American Settler Colonialism: A History Read online

  American Settler Colonialism

  American Settler Colonialism

  A History

  Walter L. Hixson

  AMERICAN SETTLER COLONIALISM

  Copyright © Walter L. Hixson, 2013.

  All rights reserved.

  First published in 2013 by

  PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

  in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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  ISBN: 978–1–137–37424–0 (hbk)

  ISBN: 978–1–137–37425–7 (pbk)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Preface

  1 Introduction: Settler Colonialism, History, and Theory

  2 “People from the Unknown World”: The Colonial Encounter and the Acceleration of Violence

  3 “No Savage Shall Inherit the Land”: Settler Colonialism through the American Revolution

  4 “The Savage and Common Enemy of the Country”: US Settler Colonialism to the Mississippi River

  5 “Scenes of Agony and Blood”: Settler Colonialism and the Mexican and Civil Wars

  6 “They Promised to Take Our Land and They Took It”: Settler Colonialism in the American West

  7 “Spaces of Denial”: American Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i and Alaska

  8 “Things Too Scandalous to Write”: The Philippine Intervention and the Continuities of Colonialism

  9 “A Very Particular Kind of Inclusion”: Indigenous People in the Postcolonial United States

  Conclusion: The Boomerang of Savagery

  Notes

  Index

  The memorial at Gnadenhutten. Photograph by Wade Wilcox

  Preface

  Driving on Interstate 77 near Coshocton, Ohio, you are in what used to be the land of the Lenni Lenape, better known as the Delaware Indians.1 Exiting the Interstate and driving east on US 36, it is only a few miles to the small town of Gnadenhutten (“tents of grace”). There, near the banks of the Muskingum River, you will find the simple, peacefully shaded memorial marking the historic site where for many years in the eighteenth century, Delaware Indians, who had converted to Christianity, lived and farmed with Moravian missionaries of mostly German ancestry.

  Gnadenhutten embodied colonial ambivalence, as it underscored the wide range of possible relationships between peace and war on the North American borderlands. It represented adaptation, accommodation, and tolerance as opposed to violent conflict between Indians and Euro-Americans. The missionaries showed their willingness to coexist with Indians by establishing the United Brethren mission and striving to save the Indians’ souls. The Delaware who lived there embodied ambivalent relations through their willingness to convert to Protestantism, and to embrace pacifism.

  Colonial ambivalence (discussed more fully in Chapter 1) existed throughout the North American borderlands over some four centuries of European colonization. The borderlands provided a vast tableau of intercultural exchange, competing desires, diplomacy, accommodation, and resistance. Indians had lived in communities united by regional networks of trade and exchange for centuries before Europeans arrived on the continent. The colonial encounter brought sweeping changes that affected Indians everywhere. Having no choice but to adapt and adjust to the newcomers, they did so in a variety of ways. The indigenes variously exchanged culture and conducted an extensive trade with the interlopers, negotiated with them, allied with them in warfare against other whites as well as other Indians, joined their families and communities, adopted their ways, and converted to the European religions. Some tried their best, as a Shawnee man once put it, to “walk the white man’s road.”2

  For their part the Euro-American settlers displayed fear and admiration, revulsion and desire, for indigenous people. They ate with them, traded with them, sometimes lived, raised children, and worshipped with them; exchanged the pipe, negotiated and allied with them; adopted indigenous methods of hunting and of warfare; wore their moccasins and leggings, and learned their techniques of “wilderness” survival; walked on their paths, canoed their streams, and adopted their place names. Newly arrived colonists often expressed shock at the extent to which their “civilized” European brethren had come to resemble the indigenes.

  Despite these examples of accommodation and hybridity, Euro-Americans were not culturally equipped to accept Indians as their equals with legitimate claims to the land. They viewed “heathen,” transient, hunting-based societies as inferior to Christian settler societies. Palpable cultural differences based on economy, land use, gender roles, spirituality, and much else underscored the distinctions drawn between the self and the other. Euro-American settlers imagined that it was their destiny to take control of colonial space and nothing would deter them from carrying out that project. Many came to view the very existence of Indians as an impediment to individual and national aspirations.3

  Settler colonization thus ultimately overwhelmed ambivalence and ambiguity. Indians, who had used and changed the land for centuries, proved willing to share land with the newcomers but not simply to give it up to the settlers. The Euro-Americans, however, were on a mission to take command over colonial space, a process that entailed demarcation and control, boundaries, maps, surveys, treaties, seizures, and the commodification of the land.

  * * *

  In the late winter of 1782, a group of militiamen from Virginia and Pennsylvania entered Gnadenhutten, where they found a large group of Indians collecting the corn harvest that had been left behind in the fall. Although the American settlers knew that the Indians at Gnadenhutten were peaceful and mostly Christians, they decided to kill all of them anyway. In a chilling display of the coexistence of democracy and genocide on the American borderlands, the settlers first held a vote on what to do with the indigenous Moravian converts. Indiscriminate slaughter won out.

