Despite such expectations Jackson, whom the Indians called “Sharp Knife,” made it clear to the Choctaw that “he would stop at nothing to obtain their dispossession and exile.” After forcing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830) down the throats of the Choctaw, Eaton mendaciously reported to Congress that the tribe had consented to voluntary removal. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek thus “was procured with the rankest sort of dishonesty and foul play on the part of the US government negotiators.” From 1831 to 1836, the United States dispossessed the Choctaw of 11 million acres and forcibly removed some 12,500–14,000 of them from Mississippi to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.72
Plagued by the disorganization, unscrupulousness, and insufficient funding that characterized the entire removal program, as many as a third of the Choctaw died along the way or shortly after arrival in the Oklahoma Territory. Cholera and other diseases ravaged their ranks. In 1830 the leadership of the Chickasaw, who lived north of the Choctaw in Mississippi, met directly with Jackson and pleaded that they “cannot consent to exchange the country where we now live for the one we have never seen.” Sharp Knife responded that in reality they had no choice and Eaton informed the Chickasaw that if they refused to sign the removal treaty, “the President in twenty days would march an army into their country” to drive them out. After the Chickasaw signed off on removal in 1832, between 500 and 800 of the 4,000 Chickasaw forced out of homes died en route to the west.73
The largest genocidal removal campaigns involved the Creeks and the Cherokee. Even before Jackson took office, and with the backing of President Adams, the Creeks had been driven out of Georgia and their homelands reduced to a five million acre tract in Alabama. Neither the United States nor Alabama respected the wishes of the remaining Creeks, as “there was an overwhelming popular demand to be rid of them once and for all.” Following the signing of a compulsory treaty in 1832, land agents defrauded the Indians while aggressive settler colonials burned their farms and seized their land. By the mid-1830s, hundreds of Creeks roamed the countryside searching for food and shelters.
The Creeks mounted a violent resistance in the “Creek War” of 1836 but they could not overcome the relentless squatters backed by the state and federal governments. Alabama militia and federal forces captured some 2,500 Creeks, put them in chains and crowded them onto barges for the trip down the Alabama River and over some 800 miles of land for the three-month journey to Oklahoma. A total of nearly 20,000 Creeks were removed, including “the friendly disposed part of them” who had fought with Jackson against their Red Stick rivals. During the removal of 1834–1837, some 3,500 Creeks died en route or shortly after arrival in Oklahoma. More than 300 died in a single steamboat accident on the river. All along the way observers commented on the near nakedness and emaciation of the barefoot Indians, alternately freezing and overheated, and trailed overland by packs of wolves ready to prey on the weak or the dead and discarded.74
The Cherokee displayed the highest levels of resistance, hybridity, and acculturation by editorializing, lobbying, petitioning, and mounting a formidable legal challenge to the ethnic cleansing campaign. In the War of 1812, the Cherokee had “demonstrated their desire to remain at peace with the United States”; moreover, hundreds of them had fought with the Americans.75 A large number of Cherokees were Christians and mixed bloods. The tribe held 15 million acres with abundant farms and livestock and worked by hundreds of slaves. The Cherokee had a written constitution with three branches of government and had established their own police forces.
As they moved toward declaring complete sovereignty as an independent nation within the southern states, the Georgia legislature struck back by declaring only a month after Jackson’s election that all Indians living within the state’s boundaries would come under its jurisdiction in six months. The Cherokee sued and the issue reached the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall’s court had previously ruled unanimously in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) that Indians were “fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest” hence the United States under the Doctrine of Discovery could legally “extinguish the Indian title of occupancy.” In his March 18, 1831, decision on Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Marshall rejected the Cherokee claim to be a foreign people, declaring instead that they were a “domestic dependent nation.” In the subsequent decision in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the last of the “fateful trilogy,” the high court declared unconstitutional the State of Georgia’s claim that its laws could govern the tribes.76 The Cherokee took the ruling as “a ringing declaration of Indian sovereignty,” but one that neither Jackson nor the Georgians had the slightest intention of accepting.77
The Cherokee refused to abandon their homelands to the encroaching settlers even when it became clear that Jackson encouraged the Georgians to ignore the federal judicial mandate. When a tiny minority succumbed to the pressure and signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the vast majority of Cherokee denounced them as traitors and eventually assassinated the collaborationists. Jackson, however, signed the treaty, which the Senate ratified by a single vote over intense opposition. The treaty gave the Cherokee a two-year grace period to vacate the state. When they failed to do so, Jackson’s handpicked successor Martin Van Buren dispatched federal troops, who rounded up Indians at bayonet point and put them in stockades. By mid-June 1838, the general in charge of the Georgia militia “proudly reported that not a single Cherokee remained in the state except as prisoners.”
In the subsequent “trail of tears,” a minimum of 4,000 and possibly as many as 8,000 of some 18,000 Cherokee who were removed died in the stockades or en route. “At every step of their long journey to the Indian territory,” Robert Remini notes, “the Cherokees were robbed and cheated by contractors, lawyers, agents, speculators, and anyone wielding local police power.”78 Lacking food, shelter, medicine, and other provisions, the Cherokee perished in droves.
