Year 501 (6 page)
The useful doctrines of justice Marshall and others remained in place through modern scholarship. The highly regarded authority A.L. Kroeber attributed to the East Coast Indians a kind of “warfare that was insane, unending,” inexplicable “from our point of view” and so “dominantly emphasized within [their culture] that escape was well-nigh impossible,” for any group that would depart from these hideous norms “was almost certainly doomed to early extinction”âa “harsh indictment [that] would carry more weight,” Francis Jennings observes, “if its rhetoric were supported by either example or reference,” in this influential scholarly study. The Indians were hardly pacifists, but they had to learn the techniques of “total war” and true savagery from the European conquerors, with their ample experience in the Celtic regions and elsewhere.
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Respected statesmen continued to uphold the same values. To Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of George Bush and the liberal commentators who gushed over Bush's sense of “righteous mission” during the 1991 Gulf slaughter, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages,” establishing the rule of “the dominant world races.” The hideous and cowardly Sand Creek massacre in Colorado in 1864, Nazi-like in its bestiality, was “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.” This “noble minded missionary,” as contemporary ideologues term him, did not limit his vision to the “beasts of prey” who were being swept from their lairs within the “natural boundaries” of the American nation. The ranks of savages included the “dagos” to the south, and the “Malay bandits” and “Chinese halfbreeds” who were resisting the American conquest of the Philippines, all “savages, barbarians, a wild and ignorant people, Apaches, Sioux, Chinese boxers,” as their resistance amply demonstrated. Winston Churchill felt that poison gas was just right for use against “uncivilized tribes” (Kurds and Afghans, particularly). Noting approvingly that British diplomacy had prevented the 1932 disarmament convention from banning bombardment of civilians, the equally respected statesman Lloyd George observed that “we insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers,” capturing the basic point succinctly. The metaphors of “Indian fighting” were carried right through the Indochina wars. The conventions retain their vibrancy, as we saw in early 1991 and may again, before too long.
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The extraordinary potential of the United States was evident from the earliest days, and of no small concern to the guardians of established order. The Czar and his diplomats were concerned over “the contagion of revolutionary principles,” which “is arrested by neither distance nor physical obstacles,” the “vicious principles” of republicanism and popular self-rule already established in a part of North America. Metternich too warned of the “flood of evil doctrines and pernicious examples” that might “lend new strength to the apostles of sedition,” asking “what would become of our religious institutions, of the moral force of our governments, and of that conservative system which has saved Europe from complete dissolution” if the flood is not stemmed. The rot might spread, to adopt the rhetoric of their heirs as they switched roles and took over the leadership of the conservative system in the mid-20th century.
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Flawed as they were, these doctrines and examples constituted a dramatic advance in the endless struggle for freedom and justice; the Wise Men of the time were right to fear their spread. Their 18th century advocates, however, were hardly apostles of sedition and did not delay in imposing their vision of “a political democracy manipulated by an elite” (Richard Morris), the old aristocracy and, in later years, the rising business classes: a “solid and responsible leadership seized the helm,” as Morris puts it approvingly. The most dread fears were therefore quickly put to rest. The ex-revolutionaries were also not lacking in ambition. And like Metternich and the Czar, they feared the “pernicious examples” at their borders. Florida was conquered to remove the threat of “mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes,” John Quincy Adams wrote with the enthusiastic approval of Thomas Jefferson, referring to runaway slaves and indigenous people who sought freedom from the tyrants and conquerors, setting a bad example. Jefferson and others advocated the conquest of Canada to cut off support for the native population by “base Canadian fiends,” as the president of Yale University called them. Expansion to north and south was blocked by British power, but the annexation of the West proceeded inexorably, as its inhabitants were destroyed, cynically cheated, and expelled.
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“The task of felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries” required that the New World be rid of alien interlopers. The main enemy was England, a powerful deterrent, and the target of frenzied hatred in broad circles. The War for Independence itself had been a fierce civil war enmeshed in an international conflict; relative to population, it was not greatly different from the Civil War almost a century later, and it caused a huge exodus of refugees fleeing from the richest country in the world to escape the retribution of the victors. US-British conflict continued, including war in 1812. In 1837, after some Americans supported a rebellion in Canada, British forces crossed the border and set fire to the US vessel
Caroline
, eliciting from Secretary of State Daniel Webster a doctrine that has become the bedrock of modern international law: “respect for the inviolable character of the territory of independent states is the most essential foundation of civilization,” and force may be used only in self-defense, when the necessity “is instant, overwhelming and leaving no other choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” The doctrine was invoked at the Nuremberg tribunal, for example, in rejecting the claim of the Nazi leaders that their invasion of Norway was justified to forestall Allied moves. We need waste no words on how the US has observed the principle since 1837.
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The US-British conflict was based on real interests: for the US, its desire to expand on the continent and in the Caribbean; for the dominant world power of the day, concern that the maverick across the seas was a threat to its wealth and power.
Though there was considerable sympathy in England for the rebel cause, the leaders of the newly independent country tended to see a different picture. Great Britain “hated and despised us beyond every earthly object,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Monroe in 1816, giving Americans “more reason to hate her than any nation on earth.” Britain was not only an enemy of the United States, but “truly hostis humani generis,” an enemy of the human race, he wrote to John Adams a few weeks later. “Taught from the cradles to scorn, insult and abuse us,” Adams responded, “Britain will never be our friend till we are her master.” Jefferson had proposed a different solution to Abigail Adams in 1785: “I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English,” he speculated, “which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not their churches that their reformation must be worked.” Ten years later, he expressed his fervent hope that French armies would liberate Great Britain, improving both its character and cuisine.
