American Settler Colonialism: A History
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Legacies of the Revolutionary War
Despite their exaltation of freedom and liberty, the American Revolutionaries “shared none of these gains with the Amerindians.” Liberated from the restraints formerly imposed by the British, American settlers and speculators descended on their new “frontier” with determination to drive Indians off the land. “The Indian will ever retreat as our settlements advance upon them,” George Washington declared in 1783. “The gradual extension of our settlements will certainly cause the savage as the wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey though they differ in shape.”2
The new nation sought “to place a legal cover” on Indian removal by asserting that the indigenous people had lost all rights to lands east of the Mississippi because some had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. While the United States depicted the Indians as defeated people, the indigenes, having won most of the Revolutionary War battles and with plenty of fight left in them, did not see it the same way. Americans thus “constructed a national mythology that simplified what had been a complex contest in Indian country, blamed Indians for the bloodletting, and justified subsequent assaults on Indian lands and cultures.”3
The British Empire had been cast aside but a new form of triangulation emerged, as settlers continued to drive indigenous removal while the federal government sought to gain control of the colonial project. In the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (1787), the Congress assumed the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” As uncivilized natives, Indians could not be perceived as “foreign nations” yet the foundational legal document did require the United State to conduct diplomacy with them albeit a diplomacy of annexation. In 1790 the Federal Intercourse Act provided the national government the exclusive right to extinguish Indian title, regulate trade, and negotiate treaties.4
Pressing economic motives conjoined with the drives of settler colonization to fuel dispossession of the tribes. Even though it had survived the struggle against the British, the United States remained surrounded by enemies and plagued by a sizable war debt accrued in the Revolutionary War. Only by occupying and converting colonial space into private property could the Americans generate the revenues needed to retire the war debt, address the claims of war veterans, and appease land speculators. Moreover, by seizing Indian land, the United States could better secure its borders against the lurking world powers of Spain, ensconced in the south and eager to foment settler rebellion there, and the British who continued to occupy forts in the northwest until the mid-1790s. The United States sought to gain control of the fluid and expanding borderlands, to build trading posts and military outposts to secure settlement and preclude alliances between Indians and foreign governments.
Viewing aggressive settler colonial expansion as vital for the survival of their young republic, Americans took land from Indians in huge chunks, by treaty cessions if possible, by violent aggression if necessary. “In a series of ‘treaties’ dictated to the Indians in the mid-1780s,” Stuart Banner notes, “the Confederation government confiscated Indian land without paying any compensation.” By the mid-1790s, Dorothy Jones concludes, the “great disparity of power” between the United States and indigenous people had forged a treaty system “so unequal that it can only be called colonial.”5
While both state and federal governments took action from the top down, they were responding to pressures that emanated from the bottom up. The loyalty of settler colonialists to the new republic depended on the backing they received in the taking of Indian land. At least since Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) in colonial Virginia, whites had shown that they would rebel against any government that attempted to prevent them from carving out new lands on the self-avowed “frontier.” Ever aware of factionalism, the American founders feared the prospect of class warfare or civil tumult unless the country continued to expand andopen new lands to squatters, settlers, and speculators.
Both the State of New York and the federal government moved systematically to dispossess the Iroquois, now considered a “subdued people.” As General Philip Schuyler told the Six Nations in 1783, “We are now masters and can dispose of the lands as we think proper or more convenient to ourselves.” As Alan Taylor points out, the “dual process of dispossessing Indians and creating private property constructed the state of New York, the United States and the British Empire in Canada.”6 New York forced upon the Iroquois vast land cessions for a fraction of their value. The Iroquois resisted vigorously, as they sought to preserve a tenuous hold on their land through negotiations, by proposing leases instead of land sales, and offering direct payments to Americans to stay out of Indian land. They also sought to preserve the Haudenosaunee legal system and cultural practices rather than be subjected to those of New York.
The Mohawk Indian “half-breed” Joseph Brant used his English fluency to appropriate the American discourse of liberty as a strategy of resistance. He and other Iroquois leaders pointed out that Americans were denying them the “natural rights” so eloquently exalted in the Declaration. But the Iroquois, the Cherokee, and other once formidable tribes had suffered a series of crippling blows. The indigenes “reeled from the triple disaster of smallpox, war, and abandonment by their British allies.” Nonetheless, scholars note, “The concessions wrung from British and American governments over the colonial and early national eras are testimony to Amerindian political acumen in the face of daunting pressures.”7
To the west, the Northwest Ordinance (1787) provided a modernist framework for incorporating colonial space into the new nation. The Ordinance, typically framed in American History as the seminal accomplishment under the Articles of Confederation, as it provided for “orderly settlement,” laid the groundwork for dispossession of the actual residents of the “northwest.” The Ordinance facilitated the incorporation of vast tracts of land comprising the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The language of the Northwest Ordinance formally disavowed aggression against Indians and the expansion of slavery. The Ordinance proscribed slavery in the territories and then states (some Americans took their slaves into them anyway) and declared, “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians.” The Ordinance claimed that Indian “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” The Americans pledged to prevent “wrongs being done to them, and preserving peace and friendship with them.”8
This discourse of disavowal suggested a degree of American respect for Indian peoples and their property rights incompatible with the settler colonial project. Settlers backed by all levels of government refused to consider compromises that might infringe upon what a subsequent generation would call “manifest destiny.” In order for the new republic “to reach its mythological destiny,” Frazer McGlinchey observes, “there was to be no ‘middle ground’ culturally or literally on the future landscape to develop in the Northwest Territory.”9
As was so often the case, Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the “empire of liberty,” personified American ambivalence as well as aggression toward the native peoples. The author of the original Northwest Ordinance (1784), Jefferson voiced profound respect for the indigenes, yet he also “had a working knowledge of the Doctrine of Discovery and used it against the Indians nations.”10 Jefferson displayed empathy for the indigenes in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which included the famous though perhaps apocryphal “Logan’s Lament.” These were statements the Mingo chief supposedly made about having tried his best to get along with the whites only to have his family victimized by atrocity at the outbreak of Dunmore’s War (see previous chapter).
