American Comments Magazine

A WORD FROM American Comments Magazine editor, Matthew Richter:

TO: My relations, the Ulster-Scots in Ulster and around the world, who are struggeling to unearth the origins of their ancient heritage and are now finding ways to share this proud heritage with the world.

The Native American families, especially the Cherokee, welcomed many thousands of you to their homeland when you fled the persecutions of Catholic Europe. Just as you have had your ancient Ulaid and Cruthin heritage torn from you we have suffered under the same forces of destruction. Many of our families in the Americas now share common blood heritage and multiple cross cultural traditions. But this mixing of people has not come easily.

You have been lied to by Americans about the behavior of many of your lost ones after they arrived on this Turtle Island. Horribly, there is a deeply vicious record of anti-Indian hatred and genocide built here by far too many individuals who came from the Ulster-Scots and Scots-Irish people. It is a terrible history and a heritage you must recognize and honestly acknowledge if Native Americans and Ulster-Scots are to go forward as good neighbors and friends.

It is a time of awakening and expression of respect for all people of peace. We speak the truth to you across the Atlantic because we need your help to speak the truth to your relatives in Ulster and to your lost kinsmen here in the Americas. It is my hope that we can break through the barriers of bigotry and share wisdom which can be of mutual help in establishing self determination, recapturing our ancient heritages and finding ways to deal with the pressures against us.

You of the present day are not responsible for the American Holocaust nor are you responsible for your relatives in the past and their crimes against humanity here in the Americas. We ask that you understand why it is very, VERY, important you do not celebrate the existence of any Ulster-Scot, or Scotch-Irish in the Americas who participated in or currently celebrates the campaigns to extermnate Native American identiy, religon and family.

One of the most notorious figures is the terrorist Andrew Jackson. There are many others as well. Learn your history, speak the truth and live with honesty. Condemn the terroist of yesterday as we condemn the terrorist of today and do not be tricked by false history, lies and bigoted history books. Do not be fooled by white supremacist speakers who praise the murderers and persecutors of Native American families.

I know that we are both trying to expose the liars who are today continually spinning tales to fool the rest of the world about our histories and our families.

It is our genuine hope that this path of education, honesty and mutual respect will help to contribute to mutual understanding between our peoples. We hope it will affect the understanding of what is happening in this American Holocaust to Native Americans and we especially hope it directly affects Ulstermen and the prospect of peace for Ulster and all of Northern Ireland.

The following article will honestly report some of the things Andrew Jackson did.

Excerpt from, AMERICAN HOLOCAUST, The Conquest of the New World,
by David Stannard, Oxford Press, 1992. Paperback edition.
Chapter 4, PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE
Page 118, 119

The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed

Consider the impact of some of the worst instances of modern warfare. In July of 1916, at the start of the First World War, General Douglas Haig sent his British troops into combat with the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. He lost about 60,000 men the very first day   21,000 in just the first hour   including half his officers. By the time that battle finally ended, Haig had lost 420,000 men. (86) And the war continued for two more years. This truly was, far and away, the worst war in Britain's history. To make matters worse, since the start of the decade England had been experiencing significant out migration, and at the end of the decade it was assaulted by a deadly influenza pandemic. Yet, between 1911 and 1921, Britain's pop- population increased by about two million people. (87)

Or take Japan, Between 1940 and 1950, despite the frenzy of war in the Pacific capped by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the population of Japan increased by almost 14 percent. Or take Southeast Asia. Between 1960 and 1970, while B-52s were raining destruction from the sky and a horrific ground war was spilling across every national boundary in the region, Southeast Asia's population increased at an average rate of almost 2.5 percent each year. (88)

The reason these populations were able to increase, despite massive military damage, was that a greatly disproportionate ratio of men to women and children was being killed. This, however, is not what happened to the indigenous people in the Caribbean, in Mesoamerica, in South America, or in what are now the United States and Canada during the European assault against them. Neither was this slaughter of innocents anything but intentional in design, nor did it end with the close of the colonial era.

As Richard Drinnon has shown, in his book Facing West: The Meta- physics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, America's revered found- founding fathers were themselves activists in the anti-Indian genocide. George Washington, in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and "lay waste all the settlements around... that the country try may not be merely overrun but destroyed," urging the general not to "listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected." Sullivan did as instructed, he reported back, destroying every- thing that contributes to their support" and turning "the whole of that beautiful region," wrote one early account, from the character of a garden to a scene of drear and sickening desolation." The Indians, this writer said, "were hunted like wild beasts" in a "war of extermination," something Washington approved of since, as he was to say in 1783, the Indians, after all, were little different from wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape." (89)

