Debunking Howard Zinn
Page 11
Nor did Cortés turn “Aztec against Aztec.” His allies were people of other tribes who had been persecuted by the Aztecs for a century—especially the Tlaxcalans, who had had their women and children “butchered,” their fields stripped, and their populations raided for “material and human tribute.”3 In fact, “Tlaxcala became the magnet for every Indian who had something to lose if the Aztecs won.” Warriors came from all around, and soon Cortés had “over fifty thousand Indians” that he was training “in the Spanish fighting methods.”4 This enabled Cortés to complete his conquest in two years instead of a decade or more.5
Zinn, however, is not concerned with such details; he is happy to lump all Indians into one group. In Zinn’s scheme, individuals don’t matter so much as the group to which they belong: Indian or European, good guy or bad guy.
So we quickly get to the next heartless Spanish conquistador: Pizarro in Peru, who, in Zinn’s narrative “used the same tactics, and for the same reasons—the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call ‘the primitive accumulation of capital.’ ”6
Notice how Karl Marx—the inventor of the Communist political philosophy whose implementation has resulted in the murders of tens of millions—is subtly introduced as a trustworthy authority.
Next, Zinn marches on to the colonies the English established in North America—where he sees the same “pattern” as in the Spanish conquests: “In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.”7
But as Gary Nash, on whose 1974 book, Red, White, and Black, Zinn relies heavily, makes clear—while Zinn does not—Grenville was not representative of the permanent settlers of the English colonies. Nash describes him as a member of the “generation of adventurous seadogs and gentlemen” whose exploits “ended mostly in failure.”8 These men were not settlers, but adventurers; the gentlemen in the group, thinking themselves above doing manual labor, refused to farm. Zinn, though, makes no such distinctions in his eagerness to see the same Europeans bad, Indians good “pattern” everywhere.
Then comes the conflict with the Indian chief Powhatan at Jamestown over his refusal to return some runaways during the “starving time” in 1610. Zinn quotes from a text he doesn’t identify, describing the colonists’ bloodthirsty “Revendge” in response to Powhatan’s “prowde and disdaynefull Answers”: killing fifteen or sixteen Indians plus the queen and her children, burning their house, and destroying the crops.9
Zinn calls his source simply “the English account,” and devotes over half a page to a speech by Powhatan to John Smith that even Zinn admits may never have really been made. Only Zinn waits to make that admission until he has first got it firmly fixed in his readers’ minds that it really did happen, claiming that “Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic.” Only then does the slippery Zinn admit that the authenticity of the speech “may be in doubt.” And he follows that admission up with the dubious claim that “it is so much like so many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it.”10 Note the whole bag of rhetorical tricks Zinn is using here. He calls the “letter” of the speech—the literal words that Powhatan actually spoke (or that he didn’t speak)—“rough” and the “spirit” of the speech “exact.” Those clever word choices lend rhetorical force to Zinn’s claim that we should take it seriously even if it never actually happened. If there are, in fact, as Zinn claims, many similar Indian statements from which he could have picked to make his point, one wonders why he didn’t choose one of them, instead of this dubious one.
When, twelve years after the colonists’ killing of fewer than two dozen Indians, the Indians kill 347 colonists, including women and children, Zinn presents the massacre as a reasoned decision on the part of the Indians in light of their alarm at the growth of the English population.11
That 1622 massacre was instigated by Opechancanough, who had succeeded his brother Powhatan upon his death in 1618 and was resentful of white settlement and “English efforts to assimilate his people into their culture.” Opechancanough saw an opportunity after “the English murdered a highly regarded warrior and prophet named Nemattanow . . . on suspicion of killing a white trader.” The 347 lives lost represented “almost a third of the English population in Virginia.” As Larry Gragg comments in American Indian History, “[m]ore would have died had not a Pamunkey [a tribe in the Powhatan confederacy] servant informed his master, who, in turn, warned the main settlements in and around Jamestown. . . . in response, the English launched a vigorous counterattack, including military expeditions, the destruction of crops, and the burning of villages. . . .”12
Zinn doesn’t bother with such details. His characterization of the situation is crude: the colonists, unable to “enslave the Indians” and unable to “live with them,” simply “decided to exterminate them.” A People’s History reserves such language for the Europeans’ intentions, not the Indians’—even in the case of King Philip’s War in the 1670s, which, as historian Bert M. Mutersbaugh explains, was intended to be a “war of extermination against the English.”13
From Virginia, we’re off to New England to the next atrocity—this time by the Puritans, who, Zinn tells us, “appealed to the Bible. . . . to justify their use of force to take the land.”14 Zinn makes little distinction between the settlers at Jamestown (originally single young men seeking their fortunes) and those in Massachusetts Bay (families seeking religious freedom). Like Las Casas, the Puritans sought to save and convert the Indians. The converts lived in “praying towns” where they enjoyed “considerable autonomy,” according to Thomas Woods. Missionary John Eliot developed a written language for the Algonquins and translated the Bible for them. Nor did the Puritans use “force”—as Zinn puts it—to steal the Indians’ land. As Woods explains, while “the king had issued colonial land grants,” the “Puritan consensus” was that this “conferred political and not property rights. . . . Roger Williams obtained title from the Indians before settling in Providence,” and “Connecticut and New Haven followed [his] pattern. . . .” In the Connecticut Valley, settlement “was positively encouraged by some tribes in the 1630s, who hoped the English might prove a useful obstacle to the ambitions of the Pequots, a hated tribe that had begun to force its way into the area. Once settled, these New England colonies went on to purchase whatever additional land they desired,” allowing Indians hunting rights on these lands. Although Zinn claims that Governor Winthrop justified the forceful taking of land that had not been “subdued,” Woods explains, “The colonists did believe that deserted or desolate land could be occupied by whoever discovered it, but this idea was never used to dispossess Indians of their lands.”15
Woods takes much of his information from Alden T. Vaughan’s 1965 study New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675, a work ignored by Zinn. In 1995, reflecting on his work and the criticism of his detractors, Vaughan said he had originally been impressed by the Puritans’ “attempt, marked by failure in the long run but partly successful in the early years, to deal justly and peacefully with their Indian neighbors. For example, in 1638 Plymouth Colony hanged three Englishmen for murdering an Indian. . . . in their educational and judicial system and in their missionary efforts, the Puritans revealed a paternalistic but genuine concern for the Indians. . . . by mid-century, Harvard College welcomed Indian students, as the colony’s common and grammar schools had
for many years.”
