American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Locke’s work, of course, post-dates the era of early British colonization in North America, but the kernels of at least these aspects of his thought were present and articulated prior to the founding of the English colonies in the work of Luther, Calvin, More, Melanchthon, and other British and Continental thinkers.113 An obvious conclusion derivable from such an ideology was that those without a Western sense of private property were, by definition, not putting their land to “good or profitable use,” as More phrased it, and that therefore they deserved to be dispossessed of it. Thus, in More’s Utopia, first published in Latin in 1516 and in English in 1551, he envisions the founding of a colony “wherever the natives have much unoccupied and uncultivated land”; should the natives object to this taking of their property or should they “refuse to live according to their [the settlers’] laws,” the settlers are justified in driving the natives “from the territory which they carve out for themselves. If they resist, they wage war against them.”114 In practice this became known as the principle of vacuum domicilium, and the British colonists in New England appealed to it enthusiastically as they seized the shared common lands of the Indians.115

  One of the first formal expressions of this justification for expropriation by a British colonist was published in London in 1622 as part of a work entitled Mourt’s Relation, or a Journal of the Plantation of Plymouth. The author of this piece describes “the lawfulness of removing out of England into parts of America” as deriving, first, from the singular fact that “our land is full . . . [and] their land is empty.” He then continues:

  This then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful: their land is spacious and void, and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have [they] art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc. As the ancient patriarchs therefore removed from straiter places into more roomy [ones], where the land lay idle and wasted and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them . . . so is it lawful now to take a land which none useth and make use of it.116

  The most well known and more sophisticated statement on the matter, however, came from the pen of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. While still in England, on the eve of joining what became known as the Great Migration to Massachusetts in the 1630s, Winthrop compiled a manuscript “justifieinge the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England,” and answering specific questions that might be raised against the enterprise. The first justification, as with Columbus nearly a century and a half earlier, was spiritual: “to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles, and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ,” an understandable reason for a people who believed the world was likely to come to an end during their lifetime.117 Very quickly, however, Winthrop got to the possible charge that “we have noe warrant to enter upon that Land which hath beene soe longe possessed by others.” He answered:

  That which lies common, and hath never beene replenished or subdued is free to any that possesse and improve it: For God hath given to the sonnes of men a double right to the earth; theire is a naturall right, and a Civill Right. The first right was naturall when men held the earth in common every man sowing and feeding where he pleased: then as men and theire Cattell encreased they appropriated certaine parcells of Grownde by inclosing and peculiar manuerance, and this in time gatte them a Civill right. . . . As for the Natives in New England, they inclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattell to improve the Land by, and soe have noe other but a Naturall Right to those Countries, soe as if we leave them sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and us. 118

  In point of fact, the Indians had thoroughly “improved” the land—that is, cultivated it—for centuries. They also possessed carefully structured and elaborated concepts of land use and of the limits of political dominion, and they were, as Roger Williams observed in 1643, “very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Land, belonging to this or that Prince or People.”119 This was, however, not private “ownership” as the English defined the term, and it is true that probably no native people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere would have countenanced a land use system that, to return to Tawney’s language, allowed a private individual to “exploit [the land] with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors.” And thus, in the view of the English, were the Indian nations “savage.”

  For unlike the majority of the Spanish before them—who, in Las Casas’s words, “kill[ed] and destroy[ed] such an infinite number of souls” only “to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits”—all that the English wanted was the land. To that end, the Indians were merely an impediment. Unlike the situation in New Spain, the natives living in what were to become the English colonies had, in effect, no “use value.” With the exception of the earliest British explorers in the sixteenth century, England’s adventurers and colonists in the New World had few illusions of finding gold or of capturing Indians for large-scale enslavement. Nor did they have an impoverished European homeland, like Spain, that was desperate for precious goods that might be found or stolen or wrenched from American soil (with forced native labor) in order to sustain its imperial expansion. They did, however, have a homeland that seemed to be bursting at the seams with Englishmen, and they felt they needed what in another language in another time became known as Lebensraum. And so, during the first century of successful British settlement in North America approximately twice as many English men and women moved to the New World as had relocated from Spain to New Spain during the previous hundred years. And unlike the vast majority of the Spanish, the British came with families, and they came to stay.120

  To that flood of British colonists the Indians were, at best, a superfluous population—at least once they had taught the English how to survive. In Virginia, true plantation agriculture did not begin until after most of the Indians had been exterminated, whereupon African slaves were imported to carry out the heavy work, while in New England the colonists would do most of the agricultural tasks themselves, with the help of British indentured servants, but they required open land to settle and to cultivate. A simple comparison between the inducements that were given the early Spanish and the early British New World settlers reveals the fundamental difference between the two invasions: the Spanish, with the repartimiento, were awarded not land but large numbers of native people to enslave and do with what they wished; the English, with the “headright,” were provided not with native people but with fifty acres of land for themselves and fifty acres more for each additional settler whose transatlantic transportation costs they paid.