And since the Indians were mere beasts, it followed that there was no cause for moral outrage when it was that, among other atrocities, the victorious troops had amused themselves by skinning the bodies of some Indians "from the hips downward, to make boot tops or leggings." For their part, the surviving Indians later referred to Washington by the nickname "Town Destroyer," for it was under his direct orders that at least 28 out of 30 Seneca towns from Lake Erie to the Mohawk River had been totally obliterated in a period of less than five years, as had all the towns and villages of the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga. As one of the Iroquois told Washington to his face in 1792: "to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers." (90)

They might well have clung close to the necks of their mothers when other names were mentioned as well   such as Adams or Monroe or Jackson. Or Jefferson, for example, who in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with "the hatchet." "And... if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe," he wrote, "we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi," continuing "in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." These were not offhand remarks, for five years later, in 1812, Jefferson again concluded that white Americans were "obliged" to drive the "back- ward" Indians "with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains"; and one year later still, he added that the American government had no other choice before it than "to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach." Indeed, Jefferson's writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given a simple' choice   to be extirpated from the earth" or to remove themselves out of the Americans' way. (91) Had these same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern memory. Since they were uttered by one of America's founding fathers, however, the most widely admired of the South's slave holding philosophers of freedom, they conveniently have become lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson's wisdom and humanity.

In fact, however, to the majority of white Americans by this time the choice was one of expulsion or extermination, although these were by no means mutually exclusive options. Between the time of initial contact with the European invaders and the close of the seventeenth century, most eastern Indian peoples had suffered near-annihilation levels of destruction; typically, as in Virginia and New England, 95 percent or more of their populations had been eradicated. But even then the carnage did not stop. One recent study of population trends in the southeast, for instance, shows that east of the Appalachians in Virginia the native population declined by 93 percent between 1685 and 1790   that is, after it already had declined by about 95 percent during the preceding century, which itself had followed upon the previous century's whirlwind of massive destruction. In eastern North and South Carolina the decline between 1685 and 1790 was 97 percent   again, following upon two earlier centuries of genocidal devastation In Louisiana the 1685-1790 figure for population collapse was 91 percent, and in Florida 88 percent. As a result, when the eighteenth century was drawing to its close, less than 5000 native people remained alive in all of eastern Virginia North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana combined, while in Florida   which alone contained more than 700,000 Indians in 1520 only 2000 survivors could be found. (92)

Overwhelmingly, these disasters were the result of massively destructive epidemics and genocidal warfare, while a small portion of the loss in numbers derived from forced expulsion from the Indians' traditional homelands. How these deadly phenomena interacted can be seen clearly by examining the case of the Cherokee. After suffering a calamitous measure of ruination during the time of their earliest encounters with Europeans, the Cherokee population continued to decline steadily and precipitously as the years unfolded. During the late seventeenth and major part of the eighteenth century alone, for example, the already devastated Cherokee nation endured the loss of another three-fourths of its population. (93) Then, just as the colonies were going to war in their quest for liberation from the British, they turned their murderous attention one more time to the quest for Indian liquidation; the result for the Cherokee was that "their towns is all burned," wrote one contemporary, '"their Corn cut down and Themselves drove into the Woods to perish and a great many of them killed." (94) Before long, observed James Mooney, the Cherokee were on "the verge of extinction Over and over again their towns had been laid in ashes and their fields wasted. Their best warriors had been killed and their women and children had sickened and starved in the mountains." (95) Thus, the attempt at straightforward extermination. Next came expulsion.

From the precipice of nonexistence, the Cherokee slowly struggled back. But as they did, more and more white settlers were moving into and onto their lands Then, in 1828 Andrew Jackson was elected President The same Andrew Jackson who once had written that "the whole Cherokee Nation ought to be scurged." The same Andrew Jackson who had led troops against peaceful Indian encampments, calling
the Indians "savage dogs," and boasting that "I have on all occasions preserved the scalps of my killed." The same Andrew Jackson who had supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses the bodies of men, women, and children that he and his men had massacred   cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. The same Andrew Jackson who   after his Presidency was over   still was recommending that American troops specifically seek out and systematically kill Indian women and children who were in hiding, in order to complete their extermination: to do otherwise he wrote, was equivalent to pursuing "a wolf in the hamocks with out knowing first where her den and whelps were." (96)

Almost immediately upon Jackson's ascension to the Presidency, the state of Georgia claimed for itself enormous chunks of Cherokee property, employing a fraudulent legal technique that Jackson himself had once used to justify dispossession. The Cherokee and other Indian nations in the re- region   principally the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Creek   stood fast, even taking their case to the United States Supreme Court. But all the while that they were trying to hold their ground, a A flood tide of white immigrants (probably about 40,000 in Cherokee country alone) swarmed over the hills and meadows and woods, their numbers continuing to swell as gold was discovered in one section of the territory. (97)

The white settlers, in fact, were part of the government's plan to drive the Indians off their land. As Michael Paul Rogin has demonstrated, the "intruders entered Indian country only with government encouragement, after the extension of state law." And once on the Indians' land, they overran it. Confiscating the farms of wealthy and poor Indians alike, says Rogin, "they took possession of Indian land, stock, and improvements, forced the Indians to sign leases, drove then into the woods, and acquired a bonanza in cleared land." They then destroyed the game, which had supplemented the Indians' agricultural production, with the result, as intended, that the Indians faced mass starvation. (98)

Still the Cherokee resisted. And by peaceful means. They won their case before the US Supreme Court, with a ruling written by Justice John Marshall, a ruling that led to Jackson's famous remark: "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." The Court, of course, had no direct means of enforcement, so the drive against the Cherokee and the other Indians of the region continued unabated.

