An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  The Upper Creek Muskogees who remained in Alabama surrendered to Jackson and ceded twenty-three million acres of their ancestral lands to the United States in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The Red Sticks, however, joined the resistant Seminole Nation in the Florida Everglades and three more decades of Muskogee resistance ensued. During this period, Anglo-American slave owners, and Andrew Jackson in particular, were determined to destroy the safe havens that Seminole towns offered to Africans who escaped from slavery.15 The Seminole Nation had not existed under that name prior to European colonization. The ancestral towns of the Indigenous people who became known as Seminoles were located along rivers in a large area of what is today Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and the Florida Panhandle. In the mid-eighteenth century, Wakapuchasee (Cowkeeper) and his people separated from the Coweta Muskogees and moved south into what was then Spanish-occupied Florida. As Spain, Britain, and later the United States decimated Indigenous towns throughout the Southeast, survivors, including self-emancipated Africans, established a refuge in Seminole territory in Spanish Florida in the Everglades. European incursions came in the form of military attacks, disease, and disruption of trade routes, causing collapse and realignments within and between the towns.16

  The Seminole Nation was born of resistance and included the vestiges of dozens of Indigenous communities as well as escaped Africans, as the Seminole towns served as refuge. In the Caribbean and Brazil, people in such escapee communities were called Maroons, but in the United States the liberated Africans were absorbed into Seminole Nation culture. Then, as now, Seminoles spoke the Muskogee language, and much later (in 1957) the US government designated them an “Indian tribe.” The Seminoles were one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” ordered from their national homelands in the 1830s to Indian Territory (later made part of the state of Oklahoma).

  The United States waged three wars against the Seminole Nation between 1817 and 1858. The prolonged and fierce Second Seminole War (1835–42) was the longest foreign war waged by the United States up to the Vietnam War. The US military further developed its army, naval, and marine capabilities in again adopting a counterinsurgency strategy, in this case against the Seminole towns in the Everglades. Once again US forces targeted civilians, destroyed food supplies, and sought to destroy every last insurgent. What US military annals call the First Seminole War (1817–19) began when US authorities entered Spanish Florida illegally in an attempt to recover US plantation owners’ “property”: former African slaves. The Seminoles repelled the invasion. In 1818, President James Monroe ordered Andrew Jackson, then a major general in the US Army, to lead three thousand soldiers into Florida to crush the Seminoles and retrieve the Africans among them. The expedition destroyed a number of Seminole settlements and then captured the Spanish fort at Pensacola, bringing down the Spanish government, but it failed in destroying Seminole guerrilla resistance and the Seminoles did not agree to hand over any former slaves. “Armed occupation was the true way of settling a conquered country,” Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri said at the time, reflecting a popular blend of militarism and white-supremacist Christian identity. “The children of Israel entered the promised land, with implements of husbandry in one hand, and the weapons of war in the other.”17 The United States annexed Florida as a territory in 1819, opening it to Anglo-American settlement. In 1821 Jackson was appointed military commander of Florida Territory. The Seminoles never sued for peace, were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the United States, and although some were rounded up and sent in 1832 to Oklahoma, where they were given a land base, the Seminole Nation has never ceased to exist in the Everglades.

  THE MYTHICAL FOUNDATION OF SETTLER PATRIOTISM

  Between 1814 and 1824, three-fourths of present-day Alabama and Florida, a third of Tennessee, a fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina became the private property of white settlers—all of the land seized from Indigenous farmers. In 1824, the first permanent US colonial institution was established. First named the Office of Indian Affairs and placed tellingly within the Department of War, the agency was transferred to the Department of Interior twenty-five years later following the annexation of half of Mexico. In making this transfer, the federal government showed overconfidence in assuming that armed Indigenous resistance to US aggression and colonization had ended. Such resistance would continue for another half century.

  Whereas white supremacy had been the working rationalization for British theft of Indigenous lands and for European enslavement of Africans, the bid for independence by what became the United States of America was more problematic. Democracy, equality, and equal rights do not fit well with dominance of one race by another, much less with genocide, settler colonialism, and empire. It was during the 1820s—the beginning of the era of Jacksonian settler democracy—that the unique US origin myth evolved reconciling rhetoric with reality. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was among its initial scribes.

