American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Once the leader of the Indian forces, “a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast,” the English called him, was captured—and cut in pieces—the rest was just a mop-up operation. As one modern celebrant of the English puts it: “Hunting redskins became for the time being a popular sport in New England, especially since prisoners were worth good money, and the personal danger to the hunters was now very slight.”76 Report after report came in of the killing of hundreds of Indians, “with the losse only of one man of ours,” to quote a common refrain. Equally common were accounts such as that of the capture of “about 26 Indians, most Women and Children brought in by our Scouts, as they were ranging the Woods about Dedham, almost starved.” All this, of course, was “God’s Will,” says the British reporter of these events, “which will at last give us cause to say, How Great is his Goodness! and how great is his Beauty!”77 As another writer of the time expressed the shared refrain, “thus doth the Lord Jesus make them to bow before him, and to lick the Dust.”78

  Typical of those being made to bow and lick the dust by this time was “a very decrepit and harmless Indian,” too old and too weak to walk, who was captured by the Puritan troops. For a time, says the eyewitness account of John Easton, the soldiers contented themselves with merely “tormeriting” the old man. Finally, however, they decided to kill him: “some would have had him devoured by dogs,” wrote Easton, “but the tenderness of some of them prevailed to cut off his head.”79

  The only major question remaining as King Philip’s war drew to its inevitable close was how to deal with the few natives who still were alive. So many Indians had been “consumed . . . by the Sword & by Famine and by Sickness,” wrote Cotton Mather’s father Increase, “it being no unusual thing for those that traverse the woods to find dead Indians up and down . . . there hath been none to bury them,” that there now were “not above an hundred men left of them who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England.”80 As to what to do with that handful of survivors, only two choices—as always—enjoyed any support among the English colonists: annihilation or enslavement. Both approaches were tried. Allegedly dangerous Indians (that is, adult males) were systematically executed, while women and children were either shipped off to the slave markets of Spain or the West Indies, or were kept as servants of the colonists themselves. The terms of captured child slaves within Connecticut were to end once they reached the age of twenty-six. But few saw their day of liberation. Either they died before reaching their twenty-sixth birthday, or they escaped. And those who escaped and were caught usually then were sold into foreign slavery, with the blessing of the Connecticut General Court that had passed specific postwar legislation with this end in mind.

  One final bit of business that required clearing up concerned the fates of those scattered Indians who had been able to hide out on islands in Narragansett Bay that were under the colonial jurisdiction of Rhode Island. Rhode Island had remained neutral during the war, and both the Indians and the leaders of the other colonies knew there was less likelihood of homicidal or other barbarous treatment for native refugees found in Rhode Island’s domain. This infuriated the colonists in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth, not only because of their continuing blood lust, but because the Rhode Islanders were themselves reducing escaped Indians to servitude, even if they were not methodically executing them. The other colonies, “mindful of the cash value of prisoners,” writes Douglas Edward Leach, felt that the Rhode Islanders were thus unfairly “now reaping the benefits which others had sowed in blood and treasure.” Rhode Island’s response was that the number of Indians within their territory was greatly exaggerated. And it appears that they were right, so successful had been the extermination campaign against the native people.81

  By the beginning of the eighteenth century the indigenous inhabitants of New England, and of most other northeastern Indian lands, had been reduced to a small fraction of their former number and were living in isolated, squalid enclaves. Cotton Mather called these defeated and scattered people “tawny pagans” whose “inaccessible” homes were now nothing more than “kennels.”82 And Mather’s views, on this at least, were widely shared among the colonists. The once-proud native peoples, who had shown the English how to plant and live in the difficult environs of New England, were now regarded as animals, or at most, to quote one Englishwoman who traveled from Boston to New York in 1704, as “the most salvage of all the salvages of that kind that I have ever Seen.”83

  It had started with the English plagues and ended with the sword and musket. The culmination, throughout the larger region, has been called the Great Dispersal. Before the arrival of the English—to choose an example further north from the area we have been discussing—the population of the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had stood at about 12,000. Less than half a century later approximately 250 of these people remained alive, a destruction rate of 98 percent. Other examples from this area tell the same dreary tale: by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Mahican people—92 percent destroyed; the Mohawk people—75 percent destroyed; the eastern Abenaki people—78 percent destroyed; the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy people—67 percent destroyed. And on, and on. Prior to European contact the Pocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000; fifty years later they were down to 920—95 percent destroyed. The Quiripi-Unquachog people had numbered about 30,000; fifty years later they were down to 1500—95 percent destroyed. The Massachusett people had numbered at least 44,000; fifty years later they were down to barely 6000—81 percent destroyed.84

