The Birth of a Nation: A History of Violence and Colonization PDF

Here is the transcription of the document in a structured markdown format: # FIVE # THE BIRTH OF A NATION > Our nation was born in genocide... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experien...

Here is the transcription of the document in a structured markdown format: # FIVE # THE BIRTH OF A NATION > Our nation was born in genocide... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. > --Martin Luther King Jr. The British withdrew from the fight to maintain their thirteen colonies in 1783, in order to redirect their resources to the conquest of South Asia. The British East India Company had been operat-ing in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain's colonization of the North American Atlantic Coast. Britain's transfer to the United States of its claim to the Ohio Country spelled a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mis-sissippi. Britain's withdrawal in 1783 did not end military actions against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained violent colonization of the continent. In negotiations to end the war, Britain did not insist on consideration for the Indigenous na-tions that resisted the settlers' war of secession. In the resulting 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Crown transferred to the United States owner-ship of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and north of Spanish-occupied Florida. Muskogee Creek leader Alexander McGillivray expressed the general Indig-enous view: “To find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies and divided between the Spaniards and Americans is cruel and un-generous.” ## THE NEW ORDER Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly deadly firepower. Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest destiny. With the consolidation of the new state, the United States of America, by 1790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negoti-ate alliances with competing European empires against the despised settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nev-ertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the inde-pendent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival and created a legacy-a culture of resistance—that has persisted. By the time of the birth of the US republic, Indigenous peoples in what is now the continental United States had been resisting European colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspira-tions of the colonizers: total elimination of Native nations or sur-vival. Precolonial Indigenous societies were dynamic social systems with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require cultural abandonment. On the contrary, the cultures used already existing strengths, such as diplomacy and mobility, to develop new mechanisms required to live in nearly constant crisis. There is always a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, including absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices, using the colonizer's language, and intermarrying with settlers and, more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped Af-rican slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through individual assimilation. A new element was added in the independent Anglo-American le-ga regime: treaty making. The US Constitution specifically refers to Indigenous nations only once, but significantly, in Article 1, Section 8: "[Congress shall have Power] to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." In the federal system in which all powers not specifically reserved for the federal government go to the states, relations with Indigenous nations are unequivocally a federal matter. Although not mentioned as such, Native peoples are implied in the Second Amendment. Male settlers had been required in the colonies to serve in militias during their lifetimes for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities, the southern colo-nies included, and later states' militias were used as “slave patrols.” The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these irregular forces into laws “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The continuing significance of that "free-dom" specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right. US genocidal wars against Indigenous nations continued un-abated in the 1790s and were woven into the very fabric of the new nation-state. The fears, aspirations, and greed of Anglo-American settlers on the borders of Indigenous territories perpetuated this warfare and influenced the formation of the US Army, much as the demands and actions of backcountry settlers had shaped the co-lonial militias in North America. Owners of large, slave-worked plantations sought to expand their landholdings while small farm owners who were unable to compete with the planters and were pushed off their land now desperately sought cheap land to support their families. The interests of both settler groups were in tension with those of state and military authorities who sought to build a new professional military based on Washington's army. Just as the US government and its army were taking form, a number of settle-ments on the peripheries of Indigenous nations threatened to secede, prompting the army to make rapid expansion into Indigenous terri-tories a top priority. Brutal counterinsurgency warfare would be the key to the army's destruction of the Indigenous peoples' civilization in the Ohio Country and the rest of what was then called the North-west over the first quarter-century of US independence. ## TOTAL WAR IN OHIO SETS THE STAGE The first Washington administration was consumed by the