There were several great periods of migration across America. The settlers performed various cruel activities; however was there genocide? Here, Daniel L. Smith returns and presents his views on the question.
Daniel’s new book on mid-19th century northern California is now available. Find our more here: Amazon US | Amazon UK
"Protecting The Settlers". Illustration by JR Browne for his work "The Indians Of California", 1864. Portraying a massacre by militia men of a Native American camp.
It was certainly polarization issues that made the 19th century a true “wild west," and I really find "wild west" fits in every sense of the phrase.
The American Settler’s from the east came over the Rocky Mountains with both broken dreams and real optimism for a new successful life. Each miner, settler, businessman (or woman), and government employee had their own personal reasons for leading a new life in California. The financial burden of the 1837 financial collapse was a national hardship, and encouraged the soon-to-be settler headed out west.[1] American economist Martin Armstrong wrote, “The U.S. entered a serious economic depression following the failure of the New Orleans cotton brokerage firm, Herman Briggs & Co in March of 1837. Inflated land values, speculation and wildcat banking contributed to the crisis, which became known as the “Hard Times of 1837-1843.” New York banks suspended payments in gold on May 10th and financial panic ensued. At least 800 US banks suspended payment in gold and 618 banks failed before the year was out.”[2]
With the discovery of gold in California and the resulting influx of immigrants, it seemed almost inevitable that the U.S. government would openly authorize the 1862 Homestead Act. This decree would guarantee all American citizens permanent private ownership of newly acquired territory west of the Mississippi River.[3] Economic growth would boom for the nation given the limitless resources of the newly acquired land. Timber, hunting, fishing, mining, commercial business, and government would take over. It was the principal economic body that California would come to offer a rapidly expanding nation, which was recovering from a financial meltdown. This new economic and cultural opportunity didn’t just benefit the legitimate law-abiding settlers, but this new world also opened up to the criminal and unprincipled elements of American society as well. This was a somber reality to the preceding historical events throughout the mid-19th century.
Violence
This same reality applies to the cultural similarities in unprincipled behavior that both settlers and Native Americans exhibited between each other, as both played a part in antagonizing the other. I stand with Michael Medved by saying that the word genocide does not truly apply to the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American Settlers. Further, in “the 400 year history of American contact with the Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant interruption for several hundred years.”
“But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality. Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.”[4]
Guns, Germs, and Poor Ethics
UCLA professor Jared Diamond, author of the acclaimed bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, writes:
"Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Colombian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdom's, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River.” (page 78)
“The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers.” (page 212)
“As for the most advanced native societies of North America, those of the U.S. Southeast and the Mississippi River system, their destruction was accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers and advancing ahead of them" (page 374)
Obviously, the decimation of native populations by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based largely on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Native American populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there is no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy. Medved writes, “For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.”[5]
Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book (and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the exception.
Finding evidence
I have found a lot of evidence difficult to obtain through large institutions bureaucratic archives. These are crucial for a more thorough and explicit observation on specific events that had occurred in relationship to the unprincipled behaviors and actions of those few individuals or groups. Some of the evidence that I have been able to successfully retrieve truly illustrates this particular viewpoint. Is this finally a small beam of light on the topic of relational nuances that occurred on both sides of the cultural aisle? The truth of the matter is that all of the overall regional hostility came down to certain specific cultural customs or traditions, which also included the erosion (or complete absence) of any personal ethical and moral values.
The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents America’s "original sin" fails to put European contact with these often struggling societies in any context and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in all Americans ignorant of the facts.
Finally, a nation ashamed of its past will fear its future. "One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that characterize contemporary political correctness. The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in genocide. The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of brain-dead defamation."[6]
You can read a selection of Daniel’s past articles on: California in the US Civil War (here), Spanish Colonial Influence on Native Americans in Northern California (here), Christian ideology in history (here), the collapse of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (here), early Christianity in Britain (here), the First Anglo-Dutch War (here), and the 1918 Spanish Influenza outbreak (here).
Finally, Daniel Smith writes at complexamerica.org.
References
[1] Smith, Daniel L. "New American Settlers." In 1845-1870 An Untold Story of Northern California: The American Settler's First Documented Accounts of their Unwelcome Arrival, 20. Publication Consultants, 2019. Print.
[2] Armstrong, Martin A. "Panic of 1837." Princeton Economic Institute. Last modified January 12, 2014. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/panic-of-1837/.
[3] "Act of May 20, 1862 (Homestead Act), Public Law 37-64 (12 STAT 392); 5/20/1862; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789 - 2011; General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC." DocsTeach, 20 May 1862, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/homestead-act. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.
[4]Medved, Michael. "Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans." Townhall. Last modified September 19, 2007. https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2007/09/19/reject-the-lie-of-white-genocide-against-native-americans-n989275.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
