American settler colonialism continued to center on the Ohio Valley, a colonial space that Americans now claimed as their own western “frontier.” Patriotic discourses exalted yeoman farmers and the spread of republicanism, thus downplaying the self-interested motivations of squatters and land speculators. The settlers constructed forts or “stations” as a means of survival as they “carried the military organization of the frontier settlements to a higher plane.” As Indian attacks intensified in the summer of 1777, the Kentucky militia girded for indiscriminate warfare.50
Confronted with an existential threat, the indigenes of the Ohio Valley diverged as to how best to respond to the mounting American assault. Zealous young warriors, angered over the loss of their homelands, hunting grounds, and way of life, prepared to fight to the death while ambivalent community elders searched for a diplomatic solution. In 1777, the Shawnee leader Cornstalk blamed some of the borderland violence on the warrior zeal of his own “foolish young men” and embarked on a peace mission. A settler mob in Point Pleasant responded to his call for nonviolence by imprisoning and then executing and mutilating Cornstalk and his son. “Everyone among the Shawnees knew that Cornstalk had been the tireless advocate of accommodation and peace,” John Mack Faragher points out, “and their outrage was immeasurable.” Meanwhile, other groups of settler colonialists in and around Fort Pitt killed innocent Delaware and Seneca Indians. As a result of this wave of indiscriminate violence, ambivalence lost ground and advocates of extermination ruled the day. The Ohio Indians sought unsuccessfully to recruit Cherokees and Creeks against the Long Knives (settlers), explaining it was “better to die like men than to dwindle away by inches.”51
Some Revolutionary Americans, George Rogers Clark among them, advocated genocide. “To excel them in barbarity is the only way to make war upon Indians and gain a name among them,” avowed Colonel Clark as he launched a raid into southern Ohio and Indiana replete with indiscriminate killing of Indian women and children. In February 1779, Clark sought to make an impression on British territorial Governor Henry Hamilton, notorious among the Americans as the “hair-buyer” for his incitement of the borderland tribes. While Hamilton and his British charges looked on from inside the gates, Clark demanded the surrender of the British fort at Vincennes and drove home his point by bludgeoning an Ottawa Indian named Macutté Mong. After being struck in the head with a tomahawk outside the gates of the decrepit British fort, Macutté Mong withdrew the weapon from his own skull and handed it back to his executioner, mocking his inefficiency. Clark ordered the indigene, still alive, thrown into the Wabash River whereupon he and other captives drowned. When Clark, in the words of Hamilton, with “his hands and face still reeking from the human sacrifice,” subsequently took the surrender of the fort, he declared that as to the Indians “for his part he would never spare man, woman or child of them.”52
The same genocidal drives underlay the Gnadenhutten massacre (discussed in the Preface) in March 1782. A growing number of American settlers could perceive Indians only as savage foes, regardless of their religious conversion and lack of aggression. As one man observed after Gnadenhutten, “On this side of the mountain … the country talks of nothing but killing Indians and taking possession of their lands.”53
Indiscriminate ethnic violence raged across the border lands throughout the Revolutionary War. As Indian prisoners brought no reward, Americans killed them for their scalps, which could be redeemed for cash. When, as often happened, no men of fighting age could be found in a village, the invaders burned the homes and crops, leaving the survivors to forage or starve. “American troops and militia tracked through the Susquehanna, the Allegheny, the Scioto, Miami, and Tennessee valley, leaving smoking ruins and burned cornfields behind them.”54
The American War of Independence accelerated violent dispossession of Indians in the southern states as well. The Creeks had granted the British a huge land cession in 1763 in return for the promise that their remaining lands would be free of Euro-Americans. But no paper agreement could put a stop to the settlers who flooded into Georgia regardless of Creek claims or British paper restrictions. Ensconced in Florida since the establishment of St. Augustine in 1565, Spain could hold back the tide of American settler colonialism for another generation or two but no longer, as it turned out.55
In Carolina American patriots issued “a call for Cherokee genocide” to put an end to ambivalent relations on the borderlands. Race mixing and middle-ground relationships in the backcountry had been a target of the Carolina Regulators, backed by the elite in Charlestown, in the late 1760s. They promoted, as Tom Hatley explains, a “message of support for white on red violence among out of power social groups,” which extended to Georgia as well. Many of the settlers had been traumatized by years of conflict with Creeks, Cherokees, and other Indians and longed to cleanse them from the land.56
In 1776, raids against borderland settlements carried out by young Cherokee warriors provided the “moment” that many Carolinians had been awaiting to unleash an indiscriminate campaign. Eager rebels called for “the first warfare of our young republic” to be a campaign in which the “awe and dread of the power of the white people” would be driven into “the breast of the Indians.” Even previous proponents of ambivalence, such as William Henry Drayton, called for destruction of “every Indian cornfield, and burn every Indian town” and either to enslave or to “extirpate” indigenes. The man who immortalized the phrase “merciless Indian savages,” the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, called for the Cherokees to “be driven beyond the Mississippi.”