  These differences in what material things they sought had deep effects as well on how the Spanish and the English would interpret their respective American environments and the native peoples they encountered there. Thus, however much they slaughtered the natives who fell within their orbit, the Spanish endlessly debated the ethical aspects of what it was that they were doing, forcing upon themselves elaborate, if often contorted and contradictory, rationalizations for the genocide they were committing. As we saw earlier, for example, Franciscans and Dominicans in Latin America argued strenuously over what God’s purpose was in sending plagues to kill the Indians, some of them contending that he was punishing the natives for their sins, while others claimed he was chastening the Spanish for their cruelties by depriving them of their slaves. Additionally, throughout the first century of conquest Spanish scholars were embroiled in seemingly endless debates over the ethical and legal propriety of seizing and appropriating Indian lands, disputes that continued to haunt indepen
dence struggles in Spanish America well into the nineteenth century.121 No such disputation took place among the Anglo-American colonists or ministers, however, because they had little doubt as to why God was killing off the Indians or to whom the land rightfully belonged. It is, in short, no accident that the British did not produce their own Las Casas.

  As early as the first explorations at Roanoke, Thomas Hariot had observed that whenever the English visited an Indian village, “within a few days after our departure . . . the people began to die very fast, and many in a short space: in some towns about twenty, in some forty, in some sixty, and in one six score, which in truth was very many in respect of their numbers.” As usual, the British were unaffected by these mysterious plagues. In initial explanation, Hariot could only report that “some astrologers, knowing of the Eclipse of the Sun, which we saw the same year before on our voyage thitherward,” thought that might have some bearing on the matter. But such events as solar eclipses and comets (which Hariot also mentions as possibly having some relevance) were, like the epidemics themselves, the work of God. No other interpretation was possible. And that was why, before long, Hariot also was reporting that there seemed to be a divinely drawn pattern to the diseases: miraculously, he said, they affected only those Indian communities “where we had any subtle device practiced against us.”122 In other words, the Lord was selectively punishing only those Indians who plotted against the English.

  Needless to say, the reverse of that logic was equally satisfying—that is, that only those Indians who went unpunished were not evil. And if virtually all were punished? The answer was obvious. As William Bradford was to conclude some years later when epidemics almost totally destroyed the Indian population of Plymouth Colony, without affecting the English: “It pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness and such a mortality that of a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above the ground for want of burial.” All followers of the Lord could only give thanks to “the marvelous goodness and providence of God,” Bradford concluded. It was a refrain that soon would be heard throughout the land. After all, prior to the Europeans’ arrival, the New World had been but “a hideous and desolate wilderness,” Bradford said elsewhere, a land “full of wild beasts and wild men.”123 In killing the Indians in massive numbers, then, the English were only doing their sacred duty, working hand in hand with the God who was protecting them.

  For nothing else, only divine intervention, could account for the “prodigious Pestilence” that repeatedly swept the land of nineteen out of every twenty Indian inhabitants, wrote Cotton Mather, “so that the Woods were almost cleared of these pernicious Creatures, to make room for a better Growth.” Often this teamwork of God and man seemed to be perfection itself, as in King Philip’s War. Mather recalled that in one battle of that war the English attacked the native people with such ferocity that “their city was laid in ashes. Above twenty of their chief captains were killed; a proportionable desolation cut off the interior salvages; mortal sickness, and horrid famine pursu’d the remainders of ’em, so we can hardly tell where any of ’em are left alive upon the face of the earth.”124

  Thus the militant agencies of God and his chosen people became as one. Mather believed, with many others, that at some time in the distant past the “miserable salvages” known as Indians had been “decoyed” by the Devil to live in isolation in America “in hopes that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them.”125 But God had located the evil brutes and sent his holiest Christian warriors over from England where—with the help of some divinely sprinkled plagues—they joyously had “Irradiated an Indian wilderness.”126 It truly was, as another New England saint entitled his own history of the holy settlement, a “wonder-working providence.”

