American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  On August 3, 1795, with the Americans having proven “relentless in their determination to terrorize the Indians of the Wabash and the Maumee into accepting their wishes,” representatives of the Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Wea, and Piankashaw signed off on the loss of their homelands following elaborate ceremonies. Little Turtle held out as long as he could before acquiescing to the Treaty of Greenville, which the president signed and the US Senate ratified.25 The indigenes gave up claims to south-central Ohio and a portion of Indiana in return for tradegoods, annuities, and promises that would not be fulfilled of preservation of their remaining pockets of land from additional settlement. With the Indians defeated, the white population of Ohio rocketed from 5,000 in 1796 to 230,000 by 1810.26

  The decade following the Greenville Treaty proved “simply disastrous for the Indians on the Wabash and its tributaries.” The settler influx brought influenza and smallpox epidemics while depleting the forests and animal populations. The Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware villages suffered “the full effects of spatial, ecological, and cultural dislocation.” Even William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana territory, condemned his countrymen for their “monstrous abuse” of the land, pointing out that the average hunter killed more game “than five of the common Indians.”27

  Harrison, a Virginian who imported African-Americans as “de-facto slaves” into the future Hoosier state, had complete authority over Indian policy and set about to clear the indigenes from the land. Harrison was “especially relentless, resourceful, and ruthless” in dispossessing Indians. He rationalized that US expansion advanced civilization and generated revenue and taxes. Moreover, white American settlement enjoyed divine sanction. There was “nothing so pleasing to God as to see his children employed in the cultivation of the earth,” Harrison explained to the indigenes while appropriating three million acres of their land at the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809).28

  Indian Homeland Defense in the “War of 1812”

  Though driven out of the Ohio Valley, indigenes mobilized resistance in the Indiana territory behind two charismatic leaders, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. The latter, like many Indians had fallen into drunkenness and despair but pulled out of it and underwent a powerful personal spiritual revival. Soon known as The Prophet, Tenskwatawa preached that the whites and their ways were evil and the path to salvation lay in a return to Indian ways of living, dressing, speaking, worshipping, and consuming. If Indians could unite against settler colonialism and shed themselves of the contamination of pale face culture, they might yet survive, the brothers and their followers believed.

  The spiritual resistance movement was intertribal, “integrated the religious and the political,” and spanned generations. Tenskwatawa’s message echoed the Delaware prophet Neolin, who had called for rejection of “white people’s ways and nature” on the eve of the Indian resistance at the end of the French and Indian War. Tenskwatawa gave Indians hope, spurred cultural renewal, and cleared the way for his brother to mobilize violent resistance. Many indigenes responded to the appeal to return to Indian ways out of a growing conviction that commercial engagement with whites had weakened them, both spiritually and materially. The whites had introduced disease, alcoholism, and prostitution while the fur trade and other extractive industries had depleted resources and fostered economic dependence. Market forces had eroded the indigenous way of life while Christianity threatened spiritual and cultural traditions. By casting off the white ways, Indians rejected dependency and sought to regain control of their lives and, they hoped, to preserve their lands as well.29

  As would occur at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, Indian spiritual revival aroused powerful American anxieties followed by indiscriminate violence. By clinging to colonial space desired by Americans and attempting to revivify their spirituality, Indians were refusing to play their designated role as a “dying race.” By uniting Indian bands, they were defying the American divide and conquer strategy. Thus the movement would have to be stopped and resistant Indians dispossessed or killed.

  Despite his contempt for the Americans, who had killed his father and two brothers and driven him from his burning village as a boy, Tecumseh proved willing to try diplomacy. However, his meeting with Harrison in 1810 at Vincennes went badly. The governor had no intention of compromising with a savage. From his sitting position on the ground—having deliberately turned down the white man’s offer of a chair in which to sit like a “civilized” man—Tecumseh explained to Harrison, “You have taken our lands from us and I do not see how we can remain at peace with you if you continue to do so.” Tecumseh urged Harrison to convince James Madison to return lands confiscated in the Treaty of Fort Wayne or else the president could “sit still in his town, and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out.” When Harrison responded lamely that Americans had forever shown a “uniform regard to justice,” Tecumseh, according to Harrison, leaped to his feet and “with the most violent gesticulations and indications of anger” stalked out of the meeting.30

  While Tecumseh traveled south to organize pan-Indian resistance, Harrison set out with 1,200 soldiers to destroy Prophetstown, the center of the Indian spiritual renewal. On November 7, 1811, the Indians attacked Harrison’s approaching forces along Tippecanoe Creek. The unprepared Americans suffered much heavier casualties than the outnumbered indigenes, who were eventually forced to abandon the attack and melt into the countryside. They burned Prophetstown behind them. Harrison represented the battle as a glorious triumph over British-incited savages and infused his report with melodrama—”To their savage fury our troops opposed that cool and deliberate valor which is characteristic of the Christian soldier.” Harrison emerged from the modest battle as “the hero of Tippecanoe,” a legacy that helped him claim a short-lived presidency 30 years later.31