The Forgotten “Florida War”
While the Cherokee put up the best legal fight, the Seminole exploited geography and their alliance with free blacks to mount the strongest and most prolonged military resistance in the entire history of American settler colonialism. The United States took the Florida territory from Spain by treaty but the Seminole and their allies would not go without a determined fight that dragged on for seven years to the consternation of the US government and its military. The so-called Second Seminole War erupted in 1835 in the midst of the IRA, lasted to 1842, and was followed by a third Seminole War in 1856 that lasted another two and a half years.
The inglorious counter-insurgency wars—obscured in American History even though they commanded national attention at the time—further ensconced the American way of war. On December 28, 1835, the Seminole and their black allies defeated a US assault force under Major Francis L. Dade, who died in the battle that Americans immediately labeled a “massacre.” Dade thus “became the Custer of his day as leader of a doomed force whose annihilation captured the nation’s imagination.”79 The shocking news of the defeat, replete with Indians and more ominously African-Americans taking trophies and committing atrocities, traumatized Americans and spurred hundreds of recruits from the adjacent southern states.
Through their effective resistance the Seminoles were defying the narrative of the inevitable triumph of civilization over savagery and of America’s continental destiny. They thus had to be removed no matter what the cost. On the Christmas Eve of 1837, a combined force of 380–480 under Colonel Zachary Taylor lost a battle on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, though Taylor claimed victory anyway and received promotion and national acclaim. By this time, “The Florida War had degenerated to a fierce guerrilla war that the United States appeared to be losing,” John and Mary Lou Missall note. Jackson found no peace in retirement at his Hermitage plantation, as he fulminated against the “disgraceful” and “humiliating” war. Alternating tropes of race and gender, the Old Hickory branded the white men in Florida “damned cowards” an
d vowed that “with fifty women” he could “whip every Indian that had ever crossed the Suwannee.”80
Nothing better illustrated American intolerance of indigenous ambivalence than the fate of the Seminole resistance leader Coacoochee. In 1841, with his forces exhausted from navigating the swamps of the Everglades, Coacoochee surrendered to the ironically named William Tecumseh Sherman at Fort Pierce. Put on trial, he explained that the Seminole had “asked for but a small piece of these lands, enough to plant and to live upon, far south, a spot where I could lay my wife and child. This was not granted to me.” A witness at the trial, John Sprague, observed, “Here was a chief, a man whose only offense was defending his home, his fireside, the graves of his kindred, stipulating on the Fourth of July, for his freedom and his life.”
The United States put in camps and then removed Coacoochee and some 3,000 other Seminole. About 1,500 Americans and an unknown number of African-Americans and Indians died in the counterinsurgency war. The Second Seminole War “was forgotten almost as soon as it ended … It had been an unpopular, dirty little war, and no one wanted to talk about it.”81 As with a small Cherokee community that held out in the mountains of North Carolina, a band of Seminoles remained in Florida (to this day) and successfully resisted removal yet again in the Third Seminole War.
The Passing of a Noble Race
By the time of the Seminole wars, a comforting national mythology rationalized removal and assuaged feelings of traumatic guilt over the American cleansing campaign. The inexorable forces of history rather than the Americans themselves were driving Indians from the land. The pervasive “cultural myth” of the “Vanishing American … accounted for the Indians’ future by denying them one, and stained the issue of policy debate with fatalism,” Dippie explains. “The fate of the aborigines was predestined. Their demise reflected no discredit on American institutions or morality,” as removal had been preordained by “benevolent Providence.”82
As Americans carried out the cleansing campaign and gained control of the land east of the Mississippi, they internalized discourses centering on the inevitable passing of the “noble savage.” The Pocahontas legend, which transformed early Indian relations from conquest into a love story, flourished in narratives and on canvas. James Fennimore Cooper’s “Leather-stocking tales” promoted the noble savage stereotype as well as mourning for the inevitable passing of the tribes. Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826) reassuringly dated the Vanishing American to a generation before the United States had even been created. Just as a later generation would feature Sitting Bull in the Wild West shows, Americans compelled the Sac chief Black Hawk to travel through the eastern United States in burlesque appearances as a symbol of the once powerful but now subdued Indian warrior. Black Hawk later renounced his own performance as a sham.83
Artistic representations promoted the maudlin mythology of the Vanishing American. A burned-out portrait artist from Philadelphia, George Caitlin, resolved to travel west and convert his art into “a monument to a dying race.” During the 1830s Caitlin visited 48 tribes and made some 470 Indian portraits. “Caitlin’s lament” raised ambivalent awareness of the decimation of Indian life and culture while reinforcing the notion of the Indians’ inevitable demise before the advance of a chosen people.84
The cultural narrative of the passing of the noble savage became so pervasive that many Americans in the east appeared to forget or never learn of the violent removal of the indigenous tribes from their midst. In the generation to come, many of them would criticize settlers west of the Mississippi for representing the Indians as savages and treating them accordingly. But such expressions of ambivalence would not obstruct the course of the empire. Fired by a renewed sense of Manifest Destiny, American settler colonialists set out to cleanse the land not only of Indians but also of Hispanics who impeded their path to the Pacific Ocean.
