ROOTS OF GENOCIDE
In The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814, military historian John Grenier offers an indispensable analysis of the colonialist warfare against the Indigenous peoples of the North American territories claimed by Great Britain. The way of war largely devised and enacted by settlers formed the basis for the founding ideology and colonialist military strategy of the independent United States, and this approach to war is still in force in the twenty-first century.3 Grenier writes that he began his study with the goal of tracing the historical roots of the use of unlimited war by the United States, war whose purpose is to destroy the will of the enemy people or their capacity to resist, employing any means necessary but mainly by attacking civilians and their support systems, such as food supply. Today called “special operations” or “low-intensity conflict,” that kind of warfare was first used against Indigenous communities by colonial militias in Virginia and Massachusetts. These irregular forces, made up of settlers, sought to disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence through scouting and taking prisoners. They did so by destroying Indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering enemy noncombatant populations.4
Grenier analyzes the development of the US way of war from 1607–1814, during which the US military was forged, leading to its reproduction and development into the present. US historian Bernard Bailyn calls the period “barbarous” and a “conflict of civilizations,” but Bailyn represents the Indigenous civilization as “marauders” that the European settlers needed to get rid of.5 From this formative period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic characteristics of the US way of war and thereby the characteristics of its civilization, which few historians have come to terms with.
In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During nearly two centuries of British colonization, generations of settlers, mostly farmers, gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution. Anglo-French conflict may appear to have been the dominant factor of European colonization in North America during the eighteenth century, but while large regular armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the Indigenous communities. Much of the fighting during the fifteen-year settlers’ war for independence, especially in the Ohio Valley region and western New York, was directed against Indigenous resisters who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of settlers with an independent government, as opposed to a remote one in Great Britain. Nor did the fledgling US military in the 1790s carry out operations typical of the state-centered wars occurring in Europe at the time. Even following the founding of the professional US Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the US conquest of the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley regions. Since that time, Grenier notes, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces.
The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to seek the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population. “In cases where a rough balance of power existed,” Grenier observes, “and the Indians even appeared dominant—as was the situation in virtually every frontier war until the first decade of the 19th century—[settler] Americans were quick to turn to extravagant violence.”6
Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided colonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that rather than racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred: the out-of-control momentum of extreme violence of unlimited warfare fueled race hatred. “Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of ‘Indian haters,’ men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.” By then, the Indigenous peoples’ villages, farmlands, towns, and entire nations formed the only barrier to the settlers’ total freedom to acquire land and wealth. Settler colonialists again chose their own means of conquest. Such fighters are often viewed as courageous heroes, but killing the unarmed women, children, and old people and burning homes and fields involved neither courage nor sacrifice.
So it was from the planting of the first British colonies in North America. Among the initial leaders of those ventures were military men—mercenaries—who brought with them their previous war experiences in Britain’s imperialist, anti-Muslim Crusades. Those who put together and led the first colonial armies, such as John Smith in Virginia, Myles Standish at Plymouth, John Mason in Connecticut, and John Underhill in Massachusetts, had fought in the bitter, brutal, and bloody religious wars ongoing in Europe at the time of the first settlements. They had long practiced burning towns and fields and killing the unarmed and vulnerable. “Tragically for the Indian peoples of the Eastern Seaboard,” Grenier observes, “the mercenaries unleashed a similar way of war in early Virginia and New England.”7
SETTLER-PARASITES CREATE THE VIRGINIA COLONY
The first Jamestown settlers lacked a supply line and proved unable or unwilling to grow crops or hunt for their own sustenance. They decided that they would force the farmers of the Powhatan Confederacy—some thirty polities—to provide them with food. Jamestown military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the settlers as well as provide them with land and labor. The leader of the confederacy, Wahunsonacock, entreated the invaders:
Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food? What can you get by war? . . . What is the cause of your jealousy? You see us unarmed, and willing to supply your wants, if you will come in a friendly manner, and not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy.8
Smith’s threat was carried out: war against the Powhatans started in August 1609 and the destruction of the Powhatans became the order of the day. The war dragged on for a year until the English governor, Thomas West, ordered forces mobilized by George Percy, a mercenary who had fought in the Netherlands, “to take revenge” and destroy the Indigenous population. In his report following the assault, Percy gloated over the gruesome details of killing all the children. Despite the terrorizing tactics of the settlers, the Powhatans were able to protect their grain storage buildings and force the Jamestown settlers to shelter within their colonial fortress.9 Meanwhile the Powhatans organized a stronger confederacy. In 1622, they attacked all the English settlements along the James River, killing 350—a third of the settler population. Unable to eliminate the Indigenous population by force of arms, the colonists resorted to a “feedfight,” as Grenier identifies it—systematic destruction of all the Indigenous agricultural resources.10 A dozen years later an even greater conflict broke out, the Tidewater War (1644–46). Hardly a war, it consisted rather of settlers continuously raiding Indigenous villages and fields with the goal of starving the people out of the area. There followed three decades of peace, from which the settlers inferred that total war and expulsion of the Indigenous people worked. The few Indigenous families that remained in eastern Virginia were under the absolute dominance of the English. It was clear, Grenier points out, that “the English would tolerate Indians within and near their settlements provided they essentially neither saw nor heard them.”11 In the absence of Indigenous sources of food and labor, the colonists brought in enslaved Africans and indentured European servants to do the work.