crisis engendered by its inability to quickly conquer and colonize the Ohio Country over which it claimed sovereignty. During the Confedera-tion period, before the US Constitution was written and ratified, the Indigenous nations in that region had access to a constant supply of British arms and had formed effective political and military al-liances, the first of them forged by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant during the 1780s. Washington's administration determined that only war, not diplomacy, would break up the Indigenous alliances. Secretary of War Henry Knox told the army commander of Fort Washington (where Cincinnati is today) that "to extend a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impos-sible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti." These orders could not be implemented with a conventional army engaged in regular warfare. Although federal of-ficers commanded the army, the fighters were nearly all drawn from militias made up primarily of squatter settlers from Kentucky. They were unaccustomed to army discipline but fearless and willing to kill to get a piece of land to grab or some scalps for bounty. The army found the Miami villages they planned to attack already deserted, so they set up a base in one of the villages and waited for a Miami assault. But the assault was not forthcoming. When the commander sent out small units to find the Miamis, these search-and-destroy missions were ambushed and sent flee-ing by allied Miamis and Shawnees under the leadership of Little Turtle (Meshekinnoqquah) and Blue Jacket (Weyapiersenwah) The deserted towns had been bait to lure the invaders into ambushes.The commander reported to the War Department that his forces had burned three hundred buildings and destroyed twenty thousand bushels of corn. Those were likely facts, but his claim to have bro-ken up the Indigenous political and military organization was not accurate. Knox apparently knew that more than food and property destruction would be needed to quell resistance. He ordered the commanders to recruit five hundred weathered Kentucky mounted rangers to burn and loot Miami towns and fields along the Wabash River. They were to capture women and children as hostages to use as terms of surrender. In carrying out these orders, the marauding rangers demonstrated what they could accomplish with unmitigated violence and a total lack of scruples and respect for noncombatants. They destroyed the Miamis' two largest towns and took forty-one women and children captive, then sent warnings to the other towns that the same would be their lot unless they surrendered unconditionally: "Your war-riors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and de-stroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.” Yet the Indians of the Ohio Country continued to fight, well aware of the likely consequences. The Seneca leader Cornplanter called the colonizers the "town destroyers." He described how, during the destruction and suffering that troops wreaked on the western Iroquois, Seneca "women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers." Despite the primary use of settler militias, President Washington insisted that the new government had to develop a professional army that would enhance US prestige in the eyes of European countries. He also thought that the cost of using mercenaries, at four times that of regular troops, was too high. But whenever regular troops were sent into the Ohio Country, the Indigenous resisters drove them out. Reluctantly, Washington resigned himself to the neces-sity of using what were essentially vicious killers to terrorize the region, thereby annexing land that could be sold to settlers. The sale of confiscated land was the primary revenue source for the new government. In late 1791, the War Department notified Ohio squatters to call out their rangers for an offensive. Major General “Mad" Anthony Wayne was charged with restructuring the units of the army under his command to function as irregular forces. Washington and other officials were aware that Wayne was unreliable and an alcoholic, but it appeared that such characteristics might be useful for the dirty war ahead. Between 1792 and 1794, Wayne put together a com-bined force of regulars with a large contingent of experienced rang-ers. He enthusiastically embraced such counterinsurgent tactics as destroying food supplies and murdering civilians. Among the fifteen hundred mounted rangers in the first mission was the talented William Wellswith his group of rangers. When he was thirteen, Wells had been captured by the Miamis and then had lived with them for nine years, marrying Little Turtle's daughter. Under his father-in-law's command, Wells had fought the invading settlers and the US Army. In 1792, Wells was chosen to represent the Miami Nation in a negotiation with the United States, but on arrival for talks he encountered a brother from the family he had been sepa-rated from for a decade. He was persuaded to return to Kentucky and served as a ranger for the US Army. Wayne's troops and rangers managed to enter the Ohio Coun-try and establish a base they called Fort Defiance (in northwestern Ohio), in what had been the heart of the Indigenous alliance led by Little Turtle. Wayne then made an ultimatum to the Shawnees: “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of your blood.” The Shawnee leader Blue Jacket refused submission, and the US forces began destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men. On August 20, 1794, at Fallen Timbers, the main Shawnee fighting force was overpowered. Even after this US victory, the rangers con-tinued for three days laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields. After creating a fifty-mile swath of devastation, the invading forces returned to Fort Defiance. The defeat at Fallen Timbers was a severe blow to the Indigenous nations of the Ohio Country, but they would reorganize their resistance during the following decade. The US conquest of southern Ohio was formalized in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, a victory based on vicious irregular warfare. The nations of the region no longer had the British and the French and the settlers to play against one another, but rather were now faced with the determined imperialist thrust of an independent re-. public that had to coddle settlers if they were to recruit any into their service. # TECUMSEH Over the following decade, more settlers poured over the Appala-chians, squatting on Indigenous lands, and even building towns, anticipating that the US military, land speculators, and civilian insti-tutions would follow. In the Ohio Country, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Ten-skwatawa began building a concerted Indigenous resistance in the early nineteenth century. From their organizing center, Prophet's Town, founded in 1807, Tenskwatawa and his fellow organizers traveled throughout Shawnee towns calling for a return to their cul-tural roots, which had been eroded by the assimilation of Anglo-American practices and trade goods, especially alcohol. Abuse of alcohol (and drugs) is epidemic like diseases in communities sub-jected to colonization or other forms of domination, particularly in crowded and miserable refugee situations. This is the case in all parts of the world, not only among Native peoples of North Amer-ica. Alcohol was an item in the tool kit of colonialists who made it readily and cheaply available. Christian missionaries often took advantage of these dysfunctional conditions to convert, offering not only food and housing but also discipline to avoid alcohol. But this was itself a form of colonial submission. Significantly, Tecumseh did not limit his vision to the Ohio Country but also envisaged organizing all the peoples west to the Mississippi, north into the Great Lakes region, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. He visited other Indigenous nations, calling for unity in defiance of the squatters' presence on their lands. He presented_a program that would end all sales of Indigenous land to settlers. Only then would settlers' migrations in search of cheap land cease and the establishment of the United States in the West be prevented. An alli-ance of all Indigenous nations could then manage Indigenous lands as a federation. His program, strategy, and philosophy mark the beginning of pan-Indigenous movements in Anglo-colonized North America that established a model for future resistance. Joseph Brant and Pontiac had originated the strategy in the 1780s, but Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged a pan-Indigenous framework made all the more potent by combining Indigenous spirituality and politics while respecting the particular religions and languages of each nation. The evolving Indigenous alliance posed a serious barrier to con-tinued Anglo-American squatting and land speculation and acquisi-tions in the trans-Appalachian region. With previous Indigenous resistance movements, such as those led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, during peace negotiations in the wake of ruinous US wars of annihilation, leaders of factions had become "agency chiefs" who agreed to land sales without the consent of those they purported to represent. The colonized communities had fallen into economic dependency on trade goods and federal annuities, incurring debts that led to the forfeiture of what land remained in their hands. The emerging younger generation was contemptuous of such chiefs, whom they perceived as selling out their people. Anglo-American settlers and speculators exerted increased pressure and issued new threats of annihilation, provoking anger and calls for retaliation but also a renewed spirit of resistance. By 1810, new Indigenous alliances challenged squatter settlers in the Indiana and Illinois Territories at a time when war between the United States and Great Britain was looming. Fearing that the British would unite with the Indigenous alliances to prevent the US imperialist goal to dominate the continent, these settlers drafted a petition to President James Madison, demanding that the gov-ernment act preemptively: "The safety of the persons and property of this frontier can never be effectually secured, but by the break-ing up of the combination formed by the Shawnee Prophet on the Wabash." In 1809, Indiana's territorial governor, William Henry Harri-son, badgered and bribed a few destitute Delaware, Miami, and Potawatomi individuals to sign the Treaty of Fort Wayne, accord-ing to which these nations would hand over their land in what is now southern Indiana for an annual annuity. Tecumseh promptly condemned the treaty and those who signed it without the approval of the peoples they represented. Harrison met with Tecumseh at Vincennes in 1810, along with other delegates of the allied Shawnee, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Peoria, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Winnebago Nations. The Shawnee leader informed Harrison that he was leaving for the South to bring the Muskogees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws into the alliance. Harrison, now convinced that Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, was the source of the renewed Indigenous militancy, reasoned that destroying Prophet's Town would crush the resistance. It would present a