  This was by mid-century. King Philip’s War had not yet begun. Neither had the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678 occurred yet. The devastation had only started. Other wars and other scourges followed. By 1690, according to one count, the population of Norridgewock men was down to about 100; by 1726 it was down to 25. The same count showed the number of Androscoggin men in 1690 reduced to 160; by 1726 they were down to 10. And finally, the Pigwacket people: by 1690 only 100 men were left; by 1726 there were 7. These were the last ones, those who had fled to Canada to escape the English terrors. Once hostilities died down they were allowed to return to the fragments of their homelands that they still could say were theirs. But they hesitated “and expressed concern,” reports a recent history of the region, “lest the English fall upon them while they were hunting near the Connecticut and Kennebec Rivers.”85 The English—who earlier had decorated the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with an image of a naked Indian plaintively urging the colonists to “Come over and help us”—had taught the natives well.

  III

  The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.

  Consider the impact of some of the worst instances of modern warfare. In July of 1916, at the start of the First World War, General Douglas Haig sent his British troops into combat with the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. He lost about 60,000 men the very first day—21,000 in just the first hour—including half his officers. By the time that battle finally ended, Haig had lost 420,000 men.86 And the war continued for two more years. This truly was, far and away, the worst war in Britain’s history. To make matters worse, since the start of the decade England had been experiencing significant out-migration, and at the end of the decade it was assaulted by a deadly influenza pandemic. Yet, between 1911 and 1921, Britain’s population increased by about two million people.87

  Or take Japan. Between 1940 and 1950, despite the frenzy of war in the Pacific, capped by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the population of Japan increased by almost 14 percent. Or take Southeast Asia. Between 1960 and 1970, while B-52s were raining destruction from the sky and a horrific ground war was spilling across every national boundary in the region, Southeast Asia’s population increased at an average rate of almost 2.5 percent each year.88
<
br />   The reason these populations were able to increase, despite massive military damage, was that a greatly disproportionate ratio of men to women and children was being killed. This, however, is not what happened to the indigenous people in the Caribbean, in Mesoamerica, in South America, or in what are now the United States and Canada during the European assault against them. Neither was this slaughter of innocents anything but intentional in design, nor did it end with the close of the colonial era.

  As Richard Drinnon has shown, in his book Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, America’s revered founding fathers were themselves activists in the anti-Indian genocide. George Washington, in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and “lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed,” urging the general not to “listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.” Sullivan did as instructed, he reported back, “destroying] everything that contributes to their support” and turning “the whole of that beautiful region,” wrote one early account, “from the character of a garden to a scene of drear and sickening desolation.” The Indians, this writer said, “were hunted like wild beasts” in a “war of extermination,” something Washington approved of since, as he was to say in 1783, the Indians, after all, were little different from wolves, “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”89

  And since the Indians were mere beasts, it followed that there was no cause for moral outrage when it was learned that, among other atrocities, the victorious troops had amused themselves by skinning the bodies of some Indians “from the hips downward, to make boot tops or leggings.” For their part, the surviving Indians later referred to Washington by the nickname “Town Destroyer,” for it was under his direct orders that at least 28 out of 30 Seneca towns from Lake Erie to the Mohawk River had been totally obliterated in a period of less than five years, as had all the towns and villages of the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga. As one of the Iroquois told Washington to his face in 1792: “to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.”90

  They might well have clung close to the necks of their mothers when other names were mentioned as well—such as Adams or Monroe or Jackson. Or Jefferson, for example, who in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with “the hatchet.” “And . . . if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,” he wrote, “we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,” continuing: “in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” These were not offhand remarks, for five years later, in 1812, Jefferson again concluded that white Americans were “obliged” to drive the “backward” Indians “with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains” and one year later still, he added that the American government had no other choice before it than “to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” Indeed, Jefferson’s writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given a simple choice—to be “extirpate[d] from the earth” or to remove themselves out of the Americans’ way.91 Had these same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern memory. Since they were uttered by one of America’s founding fathers, however, the most widely admired of the South’s slaveholding philosophers of freedom, they conveniently have become lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson’s wisdom and humanity.