By 1676, the settler population of Virginia had mushroomed and English tobacco farmers were encroaching on the lands of the Susquehannock people. When the Susquehannocks resisted, a war broke out that went badly for the
English. In 1676, the Virginia House of Burgesses formed a mounted force of 125 men to range through a particular cluster of Indigenous villages and thereby overcome Susquehannock resistance.12 This was the immediate background of Bacon’s Rebellion, so beloved by populist US historians and those who search for the onset of racialized servitude in the British colonies. The rebellion occurred when Anglo settler-farmers along with landless indentured servants—both Anglo and African—took into their own hands the slaughter of Indigenous farmers with the aim of taking their land. The plantation owners who ruled the colony were troubled, to be sure, by the interracial aspect of the uprising. Soon after, Virginia law made greater distinction between indentured servants and slaves and codified the permanent status of slavery for Africans.13 The point is an important one, but there is a larger issue. Bacon’s Rebellion affected the development of genocidal policies aimed at the Indigenous peoples—namely, the creation of wealth in the colonies based on landholding and the use of landless or land-poor settler-farmers as foot soldiers for moving the settlement frontier deeper into Indigenous territories.14 That the rebellion’s leader, Nathaniel Bacon, was a wealthy planter reveals the relationship between the wealthy landed settlers and the poorer, often landless, settlers. Historian Eric Foner rightly concludes that the rebellion was a power play by Bacon against the Virginia governor William Berkeley and his planter allies, as Bacon’s financial backers included other wealthy planters opposed to Berkeley.15
IN THE NAME OF GOD
What transpired up the coast in the founding and growth of the New England colony was different, at least at first. Just before the 1620 landing of the Mayflower, smallpox had spread from English trading ships off the coast to the Pequot fishing and farming communities on land, greatly reducing the population of the area the Plymouth Colony would occupy. King James attributed the epidemic to God’s “great goodness and bounty toward us.”16 Consequently, those who survived in the Indigenous communities had little means to immediately resist the settlers’ expropriation of their lands and resources. Sixteen years later, however, the Indigenous villages had recovered and were considered a barrier to the settlers moving into Pequot territory in Connecticut. A single violent incident triggered a devastating Puritan war against the Pequots in what the colony’s annals and subsequent history texts call the Pequot War.
The Puritan settlers, as if by instinct, jumped immediately into a hideous war of annihilation, entering Indigenous villages and killing women and children or taking them hostage. The Pequots responded by attacking English settlements, including Fort Saybrook in Connecticut. Connecticut authorities commissioned mercenary John Mason to lead a force of soldiers from that colony and Massachusetts to one of the two Pequot strongholds on the Mystic River. Pequot fighters occupied one of the forts, while the other one contained only women, children, and old men. The latter was the one John Mason targeted. Slaughter ensued. After killing most of the Pequot defenders, the soldiers set fire to the structures and burned the remaining inhabitants alive.17
This kind of war was alien to the Indigenous peoples.18 According to their ways of war, when relations between groups broke down and conflict came, warfare was highly ritualized, with quests for individual glory, resulting in few deaths. Colonial wars inevitably drew other Indigenous communities in on one side or the other. During the Pequot War, neighboring Narragansett villages allied with the Puritans in hopes of reaping a large harvest of captives, booty, and glory. But after the carnage was done, the Narragansetts left the Puritan side in disgust, saying that the English were “too furious” and “slay[ed] too many men.” After having made the Pequots the enemy, the settlers set out to complete the destruction. Fewer than two hundred half-starved Pequots remained of the two thousand at the beginning of the war. Although they had ceased fighting and were without any means of defense, the settlers started a new attack on the Pequots. The colony commissioned the mercenary Mason and his murderous crew of forty men to burn the few remaining homes and fields.19 Puritan William Bradford wrote at the time in his History of Plymouth Plantation:
Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.20
The other Indigenous nations of the region assessed what was in store for them and accepted tributary status under the colonial authority.
During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New England began the routine practice of scalp hunting and what Grenier identifies as “ranging”—the use of settler-ranger forces. By that time, the non-Indigenous population of the English colony in North America had increased sixfold, to more than 150,000, which meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous homelands. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called King Philip’s War.21 Wampanoag people and their Indigenous allies attacked the settlers’ isolated farms, using a method of guerrilla warfare that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating. The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as “skulking,” and responded by destroying Indigenous villages—again extirpation. But Indigenous guerrilla attacks continued, and so the commander of the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Indigenous tactics in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption. He petitioned the colony’s governor for permission to choose sixty to seventy settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed “wilderness warfare.” In July 1676, the first settler-organized ranger force was the result. The rangers—60 settlers and 140 colonized Indigenous men—were to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or subdue” the enemy, in Church’s words. The inclusion of Indigenous fighters on the colonists’ side has marked settler colonialism and foreign occupations ever since.22 The settler-rangers could learn from their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades, Church perfected his evolving method of annihilation.
“REDSKINS”
Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations.23 During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.24
Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”25 Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenou
s slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.
This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization—destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging, and scalp hunting—became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.27
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