  On March 8 and 9, the Americans executed and scalped 96 Indians at Gnadenhutten. After a night filled with terror, song, and prayer, one Indian after another—including 39 children—was forced to kneel, then bludgeoned to death with a heavy cooper’s mallet until the executioner’s arm tired and he gave way to a second. Two teenagers—one scalped and secreting himself beneath the carnage of the dead—survived to recount the horror.

  The massacre at Gnadenhutten stemmed from the desire of the perpetrators to bring an end to the very colonial ambivalence that the United Brethren mission represented. Enraged by Indian assaults on borderland communities, which had killed friends and family members, the militiamen pursued their quest for blood revenge at the expense of non-combatant Indians who only sought to provide food for their people. The borderland settlers had long resented efforts, first on the part of the British and then on the part of the Continental army, to conduct trade and strategic alliances with Indians. Not all of the militiamen favored the executions, yet most voted for it nonetheless because they did not want to be viewed
by their fellow settlers as coddling savages. Many Americans subsequently condemned the atrocity and an investigation ensued, but, as throughout US history, no one would be convicted and punished for killing Indians.4

  The settlers had no monopoly on blood revenge and indiscriminate violence, which were deeply rooted in indigenous traditions. In the wake of the Gnadenhutten massacre, after an Indian coalition defeated a settler invasion force in north-central Ohio, the Delaware and their allies slaughtered their captives and subjected the commander, William Crawford, to a hideous array of sadistic torture prolonging the agony of his death. The indigenes stripped Crawford naked; painted his face black for death; cut off his scalp, nose, and ears; and then slowroasted him at the stake. Crawford’s demise permeated narratives of borderland warfare, underscoring the inherent savagery of the Indians and justifying the cycle of borderland violence.5

  * * *

  The killings at Gnadenhutten, like other massacres throughout American and other nation’s histories, were not isolated events; rather they reflected a broader history of settler colonization within an even broader history of global colonialism. Whether they wanted to slaughter the Delaware and other Indians or not, the vast majority of settlers wanted them removed from the land so that it might be cultivated by a more modern and even providentially destined people. Gnadenhutten signaled that by 1782 the time for ambivalence and seeking out a middle ground was over: the settlers wanted total security, assurance of their exclusive claim to colonial space. The militiamen informed one of the Moravian missionaries in the wake of the massacre, “When they killed the Indians the country would be theirs, and the sooner this was done the better!”6

  The history of Gnadenhutten—ambivalent relationships giving way to indiscriminate violence and Indian removal—in many respects is the history of the “settlement” of the United States. At the beginning of his book on another massacre, this one of Apaches in Arizona in 1871, Karl Jacoby observes that violence against Indians is “at once the most familiar and most overlooked subject in American history.” He argues, “The true magnitude of the violent encounter with the indigenous inhabitants of North America remains unacknowledged even today. So too are its consequences and contingencies unexplored.”7

  Jacoby has identified a paradox that a postcolonial history of American settler colonialism can help us to understand and explain. The history of Indian removal is familiar; in a sense virtually every American and many others throughout the world know about it. Popular histories, from Century of Dishonor in 1881 to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970, have long since chronicled and eulogized the dispossession and displacement of the American Indian.8

  This study goes beyond a simple narrative of massacres and conquest by framing Indian removal within a context of settler colonialism. I narrate a comprehensive history of American Indian removal in order to convey the magnitude as well as the violence of the settler colonial project. I also argue that the long and bloody history of settler colonialism laid a foundation for the history of American foreign policy—and especially its penchant for righteous violence. This study thus connects the history of Indian removal with other nineteenth-century American wars to illuminate patterns of counterinsurgency and indiscriminate warfare deeply rooted in colonial history, carrying through the nineteenth century, and indeed to the present day.

  While my own background is in diplomatic history, I have sought to forge connections with other subfields of American history, to reach across disciplines. Such crossings are infrequent because of the surprisingly rigid boundaries erected by academic specialization. Within American history alone, subfields on the pre-Revolutionary era, the early Republic, Western history, Indian history, diplomatic history, military history, and American studies have their own members, annual meetings, specialized journals, and book and article prizes. Balkanization promotes a certain degree of gatekeeping while status and promotion typically derive from archival research in one’s own subfield. Synthetic and theoretical work is discouraged as arcane and outmoded; identification of continuities dismissed as simplistic. The “c” and “g” words—colonialism and genocide—are rarely invoked.