Facing a genocidal assault, the Cherokee abandoned their villages. “We are now like wolves,” one of them lamented, “ranging about the woods to get something to eat.”57 The Carolinians admired the Cherokee towns even as they destroyed them, commenting on the fine agricultural fields and “white man-like improvements” in the settlements. Dragging Canoe, leader of the Cherokee warrior faction, advocated fighting back against the scorched earth campaign, declaring that it “seemed to be the intention of the white people to destroy us from being a people.” Backed by the British the Cherokees waged an indiscriminate conflict with the settlers throughout the Revolutionary War. In 1782, the settlers ordered their blacksmiths to make special new cutlasses for “intensely violent attacks on the tribe.” In 1785, two years after the British recognized American independence, the Cherokee signed a treaty at Hopewell, S.C. establishing a western boundary. The Cherokee had few illusions that the treaties with the whites would hold water; such accords, or “talking leaves,” could be expected like leaves to blow away in the wind whenever it suited the Americans to violate them.
Most Cherokee moved deeper into the Appalachian hills and valleys where they “built farmsteads much like those of their American neighbors” and where they remain to this day. Determined Protestant missionaries rode into the backcountry but found the Cherokee little interested. The tribe was, as one member explained, “Too well acquainted with white people to be converted easily.” Though decimated by the Revolutionary War era conflict, as they had been a generation earlier, the resilient Cherokee would soon thrive once again until the next major American cleansing campaign targeted them in the 1830s.58
During the Revolutionary War, Indian combatants reciprocated the exterminatory violence replete with torture whenever they had the opportunity. In the Battle of Blue Licks in northern Kentucky in August 1782, the Shawnee and Delaware, joined by some 50 Loyalists, soundly defeated the Americans after luring them into a foolhardy frontal assault. Despite such ephemeral victories, the Ohio Valley Indians had already suffered a shattering blow the previous year albeit indirectly when the Americans and their French allies defeated the British Army under General Charles Cornwallis in a culminating battle of the Revolutionary War. Under the Treaty of Paris (1783), the British sold out their Indian allies by recognizing US independence and handing over to the Americans the vast colonial space ranging from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River a
nd south to the Gulf Coast. As the Creek leader Alexander McGillvray put it, the British had “most shamefully deserted” their Indian allies.59
In 1786 the Americans launched a bloody raid through southern Ohio fueling another eight years of exterminatory warfare. The irregular forces burned eight Shawnee villages, disregarding whether these were hostile Indians or not. In a reflection of the simmering hatreds and erosion of ambivalence on the borderlands, Hugh McGary, a Kentuckian who had led the foolish charge at Blue Licks, slaughtered an elderly chief named Moluntha with a tomahawk blow to the head. Moluntha advocated indigenous accommodation to American settler colonialism, represented the Shawnee peace faction, had no connection with the Blue Licks battle, and flew the American flag over his village in Ohio, but he was slaughtered nonetheless.60
