Book Post #4

The Violent Dispossession of Native Americans from Their Homelands in the Southeast

The first encounter of Southeastern Native Americans with Europeans was with DeSoto in about 1540.

Like Columbus, he was a wetiko, arriving in Tampa, Florida with 550 soldiers, 200 horses and smiths with responsibilities that included making collars and chains for captives. His invading army marched through the rich agricultural lands of largely peaceful Southeastern Native Americans. They destroyed crops and villages, raiding storehouses for food as they went, often capturing and slaying those who came to greet them with gifts. The goal of their search was to find gold.

The final violent encounter with European settlers, nearly 200 years later (except for those who escaped) was the dreadful Trail of Tears, precipitated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 – an atrocity that still sends tremors through Native Americans across North America. Following are notes on some of the important events that happened between these first and final major encounters between Southeastern United States Native Americans and Europeans.

Shifting focus from the impact of racism and wetiko on the life of Native Americans in colonial New England, to the Southeastern colonies, similar themes are evident. Fur trading, with European leveraging exercised through guns, whiskey and shifting alliances, begins the disruption of cultures, including the fostering of intertribal conflicts. Then, European diseases drastically reduce tribal populations and military strengths. Finally, disputes over land use and treaties fueled by the westward movement of settlers lead to armed conflicts and atrocities in which Native Americans are grossly overpowered.

The Saga of the Cherokee

The Cherokee serve as a focus to recount the history of Southeastern Native Americans. They succumbed to a smallpox epidemic in about 1721 that was brought to South Carolina on slave ships, which killed almost half their population in a matter of months. Religious leaders ‘broke their old consecrated physic-pots and threw away all their other holy things ... imagining they had lost their divine power’ and believing, like the shamans of New England, that the disease was retribution for the abandonment of traditional spiritual practices.

A significant faction of the Cherokee was persuaded by federal government arguments that to live in peace with settlers, they would have to become more “civilized.” Many of the Cherokee followed this path. They converted to Christianity and sent their children to school and came to see themselves and their culture through the prism of Anglo-American beliefs and assumptions. This process, which over the next century was to become familiar to most Native groups, made the clash between so-called ‘savagery’ and so-called ‘civilization’ an internal conflict, dividing not only communities but individuals against themselves. Encouraged to believe that their families were ‘dirty heathens’, their shamans fraudulent ‘conjurers’ and their myths and rituals false, these Native American children grew up deeply confused and, often, seething with self-hatred. Success, it seemed, lay in acknowledging the inferiority, if not the wickedness, of everything to which they were emotionally most closely tied and ruthlessly trying to suppress it in themselves.

Other Cherokee, known as the Nativists, believed that they were losing their land and the battle for sovereignty because they were giving up their traditional Spirituality. In practice, both those who accommodated to government demands and those who endeavored to return to their traditional ways, continued to have their land and their rights stolen from them. General Andrew Jackson invaded the nativists’ heartland with an army of 3,500, burning towns, killing men and forcibly relocating women and children.

In 1803, through the Louisiana Purchase, the size of the United States doubled, giving an enormous impetus to westward expansion and sharpening its sense of “manifest destiny.” (a belief that it was the divinely ordained destiny of the United States to expand its territory over the whole of North and South America and to extend and enhance its political, social, and economic resources)

The new mood, heightened by fears that immigration from other parts of Europe would ‘swamp’ the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ character of the United States, prompted a return to the Puritans’ belief in themselves as God’s Chosen People. As seventeenth-century New Englanders had seen the ‘clearing’ of Indians by disease as evidence that God intended the English to possess their land, so early nineteenth-century Americans saw the sudden opening of the area beyond the Mississippi as confirmation that divine providence ordained them to occupy the whole continent. Americans, they believed, represented not merely a superior culture, but a distinct race with a unique destiny.

As James Mooney, a 19th century American ethnographer, put it:

‘... it never occurred to the man of Teutonic blood that he could have for a neighbour anyone not of his own stock and colour. While the English colonists recognized the Native proprietorship so far as to make treaties with the Indians, it was chiefly for the purpose of fixing limits beyond which the Indian should never come. The Indian was regarded as an incumbrance to be cleared off, like the trees and the wolves, before White men could live in the country.’