clear choice to the many Indigenous people who supported the militant leaders: cede more land to the United States and take the money and trade goods, or suffer further annihilation. He decided to strike in Tecumseh's absence. Having served as Gen-eral Wayne's aide-de-camp in the Fallen Timbers attacks, Harrison knew how to keep his regular army forces from being ambushed. He assembled Indiana and Kentucky rangers—seasoned Indian killers -and some US Army regulars. At the site of what is today Terre Haute, Indiana, the soldiers constructed Fort Harrison on Shaw-nee land a symbol of their intention to remain permanently. The people in Prophet's Town were aware of the military advance, but Tecumseh had warned them not to be drawn into a fight, because the alliance was not yet ready for war. Tenskwatawa sent scouts to observe the enemy's movements. The US forces arrived on the edge of Prophet's Town at dawn on November 6, 1811. Seeing no alter-native to overriding his brother's instructions, Tenskwatawa led an assault before dawn the following morning. Only after some two hundred of the Indigenous residents had fallen did the troops over-power them, burning the town, destroying the granary, and looting, even digging up graves and mutilating the corpses. This was the fa-mous "battle" of Tippecanoe that made Harrison a frontier hero to the settlers and later helped elect him president. The US Army's destruction of the capital of the alliance outraged Indigenous peoples all over the Old Northwest, prompting fight-ers of the Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Potawatamis, and even Creeks from the South to converge on a British garrison at Fort Malden in Canada to obtain supplies with which to fight. Contrary to the false US assumption that Tecumseh was a mere tool of the British, he had been unwilling to enter into a British alliance because Europeans had proved so unreliable in the past. But now he spoke for unified and coordinated Indigenous-led war on the United States that the British could support if they wished but not control. President Madi-son, speaking to Congress in seeking a declaration of war against Great Britain, argued: "In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United States our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive fron-tiers-a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity." During the summer of 1812, the Indigenous alliance struck US installations and squatter settlements with little help from the Brit-ish. The US forts at present-day Detroit and Dearborn fell. Among the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn, Kentucky ranger William Wells was killed and his body mutilated as that of a despised turncoat. In the fall, Indigenous forces attacked Anglo-American squatter settle-ments all over Illinois and Indiana Territories. The US rangers at-tempting to track and kill the Indigenous fighters found destroyed and abandoned Anglo-American settlements, with thousands of set-tlers driven from their homes. In response, Harrison turned the mi-litas loose on Indigenous fields and villages with no restrictions on their behavior. The head of the Kentucky militia mustered two thou-sand armed and mounted volunteers to destroy Indigenous towns near today's Peoria, Illinois, but without success. A reversal came in the fall of 1813, when Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the Thames and the Indigenous army was destroyed. Throughout the eighteen-month war, militias and rangers attacked Indigenous civil-ians and agricultural resources, leaving behind starving refugees. ## ASSAULT ON THE CHEROKEE NATION In the unconquered Indigenous region of the Old Southwest, parallel resistance took place during the two decades following US inde-pendence, with similar tragic results, thanks to extirpative settler warfare. Tennessee (formerly claimed, but not settled, by the British colony of North Carolina) was carved out of the larger Cherokee Nation and became a state in 1796. Its eastern part, particularly the area around today's Knoxville, was a war zone. The mostly Scots-Irish squatters, attempting to secure and expand their settlements, were at war with the resistant Cherokees called "Chickamaugas." The settlers hated both the Indigenous people whom they were at-tempting to displace as well as the newly formed federal government. In 1784, a group of North Carolina settlers, led by settler-ranger John Sevier, had seceded from western Carolina and established the independent country of Franklin with Sevier as president. Neither North Carolina nor the federal government had exerted any con-trol over the settlements in the eastern Tennessee Valley region. In the summer of 1788, Sevier ordered an unprovoked, preemptive at-tack on the Chickamauga towns, killing thirty villagers and forcing the survivors to flee south. Sevier's actions formed a template for settler-federal relations, with the settlers implementing the federal government's final solution, while the federal government feigned an appearance of limiting settler invasions of Indigenous lands. Facing the fierce resistance of Indigenous nations in the Ohio Country and the fighting between the Muskogee Nation and the state of Georgia, Washington's administration sought to contain Indigenous resistance in the South. Yet now the settlers were pro-voking the Cherokees in what would soon be the state of Tennes-see. Secretary of War Knox claimed to believe that the thickness of settlers' development, converting Indigenous hunting grounds into farms, would slowly overwhelm the Indigenous nations and drive them out. He advised the squatters' leaders to continue building, which would attract more illegal