs in 1907, and most states established some version of these during the next decade.141 More than a hundred years later, however, these programs remain shamefully inadequate.142

WORKERS’ DEATHS IN OTHER COUNTRIES, 1900–1930

U.S. capitalists’ pursuit of profits also resulted in the deaths of many workers in other countries. In 1904, a year after Roosevelt engineered the creation of the new country of Panama and secured its independence from Colombia, his administration began construction on the Panama Canal. More than 5,600 workers, mainly men of color, died while building the canal before it was completed in 1914.143 Between 1907 and 1912, approximately six thousand workers from several nations died while building the Madeira-Mamore railroad in Brazil for a U.S. company.144 Around the same time, as many as thirty thousand enslaved Indigenous laborers in the then-Peruvian Amazon died from exhaustion, exposure, disease, starvation, and violence while producing rubber for export to New York and London.145 Thousands of miles away, Thomas Fortune Ryan, Daniel Guggenheim and other U.S. financiers invested in mining, rubber, and agricultural interests in Congo in 1906, providing half the capital for the major Belgian mining corporation Forminière.146 They were not involved in the enslavement, exploitation, and violence that killed approximately ten million Congolese in King Leopold’s so-called Free State.147 But they were deeply complicit in the deaths of countless thousands of workers from brutal work conditions, physical abuse, forced relocations, disease, and political repression in the following decades.148 Beginning in 1917, U.S. capital and technical expertise significantly contributed to the industrial development of South Africa, the ruthless white exploitation of Black labor, and the deaths of thousands of miners and other workers.149

ESTIMATES OF WORKPLACE DEATHS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1900–1930

Marc Linder has remarked, “No one in the early twentieth century knew how many industrial soldiers were being mortally wounded each year in the United States.”150 At the time, the federal government’s limited collection of mortality data and state agencies’ reliance on employer self-reporting made it difficult to accurately assess the enormous loss of life.151 But as the carnage on railroads and in mines, mills, factories, and other workplaces mounted, so did public pressure to count the number of workers who died each year on the job. When industry analysts, government officials, academics, labor advocates, and journalists began estimating the annual human toll, they developed widely divergent estimates. In 1908, Frederick L. Hoffman of the Prudential Life Insurance company estimated that as many as 17,500 deaths that year resulted from “dangerous industries or trades.”152 The same year, a journalist estimated annual occupational fatalities to be about 35,000.153 In 1910, Columbia University professor Henry Rogers Seager estimated that industrial accidents caused approximately 30,000 deaths each year.154 The new National Safety Council, dominated by business interests, found that between 18,000 and 21,000 fatal occupational injuries occurred in 1912.155 Workers’ compensation expert E. H. Downey estimated about 35,000 annual workplace deaths that year.156

Hoffman estimated that approximately 25,000 lives were lost in the workplace in 1913.157 In 1914, Carl M. Hansen of the Workmen’s Compensation Service Bureau in New York reported that between 40,000 and 45,000 workers were dying on the job each year.158 In 1915, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations informed Congress that about 35,000 industrial deaths had occurred the previous year.159 In 1924, Carl Hookstadt of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that more than 21,000 fatal job accidents were occurring annually.160 Also in 1924, Downey estimated that the annual loss of life was approximately 25,000.161 The National Safety Council estimated that about 20,000 workers lost their lives on the job in 1929.162 In contrast, the American Labor Year Book 1929 estimated that about 35,000 workers had died in workplaces that year.163 The precise numbers of fatal occupational injuries in the United States between 1900 and 1930 will never be known, but the largest contemporary appraisals were almost certainly closer to the truth than other assessments. It may be estimated that approximately 35,000 workplace deaths occurred each year during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and approximately 30,000 occurred annually during the 1920s. In sum, a total of about one million workers likely died on the job between 1900 and 1930.

DEATHS FROM OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES, 1900–1930

Brown lung disease, silicosis, black lung disease, and lead poisoning among workers increased between 1900 and 1930.164 Tuberculosis contracted in workplaces also continued to produce many fatalities, though the rate of fatal infections eventually decreased.165 In addition, miners and workers in shipbuilding, manufacturing, construction, and the oil industry exposed to asbestos often developed and perished from asbestosis, better known as white lung disease, or from lung cancer or mesothelioma.166 Stonecutters often became ill and died from respiratory diseases.167 Workers involved in manufacturing or processing tin, rubber, leather, explosives, and paints were increasingly exposed to benzene and often developed and died from aplastic anemia.168 Hatmakers became ill from mercury poisoning and sometimes died as a result.169 Furriers lost their health and sometimes their lives from mercury poisoning, other harmful chemicals, and dust.170 The proliferation of chemicals endangered workers in other industries as well.171 Watchmakers died from radium poisoning.172 Cigar and tobacco workers suffered and sometimes perished from heart and lung diseases caused by workplace conditions.173