This view simplified the drama of the frontier into an elemental struggle between two incompatible ‘races’. ‘No State can achieve proper culture, civilization and progress ...’ wrote Pres. Martin Van Buren in 1837, ‘as long as Indians are permitted to remain.’

Jefferson, in 1803, disappointed that tribes were continuing vigorous resistance to American expansion, increasingly worried that the presence of non-European peoples would undermine the vitality of the United States (a concern which also prompted him to suggest repatriating freed slaves to Africa), proposed a new solution to the ‘Indian Problem.’ Tribes could be persuaded to surrender their land in the east and then given equivalent tracts west of the Mississippi.

By the mid-1820s, ‘removal’ had become official US policy. It was justified on so-called humanitarian grounds. Advocates paternalistically argued with a racist lens, that wherever Anglo-Americans had settled in close proximity to indigenous communities, the Indians had quickly become depleted by disease, alcohol and the unequal contest with ‘civilization’. Removal to the west, where missionaries and government officials could protect them from unscrupulous drink-peddlers and other undesirable elements and at the same time teach them the skills required to live alongside ‘Whites’, must, surely, be in their best interests: indeed, it was the only viable alternative to complete extermination. Outlining the scheme to Congress in 1825, President Monroe suggested that its advantages would be obvious enough to Native Americans to ‘surmount all their prejudices in favour of the soil of their nativity, however strong they may be.’

Southeastern Indians were particularly vulnerable. Much of their remaining territory was rich farmland, and the more they ‘improved’ it in the hope of turning themselves into acceptable neighbors, the more desirable they made it to would-be plantation-owners. A popular song at the time went:

All I ask in this creation Is a pretty little wife and a big plantation Way up yonder in the Cherokee Nation.[i]

As tribal resistance hardened, the southeastern states demanded that the federal government should honor its commitment to extinguish Indian title. Indian treaties, they maintained - in the words of Governor Gilmer of Georgia - were merely ‘expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced without bloodshed to yield up what civilized people had the right to possess by virtue of that command of the Creator delivered to man upon his formation -be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.’

Motivated by the discovery of gold on Cherokee land, as well as land grabbing for plantations, the convergence of wetiko and racism was fully flowing through the White settlers. “Ridge,” a Cherokee leader who had championed accommodation, finally noting the necessity of emigration, commented,

“The lowest classes of the White people are flogging the Cherokees with cowhides, hickories, and clubs. We are not safe in our houses ... This barbarous treatment is not confined to men, but the women are stripped also and whipped without law or mercy ...”’[ii]

In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected President. ‘Build a fire under them [the Indians],’ he reportedly told Georgia’s congressmen. ‘When it gets hot enough, they’ll move.’ And in 1830, at Jackson’s instigation, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, providing for the compulsory resettlement of the Southeastern tribes to ‘Indian Territory’ (roughly present-day Oklahoma; it would be “Indian territory” until it would need to be divided into allotments for Whites).

Speckled Snake (a Creek) wrote,

Brothers! I have listened to many talks from our great father. When he first came over the wide waters, he was but a little man ... very little. His legs were cramped by sitting long in his big boat, and he begged for a little land to light his fire on ... But when the White man had warmed himself before the Indians’ fire and filled himself with their hominy, he became very large. With a step he bestrode the mountains, and his feet covered the plains and the valleys.

His hand grasped the eastern and the western sea, and his head rested on the moon. Then he became our Great Father. He loved his red children, and he said, ‘Get a little further, lest I tread on thee.’ Brothers I have listened to a great many talks from our father. But they always began and ended in this - ‘Get a little further; you are too near me.[iii]

The several tribes that were marched from their southeastern homelands, with violent coercion, during the years 1830 through 1838, included members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Ponca, and Ho-Chunk/Winnebago nations. Many moving descriptions of their Trails of Tears have been written. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting from France, observed a band reaching the Mississippi River in the middle of “an exceptionally severe” winter.