  IV

  Again and again the explanatory circle closed upon itself. Although they carried with them the same thousand years and more of repressed, intolerant, and violent history that earlier had guided the conquistadors, in their explorations and settlements the English both left behind and confronted before them very different material worlds than had the Spanish. For those who were their victims it didn’t matter very much. In addition to being un-Christian, the Indians were uncivilized and perhaps not even fully human. The English had been told that by the Spanish, but there were many other proofs of it; one was the simple fact (untrue, but that was immaterial) that the natives “roamed” the woods like wild beasts, with no understanding of private property holdings or the need to make “improvements” on the land. In their generosity the Christian English would bring to these benighted creatures the word of Christ and guidance out of the dark forest of their barbarism. For these great gifts the English only demanded in return—it was, after all, their God-given right—whatever land they felt they needed, to bound and fence at will, and quick capitulation to their religious ways.

  In fact, no serious effort ever was made by the British colonists or their ministers to convert the Indians to the Christian faith. Nor were the Indians especially receptive to the token gestures that were proffered: they were quite content with their peoples’ ancient ways.127 In addition, it was not long before the English had outworn their welcome with demands for more and more of the natives’ ancestral lands. Failure of the Indians to capitulate in either the sacred or the secular realms, however, was to the English all the evidence they needed—indeed, all that they were seeking—to prove that in their dangerous and possibly contaminating bestiality the natives were an incorrigible and inferior race. But God was making a place for his Christian children in this wilderness by slaying the Indians with plagues of such destructive power that only in the Bible could precedents for them be found. His divine message was too plain for misinterpretation. And the fact that it fit so closely with the settlers’ material desires only made it all the more compelling. There was little hope for these devil’s helpers of the forest. God’s desire, proved by his unleashing wave upon wave of horrendous pestilence—and pestilence that killed selectively only Indians—was a command to the saints to join his holy war.

  Writing of New England’s Puritans (though the observation holds true as well for most other Anglo-American settlers), Sacvan Bercovitch makes clear an essential point:

  The Puritans, despite their missionary pretenses, regarded the country as theirs and its natives as an obstacle to their destiny as Americans. They could remove that obstacle either by conversion (followed by “confinement”), or else by extermination; and since the former course proved insecure, they had recourse to the latter. The Spanish, for all their rhetoric of conquest, regarded the country as the Indians’ and native recruitment as essential to their design of colonization.128

  Given that difference, Bercovitch continues, the Iberian “colonists saw themselves as Spaniards in an inferior culture. By that prerogative, they converted, coerced, educated, enslaved, reorganized communities, and established an intricate caste system, bound by a distinctly Spanish mixture of feudal and Renaissance customs.” The Anglo-American colonists, in contrast, simply obliterated the natives they encountered, for they considered themselves, almost from the start, as “new men,” in Crèvecoeur’s famous phrase, in a new land, and not as expatriates in a foreign place. Bercovitch illustrates what he calls the subsequent New World Spaniards’ “profound identity crisis” as Americanos by citing Simón Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter of 1815, following the outbreak of revolution against Spain: we were “not prepared to secede from the mother country,” Bolívar wrote, “we were left orphans . . . uncertain of our destiny. . . . [W]e scarcely retain a vestige of what once was; we are, moreover, neither Indian nor European, but an intermediate species between the legitimate owners of this country and the Spanish usurpers.”129

  The point is further sharpened if we compare Bolívar’s lament—after more than three centuries of Spanish rule in Latin America—with the boastful and self-confident words of Thomas Jefferson’s
first inaugural address, delivered more than a dozen years before Bolivar’s letter and less than two centuries since the founding of the first permanent English colonies:

  A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of the mortal eye—when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue, and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking.130

  It was in pursuit of these and other grand visions that Jefferson later would write of the remaining Indians in America that the government was obliged “now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” For the native peoples of Jefferson’s “rising nation,” of his “beloved country”—far from being Bolívar’s “legitimate owners”—were in truth, most Americans believed, little more than dangerous wolves. Andrew Jackson said this plainly in urging American troops to root out from their “dens” and kill Indian women and their “whelps,” adding in his second annual message to Congress that while some people tended to grow “melancholy” over the Indians’ being driven by white Americans to their “tomb,” an understanding of “true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.”131