Finally, a treaty was drawn up, ceding the Cherokee lands to the American government in exchange for money and some land in what had been designated Indian Territory far to the west, Knowing that neither the Cherokee elders, nor the majority of the Cherokee people, would approve the treaty, the U.S. government held the most influential Cherokee leader in jail and shut down the tribal printing press while negotiations took ace between American officials and a handful of "cooperative" Indians. Even the American military official who was on hand to register the tribe's members for removal protested to the Secretary of War that "that paper ...called a treaty, is no treaty at all, because not sanctioned by the great body of the Cherokee and made without their participation or assent. I solemnly declare to you that upon its reference to the Cherokee people it would be instantly rejected by nine-tenths of them, and I believe by nineteen- twentieths of them." (99)

But the President had what he wanted   someone's signature on a piece of paper. This was what the great French observer of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, was speaking of when he remarked sarcastically that, in contrast with the sixteenth-century Spanish, in the nineteenth century and, we might add here, the twentieth   "the conduct of the United States Americans toward the natives was inspired by the most chaste affection for legal formalities.... It is impossible to destroy men with more re- respect to the laws of humanity." (100)

Soon the forced relocation, what was to become known as the Trail of Tears, began under the direction of General Winfield Scott. In fact, the "relocation" was nothing less than a death march a Presidentially ordered death march that, in terms of Territory mortality rate directly attributable to it, was almost as destructive as the Bataan Death March of 1942, the most notorious Japanese atrocity in all of the Second World War. (101) About 22,000 Cherokee then remained in existence, 4000 of whom had already broken under the pressures of white oppression and left for Indian Territory Another thousand or so escaped and hid out in the Carolina hills. The remaining 17,000 were rounded up by the American military and herded into detention camps   holding pens, really   where they waited under wretched and ignominious conditions for months as preparations for their forced exile were completed. James Mooney, who interviewed people who had participated in the operation, described the scene:

Under Scott's orders the troops were disposed at various points throughout the Cherokee country, where stockade forts were erected for gathering in and holding the Indians preparatory to removal From these, squads of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every small cabin hidden away in the coves or by the sides of mountain streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants, however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade, Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes m flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work l ever knew." (102)

An initial plan to carry the Cherokee off by steamboat, in the hottest part of the summer, was called off when so many of them died from disease and the oppressive conditions. After waiting for the fall season to begin, they were then driven overland, in groups upwards of about a thousand, across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. One white traveler from Maine happened upon several detachments from the death march, all of them "suffering extremely from the fatigue of the journey, and the We health consequent upon it":

The last detachment which we passed on the 7th embraced rising two thousand Indians,... wagons found the road literally filled with the procession for about three miles in length. The sick and feeble were carried in wag-    about as comfortable for traveling as a New England ox cart with a covering over it   a great many ride on horseback and multitudes go on foot   even aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back   on the sometimes frozen ground, and sometimes muddy streets, with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them.... We learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed, that they buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping place, and they make a journey of ten miles per day only on an average,'" (103)

Like other government-sponsored Indian death marches, this one intentionally took native men, women, and children through areas where it was known that cholera and other epidemic diseases were raging; the govern- government sponsors of this march, again as with the others, fed the Indians spoiled flour and rancid meat, and they drove the native people on through freezing rain and cold. Not a day passed without numerous deaths from the unbearable conditions under which they were forced to travel. And when they arrived in Indian Territory many more succumbed to fatal illness and starvation.

All told, by the time it was over, more than 8000 Cherokee men, women, and children died as a result of their expulsion from their homeland. That is, about half of what then remained of the Cherokee nation was liquidated dated under Presidential directive, a death rate similar to that of other southeastern peoples who had undergone the same process   the Creeks and the Seminoles in particular. Some others who also had been expelled from the lands of their ancestors, such as the Chickasaw and the Choctaw, fared better, losing only about 15 percent of their populations during their own forced death marches. For comparative purposes, however, that "only" 15 percent is the approximate equivalent of the death rate for German combat troops in the closing year of World War Two, when Germany's entire southern front was collapsing and its forces in the field everywhere were being overwhelmed and more than decimated. The higher death rate of the Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokee was equal to that of Jews in Germany, Hungary, and Rumania between 1939 and 1945. (105) And all these massacres of Indians took place, of course, only after many years of preliminary slaughter, from disease and military assault, that already     had reduced these peoples' populations down to a fragment of what they had been prior to the coming of the Europeans.