The failure at conversion, Vaughan said in retrospect, had to do with the colonists’ “cultural absolutism,” but not “color prejudice,” for they believed that the Indians had descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel.16
Zinn’s discussion of the war with the Pequot Indians is also topsy-turvy. His explanation is simplistic: the colonists “wanted their land.” Thus, the “murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnapper, and troublemaker” was only “an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.” In fact, more than one rather shifty European had been killed by the Pequot, as is clear from the account of the war by Governor Winthrop, who reported that the men who were sent out against the Indians were authorized “to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English.” As even Zinn has to admit, “Massacres took place on both sides.” But the massacres by the English are somehow worse because “The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortés and later, in the twentieth century, even more systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the enemy.” This claim is intended to establish in the reader’s mind the idea that Europeans, beginning with Cortés, uniquely attacked noncombatants.17 Zinn never gets around to describing the Pequots’ massacre of the English, or the attacks upon noncombatants in the Tuscarora War, which began on September 22, 1711, when “approximately five hundred Tuscaroras and their allies attacked at widely scattered points along the Neuse, Trent, and Pamlico Rivers. Men, women, and children were butchered and their homes destroyed by fire. The Indians’ frenzy was slowed only by fatigue and drunkenness. At the end of the two-day rampage more than 130 whites were dead and nearly 30 women and children had been captured. . . .” The reason for the attack was that the Tuscarora felt that they were being cheated by the settlers; they were additionally inspired by “unscrupulous traders” who described “the settlers as easy targets with no government backing or protection.”18 Then there was the Yamasee War over trade grievances when the Yamasee joined with Creeks and Catawba and “began a war against South Carolina in April 1715. The Yamasee and their allies attacked Carolina traders and settlements, killing four hundred English. . . .”19 These are just two examples of surprise attacks upon civilians, which were the early settlers’ greatest fears. Such attacks, “terrorizing the enemy,” were a continuation of Indian practices from before European settlement.
The Pequot were nothing like the stereotype of the peaceful, innocent, gentle Indians that Zinn had been carefully building up from his first introduction of the “Arawak” on page one of A People’s History. C. George Fry explains in American Indian History, “As suggested by their name (from pekawatawog, ‘the destroyers’), the Pequots were once the most formidable tribe in New England.” They had “a virtual hegemony over their adjacent nations….” That was why the Mohegans and the Narragansetts helped the English in their attack on the main Pequot fort on the Mystic River in 1637 after two English traders were killed and outlying English settlements, including Wethersfield, were attacked.20
Zinn says nothing about the fearsomeness of the Pequots. After the colonists found their “excuse,” according to Zinn’s narrative, “a punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots.” Zinn then quotes from Governor Winthrop about the expedition’s “commission” to “put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children. . . . take possession of the island,” and then demand that the “murderers of Captain Stone and other English” be turned over. The English were able to kill only “some Indians,” with the rest hiding in the forest. So, they burned deserted villages and crops. Zinn quotes from an account by “one of the officers of that expedition” to provide “insight into the Pequots they encountered: ‘The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully. . . .’ ”
This quotation evokes the scene of Columbus meeting the Arawak and serves to establish the idea that although “[m]assacres took place on both sides” the English were the aggressors, while the Indians were innocent and wronged. “So the English set fire to the wigwams of the village,” continuing that “tactic of warfare” so favored by the Europeans to “terroriz[e] the enemy,” and launched the Pequot War. Zinn quotes “ethnohistorian” Francis Jennings’ “interpretation” of the attack led by Captain John Mason on the Pequot village on Mystic River as an example of cowardly warfare on noncombatants.21