: ... there were among them the wounded, the sick, newborn babies, and old men on the point of death. They had neither tents nor wagons, but only some provisions and weapons. I saw them embark to cross the great river, and the sight will never fade from my memory.[iv]

According to accounts from the Creek oral tradition,

an old woman carrying ‘a small bundle of her belongings ... began a sad song which was later taken up by the others ... “I have no more land. I am driven away from home, driven up the red waters, let us all go, let us all die together...”’

Another source describes how many fell by the wayside, too faint with hunger or too weak to keep up with the rest ... A crude bed was quickly prepared for these sick and weary people. Only a bowl of water was left within their reach, thus they were left to suffer and die alone. The little children piteously cried day after day ... They were once happy children. Thousands died of starvation and exposure.

The lesson of these catastrophic atrocities made clear that the fundamental principles which, from the Native American point of view, governed relations between societies had broken down. In a reciprocal universe, a policy of political submission and voluntary land cessions should have brought protection from the United States, while low levels of warfare should have deterred further aggression. In fact, both accommodation and resistance accelerated the influx of settlers and the loss of Indian land. Even nativism, while finally recognizing that Europeans would never live reciprocally with Native Americans, had failed to reconnect Indians with the sacred power they needed to expel European invaders.

The Trails of Tears, echoing the arrival of DeSoto two centuries earlier, ended the Southeastern United States‘ opportunity for complementary, contrasting civilizations to live in peace and mutual enrichment.

Learning from the History of Injustice toward Native Americans

Why are these painful, historical tragedies worth recounting? The reasons are both emotional and intellectual, like the remembering of the Holocaust. They drive us to probe racism and wetiko more deeply, seeking understanding that will enable us to better mitigate their impacts on contemporary politics and society. In so doing, we honor past victims and hopefully prevent or mitigate future victimizations.

Wetiko and racist rationalizations are still used to shield exploitation and distort reality. Alluding to White Supremacist traditions of the naming of well-functioning Native American cultures as savages in the wilderness, Pres. Trump told the US Naval Academy class of 2018 that our settler ancestors “tamed a continent,” we will not apologize for America.”[v]

Former Pres. Andrew Jackson continues to be in the news. Known as a champion of democracy; it was for him that the phrase “Jacksonian democracy” was coined. His vision of democracy, however, was defined by strong ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Analogous to the Puritans who advocated strong community bonding and mutual support for others with like beliefs, Andrew Jackson championed democracy for Whites. Regarding Native Americans he not only authorized the massacres of Native Americans prior to his presidency, he was also the commander-in-chief who ordered Native Americans deported from their homeland on the notorious Trail of tears in 1830. As I write, in the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets of Washington DC tried to pull down Jackson’s statue near the White House because of his proslavery practices. Pres. Trump who has a replica of the Andrew Jackson statue on his desk and a photo behind his desk has utilized federal forces to defend Andrew Jackson’s Memorial. In 2016, the U.S. Treasury made a decision to replace Jackson’s image on the $20 bill with a photo of Harriet Tubman, A Black Hero famous for helping slaves escape and was an underground operative helping the Union win the Civil War. Trump’s administration has blocked the implementation of this change. Looking at Andrew Jackson from an historical perspective, he is manifested as a champion of White Supremacy rather than as a champion of democracy.

Slavery in Native American Nations of the Southeast[vi]

Native Americans were vulnerable not only to viral diseases but also the cultural infections of wetiko and racism that Europeans brought to America. The extreme form of cultural infection was slavery. The inhumanity of slavery was encouraged not only by greed, the profitability of having slaves to extend agricultural labor, but also to satisfy federal directives to become more “civilized,” like the White people, so as to secure federal protection for Native American lands.

Spanish and English colonizers enslaved Native people across the Americas. But tribes in Alabama, Georgia and Florida also adopted the practice, enslaving African-Americans to work on cotton plantations and in homes. When the United States government forcibly removed the Native American nations of the Southeast to Oklahoma, their thousands of slaves also made the deadly march or were transported west in crowded boats.

Ryan Smith, (Comanche) a curator of the exhibition ‘Americans’ at the National Museum of the American Indian, spoke with reluctance when talking about the issue of slavery among the Southeastern tribes.

The story should be that the enslaved Black people and soon-to-be-exiled Red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.” But such was not the case—far from it. The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized Black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

At a conference, “Common Ground,” bringing together Blacks and Native Tiva Miles, an African-American historian at the University of Michigan, described the complexity of their related histories.

