The American Empire

By Wade Frazier

Purpose and Disclaimer

Timeline

Introduction

The New World Before “Discovery,” and the First Contacts

The First Century of the New World’s Invasion

Imperial Jockeying

The English and Their Rivals in North America

Fathers of a Different Kind of Empire

To Steal a Continent – An Empire Begins

To Steal a Continent – Finishing the Job

The Empire Goes Global

Sitting on Top of the World

The New Era Looked a Lot Like the Old Era

Attacking Iraq

The Continuing War and the Body Count

Subsequent Events 

Yugoslavia and East Timor

America’s Humanitarian Record

The Kurdish Plight

Helping Kosovo

Helping East Timor

Helping Colombia

A World Trade Center Postscript

Invading and Occupying Iraq – A Postscript

Footnotes

Purpose and Disclaimer

Summer 2002

Not many Americans will find this essay an enjoyable read, but that is not its purpose.  I am an accountant by profession, not a historian, political scientist, economist or scientist, and this essay should to be read with that in mind. 

The radicalizing experience of pursuing alternative energy woke me up to the extent that I created this website.  This essay is not just an exercise in scholarship, but also tells what it has been like to be an American while my nation throws its weight around.  Please do not take my word for anything, but find out for yourself what is true for you.

Timeline

This essay contains many names and dates.  This timeline is an abbreviated version of this site’s timeline, and is intended to make the reading experience easier. 

Timeline from 1492 onward.

Timeline from 1492 Onward

Introduction

Ever since protohumans left their native habitat in the tropical forests, they had to exploit new energy sources.  Whether it was tools to scavenge predator kills, weapons that made humans into superpredators, fur from human prey worn as clothing, felling trees and using deforested land to grow crops and pasture animals, the game was always about securing or preserving human-usable energy. 

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle began coming to an end about 10,000 years ago, on a global basis, as human superpredators hunted all the easily killed and large animals to extinction.  Then the Domestication Revolution began, with plants and animals made into human-controllable and human-digestible food.  The “agricultural surplus” allowed humans to begin creating what is called “civilization.”  According to today’s prevailing theories, the first place civilization made its appearance was in Sumeria, which was in present-day Iraq.  It took thousands of years to happen, but deforestation, irrigation, mass grazing, plow agriculture and continually increasing human populations eventually turned much of the Fertile Crescent into a desert.  In 1990, Iraq imported 70% of its food. 

Along with civilization came social stratification, with elites, professions, slaves and ideological justification of their hierarchical positions.  The Zero-Sum Game came into being.  As each civilization appeared, whether it was in China, the Fertile Crescent or Mesoamerica, the elites tried expanding their energy base, and empire building was one of humanity’s most common “civilized” activities.  Because humans became superpredators during their evolutionary journey beyond the tropics, humans killing each other became one of the species’ most identifiable aspects.  Energy capture, preservation and consumption is the basis of all the world’s ecosystems, and hence every economic and political system, with the word “power” having similar meaning in each discipline.  Violence has usually been the primary method by which political-economic power has been amassed, whether the violence was against the environment or fellow humans. 

The altering of earth’s ecosystems and mining its elements, to create human-friendly environments and products, is called “progress” in the West.  It has also been the dynamic of earth’s destruction.  One of humanity’s oldest histories is perhaps also the bloodiest, filled with tales of mass murder, largely to seize land and peoples to secure energy and resources.  The Jews of the Old Testament, led by Moses, began an era of genocide as they acquired their Promised Land.  The practice of invading and annihilating the inhabitants, with the Jewish god cheering them on, is a predominant Old Testament theme.  The complete annihilation of Jericho’s residents was Joshua’s most famous feat in securing the Promised Land, with divine assistance, as his god crumbled Jericho’s walls.  From the beginning, ideological justifications were concocted to make it seem that naked theft was not so naked, and the murders transform into righteous deeds, usually by making those who were annihilated, enslaved or forced to migrate somehow impure, worshipping the wrong gods, or subhuman.  The people on the wrong end of the weaponry were thus made exploitable/expendable, and people could then commit their awesome crimes against each other with clear consciences. 

Empires rose and fell in the Old World for millennia.  The Roman Empire ruled over more than a quarter of humanity two millennia ago, and its bloody reign devastated the Mediterranean region, helping to turn such places as Libya into deserts.  Environmental degradation has contributed to the decline and fall of nearly all earthly empires.[1] 

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5^th century AD, Europe reverted to a primarily agrarian economy; mining declined, and Islamic lands and the Eastern Roman Empire became vastly more civilized than Europe.  European Crusading coincided with the High Middle Ages, which was a great period of deforestation and city building.  Europe’s High Middle Ages also took advantage of a global warming trend, and previously unsuitable lands were deforested and put under the plow.  By 1300, earth was cooling off, Europe had bred to its Malthusian limit, and the High Middle Ages ended, with a major famine beginning in 1314.  England entered a new era of incessant battling with France, beginning with its Hundred Years’ War, in 1337.  In 1347, the Black Death swept into Europe, and in 1400, Europe’s population was perhaps as low as half of what it had been in 1300, although two-thirds is a more common estimate. 

The Renaissance began in the late 1300s in the city-states of northern Italy, and the 1400s were a period of ferment and change in Europe that would have a global impact.  Portugal began exploring, colonizing and conquering the East Atlantic and African coast in the early 1400s, and as Spain completed wiping out Moorish rule on the Iberian Peninsula, it joined the game, leading to Christopher Columbus’ fateful voyage. 

The New World Before “Discovery,” and the First Contacts

What is today called North and South America, or the Western Hemisphere, has been a source of great speculation among anthropologists and other scholars, on a wide variety of topics.  During the past century, especially during the past couple of generations, the New World’s pre-Columbian past, as viewed by academia and mainstream society, has changed drastically.  Early in the 20^th century, the prevailing view among anthropologists was that humans first inhabited the New World no more than a few thousand years ago, and that the New World’s pre-Columbian population was perhaps eight million.  Those views were held quite dogmatically by academia, and it took a long time to overturn them.[2]  Beginning with the Berkeley School’s efforts, represented by the groundbreaking work of Woodrow Borah, Sherburne Cook and Carl Sauer, both the early date of inhabitation and the pre-Columbian population have changed by an order of magnitude.  Today, a first date of New World inhabitation of at least thirty thousand years ago is widely held in academia, and even the 2001 edition of Encarta Encyclopedia presents a pre-Columbian New World population of 90 million.  There is credible speculation that the New World may have had well in excess of 100 million people in 1491.  This site uses an estimate of 80 million, well within the range of current estimates. 

From the Arctic ice cap to Tierra del Fuego, an astonishing diversity of terrains, climates and peoples existed.  Pre-Columbian natives spoke about 2,000 languages from about 150 language families, for vast linguistic diversity, providing more evidence that the New World has been peopled for a very long time.  As was the case elsewhere on earth, particularly in China and the Fertile Crescent, when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle became unsustainable, the Domestication Revolution began.  In the New World, the Domestication Revolution seems to have begun in Mesoamerica, where the New World’s most advanced “civilized” activity took place, with squash and pumpkins being the New World’s first domesticated plants. 

Along the Andes mountain range appeared one of the world’s most remarkable feats of human adaptation.  From seashore to mountaintop, from desert to jungle, in a region that was extremely vulnerable to El Niño climate fluctuations, the feats of engineering and environmental adaptation of that region’s pre-Columbian peoples are still marveled at by modern anthropologists.  The Incan Empire “discovered” by the Spanish was merely the latest in a series of empires that rose and fell there.[3]  Machu Picchu may have been at least partly an agricultural laboratory, as those people were the world’s greatest agricultural experimenters.  Maize was probably first domesticated in Mesoamerica, and the potato along the Andes.  Even during the 1990s, “academics” defended Columbus Day, have called the pre-Columbian New World a sparsely populated land of primitive hunter-gatherers, with the coming of Europeans the best thing that ever happened to the New World.[4]  The facts are different. 

Of the estimated 80 million people who lived in New World in 1491, the vast majority lived in sedentary agricultural communities.  The natives had developed three thousand varieties each of maize and potatoes, and maize was grown from New England to Chile in 1491.  Most of the crops raised worldwide today are of Native American origin.[5]  Agriculture was the basis of the two largest New World populations: the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations.  The Arawakan peoples of the Caribbean had an agriculture-based civilization, and along with the Hawaiian peoples (and the South Pacific, in general) lived in what was probably the closest thing to an earthly paradise that historic humans have seen.  Agriculture was practiced in North America’s eastern woodlands, today’s American South, the Great Plains and today’s Southwest U.S.  In addition, food-procurement practices in many parts of the pre-Columbian New World have become the source of intriguing evidence, heated debate and a fair amount of amazement.

As with most animals, humans cannot digest cellulose, so most of the sun’s energy that goes into creating forests and grasslands is not directly digestible by humans.  Forests are the world’s greatest soil producers, with trees having unique abilities to break up rocks, extract minerals, circulate water through the soils, vent it to the sky, and dead leaves and trees provide vast nutrient deliveries to the forest biome.  A temperate forest can produce a foot of topsoil in about 400 years.  Grasslands create topsoil on a far more modest level.  Human-caused deforestation began with the Agricultural Revolution, in order to create environments conducive to crop production.  While razing forests to raise crops can be highly productive in the short run, it can create long-term environmental devastation, including soil loss, which also fills rivers with silt as the soil blows and washes away. 

While there is evidence that environmental over-taxation led to the decline and fall of civilizations such as the Anasazi and Mayan people and at Cahokia, in general the New World natives had a much gentler tenure on their lands than Old World peoples.[6]  Anthropologists have surmised that the situation was because the New World was “behind” the Old World in “progress,” the “agricultural surplus” in Mexico being thousands of years behind the Fertile Crescent in its development, as maize ears were still only a few inches long in 1491.  Although North America’s eastern woodlands peoples’ adoption of swidden agriculture apparently began because of the demands of the European introduction of depopulating disease and violence, and laborsaving metal axes, they did not use plow agriculture, which helped ensure long-term soil fertility.  Parts of Mexico today have been using milpa agricultural methods for four thousand years continuously, with no decline in soil fertility.[7]  Today, it is thought that the introduction of maize to today’s Northeastern United States about a thousand years ago increased the agricultural yields and led to greater population density, making it more sedentary.  That led to population pressures with its resultant warfare, which the Iroquois responded to with their Great Law of Peace. 

While anthropology is a respectable discipline, studying stones and bones is a perilous way to try reconstructing extinct cultures.  There is a spiritual facet too, and purely materialistic interpretations are limited by definition, which can lead to significant misinterpretations of the evidence.[8]  In their interaction with their environment, for instance, New World humans may have been far ahead of the Old World.  Here is some of the evidence.

One of the few sustainable civilizations that earth has ever seen was the Pacific Northwest culture, partly because spawning salmon provided a digestible energy delivery to a village’s front door.  The natives, depending on the calories of salmon-borne deliveries of sunlight energy that fell in the North Pacific, did not deforest the land to divert the sun’s energy into crops, so when white men finally got around to conquering that part of the world, the trees they chopped down were prodigious and the soils were intact.  That kind of culture could have been developed in some Old World environs, but it was not, not on that scale or duration.  It is possible that maintaining such an environmentally gentle civilization was a conscious choice by New World natives, and it became ingrained in their culture. 

The first Europeans to North America’s eastern woodlands remarked on a park-like, open forest, which was a hunter’s paradise.  That open forest was maintained by humans burning the undergrowth every year, turning the woodlands into an environment conducive to feeding animals that humans could hunt and eat.  There is significant evidence that the Great Plains was an environment husbanded by humans over millennia, burning the plains regularly so forests could not recover, and turning it into the world’s biggest pasture, where bison, elk and other edible animals could flourish.[9] 

Similarly, the Amazon may at least partly be a human-created biome.  It is controversial today, but there is persuasive evidence that the Amazon basin and vicinity was partly terraformed, millennia ago, on a scale so vast it is difficult for modern observers to even imagine, much less accept.  Thousands of square miles of the Amazon basin were terraformed by mixing ceramics into the soil, thereby creating a kind of supersoil, and ancient earthworks in the plains above the Amazon basin are so vast that it is challenging to imagine the civilization that wrought them.  The plants of the “wild” Amazon are highly unusual in their abundance of fruits, nuts and other human-usable nourishment, which is strong evidence that the biome was transformed by humans millennia ago.  The Amazon rainforest may be the world’s largest garden.[10] 

History has shown that all cultures unravel when subjected to the stresses of disease, famine, warfare and the like, especially when large fractions of the population die off.  Because European contact was so quickly and universally disastrous for Native Americans, what later chroniclers recorded were generally remnants of New World cultures that existed before Columbus. 

What the New World was like before Europeans showed up will be a source of enduring controversy, but some pursuable evidence is the first contact accounts of Europeans in the New World.  The early Europeans to North America, whether they saw the Great Plains, the Eastern Woodlands or California, described peoples who were not particularly hostile toward one another, even enemy tribes.[11]  Few early European observers left behind detailed descriptions of the New World they encountered, and those that do can have major deficiencies.  Columbus and Cortés chronicled the first contacts between Europeans and the intact cultures in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, but both chroniclers had agendas.  Although his journal is dominated with his quest for gold and how he might exploit the wealth of the discovered lands, Columbus regularly remarked on the incredible beauty of the islands and the happy, healthy, peaceful natives, and many of them did not know what weapons were.  He described the islands as an Edenic paradise and the natives its worthy inhabitants, and he was right.  Columbus and his invasions quickly destroyed it, however, so reconstructing that extinct culture has been a challenging task for modern anthropologists. 

When Ponce de León first invaded Florida in 1513, for the first recorded contact with Florida’s natives, they almost certainly had already suffered from Spanish slavers, as they fought off the invasion.  Cortés and Castillo described the first European encounters with the natives of inland Mesoamerica, meeting the Aztecs in 1519.[12]  The Spaniards had already pillaged the Mesoamerican coastline, so their welcome was not friendly there, and they easily slaughtered the Mayans with their superior weaponry.  As they marched toward Tenochtitlán however, they were welcomed along the entire route, except when they encountered a rival state, Tlaxcala.  The Tlaxcalans ferociously fought them off, but when the Spanish invaders began slaughtering women, children and the elderly (unthinkable in Mesoamerican society), the Tlaxcalans realized they were facing barbarians of a kind they had never seen before.  They then surrendered and became the Spaniards’ first significant ally in Mesoamerica, a relationship they would later regret.[13]

In 1519, the same year that Cortés invaded Mesoamerica, Ferdinand Magellan led the expedition that first sailed around the world.  Magellan’s voyage marked Europe’s first encounters with many native peoples along his route.  Magellan’s men violated many of the natives they met along the way, as well as killed each other in mutinous behavior.[14]  Magellan died fighting the natives in today’s Philippines.  In 1568, a Spanish expedition from Peru landed in the Solomon Islands (named after King Solomon and his mines, because the Spanish, as usual, were seeking gold), for the first European contact in that region.  Although the natives were once again friendly and welcoming, there was little gold to be found, and the Spaniards wasted little time in waging war against them.[15] 

Cortés and Castillo recorded a Mesoamerican civilization that overwhelmed them, with sights so incredible that some Spanish mercenaries thought they were dreaming.  The Aztec capital city was more fantastic than anything the Old World had to offer, and some of the Spaniards had seen Constantinople and Venice.  There was also the grim spectacle of human sacrifice, although the cannibalism issue is probably the New World’s first urban legend.  Columbus made up the story of Caribbean cannibalism nearly from thin air.  Cortés concocted the tale of Aztec cannibalism in 1522 after he conquered them, and his mention of his foes carrying “roasted babies” sounds like classic wartime propaganda.  Consequently, various aspects of their reporting must be viewed with skepticism.  Nearly every early interaction with Spanish and Native American cultures show that when given a choice, natives thought European culture an inferior one, even when treated to the best that Europe had to offer.[16]  While the Aztecs had a stratified society that was materialistic, violent and greedy to a degree found nowhere else in the New World, it still paled beside the European versions of those qualities.  When some Brazilian Indians visited France in the 1560s, they were amazed at the disparity in French society, where gluttons turned away emaciate beggars at their doors.  The Indians did not understand why the poor did not kill the rich.[17]  When Charles Mann recently asked seven academics in the field where they would have chosen to live in 1491, Europe or with the Iroquois, the scholars were wary of being asked such a question, them being acutely aware of the presentism issue.  Nevertheless, with all their caveats, all seven scholars chose the Iroquois.[18]  Native Americans also valued cleanliness, a virtue that Europeans would not appreciate for centuries. 

When Portugal’s Corte Real expedition landed in today’s Newfoundland in 1501, or Ayllón’s ships sailed to South Carolina in 1521, or France’s Verrazano expedition of 1524 explored the coastline from the Carolinas to Maine, or Cartier’s expedition explored the St. Lawrence River in 1535, they always captured natives, usually to make them slaves.  All first contact situations along the east coast of North America were openly predatory on the Europeans’ part, and they always preyed upon friendly natives.  By the time the Pilgrims showed up in the 1600s, the natives there had already been attacked numerous times, with their people carried off to short lives of slavery.  Even then, the invading Pilgrims were welcomed and fed by the natives. 

The Spanish invasions were called entradas, and the Narváez entrada invaded Florida in 1527 on the Gulf side, landing in Tampa Bay and outrunning the Spanish reputation in southern Florida.  The natives the Narváez expedition encountered were generally timid or friendly, and although the Spaniards did plenty to provoke the natives, it rarely became violent.  That entrada was doomed by its incompetence, not native malice. 

By the time the Spaniards got around to discovering, conquering and sacking the Incan Empire in 1532, the Incas had already been devastated by a European epidemic several years earlier, which killed the emperor and led to a civil war, so no European ever saw anything close to pre-Columbian Incan culture.  Even then, their welcome was initially good, although with Soto in charge, a reconnaissance foray raped an entire nunnery of several hundred virgins, and then slaughtered the local populace when they resisted it.[19]  The surprise attack, capture, ransoming and murder of the Incan emperor made even Charles V uneasy, as his men did that to a sovereign, putting a dent in the Divine Right of Kings doctrine.  The Spanish accounts of Cuzco’s subsequent sack give some hint of what their capital city was like, and along with Tenochtitlán, they were the New World’s two most spectacular cities, and perhaps the world’s.[20] 

When the Soto entrada invaded Florida in 1539 and marauded through today’s Southeast United States for three years, it may have been history’s most destructive expedition, laying waste to the entire region, mainly from the diseases they left behind.  One native empire had already been devastated by European epidemics when Soto passed through, so even then, Soto intruded upon a far from unsullied land, but the chroniclers of that expedition, as bent as they were for plunder, described intriguing peoples, ones who seemed largely at peace with their neighbors, although warfare was not unknown and apparently increased as populations became more dense.  Soto was about the first and last white man to see the Mississippian culture, which had flourished for several centuries before becoming extinct from European invasion and disease.  Some of the mounds are several thousand years old.  The Mississippian period may have begun declining a century before Soto showed up.  Why they declined is one of archeology’s current mysteries, and there are educated guesses about what it was like then.  It is not unreasonable to theorize that European epidemics washed through the Mississippian culture as early as the 1518 smallpox epidemic that raged through Mesoamerica and carried off millions of people, or even the unrecorded slavers that hit the Florida coastline before Ponce de León’s entrada of 1513. 

When the Coronado expedition invaded today’s American Southwest in 1540, looking for cites gilt in gold, the natives had already been visited by Spanish slaving expeditions, so they resisted Coronado’s invasion, the first Spanish entrada that tried treating the natives well.  It ended up much as the other Spanish invasions did, however.[21]  Although openly predatory, the Coronado entrada described gentle peoples, with even rival tribes living peacefully, including those who hunted bison on the plains. 

In 1542, Cabrillo “discovered” the California coast, and the native welcome was not always warm, and he found out why.  The supplier of the Coronado expedition, Melchor Díaz, had already marauded through Southern California, abusing the natives and amusing himself by hunting natives from horseback, which was one of the Conquistadors’ favorite activities.  Cabrillo described a densely populated California coastline, and the natives were usually gentle and friendly.  Epidemics tore through them long before Serra showed up to “civilize” them.  . 

In 1577, Francis Drake came through on a pirate expedition, sailing beyond the European reputation and putting ashore in Northern California (some scholars argue that he really landed in Oregon).  They stayed for several weeks as they repaired their ship, and the natives helped feed the expedition, treating the strange white men with great reverence.  At about the same time, Martin Frobisher described gentle people that he captured in his voyages to the North Atlantic. 

In short, in about every European first contact account that history offers during the 16^th century, in the New World and Pacific islands, the Europeans described gentle and either timid or welcoming natives, and when the welcome was less than friendly, it is nearly certainly because Europeans had already visited the region, and the natives were acquainted with the greedy, kidnapping, murderous men with white skin. 

There is a great deal of evidence, some of it quite compelling, that the New World was visited many times, by many world cultures, long before Columbus showed up.[22]  It is questionable whether the Europeans did to the New World what anybody else would have done in their shoes.  In the same century that Columbus stumbled into the New World, the Ming Dynasty mounted a series of massive naval expeditions along southern Asia, including trips to Africa.  They did not rape and plunder the peoples they visited.[23]  Similarly, gunpowder was invented in China, and they began using it several hundred years before Europe did.  While the Chinese exclusively used it for firecrackers, Europe began using it in the 1330s, just before the Black Death epidemics, and Europeans invented its use in weaponry.  Europeans were uniquely violent, and their mastery of violence allowed them to conquer the world. 

The First Century of the New World’s Invasion

The development of the Europe that gave birth to Christopher Columbus was a long time in coming.  Arguments can be made that go back to the Fertile Crescent and the dawn of the Old World’s civilizations, when feminine-based religion was overthrown by male-based religion, leading to what is called the dominator model of society.  For the past several thousand years, men have uniquely dominated Old World cultures.  The influence of Western men has been profound in numerous disciplines, and has greatly led them astray at times, such as in Western Medicine.  After Rome fell, Germanic tribes conquered most of Europe.  Islam made its rise during the 600s, and Moors invaded and conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD, wresting it from the Visigoths, and today’s Spain was Europe’s most civilized place during Moorish rule, with Jews living in their golden age in Europe.  Vikings began their disastrous invasions of Europe in about 800, conquering and settling lands from Newfoundland to Russia.  A global warming trend, beginning around 900, helped lead to Europe’s High Middle Ages, which was a great period of deforestation and city building.  In 1036, the Umayyad dynasty ended in Moorish Iberia, and the Christian conquest of Moorish Spain began in 1056.  The Normans (Vikings who settled in today’s France) invaded and conquered England in 1066.  The Crusades, the first launched in 1096, were Europe’s first united acts, with Europe’s first great Jew slaughters being a warm-up for the first one. 

The Catholic Church owned about a quarter of Western Europe’s land, and it was Europe’s dominant medieval institution.  The Crusades backfired in ways the Church did not anticipate.  Instead of the Church extending its religious monopoly, returning Crusaders brought back Catharism, which flourished in southern France, Christian Europe’s most culturally advanced region, which led Pope Innocent III to declare a Crusade on France.  The resulting Albigensian Crusade killed about a million people, and also became an opportunity for the Parisian elite to extend their rule, helping lead to today’s France. 

In the century that the Black Death swept off at least a quarter of Europe’s population, Europe became a hell on earth, with famine, disease and warfare continually raging throughout it.  Europe’s cities were extremely deadly, with the continual influx of the “surplus population” from the countryside being the only thing keeping the urban populations sustained.  The Renaissance began in the late 1300s in northern Italy’s city-states, and it led to humanism, which eventually undermined the Church’s power.  By the early 1400s, the “Reconquest” of Spain was reenergized with a renewed attack on Granada, which would be the last holdout of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula. 

Portugal is a tiny nation compared to Spain, both in land mass and population, having about a million people, compared to Spain’s eight million, around 1500.  It came into being during the Reconquest, and if the peoples of what is called Spain today were not busy fighting the Moors and friends, and each other, Portugal as a political entity may not have come into being.  Its existence was aided by geography, being bounded by mountains, rivers and the Atlantic Ocean. 

Spices can be tasty, and hide the taste of stale and rotting food, but the primary reason for using them was their antibacterial properties, to preserve food, especially in warmer climates, where food can spoil quickly.  Spices generally came from Asia and the Spice Islands, and were not only lucrative trade items for the right players, but were seen as necessities by many, especially in the meat-eating culture of the Iberian Peninsula, as spoiling animal products are the deadliest foods of all.  Luxury items also came from the Asian trade, such as silk and porcelain.  The spice trade from Asia to the Middle East and Europe was an ancient one, with the Romans gaining control over the sea routes by its conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, and Alexandria became a hub of trade, which bypassed Arab traders, control they later regained with the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. 

Christian elites on the Iberian Peninsula had been seeking another route to Asian trade for some time, and Portugal’s conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was an attempt to gain a trade route across Africa, to outflank its hated Islamic rivals.  It would not be as easy as it first seemed, and Portugal began sailing along the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 1430s, seeking the West African gold trade, where most of the Old World’s gold was mined.  Those efforts led Portugal to enter the African slave trade in 1444. 

There have been very few, if any, pre-industrial, sedentary cultures that did not have some form of forced servitude.  History has seen a wide spectrum of coercive institutions, with great diversity in how they operated.  Even today, relatively gentle Western taxation is a form of coerced servitude, where people are compelled to part with the fruits of their labor, to support violent states.  In Western and Northern Europe, slavery was nearly an extinct institution by the late Middle Ages.  It flourished in the Middle East however, with Arab slavers plying their trade in Africa and elsewhere.  The Balkan side of the Adriatic became a slave coast, the very word “slave” coming from “Slav.”  Enslaving the Islamic “infidel” became a feature of the Spanish Reconquest, and would lead to slavery making its rise again in Western Europe.  Christian rationales were the most prominent ones used during the coming age of slavery.  Even during America’s push for abolition (after nearly the rest of the West had abandoned the institution), Southern defenders of slavery could often be found pointing to their Bibles to justify it.  The new version of slavery also became a uniquely economic and racist institution, with scientific management principles and other sophistication that earlier incarnations of it did not possess.[24]  Portugal’s quest for slaves and gold became a theme of “exploration” and “settlement” that would not quickly disappear. 

Portugal helped advance Europe’s maritime science and technology (and also borrowed some from Islamic culture), and began exploring, conquering and settling the Eastern Atlantic’s islands.  In 1418, the Portuguese discovered the uninhabited Madeiran islands and colonized them, the Azores in 1427 and the Cape Verde Islands in 1450. 

The Fourth Crusade sacked its “ally” Constantinople in 1204, and the Eastern Roman Empire never fully recovered from it.  Venice gained a monopoly on the Asian trade with Europe from Constantinople’s sack, and charged exorbitant prices to Europeans.  Turkish expansionism and Byzantine weakness led to the fall of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) in 1453, which ended Venice’s trading monopoly and led to its decline.  It also led to renewed Portuguese attempts to find an alternate route to the Asian spice trade.  The fall of Constantinople also hastened the rise of European humanism, as Byzantine scholars fled to Europe, with their knowledge of classical Greece.  Beginning with the reign of John II in 1481, Portugal began launching ambitious expeditions down the African coast, and in 1488, Portuguese explorers rounded the southern tip of Africa.  Christopher Columbus tried getting Portugal to finance his ideas for sailing across the Atlantic to Asia, but after rounding Africa’s tip, Portugal was no longer interested and doubted his strategy, which had been put forth by Paolo Toscanelli long before.[25] 

Columbus finally sold Spain on the idea, getting the sovereigns of Iberia, who finally wiped Moorish rule off the Iberian Peninsula in early 1492 with its conquest of Granada, to finance his foolhardy journey.  

After Bartolomeu Dias returned with news of his successful rounding of Africa’s southern end, in 1497 Vasco da Gama set sail down Africa with four ships.  Two years later he returned with news of reaching India, and he brought back specimens of spices and other coveted trade goods.  He had violent encounters along the way, and his trading overtures were not well received, as the Persian and Ottoman traders in India easily guessed what the Portuguese ships were up to.  Of 168 men who began the voyage, only 44 survived to make it back to Lisbon. 

At the time, a successful voyage to India was more useful news to the European powers than what Columbus had stumbled into across the Atlantic.  In 1500, thirteen ships, with Dias captaining one of them, set sail toward India again.  The fleet visited Brazil along the way, taking a circuitous route around Africa, and seven ships were lost, including Dias’.  The six-month journey returned to Calicut on the western coast of India, and once again the reception was less than wonderful, and the Portuguese retaliated by bombarding the city with cannons and burning some boats.  A series of explicitly military voyages ensued, with the Portuguese violently establishing a trade route to India and conquering the Muslim port of Goa in 1510.  In 1511, the Portuguese conquered Malacca, in today’s Malaysia, which was the spice trade’s heart.  While the Portuguese found the Arabs and other Muslims relatively easy to defeat militarily, and seizing their trading ports was how Portugal established itself, the Chinese Empire was another matter.  The Ming Dynasty’s voyages in the early 1400s were tremendous, with more than 20,000 men on each excursion.  The few Portuguese boats that showed up failed to overawe the Chinese, who were far more civilized than the European interlopers, and the Portuguese were reduced to smuggling as they continued to try gaining trading rights with China, and they began trading with Japan in 1543.  In 1557, Portugal finally secured the rights to an easily watched and non-defendable tip of a peninsula.  Their toehold became Macau.  Pepper was by far the greatest import from Portugal’s trade route to Asia, amounting to about 6000 tons annually by 1520, and accounted for about 40% of Crown revenues.[26] 

Christian proselytizing accompanied the Portuguese trading missions, and it was fairly successful in Japan, perhaps too successful.  While the Chinese sneered at missionary efforts in Macau, which generated only about 20 Chinese Christian converts, Portuguese successes in Japan were another matter.  By 1580, there were an estimated 150,000 Japanese Christians, and Nagasaki was the heart of the proselytizing effort.  The Japanese converted largely to gain the advantages that came from trading with the Portuguese.  Apparently the Portuguese success went to their heads, and they began treating the Japanese converts shabbily and arrogantly.  In 1587, a powerful Japanese ruler saw the “Christian invasion” as a threat, and began courting the Protestant, non-proselytizing Dutch.  He also began a savage persecution of the missionaries and Japanese converts, and thousands were killed.  In 1639, Portugal was completely expelled from Japan, and the leadership of a subsequent delegation from Macau was infamously beheaded.  The Dutch then served as Japan’s foreign trade conduit for the next two centuries. 

It can be difficult for modern Westerners to comprehend the conditions that prevailed back then, for the Europeans who began sailing across the world.  In 1500, Europeans had been living on the cusp of disaster for the previous two centuries.  Earth began cooling off by 1300, and the High Middle Ages’ aggressive deforestation and agriculture on previously unsuitable lands, combined with the resultant population explosion, left Europe in a precarious state.  The first great famine that began in 1314 set the stage for what came afterward.  The “Little Ice Age” continued until about 1850, and war, famine and disease were constant facts of life.  During those centuries, there was no European city that went an entire generation without suffering an outbreak of famine, war or epidemic disease (or all three at once).  Not that Europe was a paradise before then, but Europe became a hell on earth during those centuries. 

