American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  III

  By the close of the sixteenth century bullion, primarily silver, made up more than 95 percent of all exports leaving Spanish America for Europe. Nearly that same percentage of the indigenous population had been destroyed in the process of seizing those riches. In its insatiable hunger, Spain was devouring all that was of most value in its conquered New World territories—the fabulous wealth in people, culture, and precious metals that had so excited the European imagination in the heady era that immediately followed Columbus’s return from his first voyage. The number of indigenous people in the Caribbean and Meso- and South America in 1492 probably had been at least equal to that of all Europe, including Russia, at the time. Not much more than a century later it was barely equal to that of England. Entire rich and elaborate and ancient cultures had been erased from the face of the earth. And by 1650 the amount of silver coming out of the Americas was down to far less than half of what it was only fifty years earlier, while gold output had fallen below 10 percent of what it had been.71 For a century and more the Spanish presence in the Americas had been the equivalent of a horde of ravenous locusts, leaving little but barrenness behind them.

  And still, despite so many years of such incredible plunder, Spain itself remained an economic disaster. The treasure it had imported from the Indies, Mexico, and Peru only paid brief visits to the Iberian peninsula before ending up in the coffers of Spain’s northerly European creditors. In retrospect, the foundations thus were laid for the “underdevelopment” of Latin America as a modern Third World region. The pattern was the same in other places: wherever the path of Western conquest led, if there were vast available natural and human resources that easily could be taken and used, they were—but the end result was, at best, short-term economic growth in the area of colonization, as opposed to long-term economic development.72

  The story of British conquest and colonization in North America is, in economic terms, almost precisely the opposite of Spain’s experience to the south. In the north, without a cornucopia of treasure to devour and people to exploit, the English were forced to engage in endeavors that led to long-term development rather than short-term growth, particularly in New England. Far fewer native people greeted the British explorers and colonists than had welcomed the Spanish, in part because the population of the continent north of Mexico had always been smaller and less densely settled, and in part because by the time British colonists arrived European diseases had had more time to spread and destroy large numbers of Indians in Virginia, New England, and beyond. These regions also contained nothing even remotely comparable to the exportable mineral wealth the Spanish had found in the areas they invaded. The most the northern climes had to offer in this regard was fish. To be sure, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English imported huge amounts of cod from America’s North Atlantic waters, and later tobacco and furs were brought in.73 But fish, tobacco, and furs were not the same as gold or silver.

  Nevertheless, despite the very dissimilar economic and native demographic situations they found, the British wasted little time in exterminating the indigenous people. The English and later the Americans, in fact, destroyed at least as high a percentage of the Indians they encountered as earlier had the Spanish, probably higher; it was only their means and motivation that contrasted with those of the conquistadors. To understand both the savagery of the Anglo-American genocide against the North American natives, and the characteristics that made it different from the earlier Spanish genocide, requires a brief glance at the political economy of Britaiń when its first New World explorations and settlements were being launched, then a look at Anglo-American religious and racial attitudes, and finally a return to the economic realities not of England, but of the colonies themselves.

  While Spain in the sixteenth century was overextending its primitive economy with expensive imperial adventures, thereby driving itself to financial ruin, England was developing into one of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called “the strong core states” of northwest Europe that in time would become “the economic heartland of the European world-economy.” Unlike Spain, England during this time had a strong export trade in manufactured goods, and although it ran a net deficit in its economic relationship with France, this was more than made up for by a favorable balance of trade elsewhere.74 It was a time of relative political stability and low taxation, including no personal taxes at all. One historian has made clear the contrast between late sixteenth-century Spain and England with a single telling statistic: “While in Spain Philip II may have absorbed 10 percent of Castile’s national income to pay for his wars in the 1580s and 1590s,” Ralph Davis writes, “it is doubtful whether in the same years Elizabeth I, at her wits’ end to meet war expenses, took more than 3 percent of the national income for them.”75

  For better or for worse—and it was both—England’s population was growing rapidly at this time as well. From approximately 2,500,000 at the time of Columbus’s birth in the mid-1400s, it had doubled to about 5,000,000 by 1620, when the first permanent British colony was being founded in New England. Although the overall economy was comparatively healthy, the nation contained large masses of desperately poor and potentially dangerous people. The government’s response included the passage of poor laws—which drove the poor out of the towns and cities and into marginal rural areas—and the encouragement of migration out of the country altogether. Private individuals, like the famous advocate of exploration Richard Hakluyt, joined in the call to settle England’s poor and criminal classes outside the realm, where their conditions and habits might find “hope of amendement.”76

  The first significant move of imperial expansion by the British at this time was into Ireland. Here, the intent of the English was in some ways similar—if on a far smaller scale—to that of the Spanish in the Indies: to convert and “civilize” the natives, while stripping the land bare of its wealth. In the case of Ireland that wealth was not in gold or silver, but in timber, and in just one century the English despoliation reduced the amount of Ireland’s rich timberland from an area covering about 12 percent of its territory to practically zero.77 As we saw in a previous chapter, the English also imitated the Spanish in one other way during their invasion of Ireland—they tortured and killed huge numbers of Irish people.