  Cooper’s reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel The Last of the Mohicans has become the official US origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper “our national novelist.”18 Cooper was the wealthy son of a US congressman, a land speculator who built Cooperstown, named after himself, in upstate New York where he grew up. His hometown was christened all-American with the establishment of the National Baseball Hall of Fame there in 1936, during the Depression. Expelled from Yale, Cooper joined the navy, then married and began writing. In 1823, he published The Pioneers, the first book in his Leatherstocking Tales series, the other four being The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer (the last published in 1841). Each featured the character Natty Bumppo, also called variously, depending on his age, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, or Deerslayer. Bumppo is a British settler on land appropriated from the Delaware Nation and is buddies with its fictional Delaware leader Chingachgook (the “last Mohican” in the myth). Together the Leatherstocking Tales narrate the mythical forging of the new country from the 1754–63 French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans to the settlement of the plains by migrants traveling by wagon train from Tennessee. At the end of the saga Bumppo dies a very old man on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, as he gazes east.19

  The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, was a best seller throughout the nineteenth century and has been in print continuously since, with two Hollywood movies based on the story, the most recent made in 1992, the Columbus Quincentennial.20 Cooper devised a fictional counterpoint of celebration to the dark under-belly of the new American nation—the birth of something new and wondrous, literally, the US American race, a new people born of the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European, not biological merger but something more ephemeral, involving the dissolving of the Indian. In the novel, Cooper has the last of the “noble” and “pure” Natives die off as nature would have it, with the “last Mohican” handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the nativized settler, his adopted son. This convenient fantasy could be seen as quaint at best if it were not for its deadly staying power. Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what historian Francis Jennings has described as “exclusion from the process of formation of American society and culture”:

  In the first place they [US historians] exclude Amerindians (as also Afro-Americans) from participation, except as foils for Europeans, and thus assume that American civilization was formed by Europeans in a struggle against the savagery or barbarism of the nonwhite races. This first conception implies the second—that the civilization so formed is unique. In the second conception uniqueness is thought to have been created through the forms and processes of civilization’s struggle on a specifically American frontier. Alternatively, civilization was able to triumph because the people who bore it were unique from the beginning—a Chosen People or a super race. Either way American culture is seen as not only unique but better than all other cultur
es, precisely because of its differences from them.21

  US exceptionalism weaves through much of the literature produced in the United States, not only the writing of historians. Although Wallace Stegner decried the devastation wrought by imperialism on Indigenous peoples and the land, he reinforced the idea of US uniqueness by reducing colonization to a twist of fate that produced some charming characteristics:

  Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumberland Gap, Americans have been wanderers.… With a continent to take over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could not have avoided being footloose. The initial act of emigration from Europe, an act of extreme, deliberate disaffiliation, was the beginning of a national habit.

  It should not be denied, either, that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Our folk heroes and our archetypal literary figures accurately reflect that side of us. Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of Moby Dick, all are orphans and wanderers; any of them could say, “Call me Ishmael.” The Lone Ranger has no dwelling place except the saddle.22

  The British novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence, who lived in northern New Mexico for two years, conceptualized the US origin myth, invoking Cooper’s frontiersman character Deerslayer: “You have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”23

  Historian Wai-chee Dimock points out that nonfiction sources of the time reflected the same view:

  The United States Magazine and Democratic Review summed it up by arguing that whereas European powers “conquer only to enslave,” America, being “a free nation,” “conquers only to bestow freedom.” … Far from being antagonistic, “empire” and “liberty” are instrumentally conjoined. If the former stands to safeguard the latter, the latter, in turn, serves to justify the former. Indeed, the conjunction of the two, of freedom and dominion, gives America its sovereign place in history—its Manifest Destiny, as its advocates so aptly called it.24

  Reconciling empire and liberty—based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands—into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to “the people”—indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people—by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.

  The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century—generations of young white men—the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of US American nationalism. Behind the legend was a looming real-life figure, the archetype that inspired the stories, namely, Daniel Boone, an icon of US settler colonialism. Boone’s life spanned from 1734 to 1820, precisely the period covered in the Leatherstocking series. Boone was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on the edge of British settlement. He is an avatar of the moving colonial–Indigenous frontier. To the west lay “Indian Country,” claimed through the Doctrine of Discovery by both Britain and France but free of European settlers save for a few traders, trappers, and soldiers manning colonial outposts.

