American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  24. David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1973); Clary, Eagles and Empire, 74.

  25. DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, 248.

  26. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 74, 85, 99.

  27. http://www.dmwv.org/mexwar/documents/polk.htm

  28. Francaviglia and Richmond, Dueling Eagles, 16; for Mexican perspectives, see Cecil Robinson, ed., The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989).

  29. David Clary and David Pletcher, both authors of surveys of the Mexican War (though written 36 years apart), agree that Polk’s aggressiveness to the point of recklessness brought on a war that could have been avoided while US expansionist goals still achieved through ongoing settler colonialism and dedicated diplomacy. Clary judged Polk as “impatient … ignorant and pig-headed” whereas Pletcher argued that Polk, like his mentor Jackson, “epitomized aggressive self-centered nationalism.” Along those same lines, Thomas Hietala suggests that the “anxious aggrandizement” that brought on the war stemmed from a conviction that rapid westward expansion would ward off federalism and thus preserve the sovereignty (and the right to own slaves) of the individual states. See Clary, Eagles and Empire, 452–453; Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 605; and Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). See also Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012).

  30. Francaviglia and Richmond, Dueling Eagles, 132.

  31. Andrés Reséndez, “National Identity on a Shifting Border: Texas and New Mexico in the Age of Transition, 1821–1848,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999), 668–688.

  32. Richard B. Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 195; see also James M. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1992).

  33. Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 31; Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5–10, 29.

  34. Johannsen, To the Halls of Montezumas, 11; Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 58–59.

  35. Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, 463; Joseph E. Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire: The Diary of Samuel Ryan Curtis (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1994), 19.

  36. Isaac Bowen to Katie Bowen, December 23–24, 1846, Box 2, Isaac Bowen Papers, United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA. Hereafter cited as Carlisle Barracks.

  37. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 120.

  38. Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire, 20–24, 30.

  39. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 141; Foos, Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 131.

  40. Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire, 174.

  41. Isaac Bowen to Katie Bowen, July 27, 1846, Box 2, Bowen Papers, Carlisle Barracks.

  42. Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 197.

  43. Foos, Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 113; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 145.

  44. Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire, 171–172; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 168.

  45. Francaviglia and Richmond, Dueling Eagles, 171–172.

  46. Isaac Bowen to Katie Bowen, September 27, 1846, Box 2, Bowen Papers, Carlisle Barracks.

  47. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 201–202; Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr., and Timothy D. Johnson, A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lieutenant Daniel Harvey Hill (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2002), 44.

  48. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 279–280, 221.

  49. Luther Giddings, Sketches of the Campaign in Northern Mexicoin Eighteen Hundred Forty-Six and Forty-Seven (electronic resource; G. P. Putnam and Co., 1853), 324; Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 121.

  50. Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire, 174.

  51. Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 120–121; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 143; Hughes and Johnson, Fighter from Way Back, 28; Johannsen, To the Halls of Montezumas, 37–38.

  52. Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 121.

  53. Samuel E. Chamberlain, My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987; 1956), 86–88; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 268–269.

  54. Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 123–124.

  55. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 284; Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire, 176.

  56. Chance, ed., Mexico under Fire, 173.

  57. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 206, 248–249.

  58. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 284.

  59. Francaviglia and Richmond, Dueling Eagles, 127–154; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 176–177.

  60. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 168.

  61. “Part IX, The Abridged Diaries of William Gibbs McAdoo, 1846–,” Carlisle Barracks.

  62. Clary, Eagles and Empire, 299–304.

  63. Krystyna M. Libura, et al., eds., Echoes of the Mexican-American War (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2004), 149.

  64. Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 126; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 380.

  65. Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 126; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 383.

  66. John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 162–163; on this point, see also Greenberg, AWickedWar.

  67. Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 106; Clary, Eagles and Empire, 386.

  68. Foos, Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 134; Francaviglia and Richmond, Dueling Eagles, 60; “End of Mexican War,” Box 2, Smith-Kirby-Webster-Black-Danner Family Papers, Carlisle Barracks; Transcript of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo online: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=26&page=transcript.

  69. Johannsen, To the Halls of Montezumas, 204, 297.

  70. Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 213, 35, 14; Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (Wheeling, IL: Harland Davidson, 1990), 85.

  71. Weeks, Farewell, My Nation, 84–85.

  72. De la Teja, “Discovering the Tejano Community in ‘Early’ Texas,” 87.

  73. Håmålåinen, Comanche Empire, 309; Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 190, 222, 285.

  74. Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 229, 325–326.

  75. Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 9.

  76. Ibid., 14.

  77. Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996).

  78. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 69; Joseph Allen Stout, The Liberators: Filibustering Expeditions into Mexico, 1848–1862 (Los Angeles, CA: Westernlore Press, 1973), 47.

  79. Stout, The Liberators, 1, 43–68.

  80. On Walker and his legacy, see Brady Harrison, Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004); see also Amy S. Greenberg, “Grey-Eyed Man: Character, appearance, and Filibustering,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Winter 2000), 673–699.

  81. Harrison, Agent of Empire, 81–101.

  82. Myriad accounts assess Walker’s invasion; for Nicaraguan perspectives, see Michael Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

  83. Ibid., 3, 38, 41.

  84. “In the history of filibusterism,” Charles H. Brown has pointed out, �
��it seems that nothing succeeded like failure.” Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Life and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 68.