Gerald N. Grob has argued that “it is virtually impossible to generalize about the role of industrial disease as a factor in total mortality at the turn of the century.”174 However, the first National Conference on Industrial Diseases, held in Chicago in 1910, acknowledged the growing significance of occupational illnesses while lamenting the lack of reliable statistics on related mortality and morbidity.175 At the time, it was difficult to quantify the number of deaths from occupational diseases, partly because the causes listed on death certificates were not always accurate and partly because less than 60 percent of the states reported annual deaths from all causes to the Census Bureau.176 Nonetheless, the available historical information suffices for developing estimates of annual deaths caused by occupational illnesses. In 1913, Emery R. Hayhurst described tuberculosis as “the principal terminal occupational disease” and found it to be the “leading cause of death in 110 of the 140 groups of occupations surveyed.”177 Hayhurst estimated that almost 37,000 workers in these occupations perished in 1909 alone.178 To this number must be added the deaths from tuberculosis contracted in workplaces in the remainder of the country and deaths from brown lung disease, silicosis, black lung disease, and lead poisoning. A conservative estimate is that the annual death toll from work-related diseases in 1900 was approximately 50,000 and that this number gradually increased over the decades to the better documented but still conservative estimate of 100,000 annual deaths in 1970.179 Approximately 1.8 million workers likely perished from work-related diseases in the first three decades of the twentieth century.180

ANTI-LABOR VIOLENCE, 1900–1940

The violent repression of strikes and other labor actions also continued to exact a dreadful human toll between the turn of the century and the Second World War. Forty-two people died during a strike for the eight-hour day in Colorado in 1903–1904.181 At least twenty-one people died in the Teamsters strike in Chicago in 1905.182 In 1906, a contingent of Arizona Rangers helped Mexican police brutally suppress a strike by workers at a U.S.-owned copper mine at Cananea in Sonora.183 About thirty-six people lost their lives during the violence.184 Thirty-one people died during a streetcar strike in San Francisco in 1907, and at least twelve workers died in a strike against a railroad car manufacturer in McKees Rock, Pennsylvania, in 1909.185 Two men trying to organize cigar workers were lynched in Tampa in 1910, and police shot to death one worker during the strike at the steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the same year.186 Approximately fifty people died in the coal miners’ strike in the Paint Creek-Cabin’s Creek area in West Virginia in 1912–13.187 Two workers died during the Lawrence Textile Strike in Massachusetts in 1912.188 In 1914 in Ludlow, Colorado, National Guard troops killed sixty-six men, women, and children at a tent camp housing more than a thousand striking coal miners and family members who had been evicted from their company-owned homes.189 Several other people also died during the strike.190

By the time of the Ludlow Massacre, as many as eight hundred workers had died during labor actions in the previous four decades.191 Several hundred more perished in the quarter-century after Ludlow. In 1915, private security guards killed six striking workers at an oil plant in Bayonne, New Jersey, and Joe Hill, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, was framed for murder and executed in Utah.192 In 1916, three steelworkers died during a strike in Youngstown, Ohio, and a miner was killed during a strike on the Mesabi iron ore range in Minnesota.193 The same year, five IWW members were shot to death, and at least six others drowned when they came by boat to Everett, Washington, to support a strike by shingle-makers.194 In 1917, IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Montana.195 In 1919, five people died during a strike by streetcar conductors and motormen in Charlotte, North Carolina and four organizers for the International Timber Workers Union were murdered in their office in Bogalusa, Louisiana.196 Racist whites killed 237 African Americans trying to organize a union for sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, that year.197 At least twenty-two workers died in the Great Steel Strike of 1919.198 In contrast, no one died in the Seattle General Strike the same year.199