The apparent empathy within Jefferson’s colonial discourse belied his own knowledge of and personal investment in dispossessing native peoples on the Virginia borderlands. Jefferson p
erceived Indians as having natural rights, as long as their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness did not extend to ownership of the land. Jefferson’s empire of liberty thus “was keen on land but not on people.”11 Moreover, settler colonialism—landed expansion for the yeoman farmer and slaveholder—anchored Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, the most powerful political force in early American history. “For a Jeffersonian Republican administration, the idea of siding with Indians against Americans who sought land would be laughable,” Robert M. Owens points out.12
Jefferson’s ambivalence was invariably paternal and quickly turned bellicose when the native “children” stood in the path of settlement. Jefferson thus “played a major role in one of the great tragedies of recent world history, a tragedy which he so eloquently mourned: the dispossession and decimation of the First Americans,” Anthony F. C. Wallace observes. “It was a process now known as ‘ethnic cleansing.’ ”13
This ambivalence—a professed empathy for the plight of the indigenes comingled with willingness to remove or exterminate them—epitomized American settler colonial discourse. Jefferson and others offered the same rationalization that Andrew Jackson would employ in 1830, that segregation and removal policies served to protect Indians from the potential genocidal violence of the settlers. Americans thus cleansed Indians from their lands while explaining that removal was the best thing for them, otherwise the settlers might kill them. This was no mere ruse: the US leaders understood that given a chance, settlers would kill Indians who got in the way of their expansionist drives. “It is in the highest degree mortifying to find that the bulk of the frontier inhabitants consider the killing of Indians in time of peace to be no crime,” Timothy Pickering, Indian commissioner for the United States, observed. The “frontier miscreants,” he added, were “far more savage and revengeful than the Indians.”14
Other officials alluded to the boomerang effect and the pathological nature of colonial violence. “The Whites and Savages will ever prevent their [sic] being good neighbors,” Secretary of War Henry Knox explained in 1787. “With minds previously inflamed the slightest offense occasions death—revenge follows which knows no bounds. The flames of a merciless war are thus lighted up which involve the innocent and helpless with the guilty.” Despite his seeming ambivalence, Knox like Jefferson and other US leaders could quickly turn lethal when faced with indigenous recalcitrance. When Indians resisted settlers in western Ohio, Knox authorized General Josiah Harmar at Fort Washington (Cincinnati) to “extirpate, utterly, if possible” the indigenous “Banditti.”15
Ethnic Cleansing of the Ohio Valley
General Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, displayed the same willingness to exterminate behind an ambivalent discourse of empathy. He acknowledged that blaming violence on the “savages” obscured the aggression that inhered in settler colonialism. “Though we hear much of the injuries and depredations that are committed by the Indians upon the whites,” he observed, “there is too much reason to believe that at least equal if not greater injuries are done to the Indians by the frontier settlers of which we hear very little.” Yet the same man ruled out a negotiated settlement with the “indolent, dirty, inanimate creatures” and soon led a disastrous assault against the Ohio Indians.16
Ethnic violence raged south of the Ohio River as settlers and Indians engaged in brutal campaigns of irregular warfare. Indians killed some 300 “Kentuckians” from 1783 to 1787 but the latter would not be outdone. “Kentucky pioneers continued to kill their Indian friends as readily as they did their enemies,” Stephen Aron ironically observes. Irregular and scorched-earth warfare proved decisive in cleansing the future Bluegrass state. “Once Kentuckians discovered the vulnerability of Indian villages and cornfields, they burned and plundered with devastating effect.”17
Indians responded to settler colonial expansion with more concerted efforts to craft pan-Indian alliances. Charismatic leaders who had proven themselves during the Revolutionary War—Brant, Alexander McGillvray of the Creeks, the Miami chief Little Turtle, and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee—attempted to forge alliances of homeland defense. Other Indian tribes joined the resistance, including the Mingo, Wea, Potawatomi, Piankashaw, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Munsee, Sauk, Ottawa, and Ojibwa (Chippewa).