Among the combatants at Blue Licks as well as the destruction of the Shawnee villages in 1786 was the legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone, who well embodied the transition from ambivalence to ethnic cleansing that characterized the American borderlands. Boone had led the first wave of settlers who “had come west precisely to escape hierarchy and control, and in their radical notions of independent action they resembled no group more than the Indians.” In 1777, Boone had been captured by the Shawnee and forced to run the gauntlet. He survived the beating as if he wore a shell on his back; hence the Shawnee dubbed him “big turtle,” or Sheltowee, and decided that he could live. Boone was then taken in by Blackfish, the Shawnee chief whom in the Indian tradition “covered the death” of his own son in warfare through adoption. Blackfish came to love Daniel Boone like a son. Boone evolved his hybrid personae in captivity, including intimacy with Indian women. He eventually escaped, went back to Kentucky, and survived a trial for treason for having trucked with the Indians and the British. Eager to reestablish his patriotic bona fides, Boone joined Clark in the scorched earth campaign across Ohio and into Indiana—a state whose name would not convey ultimate ownership. Boone, who had lost two sons and a brother at the hands of Indian violence, helped burn down the stores and villages of the very people who had adopted him, including Old Chillicothe, the center of Shawnee civilization.61
During the American Revolution the borderlands became a colonial space of existential violence. Indiscriminate warfare against Indians, which peaked at the very “moment” when Americans achieved their revolutionary ambitions, left a powerful imprint on the emergent national identity. Under the drives of settler colonization, the Americans would not share space or conduct diplomacy on equal terms with the indigenous people. Settler colonialism was a zero-sum game in which only the “unconditional surrender” of the enemy could stem the violence.
Historical denial, projection, and rationalization accompanied the American settler colonial project. Though the British and the Americans were the invaders of space already occupied by other societies, they blamed the “merciless Indian savages” for the violent conflict. They viewed ethnic cleansing as fantasy fulfillment, a reflection of the preordained march of civilization and progress. Colonial and revolutionary discourse depicted Indians as primordial savages and indiscriminate killers thus eliding indigenous ambivalence as well as the genocidal tendencies of the settlers. If anything, as Starkey, White, and other scholars have suggested, the Euro-Americans freed themselves of the restraints of the scope of violence more easily than did the Indians.
Wars had been waged from the arrival of the first Europeans to the end of the American Revolution, yet history has obscured these conflicts. Many of these wars—William’s, Pontiac’s, Dunmore’s—took on innocuous personal names or no name at all. This absence of meaningful names reflected “the unspoken recognition that there was little that was noble about them,” Cayton observes.62
Shrouded behind a Revolutionary discourse emphasizing the triumph of republicanism were the drives to dispossess and destroy the putatively savage indigenous other. The Americans streaming into the borderlands joined by land speculators and the “founding fathers” back east were determined to take the land and to kill or remove those who stood in their way. The time for trade and diplomacy, compromise and coexistence, had now passed. The Americans sought a final solution to the problem that had long plagued settler expansion onto a “frontier” they called their own.
4
“The Savage and Common Enemy of the Country”: US Settler Colonialism to the Mississippi River
Long before Buffalo Bill and later Hollywood romanticized the “Wild West,” Indians were driven out of the vast colonial spaces of the eastern half of the North American continent. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, as they faced relentless and unprecedented pressures, indigenous people became divided on how best to respond to the American settler-colonial juggernaut. Through trade, conversion to Christianity, intermarriage, and establishing kinship ties, many Indians had begun to acculturate to Euro-American society. In view of the demographic swamping, these indigenes viewed violent resistance as futile and, while still maintaining their identity as Indians, wanted to get on with their lives.