But Zinn is being very selective about the historical record. The quotation from the unnamed “officer” of the expedition who coldly ignores friendly Pequot overtures—Captain John Underill, as Underhill himself describes in his History of the Pequot War—further enhances this impression. The passage Zinn quotes about the Indians who “went on cheerfully,” not understanding that the colonists “intended war,” comes after Underhill’s account of an attack by Indians that killed the colonists’ Indian interpreter. And while Zinn wants the reader to believe that the Pequots were crying out “cheerfully” in innocent trust that the colonists came in peace, what follows in Underhill’s account tells a very different story. After the English made no answer, the Indians continued to call out, asking, “are you hoggery, will you cram us? That is, are you angry, will you kill us, and do you come to fight?” This is so contrary to the impression Zinn has been careful to create. In fact, the Indians were trying to ascertain whether they needed to prepare for battle—and quickly figured out that they did. According to a part of Underhill’s account that Zinn does not quote: “That night the Nahanticot Indians, and the Pequeats, made fire on both sides of the river, fearing we would land in the night. They made most doleful and woful cries all the night, (so that we could scarce rest) hallooing to one another, and giving the word from place to place, to gather their forces together, fearing the English were to come war against them.”22
In Underhill’s account, the attempted negotiations with the Indians to get the murderers handed over are met by stalling and taunting. Fort Saybrook, defended by Underhill and Mason and their twenty men “armed with corselets, muskets, bandoleers, rests, and swords . . . did much daunt” the Indians, who after six weeks, “fell upon . . . [nearby] Wethersfield, with two hundred Indians” and slew “nine men, women, and children” and held “two maids” captive in their canoe decked out with “sails” made from the slain Englishmen’s clothes, taunting the English until they fired, narrowly missing the captive girls.23
Underhill also recounts some events—not mentioned by Zinn—that led up to the conflict. The Pequots had made threats against the settlers at Fort Saybrook and were running “up and down as roaring lions” and “threatening persons and cattle to take them, as indeed they did.” He also describes what happened to a “Master Tilly, master of a vessel” anchored in the Connecticut River. Tilly came ashore, “not suspecting the bloody-mindedness of those persons, who fell upon him and a man with him, whom they wickedly and barbarously slew; and, by relation, brought him home, tied him to a stake, flayed his skin off, put hot embers between the flesh and the skin, cut off his fingers and toes, and made hatbands of them; thus barbarous was their cruelty!”24
The company sent to Fort Saybrook after the attack on Wethersfield included “one hundred armed soldiers” and “threescore Mohiggeners, whom the Pequeats had drove out of their lawful possessions.” Underhill gives details about the fighting, which resulted in the deaths of two Puritans before the colonists resorted to fire-setting. And afterward, the Narragansets asked for help against the Pequots who were after them, and the English fought them off.25
Underhill is telling the Puritans’ side of the story. But historian Shannon Duffy weighs the evidence and explains that the Pequots had raided the new Connecticut settlements and that their siege of Fort Saybrook “continued for months.” In addition, “Other attacks killed nin
e other Englishmen, including one trader, John Tilly, who was ritually tortured before his execution. Connecticut declared war on April 18, 1637. . . . Massachusetts followed suit on May 1, and Plymouth on June 7.” The colonists’ May 26 attack on Fort Mystic, which killed between six hundred and seven hundred Pequots, “apparently caused the Pequots to lose heart.” Duffy, unlike Zinn, does her best to see both sides of the story, noting that the contemporary accounts “insisted that the war was a defensive one,” but that “[s]ince the 1970s . . . historians have become more critical of Puritan motives and actions.” Some see the Puritans using the murders of John Oldham in 1636 and Captain John Stone in 1634 as an “excuse to destroy the Pequots for materialistic reasons.” Even at the time, William Bradford, because of Stone’s less than reputable character, believed the Indians’ story that Stone had kidnapped two Pequots and been killed along with seven of his men in a rescue attempt. The “Pequot refusal to negotiate on either death,” however, “seems to have been at least a partial cause of mounting Puritan frustration,” according to Duffy. And contributing to the idea that the Indians posed a threat was “Mohegan sachem Uncas, leader of a breakaway faction of the Pequots” who circulated “rumors that the Pequots were plotting against the English communities.” And Captain John Endecott’s “expedition to Block Island” was “not intended” to start a war. Endecott had orders only to “assert Massachusetts’ claims by force.” John Winthrop, writing to “aggrieved” Plymouth governor William Bradford, explained apologetically that the “first intentions” of the organizers of that raid were “only against Block Island.” Duffy judges that the colonists “did not realize. . . . that the Pequots would be required to respond . . . or risk losing face with other indigenous groups,” and the Indians “seem to have failed to recognize how the English would interpret their raids on the Connecticut settlements.” She cites Underhill’s account as one of the contemporary ones claiming that “the decision to fire the fort was not premeditated,” but was done only when the English “encountered stiff resistance and realized that they had lost the element of surprise.” It may even “have been partly an accident.”26