Some recent motion pictures have attempted to recreate the ambience of those days, but no movie can do justice to the smells, feelings and general atmosphere.  Heretics and witches burned across Europe.  In “civilized” London, a man did not walk down the street without a weapon in hand.  In European cities, criminals waited on every street, ready to pounce on the unwary.  One favored method was dropping bricks and masonry onto unsuspecting passersby, and looting their body.  Food riots became common, beginning around 1500, as Europe’s population again began hitting the Malthusian limit.  Modern Westerners can scarcely imagine the filth and stench of those days.  People would go their entire lives without bathing, except for baptism.  England’s King James I, who commissioned his famous Bible, would not have been allowed in many Western homes.  He may have not washed his hands for his entire adult life, and was notable for his personal filthiness and boorish behavior.  The streets of Europe were open sewers, as were its rivers and lakes.  If Thomas Hobbes’ famous phrase, “nasty, brutish and short” ever applied to the lives of any people, it was to average Europeans during the “Little Ice Age.” 

The Iberian Peninsula, during its several century “Reconquest,” was the scene of continual warfare, disease and famine.  The filthiness among Christians was enforced there on an even more stringent scale than the rest of Europe.  The Queen of Aragon once boasted that she had two baths in her life: when she was born and when she was married.  Bathing was a Moorish practice, and in 1500 bathing attracted the interest of the Spanish Inquisition, as it hunted down crypto-Moors and crypto-Jews, so filthiness was evidence of a Spaniard’s true Christian nature.  When the Spaniards encountered the Caribbean natives, they used the fact of the natives’ regular bathing as evidence of their “primitive” condition.  When the Spaniards eventually encountered the Aztecs, they remarked on their fanatical devotion to cleanliness, with daily baths and all manner of body and breath deodorant.  The Aztecs found the stench of the Spaniards so overpowering that they held flowers to their noses when speaking to them, and rulers would have Spaniards bathed in clouds of incense before speaking to them.  Tenochtitlán had an army of street cleaners, and was cleaner than any European city would be until the 20^th century.  

The filth, violence, starvation, disease and overall misery of Europe made life a pretty cheap commodity, which is made evident by some telling statistics.  During the 1600s, the life expectancy of a male in Europe’s ruling families was 28 years.[27]  As noted above, that first Portuguese voyage to India had about a 25% survival rate, and the risk was so high on that voyage that criminals were forced into being crewmembers.  A 75% mortality rate was a bit high, but during the next two centuries, Portugal launched about 15,000 men per year (and a few women) on its trade route.  The average mortality rate for the two-year voyage to Asia and back was about 25%.[28]  A death rate of a third of the passengers and crew was typical.  It is difficult to imagine anybody loading up ships today, to distant lands, with that projected survival rate.  As late as 1762, ten ships of the Dutch East India Company lost more than 1000 people, about 45% of those aboard, just sailing from the Netherlands to the Cape of Good Hope.  Scurvy was the biggest killer on the high seas, but was far from the only one.  Living on a ship of the day challenged even the European tolerance for squalor.  Not surprisingly, mutiny was a constant risk, and drastic methods were used to keep the crews in line.  In an early English attempt at colonization, at Roanoke, the colony simply disappeared.  The next attempt, at Jamestown, was only sustained by the continual influx of colonists.  During the first generation of the English invasion, nearly a third of the colonists died in the first year.  In 1624, of about 7000 colonists who arrived in Jamestown since 1607, only 1200 still survived. 

Not surprisingly, the best and brightest that Europe had to offer were rarely aboard those ships.  They were not all impressed criminals, and the death rates aboard were not state secrets, although deception was usually used in recruiting efforts.  The turnip truck could not keep showing up for two centuries, so imagine the kinds of people who accepted a 25% risk of death by hiring onto a ship bound for Asia.  People coming from those backgrounds would not make many gentle and enlightened encounters with the peoples of distant lands, particularly when they came from the world’s most violent culture, and the Iberian Peninsula was no exception.  The Iberian Peninsula had been the scene of innumerable invasions and forced migrations during the previous millennia, and four centuries of nearly continual warfare, raging across the peninsula, made the Spanish and Portuguese cultures thoroughly militaristic.  The violence they were about to unleash, on a global scale, had never been seen before. 

Columbus and his men usually abused the unfailing native hospitality during the first voyage, and he returned to lead a full-scale invasion the next year, with more than 1000 men.  The gold hunt soon degenerated into sending captured natives to Spain as slaves, which came naturally for a man who slaved in Africa with the Portuguese.  The natives died off quickly when shipped across the Atlantic, and Columbus then resorted to a tribute system, where each native was supposed to give Columbus and his men a thimble’s worth of gold every few months, or they had their hands chopped off.  Thus began the genocide of the New World’s natives, and history’s biggest gold rush.   

The Guanches, who probably migrated from northern Africa more than a millennium earlier, inhabited the Canary Islands.  The Spanish completed their conquest of them in 1496, aided by a European-introduced epidemic, which devastated the virgin population.  By 1600, the Canary Islands had been largely deforested and turned into a big plantation, and the Guanches were essentially an extinct people. 

Several dynamics were evident in the early days of European colonialism.  One was the environmental devastation inflicted onto the “discovered” lands.  Deforestation leads to desertification, and a mere fifty years after discovery, Columbus remarked that the Cape Verde Islands seemed misnamed, as there was not a green thing on them.  They were green when the Portuguese "discovered" them.[29]  He also noted that the Canary Islands had become much drier during the years he had been sailing to them, which was only a generation.  What was done to the previously forested Mediterranean region over many centuries was quickly done to those Atlantic islands.  Immediately after discovery, on the Madeiran island of Santo Porto, two rabbits were introduced.  They bred rapidly, as rabbits are prone to do.  Within a year, the entire island had been denuded of its vegetation by those rabbits and their progeny

In the early days of European global hegemony, ideology was a turbulent milieu.  The Catholic Church still held its religious monopoly over Western Europe, and religion was a central issue for the Spaniards who conquered the New World.  Spanish nationalism was also ascendant, with the rule of Isabella and Ferdinand forming the idea of Spain.  Isabella initiated the Spanish Inquisition in 1480, which was mainly concerned with hunting Jews and Moors who had converted under duress to Christianity, but who might have been practicing their erstwhile faith in secret. 

After Columbus came to an obscure end, other Spaniards kept the gold quest alive in the New World, as natives died off by the millions.  The mining practices of the Egyptians and Romans were revived.  The Native Americans became expendable commodities in the fevered quest for gold.  Columbus was the first person to realize what the wanton slaughter and ill treatment of the natives would mean for Spain’s burgeoning empire.  Native labor was the source of harvestable wealth on Española, as they did all the work.[30]  His observation was ignored.  Killing off the native population would ultimately cripple Spain’s imperial ambitions. 

By 1510, the Caribbean was being dramatically depopulated to keep Española's gold mines and plantations running.  Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Bahamas’ indigenous human populations were soon extinct, and slavers were almost certainly visiting the Florida natives.  The Spaniards then struck out, invading the Caribbean periphery.  They invaded Florida, Panama and South America, looking for slaves and gold.  For the first time, the Spaniards encountered armed native resistance, and numerous entradas ended in disaster.  More often, the Spaniards easily conquered and enslaved the natives.

Enslaving the natives became the standard Spanish tactic during its first century of plunder.  Ideological justifications were concocted to justify exploiting the “discovered” and enslaved peoples, with racial, religious and imperial justifications prominent.  They all merely spruced up the might-makes-right mentality.  The greater the violation, the more strained the ideology to justify it, usually by making the exploited peoples somehow subhuman.  With their humanity thus removed, their treatment became justified as clearing valuable land of subhumans (English ideology), or putting them to work as beasts of burden or serving as sex toys (Spanish ideology).  

The mining frenzy and other horrors completely exterminated the natives of the Greater Antilles, known today as the Taino.  Today’s prevailing estimate is that there were a few million island Taino, but there may have been more than ten million of them in 1492.  By 1520 they were nearly extinct on Española, and they were completely extinct long before the year 1600, and they suffered pretty much the same fate throughout the Greater Antilles.  It is the only complete genocide of millions of people in world history. 

In 1511 however, the Christian conscience peeked through the blackness.  Just before Christmas, Dominican priest Antonio Montesinos delivered a startling sermon on Española.  He quoted from the Bible, and noted the vast genocide that turned the pre-Spanish “paradise” on Española into a human desert.  The priest called into question the Spaniards’ very Christianity, asking how they could justify such treatment of their fellow human beings.  The brave priest nearly lost his life at the hands of enraged Spaniards, and they tried getting him sent back to Spain. 

In the audience for that audacious sermon was a prosperous, conquering Spaniard, with land and slaves of his own.  He became the first priest ordained in the New World.  Bartolomé de Las Casas did not indignantly receive Montesinos’ sermon, but did not really see anything wrong with keeping slaves, either.  Three years later, Las Casas was preparing for an Easter sermon when the Bible text suddenly made him question the Spanish slave system.  He then gave his slaves away and dedicated the rest of his life to the natives’ welfare, eventually becoming appointed the “Protector of the Indians.”[31]

Before Las Casas’ moment of truth, some Spanish Dominicans were able to make the Spanish court uneasy with their reports from the New World, and in 1512-1513 the Laws of Burgos were passed.  They dealt with native treatment.  Although the laws sounded high-minded for the day, the reality was that they were paternalistic, unenforceable, and laughable when compared to New World reality.  The most famous document from those laws became known as the Requirement, which is partly reproduced at this footnote.[32]  The Requirement epitomized Spanish legalism.  Legalism is a sign of a degenerate system, where form prevails over substance.  Spanish legalism resembled that of the late Western Roman Empire, and foreshadowed today’s United States.  Las Casas wrote that he did not know whether to laugh or cry after reading the Requirement. 

The Requirement was usually read to people who did not understand Spanish.  Las Casas, who knew and admired Columbus, recorded that a typical Spanish strategy was to read the Requirement in the night jungle before attacking the villages.  Care was taken so the Requirement would not be read where the natives could hear it, so they would not awaken.[33]  It was sometimes read from ship to the distant shoreline.  For instance, during a 1518 entrada to the Yucatán, the Spaniards went ashore on the island of Cozumel.  The Spaniards’ reputation preceded them, and the local populace fled.  Undeterred, the Spaniards climbed the town pyramid.  They read the Requirement to the sky, and then posted it (unreadable to the natives) to the side of the pyramid.  Duty was fulfilled.[34] 

Las Casas’ efforts were inexhaustible regarding the natives’ welfare, and he is seen today as the most radical Spaniard, the one who came the closest to questioning the entire business of Spain in the New World.  He noted that African slaves seemed hardier than the native slaves, and in 1518 his efforts were successful.  The Spanish crown agreed to have African slaves replace the native slaves in the mines, and it might have rescued the last natives from extinction, but then the New World’s first smallpox epidemic broke out in the mines, killed off more than half of the remaining natives, and soon swept to the mainland as the Spaniards invaded the Aztec Empire, killing untold millions. 

After observing that African slaves fared little better than the natives, Las Casas then sought to ban the use of African slaves, and eventually advocated the position of just having Spanish trading ports in the New World, with priests going forth to try converting the natives.  That proposal was obviously not undertaken. 

Other than the short-lived gold strike on Española, the entire New World business was a disappointment for the Spanish Crown, as not much loot was coming in.  The Spanish invasion finally hit pay dirt when Hernan Cortés stole the entrada sent out by Cuba's governor, Velázquez, in 1519.  Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire with a few hundred men.  One historian accurately stated that it was a grand tale with everything in it but a hero.  The Aztecs were vastly more civilized than the Spaniards.  The center of their empire, Tenochtitlán, was quite possibly the world's most spectacular city, a sparkling, manmade island, sitting in the middle of a vast lake, in the midst of a majestic valley ringed with mountains and snow-capped volcanoes

The Valley of Mexico and surrounding region had the largest New World population, generally estimated at somewhere between 10 and 25 million people.  There is nothing the Spaniards did worth cheering about in Mexico, unless rape, plunder, bloodshed and genocide qualify.  The loot began flowing in from the Aztec plunder, Spain got excited, and European freebooters began flooding the New World.  The Spanish Crown continually enacted measures to reduce native abuse, but in practice, the effects were minimal.  The Crown’s primary preoccupation was the flow of loot into its coffers.[35]  The first Crown officials to the New World were treasury officials. 

In 1519, the year the Spaniards began invading the Aztec Empire, Ferdinand Magellan, who was Portuguese, tried finding a way across the Atlantic to the Indies, and sailed around South America.  Although he died fighting the natives in today’s Philippines, his crew made it back to Spain in 1522, with enough cloves picked up in the Spice Islands to make a profit on the world’s first circumnavigation, even when four of the five ships were lost, and only 18 of the original 250 men completed the journey. 

Pánfilo de Narváez, the rapist of Jamaica, led the Cuban governor’s army to Mesoamerica to try ending Cortés’ usurpation of the entrada, and Cortés easily won the engagement, bribing most of Narváez’ men with the promise of Aztec gold before the short-lived battle even took place.[36]  Narváez ended up losing an eye in the fracas.  In 1527, seeking an empire for himself, he led an entrada of hundreds of men into Florida, landing in Tampa Bay, outrunning the Spanish reputation in southern Florida.  The entrada was doomed by its brutality and incompetence, and it spread disease among the natives.  After eating their horses, some Spaniards resorted to cannibalism.  Only a few members of the Narváez entrada survived the ordeal.[37] 

Taking his cue from Cortés' success, the illiterate Pizarro conquered the Incas in South America the same way a decade later.  The main strategy was kidnapping the emperor, something the natives could not conceive of.  After capturing the Incan emperor during a surprise attack that killed thousands of his unarmed retainers, Pizarro's men ransomed the Incan sovereign for tons of gold and silver, and killed him after the ransom was delivered.  Pizarro’s own men eventually murdered him, as they vied for power.  The initial Incan and Aztec plunderings, although they created great excitement in Europe, were modest when compared to the silver mines discovered at Zacatecas (today’s Mexico) and Potosí (today’s Bolivia).  At Zacatecas, the labor was scarce in the desert, so the natives were treated relatively well.  At Potosí, the "personnel" practices used on Española were evident.  The natives died at rates that rivaled Auschwitz.[38]  The Potosí and other South American mines consumed several million native lives.  Along the streams and rivers that flowed from the Andes, natives dying under the Spanish lash worked the mines furiously.  In South America, the Spaniards could not lose their way when traveling between New Granada and Popayán, because the bones of dead men formed an unmistakable path.[39]  The vultures would circle each time a new mine was dug.  In Mexico, where the natives were treated somewhat better, the natives were still forced into mining and becoming beasts of burden for the Spaniards, dying in heaps in the mines and along the roads.  The Spanish labor practices, in a macabre continuation of what they did to the Taino in the Caribbean, may have been the greatest contributing factor to the native genocide [40]

The Egyptian, Roman and Spanish mining practices were not universal.  Professionals, not slaves, performed gold mining in India.  The natives of the Incan empire saw their mines as sacred places, as the gold for their sun-god religion came from there.  The Incan miners were all married, as the Incan system had a miner’s wife care for him while he mined, and neighboring provinces would work his fields while he mined.  Bachelors could not mine.  No Incan miner ever died from overwork while the Incas ran the mines, and they were exceedingly well fed.  Mining for the Incan Empire was not even considered hard work.[41] 

Cuzco, the seat of the Incan Empire and the center of Incan sun worship, may have contained the most amazing gold treasures the world has ever seen.  The Spanish mercenaries came upon an Incan Empire wracked by civil war, caused by another Spanish-introduced epidemic that carried off vast numbers of people, including the emperor.  When they sacked the capital city, Cuzco, they stripped it of its treasures and melted it all down.  While the Spanish plunderers were busily stripping and melting all the Incan art, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, and they wrote of seeing life-sized statues of people and animals, made of gold, and a garden full of plants and a herd of llamas (including their shepherd), all in gold and silver. 

Pedro de Cieza de León wrote what many consider the finest history of the Incan people before they were "discovered."  Cieza de León was a soldier of conquest, but became interested in those he was conquering.  His Incan history and conquest was written with the Spanish Inquisition and royal censors in mind, as his work had to pass their review before publication.  He was a soldier and never questioned the conquest's propriety.  Yet, even he wrote the following:

“Thus, in the days of the Incas there was very little arable land in these kingdoms that was not under cultivation, and all as thickly settled, as the first Spaniards who entered this realm can testify.  To be sure, it is a sad thing to reflect that these idol-worshipping Incas should have had such wisdom in knowing how to govern and preserve these far-flung lands, and that we, Christians, have destroyed so many kingdoms.  For wherever the Spaniards have passed, conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone, destroying everything in its path.”[42]

For the millions of natives already dead from mining gold and working on plantations, the horrors of the Potosí silver mines may have been greater.  Descending hundreds of feet into the earth for a week at a time, hauling hundred pound loads up ladders with only a candle to give light, most of the millions who went to the mines died there or along the way.  One observer wrote that a Potosí mineshaft was “a mouth of hell.”  The natives were forced to use mercury in refining the ore, which added to their misery and death rates.[43] 

Slightly preceding and concurrent with silver mining in South America, the region’s coca plantations were native death factories.  Life expectancy on the plantations was measured in months.  The Aztecs had an alcoholic drink called pulque, made from fermented cactus.  Drinking pulque was generally forbidden in Aztec society before Cortés "discovered" them.  After the conquest, getting drunk became the native pastime as they underwent the profound psychological dislocation of being conquered, enslaved and their culture actively attacked by the Spanish priests, in an attempt to eradicate their culture and turn them into "good Spaniards."  

As the Aztecs had restricted alcohol, consumption of the coca leaf was restricted in pre-conquest Peru.  After conquest however, the coca habit swept the natives, and chewing it became their pastime, undoubtedly to soften the psychological and physical hardships that the natives endured due to the “unrestrained greed of the Spaniards.”[44] 

Accompanying the natives' genocide were numerous accounts by outraged Spanish observers and attempts by the crown to limit the abuses, but it rarely slowed the carnage.  Estimates of the death toll of Incan natives after a century of Spanish presence range from a “low” of a third of the population to more than 95%.[45]  The natives in the Valley of Mexico were probably more than 90% decimated in the first century after conquest.  In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fifteen, sixteen and eighteen epidemics respectively swept through the Valley of Mexico.[46]

Cieza de León remarked that the Spaniards exaggerated human sacrifice and other unsavory aspects of the Incan culture to attempt to justify conquest and exploitation, in a timeless dynamic.  The Spaniards constantly inflicted surprise attacks on their “hosts,” from Xaraguá to Cholula to Tenochtitlán to the Incas.  Attacking sleeping villages was a Spanish tactic, with the most capable and virtuous conquistador practicing it, and it quickly became standard Spanish practice.  Greed was a vice that the Aztecs nurtured, but they were about the only people of the pre-Columbian New World who did, which was partly why the Spaniards appreciated their culture and incomparable markets.  Among most New World natives, greed was a terrible vice, and among many tribes, greed was not even a concept.  The idea of owning land was as strange to many native tribes as owning the sky would be. 

In South America, Central America or North America, when captured, natives were each loaded with about 75 pounds of loot, and then marched towards the coast.  They were chained together at the neck, forming long marching lines.  If a native faltered, collapsing under his load (women also met this fate), the Spaniards beheaded him as an easy way to remove him from his collar.  The natives in line had to step past or over the headless body.[47]  In one region where that practice flourished, the native word for “Christian” was the equivalent of “demon.”[48]

Spain had a steeply stratified society; 85% of the population was composed of landless peasants, while a few families owned more than half of Spain's land.  About the only career options for ambitious peasants were becoming priests or soldiers.  The Madonna/whore mentality was deeply ingrained in the Spanish men.  The Spanish also picked up some of the worst traits of the Moors, such as embracing machismo and the practice of having harems.  Sometimes even priests had them.  In colonial Paraguay, the average Spaniard had nearly twenty native concubines.[49] 

The Spanish soldiers who conquered the New World mainly came from the peasant class.  The New World's soldierly leaders were generally hidalgos, which was the lowest form of Spanish nobility, usually meaning that an ancestor did well in battle against the Moors.  From the moment they discovered the naked women of the Caribbean, they were like brutal kids in candy stores.  Raping native women was perhaps the favorite pastime of Spanish soldiers, from 1492 until the 1800s, which is where the huge mestizo class of Latin America came from.  Their role models were the grandees of Spain, who were rich landowners that did not take off their hats in the king's presence.  The merchant and skilled classes of Spain were significantly composed of Jews and Moors, but they were run out of the country, which helped set the stage for Spain's decline in comparison to its European rivals. 

When Ponce de León “discovered” Florida in 1513, the natives violently resisted the Spanish intrusion, for the first hostile welcome recorded in the New World.[50]  The Spanish then began raiding the coastline.  In 1521, the same year that Ponce de León died battling Florida’s natives as he again invaded, two Spanish ships visited the Bahamas, where Columbus first made landfall in the New World.  The Bahamas had long since been depopulated by the Spanish slave trade.  Not finding anybody to enslave, they then sailed along the coastline and landed in present-day South Carolina.  They outran the Spanish reputation and the natives welcomed them.  The Spanish gave food and other gifts to the great numbers of natives who greeted them.  The Spaniards invited them onto their boats for further festivities.  The number who came aboard is estimated at between 60 and 130.  When the natives were safely aboard, the Spaniards set sail for Española.  One ship was lost at sea, while the other delivered its human cargo to Santo Domingo.  Those natives had to fend for themselves, and were reduced to scavenging garbage and eating carrion.  In 1526, only one of those captured natives still lived.[51] 

One young captive came under the control of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, an Españolan plantation owner who sponsored that slaving expedition and others, bringing several boatloads of hapless North American natives to Española.  Ayllón became quite attached to the boy and practically adopted him.  The boy was named Francisco Chicora.  He quickly learned Spanish, was baptized, and was eventually presented at the Spanish Court.  Chicora spun grand tales of his homeland, and Peter Martyr, who was uncharacteristically taken in by the boy’s fantastic stories (Oviedo was skeptical of the boy’s tales), eagerly wrote them up.  Bedazzled with Chicora’s stories, Ayllón planned to colonize Chicora’s homeland, and an expedition sailed in 1526, with six ships and 500 men (and even some women).  Ayllón had plans to establish a peaceful colony.  Even Montesinos was involved.  It was the first attempt at gentle New World settlement by the Spanish. 

The Spanish treated Chicora as well as any Native American ever was, but his first act upon coming home was fleeing back to his people, abandoning his benefactors.  As the Jamestown Englishmen later voted with their feet, so did the natives who were treated to the best that Europe had to offer.  As early as Columbus’ second voyage, as he “rescued” natives, they almost always fled from their “benefactors” at the first opportunity.  Ayllón did worse than misjudge Chicora’s motivation; the Spaniards ran their flagship aground as they made landfall, losing the greater part of their food and equipment.  Instead of the fantastic paradise that Chicora had painted, the Spaniards found themselves shipwrecked in swampland, and all natives fled inland.  Ayllón sailed southward with the remaining ships, and found more suitable lands near present-day Savannah, Georgia.  Ayllón soon died, Spaniards began killing one another and the colony fell apart.  Some Spaniards strayed into native villages, quickly wore out their welcome and were killed.  Only about 150 bedraggled Spaniards made their way back to Española.[52] 

The failed colony left a lasting impact, however.  Hernando de Soto had perhaps the most improbable career of any Conquistador.  He is the only Spaniard to have been prominently involved in the first plunderings of Central America, South America and North America.  Born in about 1500, he got an early start in raping Central America as one of Balboa’s men, perhaps as early as 1514.  Balboa was about the most capable and virtuous of all the Conquistadors, but he still wantonly killed natives and fed them to his dogs, had gold fever and played a large part in the complete depopulation of Central America, as millions died.[53] 

Balboa was beheaded in a power play by his father-in-law, in another example of how the most dangerous New World enemies of the Spanish were often the Spanish.[54]  After getting rich in Central America, Soto became an investor/participant in the 1532 entrada to the Incan Empire, and his share of that pillage made him fabulously wealthy.[55]  For those in greed’s thrall, there is no such thing as “enough.”  Not satisfied with his vast, bloody fortune, Soto mounted an invasion of North America in 1539, after scouring Cuba for men and supplies. 

Although Ayllón tried a gentle colonization, and Coronado would invade what is today the Southwestern United States in 1540 pursing gentle principles (although practice and theory were at odds once again), Soto’s expedition was openly predatory, seeking another gold-plated civilization to rob.  Even when Soto arrived, one region he visited was almost completely depopulated.  The woman who presided over the remnants of her empire treated Soto’s men to warehouses full of goods (before Soto kidnapped her, in the standard Spanish “exploration” style).  Those lands were upriver from the failed Ayllón colony, which probably unleashed the epidemic that depopulated the region, if it was not from other European intruders.[56] 

The Soto expedition’s chroniclers described a densely populated southeastern North America.  Entire civilizations were destroyed by Soto’s entrada, and regions were devastated by its disease-ridden aftermath, perhaps spread by the pigs he brought along. 

In 1559, the Tristán de Luna entrada marauded through the thickly populated lands that Soto plundered a generation earlier, and expected to prey upon the same natives.  Starvation was the Luna expedition’s constant companion, as they trudged through the ruins of depopulated regions.  When the Frenchman La Salle traveled the Mississippi River about 140 years after Soto, in 1682, he was in for a surprise.  Where there were about fifty settlements along the Mississippi when Soto came, there were perhaps ten when La Salle passed through, and some of those were due to recent native immigrants.[57]  La Salle thought there must have been a mistake in the chronicles and maps of Soto’s entrada, because the lands he visited were wilderness.  In 1828, about 140 years after La Salle passed through, a French biologist could locate only four nations of the fifty-two that the La Salle expedition recorded in today’s Texas.[58] 

In 1542, the year that Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi River, Las Casas’ efforts persuaded Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V to sign laws repealing native slavery, but once more, theory and practice resided an ocean apart.  In 1550-1551, Las Casas engaged in a famous debate regarding the humanity of Native Americans.  Las Casas argued for the essential humanity of Native Americans and all people, while his opponent, another priest, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, refurbished Aristotle’s philosophy and argued that the Native Americans were natural slaves, simple beasts of burden.  In practice, Sepúlveda’s argument prevailed, while the Crown gave an ambiguous answer to their arguments a decade later. 

In 1552, Las Casas decided to publish his horrifying A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which he originally presented to the Spanish court in 1542.  He published it without the Inquisition’s permission, and it became his best-known work and Europe’s second most popular book, behind the Bible.  Las Casas died in 1566, and his greatest work, his history of the Indies, sat in the Vatican archives for more than three centuries, to finally be published in 1875.  Pedro de Cieza de León’s history of pre-conquest Incan society met the same fate, not being published for three centuries.  The reason for that treatment was that Las Casas’ Short Account became a runaway bestseller, and the resultant “Black Legend” became used for propaganda purposes by Spain’s imperial rivals, the English in particular.  Burying the work of Las Casas, Cieza de León and others became a form of damage control for Spain and the Church, which was battling the Protestant Reformation. 

Lack of readily plunderable gold and silver spared the North American natives from immediate, violent conquest.  Coronado and Soto invaded North America, looking for the El Dorado, but none was discovered.  Nevertheless, the diseases they brought along devastated the North American natives, destroying many tribes and civilizations before they even saw white men.   

Those were the early days of European colonialism, celebrated in the United States with Columbus Day.  The Spaniards killed off nearly all the Greater Antilles' millions of natives in one generation, so Caribbean colonialism is not a good example to chart European colonialism's development.  The conquest of the Aztecs and Mesoamerica, however, is the earliest example of European colonialism in the Columbian phase. 

The Valley of Mexico was the center of Mesoamerican civilization and the New World's most densely populated region, crowned by its most spectacular city, Tenochtitlán.  The legalistic Spanish enacted many laws that exploited the natives, and the laws that supposedly protected them were largely ignored.  The misery seen today in Mexico was partly created by a constellation of such laws and their enforcement. 

A series of institutions came and went in colonial Mexico.  First there was encomienda, then repartimiento, and finally there was the hacienda (the rancho was a related institution).  Encomienda and repartimiento were systems that commandeered the native labor.[59]  As epidemics and Spanish rule decimated the native population, farms and villages were abandoned, so the Spanish took the land.  A spectrum of tactics existed for obtaining the native land "legally."  Often natives "sold" the land, but it was rarely, if ever, a fair deal.  Transactions were usually performed under duress or fraud.[60]  Other times it was given to the petitioning Spanish directly.  They ended up owning the land, and recreating the great ranches that dominated Spain.  By 1600, most of the Valley of Mexico's arable land was in the hands of Spaniards.[61]  Lower-class Spanish immigrants became lords in a New World.  The hacienda system evolved from that seized land. 

The hacienda system was the first one without forced labor, but it was not forced because it did not have to be.  By the time the hacienda system appeared, the natives had been reduced to such abject poverty, as the white lords owned everything, that working for a hacienda could provide badly needed food and shelter.  Forced labor institutions still existed, however.  In the most notorious, the obraje system, which was a prison labor camp, the workers spent their entire lives locked up, producing textiles and other goods.  One of the most dreaded forced labor systems was work on the aqueduct that was being built and maintained to slowly drain the Valley of Mexico's lakes, known as the Desagüe. 

Gold, silver, mercury and salt were royal monopolies in Spain's New World territories.  Commercial monopolies, granted by the Crown, greatly inflated the cost of European goods in the New World.  The net profit margin on goods shipped to the New World was 50%, according to one qualified observer.[62]  The moneylenders who financed New World expeditions received interest rates from 50% to 90%, partly because of the great risk of failure by shipwreck or piracy.[63]  Also, the Crown controlled or banned certain industries so they could not compete with those in Spain.

Gold and silver were by far the must lucrative Spanish exports from the New World.  Also exported were hides, dyes and sugar, although they aggregated less than 10% of the value of gold and silver during the 1560's.  The traffic of goods had virtually no net beneficial effect for Europe, while the natives died off by the tens of millions.  The substantial benefits to Europe and the world from Native Americans were the introduction of native foods such as corn and potatoes, the democratic ideals of the Iroquois and many other benefits, but virtually none of that had happened by 1600.[64] 

Corn had been the backbone of the native economy, where it was generally raised in communal plots.  That changed too, and eventually haciendas raised most of the corn (and wheat cultivation began to dominate in some areas).  The natives no longer had control over the food they ate.  Capitalistic practices made their appearance, and hacendados speculated on prices by hoarding, undercutting native producers with bulk transactions and manipulating the markets with their control of supply.[65]  Those practices led to native hunger.

The Catholic Church was a major player in New Spain's transformation.  Church-owned monasteries, haciendas, obrajes and other institutions dotted the landscape.  Natives were required to give tribute to the church, and many priests became rich.  For every friar who sincerely believed in his holy mission, others kept concubines, solicited women during confessionals, drank heavily, fed people to their dogs and so on.  As with the monastic wineries in Europe, New Spain's versions often made pulque, although many priests tried stamping out drunkenness.  The Jesuit hacienda of San Xavier was devoted almost exclusively to making pulque (they sold more than six million pounds of it in 1770), and had one of the highest incomes of any hacienda.[66]

Another economic effect of European hegemony was the introduction of guilds.  They were anti-competitive institutions, and the natives were often excluded from them.  Blacksmiths and veterinarians, with their relationship to elite European horsemanship, made it clear that natives were not allowed in their professions.  All apprentices were to be "Spaniards, pure and without stain, as demonstrated through their baptismal records, for ours is a noble profession."[67]

Laws enacted in colonial Mexico, called New Spain in those days, were explicitly racist and designed to oppress the natives.  Three races - European, African and Indian – met in the New World.  The Spanish developed sixteen categories of interracial distinction in eighteenth-century New Spain.[68]  Of the 200,000 “Spaniards” in New Spain by 1570, it is estimated that two-thirds were of Jewish or Moorish descent, to cloud the racial picture further.[69]  Conquering Spaniards marauded from town to town, seizing the best looking women for their concubines and creating the huge mestizo class of Mexico. 