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The dislike was reciprocated, interlaced with no little contempt. In 1865 a progressive English gentleman offered to endow a lectureship at Cambridge University for American studies, to be filled every other year by a visitor from Harvard. Cambridge dons protested against what one called, with admirable literary flair, “a biennial flash of Transatlantic darkness.” Some found the concerns exaggerated, recognizing that the lecturers would come from the class that felt itself “increasingly in danger of being swamped by the lower elements of a vast democracy.” But most feared that the lectures would spread “discontent and dangerous ideas” among defenseless students. The threat was beaten back in a show of the kind of political correctness that continues to predominate in the academic world, as wary as ever of the lower elements and their strange ideas.
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Recognizing that England's military force was too powerful to confront, Jacksonian Democrats called for annexation of Texas to gain a world monopoly of cotton. The US would then be able to paralyze England and intimidate Europe. “By securing the virtual monopoly of the cotton plant” the US had acquired “a greater influence over the affairs of the world than would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous,” President Tyler observed after the annexation and the conquest of a third of Mexico. “That monopoly, now secured, places all other nations at our feet,” he wrote: “An embargo of a single year would produce in Europe a greater amount of suffering than a fifty years' war. I doubt whether Great Britain could avoid convulsions.” The same monopoly power neutralized British opposition to the conquest of the Oregon territory.
The editor of the
New York Herald
, the country's largest-selling newspaper, exulted that Britain was “completely bound and manacled with the cotton cords” of the United States, “a lever with which we can successfully control” this dangerous rival. Thanks to the conquests that provided a monopoly of the most important commodity in world trade, the Polk Administration boasted, the US could now “control the commerce of the world and secure thereby to the American Union inappreciable political and commercial advantages.” “Fifty years will not elapse ere the destinies of the human race will be in our hands,” a Louisiana congressman proclaimed, as he and others looked to “mastery of the Pacific” and control over the resources on which Europe was dependent. Polk's Secretary of Treasury reported to Congress that the conquests of the Democrats would guarantee “the command of the trade of the world.”
The national poet, Walt Whitman, wrote that our conquests “take off the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good.” Mexico's lands were taken over for the good of mankind: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?” Others recognized the difficulty of taking Mexico's resources without burdening themselves with its “imbecile” population, “degraded” by “the amalgamation of races,” though the New York press was hopeful that their fate would be “similar to that of the Indians of this countryâthe race, before a century rolls over us, will become extinct.” Articulating the common themes of manifest destiny, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that the annexation of Texas was simply a matter of course: “It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun that trace, and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done.” In 1829, Minister to Mexico Joel Poinsett, later Secretary of War responsible for driving the Cherokees to death and destruction on their Trail of Tears, had informed Mexico that “the United States are in a state of progressive aggrandizement, which has no example in the history of the world”; and rightly so, the slave-owner from South Carolina explained, because “the mass of its population is better educated, and more elevated in its moral and intellectual character, than that of any other. If such is its political condition, is it possible that its progress can be retarded, or its aggrandizement curtailed, by the rising prosperity of Mexico?”
The concerns of the expansionists went beyond their fear that an independent Texas would break the US resource monopoly and become a rival; it might also abolish slavery, igniting dangerous sparks of egalitarianism. Andrew Jackson thought that an independent Texas, with a mixture of Indians and fleeing slaves, might be manipulated by Britain to “throw the whole west into flames.” Once again, the British might launch “mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes” in a “savage war” against the “peaceful inhabitants” of the United States. In 1827, Poinsett had reported to Washington that the “half-breed” Cherokee chief Richard Fields and the “notorious” John Hunter had “hoisted a red and white banner,” seeking to establish a “union of whites and Indians” in Texas; Hunter was a white man raised by the Indians who returned to the West to try to prevent genocide. The British also noted with interest their “Republic of Fredonia.” Stephen Austin, head of a nearby white colony, warned Hunter that his plans were folly; if the Republic were established, Mexico and the US would join in “annihilating so dangerous and troublesome a neighbor,” and would be satisfied with “
nothing short of extermination or expulsion
.” “The US would soon sweep the country of Indians and drive them as they always have driven them to ruin and extermination.” Washington would, in short, continue in its policies of genocide (in contemporary terminology), putting an end to “this madness” of a free Red-White society. Austin had successfully cleared out the “natives of the forest” from his own colony before moving on to put down the uprising, with Hunter and Fields assassinated.
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The logic of the annexation of Texas was essentially that attributed to Saddam Hussein by US propaganda after his conquest of Kuwait. But the comparisons should not be pressed too far. Unlike his 19th century American precursors, Saddam Hussein is not known to have feared that slavery in Iraq would be threatened by independent states nearby, or to have publicly called for their “imbecile” inhabitants to “become extinct” so that the “great mission of peopling the Middle East with a noble race” of Iraqis might be carried forward, placing “the destinies of the human race in the hands” of the conquerors. And even the wildest fantasies did not accord Saddam potential control over oil of the kind the American expansionists of the 1840s sought over the major resource of the day. There are many interesting lessons to learn from the history so extolled by enraptured intellectuals.