In 1920, state troopers killed about sixteen black and white coal miners during a strike in Walker County, Alabama, strikebreakers killed seven people during a streetcar strike in Denver, and five longshoremen died during a strike in Philadelphia.200 The United Mine Workers’ efforts to organize coal miners in West Virginia in 1920–22 met with fierce resistance, which led to the Matewan Massacre, the assassination of a pro-union sheriff, an intermittent guerrilla war, and ten thousand armed miners fighting state police and deputies in the Battle of Blair Mountain. As many as 150 workers died during those two years.201 In 1922, three coal miners died in Herrin, Illinois, during the national strike called by the UMW, and their comrades killed twenty company guards and strikebreakers.202 In 1924, fourteen sugar plantation workers and three police officers died during a strike in Hanapepe, Kauai Hawai’i.203 Three years later, Colorado state police fatally shot six coal miners during a strike at the Columbine Mine in Serene.204 In 1928, when a massive strike crippled United Fruit Company operations in Colombia, company pressure and U.S. government threats resulted in the Colombian army crushing the labor action, and approximately one thousand workers died.205

As the Great Depression ravaged the United States, there was a historical upsurge of labor activism. Sixteen people were killed during the miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931–32.206 Police murdered six Black Alabama Sharecroppers Union members during the same period.207 Several unionists and others died during the San Francisco General Strike and broader West Coast Waterfront Strike of 1934.208 Also in 1934, two workers died in a strike against an auto parts plant in Toledo, Ohio, four people were killed during a Teamsters’ strike in Minneapolis, and seven textile workers died in Honea Path, South Carolina, during a national strike.209 During the Pacific Northwest Lumber strike the following year, police and armed strikebreakers killed three workers in Humboldt County, California.210 More than a hundred workers were killed during labor actions across the country between 1933 and 1936.211 Approximately thirty steelworkers and others died in Chicago and Youngstown during the Little Steel Strike in 1937.212 Twenty-eight members of the National Maritime Union lost their lives during strikes in Texas, Louisiana, and other states between 1936 and 1938.213 In the decades that followed, company and state violence against workers in labor actions significantly declined but did not disappear.214

WORKPLACE DEATHS AND DEATHS FROM OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES, 1930–1970

The frequency of major industrial disasters and the annual number of fatal occupational injuries slowly declined after 1930, but the significant loss of life from workplace accidents and occupational diseases remained a central feature of U.S. capitalism. As many as 1,500 workers who helped construct the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel to carry the New River through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia in 1930–31 died of acute silicosis in what has been called this country’s “worst industrial disaster.”215 More than a hundred workers died building the Hoover Dam in Colorado between 1931 and 1936.216 About eighty died during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington between 1933 and 1942.217 An oil well explosion in St. George, Utah, killed ten workers in 1935.218 As the Second World War raged, there were numerous industrial casualties on the home front. In 1944, a munitions explosion at the Naval Ammunition Depot at Port Chicago, California, killed 320 workers.219 That same year, a natural gas tank explosion and fire in Cleveland left 131 people dead.220 From 1942 until 1945, the U.S. government paid the Brazilian government to transport workers to the Amazon to tap rubber for wartime production under perilous conditions. Twenty-five thousand workers died from disease, lack of medical care, and attacks by wild animals.221 By the end of 1945, almost 85,000 coal miners had been killed in accidents since the new century began.222

The number of Congolese workers who died from exposure to radiation after mining uranium for export to the United States between 1942 and 1960 may never be known.223 At least two thousand workers who mined uranium in the western United States between the 1940s and the 1980s, including many Diné people, perished from radiation-related causes.224 More than 33,000 U.S. nuclear weapons plants employees have died from exposure to radiation since 1945.225 In 1947, at least 581 workers and local residents died in Texas City, Texas, when an explosion occurred as ammonium nitrate was being loaded onto a ship.226 Measured in terms of immediate deaths, this was the worst industrial accident in U.S. history.227 That same year, 111 workers died in an explosion at a coal mine in Centralia, Illinois.228 In 1950, thirty-one dockworkers and others lost their lives when munitions detonated on barges and trains at the Raritan River Port in South Amboy, New Jersey.229 The following year, 119 workers died in an explosion at a coal mine near West Frankfurt, Illinois.230 In 1956, a fire at a refinery near Sunray, Texas, led to the deaths of nineteen firefighters.231 In 1959, a flood in a coal mine in Jenkins Township, Pennsylvania, killed twelve workers, and eight people died when an oil tanker exploded and burned in the Houston ship channel.232