Other indigenes rejected acculturation and accommodation. They believed that Indians could survive only by retaining indigenous ways, including warfare, and resisting American cultural imperialism as well as the expansion of settlements. During this period, bands such as the Shawnee and the Creeks became bitterly divided over the best means to cope with the settler onslaught. The Americans exploited these divisions to further a national campaign of Indian removal.
As in other settler colonial settings in global history, the Americans confronted the indigenes with “facts on the ground.” As immigrants poured into the country, migrating west and south, settlers overwhelmed the indigenous cultures and forced them out of colonial spaces regardless of the degree of their ambivalence or willingness to acculturate. Crucially, the War of 1812 and the US takeover of Florida left Indians bereft of European allies and more vulnerable than ever to American aggression.
The United States preferred to disavow colonialism by dispossessing Indians through legal means, an effort that culminated in the Indian Removal Act (1830). In this landmark act, Americans openly debated and then legislated a national campaign of ethnic cleansing. The stormy debate that ensued over the Indian Removal Act underscores that Americans, too, were often divided over Indian policy during the early national and antebellum years. Many Americans opposed Indian removal, many others lamented but acquiesced to it, yet still other Americans—especially those living on the borderlands—relished the dispossession and destruction of the savage foes.
Racial formations and national self-righteousness anchored denial and rationalization of Indian removal, as well as the expansion of slavery. Americans viewed themselves as a chosen nation, expanding republicanism and leading the world toward liberation from monarchy and aristocracy. The United States was a sovereign nation-state and as such had a right to settle in defined spaces, whereas Indians were nomadified as primitive hunter-gatherers, children of the forest, warlike people who could not adapt to a rational existence such as tilling the soil while their wives anchored the domestic sphere.1 Americans proved adept at overlooking the considerable number of indigenes who defied these stereotypes and showed themselves willing and able to acculturate.
As a progressive nation, nothing less than an “empire of liberty,” Americans were by their very identity performing good works. Accordingly, inferior races in the path of progress had to give way, or in the case of blacks, they had to perform the labor required for the greater good of mankind. National narcissism thus fueled denial and rationalization of the settler colonial project.
During the early national, Jacksonian, and antebellum eras, Americans cultivated a discourse of nostalgia for the inevitable “passing” of the noble savage. The incorporation of Indians into the symbolic past thus coincided with the actual removal of the tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River. At least since William Bradford at Plymouth, North American settlers had attributed the devastating impact of their d
iseases to a higher plan from God to displace the savages. No guilt or responsibility had to be assumed in the ebullient young republic for a “dying race” whose fate was the inevitable consequence of providential design.
Framing removal as the best possible solution for Indians assuaged guilt and rationalized ethnic cleansing. Even many Americans who expressed paternal concern for Indians advised that the most prudent course was for them to withdraw to the west, otherwise the least civilized among the white men living within the putatively civilized society might kill them. Ironically, then, it made little difference whether American colonial discourse was benevolent or hate-filled, as they produced the same policy: removal of Indians from colonial spaces desired by whites.
With hundreds of thousands of settlers flowing into the country, indigenous people east of the Mississippi had no choice but to adapt. They did so through a variety of strategies, distinct to time and place including acculturation, trade, alliances, diplomacy, use of the American legal system, spiritual revival, and warfare. Indian violence, however, continued to boomerang against the tribes in a vicious cycle of aggression and retribution. Indian violence traumatized settlers, affirming the colonial discourse of savagery, defying the narrative of a vanishing race, and igniting never deeply subsumed genocidal tendencies. Americans thus engaged in warfare and perpetrated massacres, work that attempted to turn the narrative of the dying race into reality.
Indigenous strategies, whether of accommodation or resistance, ultimately failed because Indian removal inhered in the structure of settler colonialism. Americans left no cultural space for Indians under the fantasy frame wherein it was the white man’s providential destiny to take sole command of the continent. Thus, Americans would accept nothing less than removal of Indians from all but a few pockets of the land east of the Mississippi River.
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 12