The story of the southeastern Indians, like that of the northeastern tribes, was repeated across the entire expanse of the North American con- continent as far south as Mexico, as far north as Canada and the Arctic, as far west as the coasts of Washington Oregon, and California. Just as we have had to overlook many native peoples in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and elsewhere, who regularly suffered depopulation rates of 90 to 95 percent and more as well as numerous New England and southern tribes who passed into total extinction with less drama than did those we have surveyed here our references to the holocaust that swept the rest of the continent can be little more than suggestive of the devastation that occurred.

We can speak of small but illustrative incidents. For example, the total destruction in 1792 of a far northwest coast Nootka Indian village called Opitsatah, half a mile in diameter and containing more than 2OO elaborately carved homes (and many times that number of people) under the command of a man who later said he "was in no ways tenacious of "carrying out such mass murder" and that he "was grieved to think" that his commander "should let his passions go so far." But he did it anyway, because he was ordered to. Every door the American killers entered, he said, "was in resemblance to a human and beasts head, the passage being through the mouth, besides which there was much more rude carved work about the dwellings, some of which by no means inelegant. This fine vil- village the work of ages, was in a short time totally destroyed."' Or there is the case of the Moravian Delaware Indians who had converted to Chris- Christianity as demanded by their white conquerors, in order to save their lives. It didn't matter. After destroying their corn and reducing them to starving scavengers, American troops under Colonel David Williamson rounded up those tribal members who were still clinging to life and, as reported after the events,

"assured them of sympathy in their great hunger and their intention to escort them to food and safety, Without suspicion... the Christians agreed to go with them and after consultations, hastened to the Salem fields to bring in their friends. The militia relieved the Indians of their guns and knives, prom- promising to restore them later, The Christians felt safe with these friendly men whose interest in their welfare seemed genuine. Too late they discovered the Americans' treachery, Once defenseless, they were bound and charged with being warriors, murderers, enemies and thieves.... After a short night of prayer and hymns... twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women, and thirty-four children were ruthlessly murdered. Pleas, in excellent English from some of the kneeling Christians, failed to stop the massacre, Only two escaped by feigning death before the butchers had completed their work of scalping."' (107)


FOOTNOTES
86- Martin Middlebrook, The First Day of the Somme (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972); John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 255, 280

87- Peter R. Cox, Demography, Fourth Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 319, 361

88- Donald J. Bogue, Principles of Demography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969), p. 34; Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1799), p. 199

89- Richard Drinnon, Facing West, The metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980) pp. 331-32, 65

90- Ibid., p. 332; Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 99; Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebrith of the Seneca (New York; Alfred A. Knoph, 1097) pp. 141-44.

91- Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 96, 98, 116; Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in the 19th Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1979), pp. 61-65

92- For the 1685 to 1790 figures, see Peter H. Wood, "The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685-1790," in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 38

93. Ibid.

94. James. O'Donnell, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), p. 52

95- James Mooney, Historical Sketch of the Cherokee (1900) (Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1975), p. 51

96- Takaki, Iron Cages, pp. 96, 102

97- Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1975), pp. 132, 218-19, 355.

98. Ibid., pp. 219-220

99- Quoted, ibid., p. 227

100- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), Volume One, p. 339.
101- Of the 10,000 or so Americans who were victims of the Bataan Death March, 4,000 survived to the end of the war, meaning that about 6,000 or 60 percent, died on the march or during subsequent three years of imprisonment. As noted in the text, about 8,000 of the approximately 17,000 Cherokee who began that death march died on the Trail of Tears and in the immediate aftermath- about 47 percent. The comparison is incomplete, however because, unlike the Bataan situation, no one knows how many Cherokee died during the next three years of reservation imprisonment- and also because, again unlike the Bataan death march, the Cherokee death march included many thousand of women and children. For Bataan, see Donald Knox, Death March: The Survivors of Bataan (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovannovich, 1981).

102- Mooney, Historical Sketch of the Cherokee, p. 124

103- In Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), pp. 305-306.

104- Russell Thornton, "Cherokee Population Losses During the 'Trail of Tears': A New Perspective and a New Estimate," Ethnohistory, 31 (1984), 289-300.

105. Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and Hohn Pritchard, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War, Revised Second Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p523; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago Press, 1972) p. 74

106- “Log of John Boit,” quoted in Erna Gunther, Indian Life on the Northwest Coast of North America as Seen by Early Exploreres and Fur Traders During th eLast Decades of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 74

107. Quoted in Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario, pp. 99-100.