Erstwhile Cortés allies Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco found themselves much worse off with the Spanish overlords than the hated Mexica, and they were the natives who got the “good deal” from the Spanish.  They would not have believed it, but the days when the Mexica ruled were the “good old days.”  Helping Cortés conquer Tenochtitlán slit their own throats in the end.

By 1560, forty years after they performed their "heroic" service, the tribute extracted from the Huexotzincos by the Spanish was seven times what the Mexica had obtained from them.  The deal Cortés made with the Tlaxcalans was that they would never have to pay tribute at all.[70]  The Tlaxcalans eventually fared much the same. 

Europeans honored their agreements when they were convenient or served their interests, but when an agreement obstructed European desires, it was not worth the paper it was printed on.  Europeans would always find a legal rationale, no matter how strained, to justify their behavior.  They backed up their legalistic arguments with deadly violence. 

Occasionally the most abusive Spaniards would find themselves being imprisoned for their crimes against the natives, but that treatment was reserved for either the most evil of the lot or those with political enemies.[71]  The crown-sponsored residencias and audiencias were tribunals that investigated the conduct of New World officials such as Cortés.  The tribunals recorded many allegations and evidence of misdeeds, information that historians use today.  While such investigations may seem to reflect the Spaniards' “just” nature, and indeed “justice” seemed to be served at times, the residencias were mainly used to trim the power of those posing the greatest threats to Crown authority.[72] 

Fraud, corruption and exploitation were the facts of life in colonial Mexico, and the natives always bore the brunt of it.[73]  The legal system was rigged to favor the Spaniards.  One of the few honest lawyers in New Spain suggested a method to reduce the fraud and corruption: keep Spanish lawyers out of the natives’ business.[74] 

European cultural practices could be found in many facets of the colonial experience.  Although Montezuma had a hunting island, the aristocratic "hunts" of Europe made their appearance, using thousands of natives to flush the animals out to be slaughtered at leisure by Spaniards trying to act like European lords.[75]

Before the middle of the seventeenth century, the native population in Mexico bottomed out at probably less than ten percent of the pre-conquest population.[76]  After that, it began a slow recovery.  After studying what the Spanish did to the Caribbean and periphery, what they did to the Aztecs and Mesoamerica, what they did to the Incas and South America, their “explorations” into North America, what the Portuguese did to Brazil, and after looking at the death rates in the mines, plantations and periphery, I estimate that between fifteen and twenty million natives died as a direct result of the violence and greed of the Spanish and Portuguese during the 1500s.  Some can argue for as few as ten million (while others argue that there were not ten million natives in the whole hemisphere), and others can argue for as many as thirty million.  European diseases killed off another fifty million natives or so in the 1500s, and the Spanish and Portuguese labor practices probably contributed substantially to those fifty million deaths.  It is within the range of modern estimates to say that the New World’s human population declined by 90% during the first century of the European invasion, or by about 70 million people.  It is an immense tally, with nothing in world history to compare it to. 

Spaniards remade the New World's ecological systems.  Imported cattle, sheep, pigs, horses and jackasses dominated the landscape.  Chickens became a barnyard staple.  Sugar, bananas, and citrus fruits were introduced and flourished.[77]  In many places, the landscape was altered beyond recognition.[78]  Spain was a land of shepherds and cattle ranchers, and many farmers in Spain were put out of business as the rich, herd-owning, land-owning aristocracy obtained the legal rights for their livestock to overrun the land.[79]  Spain's great herds helped make it such an arid land.[80]  South of the great bison herds of North America, there were no large roaming herds of grazing animals.  Huge tracts of farmland were destroyed throughout the New World by those imported European grazers, with areas previously cultivated or unused quickly destroyed, leaving a desert-like environment behind.  In Spain, the sheep dominated.  In New Spain, the cattle dominated.  Deforestation and mass grazing altered the landscape immensely.[81]  In a replication of what happened to the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic islands, the Spaniards noted that when they cut down the forests for their lifestyles, the streams dried up and eventually there was less rainfall.[82]  The desert-like environment of Mexico is not completely natural, but is somewhat the result of Spanish depredations.[83]  Not only was 90% of the human population exterminated, the first century of the Spanish invasion was also the greatest ecological catastrophe for native plants and animals in history, rivaled, and in ways exceeded, by what the English and Americans would later do to North America.   

Native Mesoamericans were not always great environmentalists.  The collapse of the Mayan “classic” phase before 1000 AD, the fall of Teotihuacan and other events in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were probably related to an overtaxed environment.  The Europeans, however, initiated what is called “The Rape of the World.”[84]  Their increasing technological prowess was largely directed at developing more effective methods of exploitation and killing each other.   

There was a major effect of the Spanish gold rush on Europe: the money revolution.[85]  Before Europe’s money revolution, land was the primary basis of wealth.  Money became the primary symbol of wealth during the Spanish gold rush, with Europe’s money supply tripling during the first fifty years of conquest.  By 1800, the money supply in places such as France and Italy increased by about twenty-fold.  Because gold and silver were the basis of money in the Old World, it heralded Europe’s ascent relative to its rivals, such as the Ottoman Empire.  The flooding of Europe by New World gold and silver, although it made no European society wealthier, crippled the Ottoman Empire’s monetary system.  Ottoman coins fell to half their value in the first century of the New World’s plunder, and the Ottoman Empire never regained its former prominence. 

With the Spanish gold rush, greed became a mainstay of the European mind.  While gold lust inflamed the Spanish mind, England and France were plundering Spanish ships coming back to the New World, laden with gold and silver.  The pirate Francis Drake became England’s richest private citizen and was knighted for his surprise pillage of Spain’s Pacific ports.

Europe’s money revolution resulted from tens of millions of Native American deaths, and brought no real wealth to Europe.  What the Spanish gold rush did, however, was change how Europeans viewed money and wealth.  In his classic study, Tzvetan Todorov showed how contemporary Spanish chroniclers chalked up the motivation of Spaniards in the New World to sheer greed.  It was a new phenomenon.  Todorov wrote:

“Certainly the desire for riches is nothing new, the passion for gold has nothing specifically modern about it.  What is new is the subordination of all values to this one.  The conquistador has not ceased to aspire to aristocratic values, to titles of nobility, to honors, and to esteem; but it has become quite clear to him that everything can be obtained by money, that money is not only the universal equivalent of all material values, but also the possibility of acquiring all spiritual values.  It is certainly advantageous, in Montezuma’s Mexico as in preconquest Spain, to be rich; but one cannot purchase status, or in any case not directly.  This homogenization of values by money is a new phenomenon and it heralds the modern mentality, egalitarian and economic.”[86] 

Adam Smith noted in his Wealth of Nations that gold mining was perhaps the most counterproductive economic activity that any nation could engage in.  The only “wealth” that gold and silver had was what people bestowed on it.  It was only valuable because it was scarce and difficult to produce, and so became a form of currency.  Obtaining more of it would not grow one more crop, manufacture one more tool, or make society any wealthier, unless luxury goods such as gold plating and silverware counted.  In fact, such activities made society less wealthy, because so much activity was devoted to such a worthless pursuit.  Expendable natives were the only way that Spain’s 16th century gold rush could take place.  Gold rushes are merely counterfeiting operations, in essence stealing from one’s neighbor. 

The grim joke was on Spain in the end.  In 1557, a mere generation after the huge Incan haul began hitting Spain’s shores, the Spanish Crown went bankrupt.  Although some Spanish scholars cautioned the Crown that simply importing shiploads of gold and silver would not improve Spain’s economy, if nothing were done to develop the real economy, their advice was ignored.  By about 1580, Castile no longer raised enough food to feed its people, and by the 1590s, its textile industry was in steep decline.  Price levels rose in Spain by 500% by 1600, the Spanish Armada was destroyed in battle with England in 1588, bubonic plague swept through Spain beginning in 1596, killing off nearly 10% of its population, and Spain was arguably worse off in 1600 than in 1500, for one of history’s greatest ironies.  The 1500s had seen Spain rise to the height of European power, to decline into a backwater, imperial has-been, with its empire eventually seized by its rivals, or its imperial domains revolting and becoming independent.  Gold, weapons and rapacity generate no real wealth, and Spain’s experience is instructive. 

Among the most famous and best works on the early Spanish experience in the New World is Carl Sauer’s The Early Spanish Main, and the book’s cover sums up the character of those early days, stating that the book was,

“not so much a record of European villainy as of human stupidity.  Columbus’ lack of understanding not merely of where he was but of the possible consequences of his being there established a pattern of conquest and settlement that was repeated all over Spanish America.”  

The book’s foreword finishes with a quote from Sauer:

“the ‘frontier’ attitude has the recklessness of an optimism that has become habitual, but is residual from the brave days when north-European freebooters overran the world and put it under tribute.  We have not yet learned the difference between yield and loot.”[87]

Long ago, Sauer saw the nature of the West’s “progress”:

“We have accustomed ourselves to think of ever expanding productive capacity, of ever fresh spaces of the world to be filled with people, of ever new discoveries of kinds and sources of raw materials, of continuous technical progress operating indefinitely to solve problems of supply.  We have lived so long in what we have regarded as an expanding world, that we reject in our contemporary theories of economics and of population the realities that contradict such views.  Yet our modern expansion has been effected in large measure at the cost of an actual and permanent impoverishment of the world.”[88]

As David Stannard, Ward Churchill and others have competently made the case, although Spain’s imperial rivals used the Black Legend for propaganda purposes, it did not make the so-called “legend” less real, and Spain’s European rivals were no better in their attitude toward the natives they encountered, especially the English.[89]  About the only reason the Spanish depredations racked up the greatest death toll was that they had a “virgin” hemisphere to rape, having it nearly to themselves, for about a century.[90] 

Study of the early Spanish experience in the New World identifies several dynamics that have been central to the West’s experience ever since: greed, violence, sexism, nationalism and proselytizing.  Not that any of them were necessarily new phenomena, but they were all indulged on a level that had largely not been seen before.  On a vast scale, women were raped, men were worked to death and children were used as dog food.  Spanish nationalism was a new phenomenon, and Christian proselytizing hit the mother lode, just as the Church began losing its power.  Christian ideology eventually gave way to secular religions, such as materialism, nationalism and capitalism.  

The economic ideology known as mercantilism took root during those early colonial days.  The basic idea was importing cheap raw materials from the subjected colonial peoples, and exporting one’s way to prosperity.  The Spanish were the first to practice it, in relatively primitive fashion, as they exploited Mesoamerica.  Spain's plunder of Mexico is the predecessor to the more refined exploitation that the British would later inflict on India.  Spain dominated the first century of Columbian-era colonialism, but they were not alone on stage. 

The Portuguese experience was different.  Each European power had distinctly different methods by which they pursued their colonial enterprises.  While Spain had little trust in its freebooters, as they always tried carving out New World empires for themselves, and endless tribunals were held to try trimming their ambition, the Portuguese Crown did not continually hound its imperial agents, but maybe it should have.  It is estimated that in those early days, only about a quarter of the revenues that should have made it into Portugal’s royal coffers ever got there, the rest being skimmed off along the way by the corruption in Portugal’s nascent imperial system.  The lavish court and inefficiency of Portugal’s imperial system left the Crown continually strapped for cash. 

Lisbon became the heart of Europe’s early imperial efforts.  Portugal’s African slaves became domestic servants in Lisbon.  By 1550, Lisbon had about 100,000 people in it, nearly 10,000 of them Africans.  The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the global romping grounds between Spain and Portugal.  The early Portuguese success was with its trade route to Asia.  The Portuguese originally viewed Africa as an obstacle to getting at Asia, although the slaves and gold from Africa came in handy.  After Lisbon was satisfied with its number of African slaves, Portugal began using them on the sugar plantations on its Atlantic islands.  The first instance of Portuguese slaving in the New World was when the Corte Real brothers seized more than a hundred gentle Beothuk Indians from the shores of Newfoundland in 1501, and delivered their cargo to Portugal.[91]  Although the king was pleased, those were the only boatloads of slaves that Portugal obtained from that region.  

The discovery, conquest, sack and destruction of the Aztec Empire brought great excitement to Europe.  The Spanish gold rush began in earnest with that event.  Until then, Europeans had largely encountered “primitive” natives in the New World, but the Aztecs were another matter.  Their capital city was arguably the world’s most spectacular, its markets more breathtaking than anything the Spanish invaders had ever seen.  After the Aztec discovery and sack, endless boatloads of European freebooters set sail for the New World, seeking fame, riches, and there was a virtually unlimited supply of native women to rape.  The Treaty of Tordesillas unwittingly gave Portugal a chunk of South America as their domain of conquest, but Portugal was far too busy mining the “Golden Goa” route for the spice trade to devote any resources to the New World.  French ships began landing in Brazil in 1504, and they had no respect for Portugal’s theoretical claims to it.  French pirates harried the returning Spanish ships as early as 1504, seized a huge Aztec plunder shipment in 1523, and began raiding Spain’s Caribbean ports in the 1530s.  Silver was relatively expensive in those days, and had been getting more expensive for centuries, as gold was the primary preoccupation of mercenaries and miners.  In China there was a particular desire for silver, and it was better to pay them in silver for their goods than gold.  Portugal began seeking silver. 

In 1530, Portugal’s King John III sought to establish a significant presence in Brazil, and sent an expedition to scout it.  By that time, South American coastal natives were well acquainted with European intentions and fought off European settlement attempts.  The 1530 expedition was successful, and captured some French ships that traded in brazilwood.  In 1532, the Spaniards discovered, conquered and sacked the Incan Empire, including its capital city of Cuzco, in what may have been history’s most lucrative sack of a capital city.  In 1534, Portugal began granting “captaincies” in Brazil to ambitious minor nobles.  The captaincies were authorizations to invade and conquer Brazil.  The discovery and sack of the Incan Empire was as good as it would get for Europe’s pillagers, but it did not keep them from dreaming of finding more gold-plated empires in the New World’s vastness.  That insatiable lust drove Coronado into Pueblo land and Soto into southeast North America.  The Portuguese captains eagerly invaded the Amazon basin, but to their great disappointment found no cities gilt in gold and silver.  They also did not find vast settlements of sedentary natives, as the Spanish had done, although, as with the rest of the New World, increasing research keeps revising the estimate upward of pre-Columbian Amazonia’s population.  In 1992, the most prominent scholarly estimate put it at nearly six million.[92]

The Portuguese presence, as with all European invaders, meant native genocide, but the Portuguese colonial experience was gentler than Spain’s.  Probably mainly due to Portugal’s past, with its many races and ethnic groups living together, due to its many invasions and forced migrations over the millennia, the Portuguese colonial experience was the least racist in character of the European powers.  Consequently, Portugal had a more harmonious racial mixing with those it conquered and traded with, which is reflected in Brazil’s relative multi-ethnic harmony today. 

Untold numbers of Europeans died in the jungles, mountains and deserts of the New World, seeking El Dorados, Seven Cities of Cibolas and other mythical lands that dripped with riches.  Portuguese enthusiasm for overrunning their chunk of South America quickly waned, and they tried reproducing the sugar plantation culture of its Atlantic island colonies, and instead of dumping its criminals on the Atlantic island of São Tomé, it began dumping them in Brazil in 1535.  By 1545, the plantations of Brazil sent about fifty shiploads of sugar to Europe each year.  In theory and practice, the early Portuguese experience in Brazil was similar to Spain’s in the Greater Antilles.  Lip service was given to converting the natives to Christianity, and zealous missionaries (in Portugal’s instance it was the Jesuits, beginning in 1549) did their best to convert the natives, but the outcome was that the natives were enslaved as they were “christianized” and worked to death.  Native Americans always died off quickly when subject to the rigors of plantation and mine slavery.  The enslavers also introduced epidemic disease that carried off incredible numbers of natives, and the evil triplet of starvation, overwork and disease quickly eradicated the native population. 

Fortunately for the Portuguese, they had already initiated the world’s greatest era of slavery, and bringing in African slaves to replace the extinguished natives was a natural idea, which began in Brazil around 1550.  In 1559 came royal approval for Portuguese slavers to sell their wares in Brazil.  The Portuguese had been officially selling African slaves to the Spanish in the New World since 1510, when Lisbon authorized the sale of 250.  In 1550, there were only about 15,000 African slaves registered in the New World.[93]  As the native population became extinct, Caribbean plantation work became an expensive proposition.  African slaves were far more expensive than Native American slaves, and French pirates began plying the Caribbean waters in the 1530s as the plunder of mainland empires and mining activity took off.  Spain stopped supporting the Caribbean plantation economy, and the Caribbean became little more than a port of entry to the lucrative mainland.  Piracy of Spain’s shipments to Europe began in earnest, and in 1565 the fort at St. Augustine was built to protect the plunder route, which became the first permanent European settlement in North America. 

Because the Spanish were preoccupied with the gold and silver business, Portugal got into the plantation business, growing sugar in Brazil.  In 1570, there were only about 3000 African slaves in Brazil, and as the sugar economy took off, so did the imports.  In 1600, there were about 15,000 African slaves in Brazil.  By 1650, another 200,000 were brought there. 

Imperial Jockeying

While the Spanish and Portuguese were having their way in the New World, Renaissance Europe was in tumult.  Similar to how the Crusades turned out, the invention and use of the printing press, in about 1450, did not turn out as the Church had hoped.  With the advent of the printed word, the Bible was Europe’s biggest bestseller, and the Church hoped to expand its religious hegemony through literacy.  It backfired.  By 1500, literacy was growing in England’s incipient middle class, and was becoming more common in Europe.  During the 1400s, student enrollment in German universities quadrupled, and it was representative of Europe as a whole.  Europe was slowly becoming educated.  When Columbus made his way back to Spain in 1493, Europeans began reading of new lands.  While Columbus called himself the “Christ-bearer,” there were about zero conversions to Christianity among the quickly disappearing Caribbean natives.  When Cortés and his mercenaries conquered the Aztecs, however, the Church hit the big time in Christian recruitment.  In 1524, twelve Christian missionaries came to Mesoamerica to convert the natives who survived the conquest.  The mass conversion of Mesoamerica began.  There were baptisms of thousands of natives at a time.  Although the conversions were rather compulsory, and burning Aztec books was part of the Christianizing process, with the Inquisition following closely behind the converting missionaries, the Catholic Church never before had such immediate and massive success in recruiting the sheep to its flock.  However, just as the Catholic Church was enjoying its greatest recruitment success, its European downfall was beginning. 

Ever since the fall of Rome and the invasion of Germanic tribes, Europe was the scene of constantly shifting royal alliances and musical crowns.  In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his most famous work, The Prince, and it, perhaps more than any other work, would describe European political reality for the next five centuries.  Political “realists” of the 20^th century saw his work as seminal.   

King Charles of Spain, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, bribed his way into becoming Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and Europe’s most powerful man, in 1519.  His reign marked the peak of Hapsburg power.  It also began falling apart under his rule.  In 1517, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, and at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Charles V outlawed him.  The Protestant Reformation thus began.

Charles V and England’s Henry VIII allied against France, and Charles’ armies were victorious against France in 1525, and they battled in Italy.  Charles V’s armies continued marching and captured the Pope in 1527.  Charles V’s brother Ferdinand ruled in Austria, but in 1526 the Ottoman armies began invading from the Balkans, and in 1529 they laid siege to Vienna.  The continual wars, with Charles V’s European neighbors and the Turks, led to a fragmenting empire, and suppressing the Reformation was proving hopeless, 

In 1555, Charles handed the Netherlands over to his son Phillip II, who was Spanish by birth.  The next year, Charles handed over his Holy Roman Emperor crown to his brother, and in 1557 the Spanish Crown went bankrupt, the first of several bankruptcies that would chart Spain’s decline as an imperial power.[94]  Charles retired to a monastery in 1558, his once mighty empire feeling the strain, and he died that same year. 

Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, published in 1552, quickly became a runaway bestseller, especially in Protestant Northern Europe.  That began the “Black Legend,” and in 1559 the Church began publishing its infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books that lasted until the 1960s. 

The Catholic Inquisition had its roots in the Church’s efforts to exterminate the Cathars in the 1200s, but the Spanish Inquisition was more of a Spanish nationalistic institution than a Roman Catholic one.  King Philip II had little liking for the Netherlands, and his solution to the Protestant Reformation there was to send the Spanish Inquisition.  When the Spanish Inquisition was only persecuting Moors and Jews, few in Europe really cared, but when Phillip sent his inquisitors to the Netherlands, and the hot tongs began being used on white Christians, that was going too far, and then “The Inquisition” came into being in Protestant polemics.[95]  The Wars of Religion began in France in 1562, lasting until 1598, and a new era of inter-Christian warfare began in Europe.  In 1568, the Dutch revolted against Spain’s oppressive rule.  The Netherlands declared its independence in 1581, becoming Europe’s first republic, but the war with Spain lasted nearly continually for eighty years, until the Thirty Years’ War ended. 

Portugal was largely untouched by the furor that erupted in Europe.  Its own Inquisition kept the populace in line and the Reformation did not touch it.  However, it also overextended itself imperially.  Its tenuous trade route was not the source of its overextension, ironically.  Portugal’s big mistake was trying to extend itself in Africa, near home.  In 1557, King Sebastião came to the Portuguese throne at age three.  At age fourteen, he began running his empire.  He was virtually uneducated and had two passions, in the great European tradition: religion and warfare.  In 1578, with Church assistance, he mounted an expedition to Africa.  He had few plans, other than a glorious invasion against the infidel Moors.  With an army of about 25,000 people, which included several thousand mercenaries and much of Portugal’s nobility, Sebastião sallied forth.  For most of the campaign he amused himself with hunting, and he felt that the Moors would flee at the sight of his army.  In a ferocious battle in which 40,000 Moors fought, the Portuguese army was annihilated.  Sebastião died heirless in Africa, and in 1580, Spain’s King Phillip II simply annexed Portugal.  A Sebastião cult quickly took root in Portugal’s peasantry, which fantasized that Sebastião had not really died in Africa, and would return to lead Portugal back to greatness, the first Sebastião pretender appearing in 1584.  The cult persisted while Portugal was under Spanish rule. 

Even though Phillip II was careful to not extend Spain’s rule over Portugal too oppressively, and left Portugal’s imperial concessions alone, Portugal’s lot had now been involuntarily thrown in with Spain’s.  Spain’s enemies were now Portugal’s, including the Dutch, who were suddenly cut off from Lisbon’s trade.  By being joined at the hip with Spain, Portugal’s imperial fortunes were doomed when the Spanish Armada was destroyed in 1588.  While there would be more wars fought with the European powers, the 1588 disaster marked the end of Spain’s imperial dominance in Europe, further emphasizing the bankruptcies the Crown experienced during those years, and other factors of Spain’s decline. 

By 1600, the Netherlands had cleared all Spanish troops from its lands, and began sailing to Asia to get spices.  That same year, England established its East India Company, and it also sought Asian trade.  The Dutch formed their East India Company in 1602.  The Dutch and English soon became the two great mercantile empires.  Their nations were better suited to commerce than Spain and Portugal.  England and the Netherlands had rising middle classes and their merchants had not suffered the devastating blows that Spain and Portugal’s had.  The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions oppressed Jews and Moors, who comprised a large share of their educated and merchant classes.  Portugal, and to a greater extent Spain, had more primitive economies than England and the Netherlands.  Throughout the 16^th century, Spain exported raw materials such as wool, hides and the gold and silver it was plundering from the New World.  England and the Netherlands had a much stronger craft and proto-industrial base, being large exporters of manufactured goods. 

The Dutch revolt was part of a series of religious conflicts that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which began in 1618.  Until the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, the Thirty Years’ War was Europe’s most devastating war.  It killed about four million people and left Germany in ruins, where most of the fighting took place.  While Europeans had long ago abandoned any notion of “honorable” war, winning being the only thing that mattered, and the more ruthless the better, the Thirty Years’ War took it to a new level, and the concept of “total war” came into being.  As Europeans honed their craft in the Reconquest, Crusades, Hundred Years’ War and countless other conflicts, they refined the art of violence.  While non-European peoples across the world generally regarded organized violence more as a sport or religious experience, in Europe it became a science, which was mainly why Europe conquered the world.  Nobody could match European viciousness and their winning-at-all-costs style of warfare, something the Thirty Years’ War and related conflicts further ingrained.  France had been harrying Spain since the early 1500s, while England was busy subduing its Celtic periphery.  By 1600, the Dutch and English began seizing Spain and Portugal’s imperial assets. 

The new Dutch republic made Spain and Portugal pay for its oppression.  The Dutch made their first attack on Bahia, the capital of Portuguese Brazil, in 1604, as the English had also done in 1587.  In 1609, a truce was signed between Spain and the Netherlands, which gave the Dutch trading rights with peoples outside of Europe.  Most particularly, that meant the Asian trade route, which the Dutch immediately undertook to seize.  Arrogant Portuguese proselytizing had caused great animosity among many of the peoples along its trade route, and the Dutch were mainly interested in commerce, so were more welcome than the Portuguese. 

In 1619 the Dutch founded what became Jakarta, which became the new center of the spice trade.  In 1621, the Dutch incorporated its West India Company, and in 1623 it mounted an expedition that seized Bahia.  By that time, its spice route had largely been lost to the English and Dutch, so Portugal devoted its effort toward Brazil and reconquered Bahia the next year.  In 1628, the Dutch seized the Spanish silver fleet off Cuba, which was the first time that Spain lost an entire fleet.  In 1630, the Dutch mounted another invasion of Brazil, which would be fought for several years.  During the 1630s, the Dutch, English and French began growing sugar in the Lesser Antilles, which not only competed with Brazil but also initiated the great age of New World sugar growing, which led to a huge increase in the African-Atlantic-Americas slave trade.   

The end of Spanish military dominance was further reinforced by the Dutch defeat of the Spanish fleet in the English Channel in 1639, and the French destruction of the Spanish army at the Battle of Rocroi in 1643.  Those defeats marked the end of Spain’s military might in Europe.  Portugal got its independence back in 1640, the same year that England began having its civil wars.

The Dutch established a trading post on Manhattan Island in 1624, and in 1626 they “bought” Manhattan Island from the natives for a few trinkets.  In 1638, the Dutch seized the Portuguese outpost of El Mina in western Africa.  The Swedes and Danes even joined the Empire Game briefly, with a short-lived New Sweden in present-day Delaware, established in 1638 but captured by the Dutch in 1654, to be further lost to the English in 1664, when the Dutch lost all their North American colonies to the English. 

The English also joined the spice trade, and in 1622 an English-Persian expedition seized Ormuz from Portugal, in present day Oman, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.  Dutch imperial supremacy did not last long.  With the devastating Thirty Years’ War ending in 1648, it did not take England and the Netherlands long to begin a new series of wars, the first beginning in 1652, with the wars lasting until 1684.  In 1664, the New Amsterdam colony in North America was lost to the English, but it had other gains.  The peak of the Dutch East India Company’s supremacy was around 1669.  The Dutch East India Company was a direct forerunner to modern corporations, and was a combination of corporation and state, and owning shares of its stock was a lucrative proposition, for a while.  The French East India Company entered the fray in 1675, with its outpost at Bombay. 

During the last half of the 17^th century, the Asian trade route was the scene of continual battles between the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English traders.  Portugal had largely lost out by 1620, and the Dutch by the early 1700s, leaving the English and French alone on the field.[96]  The rivals also carved up the Caribbean and periphery into imperial chunks.  By 1770, the Spanish kept a grip on Cuba, better than half of Española (today’s Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, New Granada (today’s Colombia) and Venezuela.  The French took Haiti on Española, and got Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Lesser Antilles, as well as part of the South American mainland, in what became French Guiana.  The Dutch got Dutch Guiana and Surinam on the South American mainland, and the islands of Curacao and Saba.  The English got Jamaica, and in the Lesser Antilles they got the Leeward Islands, Barbados and Grenada.  The Danes were able to hold onto part of the Virgin Islands. 

The main Caribbean game was plantation work, although Portugal finally joined the big game with a gold strike, finally, in Minas Gerais in Brazil.  Then the Portuguese had their very own gold rush, which saw about 600,000 Portuguese citizens migrate there by 1760.  The Portuguese Crown tried keeping control and getting its cut, but greedy chaos prevailed regularly, as in all gold rushes.  As with all New World gold rushes to that time, slaves were needed to make it work.  The 18^th century was the greatest era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Portugal, being the inventors of the African-Atlantic-Americas slave trade, was also its biggest beneficiary.  More than half of the slave voyages to the New World were Portuguese, and of the estimated 11 million Africans who eventually became New World slaves (with probably at least an equal number dying, and perhaps as many as 30 to 60 million, in the process), more than 4.5 million ended up in Brazil, with the English in second place with 2.6 million slaves.[97]  A Brazilian slave could be expected to provide about seven years of usefulness before dying. 

The Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish were able to hold onto pieces of their empires, but the English and French dominated the scene after 1700, with the other powers reduced to gnawing on the bones of their former glory.  The imperial jockeying during the 1600s, with constantly shifting alliances and endless wars, can make a reader dizzy, and the point of this essay is charting the American Empire, so it will begin focusing on the imperial powers and North America, and especially America’s parent, England. 

The English and Their Rivals in North America

When Spain’s rivals appeared in the New World during the 1600s, they acted similarly to Spain.  Spain was after slaves and gold.  England’s first New World adventures also sought slaves and gold.  In 1576, Martin Frobisher captured a native of Baffin Island while looking for the mythical Northwest Passage.  Frobisher also found what appeared to be gold, and it was assayed as such in England.  The next year Frobisher returned with a mining expedition that devastated the local natives and hauled two hundred tons of ore back to England.  The year after that, Frobisher returned to mine two thousand more tons.  It all turned out to be fool’s gold.[98]  In 1577, the same year that Frobisher hauled his fool’s gold back to England, the slave runner and pirate Francis Drake raided Spain’s Pacific ports and stole their loot, mainly silver.  Drake also sought the Northwest Passage and circumnavigated the earth to complete his mission on behalf of Queen Elizabeth.  When Drake returned with his haul, he was knighted and became England’s richest private citizen. 

Humphrey Gilbert was a soldier who eventually became the English governor in Ireland.  Gilbert had a practice of lining the path to his tent with severed Irish heads, a strategy designed to induce a psychological effect when Irishmen led to his tent recognized their relatives among the heads.  After an unsuccessful attempt at finding the Northwest Passage in 1578, Gilbert was lost at sea near the Azores in 1583 after a failed attempt at colonizing today’s Newfoundland (some colonists mutinied).  Gilbert’s explorations inspired his half-brother, Walter Raleigh. 

In 1585, Raleigh tried establishing a colony at Roanoke.  Although the natives of the North American east coast, particularly the southerly shores, had already suffered from numerous Spanish depredations and European-introduced epidemics,[99] the natives welcomed and fed the Roanoke pirate-colonists, who arrived via the Caribbean, where they plundered and traded with the Spanish colonists.  The English pirate-colonists originally hunted for gold, and quickly wore out their native welcome, as they destroyed a town and burned its cornfields when a silver cup turned up missing.  The colony failed, with the survivors probably adopted into the native tribes.[100] 

Raleigh followed up the Roanoke failure with a fruitless quest for El Dorado, in South America in 1595.  He also sought to establish a beachhead to attack and seize Spain’s South American mines.  Raleigh spent thirteen years in the Tower of London for alleged treason against James I, and was finally released to seek El Dorado again.  James I forbade Raleigh to harass the Spanish, who were at peace with England at that time, but Raleigh’s expedition attacked a Spanish outpost, his son dying in the process, and Raleigh ended up losing his head in 1618 to satisfy the Spanish Crown. 