Native Americans, she said, had themselves been enslaved, even before African-Americans, and the two groups “were enslaved for approximately 150 years in tandem.” It wasn’t until the mid 18th-century that the bondage of Native Americans began to wane as Africans were imported in greater and greater numbers. Increasingly, where white colonists viewed Africans as little more than mindless beasts of burden, they saw Native Americans as something more: “noble savages,” unrefined but courageous and fierce.

Perversely, Native American ownership of Black slaves came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to White settlers. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization,’” Miles explained.

How would slave ownership prove civilization? The answer, Miles contends, is that … slaves became tokens of economic success. The more slaves you owned, the more serious a business person you were, and the more serious a business person you were, the fitter you were to join the ranks of “civilized society.” It’s worth remembering, as Paul Smith says, that while most Native Americans did not own slaves, neither did most Mississippi Whites. Slave ownership was a serious status symbol.

“The Cherokee owned slaves for the same reasons their White neighbors did. They knew exactly what they were doing. In truth,” Smith said, the Cherokee and other “Civilized Tribes were not that complicated. They were willful and determined oppressors of Blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to Whites and superior to Blacks.”

n treaties signed after the Civil War, slaves of the Five Nations won freedom and were promised tribal citizenship and an equal stake in the tribes’ lands and fortunes. But what followed were broken promises, exclusions and painful fights over whether tens of thousands of their descendants should now be recognized as tribal members. An 1866 treaty guaranteed that freed slaves and their descendants would have and enjoy all the rights and privileges of native citizens. Today, there are some 160,000 descendants of those who were formerly enslaved, fighting for their rights.

The legacy of anti-Black racism in tribal nations is a topic that forces communities who have suffered centuries of land theft, colonialism and genocide to confront the darker corners of their own past.

The Differing Continental-Resource Impacts of the Encounter between European and North American Civilizations

James Wilson, in his book, The Earth Shall Weep, presents a broad view of how as a result of contact, differences between the Old World and the New World grew exponentially. In 1492, although the western hemisphere was larger, richer and more populous than Europe, both were largely self-sufficient and economically independent, primarily on a combination of agriculture and internal trade. Almost immediately, however, balance between the two sides tipped in Europe’s favor. The draining of wealth, ideas and products from the New World to the Old, fueled an enormous extension of European global power and contributed to a rapid and continuing rise in population and prosperity. Native America, on the other hand, experienced an almost unimaginably catastrophic collapse as a result of conquest and disease. At the same time, the diffusion of maize from America to the rest of the world caused a population explosion in Africa, ultimately allowing Europeans to replace their dying Native American labor force with Black slaves.[vii]

This book’s narrative of the ongoing encounter between Native American and European cultures will be continued in a subsequent section. Firstly, the early American impact of wetiko and racism on Black America will be described.

Chapter 3: Colonial and Pre-Civil War Era Impact of Wetiko and Racism on Black Americans

In parallel to the impact on Native Americans, wetiko and racism were taking their toll on Black Americans. The proceeding narrative looks at the roots of American slavery prior to the Civil War, including Black life on plantations, Black resistance and insurrection, and Black contributions to the Civil War.

Historical Roots of American Slavery System

(This description of the roots of colonial era slavery is informed by Ira Berlin in his book, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. His researched information and observations have been selectively collated, customized and interwoven with other material.)

In the early settlement of North America, European practices of slavery were allowed. Some settlers brought slaves with them – Creoles of mixed ancestry and Blacks of African origin. The conditions of these charter slaves, though it is always brutal and degrading when one person owns another, were not so totally oppressive as those which emerged with the development of the plantation society in the South. The Blacks who arrived prior to the Plantation development, mastered the language of their enslavers and enough of their owner’s customs to challenge them. On occasion they entered the marketplace, worked on their own, sued their owners in court, and gained legal freedom.

Plantation Societies Foster Slavery

In the earliest colonial settlements, slaves were part of a mixed economy that gave varying degrees of freedom with different types of labor. But in the developing plantation society, by contrast, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations: husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student. From the most intimate connections between men and women to the most public ones between ruler and ruled, all relationships mimicked those of slavery. Whereas slaveholders were just one portion of a propertied elite in pre-plantation society, they were the one ruling class in plantation societies.