settlers. This disingenuous view ignored the fact that the Indigenous farmers were well aware of the intentions of the settlers to destroy them and seize their territories. In the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell between the federal government and the Cherokee Nation, the United States had agreed to restrict settlement to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The several thousand squatter families who claimed nearly a million acres of land in precisely that zone were not about to abide by the treaty. Knox saw the situation as a showdown with the settlers and a test of federal authority west of the mountain chains, from Canada to Spanish Florida. The settlers did not believe that the federal gov-ernment meant to protect their interests, which encouraged them to go it alone. In the face of constant attacks, the Cherokees were desperate to halt the destruction of their towns and fields. Many were starving, more without shelter, on the move as refugees, with only the Chickamauga fighters as a protective force fighting off the seasoned ranger-settler Indian killers. In July 1791, the Cherokees reluctantly signed the Treaty of Holston, agreeing to abandon any claims to land on which the Franklin settlements sat in return for an annual annuity of $100,000 from the federal government. The United States did nothing to halt the flow of squatters into Cherokee territory as the boundary was drawn in the treaty. A year after the treaty was signed, war broke out, and the Chickamaugas, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe, attacked squatters, even laying siege to Nashville. The war continued for two years, with five hundred Chickamauga fighters joined by Muskogees and a contingent of Shawnees from Ohio, led by Cheeseekau, one of Tecumseh's brothers, who was later killed in the fighting. The settlers organized an offensive against the Chickamaugas. The federal Indian agent attempted to persuade the Chickamaugas to stop fighting, warning that the frontier settlers were “always dreadful, not only to the warriors, but to the innocent and helpless women and children, and old men.” The agent also warned the settlers against attacking Indigenous towns, but he had to order the militia to disperse a mob of three hundred settlers, who, as he wrote, out of "a mistaken zeal to serve their country" had gathered to destroy “as many as they could of the Cherokee towns. Sevier and his rangers invaded the Chickamaugas' towns in September 1793, with a stated mission of total destruction. Although forbidden by the federal agent to attack the villages, Sevier gave orders for a scorched-earth offensive. By choosing to attack at harvesttime, Sevier intended to starve out the residents. The strategy worked. Soon after, the federal agent reported to the secretary of war that the region was pacified, with no Indigenous actions since “the visit General Sevier paid the [Cherokee] nation." A year later, Sevier demanded absolute submission from the Chickamauga villages lest they be wiped out completely. Receiving no response, a month later 1,750 Franklin rangers at-tacked two villages, burning all the buildings and fields-again near the harvest and shooting those who tried to flee. Sevier then re-peated his demand for submission, requiring the Chickamaugas to abandon their towns for the woods, taking only what they could transport. He wrote: “War will cost the United States much money, and some lives, but it will destroy the existence of your people, as a nation, forever." The remaining Chickamauga villages agreed to al-low the settlers to remain in Cherokee country. In squatter settlements, ruthless leaders like Sevier were not the exception but the rule. Once they had full control and got what they wanted, they made their peace with the federal government, which in turn depended on their actions to expand the republic's territory. Sevier went on to serve as a US representative from North Carolina and as governor of Tennessee. To this day, such men are idolized as great heroes, embodying the essence of the "American spirit." A bronze statue of John Sevier in his ranger uniform stands today in the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol. ## MUSKOGEE RESISTANCE The Muskogee Nation officially had remained neutral in the war be-tween the Anglo-American settlers and the British monarchy. None-theless, many individual Muskogees had taken the opportunity to raid and harass squatters within their national territories in Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. When the United States was formed, the Muskogee Nation turned to Spanish Florida for an alliance in trying to stop the flow of squatters into their territory. Spain had an interest in the alliance as a buffer to its holdings, which at the time in-cluded the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans. The squat-ters believed that the Muskogees and the Spanish officials, as well as the British, were in cahoots to keep them out of western Georgia and present-day Alabama and considered the Muskogee Nation to be the main barrier to their permanent settlement in the region, particu-larly Georgia. The Muskogees called the squatters ecunnaunuxulgee -"people greedily grasping after the lands of the red people.” The federal government negotiated with the Muskogee Nation for a new boundary and for more settlements and trade, in exchange for $60,000 a year in goods.The squatters did everything they could to provoke the Muskogees to war, while ignoring the treaty's provisions. They slaughtered hundreds of deer in the Mus-kogee deer parks, with the intention of wiping out the livelihood of Muskogee hunters, who also made up the resistance forces. But