The first permanent English settlement in the New World was at Jamestown, which began in 1607.  By that time, the Europeans had established their murderous intentions in that region, and Jamestown was a military outpost from the beginning, with no women accompanying the first landing.  As usual, the invaders sought gold, and their first task was building a fort in the Pamunkey lands before the natives realized what was happening.  Due to European-introduced disease, those lands already had a small fraction of the human population that it possessed a century earlier.  It may have been no exaggeration when an elderly native told the English invaders in 1608 that he was the only surviving member of his family, going down his family tree for three generations.[101] 

The Jamestown relationship between natives and invaders was largely hostile from the beginning.  Powhatan was the Pamunkey chief, and his warriors attacked before the fort was finished.  The English strategy was intimidating the natives with their weaponry, which included a cannon.  Largely for self-serving reasons, Powhatan initially fed the starving invaders, and both sides played diplomatic games.  Powhatan’s younger brother, Opechancanough, captured John Smith, the most capable Jamestown leader, as Smith tried forming an alliance with a tribe independent of Powhatan.  Powhatan studied Smith and adopted him.  Powhatan probably thought he was installing his adopted relative as the chief of his new, dependent, white-skinned tribe.  The English tried reversing the political situation by crowning Powhatan the next year, and making him a subject of King James by doing so.  Neither side probably fully appreciated what the other tried accomplishing with its political gestures. 

The English then tried allying themselves with Powhatan’s enemies, and Powhatan stopped feeding the invaders in 1608.  John Smith then raided the neighboring villages, holding people for ransom, including an infamous instance when he held a loaded gun against Opechancanough, as Smith extorted food.  In 1609, the English were starving, sick and began spreading out along the shores in “self-sufficient” settlements.  In one expedition, Smith compelled the natives to “sell” an entire village, with its ripening cornfields, to the invaders.  War broke out, and Powhatan had his warriors encircle and starve out the Jamestown fort.   The Englishmen resorted to cannibalism that winter, and many fled and took up residence with the natives, in the first recorded English instances of “going native” in the New World. 

Jamestown was about to be abandoned in 1610 when ships arrived with veterans of the bloody Irish wars.  “Going native” was a capital crime to the English overlords, and in 1610 Jamestown governor Thomas West, known as Lord De La Warr (the state of Delaware is named after him), demanded that Powhatan hand over those English runaways.  When Powhatan refused the demand, the English launched several exterminatory raids that wiped out entire villages, and concluded one particularly savage day by executing the children of the village’s chief.

During the first generation of “settlement,” Jamestown’s population was sustained by the continual influx of thousands of “settlers” to replace those who died of disease and starvation.  In 1612, some of Jamestown’s settlers ran off to live with the Indians, preferring the native way of life.  Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed.  Hanging, burning, shooting and being tortured to death were among the treatments dealt out to those deserters.[102]  “Settlers” running off and going native was an epidemic problem for the invading English for generations, and extremely harsh methods were devised to discourage such “abandonment.” 

The first Jamestown war ended in 1614, when Powhatan refused to pay the astronomical ransom that the English were demanding for his captured daughter, Pocahontas.  He instead accepted her marriage to an English settler who was experimenting with raising tobacco for export.  Pocahontas’ forced marriage was one of only three recorded Anglo-Pamunkey marriages during the 17^th century.  The Smith-Pocahontas love story was originally a fabrication by Smith, with today’s tale a retread of a probably true story of a native woman sparing a member of the ill-fated Narváez entrada, in Florida, nearly a century earlier.[103] 

Powhatan died in 1618, and his successor Opechancanough was under increasing pressure from the heavily armed, increasingly well provisioned invaders.  The invaders regularly entered into peace treaties that they fully intended to violate, and killing women, children and the elderly was a standard English tactic. 

By 1622, the land-hungry English had seized all the good land around Jamestown, and European disease and warfare further thinned the Pamunkey’s ranks.  Opechancanough demonstrated his misunderstanding of the English mind by planning what he thought would convince the invaders to quit Virginia.  A surprise attack killed 347 of the 1240 English settlers, including the few women and children that lived there.[104]  Opechancanough, thinking like a native, thought that such a devastating blow would convince all the English to leave.  He reckoned incorrectly.  The English retreated to their forts and began mounting attacks on the neighboring villages, which evolved to attacking and securing the fields, which led to hungry Pamunkey people.  As the English destroyed or raided native fields, the natives had to make new ones, which the English then hunted for.  During those attacks, the English mistakenly killed thirty native allies from the Patawomec tribe, who were helping the English find those new fields.  Killing “friendly” natives was something the English and Americans did throughout their conquest of North America, and many times killing friendly natives was not all that accidental, the discovery of their “mistake” accompanied by a wink. 

In 1623, English duplicity took a celebrated turn when they poisoned the wine at a peace conference with the Pamunkey, killing two hundred natives.  The English then engaged in their first reported scalping, of another fifty Pamunkey killed in an ambush.[105]  After Opechancanough’s failed strategy of surprise annihilation, it was open season on the natives.  In 1644, Opechancanough was nearly a hundred years old, and he mounted one last attack on the invaders, but by that time the Pamunkey were little more than nuisances to the vastly more numerous and heavily armed English.  In 1646, Opechancanough was captured, chained and put on display at Jamestown, where an English soldier, who was guarding him and thought too him prideful in his captivity, shot him to death. 

With Opechancanough’s death, the Pamunkey were effectively an extinguished people, with most surviving women and children sold into slavery.  In 1672, 17 million pounds of tobacco were exported from Chesapeake Bay, and Virginia’s human population was about 44,000 in 1675.  About 3500 of them were natives, 2500 were African slaves, and 38,000 were Europeans.[106]  With their beachhead established, the English “settlers” quickly began invading their neighbors, seizing native lands and completely eliminating entire tribes.[107]

While the English were securing the lands of Virginia and vicinity, religious fanatics were conquering New England.  The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were Calvinist Christians, and their dour, fearful philosophy contained a catalog of sinful behaviors that boggle today’s minds, such as laughing or kissing one’s child on the Sabbath.  Calvinist fanaticism would lead to one of the West’s last witch trials and executions, in 1692 in Salem.  American mythology has held that the Calvinists came to the New World for religious freedom, but the facts do not support that notion.  The Mayflower Pilgrims came from the Netherlands, where they had already escaped their persecution in England.  They sought economic opportunity, not religious freedom.  They were sailing to the English colony at Virginia in 1620, but bad weather and poor navigation landed them in present-day Massachusetts.  They came ashore on land that had already been depopulated by European disease, and the Wampanoag tribe fed them and taught the English city dwellers how to farm and survive in the New World. 

There really was an original Thanksgiving, where the Pilgrims and their native benefactors feasted and played games with each other, but the settlers eventually annihilated the tribe that welcomed them.  The bloody record of the English in New England is probably worse than the English record in Virginia.[108]  In 1637, the English slaughtered an entire sleeping village of several hundred people of the Pequot tribe, selling the few survivors into slavery.  One leader of the massacre, John Underhill, would later justify the attack by citing King David’s genocidal Old Testament activities.  The complete extermination of the village alarmed the Mohegan and Narragansett allies who accompanied the attack, Underhill writing that they complained about the English manner of fighting, because, “it is too furious, and slays too many men.”[109]

A Narragansett sachem, Miantonomi, whose tribe helped the English wipe out the Pequot, may have seen the writing on the wall.  In 1642, he allegedly spoke to the Montauk tribe on Long Island, and noted that the English arrival was ominous, and unless the native tribes learned to put aside their differences and unite against the white man’s invasion, before long there would not be any more natives.[110]  The next year, citing rumors of that speech and other activities, the Massachusetts authorities had Miantonomi executed by the Mohegan, a rival tribe and Pequot offshoot.  The Mohegan subsequently made themselves useful to the Europeans as warriors and guides, and their utility kept them alive, although repeated visits of epidemics reduced their numbers.  Even after absorbing the remnants of tribes they helped extinguish, there were less than 1000 of them in 1680, and only about 200 in 1790.  Their “loyalty” may have kept them alive, but settlers kept gobbling up their lands, with the tribe possessing only 2300 acres in 1790, when their lands were broken up into individual plots.  The 1910 census recorded only 22 of them.  As with many other tribes that were seemingly extinct, the Mohegan have made a bit of a comeback, being reorganized as a tribe in the 1970s, and claiming about 1000 members today, with the standard casino accompanying their resurgence. 

The Dutch, who colonized present day New York, were no better than the English, with the Manhattan governor offering the first known scalp bounty in 1641.   Because Underhill proved himself so effective at dispatching sleeping villages, in 1643 the Dutch hired him.  The first thing Underhill’s men did was attack a friendly and tribute-paying local tribe, the Wappingers.  When attacked, the tribe fled to the Dutch governor, asking for protection, not knowing that he had hired their attackers.  The governor instead ordered their annihilation, and the subsequent attack killed about eighty men of fighting age, who were then scalped and skinned.  The remaining women and children were slaughtered, and severed heads were kicked around the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls during the subsequent celebration.  Then Underhill and his men tried exterminating the resisting local tribes, but usually only destroyed empty villages.  In 1644 however, Underhill was able to successfully reproduce his night attack strategy, on a sleeping village of about 500 people.[111]  After Underhill’s men finished butchering them, the church leaders of Manhattan declared the second Thanksgiving.  The white invaders then held Thanksgiving celebrations after mass murders of natives.  That was the real Thanksgiving tradition in colonial America, one that my history lessons failed to teach me, as I made my construction paper Pilgrim outfit in kindergarten.

Similar to the Jamestown residents who ran off and “went native,” in the earliest days of the Puritan invasion there were those who had high appreciation for the native way of life and their human virtues, which were in far greater abundance among the natives than contemporary Europeans.  Thomas Morton arrived in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1625 and lived at his home at Merry Mount, happily living among the natives.  The New England of those days was a hunter and outdoorsman’s paradise, a fact not lost on Morton, who eventually wrote New English Canaan, where he marveled over the paradise that was New England.  Morton was first arrested by Miles Standish in 1628, and was shipped back to England to stand trial for selling guns and liquor to the Indians.  The charges had slim justification and the case collapsed, with Morton soon returning to his home at Merry Mount.  John Endicott then tried having Morton arrested in 1629 on a frivolous charge.  John Winthrop had Morton arrested the next year.  A kangaroo court ensued, and Morton’s house was burned down and he was shipped back to England.  The Puritanical colonial authorities worked to silence Morton’s joyful voice for a generation.[112]  Morton concluded that the colonial Puritan leaders were motivated by a joy in inflicting pain, agony and bloodshed onto others.  As Richard Drinnon noted, Morton saw that the Puritan leaders,

“were not coldly righteous monsters, however great their hypocrisy, but men who found their cruelty great bloody fun.”[113]

While the symbol of Morton was his happy Maypole, the symbol of the Puritans was the whipping post.  The typical English pattern of invasion and genocide was using the slightest imagined affront as justification for exterminating entire tribes, while eagerly taking their land afterward.  In the northeastern United States, numerous towns have the word “field” as part of their name, such as the many Springfields that exist.  The “field” came from the fact that the town was established by stealing a native town (often obtained by annihilating its inhabitants), and the “field” was where the natives raised their crops. 

Notable Puritan leaders such as Cotton Mather rejoiced in the butchery and genocide.  Mather openly approved of Underhill’s annihilation of that Pequot village, writing that those women and children were “dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.”[114]  Mather wrote of that slaughter, “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”[115]  Mather called the natives who fed and hosted the Puritans “ravenous howling wolves.”  The insatiably greedy Puritans and the other English settlers eventually seized more and more land that was Wampanoag, leading to what is called King Philip’s War in 1675, Philip being Massasoit’s son (the chief who welcomed and fed the original Puritan invaders).  The war ended with the annihilation of the Wampanoag, and Philip’s head being mounted on a pole at Plymouth for 24 years.  Thus ended the tribe that welcomed the Puritans.  As with the Spanish in the New World, the English process of invasion and settlement was devastating to New England’s environment, which further doomed the natives.[116] 

Underhill also remarked on the method by which the “savages” carried out warfare.  Their so-called warfare was highly ritualized, with symbolic gestures, such as firing arrows at the distant enemy and then going home.  Underhill said that the Pequot battles seemed more for pastime than conquering and subduing enemies.  Henry Spelman, who lived among the Pamunkey, said that in their wars, “They might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men.”  It has been estimated that as many as 70% of North American tribes were pacifists, a notion supported by the high status of women in many tribes and the fact that in perhaps two-thirds of the native tribes, warfare was so small a part of their existence that there were no “war stories or battle legends of any kind.”[117] 

The English practiced headhunting before they began invading the New World, as exemplified by Gilbert’s tactics in Ireland, as a way of instilling terror in the locals as well as confirming just who and how many they killed.[118]  In the New World, the English began paying people to deliver native heads.  Heads were more positive proof of death than scalps, as people could survive scalping, but scalps were easier to haul, an adult human head weighing about eight pounds.  The English practice was not just for fun; big money was paid for scalps and heads.  During the 1600s, the English in New England offered scalp and head bounties.  In 1704, the Massachusetts authorities raised their bounty to 100 pounds per man’s scalp, 40 pounds per woman’s and “only” 20 pounds for a child’s.  In those days, a good New England farmer earned only about 25 pounds in a year.[119] 

Indian killing became big business in colonial America, with such lucrative bounties.  Nobody could tell if a scalp came from a “friendly” or “hostile” native, and it was easier to kill “friendlies” than “hostiles,” so there was a great deal of “scalp fraud” among the bounty hunters, as they preferred killing friendlies, and the less talented particularly went after women and children.  Even though women and children’s scalps paid less, there was far less risk in obtaining them, and they were more plentiful than braves.  In 1750, “pacifist” Pennsylvania lowered its definition of an adult native male to ten years old, to keep the bounty hunters happy and busy.  The scalp bounty business was an immensely popular undertaking in colonial America.  As an example, in 1757 the Reverend Thomas Smith of today’s Maine was in investor in a bounty-hunter operation.  In return for providing ammunition and provisions, Smith and his fellow investors received one-third of the bounty.[120]  Scalp and head bounties became an American institution wherever natives were to be found along the “American frontier,” clear up until the 1880s, when there were virtually no natives left to be scalped. 

The French had a gentler tenure in the New World, but that had more to do with France’s political-economic-demographic situation than benevolent intent.  While it is true that the French respected Native American culture more than any other European power did, during the 1760s, when France’s commitment to New World colonization was its greatest, they had fewer than 50,000 people in the New World, while the English had nearly a million members of its “surplus population” in the New World.[121]  Hence, France manipulated the native tribes to its ends more effectively than its European rivals did.  In 1536, Jacques Cartier impacted the native political situation by kidnapping leaders deemed obstructive to his aims.  Although Cartier’s men got scurvy and were cured by a native medicine man, an empirical observation that Europe would fail to embrace for the next three centuries, they left behind their calling card.  The natives began falling prey to European disease almost as soon as they met Cartier and his men.  Cartier began wearing out the native welcome early on, and after his last failed attempt at invasion/settlement, the French left the area, and did not return for 60 years.

In 1598, 250 French settlers (200 men and 50 women) tried establishing a colony on uninhabited Sable Island off of Nova Scotia, in a rich fishing area, and had it to themselves.  With no interference from either the natives or France’s European rivals, the colony completely failed, with murders and desertions.  In 1603, the eleven survivors were rescued and brought back to France.[122] 

When Samuel de Champlain returned to found Quebec in 1608, he found that the entire St. Lawrence Valley was depopulated.  There is speculation as to its cause, but if other European experiences carry any weight, the diseases Cartier’s men began spreading almost immediately in 1535 was at least partly responsible.[123]  The “help” that Champlain provided the Hurons led to a fairly unique event in 1609.  It is about the only surviving account of what North American warfare was like before the white man showed up.  Champlain went with a Huron war party to go hunt their rivals, the Mohawks.  Champlain was their secret weapon.  The Huron and Mohawk met on the shores of Lake Champlain.  The Huron sent a delegation to the Mohawks, to confirm their willingness to fight.  The Mohawk then hastily made a barricade.  That night, the two war parties camped within earshot of each other, singing songs and shouting insults.  The next day, the groups approached each other, as three Mohawk chiefs advanced to meet the Huron, still with no arrows being fired or other hostile behavior, Champlain came from his hiding place behind the Huron warriors and shot the chiefs with his arquebus, immediately killing two of them and mortally wounding the third.  The Huron killed many surprised and overmatched Mohawk warriors that day.[124]  The event gave more evidence of the notion that pre-European Native American warfare, even among such “savage” tribes as the Mohawk, resembled rugby matches more than European-style warfare. 

The Huron and Iroquois, as with other tribes, had an unfortunate habit of torturing a captive warrior to death, a practice that horrified Champlain.  The Spanish were horrified at human sacrifice, and the French at torturing captives.  Cannibalism however, was a myth virtually made from whole cloth by Columbus on his first voyage (a favorite European myth, to describe “savage” people) and a self-serving one that did not go away.  Those were definitely dark sides to Native American cultures, but it all depended on what “atrocity” captured the European fancy.[125]  Burning people to death was a European specialty, which horrified Native Americans.  Being fed to the dogs (a Spanish specialty) was considered the worst way to die for the natives of today’s Latin America, and the Spanish fed native infants to their dogs as a canine delicacy.  The Native American tribes, even the highly warlike Aztecs, did not kill women, children and the elderly; something that a warrior knew had no honor in it (although an offering cache of about forty sacrificed children was discovered during the excavation of Tenochtitlán’s great temple, during the 1970s).  The Europeans preferred killing women, children and the elderly instead of native warriors, as they were far easier to kill, and that practice would eventually render the tribe extinct, which was the desired result.  The Europeans were selective in what horrified them about Native American practices, and would usually greatly exaggerate the darker aspects. 

That “help” that Champlain gave the Huron tribe was short-lived.  The next year they marauded across the land, with their newfound military advantage, and annihilated a Mohawk party they came upon.  The Mohawk did not raid Huron lands for a generation.  The Mohawk fought a war with the Mahican in order to gain access to Dutch arms at Fort Orange in 1624.  French Jesuit missionaries had been proselytizing in North America since 1611, and their tenure in North America was the gentlest European effort that those early days of invasion would see.  Although there was sincere, soul-saving effort made by many Jesuits, it was part of a larger pattern of exploitation that the French would inflict on the natives.  No matter how seemingly benevolent the Jesuit intent, their presence exterminated the natives.  Priestly zeal was exploited by French elites, similar to how Peace Corps volunteer zeal is manipulated today, or how the CIA exploited Ralph McGehee’s zeal.   Wherever the Jesuits showed up, smallpox broke out, beginning as early as 1625. 

The Huron did not miss the “coincidence” of priests and smallpox arriving at the same time.  Huron leaders contemplated wiping out all the priests, but did not, while smallpox repeatedly swept through their ranks.  Similar to the Spanish experience with the Aztecs, the natives noticed that the European intruders seemed immune from the scourge that carried off so many of their people.  While Cortés attained mythic status among the natives because the 1520 Mesoamerican smallpox epidemic failed to decimate the Spanish invaders, the Huron concluded that the Jesuits must have more powerful medicine and gods, because the epidemics left them untouched.  As the Huron died in droves, many decided that the Christian god might be able to save them, and the Jesuits then had great success in converting the natives. 

In 1630, there were about 30,000 Huron.  By 1640, waves of smallpox reduced them to about 10,000, and half of the survivors were Christian.  In the culture that existed before the French showed up, the decimated Huron would have come to an accommodation with the Mohawk, who after all were their cousins, both tribes being Iroquoian.  Fired up with new crusading Christian zeal, however, the Huron began attacking the far more numerous Mohawk, who had long possessed European arms, even though a peace agreement had been negotiated in 1645.  The Mohawk and Seneca responded in kind.  By 1649, when the Mohawk and Seneca destroyed Huron villages and adopted the surviving women and children into their tribes, the complete demise of the Huron tribe had come to pass.[126]  From warfare that resembled rugby matches to the complete extinction of a people in forty years; that was the typical effect of the European invasion, even at its most benevolent. 

Even though the French and Dutch efforts had disastrous effects on the natives, the English were by far the most murderous and overtly exterminatory of the European powers in North America, which is partly why they were the most successful.  The story of the English in North America is a continual tale of invasion and genocide, with even deliberate introduction of European disease to the natives, which may have even begun in the Massachusetts colony in 1636.[127]  As the Spanish did, the English hunted the natives with their dogs.[128]  Hunting humans was the ultimate sport for the Spanish and English “settlers.” 

Not very different from the Spanish experience, ambitious Englishmen wanted to carve out empires of their own in the New World, and in 1776, a new kind of empire was born.

Fathers of a Different Kind of Empire

The French and English, virtually alone on the world imperial stage during the 1700s, had several full-fledged wars in North America, beginning as early as 1689.  In all those wars and heated rivalries, the big losers were the natives, whether they were in North America, Australia, Asia or the South Pacific.  The Europeans did not show up to help anybody but themselves. 

In 1756 the Seven Years’ War broke out, and was largely about Britain and France competing in the Empire Game.  The war was played out across the globe, foreshadowing the so-called World Wars of the 20th century. On Continental Europe, Russia and Austria allied with France, and Prussia with Britain, with other minor players in the mix.  The most important impact on the world's people, however, was the imperial rivalry between Britain and France beyond Europe.  In North America, the British/French war was called the French and Indian War, and in India it was called the Third Carnatic War.  In 1763 the British were victorious, and the next year they began their rape of India, which began in Bengal.  After losing India and much of North America to the British, the French then began searching for new lands to claim, and a period of competition between the French and British ensued, especially in the South Pacific.[129]  The French were losers there too, as James Cook visited Australia in 1768 and New Zealand in 1769, setting the stage for British invasion and colonization.  In 1773, Cook made the first visit to the Antarctic icepack, and in 1778 Cook “discovered” the last great unconquered land: Hawaii, which was probably the closest thing there was to an earthly paradise. 

Along with the imperial rivalry was a more salutary trend.  The Renaissance marked the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church’s dominance.  The Protestant Reformation dominated European affairs for a century, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War.  The 17^th century saw the rise of science and reason, with Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Bacon and others making their contributions.  By the early 1700s, science and reason were on the rise, and religion was on the wane.  England’s Civil War, also known as the Puritan Revolution, began in 1640 and initiated conflicts that lasted twenty years.  It was the beginning of the end of royal absolutism in England, challenging the Divine Right of Kings that James I believed so fervently in.  James’ son, Charles I, ended up being publicly tried and headed in 1649.  The “rabble” was beginning to have a say in their governing, with kings and popes having less influence. 

In 1688, England had its Glorious Revolution, which permanently limited the power of English royalty.  In 1689, English Parliament passed its Bill of Rights and Tolerance Act, which promoted religious tolerance.  Both English legal acts of 1689 directly influenced the U.S. Bill of Rights.  England united with Scotland in 1707, becoming Great Britain. 

The Frenchman Voltaire spent his first stint behind bars in 1717 for his satirical writings, and his work came to epitomize an era known as the Enlightenment, which was well established by 1750, France being its heart, while philosophers across Western Europe, in Britain most particularly, embraced the movement.  Paradoxically, as the imperial rivals were battling across the globe for supremacy, its Enlightenment theoreticians argued for the inherent equality of all people.  Today’s scholars legitimately wonder just how influential the European experience in the New World was to its Enlightenment philosophers, where truly egalitarian societies were witnessed; something far removed from the European experience.[130] 

The collision of Britain and France’s rivalry, the Enlightenment and the ambition of British colonists led to the American Revolution and the birth of a new kind of empire.  The profits of slavery helped fuel British efforts, both the chattel slavery in North America and the Caribbean, as well as the imperial exploitation that Britain imposed on India.  The most prominent British colonists in America were often slaveholders, with Founding Fathers such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin (and even “Give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death” Patrick Henry) being affluent slaveholders.  Washington was perhaps the richest man in America when he became president. 

The Europeans played divide-and-conquer from the very beginnings of their invasions, and the natives rarely realized the European game and put aside their differences to form a united front.  Far too often, testosterone overrode the brains and hearts of young men, which thwarted the attempts of elders to maintain peace among the tribes.[131]  The French, partly because they had far fewer colonists in the New World, and partly because they were less arrogant and exterminatory than the English, had friendlier relations with the natives, although the French could also be genocidists.  French attempts to exterminate the Fox tribe alienated their native allies, which ultimately diminished French efforts in the region.[132]  After a generation of warfare, the fiercely independent Fox (who called themselves the Mesquaki) were very weakened by 1730, and living in present-day Wisconsin.  They tried escaping, to go live with the Seneca, in present day New York, but their flight was detected.  About three quarters of the remaining Fox were women, children and the elderly.  After a siege of a hastily constructed fort in a stand of trees, the Fox asked to surrender, but the French would give no quarter and the tribe was nearly exterminated, with several hundred killed.  The survivors were parceled out to the French-allied tribes.[133] 

The Delaware tribe is of Algonquin origin, and they call themselves the Lenape.  When the Europeans showed up, they had been living on the North America’s east coast, occupying today’s New Jersey and vicinity, for thousands of years.  They were considered the eldest of the region’s tribes, and had great respect.  Their first contact with Europeans was with the Italian explorer Verrazano, working on behalf of France in 1524.[134]  Verrazano tried kidnapping the friendly natives.  Slave raids were about the only times the coastal natives saw white people for the next eighty years of European contact, which understandably made them a bit hostile toward the invaders.  When the European invasion began in earnest, warfare and disease quickly decimated the Delaware, and they were forced to relocate about twenty times before ending up in today’s Oklahoma.

A number of the Delaware diaspora became visionaries and prophets, influencing other tribes.  Some were pacifists, others were warlike, and Pontiac became a disciple of one of them.  An Indian only known today as the Delaware Prophet encouraged the natives to give up drunkenness, intertribal war, magic and other practices, and said that if the natives regenerated their culture, they would be strong again and able to resist the European invasion.  In 1760, when the French left the scene, the natives were on their own with the British, whose arrogant, paternalistic, exterminatory attitudes and behaviors led to friction.  After three years of dealing with the British, Pontiac had enough.  He was chief of the Ottawa tribe, and tried uniting the natives from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico to attack the British encroachments into Indian lands.  In 1763 the attacks began, and they were successful.  The British invasion of the Ohio River Valley was especially targeted.  Virginian land speculators such as George Washington led the invasion.  The French captured Washington and his men in 1754. 

As Pontiac’s forces were laying siege to forts in Detroit and today’s Pittsburgh (Fort Pitt), Jeffrey Amherst, who commanded the British army in North America, and for whom a town in Massachusetts is named, had a series of exchanges with his commanders, and the strategy of giving the Native Americans smallpox blankets was raised and approved by Amherst, rather offhandedly.  They gave out smallpox blankets, and a smallpox epidemic broke the siege.  The timing of letters, handing out smallpox blankets and epidemics makes it doubtful whether giving out smallpox blankets led to the epidemic during the siege, but during the following year, smallpox annihilated the Ohio River Valley’s natives, making its conquest by the United States, a generation later, an easier task.  The intention of germ warfare is clear, and surely at least contributed to the resulting epidemic that killed more than 100,000 people.  Amherst was one a long line of British genocidists, and he even wrote that he wished he could use the Spanish “dog” method on the Indians, but lamented the fact that he did not have enough dogs for the job.[135]  Ben Franklin was a staunch advocate of using dogs on the Indians.[136] 

Not long after Amherst mentioned his longing to use dogs on Native Americans, the English nearly replicated the Spanish experience in the Caribbean on the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania.  On Tasmania, the British invaders used natives for dog food, and three centuries after the Spanish atrocities the British did the same thing, when the opportunity presented itself.  The colonization of the South Pacific and Australia was supposedly the “enlightened” colonization.  There were only about 5000 original Tasmanians, because they were hunter-gatherers and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle cannot support nearly the population densities that agricultural societies can, as the Caribbean islanders were.  By 1843, only 43 Tasmanians were left alive, and the last Tasmanian died in 1876, for a complete genocide that the British were responsible for during the modern age. 

There was a temporary positive effect for the natives due to Pontiac’s war.  King George III made the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that set aside the lands between the Appalachians and Mississippi River to be reserved for native tribes.  That act enraged the land-hungry colonists, and led directly to the Revolutionary War.  The colonists regularly ignored the proclamation.  Daniel Boone was illegally penetrating into today’s Kentucky by 1769.  He had big dreams to build his empire there, but he was not nearly as successful in his empire-building dreams as Washington was.[137] 

While tribes were regularly exterminated, some scattered survivors eked out existences here and there, to give rise to tribes/nations making a “comeback” today, the Taino, Huron and Wampanoag being examples of this trend.  It can be seen as a healthy trend (although the casino phenomenon is anything but auspicious), there is reason for skepticism toward some claims, but critiques of white people appropriating Native American culture are accurate.[138]  I am nearly an eighth Native American myself (Creek tribe, and perhaps a bit of another), although native blood in the family was something that my ancestors vehemently denied.  The “taint” is obvious in some of my relatives; their bloodlines are supposedly all from Northern Europe, but some could have been convincing extras in Dances with Wolves.  Although I have some native blood, I write this essay as a white American, which I consider myself to be. 

In 1769, James Watt invented the modern steam engine, which was probably the 18^th century’s most important event, as it made the Industrial Revolution possible.  In 1776, two events marked the rise of a new kind of empire.  One was American elites signing the Declaration of Independence, and the other was the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Similar to how the Catholic Church’s influence began unraveling as it reached new heights of power, just as Great Britain was reaching a truly global dominance, its most successful colonies revolted.  The American Revolution probably would not have succeeded without French assistance, as France did what it could to thwart its rival.  Capitalism already existed when Adam Smith wrote his monumental work, although the term would not be used until the 20^th century.  Smith, an Enlightenment philosopher, would have been horrified by today’s corporate capitalism, although he is considered its father today.  Smith’s work provided a theoretical framework that dogma would later harden around, as it was used to justify a new breed of thief: the capitalist. 

Europe’s money supply tripled during the first fifty years of the Spanish invasion, and wealth became seen as money, and money could buy everything, even a ticket to heaven, in the Spaniards’ eyes.  Greed became a European mainstay from that time forward.  European ideologists transformed a deadly sin into a virtue, and greed is assumed in today’s capitalistic ideology, with the “law” of supply and demand, and ever-increasing profits (for the idle owners) being the primary reason for a corporation’s existence.  Once ideological principles are assumed, they largely become invisible and are rarely examined afterward. 

The European concept of wealth became abstracted with the money revolution, and it became further abstracted with the rise of capitalism.  Shares of corporate stock are the ultimate symbols of wealth in today’s world, defining the fortunes of the world’s richest people, from Bill Gates and the Walton (Wal-Mart) family on downward.  Not long ago, Bill Gates possessed more “wealth” than the 100 million poorest Americans combined, to reach surreal levels of wealth concentration.  The rise of the corporation was evident when Britain began plundering India, and shares of the English East India Company became coveted as the money rolled in from the rape of Bengal, and the East India Company became the acting government of India. 

The United States’ government is hailed as the world’s oldest, and the best example of the virtues of democracy.  The facts are something different.  More than 400 years ago, and perhaps as many as 800 years ago, the Iroquois Confederation came into being, founded on its “Great Law of Peace.”  It still exists.  American elites created the Constitution by borrowing heavily from the Iroquois Confederation’s system.  The Iroquois had a system that is still more democratic than any political system the West has ever devised.  Women owned the village land, cast their children’s vote in proxy, and elected the chiefs.  The women could replace the chiefs if they did not act as the women liked.  It was a balance of power between the sexes that no Western nation has ever approached.  White men can still be found who deride the influence of the Iroquois system on the Constitution as “apocryphal,” partly because the Iroquois have never put their law to paper.  The Iroquois believe that ideas lose too much of their meaning when committed to a limiting form such as writing (and can more easily fall prey to dogmatism, not to mention legalism), a common understanding among the “primitive” natives. 