  The battle of Tippecanoe actually settled nothing, but the subsequent War of 1812 would prove as devastating for Midwestern Indians as the Revolutionary War had been for those living in the eastern states and the Ohio Valley. Known primarily as the second American war to secure independence against the British, the history of the conflict, as with conventional histories of the Revolutionary War, obscures the US campaigns of Indian dispossession. The War Hawks, a congressional faction representing the new “western” states, had agitated for war out their desire to drive Indians from the land in order to free up colonial space for their constituents.32

  Irregular warfare between Americans and Indians replete with atrocities on both sides raged across the borderlands during the innocuously entitled War of 1812. As was usually the case, open warfare undermined ambivalence and ignited the American impulse to exterminate the “merciless Indian savages.” Jefferson declared that the Indian resistance would “oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” The sage of Monticello projected US settler colonial aggression onto the British and the Indians, rendering them the aggressors thereby rationalizing American settler colonialism as a purely defensive reaction.33

  While glossing over their own indiscriminate killing, Americans publicized Indian massacres as confirmation of the primordial savagery of the indigenes. In January 1813, a group of Indians, having swilled a case of American whiskey, slaughtered 30 to 40 wounded Americans in eastern Michigan following the Battle of River Raisin, the largest battle of the War of 1812 and a defeat for the United States. The American press was aflame with stories of the killings, but as Armstrong Starkey points out, “the ‘massacre’ occurred against the background of indiscriminate American scorched earth tactics in the Indian villages.”34

  In September 1813, following a series of setbacks, including a reprise of their Revolutionary War invasion of Canada, the United States took control of the Great Lakes in the Battle of Lake Erie and the British began to retrench. Disgusted once again with the unreliable European ally, Tecumseh declared the British were “like a fat animal that carries its tail upon its back” but, when frightened, “drop
s its tail between its legs and runs off.”35 The indigenous war effort deflated with the news that on October 5 Tecumseh had been found dead and mutilated after the battle on the Thames River. Exhausted by the Napoleonic wars, the British settled for burning Washington, DC, and withdrawing. In December 1814, the Treaty of Ghent brought a return to the status quo ante.36

  The death of Tecumseh and their abandonment by the British left Indians demoralized whereas American patriotic fervor soared in the wake of the War of 1812. Like the Revolution of 1776 and the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the War of 1812 powerfully affirmed the national fantasy of providential destiny to inherit the continent. In the postwar “era of good feelings,” a sense of “revitalized national strength, liberal individualism, and godly affirmation of the republic surfaced everywhere in peace commemorations.”37

  The War of 1812 created “a powerful anti-Indian faction in the national government” including the War Hawk congressmen and two future presidents, Harrison and Jackson. Support for settler colonialism by means of ethnic cleansing thus provided the foundation for a successful political career in the United States. The Battle of the Thames alone “produced a president, a vice president, three governors, three lieutenant governors, four senators, twenty congressmen, and a host of lesser officials.”38

  As in the Revolutionary War, the Treaty of Ghent excluded the Indian savages from any involvement in the white man’s diplomacy. The French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte had sold off a monumental portion of Indian land in the Louisiana Purchase and the British had now done the same thing to their Indian allies. The Americans laughed off a half-hearted British proposal of an independent Indian nation in the Old Northwest. Having won most of the battles on the upper Great Lakes and upper Mississippi Valley during the War of 1812, the indigenes could scarcely believe that they once again would be denied the fruits of their victories at the negotiating table. The tribes faced an ominous future with the ouster of the British. Determined “to expel the British entirely from the Indian country,” the Americans proceeded to construct new forts on the upper Mississippi River and along the western shore of Lake Michigan.39

  To gain the British signature on the Ghent Treaty, the United States disingenuously pledged in Article IX to make peace with the Indians and “forthwith to restore to such tribes or nations, respectively, all the possessions, rights, and privileges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to” before the war broke out.40 This insincere pledge was as empty as its counterpart in the Northwest Ordinance hence the indigenous people again faced a reinvigorated tide of righteous American settler colonial expansion.

  Many Americans living along the borderlands had been traumatized by their defeats at the hands of the Indian savages. The humiliating US surrender of Fort Detroit, for example, came in the wake of a British general’s threats to unleash on the Americans “the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops.” Having now survived the second war with Britain, many Americans longed to destroy the “merciless” savages to ensure that they never again posed such a threat. Like the Pennsylvania settlers who besieged Gnadenhutten, these western settlers sought total security—a final solution to the Indian problem.41

  With the exterminatory impulse at the forefront, the Americans proved equally hostile to the considerable numbers of Indians who had fought with them in the War of 1812. In western Ohio, the remaining Shawnee, Wyandot, Seneca, Miami, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Kickapoo had joined in the battle, often under coercion. As one Ohioan explained to the Indian residents of the Buckeye state, “War is our trade and you cannot live quiet and take no part in it.” The War of 1812 “especially divided the Shawnee,” as more members of the tribe had fought against Tecumseh than with him at the Battle of the Thames. The indigenes had shown their ambivalence by fighting other Indians, thereby “rejecting the binary racial and ethnic division” that prevailed strongly among Americans.42