5
“Scenes of Agony and Blood”: Settler Colonialism and the Mexican and CivilWars
The “Mexican War” was an extension of the borderland violence that had been ongoing for centuries and deeply implicated in American national identity. The term “Manifest Destiny” may have been new but removing putatively inferior people from colonial space was not. After centuries of Spanish colonialism, the southwestern borderlands had a polyglot character with considerable ethnic mixing between Indians and Hispanics. “Mongrel” peoples such as these lacked legitimacy in American eyes and could not be allowed to impede civilization, progress, and acquiring of new lands by white settlers.
Within a generation the triumphalism of the Mexican War had been replaced by internecine conflict. In the Civil War the boomerang of savagery came hurtling back onto the United States with a vengeance. The effort to incorporate the vast territories taken from Mexico exacerbated the sectional crisis over slavery— which was challenged primarily where it did not already exist—and propelled the Americans into the depths of civil tumult.
Both the Mexican and Civil Wars became counterinsurgency wars replete with indiscriminate killing and collective punishment. Underscoring the continuities within an American way of war, the Mexican and Civil wars shared much in common not only with each other but also with the centuries of warfare with the Indian tribes. All reflected the powerful sway of nationalist fantasy—the Indian and Mexican wars to dramatically expand the chosen nation, the Civil War to prevent the dissolution of the “last best hope of earth.”1
The Civil War complemented Indian removal insofar as both the Union and the Confederacy agreed that the “Negro problem,” like the Indian problem, needed to be resolved primarily through strategies of elimination. In order to achieve its providential destiny, Americans needed to clear geographic space for white men and their families to the exclusion of Hispanics, Indians, and African-Americans. The vast majority of Northern anti-slavery forces, as is well known, did not advocate inclusion of African-Americans into society, just as most supported removal of the indigenes. The South sought to preserve slavery whereas the preferred solution of the Union at the outset of the war, including President Abraham Lincoln, was colonization. While many ambivalent reformers advocated uplifting and assimilating Indians, Hispanics, and African-Americans, most Americans preferred to rid the nation of these highly problematic alien races.
Indians and the “Mexican War”
The “Mexican War” has been poorly understood because Indians until recent years did not factor into its narration. In fact the indigenes played a profound role in destabilizing the Spanish borderlands; weakening the newly independent nation of Mexico; and making Texas, the southwest, and California ripe for the Yankee picking. Borderland studies have discredited the notion of fixed boundaries, especially in regions of mixed ethnicity such as the North American Southwest. Rather than a war between the United States and Mexico, the conflict was a war for the extension of American settler colonialism into the colonial space of California and the contested borderlands of the Southwest.
Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Spain had tried, but failed to establish colonial authority through the mission and the presidio (see Chapter 2). Most indigenous people successfully resisted Spanish efforts to remold them into “sons of God and vassals of Spain.” By the mid-seventeenth century horses became widely available and various Indian groups exploited this new technology to raid and to terrorize the Spanish outposts as well as other indigenous groups. Even the Bourbon reformer King Carlos III, who had implemented a more benevolent approach to the indigenes, became so incensed over Apache raids that in 1772 he called for “vigorous and incessant war” and even “extermination” of the “mob of savages.” By their own introduction of horses, sales of weapons, and efforts to establish colonialism, “Spaniards, like other Europeans, pushed indigenous conflict,” David Weber notes, and “war became endemic.”2
Despite the inability of Spain to establish colonial authority outside of its mission and presidio enclaves, intermarriage and sexual liaisons over the gene
rations produced people of mixed blood. By the nineteenth century the North American Southwest constituted a hybrid “third space” of ambiguous ethnicities and ambivalence with no single authority. Exchange economies existed alongside brutal violence rooted in the tradition of raiding and spurred by slave trading and the warfare associated with it.
A series of events in the early nineteenth century increased the scope and stakes of violent contestation in the Southwest. The Mexican independence movement, the influx of American settlers, and the migration of various Indian tribes into and around the region spurred violence and uncertainty. In 1821 the opening of the Santa Fe Trail linked the Southwest with central Mexico and with the eastern US market economy, creating increased trade and political instability. That same year, after a decade of struggle, Mexico gained its independence from Spain, thus inheriting an unstable northern frontier that it would prove utterly unable to control.
The revolt against Spain destabilized an already weak imperial authority from Texas to California. Spain never controlled the northern borderlands but it had established colonial structures of defense, trade, and alliances with indigenous groups, all of which dissolved with Mexican independence. Mexico thus was a newly independent, sprawling, disunited territory with power centered in Mexico City and maintained primarily by the Catholic Church and a privileged aristocracy. The weak central government and regional differences fostered separatist movements, frequent rebellions, and banditry. “It would be decades before the country would unite politically,” Douglas Richmond notes.3
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 16