The Iroquois government was highly decentralized and democratic, with decisions being made by consensus, with little power vested in the hands of any one person.  When the United States used the Iroquois system as a model, those monarchical Europeans invented the executive branch (George Washington was almost named king, and to his credit did not like the idea), which has been the primary method by which the U.S. government has been undermined, with almost wholly unaccountable executive branch agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, FBI, CIA, Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the like, agencies that rely in large measure on secrecy, deception and violence.  The balance of power between the branches of the U.S. government is more theoretical than actual, with the same rich interests largely owning all of them, but the presidency is the easiest to manipulate, as there is only one person in that branch, although his retinue is immense. 

When the English colonists declared their independence in 1776, industrialization was in its early stages, and land was still seen as the greatest source of wealth.  George Washington became America’s richest man by “surveying” and stealing Native American land.[139]  Stealing their land stole their lives. 

American mythologists conjured stories from the thin air about Washington (as they did about Columbus), such as the story of him chopping down a cherry tree and admitting it to his father because he “could not tell a lie.”  Contrary to the fairy tales, Washington was one of U.S. history’s most successful criminals, aptly described as the “father of our country.”  In 1782, as the dust was still settling on America’s successful elite revolt (although the poor were drafted to fight in it), Washington presented a plan to the Continental Congress to defraud the Native Americans.  It was a blueprint for theft and genocide.  Washington built his fortune partly by stealing native land, so his plan came to him quite naturally, although his initial, more openly militaristic, plan of theft was modified by General Philip Schuyler’s “low intensity” method of swindling the natives.[140]

Washington’s plan was to compel Native Americans to sell their land by treaty.  The U.S. agents would promise that their new nation would honor its treaties, but the promises would only be kept until the “settlers” showed up.  Then the treaty was not worth the paper it was printed on, and the tribes would be coerced to “sell” their treaty-provided land and be forced ever westward.  Washington advocated a divide-and-conquer strategy of negotiating with each tribe separately, and trying to incite animosity between them by playing one against the other.  The new “settlers” would then exterminate the game and chop the trees down, thereby making the land even less desirable to the natives.  Washington specifically recommended that Indian lands be promised to Revolutionary War veterans, and having those veterans “settle” in Indian lands would form a vanguard of invasion, and those veterans could be used to create a ready-made militia when the inevitable violence broke out, as the natives were forced off their land.  That plan was consistent with Washington’s view of the natives.  Washington doubted that the natives were quite human.  He wrote that buying out the natives was preferable to removing them by force, and that their eventual removal would be,

“like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest…when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape.”[141]

The new nation was weak, and Washington’s plan was, in his words, “the cheapest and least distressing way” of eliminating the Indians.  Allan Eckert observed that Washington’s conspiracy was “immoral, unethical and actually criminal,” but it “was so logical and well laid out that it was immediately accepted practically without opposition and at once put into action.”  Eckert concluded, “Without even realizing it occurred, the fate of all Indians in the country was sealed.  They had lost virtually everything.”[142]  I was never told of Washington’s clever plan, during four years of American history studies, including college. 

History has shown how well Washington’s plan worked.  Of more than 370 treaties forced onto the native tribes by the United States during the succeeding century, historians cannot find even one that the United States honored.  When natives were coerced into the “voluntary” ceding of lands, the U.S. government paid them between one and two cents per acre, and then turned around and sold it to land companies and “settlers” for between one and two dollars per acre.[143]  Forced sales at 1% of the retail price probably is, in proportional terms and arguably even in absolute terms, history’s greatest swindle.  When Nazi Germany compelled Jews to sell off their properties in the 1930s for bottom dollar in their Aryanization program, the “sellers” received around half of the asking price.[144]  My ancestors profited handsomely from the “cessions” of Native American land.[145]  The issue of dishonest treaty implementation still exists today in most of the United States’ dealings with foreign countries.  Washington was the architect of America’s Final Solution to the Indian Problem, and America has a national holiday in his name. 

As Zinn observed about Columbus, that little tidbit about Washington’s plan, which cannot be found in the standard biographies, while American children are told outright fairy tales about him, is far from innocent.  It is not merely good-natured story telling, to deceive American children into ranking Washington up there with Santa Claus.  Washington’s land grabs, both imperial and private, were the very essence of his life and career, and to sweep his greatest crime/achievement under the rug, while extolling his honesty with fabricated tales, is a form of reality-inversion. 

The natives, to their credit, saw the likely outcome of a successful revolt by those elite colonists, and few supported the revolutionaries, and they generally backed Britain or hoped they would win.  At that time, Britain was trying to honor its Royal Proclamation of 1763.  That angered the land-hungry colonists, especially the land speculators, Franklin and Washington among them, who set their sights on the Ohio River Valley. 

About as many colonists were loyal to Britain as revolted.  About 500,000 American colonists of the day would be considered “loyalists,” about 20% of the colonist population.[146]  The revolutionaries forced as many as 100,000 British loyalists to flee the colonies.  Both “rebels” and “loyalists” were often more on the order of bloodthirsty, criminal rabble than bona fide soldiers.[147]  Washington as general did not have a high regard for his Yankee soldiers, noting after a review of his troops in 1775, “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”[148]  Washington disdained the militias, while they were probably a deciding factor in the war.  As with all wars, the poor did the bulk of the fighting for the colonies during the American Revolution, and the war may have widened the gap between rich and poor in America.[149] 

By the time Washington became the first U.S. president in 1789, the American invasion of westward lands was well underway.  New York, the Ohio River Valley and Kentucky were the early prizes.  After nearly two centuries of ultimately fruitless bloodshed, the Iroquois vacated their lands and went to reservation land in Canada, with hardly a shot being fired.  Ironically, the Seneca, an Iroquois tribe, who had treaty rights to about half of present-day New York State in 1784, were devastated at Washington’s instruction during the Revolutionary War, and Washington was known as “Town Destroyer” among the Seneca.[150]  Seneca leader Red Jacket told Washington in 1792 that the mere mention of his name brought trembling fear to Seneca women and children.[151] 

Washington was the first in a long line of American empire builders who made the United States into the global empire it is today.  John Jay summed up the attitude of the Founding Fathers when he said that those who owned the country should run it.  The hallowed Constitution made it clear just who were true citizens and who were not.  Full-fledged citizens were white, land-owning men.  Women, slaves, natives and white men who did not “own” stolen native land were specifically excluded.  In Virginia, in those early days of the republic, about 1% of the population could vote; a proportion that approximates the Communist Party in China today.  Just who were the real “patriots” during the American Revolution: the rebels, or those loyal to King George?[152]

The United States has been a plutocracy from its earliest days, and having its richest citizen as its first president was no coincidence.  Interestingly, the slave-owning elites were the very people who often yelled for “liberty” the loudest.[153]  Alexander Hamilton (who was one of the few Founding Fathers who actually freed his slaves), who wanted Washington to become America’s first king, unabashedly sought to give the rich a “permanent share in our government.”[154]  The new American government immediately imposed heavy taxation onto America’s poor, generally without fair representation, the exact thing the Founding Fathers said they were fighting the British over.  The oppression led to revolts such as Shays’ Rebellion in 1786.  The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 was waged over Hamilton’s whiskey excise tax, which fell heavily on Pennsylvanian farmers.

Hamilton wanted to make George Washington America’s first king, but Thomas Jefferson believed more strongly in democratic ideals.  Hamilton and Jefferson were both in Washington’s cabinet, and their differences in philosophy led to the non-Constitutional phenomenon of political parties, the first two being the Federalist and Democrat Republican. 

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were members of a committee of five people that drafted the Declaration of Independence, as was Ben Franklin.  The sacred Declaration of Independence is an interesting document.  In its original draft, Jefferson charged King George III with waging a “cruel war against human nature” for Britain’s participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Although Jefferson was casting blame on King George, the southern slave-owning “patriots” would not support anything that cast a harsh light on their hallowed institution, so those words were struck from it.  What all the Founding Fathers heartily agreed upon, however, was the following passage,

“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Interestingly, as the English killed all men, women and children from the earliest days of their invasion, the mass slaughters even cheered on by their religious leaders, they remarked that when the natives captured white women, they never raped them, as had been standard operating practice for Europeans for millennia.  So, while the Indians are uncontroversially merciless savages in the Declaration of Independence, the institution of slavery passed in silence and the reader is left with the high-minded rhetoric that stated, “all men are created equal,” and among their inalienable rights were the right of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  The original statement by John Locke was the “pursuit of property,” but was changed to “happiness” by Jefferson to try appealing to the property-less, who comprised the majority of those living in the colonies.  The notions of liberty and property were firmly conjoined in those days of the ascending British Empire.[155]  What to make of such a document?  Today’s defenders of the Founding Fathers make generous allowances for such a remarkable bifurcation of their minds.  Perhaps it is an example of what George Orwell would call “doublethink” in his 1984.  Jefferson would later write that the choices left to the natives were “extermination” or expulsion from their lands. 

Along with Declaration of Independence, Jefferson and Adams drafted the Articles of War for the new nation, and they simply retreaded the British laws when making it a crime for Americans to use “traitorous or disrespectful words” toward Congress or state legislatures.[156]  Adams made that proposed wartime crime a peacetime crime, soon after he came to office.  Two laws were passed in 1798, which reflected Adams’ elitist views.  The laws were the Alien Act and the Sedition Act.  Adams and friends did not want revolutionaries from France, Ireland or, God forbid, Haiti, stirring up trouble, so the Alien Act authorized the summary deportations of “revolutionaries.”  Adams did not use the Alien Act, but the Sedition Act was used effectively.  

The Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize American officials.  Even before the Sedition Act was passed, Ben Franklin’s grandson was jailed for criticizing Adams’ administration.[157]  The Sedition Act helped lead to Adams’ political downfall, and the law expired in 1801, but various Sedition Acts were passed during the next two centuries.  The Espionage Act, passed in 1917 to specifically curtail freedom of speech, with even presidential candidate Eugene Debs, a staunch pacifist, being jailed by its authority, is in force even today. 

Other abridgments of freedom of speech exist today.  Pondering the gauntlet that Ralph McGehee had to run to publish his memoirs, or all those fired American journalists, can be a sobering experience for those who think that there is true freedom of speech in the United States. 

Jefferson and John Adams both served as emissaries to France, as did Franklin.  Adams and Jefferson were destined to represent two distinct philosophies of American politics.  Jefferson nominally believed in democratic rule, and was sympathetic to the French Revolution.  Adams saw what the French mobs did with their guillotines, wanted no part of it, and aligned himself with the royalist Hamilton.  Jefferson and Adams became heated rivals during their political careers, but rekindled their friendship in their retirement, both dying on the same day.  

Adams was a Puritan from Massachusetts, believed strongly in religion and admired English royalty.  Jefferson, although a slave-owner, embodied the Enlightenment in America, and as with Washington and Franklin, Jefferson was a deist, not a Christian.  Jefferson even created the Jefferson Bible, where he edited out all the “miracles” of Jesus and other parts that a rationalist/materialist had a difficult time swallowing.  Jefferson rightfully thought highly of Jesus’ ethics, but wanted no part of religion’s baggage.  There was no resurrection in the Jefferson Bible, which ended with Jesus’ entombment. 

In the 1790s, the new nation was quite weak.  Giving grants of Indian land to soldiers was partly done because the government could not afford to pay them, so the government gave away what was not theirs to give.  Washington waged war against the natives as soon as he became president.  His strategy of fraudulent diplomacy and low-intensity conflict was not always sufficient.  In 1791 the American army, a fighting force more than two thousand strong, led by Major General Arthur St. Clair, invaded the Ohio River Valley and was trounced by a smaller contingent of native warriors in present day Ohio, not far from Dayton.  That defeat saw the greatest proportional casualties that the American army ever suffered.  Washington, sobered by the disaster, was able to commit more than a million dollars, a large sum in those days, to making the American military more formidable.[158]  Within a few years, the American conquest of the upper Ohio River Valley was complete, with the Battle of Fallen Timbers won in 1794, and the Greenville Treaty signed in 1795, which the U.S. violated in short order, with future president William Henry Harrison leading the swindle of the natives.[159]  Harrison’s efforts helped lead to Tecumseh’s campaign to unite the native tribes to resist further U.S. invasion.  U.S. expansionism, not only against the native tribes, but also against its European rivals, helped lead to the War of 1812, although that aspect of the war’s dynamic is generally minimized or missing from the mainstream histories.[160] 

Washington, as was the case with most American plantation owners of the day, engaged in the triple evil of raising tobacco on stolen land with slave labor.  It is said that Washington was “troubled” by the institution of slavery.  Maybe so, but not troubled enough to actually free any of his slaves.  He should be given some credit, however; his will called for freeing his slaves after his wife died, although he illegally kept slaves at his Philadelphia residence when president, and when one escaped (two escaped Philadelphia when he was president), Washington attempted recovery by having her kidnapped. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made it a crime to assist a freed slave, and thereby created a slave-catching industry.

Washington was a typical Founding Father in significant ways.  Thomas Jefferson shared many of Washington’s sentiments.  Perhaps more than any other Founding Father, Jefferson could pen the most impressive rhetoric, as with the Declaration of Independence.  All too often however, his actions were a very different matter.  While writing about unalienable rights, Jefferson owned quite a stable of slaves.  Similar to Washington, while Jefferson was supposedly a father of freedom, he never freed any of his slaves while he was alive.  His hagiographers can always be counted on to stress how well Jefferson treated his slaves, and that he could not afford to free any (and there is a raging debate today regarding Jefferson perhaps fathering the slaves he freed upon his death).  He sold his personal library, America’s largest private library, which contained more than 6000 books, for $23,950 to the Library of Congress, a vast sum in those days.  For the record, Jefferson’s plantation went deeply into debt, up to $120,000.  The issue of freeing the slaves was purely economic.  Jefferson could not afford to free his slaves, at least if he wanted to continue playing the aristocrat game; such was the logic of an economic system built on turning people into property.

Jefferson exemplified the deeply ingrained racism of America.  In scale, intensity and duration, the United States is history’s most racist nation.  Jefferson, being a child of the Enlightenment, thus derived scientific rationales for his racism.  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson tried his hand at anthropology and wrote at length about African slaves.  Jefferson thought they were equal to whites in feats of memory, but inferior in reasoning ability, and he put them well below Native Americans in ability to make art and speak.[161]  That is not to indict Jefferson, but to demonstrate how thoroughly racist early America was, that the embodiment of the Enlightenment in America could speculate on the natural inferiority of Africans.  If people such as him are hoisted into America’s Pantheon, people Americans are supposed to look up to, it is only ethical to examine the saint’s life.  Jefferson later reasoned that the treatment of slaves might have contributed to their condition, a suspicion that his abolitionist friend Benjamin Rush was fully convinced of.

Other events further demonstrate Jefferson’s humanity.  Near his home was an Indian burial mound, and not a long abandoned one.  Jefferson noted that about thirty years earlier, passing natives went twelve miles out of their way to visit the mound, where they solemnly stayed for “some time.”  The burial mound was about forty feet in diameter and twelve feet high.  Jefferson made an excavation into the mound, cutting a ditch from end-to-end that he could walk through.  He took bones and examined them, noting that skulls generally fell apart in his hands.  Jefferson played archeologist, and estimated that about 1000 natives were interred there.[162]  While Jefferson would declare that the “dead have no rights,” the burial mounds were sacred in the Indian view, as cemeteries are respected in white culture.  If Jefferson had played archeologist in a white cemetery, one not long ago visited by solemn descendants, he would have been called a grave robber.[163] 

In 1792, Jefferson’s notes record a meeting with the British ambassador, George Hammond.  Hammond made the blunt observation that the Indians were the big losers in Europe’s New World, and that U.S. intentions appeared to be to “exterminate the Indians and take their lands.”  Jefferson replied that the U.S. system was instead designed to protect the natives (too bad Hammond could not produce Washington’s plan at that meeting), and that the United States had “no views of even purchasing any more lands from them for a long time.”  Between the meeting with Hammond and Jefferson’s handing over the presidency to James Madison in 1809, the United States had acquired, partly by deception and force, nearly 110 million acres of Indian lands.[164]

In an 1803 letter to then Indiana governor William Henry Harrison, before the Lewis and Clark expedition was launched, Jefferson echoed Washington’s strategy by admitting that,

“To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”

And later in his letter,

“As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only.  Should any tribe be fool-hardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.”

Jefferson concluded by telling Harrison that it would be “improper” to reveal the content of his letter to the natives.[165]  The sitting president made his logic plain in 1807, and warned that “In war, they shall kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”  In 1813 during his retirement, Jefferson made his intent clearer.  There were two choices regarding the natives, “extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.”[166]  Hitler drew inspiration from the way America pursued its Final Solution, and regarded it as a forerunner of his programs.  Hitler sought to clear Eastern Europe of subhumans, for German “settlers.”[167] 

The Big Three Founding Fathers were Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.  Ben Franklin was the universal man of the English colonies, putting America on the intellectual map.  He originally amassed a fortune in the printing business, and is considered the father of America’s free press.  He then retired at a young age and pursued science, civics and politics. 

In 1744, at a conference between Indians and the colonists, an Iroquois leader noted that the colonial system was impossible for the Indians to deal with, with thirteen different governments.  If the colonies came together, as the Iroquois did, it would be far easier, administratively.  Franklin took the Iroquois observation seriously, and in 1754 Franklin introduced his Albany Plan of Union, which is considered the first step toward the creation of the U.S. Constitution.[168]  A large delegation of the Iroquois Grand Council was there to advise Franklin and the colonists on forming their confederacy.  Franklin played a crucial role in the American Revolution, being the ambassador to France and parlaying his celebrity into gaining French assistance, without which the American Revolution probably would not have succeeded.  While the Americans rarely had 10,000 soldiers in the field at any time, the French committed more than 30,000 soldiers to the American Revolution.  At the final battle of the Revolutionary War, the siege of Yorktown, there were as many French soldiers and sailors as American soldiers.  Thirty French warships, cutting off the British Army from receiving reinforcements, proved decisive.  Little did the French know it, but their support of the American Revolution would help lead to their own, which began in 1789 but ended with Napoleon’s power grab. 

Franklin is associated with Philadelphia, but he was from Boston and his attitude toward the Indians displayed the Puritans’ genocidal intentions more than Quaker pacifism.  Even though Franklin was an emissary to the Iroquois, where he gained a deep appreciation of their government, he openly pondered the coming annihilation of the all Native Americans, writing, “…if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these Savages…” then he thought that rum was the preferred means.[169] 

I discovered that although Franklin became the father of American freedom of the press, once more practice and theory were at odds.  While Franklin and his cohorts plotted their rebellion, religious pacifists in Pennsylvania wanted no part of an armed insurrection.  The false dichotomy was directed at them.  If they were not for armed insurrection, they must have been Loyalists to the Crown. 

Europe’s imperial jockeying in the New World led to war after war against the natives and each other, and the pacifistic sects in Pennsylvania were hard-pressed to maintain their ideals.  The religious idealism of William Penn soon degenerated into seizing native land.[170]  Penn’s gang became Pennsylvania’s ruling class, and they eventually abandoned their pacifism, advocating an armed militia to keep the natives in line.  Opposing the increasingly militant English Penn cadre were numerous German immigrants, who still held to the Quakers’ pacifist ideals.  Penn recruited religious sects throughout Europe, and the Church of the Brethren was one of many radical European religious groups that eventually came to Pennsylvania, to escape persecution as well as pursue economic opportunity.  The Sauer family became prominent printers, especially Johann Christoph and his son Christopher II, although their story is obscure today. 

The Sauers’ tale dealt does not appear to be dealt with in American scholarship, even by America’s radical left.  The Sauers achieved some milestones in printing Bibles in America (first Bible printed on American-made paper and American-made typesetting), and they were printed in German.  Franklin was a notorious anti-German bigot, and used his monopoly power in the printing business to try putting the Sauers out of business.  Franklin had considerable control over the paper and ink trade, as well as publishing distribution, and his attempts to wipe out the Sauers led them to manufacture their supplies and create their own distribution network.  The Sauers, just as the “patriot” presses did, wrote criticisms of the Stamp Act and other English colonial measures.  When the “patriots” began advocating armed resistance, Christopher II backed off, due to his pacifism.  He also was an advocate of humane and fair treatment of the Native Americans, their ongoing dispossession and genocide quite obvious.  Christopher II did not align with either side during the American Revolution, but his son became a British Loyalist, as did Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son William. 

While some scholars today debate whether the famous kite-flying experiment ever took place, it may have been William Franklin who built and flew the famous kite in that dangerous thunderstorm, while his father hid in a nearby shelter.  If the experiment took place, William was the witness.  Father and son were both English loyalists before the 1770s.  William became the New Jersey governor and headed the Board of American Loyalists.  Father changed his stripes, while the son remained loyal to the Crown.  Ben arranged for his son’s harsh imprisonment during the American Revolution, and later compelled him to sign over his properties.  Father and son did not part on good terms.  While nearly disinheriting his son, Franklin’s will stated a little vindictively,

“The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavoured to deprive me of.”

Christopher Sauer II never advocated violent resistance, nor did he take sides, because any loyalty oath was against his religious convictions, but the “patriots” nevertheless seized and sold off his business and properties to their fellow rebels, cheaply.  They imprisoned and tortured the elderly Sauer, and he died a pauper in 1784.  Franklin apparently profited from the seizure of Christopher Sauer’s printing property.[171]  In the Sauers’ case, Franklin’s “free press” ideals did not comfortably mesh with the reality of his actions.  He acted just like a capitalist, trying to wipe out the competition, and his huge fortune may not have been amassed as honestly as his hagiographers would have people believe.  The original Constitutional Convention was a bona fide conspiracy, the Founding Fathers far overstepping their authority.  The Pennsylvania Herald was bought out by the Founding Fathers during the Constitutional Convention, because it was reporting the facts from that illegal convention.  With the press thus bought out and silenced, the American people knew nothing about the most important issue of the day.  That censorship also foreshadowed how the American press is censored today, by capitalistic means, not direct government intervention.  The Constitutional Convention was not exactly a democratic undertaking.  In fact, the Founding Fathers generally dreaded democracy.[172]  Franklin headed the first abolitionist society in America, although he was a slave-owner and slave trader himself who partly built his fortune on running ads for recapturing runaway slaves.  He never freed his slaves, and his stance on the issues is far less than heroic.[173] 

The only non-slave-owning, non-plantation-owning president of the first five was John Adams, who joined his Founding Father brethren in bestowing subhuman appellations upon the natives.  In 1775, he called them “blood Hounds” when they fought alongside the French a decade earlier, but the next year, while calling them “Savages with their cruel, bloody dispositions,” Adams, when considering the early British military successes, thought that the revolutionaries “need not be so delicate as to refuse the assistance of Indians.”[174]  By happenstance, Morton’s Merry Mount was on the Adams’ family lands, and John sought long and hard for Morton’s New English Canaan, and after half a century of searching (because the Puritans’ suppression efforts were so effective), his son John Quincy finally found a copy of it in Europe.  Adams concurred with his Puritan forefathers about the depraved nature of Morton and the degenerate spectacle of Morton and the natives dancing and playing together.  With Morton and the natives long gone, his book was more of a curiosity than a threat, and Adams even found pleasure in Morton’s work and vision, from a safe two centuries later. 

Adams allied himself with Alexander Hamilton (about the only Founding Father who freed his slaves).  Adams was the vice president under Washington, but in those days, there was not a president/vice president ticket as America has today.  Adams became vice president because he was in second place in receiving Electoral College votes cast for president.  Adams generally sided with Washington’s policies as vice president, and when he became president, he did nothing to ameliorate the dispossession of the Native Americans, being the “blood Hounds” that they were. 

The lustrous aura surrounding the Founding Fathers dims greatly when the minimized facets of their lives are considered.  They were all-too mortal.  As Howard Zinn has written, the American Revolution was “A Kind of Revolution.”[175]  Although there was some of the “rabble” effect of the common people, as in the English Civil War, the American Revolution was obviously a revolt of American elites, as shown by the names that signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution giving full citizens’ rights to white, land-owning men, and the fact that the oligarchy tried managing the “rabble” from the beginnings of the American Revolution, and quickly took over the American political system. 

Although Mason Locke Weems began fabricating fairy tales about George Washington immediately after his death, with Weems eventually concocting the cherry tree story from thin air, Boston was indeed a hotbed of radicalism before the Revolution began, and there was some true heroism shown by the Founding Fathers, and the common people played a significant role.  The “rabble” was given lip service, a Bill of Rights was passed, much as the English Parliament did exactly 100 years earlier, and some other measures that led to today’s America are reasons to look upon it with some respect. 

However, a critical look at the American Revolution can be sobering.  Studying how America celebrated its holidays in the early days, such as the Fourth of July, punctures a few myths.  Events such as the protest of the Stamp Act, Boston Tea Party, Boston Massacre and Paul Revere’s Ride look a lot different when the primary documents are considered and the patriotic veneer is stripped away.  Not only was Revere captured during his ride, the vast majority of Americans had never heard of him before Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about him in 1863.  Revere’s memory was in oblivion during the early 19^th century. 

When appraised objectively, the 1773 Tea Party was a deliberately provocative, quasi-military, destructive act, and no American revolutionary could have been too surprised when events led to war.  Why the Tea Party?  The thinking was to protest British taxation.  Fair enough, but the reasoning used by those “patriots” would fall flat today, when the nature of the cargo was contemplated.  The tea shipment was from the English East India Company, and was bought with India’s blood.  Today’s radicals might have been impressed if the Tea Party radicals had protested in sympathy with the truly suffering colonized peoples of Asia, and not the self-serving motivation of tax avoidance.  That observation is not in instance of presentism, for some activists of the day held that enlightened understanding of the British tea ”trade.”[176]  The American colonies, peopled by whites, were the least oppressed of the British colonies, and those who signed the Declaration of Independence were the colony’s elites, about half of them owning slaves, and they deliberately provoked Britain into America’s “War of Independence.” 

The Eastern Oligarchy quickly overcame Bostonian Radicalism, even before the Revolutionary War ended.  Even during the Revolutionary War, “patriots” were drafted, and the rich easily got out of service.  The American colonists had impressment riots during the 1760s, when the British Crown conscripted sailors, yet the American government was doing the same thing by 1779, before the war was won.  In Connecticut, a law was passed that specifically exempted Yale’s students and faculty from conscription, and even then, a drafted man could buy his way out of service for five pounds.[177]  Even then, the U.S. government could not afford to pay the soldiers, which was partly why Washington proposed “giving” Native American land to Revolutionary War veterans, and piracy was a popular way to serve one’s nation, getting a cut of the booty if one was lucky.  The practice of government-sanctioned piracy was nearly identical to how the Spanish Crown financed its 16^th century New World adventures, and was called “privateering.”  Official English pirates such as Drake became knighted.  Official American pirates became “patriots.” 

Washington set the blueprint for what the United States concentrated on during the next century: stealing a continent. 

To Steal a Continent – An Empire Begins

The first century of Spanish tenure in the New World was history’s greatest genocide, and honor was not easily found among the mercenaries that conquered and annihilated the Native Americans.  When the English showed up, they proved themselves as honorable as the Spanish, with poisoning the wine at a peace conference being an early example of English tactics.  Entering into treaties they had no intention of honoring was part of the English bag of tricks.  Those behaviors led to the native saying, “White man speak with forked tongue.”  Lying was not unknown among the native tribes, but somebody who lied was considered insane, one who lost touch with reality.[178]  It was more of a sickness than a crime to many native tribes.  Washington’s strategy was a more refined version of what Europeans had been doing to Native Americans for three centuries.  European violence, dishonesty and greed are not pleasant subjects, but they go a long way toward explaining why I live in Seattle, and are critically important to understand what is happening in today’s world. 

In American history circles, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are heroic icons.  No imperial taint besmirches their noble expedition of discovery…or does it?  When he sent out the Lewis and Clark expedition to scout the ultimate reach of empire in North America, Jefferson lied so creatively to the Spanish ambassador about U.S. intentions that Eisenhower’s biographer, Stephen Ambrose, wrote that in the midst of his show, Jefferson was “into a third or fourth degree of indirection.”[179]  Lewis, Jefferson’s emissary to the great unknown, had messages to deliver.  On the Missouri River, at present day Council Bluffs, so named after the meeting between the expedition and the Oto tribe, Lewis and his men dressed in their military best, and made a show of their military precision as they marched and shot their guns.  Then came the speech.  In essence, it was no different than the Requerimiento that the Spanish invaders read to their victims.[180]  Lewis began his speech by calling the natives “children,” and Jefferson the “Great Father.”  Lewis’ speech to the natives, who would have had limited understanding at best, as it went through a French translator, stated in essence,

“You have never seen my kind before, but we are a mighty people, having sanction from the highest authority, and this land you have lived on for time immemorial is now ours.  If you submit to our rule, it will go well for you, but if you resist, we will destroy you, and it will be your fault.”

European disease, especially smallpox, had already repeatedly decimated the Plains Indians.  The trigger-happy soldiers almost ended the exploration before it began, threatening to shoot their boat’s cannon at the Sioux, and it was only the cool head of a native leader that saved the day.[181]  Native tribes all along the way hosted and assisted the expedition.  The expedition left a swath of destruction in its wake, wantonly chopping down trees and shooting anything that moved in order to provision themselves.  Western North America was the Northern Hemisphere’s last place that had not been shorn of its fur-bearing animals.  The fur trade would eliminate the fur-bearing animals there too, very quickly, as well as most Indian tribes and the vast bison herds. 

Later in the expedition, on the way back, immediately after notifying some teenage Blackfeet braves that America had just allied with the Blackfeet’s traditional enemies and would arm them, Lewis and his men killed a Blackfeet boy and wounded a young brave while they tried stealing rifles and horses.  Lewis then hung a medal around the dead boy’s neck, to advertise the deed.[182]  Although Lewis and Clark were credited with great courage for mounting the expedition, how courageous was Clark’s slave, who was forced to walk every step with him, served Clark hand and foot and then was beaten by Clark when they got back, when he became “insolent” when Clark refused to free him or reunite him with his wife?[183] 

America’s most humiliating war was the War of 1812, with the British burning Washington, D.C.  American history textbooks rather lightly cover the War of 1812.  Americans soon saw it as another war of independence, and it was not until after that war ended that Americans began creating the “patriotic” culture that is familiar today.  The British, on the other hand, regarded the War of 1812 as little more than a sideshow.  The British were fighting the Napoleonic Wars, battling their old nemesis, which was Europe’s bloodiest era until World War I.  For the United States, it was another war of expansion, with American “frontiersmen” wanting the U.S. government to conquer Canada, seize Spain’s imperial lands in southern North America, and, as always, steal more Native American land. 

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had far-reaching influence.  France was the home of the Enlightenment, but it was ruled by the feudalistic ancien régime, and the American Revolution seemed to be an example of what the Enlightenment was capable of producing.  In 1789, the same year that George Washington came to office as the first American president, French citizens stormed the Bastille.  From an auspicious beginning, it did not take long for the French Revolution to go sour.  By 1791, the royal family had become outright prisoners of the revolutionaries, and by 1792, the revolutionary government declared war on Austria and Prussia.  The wars did not go well, and the revolutionaries took it out on the monarchy.  Led by Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins, the revolutionaries beheaded Louis XVI with the revolutionaries’ new contraption, the “humanitarian” guillotine. 