  The Shawnee who had sided with the Americans nonetheless endured persistent harassment from borderland settlers because they were racialized as Indians rather than respected as allies. During the War of 1812 the Kentucky, militia betrayed an inclination to attack any and all Indians on general principles. With news of the River Raisin massacre, “settlers burned many Shawnee cabins, stole their livestock, and physically abused several Shawnee tribesmen.” Settlers tried to assassinate the “progressive” Shawnee chieftain Black Hoof, who had joined Harrison in the invasion of Canada, shooting him in the face as he conferred with a US general.43

  Many Indians had been moved onto newly created reservations and received federal annuities but others had settled successfully and begun to acculturate within Ohio communities. These ambivalent indigenes had learned to provide for themselves and wanted to live with their white neighbors. “We have good homes here” and had invested the “labor and pains to make them,” a Shawnee explained. These Indians had successfully adapted, fought on the American side in the war, and were “willing to walk the white man’s road.” Yet when they tried to claim “all the privileges of the white male inhabitants” their actions aroused opposition from “the honorable part of this community,” a resident of Bellafontaine declared. In 1824, citing drunkenness and occasional violent clashes between whites and “roving Indians,” the Ohio governor pronounced the remaining Shawnee “morally depraved” and thus subject to removal.44

  Forced by the Treaty of Miami Rapids (1817) into a small reserve near Black Hoof’s village at Wapakoneta, Ohio, the Shawnee built cabins, raised crops, and sent their children to schools. The American settlers, viewing the Indians as “out of time and place in the linear conception of ‘progress,’ “ drove them out of Wapakoneta and appropriated their lands and cabins. In the two decades following the War of 1812, “the Americans forced most Shawnee to yield their lands and to seek refuge across the Mississippi.” Told in 1831 that they would get no legal protection and thus “might be beaten or killed by white men,” the remaining Shawnee contingent at Wapakoneta had no choice but to sign a removal treaty.45

  Just as the Prophet, Tecumseh, and other spiritual leaders had predicted, efforts to accommodate the Americans came to grief. While Indians manifested colonial ambivalence through their willingness to live and fight with Americans against other Indians, the United States exalted the superiority of white people. Indigenous people had shown that they would transcend a common identity as Indians in order to keep their homes and try to carve out some cultural space within US society, but Americans in this period were intent on affirming the racial identity of the country as a white man’s republic. While slavery expanded dramatically in the South, Americans north of the Mason–Dixon Line exalted whiteness with no less enthusiasm than their southern brethren.46

  The war and continuing settler colonial expansion finished off the ambivalence embodied in the “middle ground” in which Indians and Euro-Americans, mainly French, had lived, traded, and intermarried in mixed communities since well before the advent of the United States.47 As settlers flooded into the territories after the War of 1812, ethnic cleansing soon followed. As they entered the federal union, Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Iowa (1846), and Wisconsin (1848) simultaneously drove out not only Indians but also “half-breeds.” As with African-Americans, in a republic that celebrated the purity of the “white race,” mixed bloods were considered members of an inferior order of humanity.

  Many Trails of Tears

  While historical discourse has focused overwhelmingly on Indian removal in the Southeast—and especially on the infamous Cherokee “Trail of Tears”— the “equally egregious behavior of people in the Old Northwest has generally escaped historical notice.” Death, disease, corruption, and perfidy characterized Midwestern Indian removal in the aftermath of the War of 1812. “Rations supplied to emigrating Indians were so spoiled that militia accompanying the removal refused to eat them,” Susan Sleeper-Smith explains, “and Native women were forced to prostit
ute themselves to obtain food for their families.” Michigan Indians escaped the worst of it, as many Ottawa and Ojibwa migrated to relatively undesirable lands in the northern portion of the territory and the upper peninsula near the Canadian border. Americans removed only some 650 out of about 8,000 Michigan Indians, hence by 1853 about a third of the indigenous people still living east of the Mississippi River resided in Michigan.48

  As settler colonialism, patriotic nationalism, the market economy, and military fortifications converted colonial space into American space, Indians were driven across the Mississippi River. The staggering influx of settler colonials destroyed indigenous hunting grounds and cultural autonomy. Wisconsin, for example, grew from 11,000 people in 1836 to more than 300,000 by 1850. In Illinois land sales catapulted from less than 100,000 acres a year in 1829 to two million acres in 1836.49

  As the Sac chief Black Hawk discovered, Americans meant to cleanse the eastern side of the Mississippi of Indians. The roots of the so-called Black Hawk War dated to 1804 when Harrison “negotiated” a huge land cession from an unrepresentative group of Sac and Fox Indians that he had plied with liquor. Later, the Sacs, Foxes, Winnebago, and other tribes had been inspired by Tecumseh and the Prophet to resist American settler colonialism in modern-day Illinois and Wisconsin. Many young warriors destroyed the property of whites and attacked and murdered them with a vengeance. After a campaign of irregular warfare, US volunteers put down a Winnebago “rebellion” in 1827 and used the occasion to seize additional Indian land. “The Winnebago war of 1827 convinced most Indians in the region that the Americans were too numerous and powerful to contest by force of arms,” John Hall notes, “but some retained the hope that a pantribal alliance could punish white transgressions and establish a more favorable balance of power.”50