  The English treatment of Ireland’s native people provides important insight into understanding the way the British later would treat the indigenous people of North America—not only because it reveals the extent to which the English would go in defining non-Englishmen as savages and destroying them in the process of seizing their land, but also because it shows how far they would not go when the native people in question were white. For while it is true that the English demolished large portions of the Irish population in the sixteenth century—massacring the people of Ireland in the same way their forebears had mass-murdered Muslims—the example of the Irish does not equate with that of American Indians. On the contrary, it actually serves to demonstrate how differently the British treated people they regarded as lesser than themselves—but lesser in varying degrees, and different precisely because of the rapidly evolving European ideology of race.

  First, in their depredations and colonizing campaigns in Ireland, the English clearly distinguished between those natives who were Gaelic Irish and those—though certainly Irish—who were known as “Old English” because they were descendants of earlier Anglo-Norman conquerors. Although both groups were regarded as barbaric by the English, even those British who most vociferously denounced all things Irish tended to make favorable exceptions for the Old English since they were believed to have fallen into barbarism as a result of their long-term association with the Gaelic Irish. In contrast, as genealogically non-Anglo-Norman, the Gaelic Irish (like the American Indians) were considered always to have been barbaric. Further, in what might seem a paradox only to those innocent of the workings of the racist mind, the British sustained this invidious distinction even when they were arguing that the Old English
could be more dangerous and treacherous opponents than were the more barbarous Gaelic Irish. As the Irish historian Nicholas Canny has shown, the British considered the Old English to be more formidable in these ways because they combined “the perverse obstinacy of the authentic barbarian” (i.e., the Gaelic Irish) with “the knowledge and expertise of civil people.”78

  “Authentic” barbarians though they may have been in English eyes, nevertheless, the Gaelic Irish still were not so savage as the darker-skinned people the British at that same time were encountering on the huge continents of Africa and the Americas. As a result, whether living among the Gaelic Irish or the Old English populations, the British never set up segregated enclaves—as those Englishmen who moved to North America did—and, despite the terrible levels of violence perpetrated by the English against the Irish, the English were always determined that in time they would assimilate all the Irish within English culture and society. “Thus,” writes Canny, “while the establishment of British authority in Ireland was closely identified with war, brutality, and the confiscation of property, those on both sides who survived that ordeal learned how to live and associate with each other on the same territory.”79 This did not prevent enormous violence, not only in the sixteenth century, but during the Irish rising of 1641–42 and long after, when tens of thousands of Irish died. However, the English all the while persisted in their efforts to meld the Irish into the British world. As Canny writes:

  More thought was given by Englishmen to this effort at the assimilation of a foreign population into an English-style polity than to any other overseas venture upon which they were then engaged. . . . It will become immediately apparent that whatever the analogies drawn between the Irish and the American Indians, the reality was that English and Scots settlers of the seventeenth century encountered little difficulty in living in close proximity to the Irish and that it seemed, for a time, that the different elements of the population would come together to constitute a single people.80

  Without minimizing, then, the carnage the English were willing to call down upon their Irish neighbors, such devastation—like that wrought by Europeans upon other Europeans during the Thirty Years War—was of the sort that Frantz Fanon once described as, in the long run, a “family quarrel.”81 For even when such quarrels culminated in multiple and often horrendous instances of mass fratricide, rarely did the rhetoric or action lead to all-out efforts of extermination—as they did in America, repeatedly, when the struggle was an actual race war.

  From the start, the English explorers’ presuppositions about the human and moral worth of America’s native peoples were little different from those of the Spanish, because in large measure they were based directly on Spanish writings and reports. Throughout the sixteenth century, English publishers of travel literature on the Americas studiously avoided reprintings of or references to Las Casas (with the exception of a single small edition of his Brévissima Relatión in 1583), or to any other Spaniard with even marginally favorable views on the Indians. Rather, they drew almost exclusively on the writings of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Francisco López de Gómara, and other Spanish adventurers and writers who, as Loren E. Pennington puts it, “presented a nearly unrelieved picture of native savagery.”82 Indeed, the very first book on America that was published in the English language appeared in 1511, a decade before Cortés had even laid eyes upon Tenochtitlán; it described the Indians as “lyke bestes without any resonablenes. . . . And they ete also on[e] a nother. The man etethe his wyf his chyldern . . . they hange also the bodyes or persons fleeshe in the smoke as men do with us swynes fleshe.”83 As for how such savages should be treated, notes Pennington, “far from being repelled by Spanish repression of the natives,” the earliest English propagandists writing about the New World “looked upon [such repression] as the model to be followed by their own countrymen.”84

  To citizens of Britain and the lands of northern Europe, as with the Spanish and Portuguese to the south, wild men and other creatures of halfhuman pedigree were as real in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they had been in the Middle Ages. As always, such odd and dangerous species were given their place on the outer fringes of humanity within the Great Chain of Being. John Locke believed in the existence of hybrid species that encompassed characteristics of the human and animal—and even the plant and animal—kingdoms, and so did most other intellectuals, such as the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. As Leibniz wrote, in the midst of a long peroration on the subject:

  All the orders of natural beings form but a single chain, in which the various classes, like so many rings, are so closely linked one to another that it is impossible for the senses or the imagination to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins—all the species which, so to say, lie near to or upon the borderlands being equivocal, and endowed with characters which might equally well be assigned to either of the neighboring species. Thus there is nothing monstrous in the existence of zoophytes, or plant-animals, as Budaeus calls them; on the contrary, it is wholly in keeping with the order of nature that they should exist.85

  Added Locke:

  In all the visible corporeal world we see no chasms or gaps. All quite down from us the descent is by easy steps, and a continued series that in each remove differ very little one from the other. There are fishes that have wings and are not strangers to the airy region; and there are some birds that are inhabitants of the water, whose blood is as cold as fishes. . . . There are animals so near of kin both to birds and beasts that they are in the middle between both. Amphibious animals link the terrestrial and aquatic together; . . . not to mention what is confidently reported of mermaids or sea-men. There are some brutes that seem to have as much reason and knowledge as some that are called men; and the animal and vegetable kingdoms are so nearly joined, that if you will take the lowest of one and the highest of the other, there will scarce be perceived any great difference between them.86

  Until well into the eighteenth century others of the finest minds in Europe believed in, along with the principle of overlapping species continuity in the Great Chain of Being, the existence of half man/half beast creatures who were the product of cross-species mating. As Keith Thomas has pointed out, even Linnaeus, in his famous eighteenth-century classificatory system, “found room for the wild man (homo ferns), ‘four-footed, mute and hairy,’ and cited ten examples encountered over the previous two centuries.” In the popular mind, as in medieval days, Thomas writes, “the early modern period swarmed with missing links, half-man, half-animal.”87 An example of especial relevance to the present discussion is the illustration of an “Acephal”—a headless creature with his face in his chest—among the depictions of America’s native peoples in the Jesuit Joseph François Lafitau’s highly respected Customs of the American Indians, published in 1724.88

  It is, therefore, far from surprising to find sixteenth-century English sea captains, adventurers, and soldiers of fortune—all of whom had heard the most negative Spanish descriptions of the native peoples of the New World—solemnly performing inspections of captured Indians to see (as we noted earlier in the case of Martin Frobisher) if they had cloven feet or other marks of the Devil. To some Englishmen there also remained, for a time, the possibility that the New World natives were of some sort of Golden Age ancestry. Both these expectations can be found in the earliest writings of the British in America. Thus, for example, Arthur Barlowe—after landing in Virginia in 1584 and “tak[ing] possession of [the land] in the right of the queen’s most excellent Majesty . . . under her Highness’ Great Seal”—recalled that upon encountering the Indians,

  we were entertained with all love and kindness and with as much bounty, after their manner, as they could possibly devise. We found the people most gentle loving and faithfull, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age. . . . a more kind and loving people, there can not be found in the world, as farre as we h
ave hitherto had triall.89

  There is probably no more favorable description of the Indians of North America in the annals of the early explorers. This did not, however, prevent these very same Englishmen from attacking these very same Indians at the slightest provocation: “we burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people” (those “gentle loving and faithfull” people) “beeing fledde.”90 For, on the other hand, these same Virginia Indians were soon after described by the likes of Robert Gray as

  wild beasts, and unreasonable creatures, or . . . brutish savages, which by reason of their godles ignorance, and blasphemous Idolatrie, are worse than those beasts which are of most wilde and savage nature. . . . [They are] incredibly rude, they worship the divell, offer their young children in sacrifice unto him, wander up and downe like beasts, and in manners and conditions, differ very little from beasts.91

  Any number of commentators can be summoned to support either of these contrasting views of the Indians, and still more can be called upon to provide judgments of the Indians ranging variously between these two extremes. As had been the case earlier with the Spanish, however, the more negative views very quickly came to dominate. And they were not infrequently expressed by drawing direct parallels between the experiences of the British in Virginia or New England and the Spanish in Mexico and the Caribbean. Thus, in an early treatise on the Virginia Company’s progress in the New World, the company’s secretary, Edward Waterhouse, discussed at length the Spanish experience with the natives of the Indies and approvingly quoted the Indian-hating and genocide-supporting conquistador Fernández de Oviedo to the effect that those Indians were “by nature sloathful and idle, vicious, melancholy, slovenly, of bad conditions, lyers, of small memory, of no constancy or trust. . . . lesse capable than children of sixe or seaven yeares old, and lesse apt and ingenious.” Oviedo’s description of the Indies’ indigenous inhabitants was offered the reader, Waterhouse said, “that you may compare and see in what, and how farre, it agrees with that of the Natives of Virginia.” Indeed, so closely did it agree, he contended, that the proper response of the British against this “Viperous brood . . . of Pagan Infidels” should be the same as that meted out by the Spanish: extermination.92 This conclusion was reached, it should be noted, at a time when there were barely 2000 Englishmen living in all of North America, and nearly a decade before Britain’s Massachusetts Bay Company would be sending settlers into New England.