By that time, England and Spain were also battling the revolutionary forces and whipping them.  Faced with mounting defeats on the battlefield, the revolutionaries turned on each other, and in 1793 the Jacobins approved a reign of terror on the populace to consolidate the revolutionary government.  A quarter million people were arrested during the reign of terror and the guillotines were used with vigor.  In 1794, the Jacobins turned on each other, and Robespierre and his cohorts all met the business end of their guillotines.  By 1795, France was in full retreat from its revolutionary zeal, and political rights were reserved for the wealthiest Frenchmen.  France was winning battles and the European coalition collapsed, with only Austria and England opposing France militarily by 1796.  In 1799, Napoleon came to power and things calmed down for a little while.  Napoleon eventually crowned himself emperor and handed out crowns to family members. 

By 1803, France and Britain were at war again.  The English Channel would prove to be one of Britain’s greatest assets, as it helped discourage invasion from France.  Napoleon decided it would be easier to invade Austria than England, and Napoleon quickly conquered Europe.  In 1807, Spain supported Napoleon in a war against Portugal, and for the next several years the Iberian Peninsula became the scene of the Peninsular War.  Napoleon’s continual battles with the British-supported Spanish guerillas weakened France’s military efforts, helping lead to Napoleon’s downfall. 

Napoleon’s biggest mistake, which Hitler also fell prey to a few wars later, was invading Russia.  After capturing a deserted and burned-out Moscow in the autumn of 1812, most of Napoleon’s half-million-man army died during the winter retreat.  While Britain had the English Channel as its greatest defense against invasion, Russia had its fierce winter as its greatest defensive asset.  The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars killed about five million people, and was Europe’s bloodiest period since the Thirty Years’ War, nearly two centuries earlier.  The Seven Years’ War and Napoleon’s reign foreshadowed the so-called World Wars of the 20^th century, which were really wars of empire between the Great Powers.  The Napoleonic Wars also marked the beginning of the end of Spain’s empire.  In the Seven Years’ War, Britain and France battled across the world, with France being the loser.  In North America, Britain got most of France’s imperial lands, and it also got Florida from Spain.  France held onto lands east of the Mississippi River, with Spain and Britain getting Louisiana. 

In 1800, Napoleon forced Spain to give back Louisiana, which the United States bought in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.  In 1802, Napoleon launched an invasion of Haiti to try putting down the slave rebellion, which began in 1791.  As was the case with Britain and Russia, geography was Haiti’s greatest defensive asset, and the tropical conditions decimated the French invasion.  Of the 28,000 French troops sent to Haiti, which landed in January 1802, 20,000 were dead by September, due to yellow fever and the fierce resistance of the ex-slaves.[184] 

As with all revolutions, theory and practice were at odds in Haiti.  In events leading up to the original rebellion, mulatto ex-slaves tried becoming a new, intermediary class that rode atop the ones still enslaved.  Encouraged by the French Revolution, which gave mulattoes some rights in 1791, a more popular rebellion took place.  Haiti’s revolution did not turn out as egalitarian as the revolutionaries hoped, although the Haitian constitution wisely forbade foreign land ownership.  A republic of ex-slaves caused fear and loathing throughout the West, especially in the slave-owning United States.  The United States would not recognize Haitian independence until 1862 during its Civil War, for obvious reasons.  As with every other colonial power, a fair amount of “miscegenation” happened in Haiti.  The offspring of French masters and slave women became house slaves, and had higher status than the pure African field slaves.  Even today, the more French blood a Haitian mulatto can claim, the better.  The mulattoes became Haiti’s ruling class, while others settled in New Orleans and became part of the Creole culture.  European racism still infects the New World.  There is not a nation in the Western Hemisphere where the rule (officially or unofficially) is not: “the lighter your skin, the better off you are.” 

The European chaos encouraged the Spanish colonies to revolt, beginning in earnest when Napoleon put his brother on the Spanish throne in 1808.  The colonists in Venezuela formed an independent government that refused to recognize Napoleon’s rule, and one of Venezuela’s elite, Simón Bolivar, became the junta’s representative to Britain, to try gaining recognition.  Bolivar’s attempts failed, and in 1811 the junta declared itself an independent nation.  The revolution failed the next year, as the royalists regained power, but the course was set, with Bolivar, a pupil of the Enlightenment, successfully ending Spanish rule in 1819 in what became Colombia.  He became its first president.  During the next several years, he led efforts to end Spain’s rule in what became Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. 

In Southern Spanish America, José de St. Martín led revolutionary efforts in Argentina and Chile, and he was the first to defeat royal forces in Peru, to later allow Bolivar to finish the job, which was not complete until 1825, when the Peruvian highlands were rid of the last royalist resistance.  That upland region became Bolivia.  Bolivar had grand plans to unite South America into a confederation, much as the English colonists had formed the United States, but his plans came to naught, and by 1828 he had become Colombia’s dictator, and in 1829 Venezuela proclaimed its independence from Colombia, and by the time Bolivar died in 1830, he was largely a pariah, and Venezuela would not even allow his body to be buried on its soil. 

Following Venezuela’s lead, Mexico had its Hidalgo Rebellion in 1810, in another attempt at bringing Enlightenment ideals to a New World colony, at least for its elites.  After numerous revolts and royalist counterattacks, Mexico gained its independence in 1821. 

When Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807, the Portuguese court fled to Brazil and set up operations there.  Despite attempts to suppress it, Enlightenment ideals also infected the Brazilian populace.  Portugal never quite had the fractious relationship with its colonies that Spain had, and Brazil was unique in Latin American by coming to its independence peacefully, in 1822. 

The only holdings that Spain was able to hold onto were in the Caribbean.  Cuba and Puerto Rico did not join the mainland revolts.  Cuba was a competitor of Haiti in the sugar trade, and the Haitian Revolution created many dead and fled plantation owners, something the rich Spanish overlords did not want to see happen in Cuba, so it stayed quietly in the Spanish fold. 

The post-9/11 patriotism that gripped the U.S. in late 2001 would have looked strange to the average American of 1810.  In Boston, the hallowed Fourth of July celebration was completely taken over by Puritanical Harvard-types, not long after the Revolutionary War was over.  The radical spirit that was sometimes seen in the American Revolution was wallpapered over by safe, conservative celebrations.  Even elite radicals such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams were quickly written out of the histories.  When Samuel Adams died in 1803, his passing was nearly greeted with a yawn, leading John Adams to state in 1809 that Hancock and his cousin were “almost buried in oblivion.”[185]  Washington was the only “hero” that Boston celebrated during the first fifty years after the American Revolution.  In Boston, there was no celebrating the anniversary of the “Tea Party,” the protests over the Stamp Act, the “Boston Massacre” or other revolutionary events.  There were not any 50^th anniversary celebrations of those events, even in Boston. 

It was not until the 1820s that Americans began recovering American Revolution memories, and their revisionism typically had a bias, serving the day’s agenda.  The Puritans’ reputation had faded to nothingness by 1820, especially as they made the mistake of supporting the British Crown during the American Revolution.  With the rising nationalism, they were rescued from oblivion in the 1820s, and eventually became the “Pilgrims,” although little about the popular representations of them is accurate.[186]  

In 1825, ascendant nationalism led to a big bash, with Lafayette, the French general whose forces were the deciding factor in the American Revolution (and he also took a prominent role in the French Revolution), coming to Boston during his American tour, and commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.  The rising tide of nationalism led to a big celebration in 1826 of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution.  When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, adversaries who personified America’s political philosophies, both died on July 4^th, 1826, Americans felt it was the sign of providence. 

George Robert Twelves Hewes was a shoemaker of modest means.  Shoemaking was a poor man’s trade in those days, and Hewes became one because he was too destitute and small (standing five feet, one inch) to pursue the more lucrative ones.  He was a participant in the “Boston Tea Party,” and eventually served in the American Revolution as a privateer (and his captain stole his lucrative share of the plunder) and was conscripted into the militia, and once bought his way out of conscription.  He met with General Washington and even repaired John Hancock’s shoes in his younger days, but his participation in the “Tea Party” brought him fame as America recovered its revolutionary memories.  He was about the only living survivor of the “Tea Party” in the 1830s.  The term “Tea Party” was never used to describe that event until the 1830s.[187]  A figure so obscure that most of his life lies beyond the recovery of historians, Hewes bathed in his newfound fame during the 1830s.  When seen in the golden glow of his celebrity and old age, Hewes recalled destroying the tea alongside John Hancock, a memory that was almost certainly false; the elite ringleaders of the tea action conspicuously stayed at the Old South facility when the “Tea Party” was arranged.[188] 

Christopher Columbus died in obscurity in 1506, but when mercenaries began discovering gold-plated civilizations on the New World’s mainland, Spain recovered Columbus from obscurity and he began becoming a heroic figure, although few, if any, facts support such stature.  Accompanying the rise in American nationalism, Washington Irving, a novelist, published a three-volume epic on the life of Columbus in 1828.  It became a huge bestseller.  Irving made up events from whole cloth, such as the Spanish Court doubting that the world was round, and Columbus setting out to prove it.  When the fabrications of Irving, Weems and others were discovered, American ideologists defended them.  The logic was that America needed its own mythology, separate from Europe’s.[189]  With all the fake hagiography being concocted by American mythologists, there was even an effort in the 19^th century to make Columbus a saint.  In 1831, a poem set to the tune of a drinking song won a contest, and the Star Spangled Banner became the U.S. national anthem. 

James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights, was president from 1809-1817, and as with Washington and Jefferson, he was another slave owning, Virginian tobacco plantation owner, and the international embarrassment that those slave-owning presidents were accumulating began weighing heavily on their images, if not their hearts.  As with the others, Madison tamely advocated slavery eventually becoming an extinct institution (long after he was gone), and was an early advocate of shipping the slaves back to Africa.  Later in life, he used novel reasoning to support the expansion of slavery to new lands as a way to “dilute” it.  He died in 1836, without having freed any of his slaves.  Europe began abolishing the slave trade before 1800, and most of Europe abolished it before 1820, and the United States appeared increasingly anachronistic, especially with its many slave-owning presidents. 

James Monroe was the U.S.’ fifth president, serving from 1817 to 1825.  Monroe, a protégé of Jefferson and another slave owning, Virginian tobacco planter, was another paternalistic racist who also favored eventually eliminating American slavery by shipping them back to Africa.  During his presidency, just such a colony was established in 1822, which later became Liberia.  Monroe sized up Indian lands during the 1780s, and his efforts led to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was designed to legitimate the American invasion, seizure and settlement of those lands.  Those machinations were part of Washington’s grand plan, even as native tribes were petitioning the U.S. government regarding the “illegal treaties” that were already being foisted on them.[190]  The U.S. government was planning on becoming solvent by selling off Indian lands, lands that were not theirs to sell.  Monroe also negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon’s France, which really was the purchase of rights of conquest.  It was the Indians’ land, not France’s, and no negotiations were made with the natives, as Jefferson’s emissary Lewis soon made clear.  

Monroe was James Madison’s Secretary of State.  Monroe led a brutal repression of a slave revolt in 1800, and all those slave-owning presidents were highly aware of what had happened in Haiti, and wanted no threat that American slaves might actually rise up and free themselves.  As governor of Virginia, Monroe refined the system of keeping the slaves suppressed and less likely to revolt.  Monroe presided over the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which extended slavery to southern North America as the empire expanded westward.  Madison and Jefferson both approved of the measure.  Monroe was a Revolutionary War veteran, and he got back into uniform, leading American forces during the War of 1812, and he became Madison’s Secretary of War after the British burned Washington D.C.  Four of the first five American presidents were land-grabbing, slave-owning empire-builders. 

All political systems have always ridden atop economic systems, and all those slave-owning Founding Fathers’ actions further highlighted that fact.  In those pre-industrial days, unless one had slaves, or colonial lands and subjects to exploit, one could not live a life of leisure, to contemplate the affairs of state and other lofty issues.  The ancient Greeks, in “democratic” Athens, had a similar philosophy, with slaves outnumbering citizens.  In that respect, the allusions to ancient Greece in American government are accurate.  The Founding Fathers saw the slavery economy as necessary to their livelihood, and no afflictions of conscience could persuade any of them to free their slaves and actually work for a living. 

In 1823, Monroe gave a speech to the U.S. Congress that became the Monroe Doctrine.  While his rhetoric sounded impressive, the reality was that he staked out Latin America as the United States’ arena of influence, with no European powers allowed.  Monroe virtually declared the United States a hemispheric empire in 1823, although there was still plenty of work to be done.  History has borne that notion out.  Between 1798 and 1945, the United States sent its soldiers abroad in 168 separate events.  Of those 168 events, 85 times the troops were sent to what was or is known as Latin America.[191] 

Andrew Jackson was America’s first president not from the Eastern Oligarchy, although he was another slave owner.  The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, Jackson was born after his father died and was raised in today’s Carolinas.  A fighter and brawler from a young age, he fought in the Revolutionary War at age 13, and all of his immediate family members died in the war, leaving him on his own at age 14.  Jackson became a lawyer, and in 1796 he became Tennessee’s first U.S. Congressman.  While in office, he aligned with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party and went on the record, calling Washington’s policy toward the Native Americans too lenient.  Jackson left Congress in 1798 and became a judge, retiring from that position in 1804.  Still having the fiery temper he displayed as a boy, Jackson brawled and dueled regularly.  Jackson’s violent, belligerent reputation got him elected to head the Tennessee militia in 1802, and when the War of 1812 broke out, Jackson offered to invade Canada, but was instead ordered to defend the imperial outpost of New Orleans.  His men were forced to return when their orders were reversed, and short-provisioned by government inadequacy, Jackson looked out for his men on the march back to Tennessee, earning their admiration and the nickname “Old Hickory.”   

By that time, Native Americans were virtually extinct in today’s Northeastern United States.  Washington’s plan was highly successful.  William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, spent the first decade of the 19^th century swindling the natives out of their treaty-provided lands, as he had been ordered to do.  The great Shawnee leader Tecumseh tried uniting Native Americans against the white invaders.  Tecumseh was at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but his resistance was more to not let the white men get any more Indian land.  The natives he influenced were following Jefferson’s prescription: settle down and adopt the white man’s ways.[192]  Jefferson’s advice was apparently more on the rhetorical level, seeming impressive, but to be avoided in practice.

Tecumseh did not believe that any tribe should cede lands without the consent of the others.  Tecumseh, returning the Founding Fathers’ racism in kind, adopted a cosmology that saw whites as a variety of pond scum.  His brother reformed himself from being a drunken Indian to turning his life around and becoming “The Prophet” to his people.  William Henry Harrison was surprised when the natives following Tecumseh’s teachings refused whiskey.  The natives were acting far too responsibly for Harrison’s liking, and were forming a united front.  Uniting the American colonies had won them independence from British rule, and a united native front might thwart U.S. imperial designs.  When faced with dwindling prospects of swindling the natives, and the appearance of an effort that could resist further white invasion, Harrison launched a pre-emptive strike in 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting mission.  Harrison led an army to Tippecanoe, Tecumseh’s headquarters.  Tecumseh’s brother, in charge while his brother was away, acted rashly and fell into Harrison’s trap, and after a bloody battle that saw more white casualties than native, the whites drove the Indians away and burned Tippecanoe.  Tecumseh returned months later to the ashes of his dreams. 

In post-9/11 America, white people might begin developing some comprehension of what North American natives were facing back then.  History has shown that cultures unravel when subjected to catastrophes that kill off large fractions of the population, such as what the Black Death did to Europe in the 1340s.  Although Osama bin Laden and gang is biting the hand that fed them, nobody seriously thinks that waves of Islamic settlers will be coming across the oceans, to invade and exterminate Americans; Native Americans faced just that.  By the American Revolution, the natives of Eastern North America clearly saw the trends, with many eastern tribes already extinct, and an inexorable march westward by the white invaders, destroying everything in its path in the name of “progress.”  Not only were the woods, creatures and natives disappearing under the boots and axes of the white juggernaut, but also there was active, exterminatory hatred directed at the natives from the very beginning of the white invasion…and it was successful.  Invasion, disease and environmental devastation were inflicted in never-ending waves upon the natives.  Miantonomi was perhaps the first North American native to figure it out, but was far from the last.  The Delaware sages clearly saw the disintegration of Native American culture, and as they were violently dispersed from their homelands, they influenced many inland tribes, Pontiac’s Ottawa tribe among them.  Pontiac’s efforts influenced Tecumseh’s, and the confederacy the tribes tried creating during the American Revolution. 

Tecumseh died in the War of 1812 a couple of years later.  He was about the Indian equivalent of George Washington, so his corpse was eagerly scalped by the American troops, and the frenzy to get pieces of him was heated.   One soldier contented himself with seizing a dime-sized piece of Tecumseh’s flesh, attached to a mere tuft of hair, which he produced in an interview seventy-three years later.  After being stripped and scalped, one enterprising soldier flayed Tecumseh’s body, cutting his skin into foot-long strips to make razor straps for his pals.[193] 

While Tecumseh was pursuing the shards of his shattered dreams in America’s Midwest, Old Hickory was making progress in America’s Southeast.  From the very beginning of the European invasion of the New World, even on Columbus’ first voyage, it really did not matter much if the natives were friendly or hostile; they all eventually died under the European boot.  Sometimes friendliness meant they were the first to be exterminated (such as scalps of friendly natives being easier to obtain than scalps of hostiles), and sometimes it meant they were the last to fall to their state (such as the Tlaxcalans).  The Cherokee tale is important.  Not only are they the largest surviving North American tribe, their journey demonstrates how even the most U.S.-friendly natives were doomed, if they lived on land the whites wanted.  The Cherokee were one of the “five civilized tribes,” which included the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole. 

The Iroquois lived at the north end of the Appalachians, and the Cherokee at the south end.  The higher elevation of their lands probably spared them the worst of the early diseases that Europeans introduced.  While the Iroquoian people engaged in the short-lived fur trade (the beaver was extinct in the Hudson River Valley by 1640), the Cherokee traded in deerskins for Europe’s manufactured goods.  In the early 1700s, England, Spain and France were jockeying for position in the region, with the English settlers doing their usual land grabbing, which led to numerous wars.  The natives were largely battling for survival, and allied however they could.  In the early 1700s, the Tuscarora were completely eliminated from their homeland in today’s North Carolina.  The survivors fled north and joined the Iroquois Confederation.  The Shawnee were also losers, first being kicked out of Ohio during the late 1600s by the Iroquois, with most of the scattered tribe moving to today’s Southeast U.S.  The wars down there saw many of them flee back to Ohio, and the English invasion of the Ohio River Valley inspired Tecumseh to try uniting his Shawnee with other tribes, to form a united front.  Other tribes simply disappeared in the mayhem.

In pre-Columbian times, the Cherokee probably controlled at least 100,000 square miles of territory, and may have had more than a half million people.  America’s Southeast was the most densely populated part of North America, and warfare and empire building were not unknown.  The Cherokee lived in palisaded towns in their heartland.  Soto was the last European to see those lands in close to their 1491 condition.  The Mississippian cultures built large mounds, as palaces, cemeteries and temples.  Those types of structures have only been built in densely populated regions.  By the time Soto saw those lands, the populations had probably already been reduced by European disease.  After Soto visited that desolate former empire, his entrada wandered through territory that was partly the Cherokee’s, as well as other tribes.  After Soto, a few more smallpox epidemics made their way through the area before the English began invading the region. 

The Cherokee have an Iroquoian language, and probably migrated from the Great Lakes region, as did the Tuscarora, at least several centuries before Soto showed up.  Iroquoian civilizations were matrilineal.  The high status of women is generally the sign of a healthy and vibrant society.  The other “civilized” tribes are from the Muskogean language family, and they also had matrilineal societies.[194] 

By 1700, Florida’s original inhabitants were nearing extinction.  The largely hunter-gatherer Calusan and Timucuan peoples became extinct in Florida before 1800.  The Apalachee people lived in northern Florida and were largely farmers, and did not become quite as extinct as the Timucuan and Calusan peoples.  During the destructions of numerous tribes of America’s Southeast, survivors joined with others, and the Seminole people are an amalgamation of tribal fragments of largely Muskogean peoples.  Even former African slaves joined the Seminole.  The word “Seminole” may be derived from the Spanish word for “runaway.” 

South Carolina was England’s early slave coast in the New World.  Just as the European slavers had done in Africa, the English armed coastal natives, turning them into pawns of the slave trade, encouraging them to use the English’s superior weaponry to invade inland and capture neighboring tribes.  Slave trains from inland were making their way to Charleston as early as the 1670s, to be sold into Caribbean slavery.[195]  The English slave trade quickly decimated the natives, and fragments of tribes came together to make new “tribes,” such as the Westos, who made a brief living enslaving other intact tribes.  When their utility expired, the Westos also became extinct.[196]  The English enslaved the Cherokee as early as 1681, and in 1693 the Cherokee sent a delegation to the South Carolina’s Royal Governor to ask for protection from the native slave raiders.  The year before, the Shawnee, who the Cherokee welcomed (to become a buffer tribe - it was not a completely humanitarian act) to their lands, destroyed a Cherokee village while the men were away hunting, and sold the women and children into slavery.  It was an act of treachery that the Cherokee never forgot, and the Shawnee were eventually expelled back to the northern lands, with the Cherokee happy to see them go.

Because of South Carolina’s continued pursuit of the flesh trade, the tribes united and began a war against South Carolina in 1715.  The Cherokee began fighting as English allies as early as 1689, in England’s imperial struggles with France.  After the war of 1715 briefly interrupted their relationship, the Cherokee signed their first treaty in 1721, which ceded land to British colonists. 

Similar to the Iroquois, the Cherokee were a democratic people.  In 1730, there were less than 50,000 Cherokee left, and the English at Charleston tried making one of them an “emperor.”  Some young braves visited King George II in England, and supposedly gave fealty to the King, but those boys did not run the Cherokee people, although one of them subsequently became prominent.  In 1738, a slave ship to Charleston brought smallpox, and killed off at least a quarter of the remaining Cherokee, while also sweeping through other local tribes, such as the Catawba.  By 1730, the Cherokee were as low as ten percent of their numbers of two centuries earlier, and another large fraction was taken away in one swoop in 1738.  Another devastating plague swept through in 1753, bringing the Cherokee population to perhaps 25,000 (estimates vary, going as low as 10,000 in 1780), where it would largely remain until they were forcibly removed during the 19^th century. 

Largely because of epidemics, widowed lands were easier to give up than occupied ones, such as the Wampanoag welcome to the Puritans.  The wars, epidemics and continually encroaching settlers created massive displacements among the native tribes.  Tribes were forced away from the eastern coastline, and intruded upon neighboring tribes.  Sometimes inland tribes would allow the coastal tribes to settle with them, and other times they might resist or otherwise give less than a friendly welcome.  Surviving tribes would be crowded together, and formerly friendly relations would degenerate into hard feelings and warfare, as each tribe tried surviving.  The Creek and Cherokee shared hunting grounds in today’s northern Georgia, but settler pressures led to them fighting a war that began in 1752. 

The British were arrogant, with a predilection for murder, and few natives liked them much, but they made the best trade goods, and were cheaper than what the French offered.  The French had greater regard for the natives, and did not try imposing their notions of what people should be like, at least not nearly to the degree that the British did.  The Cherokee were the region’s dominant tribe, and the British worked hard at maintaining a good relationship with them. 

The British were soon allying with the Creek to fight against the Spanish settlements, eventually laying siege to St. Augustine.  The French were also in the picture, trying to form alliances with tribes, to fight the British.  The French generally allied with the Algonquin tribes of the north, and they were able to ally with the less-warlike Choctaw in the south (the Choctaw-French alliance also split the tribe).  The Chickasaw were bitter enemies of the French, as the French tried dominating the Mississippi River for trade purposes, and tried exterminating the Chickasaw during the early 1700s.  The French never successfully penetrated the Cherokee region, largely because of Chickasaw resistance, which helped bring an end to France’s imperial designs in North America.[197] 

When the Cherokee-Creek war ended in 1755, with the Cherokee victorious, the Cherokee then supported the British in the French and Indian Wars, at least for a time.  The Cherokee fought alongside the British during the wars, but there was continual uneasiness, as the colonists always coveted Indian land.  The British built forts in Cherokee lands to protect the colonists, supposedly from the French and their allies, but the British always suspected the Cherokee of having French sympathies.  There were sporadic conflicts with the Cherokee and white settlers, although the British tried hard to maintain the peace, at least while the Cherokee were useful. 

In 1758, a Cherokee war party was traveling with British forces through Virginia when the Cherokee lost their provisions while crossing a river.  Their “allies” abandoned them, leaving them to get home on their own.  Some angry braves then helped themselves to local provisions, such as Virginian horses.  Skirmishes broke out, with Virginians killing Cherokee warriors and selling their scalps for the Virginia bounty.  An Indian scalp brought fifty pounds in Virginia, the equivalent of a year’s income for a Virginian farm, and bounty hunters sold the scalps of “friendlies” as “hostiles” regularly.  Attacks and counterattacks occurred along the Cherokee frontier, and angry braves prevailed over the chiefs who sought peace.  The British were beating the French by that time, had less use for their native “allies,” and a war broke out between the Cherokee and British in 1759.  The British soldiers, who had been drunkenly raping the local natives, kidnapped a Cherokee peace delegation, then murdered them when Cherokee braves attacked the fort where they were held and killed one of the rapists.  Those events inflamed matters.  The killing escalated, with the Cherokee laying siege to Fort Loudon, and Amherst sending a huge expedition to the region in 1760.  The Cherokee chiefs were dismayed that their English allies were making war against them.  The Cherokee made several attempts to gain native allies against the English, but were unable to.  After massacres on each side, and an English expedition that destroyed many Cherokee villages, a “peace” was negotiated in 1761, where the Cherokee ceded huge chunks of land along the Carolina frontier.  Thousands more Cherokee died in the war.[198] 

Watching the British turn on their allies made a deep impression on the natives along the northern frontiers, and helped lead to Pontiac’s “rebellion.”  The British inflicted genocide on the Abenaki people at the same time, which made their intentions clear.  Even so, the Cherokee became British allies again, even as greedy colonists ignored the Royal Proclamation.  Daniel Boone’s penetration of Cherokee hunting grounds led the Cherokee elders to give in to the inevitable, “selling” the lands in Kentucky and Tennessee to the speculators in 1775.  The Cherokee chief Attakullakulla, who was the “emperor” that visited King George II in 1730, and who was raised in the Cherokee village that Tennessee is named after, acquiesced to the inevitable.  He saw the teeming hordes of England and the writing on the wall.  His son, however, did not.  A young warrior who survived smallpox epidemics, with his skin heavily scarred, he defied the treaty, making the following prophetic speech before leaving.

“Where now are our grandfathers, the Delawares?  We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains.  Now that hope is gone.  They have passed the mountains, and have settled upon Cherokee land.  They wished to have that usurpation sanctioned by treaty.  When that land is gained, the same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other land of the Cherokees.  New cessions will be asked.  Finally the whole country, which the Cherokees and their fathers have so long occupied, will be demanded, and the remnant of Ani-Yunwiya, “The Real People,” once so great and formidable, will be compelled to seek refuge in some distant wilderness.  There they will be permitted to stay only a short while, until they again behold the advancing banners of the same greedy host.  Not being able to point out any further retreat for the miserable Cherokees, the extinction of the whole race will be proclaimed.  Should we not therefore run all risks, and incur all consequences, rather than submit to further laceration of our country?  Such treaties may be all right for men who are too old to hunt or fight.  As for me, I have my young warriors about me.  We will have our lands.”[199]

Attakullakulla’s son waged a guerilla war against the white invaders, in today’s Tennessee, for the next generation.  When the American Revolution began, the Iroquois Confederacy and other hostile tribes such as the Shawnee saw where events were headed.  If the colonists succeeded in breaking away from their mother country, the Indians would be more certainly doomed.  A delegation was sent to the Cherokee in 1776, as part of an effort to unite all tribes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico against the colonists. 

By that time, the British colonies had taken on characteristics that could be discerned during the next century, dynamics that can be easily seen in the United States today.  From the earliest days of the Spanish invasions, the losers of European society came to the New World.  Europe’s upper classes rarely made trips to the New World or other imperial lands, unless they were royal representatives.  European sovereigns did not go abroad to survey their realms.  The lower class invaders turned themselves into local elites, and Europe’s rulers continually tried undermining colonial aspirations, and made grand pronouncements in Europe about respecting native lives.  The colonists mostly laughed at the proclamations and laws, which was particularly evident in the Spanish and English colonial experience.  English subjects even sold themselves into slavery, called indentured servitude, to gain passage to the New World. 

Even though early Jamestown “settlers” ran off and lived with the natives, and Morton had high appreciation for the native way of life, and the spectacle of the “Unredeemed Captive” played itself out in the early 18^th century[200], by the time of the American Revolution, the new elites had carved out estates in the settled east, and were the forerunners of today’s Eastern Establishment.  The opportunities for free land and dreams of estates lay on the frontiers of English/British encroachment, and was pursued by the losers of colonial life.  Trappers, traders and soldiers were the early English vanguard, followed by settlers.  While frontiersmen might wear buckskins and take native wives, they rarely thought like Indians, and the native ideal of harmony with nature was in stark contrast to how frontiersmen behaved.  Eastern North America was completely deforested by those frontier settlers, which wiped out both native humans and animals.  The white invaders would rarely make enlightened contact with the natives, and the genocidal aspirations in Amherst’s letters to his men (a sentiment that was missing in his writings about his French adversaries) were more literate versions of the scalp-hunting attitudes of frontier settlers. 

Attakullakulla’s son waged warfare against the intruders, but his was the minority opinion among the Cherokee.  Attakullakulla’s niece married a white trader and distinguished herself in battle against the Creek.  She sought peace with the whites, and even warned them about the plans of Attakullakulla’s son.  In the big picture, guerilla warfare by tribal minorities provided justification of slaughter and dispossession of entire tribes.  When the northern delegation came in 1776, Attakullakulla’s son gladly accepted the war belts, while the Cherokee elders held a sad silence.  By 1777, the rebel colonists had overrun the Cherokee once more, launching extermination raids against Cherokee villages, mostly neutral ones.  The elders then sued for peace, and signed a treaty at gunpoint that gave up nearly all their lands in the Carolinas.  Another treaty in 1781 took more land.  Most Native American tribes sided with the British, or more properly, against the rebel colonists.  Not the Cherokee. 

Although Washington’s secret plan of 1782 made U.S. goals evident, the first tribe the United States made a post-revolution treaty with was the Cherokee.  The 1785 Hopewell Treaty was about the only one that did not make land cessions a part of it.  High-minded happenings in Washington translated poorly to the frontier.  White invaders had zero respect for the Hopewell Treaty, and the breakaway “state” of Franklin ran the Cherokee off their lands, and in 1788 murdered several elderly chiefs under a truce flag.  Although natives could perform atrocities, it was nearly always provoked, and a disinterested frontier observer remarked that the settlers were “in the wrong four times out of five.”[201] 

Another of Attakullakulla’s sons participated in the 1791 annihilation of the American Army in the Ohio River Valley, but in 1794, all Cherokee factions signed another treaty with the U.S.  In 1792, the United States allocated funding to begin trying to turn the Native Americans into European peasants, and the Cherokee were the logical tribe to begin the experiment on.  The U.S. began providing plows, spinning wheels and other European technology.  It was not exactly an altruistic move.  Sedentary farmers and craftsmen needed far less land than hunter-gatherers, and the Cherokee adopted the white man’s ways in order to survive.  That transformation caused upheaval within the Cherokee people, as many of the white man’s ways were disgusting to native sensibility.  Nevertheless, the Cherokee adopted European methods to such an extent that the name “civilized” was applied to their tribe, and others who adopted similar practices.  The Cherokee became cotton growers and cloth weavers instead of deer hunters and skinners.  Apparently, George Washington genuinely tried the assimilation policy on the Cherokee, especially after the 1791 disaster. 