  Discussion of violent Indian removal thus has become strangely passé. Owing in no small part to the sensational success of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, many Indians and the overwhelmingly non-indigenous scholars of Indian history have for years steered clear of accounts centered on the victimization of Indians by Euro-Americans. They grasp that a maudlin sentimentalism, ironically, tends to dehumanize Indians by denying them historical agency and leaving the impression that all of the Indians were “killed off” (in fact more than five million people identify themselves as indigenous North Americans today). With justification, scholars thus avoid writing narratives in which Indians function purely as victims of the man’s white aggression, with virtually no attention paid to indigenous culture and colonial ambivalence. Scholars in the dynamic fields of Indian history and borderland studies emphasize indigenous cultures and agency, the complexities and ambivalence of specific borderland situations, cultural brokers and go-betweens. In the field of American history, studies focused on Euro-American drives, removal policies, and killing of Indians have been branded Eurocentric or teleological and relegated to the margins.

  Indigenous-centered and borderland studies were and are much needed, typically insightful, and make possible a new synthesis incorporating Indian agency and colonial ambivalences into a broader narrative. In this book, that narrative centers on the continent-wide and centuries-long settler colonial project of dispossessing indigenous people. As Indians mounted an anticolonial resistance, American settler colonialism entailed the application of sustained and often indiscriminate violence. Borderland warfare gave rise to an “American way of war,” which manifested in the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the “Philippine Insurrection,” and indeed has carried over into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Counterinsurgency and indiscriminate warfare did not originate in the search-and-destroy operations in the jungles of Vietnam, but rather sunk their roots over centuries of North American settler colonization.

  Only by synthesizing and conceptualizing over a broad sweep of American postcolonial history can we address the “true magnitude” and consequences of the “violent encounter with the indigenous inhabitants of North America” to which Jacoby referred. I discuss these issues more fully in Chapter 1, which locates this study within historiography and within postcolonial studies. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 analyze American Indian removal and borderland warfare. Chapter 5 frames the Mexican and Civil Wars as part of a broader history of settler colonialism and borderland violence. The colonialisms of Alaska and Hawai’i (Chapter 7) offer different frames of comparison from the continental experience. Chapter 8 addresses the issue of continuity and discontinuity in the history of American colonialism through an analysis of the history of intervention, indiscriminate warfare, colonialism, and postcolonialism in the Philippines.

  Chapter 9 discusses the ways in which indigenous people not only survived but also struggled for change in the wake of the centuries of violent dispossession. The legacies of settler colonialism, integral to postcolonial studies, remain formidable, as they continue to affect the lives of indigenes and indeed of all those who live in colonized societies.

  The Conclusion focuses on the internalization of righteous violence within American history and the nation’s foreign policy. The violence of empire did not victimize the indigenous people alone. Colonialism “dehumanizes even the most civilized man,” Amié Césaire pointed out in Discourse on Colonialism. The colonizer “gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.”9 In the Conclusion, I explore the ways in which this “boomerang of savagery” came hurtling back on the United States itself.

  * * *

  Other
scholars have helped me along the way with efforts both great and small, from reading multiple drafts, to offering encouragement, to suggesting literature. In actuality I have hundreds of scholars in multiple subfields to thank for the books and articles that they have written over the years and which inform this study. None of these scholars, mentioned here or cited in the work, should be held accountable for the final product, though many of them made it much better than it otherwise would have been. Shelley Baranowski, Kevin Kern, Margaret Jacobs, Sherry Smith, and one of the preeminent theorists of settler colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini, all read full or partial drafts at various stages and helped me a great deal. Others who read, criticized, and suggested literature include Christine Lober, Maurice and Kathryn Labelle, David Zietsma, Ted Easterling, Kelsey Walker, Andrew Sternisha, Michael Sheng, Elizabeth Mancke, Martin Wainwright, Stephen Harp, Janet Klein, Michael Graham, Constance Bouchard, Lesley Gordon, Benjamin Harrison, Gary Hess, Brian Halley, Philip Howard, Kelly Hopkins, Anne Foster, Eric Hinderaker, David Ryan, Karine Walther, Kristin Hoganson, Daniel Margolies, Wade Wilcox, and Kym Rohrbach. The Hixsons—especially Kandy but also Bud, Emma, and Maiza—always encourage my work. Zoe was always there for a pat on the head or a yawn and a stretch while I was actually doing it.

  I thank the University of Akron and the US Army Heritage and Education Center for generous research grants in support of this study. I thank the History Departments at the University of Louisville and Bowling Green State University for inviting me to give, respectively, the prestigious Louis R. Gottschalk and Gary R. Hess annual lectures at their institutions wherein I worked through some of these ideas with the help of some excellent questions from the audiences. Finally, I especially thank Chris Chappell, a senior editor at Palgrave-Macmillan, for taking an immediate interest in the study, and shepherding it through the publication process.