  In fact, however, to the majority of white Americans by this time the choice was one of expulsion or extermination, although these were by no means mutually exclusive options. Between the time of initial contact with the European invaders and the close of the seventeenth century, most eastern Indian peoples had suffered near-annihilation levels of destruction; typically, as in Virginia and New England, 95 percent or more of their populations had been eradicated. But even then the carnage did not stop. One recent study of population trends in the southeast, for instance, shows that east of the Appalachians in Virginia the native population declined by 93 percent between 1685 and 1790—that is, after it already had declined by about 95 percent during the preceding century, which itself had followed upon the previous century’s whirlwind of massive destruction. In eastern North and South Carolina the decline between 1685 and 1790 was 97 percent—again, following upon two earlier centuries of genocidal devastation. In Louisiana the 1685–1790 figure for population collapse was 91 percent, and in Florida 88 percent. As a result, when the eighteenth century was drawing to its close, less than 5000 native people remained alive in all of eastern Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana combined, while in Florida—which alone contained more than 700,000 Indians in 1520—only 2000 survivors could be found.92

  Overwhelmingly, these disasters were the result of massively destructive epidemics and genocidal warfare, while a small portion of the loss in numbers derived from forced expulsion from the Indians’ traditional homelands. How these deadly phenomena interacted can be seen clearly by examining the case of the Cherokee. After suffering a calamitous measure of ruination during the time of their earliest encounters with Europeans, the Cherokee population continued to decline steadily and precipitously as the years unfolded. During the late seventeenth and major part of the eighteenth century alone, for example, the already devastated Cherokee nation endured the loss of another three-fourths of its population.93 Then, just as the colonies were going to war in their quest for liberation from the British, they turned their murderous attention one more time to the quest for Indian liquidation; the result for the Cherokee was that “their towns is all burned,” wrote one contemporary, “their Corn cut down and Themselves drove into the Woods to perish and a great many of them killed.”94 Before long, observed James Mooney, the Cherokee were on “the verge of extinction. Over and over again their towns had been laid in ashes and their fields wasted. Their best warriors had been killed and their women and children had sickened and starved in the mountains.”95 Thus, the attempt at straightforward extermination. Next came expulsion.

  From the precipice of non-existence, the Cherokee slowly struggled back. But as they did, more and more white settlers were moving into and onto their lands. Then, in 1828 Andrew Jackson was elected President. The same Andrew Jackson who once had written that “the whole Cherokee Nation ought to be scurged.” The same Andrew Jackson who had led troops against peaceful Indian encampments, calling the Indians “savage dogs,” and boasting that “I have on all occasions preserved the scalps of my killed.” The same Andrew Jackson who had supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses—the bodies of men, women, and children that he and his men had massacred—cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. The same Andrew Jackson who—after his Presidency was over—still was recommending that American troops specifically seek out and systematically kill Indian women and children who were in hiding, in order to complete their extermination: to do otherwise, he wrote, was equivalent to pursuing “a wolf in the hamocks without knowing first where her den and whelps were.”96

  Almost immediately upon Jackson’s ascension to the Presidency, the state of Georgia claimed for itself enormous chunks of Cherokee property, employing a fraudulent legal technique that Jackson himself had once used to justify dispossession. The Cherokee and other Indian nations in the region—principally the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Creek—stood fast, even taking their case to the United States Supreme Court. But all the while that they were trying to hold their ground, a flood tide of white immigrants (probably about 40,000 in Cherokee country alone) swarmed over the hills and meadows and woods, their numbers continuing to swell as
gold was discovered in one section of the territory.97

  The white settlers, in fact, were part of the government’s plan to drive the Indians off their land. As Michael Paul Rogin has demonstrated, the “intruders entered Indian country only with government encouragement, after the extension of state law.” And once on the Indians’ land, they overran it. Confiscating the farms of wealthy and poor Indians alike, says Rogin, “they took possession of Indian land, stock, and improvements, forced the Indians to sign leases, drove them into the woods, and acquired a bonanza in cleared land.” They then destroyed the game, which had supplemented the Indians’ agricultural production, with the result, as intended, that the Indians faced mass starvation.98

  Still, the Cherokee resisted. And by peaceful means. They won their case before the U.S. Supreme Court, with a ruling written by Justice John Marshall, a ruling that led to Jackson’s famous remark: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” The Court, of course, had no direct means of enforcement, so the drive against the Cherokee and the other Indians of the region continued unabated.

  Finally, a treaty was drawn up, ceding the Cherokee lands to the American government in exchange for money and some land in what had been designated Indian Territory far to the west. Knowing that neither the Cherokee elders, nor the majority of the Cherokee people, would approve the treaty, the U.S. government held the most influential Cherokee leader in jail and shut down the tribal printing press while negotiations took place between American officials and a handful of “cooperative” Indians. Even the American military official who was on hand to register the tribe’s members for removal protested to the Secretary of War that “that paper . . . called a treaty, is no treaty at all, because not sanctioned by the great body of the Cherokee and made without their participation or assent. I solemnly declare to you that upon its reference to the Cherokee people it would be instantly rejected by nine-tenths of them, and I believe by nineteen-twentieths of them.”99