In 1960, a chemical plant explosion in Kingsport, Tennessee, killed sixteen workers.233 In 1965, a gas explosion in a missile silo at an Air Force base near Searcy, Arkansas, killed fifty-three people.234 In 1968, seventy-eight workers died in a mine explosion in Farmington, West Virginia.235 Amid the political upheavals of the late 1960s, labor activists demanded legislative reforms to reduce fatal occupational injuries and deaths from occupational diseases. Under intense public pressure, President Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. This law established an agency of the same name within the U.S. Department of Labor “to assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training, outreach, education and assistance.”236 Strikingly, the Act did not establish a mechanism for accurately counting the annual number of work-related deaths.237 In 1972, The President’s Report on Occupational Safety and Health estimated that 14,000 workers were dying on the job each year, and about 2.2 million disabling accidents were occurring annually.238 The President’s Report also estimated that as many as 100,000 people were dying each year from occupational diseases, and 390,000 new cases were developing annually.239 National Safety Council statistics published since then have indicated that more than 620,000 fatal occupational injuries occurred between 1930 and 1970, and this estimate almost certainly did not include all workplace deaths.240 Between 1930 and 1970, more than 3.3 million people likely died from work-related diseases.241

“THE CONTINUING DEATH ROLL OF INDUSTRY,” 1970–1990

Since 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and other new legislation promoting mine safety and worker protections have helped reduce fatal occupational injuries in the United States. However, as David Rosner has pointed out, “There is a continuing ‘death roll of industry.’ ”242 The same year OSHA became law, an explosion at a coal mine in Hyden, Kentucky, killed thirty-eight workers.243 In 1971, an explosion at a chemical plant in Camden County, Georgia, resulted in twenty-nine deaths.244 In 1972, a coal slurry impoundment dam in Logan County, West Virginia, burst and killed 125 people.245 Ninety-one silver miners died in a fire at the Sunshine Mine between the cities of Wallace and Kellogg in Idaho the same year.246 At least sixty workers died while building the World Trade Towers in lower Manhattan before they opened in 1973.247 Half a world away, the massive U.S. military presence in Thailand during the Vietnam War fostered the significant growth of prostitution and sex trafficking, which contributed to almost 600,000 deaths there from Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome between 1984 and 2008.248 In 1976, an explosion and fire at a grain elevator in Houston killed nine workers.249 In 1977, eighteen workers died in a flash fire at a grain elevator in Galveston.250 The collapse of a partially constructed cooling tower at a power plant in Willow Island, West Virginia, killed fifty-one workers in 1978.251

In 1983, an explosion in an unlicensed fireworks factory killed eleven employees.252 In 1984, seventeen workers died in an explosion at an oil refinery in Romeoville, Illinois.253 The same year, a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, became the worst industrial disaster in world history.254 Exposure to methyl isocyanate, the toxic gas used to make the pesticides, killed about seven thousand people in the first three days and about 25,000 people since the incident.255 In 1988 in Henderson, Nevada, a chemical plant explosion resulted in two deaths.256 Also in 1988, 167 workers lost their lives in a gas explosion on a U.S. company’s oil platform in the North Sea, and seven oil workers died in a refinery explosion or Norco, Louisiana.257 In 1989, a gas explosion at a refinery in Pasadena, Texas, killed twenty-three workers, and an explosion on the battleship USS Iowa off the coast of Puerto Rico claimed the lives of forty-seven sailors.258 As of 1990, more than ten thousand workers were still dying on the job every year.259 National Safety Council data have indicated that more than 250,000 fatal occupational injuries occurred between 1970 and 1990, and this may well have been an undercount.260

Many more workers died from occupational diseases during these two decades. Some researchers have estimated that the annual number of deaths from work-related diseases declined to between fifty and seventy thousand between 1970 and 1990.261 Other analysts and labor advocates have insisted that the loss of life each year remained approximately 100,000 during this period.262 Milan Stone of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department testified in a Congressional hearing in 1985:

The exposed worker populations include … 3 million workers exposed to benzene with a risk of leukemia up to five times greater than normal; 2.5 million workers exposed to asbestos, many with a risk of lung cancer five times greater than normal; 1.5 million workers exposed to arsenic, many of whom have a risk of lung cancer two to five times greater than normal; 725,000 workers exposed to chromium and chromate pigments, some with a risk of cancer five to nine times greater than normal; 1.4 million workers exposed to nickel, some of a risk of cancer 5–10 times greater than normal. Examples of other noncarcinogenic but nevertheless dangerous workplace exposures include 89 agents of heart disease … 1 million workers exposed to silica dust at risk of lung disease; and 800,000 workers exposed to cotton dust at risk of brown lung disease.… Some 100,000 die and another 1 million may be disabled each year from occupational disease.263

The higher estimate is surely more accurate yet still conservative.264 It is likely that at least two million workers died from occupational diseases between 1970 and 1990.