The Cherokee kept ceding lands in “treaties,” in 1798, 1804, 1805 and 1806.  Some pro-French Cherokee migrated to today’s Arkansas in 1763, after the French lost the war against the British and the Spanish granted them land.  Pro-British Cherokee also began migrating there in 1782.  After the United States “bought” the land by the Louisiana Purchase, in an 1817 treaty it officially recognized the Western Cherokee.  Under pressure from white settlers, the Western Cherokee were induced to move to Oklahoma in 1828. 

The Eastern Cherokee kept assimilating the white ways and giving up their lands.  With white influence came tribal corruption, with lying and greed making their appearance among the warriors and chiefs, which was something new to the Cherokee.  The more traditional Cherokee (usually the full-bloods) migrated to the western reservation, and the Eastern Cherokee adopted the white ways.  In the 1806 treaty, the Cherokee ceded ten million acres, an area half as large as today’s South Carolina.  The chief who negotiated the treaty, and got rich in the process of selling out his people, was assassinated by a faction of young men, led by a brave named Ridge.  The chief was so hated that even his relatives did not mind his murder.[202] 

Ridge became a prominent Cherokee leader, and led the effort to assimilate the white culture.  The assimilation brought on problems that no society could easily manage.  The entire fabric of Cherokee existence was under siege.  Women were to stop tending plants in the fields and become textile makers, while the men performed plow agriculture.  Native concepts of reciprocity and the concept of sufficiency did not mesh with the “greed-as-a-virtue” attitudes of whites, who grabbed whatever they could and always wanted more.  Try imagining a female American president that dismantles the military, declares holidays to bake bread, Christianity is discarded as a male aberration, and she declares a Goddess-based, nature-worshipping religion as the national religion.  The culture shock the Cherokee underwent was greater, but they underwent it, and it presented them with a chance to survive. 

By 1811, more than 1000 traditional Cherokee had migrated west, and Ridge and others who favored adopting the white man’s ways dominated the Eastern Cherokee.  Great rifts rent the “civilized” tribes.  During 1811, Tecumseh toured Eastern North America, trying to unite all tribes against the white invasion.  Tecumseh gave symbolic red sticks to the tribes he spoke to.  The sticks were prepared by his brother, the Prophet, and were to help tribes mark time until their uprising, each stick representing a moon cycle.  Although his brother was known as The Prophet, prophetic ability was apparently a family talent, and Tecumseh had prophesied for several years that a great earthquake would mark the time when the tribes should make their move to present a united front to the whites.  Tecumseh was born on the night of a “shooting star,” and also prophesied that a shooting star would also be a sign that the Great Spirit supported his efforts. 

At a huge meeting at the Creek capital, in present-day Alabama, attended by five thousand natives from numerous tribes, Tecumseh spoke of his plan, and the red stick bundles were only three moons large.  At that meeting, Ridge threatened to kill Tecumseh if he came to speak to the Cherokee.  A Creek chief challenged Tecumseh, and Tecumseh told the chief his blood was white and that when he went home to Tippecanoe, he would stomp on the ground and shake the land, to let the tribes know the truth.  On November 7, 1811, the battle of Tippecanoe was fought, which was Harrison’s pre-emptive strike against Tecumseh’s efforts.  On November 16^th, a great meteor was seen in the sky, supposedly informing the natives that Tecumseh’s efforts had the Great Spirit’s approval, but Tippecanoe’s ashes said otherwise.  A month later, while traveling back to Tippecanoe, at a camp near New Madrid, Missouri, Tecumseh received word of the disaster of Tippecanoe.  That same night, December 16, 1811, the first New Madrid quake hit, which was a series of quakes that are the strongest in U.S. history, measuring more than eight on the Richter scale, which caused church bells to ring in Boston.  It stands today as a most curious testament to Tecumseh’s alleged ability.  Because of Tippecanoe, Tecumseh (some say it was his brother) also allegedly cast a curse on the United States, where every president elected in a year ending in zero would die in office.  Harrison was the first to fall to this alleged curse, being elected in 1840 and dying soon after coming to office.[203] 

With the destruction of Tippecanoe, The Prophet lost standing among the natives, Tecumseh’s plans were ruined, and he died in battle against the Americans a couple years later.  Many Creeks took his message to heart, and they dyed their war clubs red, becoming known as the Red Sticks.  The last New Madrid quake was the most devastating, occurring on February 13, 1812.  In June the War of 1812 began, and Tecumseh’s alliance was in ruins.  The Red Stick faction, acting on its own, initiated a civil war among the Creeks, warring against Creek villages that had adopted the white man’s ways.  The Spanish armed the Red Sticks, and in 1813, a group of U.S. soldiers stopped and looted a Red Stick pack train, which ignited war with the Red Sticks.   The Red Sticks then laid siege to Fort Mims in Alabama, and about 250 settlers were killed, which made huge news that swept the U.S. 

The Cherokee elders advocated neutrality in the latest white man’s war, and wanted no part of the Creek civil war.  Ridge however, was violently opposed to Tecumseh’s movement, and he gathered hundreds of men and joined Andrew Jackson’s motley crew.  While “Old Hickory” gained the respect of his men during the march back from the aborted trip to New Orleans, as time wore on, with his men weary and under-provisioned, they lost their morale and wanted to go home.  Old Hickory then became draconian, executing a teenage soldier who became unruly, making an example of him.  He took on Ridge’s braves, about five hundred strong, and made Ridge a major in the Tennessee Militia, and Ridge called himself Major Ridge for the rest of his life.  The Cherokee were much better fighters than the white soldiers, something Jackson readily admitted.  Friendly Creeks also were part of the fighting force.  Jackson did not trust his Cherokee fighters, but willingly used them as high-grade cannon fodder. 

In March 1814, a force of 2000 whites and 500 Cherokee and Creek cornered the Red Stick army at what is today called Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama.  Jackson had never led a battle before, and his strategy amounted to firing cannons at their fortifications.  The action would have probably ended in failure if not for the Cherokee braves who swam the river and attacked the Red Sticks from the rear.  Their efforts divided the Creek defense, and the whites then laid siege to the fortifications.  In that fierce battle, eight hundred of the thousand Red Sticks died.  The aftermath was as brutal as they come.  The whites were not content with mere scalps.  They skinned Red Stick bodies to make bridle reins, belts and other fashionable items.  Jackson ordered cutting off the noses of dead Red Sticks to get an accurate body count.  He later gave body parts to the “ladies of Tennessee” as souvenirs.  Davy Crockett, who fought at Horseshoe Bend, as did Sam Houston, wrote that the troops ate potatoes that had been basted in the fat of Red Stick warriors.  That battle made Jackson an American hero.  Part of the Cherokee logic was that if they adopted the white man’s ways and fought with him, they might be able to survive without being eliminated from their lands, as most other tribes had already suffered.  On the way home, the Tennessee volunteers passed through Cherokee lands and ravaged them.  When the Cherokee complained, Jackson was furious with them for making the scandal a public matter.[204] 

Although the Creek saw the Red Stick War as a civil war among the Creek and not against the U.S., Jackson got himself appointed the treaty commissioner, and forced the Creek to cede the largest single cession the natives of the South ever made: 23 million acres, an area substantially larger than South Carolina.  Even land of the white-friendly Creeks, Creeks who had fought with Jackson, was taken from them.  Part of the “ceded” land the Creek and Cherokee had shared.  Jackson and his friends bought up the choice lands that he forced the Creek and Cherokee to cede.  It was an early example of Jackson’s theory of government, where the winner gets the “spoils.”  Jackson should not be treated too harshly here; George Washington did virtually the same thing, speculating in lands that his troops violently wrested from the natives.  The Cherokee protested Jackson’s claim on the land they shared with the Creek, and Jackson acted typically: he bribed most of the Cherokee chiefs into acquiescence.[205]  Where Washington’s plan called for negotiating with tribes individually, to play divide-and-conquer, Jackson introduced a new tactic, breaking up tribal lands into individual plots, then being able to bribe and coerce individual landowners, cutting out the tribes altogether.[206]  Bribery and threat of attack were Jackson’s two primary methods of dealing with the Indians, especially when stealing their land, something that Jackson openly admitted, saying that treaties were secured by playing to the Indians’ “avarice or fear.” 

Jackson’s tactics were openly fraudulent, and characterized the legal treatment that the U.S. imposed on the natives.  During the century that the U.S. entered into treaties with native tribes, a common tactic was getting the chiefs roaring drunk, and when they had sobered up, they realized that somebody got them to “sign” a treaty that ceded their lands.  Treaties entered into at gunpoint, outright forgery of a chief’s signature onto treaties (not a difficult task, when a chief did not know how to read or write), straight bribes to a “chief” who was not empowered to negotiate for his tribe - those were typical U.S. tactics.  When Major Ridge and another prominent chief discovered what the chiefs had “negotiated” with Jackson, the head chief was stripped of his powers.  They protested, but the U.S. Senate ratified the fraudulent treaty.  Jackson only got one million of the two million acres that he and his cronies set their sights on.  Jackson was not happy.[207]  Even back then, Jackson’s goal was the removal of all Indians.  He did not believe that any Indian could ever become “civilized,” so removal or extermination was his goal.  In that instance, Major Ridge and John Ross successfully lobbied the U.S. government and got the treaty rescinded, for the first time ever. 

Jackson became a war hero again when his defense of New Orleans trounced the British a couple of weeks after the War of 1812 had ended.  After beating Napoleon, the British came in a little too arrogant, and the militia-types slaughtered them as they marched across an open field, thinking the “rabble” would scatter when seeing lines of marching soldiers coming at them. 

The fragments of destroyed Muskogean tribes fled to Florida, amalgamating with the Apalachee remnants, and became the Seminole.  On his own initiative, Jackson attacked and took the British fort at Pensacola on the way to New Orleans.  He wanted Florida, and was dismayed that he did not get it after the Battle of New Orleans.  Not to be thwarted, Jackson invaded Florida in 1818, which was a Spanish possession at the time.  John Quincy Adams was James Monroe’s Secretary of State when Jackson invaded Florida.  Jackson had no authority to invade Florida as he had.  Jackson had committed an unprovoked act of war against Spain, prosecuted with exceptional brutality.  Jackson, like Underhill and others before him, cited Old Testament stories to justify his actions, imagining that he was some kind of avenger for Jehovah.[208] 

Jackson’s invasion appeared less than godly, and more like a land-grabbing, bloody invasion of conquest, with the invasion’s leader getting rich off the lands he stole.  John Quincy Adams stood alone in the Monroe administration, defending Jackson’s invasion, casting blame on the Spanish.  Adams performed a remarkable Orwellian somersault, calling Jackson’s invasion, “defensive acts of hostility.”[209]  All the surviving ex-presidents approved of Adams’ gymnastics.  Adams became the sixth U.S. president, followed by Jackson.  Adams was the primary architect of the Monroe Doctrine, and he became president in 1825.  Jackson handpicked his successor, Martin Van Buren, who was his Secretary of State and campaign advisor. 

Jackson might have died at Horseshoe Bend, if not for the daring efforts of his Cherokee warriors, and Jackson led the swindle of the Cherokee.  Today, many Cherokees refuse to use twenty-dollar bills, because Jackson’s face is on them.  From Washington’s original subsidy of civilizing them, to the 1830s when Jackson was president, the Cherokee engaged in what may be history’s most astonishing feat of cultural change. 

The Cherokee were liberal in adopting people into their tribe, which is partly why they are the largest surviving tribe today.  John Ross was only one-eighth Cherokee.  There were blond haired and blue-eyed Cherokee.  A Western Cherokee, the reclusive Sequoyah, performed one of the greatest intellectual feats of all time by creating a Cherokee alphabet.  It was easy to learn, and most of the tribe became literate by 1825, with a literacy rate higher than most of the world, even the United States.  The Cherokee created a true nation, with a constitution, electing John Ross as its “Principal Chief.”  By 1828, they had a national weekly newspaper, published in Cherokee and English.  The Cherokee were out-whiting the whites.  The Cherokee were more prosperous than the whites in the vicinity, with their groomed lands and society being the envy of its neighbors.  They even had African slaves (the Cherokee’s slaves were largely treated better than African slaves of whites).  Subsequent events betrayed the racist foundation of the white invasions and exterminations of Native Americans.  Gold was found in northern Georgia in 1828 and 1829, creating a gold rush in Cherokee lands, with the white miners flooding in.  History has rarely recorded a baser breed of people than gold rush miners, as greed and desperation are their most salient characteristics, whether it was 16^th century Spain or 19^th century America.  The Georgia gold rush foreshadowed the gold rushes that propelled the invasion and “settlement” of whites west of the Mississippi River.  With a new lure of greed, the Georgia government then began plotting the Cherokee expulsion in earnest. 

Andrew Jackson was the first president to bring the frontier mentality into the White House.  His Indian-killing reputation got him elected.  While all the previous presidents were dishonest land-grabbers, they at least adopted a “civilized” veneer to their murderous criminality.  Jackson often dispensed with even that.  Jackson openly bribed people, and adopted the “spoils” system of governance, where party loyalists were appointed to government posts.  His reputation was so well known that people stayed at his inauguration until the wee hours, hoping that if they hung around long enough, they might be appointed to government positions.  Jackson’s tenure marked the rise of machine politics in America. 

When he ascended to the presidency, Jackson soon pressed his “Indian Removal” dreams.  After he was elected but before he took office, Jackson wrote to a Georgia Congressman about the Cherokee, “Build a fire under them.  When it gets hot enough, they’ll move.”[210]  Indian removal was the biggest issue of his presidency.  In seven of his eight annual addresses to Congress, he talked about the “Indian Problem.”  Jackson pushed through his Indian Removal Act in 1830, which was called at the time the greatest issue ever to come before Congress, except for matters of war.  Although Jackson was its architect, he was a master of political doubletalk, and feigned powerlessness when Cherokee delegations called on their “great friend” to aid their plight.  A fraudulent subterfuge played out.  Native American tribes were always forced to deal with the U.S. government, even though the U.S. never kept up its end of the deal.  Now, Jackson played the “states’ rights” card, telling the Cherokee that the U.S. government was powerless in the face of the claims made by Georgia.  Jackson’s pushed through his Indian Removal Act, but when meeting the Cherokee delegates, he wrung his hands in impotence, when faced with Georgia’s might.  It was a genocidal con game, and helped lead to the American Civil War. 

The Cherokee kept playing in the rigged system, and even won in the U.S. Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Marshall issuing his famous 1832 ruling on Worcester v. Georgia, where he ruled that the federal government had jurisdiction over native lands, not the states.  Jackson made the infamous reply to Marshall’s ruling, stating, “John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can.”[211]  Beginning in 1836, the civilized tribes were removed from their homes at gunpoint, interned in concentration camps and force-marched several hundred miles (in the winter) to their new “homes” west of the Mississippi, in a dynamic that would foreshadow how the Nazis treated the Jews during the 1940s.  That forced removal is known as the Trail of Tears.  Jackson left office, in 1837, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, presided over the removal of the Cherokee.  White historians and scholars can be counted on to continually underestimate or ignore the body counts caused by their kind.  The death toll of the Trail of Tears (including internment, transport and resettlement) used to be estimated at only 15% to 25% of the removed populations, but the most recent and thorough study of the Cherokee removal estimates a 55% mortality rate, a rate that probably roughly applies to the other tribes that were force-marched.[212]  The “first lady” of the Cherokee, John Ross’ wife, died on the march. 

Major Ridge, who could not be bought when younger, and said he would kill anybody who sold off Cherokee lands, ended up signing the fraudulent “treaty” that led to the Cherokee’s forced removal.  The case can be made that Ridge, similar to other Cherokee elders over the generations, was simply succumbing to he inevitable, but when he signed it, he said he was signing his own death warrant.  He was right.  His cadre relocated with the Western Cherokee before the Trail of Tears, but when Trail of Tears survivors were finally delivered to the Western Cherokee, Ridge died by his own code, being assassinated along with others who had signed away Eastern Cherokee land.  The Seminole fought removal, beginning in 1835, and the U.S. waged a war of attrition against them for several years, with the Seminole finally surrendering in 1842. 

As with Las Casas and other Spaniards of conscience, there were some American observers whose humanity would not allow them to keep silent.  John Burnett was a U.S. soldier who participated in the Trail of Tears, and later wrote,

“School children today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed…

“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 I ever knew."[213]

Land grabbing and dispossessing the natives was how America was built, and was the essence of Jackson’s career, but future CIA-asset Arthur Schlesinger won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1945 Age of Jackson, and in it there is no mention of Jackson the land grabber, no mention of the Trail of Tears, no mention of his slave ownership, no mention of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which made him famous and won him the presidency.[214]  That is how a great deal of American “history” has been fabricated, by simply white washing over the greatest feats of the early robber-baron presidents, acting as if they never happened, and winning awards for doing so.  Schlesinger is also the most prominent person to fabricate the Camelot image of the Kennedy presidency.  The cultural awakening of the 1960s has helped ameliorate such nationalistic revisionism. 

While Jackson and friends were securing the South, the Northwest boundary was being expanded.  The Fox were nearly exterminated by a French-led alliance in 1730.  They barely survived, and lived with the Sac tribe in today’s Illinois and Wisconsin.  A century later, after Tecumseh died and settlers began flooding into today’s Midwest, the Sac and Fox chiefs were made drunk and “signed” a “treaty” that ceded their lands east of the Mississippi.  They acquiesced to the fraud and tried eking out a life in present-day Iowa, but many starved to death in the winter of 1831-1832, and the Sac chief Black Hawk led about two thousand of his people back to northern Illinois in early 1832 to plant crops, and the whites quickly began organizing a militia against them.  When faced with the mounting military effort, Black Hawk tried surrendering, but the militia fired on his people and the “Black Hawk War” thus began.  The Sac and Fox peoples then went on a fruitless quest to avoid the white troops, with braves raiding frontier farms and villages as they fled.  The Sac and Fox tried to go settle with other tribes that had already been forced west of the Mississippi, but the white army caught them trying to cross the Mississippi in 1833, and even though the natives tried surrendering, the whites engaged in an outright extermination of the Sac and Fox peoples, virtually completing what the French could not accomplish.  Two future presidents took part in the Black Hawk War, Zachary Taylor as an officer, and Abraham Lincoln as a foot soldier.[215]  Black Hawk was captured and then sent around the United States as an exhibit of a “humbled savage.”  After Black Hawk died, his remains were disinterred and put on display as trophies in an Iowa museum, which later burned down.  The tiny remnants of the Sac and Fox got a postage-stamp-sized reservation in Iowa, in return for officially “ceding” their last six million acres of land. 

The Spanish government allowed Americans to settle in Texas beginning in 1820, and the Mexican government foolishly allowed the practice to continue the next year.  The deal was for only American Catholics to settle Texas, but the American whites only pretended to be Catholic.  As the fake Catholics flooded in, they quickly wore out their welcome, especially as they brought African slaves with them, and Mexico opposed slavery.  The whites began trying to take Texas from Mexico as early as 1826, with its Fredonian Rebellion.  The rebellion caused the Mexican government to forbid more white settlement in Texas.  Afraid that Mexico would abolish slavery in Texas, the white settlers revolted, and stole Texas from Mexico in 1836. 

By 1840, except for tiny Iroquois reservations in New York and the few Seminoles who were holding out in Florida, the Native American was virtually extinct east of the Mississippi.  The vast tract of land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, which the British set aside for native tribes in 1763, was now completely in the hands of white Americans.  The tiny remnants of the Eastern Woodlands’ tribes were living largely in today’s Arkansas and Oklahoma, although the trend was forcing all of them into Oklahoma, which was about the most inhospitable land then known and available.  Every single American president to 1840 was an unabashed, land-grabbing empire builder.  As the “frontier” kept being pushed back, killing Indians was the American way to fame and fortune.  During the 19^th century, being known as an Indian fighter was the quickest way to garner votes, a trend that would continue after 1840. 

In 1840, there were about seventeen million Americans, as compared to less than four million in 1790, when the first U.S. census was taken.  The 1840s saw the U.S. in the midst of trends that define its character today.  Between Napoleon and World War I, European soil was largely free of warfare.  That was partly because the United States acted as a safety valve for poorer Europeans.  British subjects and Germans were the most common immigrants, and the Africans who came against their will as slaves.  Early industrialization in Europe was a hellish experience, with Britain leading the way.  British factories were known as “satanic mills” and dismal British urban life of the late 18^th and early 19^th century is epitomized by the work of Charles Dickens.  His Christmas Carol was published in 1843. 

The United States began a rapid industrial development, but Britain’s was even faster.  In 1830, the United States’ industrial output per capita was higher than any other nation in Europe, except for Britain, which was nearly twice as high, and was more than three times higher in 1860.[216]  The era of the corporation was on the rise.  Cornelius Vanderbilt began making his fortune as a war profiteer during the War of 1812, getting the government contract to supply the forts guarding New York Harbor.  He quickly built a shipping empire, then began building a railroad empire, and he was worth $20 million when the Civil War broke out, when the robber barons really began their ascent in America.  The du Pont commercial empire was begun in 1802, by a pupil of Lavoisier.  The du Pont company provided gunpowder during the War of 1812.  Warfare and monopolies became the American way to build fortunes, which led to the Gilded Age in the late 19^th century. 

The Great Potato Famine of the 1840s caused millions of hungry Irish to leave for the New World, and millions of Germans and British also came during those years.  Large families and greater life expectancy also contributed greatly to America’s population increase.  Slave populations, unless they are worked to death as the Native Americans were, tend to have life expectancies not far removed from the master population, which led to a phenomenon unique to the Untied States: the ability to breed slaves.  By the Civil War, there were about 6 million Africans in the United States, but only about a half million slaves were brought to what became the United States. 

By 1870, the U.S. population tripled from its 1830 population, to 39 million.  American xenophobia also began during that time.[217]  The natives had been exterminated or removed, and African slaves largely accepted their lot, and Anglos dominated, especially in the Eastern Establishment.  The immigrants did not get the red carpet treatment, although their horrid living conditions were better than what they left in Europe.  American life expectancy was far greater than Europe’s early on, as the whites plundered such a rich continent.  The United States became a relief valve for Europe’s huddled masses.  By 1900, the United States had 76 million people in it, nearly all of whom were of European extraction, except for the 9 million Africans. 

Native Americans were virtually extinct by 1900, as were many of their fellow creatures.  The period from 1700 to 1900, when the English/American Empire expanded across North America, is arguably the most single-minded and sustained effort of environmental destruction that any species has ever inflicted upon this planet.  John Adams wrote that his family cut down more trees than any other family in America.  As one author wrote, the ax was the appropriate symbol of the early American attitude toward nature.[218]  North America probably had earth’s greatest store of environmental wealth, and the English and Americans ruthlessly plundered it.  Eastern North America had the world’s largest temperate forest, and the old saying that a squirrel could have run from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, without ever touching ground, was not very fanciful.  Eastern North America was almost completely deforested by those “pioneers.”  The passenger pigeon, which may have flown in the greatest flocks our planet has seen, was on the brink of being driven to extinction in 1840, in capitalistic fashion.  Expanding railroads in the 1850s allowed for a short-lived industry of killing the pigeons in the Midwest and transporting them to East Coast markets.  Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions, and migrating flocks turned day into night, but by the 1880s their populations had collapsed, and the last passenger pigeon died in captivity in 1914.  The woodland bison, which roamed today’s Eastern United States, was rendered extinct by the early 19^th century.  

The single greatest cause of the explosion of world human population, which began growing with increasing rapidity during the last half of the 1700s, was probably the introduction of New World crops to the rest of humanity.  For providing human-digestible calories, New World crops were superior in significant ways.  Maize is earth’s hardiest seed crop, and Native Americans developed more than three thousand varieties of it, so it could thrive from northern forest to arid desert, from mountaintop to seashore.  Northern China came to subsist on the sweet potato.  Ireland, Russia and other harsh climates came to rely on the potato, which provided nearly double the calories of a wheat crop in half the time for less work at cultivation.  It was a healthier food than wheat (people can subsist solely on the potato) and was not as subject to the vagaries of weather.  The cassava root and maize became the staple of Africa, which led to its population increase that began during the 19^th century.  When New World crops were introduced to Old World agriculture, famines decreased and populations exploded, in Malthusian fashion.  With the introduction of the potato, Ireland grew from 3.2 million in 1754 to 8.2 million in 1845, while an additional 1.75 million migrated to the New World.  Today, more than half of the world’s crops are of New World origin.[219] 

Native Americans developed more than three thousand varieties of potato, and the white man made fatal errors in adopting New World crops.  The Irish came to depend solely on one variety of potato, which made the Irish subsistence crop vulnerable, and in 1845 a blight ripped through not only the Irish mono-crop, but also Europe’s, leading to a famine.  The Great Potato Blight and subsequent famine reduced Ireland’s population by more than a million, and initiated another great wave of migration to the New World. 

To Steal a Continent – Finishing the Job

The 1840s saw the ascendance of two cultural phenomena.  One was the xenophobia directed toward non-Anglo whites, and the other was a concept known as Manifest Destiny.  An American diplomat, when making the case for annexing Texas, first used the term in 1845.  It borrowed from the Jewish idea of a land promised to them by God, and then killing the inhabitants to get it.  Manifest Destiny provided a similar rationale for the U.S., and even retroactively sanctified its vast murders.  The Indians of eastern North America were gone, so American racism needed a new target, and the immigrants, even though their skin was white, served that purpose.  On the frontiers however, there were still natives to eradicate, and the hatred could still be focused on dark-skinned subhumans. 

Manifest Destiny may have been an attempt to reduce “cognitive dissonance,” which is a psychological condition where beliefs conflict with experience, leading to “dissonance.”  The healthy response is to question or modify one’s beliefs.  The pathological response takes two forms.  One is to increase the “positive cognitions,” which means to stress information that supports the belief being challenged by experience.  The other is to decrease the “negative cognitions,” which means to ignore, suppress and forget the experiences that contradict the belief in question. 

It took extreme effort to paint early American nation building in a positive light.  American nationalism began growing in the 1820s, and the events that could lead to negative cognitions were abundantly clear.  Accordingly, they were largely minimized, such as “historians” omitting history’s greatest complete genocide from Columbus’ story, or Washington’s fraudulent strategy.  A creative bag of tricks was used to decrease the negative cognitions, including making the Indians subhuman.  Then Weems, Irving and many others created fictional positive cognitions.  Manifest Destiny was another case of fabricating positive cognitions, invoking the Creator’s sanction.  The basic tenet of Manifest Destiny was that Americans were “destined” to rule from sea to shining sea, and anybody in the way was in God’s way. 

Why deal with anybody fairly, if superior violence will prevail?  The thief just takes what he wants, and lets violence decide the issue.  Might makes right has been the rationale for every empire, but it has never been prudent to come right out and say it, so Machiavelli’s professional descendants have concocted a wide range of cover stories over the centuries.  Early on, because the Bill of Rights and other factors limited the coercion that the U.S. could inflict on its citizens, those who ran the U.S. began refining the art of deluding the masses to unprecedented levels.  Anti-sedition laws were too crude a means of control.  The art of creating mass delusions became a science during the 20^th century, with the rise of the public relations industry, among others. 

In 1840, William Henry Harrison was elected president, and his campaign’s slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”  As with Jackson, Harrison’s claim to fame consisted of killing Indians.  The Harrison campaign was nearly apolitical, and simply tried cashing in on Harrison’s Indian-killing celebrity.  Harrison was the early example of a Ronald Reagan-type front man, Harrison being 67 when elected, similar to Reagan’s 69 - America’s two oldest elected presidents.  Harrison’s campaign avoided dealing with any substantive issues.  He died quickly while in office, and Tyler usurped power.  Harrison was the first president to die in office, and the Constitution was unclear about what should happen.  The general thinking was that the vice president should become acting president, and call for a new election.  Tyler decided to grab the throne for himself, which was bitterly denounced in his day, but his move became the precedent that America has used ever since. 

Tyler was another slave-owning Virginian plantation owner, who believed that the landed aristocracy should run things.  As a congressman, Tyler was against the Missouri Compromise, not wanting any restrictions on slave ownership.  Another slave-owning president was an embarrassing anachronism in the West during the 1840s.  The abolition movement was strong by that time.  The British Empire passed laws to free all of its slaves in 1833, and by 1838 ended the “apprenticeship” program for “ex-slaves” that permitted flogging.  France was forced to by the European revolutions of 1848, leaving Latin American sugar plantations and the United States virtually alone on the world stage.  About the sole feat of Tyler’s administration was bringing Texas into the national fold in 1845, something that he did in cahoots with the next president, Polk, who was yet another slave-owning aristocrat.  A treaty to annex Texas was defeated in the Senate in 1844 due to the slavery issue, so Tyler and Polk fabricated a legal end-run around the abolitionists, making it so that only a majority vote was needed, instead of the two-thirds majority that the Constitution required for treaty-ratification.  Tyler pushed through his strategy and signed the measure a few days before he left office. 

James K. Polk took office in 1845 and immediately began planning a vigorous American expansion, to make America’s Manifest Destiny come to fruition.  There were even discussions at Polk’s inaugural about buying California from Mexico.  Mexico considered Texas a renegade territory, and when the United States absorbed Texas, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, and Polk’s cohorts began immediately plotting to seize western lands from Mexico. 

For hundreds of years, all references to New Spain’s province of “Tejas” delineated its western boundary as the Nueces River, something that Mexican maps confirmed.  The Texas land grabbers, however, claimed that Texas extended another 150 miles westward, to the Rio Grande River, in violation of the region’s history.  Mexico was understandably upset with the claims of Texas, not only becoming part of the United States, but also arbitrarily extending its boundaries another 150 miles into Mexico. 

General Zachary Taylor, whose claim to fame was, as usual, killing Indians, did not even like the idea of annexing Texas, but he was ordered to lead an army to the Rio Grande and start something.  The U.S. army purposely created a “border” incident to justify launching an invasion.  Hitler did a similar thing to Poland, to start World War II.  Before word even got back to Polk of Taylor’s successful baiting of Mexico into the trap, Polk was campaigning to his cabinet to declare war on Mexico.  When news came of the expected incident, Polk immediately declared war.  U.S. Congressman Abraham Lincoln, among others, heatedly contested the war declaration, calling it nothing more than a naked land grab.  A young officer serving under Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, helped lead the American army into Mexico, where the army marauded almost at will.  Grant later wrote in his memoirs that he regarded the Mexican-American war as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”  Disinterested historians have generally agreed with Grant’s assessment. 

Mexico made the mistake of allowing Anglo settlers to come to California.  With the bad experience of allowing American “Catholics” to settle in Texas, Mexico made it a requirement that all white settlers to California become Mexican citizens.  They did, but it proved a worthless tactic.  The California whites revolted even before news of the U.S.’ war declaration reached them.  Similar to the whites that seized Texas, the whites in California tried establishing a new nation, called the Bear Flag Republic.  That new nation lasted less than a month, ending when the U.S. Navy showed up.  The Mexican-American war was an easy one for America.  Although about 12,000 Americans died in the war, less than 1800 were battle deaths, the rest being disease and the related miseries of invading tropical Mexico and laying siege to Mexico City, as Cortés had done more than three centuries earlier.  The United States stole half of Mexico in that war, and made Taylor a “war hero.”  Although Taylor never voted in his life, the Whig party used his celebrity to sweep him into the presidency in 1848, as another war hero front man.  Taylor used Jackson’s “spoils system,” and soon died in office.  Although American establishment scholars downplay the evidence, with questionable logic, substantial evidence shows that Taylor’s death may have been due to intentional poisoning, and he was hard to kill, so his assassins had to poison him more than once.[220] Although Taylor was a slave-owner himself, he opposed sanctioning slavery in the newly-conquered American territories, which earned him animosity from his fellow slaveholders.