North of the Ohio River, a broad coalition of tribes united under Brant’s diplomacy as embodied in the United Indian Nations document of 1786, which called for the natives to speak with “one mind and one voice.” The vast majority of indigenous people refused to recognize the huge cessions of Indian land, which had been extorted from the tribes for a fraction of their value in the treaties of Fort Stanwix (1784), Fort McIntosh (1785), and at the mouth of the Great Miami River (1786). Brant now proposed the Muskingum Compromise, which offered a boundary line drawn along the Muskingum River in southeastern Ohio between the Stanwix line and the line drawn at the coerced Fort McIntosh treaty, which had ceded virtually all of the Ohio Valley. Invoking the Indian imperative of blood revenge, Brant warned that if the United States rejected diplomacy, the Indians would “most assuredly, with our united force, be obliged to defend those rights and privileges which have been transported to us by our ancestors.”18
American settler colonialism thus confronted a determined, last-gasp Indian resistance in Ohio. In 1790, the Shawnee under Blue Jacket, joined by the Miami under Little Turtle, decisively repulsed a foolhardy traditional, European-style US military assault led by General Harmar near the (modern day) Indiana–Ohio border. With the Kentucky militia forced into a desperate retreat, St. Clair mobilized an armed force for “vengeance” and “utter destruction” of the Shawnee and Miami, but the Americans instead suffered yet another humiliating and total defeat.
On November 4, 1791, the Americans—disorganized, poorly equipped, absent effective scouts, and blundering headlong into battle much as British General Edward Braddock had done in 1755—suffered a total rout in which some 650 were killed, including 69 of 124 commissioned officers, and 270 wounded, the casualties including scores of women and children. Many of the dead had their mouths stuffed with dirt to mock their lust for Indian land. The indigenes suffered only 21 warriors killed and 40 wounded in the slaughter on the Wabash River. With two and a half times the number dead as Custer’s command would suffer at Little Big Horn, it was the worst defeat the army would ever suffer in battle with Indians, yet few Americans know of it today.19
The Indian confederates celebrated their decisive victory, but were under no illusions about their future prospects in view of the relentless settler colonial advance. “The pale faces come from where the sun rises, and they are many,” Little Turtle lamented. “They are like the leaves of the trees. When the frost comes they fall and are blown away. But when the sunshine comes again they come back more plentiful than ever before.”20
Some ambivalent Americans in the east blamed the shocking defeat on the headlong rush of the settlers into Indian Territory. Secretary of War Knox responded, however, that even if “it should be admitted that our frontier people have been the aggressors,” the federal government had tried to come to terms with the tribes, thus “justice is on the side of the United States.”21 Knox’s comment epitomizes the American approach to Indian removal: it would seek to accomplish the project humanely and through diplomacy but when Indians resisted giving up colonial space, “justice” was on the side of military aggression and ethnic cleansing.
Americans mobilized for violent retribution under the command of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who declared his eagerness to lay siege to the “haughty and insidious enemy.” Provided with an (at the time) massive $1 million federal appropriation, Wayne mobilized an infantry of 2,200 men backed by 1,500 Kentucky volunteers eager for revenge. Underscoring the limitations of the pan-Indian movement, ambivalent Choctaw and Chickasaw mercenary “scouts” came up from the South to assist the US assault on the northern tribes. In the by now deeply rooted tradition, irregular forces were offered bounties for as many sca
lps as they could deliver. Wayne methodically constructed forts at Greenville, Fort Recovery (the site of St. Clair’s defeat), and further north at Fort Defiance. The Indians held out the hope of assistance from the British, still ensconced in the northwest forts, but their former allies instead in 1794 agreed to withdraw under the Jay Treaty from the territory they had formally already ceded to the Americans in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.22
Wayne’s careful planning and mobilization led to a decisive victory flowing from a by now well-ensconced American style of counterinsurgency warfare. Wayne unleashed his rangers on Indian villages and cornfields throughout the Miami and Maumee River Valleys. American History texts focus on the anticlimactic Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794) but it was the scorched-earth campaign against Indian homes and agricultural stocks that shattered the resistance. Wayne “laid waste the Indian country along the Maumee, destroyed even the British agents’ houses and fields.” The Americans “left evident marks of their boasted humanity behind them,” the Shawnee-raised “white” Alexander McKee sardonically observed, noting that the invaders scalped and mutilated their victims and unearthed graves.23
Adorned in a scarlet jacket and gold epaulets, Blue Jacket met Wayne in the field to surrender the upper Ohio country to the American general. The ambivalent Shawnee chief had associated closely with the British and French, lived in a nice home with his French-Shawnee wife, owned livestock and black slaves, traded in alcohol, and sent his son to Detroit for education. Wayne and others grasped the importance of co-opting indigenous leaders such as Blue Jacket, who was soon provided with bribes and given a commission in the US Army. Blue Jacket thereafter cultivated the Western lifestyle and indulged his taste for liquor.24