WORKPLACE DEATHS AND DEATHS FROM OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES, 1990–2020

Since 1990, the annual number of fatal occupational injuries has declined, but many workers continue to die on the job each year. In 1990, a chemical plant explosion in Channelview, Texas, killed seventeen workers.265 The next year, twenty-five workers perished in a fire at a food processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina.266 Also in 1991, an explosion at a nitro-paraffin plant in Sterlington, Louisiana, killed eight workers.267 In 1993, a fire at a Thai factory producing toys for U.S. companies killed 188 workers.268 In 1998, a series of explosions at a grain elevator and storage facility in Haysville, Kansas, killed seven people.269 In 1999, an explosion at a power plant in an automobile production complex in Dearborn, Michigan, resulted in six deaths.270 In 2005, fifteen workers died in an explosion at a refinery in Texas City, Texas.271 In 2006, twelve workers died in a coal mine explosion at Sago, West Virginia, and three died in a gas explosion in a gear manufacturing plant in Milwaukee.272 Later that year, an explosion at a coal mine in Holmes Mill, Kentucky, killed five workers.273 In 2007, two collapses at a mine in Crandall Canyon, Utah, resulted in nine deaths.274 The following year, an explosion at a sugar refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, killed fourteen people, and a crane collapse in New York City killed six workers and a tourist.275 From 2008 through 2017, 1,566 fatal occupational injuries reportedly occurred in the oil- and-gas drilling industry and related businesses.276

In 2010, a power plant explosion killed five workers in Middletown, Connecticut, and a coal mine explosion claimed twenty-nine lives in Montcoal, West Virginia.277 Eleven workers died when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico blew up the same year.278 In 2011, a grain elevator explosion killed six workers in Atchison, Kansas.279 In 2013, fifteen people died in an explosion at a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas.280 In recent years, the transfer of production to low-wage countries has enabled the U.S. Empire to outsource large-scale workplace disasters.281 In 2010, a fire at a textile factory supplying U.S. and other multinational corporations killed at least twenty-seven workers near Dhaka, Bangladesh.282 Nine employees of Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer that supplies several U.S. companies, committed suicide in China because of harsh working conditions the same year.283 In 2012, a fire at a textile factory near Dhaka resulted in 112 deaths, and a fire in a clothing plant in Karachi, Pakistan, killed almost three hundred workers. Both businesses produced apparel for Walmart.284 In 2013, approximately 1,130 people died when the Rana Plaza building, which housed garment factories supplying global brands, collapsed near Dhaka.285 Later that year, an explosion at a factory in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which produced candy for U.S. companies, killed seven workers.286 Today cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for U.S. and other companies leads to frequent accidental deaths and the risk of hard-metal lung disease.287

In 2019, about 5,333 workers died on the job in the United States.288 Statistics from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that almost 170,000 fatal occupational injuries occurred between 1990 and 2018.289 Although 3.5 million new accidents and illnesses were officially reported in 2017, the AFL-CIO has contended that the annual number is actually between 7 million and 10.5 million.290 Since 1990, some analysts have reported that between fifty and sixty thousand people die each year from work-related diseases.291 For years, the AFL-CIO included similar appraisals in its annual Death on the Job report while warning that many occupational diseases are undetected for years and are often “misdiagnosed and poorly tracked.”292 Other investigators have concluded that the annual toll remains about 100,000, and still others have offered estimates of 200,000 to 300,000.293 In the most recent editions of Death on the Job, the AFL-CIO has estimated the annual number of deaths from occupational diseases to be approximately 95,000, and this is arguably still a conservative appraisal.294 In sum, between 1990 and 2020, approximately three million people likely died from occupational diseases.

COUNTING THE DEAD

As with the Indigenous Peoples Holocaust and the African American Holocaust, the total number of people who have perished in the Workers Holocaust in the United States can only be estimated.The available historical information makes possible an informed and reasonable, if rough, estimate of the terrible loss of life. Since 1880, almost 13 million workers have suffered fatal occupational injuries or died from occupational diseases in this country.295 To this number must be added the deaths of indentured servants in the colonial period; Chinese workers transported by U.S. ships to Cuba, Peru, and other countries; U.S. railroad company employees in Central and South America; laborers hired by the United States to build the Panama Canal; rubber workers in the Amazon; miners in Congo; sex workers in Thailand; and other workers employed by U.S. companies or their suppliers in various countries. When these deaths are included, the total loss of life may be close to 13.5 million. Like the Indigenous Holocaust and the African American Holocaust, the Workers Holocaust continues today.