Plantation owners not only drove small farmers and wage workers to the margins, they extended their rule to governmental institutions. They enacted comprehensive slave codes in which they invested themselves with near-complete sovereignty over their slaves, often extending to the absolute right over the slave's life. The final seal on their righteous defense of slavery was to elaborate its logic of subordination by finding its source in the rule of nature or law of God. Slavery became identified with African descent and the racist colorization that became a marker for racism.

The massive import of slaves for plantations began with violent abductions and slave auctions in West Africa, then a nightmarish journey across the Atlantic. The voyage of the Venus, whom French slave traders packed off to Louisiana, offers an egregious example. Of the 450 slaves, only 363 reached the Mississippi River. Another forty-three succumbed before they disembarked in New Orleans. The remaining slaves were so disease-ridden that more than two-thirds of those who were sold at auction into the hands of the inhabitants died soon thereafter.

The appetite of plantations for labor was nearly insatiable. Drawing power from the state, planters-who preferred the designation "masters"-transformed their society. While new to North America, such planters had a long and notorious history. Beginning in the twelfth century in the Levant, planters developed organizational- plantation techniques to produce sugar that were eventually extended to other commodities, such as tobacco, coffee, rice, and cotton.

By the late sixteenth century the plantation economy had become entrenched on the coast of Brazil. The wetiko-possibilities inherent in drawing together European capital, African labor, and American lands led planters to turn northward, to the Antilles and mainland North America. Everywhere they alighted, plantation planters created new classes, remaking social relations, and establishing new centers of wealth and power. Armed with the power of the state and unprecedented agglomerations of capital, planters chased small farmers from the countryside and monopolized the best land. To work their estates, they impressed or enslaved indigenous peoples or, in the absence of native populations, imported large numbers of servants or slaves.

The plantation's distinguishing mark was its peculiar social order, which conceded nearly everything to the slaveowner and nothing to the slave. The Great House, nestled among manufactories, shops, barns, sheds, and various other outbuildings, buildings which were called, with a nice sense of the plantation's social hierarchy, "dependencies," dominated the landscape, the physical and architectural embodiment of the planters' hegemony. But the masters' authority radiated from the great estates to the statehouses, courtrooms, counting houses, churches, colleges, taverns, racetracks, and private clubs. In each of these venues, planters practiced the art of domination, making laws, meting out their version of justice, and silently asserting-by their fine clothes, swift carriages, and sweeping gestures-their natural right to rule. The violence that they enacted upon slaves was systematic and relentless; lash gained a place that was not evident in pre-plantation slavery. The plantation with its “whipping post” became the symbol of racist oppression through slavery, then Jim Crow into the 21st century, and integral to civil rights singing in the 60s.

No more auction block for me, No more, no more, No more auction block for me, Many thousands gone.

No more peck o’corn for me, No more, no more, No more peck o’corn for me, Many thousands gone.

No more driver’s lash for me, No more, no more, No more driver’s lash for me, Many thousands gone.

No more mistress call for me, No more, no more, No more mistress call for me, Many thousands gone, Many thousands gone.

Planters understood themselves not as economic buccaneers exploiting the most vulnerable, or as social parasites living on the labor of others, but as the "fathers" of their vast plantation families. As paternalists, they granted themselves the right to enter the slaves' most intimate affairs, demanded the complete obedience due a father, and consigned slaves to a permanent childhood.

Slaves Speak: Black Life under Plantation Slavery

Introduction

As a descriptive window for sampling life on the plantation, the stories of three slaves will be briefly told. Solomon Norman began his life as a free Black but was abducted in 1841. Spending 12 years as a slave, being sold to differing plantations, his varied experiences are instructive. An excellent writer, we can learn directly from his narrative. Secondly, Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in 1818, surreptitiously taught himself to read and write, before escaping to the north where he was able to write his own narratives concerning life as a slave. Thirdly, sampled experiences of Harriet Tubman provide another window into slavery. She was illiterate but her legacy of transcribed oral history is prolific.