Cuban plantation owners realized the precariousness of their situation, and Polk’s Secretary of State, the pro-slavery James Buchanan, tried buying Cuba.  Polk even tried taking all of Oregon Country, nearly all the way to today’s Alaska, willing to risk war with Britain (at that time, still the world’s greatest power) to do so.  Arbitration set the line at 49 degrees north latitude, where the U.S. boundary with Canada is today.  Polk’s tremendous land grabs helped make him one of history’s “best,” in the eyes of presidential historians. 

The “treaty” between Mexico and the United States, legitimating the U.S. seizure, was signed in early 1848, and before the U.S. Senate even ratified the treaty, gold was found on John Sutter’s land, in today’s Sacramento.  America’s biggest gold rush was then underway, and the usual rabble got to California any way they could.  Sailing around South America was one way, and going overland to California was another, which was by far the most common method for the more than 200,000 gold seekers that made it to California by 1852.  The quickest and easiest way, however, was to sail to Colombia and go overland across the Isthmus of Panama.  The U.S. signed a treaty with Colombia in 1846, as its empire began straddling North America, for rights to pass through the Isthmus and build a railroad across it, which was completed in 1857, and the trip from New York to San Francisco was then shortened to about two weeks. 

Before Polk, Indian removal ideology held that natives could be always pushed westward as the empire expanded, but Polk’s rapid successes leapfrogged the continent.  The natives could not be pushed further westward…or could they?  The Indians of the California coastline, from San Francisco to the tip of Baja California, had suffered almost complete genocide at the hands of Spanish priests and soldiers by 1846.  All of Southern California’s coastal tribes were extinct long ago; the only coastal natives that survived California’s mission era were those that fled inland.  When the 49-ers showed up, there were only about 150,000 surviving California natives, from a pre-Columbian population of perhaps a million.  The man who initiated the genocide of California’s natives is up for sainthood today, and I went to a school named after him, and that most important part of his legacy was never told me as a child.  Indian removal westward was not practical in California, so the first governor of California, which joined the Union in 1850, called for an open season on California’s natives.  There was a lucrative head bounty on the gentle natives of California, and in the 1850s and 1860s the slaughter of the remaining California natives may have been the most intense genocidal effort of the entire history of the white man in North America, something that also escaped my California history textbooks.  When the 49-ers slaughtered entire villages every weekend for fun and profit, surviving children were often sold into slavery in Sacramento and San Francisco.  Indian girls brought twice the price of Indian boys, because they also served as concubines for the “settlers.”  Similar dynamics took place in Oregon Country. 

Even though the genocide of Northern California’s natives proceeded, celebrated and unabated, there was still talk in the 1860s to “resettle” the natives even further westward, on unnamed islands in the Pacific Ocean.[221]  By 1900, the Native American population in California was 15,000, for a greater than 95% extermination rate since 1769, the typical rate that all Native American tribes experienced at the white man’s hands, if they survived outright extinction. 

The United States began thinking on a global basis fairly early.  In 1853, Commodore Perry mounted his diplomatic invasion of Japan, forcing an insular, feudal people into the developing world economy.  Japan quickly began playing catch-up with the West, leading to their participation in World War II. 

With eastern North American bereft of its native population, and the genocide of the West Coast’s natives well underway, there was only one region still “unsettled” by the white man, the mountainous, desert-like interior of the American West, and the Great Plains north of Oklahoma.  The beaver pelt trade collapsed in the 1830s, as the fur trade finally encircled the world.  Gold was discovered in the Rocky Mountains in 1858, and Denver was established in 1860.  Black Kettle’s Cheyenne tribe welcomed the white men, but no matter how warm the welcome, the “pioneers” were bent on collecting scalps, which led to the outrageous Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.  The “pioneer” press went delirious with joy at each new massacre.  The “frontier” Americans cheered the slaughters the loudest.  The “noble pioneer” archetype of the American settlers is nearly a complete fabrication.  Few seem to want to remember the truth, however, at least in white America. 

The American Civil War is probably best seen as a crisis of empire.  Abraham Lincoln even openly admitted it, saying that keeping the Union whole was the point of the Civil War, and that keeping blacks in slavery was acceptable to him if it kept the Union together.  Most empires, from the earliest days of civilization, through Rome, Spain, Britain and others, have largely collapsed from within, from internal corruption and imperial lands breaking away, seeking independence (to create their own empires).  No empire has ever given up its lands easily, and the United States is no exception, and it had been grabbing land as virtually no earthly empire had ever done before.  Such unprecedented growth was bound to lead to internal friction, with imperial subjects breaking away and vying for power, just as the United States originally broke away from the British Empire, soon after its greatest moment of triumph. 

Corporations originally had limited lives, being temporary vehicles for conducting business.  During the Civil War, war profiteering became an American science, and the corporation became the real power in America, with laws being rewritten to give corporations the rights of people and even unlimited life.  Graft and corruption were on the rise. 

The United States still bears the scars from the Civil War.  The Civil War was about the world’s first industrial war, with submarines and railroads seeing use, and other technologies.  The North’s strategy, as represented by Grant’s philosophy, was to simply use the North’s greater industrial capacity to grind down the South through a war of attrition.  That also became the strategy for how future wars would be won, notably World War II.  Early cameras recorded the Civil War’s carnage, bringing it into people’s living rooms, which considerably dimmed the glorious luster that is always falsely attributed to the organized murder known as warfare. 

Slavery and abolition played its role in the Civil War, but Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free one slave, being more of a politician’s gambit.  Until Lincoln’s proclamation, the Civil War was explicitly one to hold the Union together.  His proclamation gave the veneer of righteousness to the affair, and helped sway European opinion, as the northern half of the empire was now waging war against a barbaric anachronism.  The European powers were toying with intervention, as the American empire threatened to fragment.  Britain sent troops to Canada, and France sent troops to Mexico, both supporting the South.  The Czar of Russia sent his navy to the U.S, anchored at New York and San Francisco, in a show of support for the North.  Russia, Britain and France were jockeying in those days for supremacy, the Crimean War ending a few years earlier, and with U.S. instability, the New World became a theater for the jockeying of European powers, for a historical moment.  Secretary of State Seward deftly handled the situation and avoided open war with Europe, especially in 1861 when a northern ship stopped and boarded the Trent, a British ship, and seized two Southern diplomats bound for England.  Seward, like his predecessors, grabbed what land he could, but failed with his plans to acquire Caribbean islands and Hawaii.  His only success was “Seward’s Folly,” “buying” Alaska from the Czar of Russia. 

When Ulysses Grant toured the South after the Civil War, he saw no problem with blacks becoming even worse slaves than before, working for the same masters they had before the Civil War, except with no guarantee of food or shelter, which was part of the slavery “deal.”  Grant even called the freedmen’s refusal to submit to a new form of slavery lazy on their part.[222] 

The slaughter and dispossession of the Indians continued unabated during the Civil War.  Ironically, the demographic group to suffer the greatest was the Cherokee Nation.  After the Trail of Tears, and also being violently kicked out of Texas by white settlers, they made the best of their lives in Oklahoma, and when the Civil War broke out, they wanted no part of another white man’s war.  Oklahoma, however, was strategically placed between North and South, and the Cherokee were pretty much forced to choose between the lesser of two great evils.  They generally aligned with the South, and the resultant carnage killed off probably more than a third of the Cherokee.  White America lost less than 2% of its population in the Civil War. 

The Bozeman Trail to gold fields in Montana went right through Sioux hunting grounds, and the whites wreaked their usual devastation as they passed through.  In 1866, the Sioux, led by Red Cloud, fought off the white invasion.  In 1868 the U.S. relented and agreed to close its forts along the trail, for the only war that Native Americans ever won against the United States.  However, the 1868 treaty was deceptive, in the U.S. tradition, with it calling for the Sioux to move to reservations in today’s South Dakota.  Fittingly, that deceptive treaty with Red Cloud was the last treaty the United States would sign with a Native American tribe.  Washington’s subterfuge worked brilliantly.  More than 370 treaties were forced by the U.S. onto Native Americans, and the U.S. did not honor even one of them.  After 1868, the stratagem was not needed any longer, as there were virtually no more natives left to swindle.  The last remaining land to steal was in the northern plains, and the industrial giant would not need much more effort to subdue the last remaining natives…or so they thought. 

In 1868, another famous “Indian fighter” made his mark, when George Custer attacked the sleeping, friendly camp of Black Kettle’s.  Black Kettle survived the Sand Creek Massacre and amazingly kept advocating peace, to only die in Custer’s dawn attack on the Washita River.  Custer became a national hero because of Washita.  He was also an accomplished liar.  His first account of the Washita massacre stated that he killed a bunch of warriors, instead of sleeping women and children.  He led a gold-hunting expedition into the Black Hills in 1874, in violation of the treaty.  The Black Hills were sacred, spirit land to the Sioux, and they would never cede them.  Custer lied about the gold that was found there on his illegal expedition, and a gold rush then descended on the Black Hills, when gold really was found.  After more fraudulent diplomacy, the U.S. declared war on the Sioux in 1875. 

Custer turned 35 during the winter of 1875-1876, the minimum age for presidential eligibility.  He hobnobbed with New York’s elite that winter, and a conspiracy apparently hatched.  The Grant administration was possibly America’s most corrupt ever, and the centennial celebration was coming up that summer, with American nationalism reaching a deafening crescendo.  The plan, later admitted by his Indian scouts, was for Custer to kill more sleeping Indians that summer, and the resultant fervor would sweep him to the presidency that autumn.  The Sioux were proving to be rather tough customers for the U.S. military, as Red Cloud’s war demonstrated.  In the spring of 1876, marauding armies were hunting for Indians to kill, and an army attacked a large bison-hunting party in early June.  Led by Crazy Horse, those natives crippled the U.S. forces.  A couple of weeks later, the army with Custer in it was in the vicinity, also hunting for natives, and happened upon the same Indians. 

Custer deserted his post earlier in his career, but his Civil War reputation got him lenient treatment, and he was merely suspended from duty for a year.  Custer nearly did not make it to the Great Plains that summer to mount his presidential campaign.  Grant knew of Custer’s ambition and tried clipping his wings, but Custer did some maneuvering, pulled some strings and got into position to kill Indians that summer. 

Custer was not leading the army, and when they caught sign of a large group of natives, Custer was assigned to reconnoiter them, not attack them.  His ambition was well known among the army brass, and when he went to scout the “enemy,” his commander reminded him to follow orders, which Custer replied to jokingly as he rode off.  Custer knew that he needed to place the heroic mantle on his shoulders alone, in order to be swept into the White House.  He disobeyed orders so he could monopolize the killing.  The Washita Massacre showed him to be a sloppy commander, not properly sizing up the situation before attacking.  At the Little Big Horn his “Custer’s luck” ran out, as he led a charge of less than three hundred men into a camp of four thousand armed natives.  The surprised natives made short work of Custer and his men.

The news of “Custer’s Last Stand” made it to Washington during the midst of the centennial celebration.  Instead of Custer being hoisted onto the nation’s shoulders as the greatest Indian-killer of all, America had a sobering moment.  I have a special interest in the genocide of the Plains Indians, which is discussed at this footnote.[223]

During those days, robber barons were busily building their capitalistic empires, most of them getting their start in Civil War profiteering.  Today’s empires in energy and medicine had their beginnings during the Gilded Age, empires that largely hold Americans (and even humanity) hostage today.  The defrauding of Native Americans out of their lands and lives would have been bad enough if it had stopped there, but it continued.  In 1775, the revolutionaries formed a Committee of Indian Affairs, headed by Ben Franklin.  Today’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was formed in 1824.  The treaties the Indians signed often provided for government assistance, because the natives had the land taken away that sustained them.  Similar to how the United States honored its treaties, the graft and corruption in the Indian Bureau was probably worse than in any other government agency, a notable feat.  One of the quickest ways to riches in the mid-19^th century was becoming an Indian agent at the Indian Bureau.  A favorite Indian agent method was pocketing the money appropriated for Indian food and supplies, and then devoting a tiny fraction of the purloined funds toward largely worthless “supplies.”  The corruption was so bad that the Grant administration tried the strategy of hiring church members as agents.[224]  Grant’s “Quaker Policy” was not very successful. 

In U.S. history, one of the greatest vehicles for mischief has proven to be “philanthropy.”  Some has been disastrous, such as the “philanthropy” of Rockefeller and Carnegie, which helped create today’s medical racket.  It is challenging to put a humanitarian spin on the machinations of some of U.S. history’s greediest men.  Their right hand would machine-gun striking employees, while their left hand “gave” money to “worthy causes.”  Wink, nudge.  Other “philanthropists” may have been well intended, but their actions were often based on arrogant paternalism, thinking that they knew what was best for the victims of the very system that garnered the philanthropists their wealth. 

When the Civil War ended, the Cherokee clawed back from the edge of the abyss once again, and more of their land was taken, while railroads and other land-grabbing enterprises moved in.  The Cherokee, as with all North American tribes, did not have the concept of individual land ownership.  Tribal members owned their homes and other possessions, but the tribe owned the land.  On the East Coast, “philanthropists” huddled together to decide how to “help” the dispossessed.  American “philanthropy” was a cousin to the “White Man’s Burden,” which was rooted in some sense of responsibility, at least superficially.  Seemingly more often than not, the “help” given in the name of philanthropy and the White Man’s Burden made the situation worse. 

A most curious instance of U.S. “philanthropy” was the “reform” that Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes rammed through during the 1880s.  In 1883, at a meeting of Eastern philanthropists, Dawes, an Indian “expert,” spoke of his recent visit to Indian Territory.  Almost certainly speaking of the Cherokee, Dawes painted a portrait that even the most Indian-friendly observer would have blushed at.  What Dawes said was true, about how there were no Cherokee homeless, how the Cherokee Nation had no debt, how high literacy was and the like.  For what the Cherokee had endured, what they accomplished was truly astounding, although they still had their problems, as every society does.  Dawes then came to the nub of the issue as he saw it,

“Yet the defect of their system was apparent.  They got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common.  It is Henry George’s system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors.  There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.  Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.”[225]

Seldom has there been a more frank admission about what really drives Western civilization.  The Cherokee surely had a “civilization,” something arguably more civilized than anything the whites ever had, but it was not selfish enough.  Dawes tried remedying that defect.  Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887.  It broke up tribal lands into individual plots, at 160 acres for a head of household, down to 40 acres for a child.  Such arithmetic took away 10,000 square miles of land that had been designated for the Cherokee tribe, and that land was used in the famous Oklahoma homesteader rush of 1893, complete with a starting line and gun to start the race.  What Jackson could not do by outright fraud, Dawes accomplished under the rubric of “philanthropy.”  The Cherokee heatedly contested such “philanthropy,” and the U.S. government responded with the 1898 Curtis Act, which abolished the governments of the Civilized Tribes.  The names, faces and tactics changed, but the game remained the same. 

While the Oklahoma Indians did their best to put the shattered pieces back together, the last free natives of the northern plains were under siege.  What happened on the plains was an industrial genocide.  Early on, Americans used killing off the bison as a method of starving the Plains Indians out, related to Washington’s strategy.  Railroads were built into Indian Country, and there were even “railroad hunts,” where “hunters” would shoot out the windows of the trains, slaughtering the bison in awesome numbers.  The railroad builders even fairly regularly murdered their laborers, as it was cheaper than paying them.  Great heaps of bison bones lined those early railways along the prairie.  The U.S. government handed out free ammunition to “buffalo hunters.”  Shooting bison was about the least sportsmanlike activity that an “outdoorsman” could engage in.  Bison would stand in a herd, and shooting a “stand” of bison was the ideal.  If done properly, the bison would fall one-by-one, as the marksman dropped each one, until they were all down.  The record for a single man, shooting at a bison stand, was more than one hundred.  From a pre-Columbian population of about 60 million animals, the bison were reduced to 23 wild ones, and less than a thousand of them in all, at about the same time that the Plains Indians were finally conquered and brought to the brink of extinction. 

The Sioux may have prevailed momentarily during 1868 and the summer of 1876, but their triumphs were short-lived.  The American juggernaut merely threw more resources at the problem, and the standard murderous duplicity was brought to bear.  Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse met violent ends at the hands of white men; the usual fate for those who led the resistance, especially if it was successful.  By the late 1880s, the Sioux joined their North American brethren, being ground under the white man’s boot.  The American vengeance inflicted on the Sioux lasts to this day.  The Pine Ridge reservation sits in the United States’ poorest county.  Life expectancy there is at Third World levels, as it is on all Indian reservations.  In 1980, the life expectancy of a Native American reservation man was 44.6 years, nearly 30 years less than their white American counterparts.[226]  The reservation women lived less than three years longer. 

During the late 1880s, the forlorn remnants of the Plains Indians engaged in something that Native Americans had done since at least the Aztec conquest: mourning the passing of their societies, and a desperate hope that if they beseeched the sprit world properly, the whites would disappear and the lands and peoples would be restored.[227]  Local whites feared the Ghost Dance.  They probably did not understand its purpose, but would have undoubtedly been more hostile if they had.  The U.S. mobilized against the Ghost Dance “threat,” to prevent the natives from dancing.  In late 1890, U.S. troops killed Sitting Bull and a dozen other Ghost Dancers, and the survivors fled to Wounded Knee.  A few days after Sitting Bull died, Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz, called for the complete extermination of all remaining Native Americans.  A few days later, U.S. troops put an end to the Ghost Dancers, opening their guns on them at Wounded Knee, killing a few hundred men, women and children.  The troops were so eager that they killed quite a few of their own with “friendly fire.”  Native survivors of the massacre were tracked down and murdered.  When he heard of Wounded Knee, Baum recorded his approval, urging his readers to “wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”[228]  With the massacre at Wounded Knee, Manifest Destiny succeeded in securing the continent.  From Morton’s Puritan persecutors to Wounded Knee, dancing Indians were only good for killing.[229]  In the words of David Stannard, “There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.”

The Empire Goes Global

In 1890, the American “frontier” was declared officially extinct.  American settlement spanned the entire continent, from sea to shining sea.  The 1900 census counted about 76 million people, and 250,000 Native Americans.  The frontier was not the only thing extinct.  The Eastern Woodlands were almost completely leveled, in history’s most spectacular deforestation.  The passenger pigeon was nearing extinction, with the bison close behind it.  The European/American whaling industry virtually wiped out several species of whales, and whaling was becoming industrialized, eventually bringing what is probably another sentient species to the verge of extinction.  Native Americans in the United States were reduced from their pre-Columbian population by probably somewhere between 95% and 98%.  American cultural managers appeared to try reducing the cognitive dissonance of the nation’s people, because American nationalism was about to achieve orgiastic dimensions. 

America in 1890 was turbulent, although the subsequent decade is known as the “Gay Nineties.”  The robber baron empires had largely been built by that time.  Monopolies were the rage, their excesses becoming so overt that the era of “trust-busting” began early in the early 20^th century, with limited effectiveness.  Modern medicine was well on its way to becoming the racket it is today.  By the 1890s, surgery vaulted from barbaric obscurity to becoming a racket.  In the South, the Ku Klux Klan, which was originally formed by Southern elites to harass the Reconstruction government, quickly degenerated into poor, uneducated whites lynching blacks - their primary economic competitors.  American lynchings peaked during the early 1890s, and were highly popular, with people murdered in a carnival atmosphere, the lynchers making postcards from the scenes, posing next to the burning or hanging (or both) corpse.  The North was not noted for its enlightened racial attitudes, either.

The 1880s saw a huge influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, with Slavic peoples arriving by the millions, as well as Jews, Italians, Chinese and others who differed markedly from the Germanic, Anglo and Celtic immigrants of earlier generations.  The United States was well on its way to becoming an anti-Semitic society[230], and American xenophobia was on the rise.  Every non-Anglo American group had an unflattering epithet bestowed onto them, including nigger, chink, greaser, kike, spic, dago and so on.[231]  The cognitive dissonance dynamic surely contributed, but also some sought to unify widely disparate groups. 

Post-9/11 Americans might be surprised to know that today’s American flag worship had its roots in the modern era, not the American Revolution.  England was the first Great Power to permanently undermine the power of royalty, with its revolutions during the 1600s, but the phenomenon of worshipping British royalty is regarded as a strange, pre-modern relic, something found nowhere else in Europe.  Sober scholars see American flag worship as even more bizarre.[232]   

The American flag was originally the British Union Jack with white stripes added.  The American flag was created solely because ships needed to carry a flag.  Adopting a flag was a trifling formality for the Founding Fathers.  No flags flew in the early days of the American republic, and even the Founding Fathers were not sure what it looked like.  A year after the American flag was adopted, a letter to the king of Naples, signed by Ben Franklin and John Adams, informed the king that the American flag ”consists of thirteen stripes, alternately red, white and blue.”  In 1794, a bill was introduced to add two stars to the flag, because Vermont and Kentucky were admitted to the union.  Congressmen objected that their important time was being wasted by such a trivial matter, and the bill was quickly adopted “as the quickest way of terminating” discussion of it.[233]  The Betsy Ross “stitching-the-flag” story is a fabrication, concocted by her grandson.  There are no contemporary depictions of the American flag in any American Revolution artwork.  Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem that was wedded to a drinking song to become the national anthem, thought that the U.S. had begun the War of 1812 and deserved to lose it. 

American nationalism began its ascent during the 1820s, reaching a fevered pitch with Manifest Destiny, as the United States began looking more like a proper empire.  As the continental theft was completed, and “surplus” Europeans flooded in, there was a conscious attempt to create a new form of religion: state worship.  Fittingly, a Marxist minister created the American pledge of allegiance in 1892, in a conscious attempt to create a new object of worship.  The original pledge was not performed in the hand-over-heart way that we see today.  The “Bellamy Salute” was originally given with an outstretched arm pointing to the flag, palm up.  Imagine Romeo making his love speech, with his hand held toward Juliet’s balcony, and we get an idea of what the original pledge of allegiance looked like.  It stayed that way until 1942, when the fascist salutes of Hitler and Mussolini looked a little too close to the American pledge of allegiance, and Americans took their arms down and placed them over their hearts.  The connection with Nazi Germany is more than coincidence.  In the modern era, only three states have had a pledge of allegiance: the U.S., Nazi Germany and the U.S. vassal state, the Philippines. 

People I consider enlightened Christian Americans refuse to say the pledge of allegiance and salute the flag, because it is the worship of an inanimate object, which is idolatry and something that the Second Commandment forbids.  They consider saluting the American flag the equivalent of Moses’ followers worshipping the golden calf.  Interestingly, as I was writing this essay in July 2002, a federal judge declared the pledge of allegiance unconstitutional, because of the words “under God” (added to the pledge in 1954, during the McCarthy witch hunts) in it.  American politicians called the ruling ridiculous, but both the politicians and judge completely missed the real issue, which is that the entire pledge of allegiance amounts to an act of religion that American children are forced to undergo.  Few Americans seem to think that flag and state worship are not acts of religion, even when laws pertaining to flag treatment use overtly religious terms such as “desecration.” 

The pledge of allegiance was given to American schoolchildren as a warm-up to the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World.  The Columbian Exposition was held in 1893, because the affair was so colossal and took awhile to stage.  It had the highest event attendance in world history, to that time.  The American continent was secured, and the empire then began to go global.  In early 1893, white settlers overthrew the Hawaiian government (with the help of the U.S. Marines), bringing the Pacific plum into the American hand.  Some Congressmen decried the move as naked imperialism, and even the new president, Grover Cleveland, tried putting Hawaii’s queen back in power.  The whites in Hawaii, as with whites in California and Texas, created a short-lived republic, with Sanford Dole becoming Hawaii’s president.  Hawaii stayed a white republic until the openly imperial William McKinley came into office in 1897, and the U.S. soon annexed it.  Dole, as in Dole Pineapple, became the Hawaiian territory’s first governor.  Land grabbing was still the road to riches in the pre-industrialized world. 

The European powers did not idly sit by while the U.S. conquered a continent and began its global expansion.  After losing the best parts of North America to its ambitious colonies, Britain busily conquered and colonized Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, while devastating the peoples of those lands.  Britain ruthlessly pillaged India and China.  France also did not sit and watch.  It secured some of the South Pacific, and during the 1860s it began conquering Indochina and inflicting its brutal reign.  In the 1870s the Scramble for Africa was witnessed, as Europe began to carve up Africa, turning it into a big plantation and mine, with railroads installed to ship the loot to Europe.  Russia and today’s Germany were a little late in coming to the imperial table, and were largely landlocked.  Russia and Prussia had to content themselves with more local conquests, and the Hapsburg Empire, headquartered in Austria, was feeling a bit hemmed in.  Belgium was the first nation on the European mainland to industrialize.  Belgium’s King Leopold II wanted an empire, but it was difficult finding lands and people not already living under the European lash.  After years of searching, Leopold finally engaged in “philanthropic” empire building in the Congo.  The subsequent rubber boom became the source of Leopold’s wealth, and one of history’s greatest and most neglected genocides is what Belgium did to Congolese Africans during Leopold’s rubber grab and afterward.  During its first generation of conquest and exploitation, Belgium’s efforts killed off about ten million Africans.[234] 

Britain played the Great Game with Russia in Central Asia, with Afghanistan being an imperial battleground.  While the Great Powers were securing the planet, there were also imperial losers.  The Ottoman Empire began declining during the 1500s.  Ironically, Europe had more ancient and lasting animosity with Islamic peoples than any other non-European culture, but it was about the planet’s last place to have the European boot laid across its neck. 

By 1800, about the only thing keeping the Ottoman Empire alive was the Great Powers preventing any one of them from seizing it.  The issue of the Ottoman Empire’s fate became known as the Eastern Question.  The European powers nibbled away at it, however.  Greece was carved away from it in the 1820s, Russia kept southward pressure on Ottoman lands and sought influence in the Balkans, and a series of events eventually led to the Crimean War, which began in 1853, with France, Britain and the Ottoman armies fighting against the Russians.  The war blunted Russia’s ambition for Black Sea hegemony, as seven hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, died. 

The era from about 1870 to World War I is generally seen as a cultural golden age in imperial Europe, known as La Belle Époque.  The Impressionist and post-Impressionist period was one Europe’s more fecund artistic eras.  Life expectancy in England began rising dramatically during the late 19^th century, from about forty years for a man in 1860, to more than fifty in 1910.  Life insurance companies began taking note of obesity and mortality, as obesity was no longer the sole province of the rich.  While Europe was having fun, the peoples in its imperial domains were devastated.  King Leopold was just one of the gang.  The imperial, capitalistic conquests of Britain in Asia dealt severe blows to the economic, political and cultural systems in India, and China also suffered.  El Niño events in the late 1870s and late 1890s, combined with the effects of European imperialism, created two catastrophes that killed off between 40 and 60 million people in India and China, while boxcars of food with armed guards were shipped to Europe.  Between 1750 and 1900, Europe’s population rose from 17 to 21% of world population, while South Asia’s declined from 23 to 20%.[235]  It partly had to do with a resource transfer.  The same resource-transfer situation prevails today, with more than a billion overweight people and more than a billion underweight people, with the fat ones in the imperial world and the skinny ones in the colonial world. 

The United States was enjoying its Gilded Age at the same time.  Life for the white man was good, sitting atop the world.  By 1900, the world’s only place of significance not under white domination was Japan, and they were feverishly playing catch-up with the West.  Taking their lead from the United States, Japan created a Manifest Destiny-type ideology that focused on China, making their Chinese cousins into subhuman dogs, something evident in the Rape of Nanking.[236]  The year after adding Hawaii to its larder, the United States waged a war against Spain, with Manifest Destiny cheerleader William Randolph Hearst giving an infamous message to his employee Frederick Remington, who was covering the non-events in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures.  I’ll furnish the war.”  Hearst’s yellow journalism won the day, and the United States stole Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain, as a former New World colony seized about the last shreds of Spain’s imperial lands.  Not far removed from how the Spanish mercenaries treated the Incan emperor, President McKinley made demands of Spain as he rattled his saber, and even after Spain capitulated, meeting all U.S. demands, McKinley still declared war on them.  The peoples of those lands that the U.S. seized became anything but free.  They merely had new imperial overlords. 

The Philippines’ case was particularly egregious.  The U.S. had designs on Caribbean islands for many years, and as they were in the U.S.’ back yard, Americans could concoct some mildly plausible case for their conquest.  The Philippines, however, lay across the world’s largest ocean.  “Discovered” by Magellan in 1521, who died while fighting the natives there, the Philippines were conquered by Spain during the 1560s, and Manila was established.  The Philippines did not have the imperial culture of the Aztecs or Incas, and there were no gold-plated civilizations to plunder.  Also, the Philippines were conquered later in the imperial game than the New World was.  The Spanish experience in the Philippines was kind of a cross between the mass conversions of Mexico and its hacienda economy, imposed on peoples more like Caribbean natives than Aztecs.  Priests, ranchers and plantation owners dominated the Philippines during the colonial era, with the church being the Philippines’ largest landowner.  The Spanish never had a gentle colonial tenure anywhere, but at least the Philippine experience was not the vast genocide that marked their New World efforts. 

Cuba and the Philippines had independence revolts, and the Spanish brutally put them down.  That became the U.S. excuse for invading: freeing the subjected peoples.  Cortés mouthed some of the same rhetoric as he laid siege to Tenochtitlán.  As the United States took the global stage with its invasion of the Philippines, Britain’s imperial bard, Rudyard Kipling, penned a poem titled “The White Man’s Burden.”  Kipling was articulating British racism, framing the imperial venture as bringing “civilization” to the world’s dark-skinned peoples, and his poem was specifically an exhortation to the Philippines to submit to America’s benevolent rule.  Kipling was welcoming the United States to the intercontinental smorgasbord.  U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge was a leading light of the day, eventually joining Teddy Roosevelt’s third party when he ran for president in 1912.  In January of 1900, Beveridge gave a famous speech where he called the Filipino people “children,” totally incapable of “self-government.”  It was a direct echo of Kipling’s sentiments.  McKinley told a group of Methodist ministers,

“The truth is I did not want the Philippines and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them.”[237]

The invasion’s benevolence quickly became evident.  The Filipino people could not be kept from childish notions of self-government, and the United States quickly waged a war against them, in much the same way they prosecuted the exterminations of Native Americans, even using the same rhetoric at times.  In the Philippines, while many thousands of “militant” natives were killed, the U.S. murdered about 200,000 civilians, using starvation and other tactics, including torture.  The Americans called the Filipinos “goo-goos,” and waged scorched-earth campaigns.  It was a preview of what the United States did to Southeast Asia during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  “Goo-goo” was a direct predecessor to “gook” and the same kinds of “kill-all-the-civilians” tactics were used in both wars, to “help” those people.  Tacitus remarked on the Roman style of warfare and subjugation, “They make a desert and they call it peace.” 

One American officer in the Philippines justified the exercise with,

“There is no use mincing words…If we decided to stay, we must bury all qualms and scruples about Weylerian cruelty, the consent of the governed, etc., and stay.  We exterminated the American Indian, and I guess most of us are proud of it, or at least believe the end justified the means; and we must have no scruples about exterminating this other race standing in the way of progress and enlightenment, if it is necessary.”[238] 

There was little domestic dissent to that latest American adventure.