  85. Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 22.

  86. The violent contradictions of the settler colonial project played out over a generation rather than merely four years of the traditional periodization from Fort Sumter (April 1861) to Appomattox (April 1865). As other scholars have suggested, the Civil War might more fruitfully be conceptualized as an era beginning with “Bleeding Kansas” in the mid-1850s if not even earlier and ending with the Compromise of 1877. See Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 15; Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004); see also David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 138–178.

  87. Something resembling a culture of death materialized during the Civil War, as shared assumptions about the righteousness of the cause on both sides enabled and sustained an unprecedented level of violence. See Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2, 67, 125; see also Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).

  88. J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57 (December 2011), 307–348.

  89. Jonathan D. Sarris, “ ‘Shot for Being Bushwhackers’: Guerrilla War and Extralegal Violence in a North Georgia Community, 1862–1865,” in Daniel Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Little Rock, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 43–44.

  90. Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861–1865 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Clay Mountcastle, Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Daniel E. Sutherland, Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on Confederate Home Front.See also Philip S. Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

  91. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on Confederate Home Front, 28; Harrold, Border War,1.

  92. James A. Ramage, Grey Ghost: The Life of Colonel John Singleton Mosby (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Ramage, Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993).

  93. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18, 19, 35, 41.

  94. Mountcastle, Punitive War, 53; Fellman, Inside War, 25.

  95. T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 93; Fellman, Inside War, 151.

  96. Michael Fellman, “Inside Wars: The Cultural Crisis of Warfare and the Values of Ordinary People,” in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on Confederate Home Front, 190–191, 203; see also Stiles, Jesse James.

  97. Mackey, The Uncivil War, 30, 36.

  98. Ibid., 39–41.

  99. Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 228–239.

  100. Ibid., 224–226.

  101. Ibid., 50; David Paul Smith, “The Limits of Dissent and Loyalty in Texas,” in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence, 134.

  102. Smith, “Limits of Dissent and Loyalty in Texas,” 135, 141.

  103. Ibid., 152–170.

  104. Mountcastle, Punitive War, 32.

  105. Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 240; Mountcastle, Punitive War, 82, 1, 40.

  106. Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 253.

  107. Ibid., 271–272.

  108. Mackey, Uncivil War, 117; Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 240.

  109. Sarris, “Shot for Being Bushwhackers,” 32; Lesley J. Gordon, “ ‘In Time of War:’ Unionists Hanged in Kinston, North Carolina, February 1864,” 47, both in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence.

  110. B. Frank Cooling, “A People’s War: Partisan Conflict in Tennessee and Kentucky,” in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence., 122, 124.

  111. George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 13, 1.

  112. Smith, “The Limits of Loyalty in Texas,” 148–149.

  113. Rable, But There Was No Peace, 29–52.

  114. Ibid., 143.

  115. Laurence M. Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 186.

  116. Ibid., passim.

  117. Clarissa W. Confer, The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 145.

  118. David La Vere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 169.

  Chapter 6

  1. As Pablo Mitchell observes, “The American railroad was none other than the ultimate agent of modernity and imperialism.” Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing Mexico, 1880–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3; see also William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994).

  2. “No other nation has taken a time and place from its past and produced a construct of the imagination equal to America’s creation of the West,” David H. Murdoch declares. The West also served as “Hollywood’s most popular single genre.” David H. Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2001), vii; See also Robert G. Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1986); Albert Hurtado, “Romancing the West in the Twentieth Century: The Politics of History in a Contested Region,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Winter 2001), 417–435; and Helen McLure, “The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 31 (Winter 2000), 457–476.

  3. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, Under an Open Sky:Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 9.

  4. Jacki Thompson Rand, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 56.

  5. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 44.

  6. As Frank Van Nuys points out the West “helped consolidate the widely held assumption of American identity as fundamentally white and Anglo-Saxon.” Frank Van Nuys, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2002), xii.

  7. John Mack Faragher, “ ‘More Motley than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” in Andrew R. L. Clayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 304–326.

  8. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border States (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 151, 162–163.

  9. Aron, American Confluence, 226.

  10. Ibid., 183, 209, 207.

  11. Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

  12. William E. Unrau, The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825–1855 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 61; James P. Ronda, “ ‘We Have a Country’: Race, Geography an
d the Invention of Indian Territory,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999), 740.

  13. Frank McLynn. Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails (New York: Grove Press, 2002); Unrau, Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 148, 125.

  14. Unrau, Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 142.

  15. David J. Wishart, An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), viii; see also William E. Unrau, The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673–1873 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).

  16. Unrau, Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 11.

  17. Wishart, Unspeakable Sadness, 69, 111, 104, 107.

  18. Ibid., 110, 132, 143, 187, 201.

  19. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 265.

  20. David La Vere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 91.

  21. Ronda, “We Have a Country.”

  22. La Vere, Contrary Neighbors, 139.

  23. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 95.

  24. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 262; Sherry L. Smith, The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1990); see also Smith, “Lost Soldiers: Re-searching the Army in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Summer 1998), 149–163 and Robert Wooster, The Military and the Indian Wars, 1865–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

  25. Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York: Random House, 1995), 260.

  26. Wooster, The Military and the Indian Wars, 41–110.

  27. Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 70.