  Daniel Boone died in 1820 in Missouri, a part of the vast territory acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. When Missouri opened for settlement, the Boone family led the initial settlers there. His body was taken for burial in Frankfort, Kentucky, the covenant heart of the Ohio Country, Indian Country, for which the revolution had been fought and in which he had been the trekker superhero, almost a deity. Daniel Boone became a celebrity at age fifty in 1784, a year after the end of the war of independence. Real estate entrepreneur John Filson, seeking settlers to buy property in the Ohio Country, wrote and self-published The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, along with a map to guide illegal squatters. The book contained an appendix about Daniel Boone, purportedly written by Boone himself. That part of the book on Boone’s “adventures” subsequently was published as “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone” in the American Magazine in 1787, then as a book. Thereby a superstar was born—the mythical hero, the hunter, the “Man Who Knows Indians,” as Richard Slotkin has described this US American archetype:

  The myth of the hunter that had grown up about the figure of Filson’s Daniel Boone provided a framework within which Americans attempted to define their cultural identity, social and political values, historical experience, and literary aspirations.… Daniel Boone, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson were heroes to the whole nation because their experiences had reference to many or all of these common experiences. “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a popular song that swept the nation in 1822–28, helped elect Andrew Jackson as President by associating him with Boone, the hero of the West.25

  Yet the Leatherstocking’s positive twist on genocidal colonialism was based on the reality of invasion, squatting, attacking, and colonizing of the Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created that reality. Rather, they created the narratives that captured the experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories that were surely instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide and set the pattern of narrative for future US writers, poets, and historians.

  COMMANDER AND CHIEF

  Andrew Jackson is enshrined in most US history texts in a chapter titled “The Age of Jackson,” “The Age of Democracy,” “The Birth of Democracy,” or some variation thereon.26 The Democratic Party claims Jackson and Jefferson as its founders. Every year, state and national Democratic organizations hold fund-raising events they call Jefferson-Jackson Dinners. They understand that Thomas Jefferson was the thinker and Jackson the doer in forging populist democracy for full participation in the fruits of colonialism based on the opportunity available to Anglo settlers.

  Jackson carried out the original plan envisioned by the founders—particularly Jefferson—initially as a Georgia militia leader, then as an army general who led four wars of aggression against the Muskogees in Georgia and Florida, and finally as a president who engineered the expulsion of all Native peoples east of the Mississippi to the designated “Indian Territory.” As the late Cherokee principal chief Wilma Mankiller wrote in her autobiography:

  The fledgling United States government’s method of dealing with native people—a process which then included systematic genocide, property theft, and total subjugation—reached its nadir in 1830 under the federal policy of President Andrew Jackson. More than any other president, he used forcible removal to expel the eastern tribes from their land. From the very birth of the nation, the United States government truly had carried out a vigorous operation of extermination and removal. Decades before Jackson took office, during the administration of Thomas Jefferson, it was already cruelly apparent to many Native American leaders that any hope for tribal autonomy was cursed. So were any thoughts of peaceful coexistence with white citizens.27

  It’s not that Jackson had a “dark side,” as his apologists rationalize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonialist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to constitute the core of US patriotism. The most revered presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama—have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people.

  Jackson was a national military hero, but he was rooted in the Scots-Irish frontier communities, most of whose people, unlike him, rem
ained impoverished. Their small farms were hard-pressed to compete with large plantations with thousands of acres of cotton planted and each tended by hundreds of enslaved Africans. Land-poor white rural people saw Jackson as the man who would save them, making land available to them by ridding it of Indians, thereby setting the pattern of the dance between poor and rich US Americans ever since under the guise of equality of opportunity. When Jackson was inaugurated in 1829, he opened the White House to the public, the majority in attendance being humble poor whites. Jackson was easily reelected in 1832, although landless settlers had acquired very little land, and what little they seized was soon lost to speculators, transformed into ever larger plantations worked by slave labor.

  The late Jackson biographer Michael Paul Rogin observed:

  Indian removal was Andrew Jackson’s major policy aim in the quarter-century before he became President. His Indian wars and treaties were principally responsible for dispossessing the southern Indians during those years. His presidential Indian removal finished the job.… During the years of Jacksonian Democracy, 1824–52, five of the ten major candidates for President had either won reputations as generals in Indian wars or served as Secretary of War, whose major responsibility in this period was relations with the Indians. Historians, however, have failed to place Indians at the center of Jackson’s life. They have interpreted the Age of Jackson from every perspective but Indian destruction, the one from which it actually developed historically.28

  Once elected president, Jackson lost no time in initiating the removal of all the Indigenous farmers and the destruction of all their towns in the South. In his first annual message to Congress, he wrote: “The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry.”29 This political code language barely veils the intention to forcibly remove the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole Nations, followed by all other Indigenous communities from east of the Mississippi River, except for the many who could not be rounded up and remained, without land, without acknowledgment, until the successful struggles of some of them for recognition in the late twentieth century.