the War Department was complicit, using money due to the Muskogees under the treaty to divide them by bribing leaders (miccos) and thus isolating the insurgents from their communities. Eighty Muskogee fighters joined the Chickamaugas when they were still fighting, and together they attacked the Cumberland district of Tennessee in early 1792, while others struck Georgia squatters in Muskogee territory. It was then that Shawnee delegates, sent by Tecumseh, visited from the Ohio Country to encourage the Muskogees to drive the squatters from their lands, as the Shawnees had done successfully up to that time. Secretary of War Knox wrote to the federal agent in Georgia that he knew the Muskogee militants were "a Banditti, and do not implicate the whole nor any considerable part of that Nation. The hostilities of the Individuals arise from their own disposition, and are not probably dictated, either by the Chiefs, or by any Towns or other respectable classes of the Indians." By this time, in the process of the preceding British coloniza-tion and continuing with US colonization of the Muskogee Nation and other southeastern Indigenous nations, an Indigenous client class called "compradors" by Africans, "caciques" in Spanish-colonized America-essential to colonialist projects, was firmly in place. This privileged class was dependent on their colonial masters for their personal wealth. This class division wracked the traditional relatively egalitarian and democratic Indigenous societies inter-nally. This small elite in the Southeast embraced the enslavement of Africans, and a few even became affluent planters in the style of southern planters, mainly through intermarriage with Anglos. The trading posts established by US merchants further divided Muskogee society, pulling many deeply into the US economy through dependency and debt, and away from the Spanish and British trad-ing firms, which had previously left their lands undisturbed. This method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of indigenous insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this manner. While most Muskogees continued to follow their traditional democratic ways in their villages, the elite Muskogees were making decisions and compromises on their behalf that would bear tragic consequences for them all. Federal authorities in 1793 identified five hundred Muskogee towns where they believed the majority of insurgents resided. Secretary of War Knox called on the Georgia militia for federal service. The federal Indian agent notified the War Department that the settlers were set on assaulting the Muskogees and asked that a thousand federal troops be deployed to occupy the insurgent Muskogee towns. Although the War Department rejected that idea and war was postponed, the restless Georgian militiamen deserted after having rushed to the Muskogee territory to loot, burn, and kill, only to be forced to wait. Persistent squatter attacks on Muskogee farmers, traders, and towns continued. During the winter of 1793-94, Georgia border squatters formed an armed group of landless settlers. The leader, Elijah Clarke, was a veteran Indian killer and had been a major general in the Georgia militia during the war of independence, in which he commanded rangers to destroy Indigenous towns and fields. As a US patriot hero, Clarke was certain that his former troops would never take up arms against him. Clarke and his rangers declared the independence of their own republic, but Georgia state authorities captured him and destroyed the rebel stronghold. Still, Clarke's action sent a strong message to state and federal authorities that landless squatters were determined to take Indigenous lands. They would get the leader they needed for that purpose a decade later. Meanwhile, the elite of the Muskogee towns were successful in marginalizing the insurgents, while the federal government increased grants, and the wealthy class of Muskogees established trading posts, making whiskey cheaply available to impoverished Muskogees. ## THE DIE IS CAST The successful settler intrusion into western Georgia made Alabama and Mississippi the next objectives for the rapidly expanding slave-worked plantation economy, which, along with land sales of occupied Indigenous lands by private speculators, was essential to the US economy as a whole. The plantation economy required vast swaths of land for cash crops, even before cotton was king, leaving in its wake destroyed Indigenous national territories and Anglo settlers who would fight and die driving out the Indigenous communities yet remain landless themselves, moving on to the next frontier to try again. US colonization produced the subsequent hideous slavery-based rule of the Old Southwest, which would flourish for seven more decades. Unlike in the Ohio Country, the Washington administration avoided force and in doing so alienated settlers in the region. By preventing them from wiping out the Muskogees, the federal government was seen as the enemy, just as the British authority had been for an earlier generation of determined settlers. But that would soon change with the Muskogee War of 1813-14, narrated in the following chapter, in which, as Robert V. Remini puts it in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, "Tennessee frontiersman Andrew Jackson, commanding both regular Army troops and frontiersmen, personally guaranteed that the Creeks would feel the full brunt of total war." 1. During 1810-15, then, two parallel wars were ongoing, one in the Ohio Country the Old Northwest—which ended with the de-feat of the Tecumseh-led alliance, and the other the war against 2. the Muskogee Nation in 1813-14. Unlike the 1812-15 war between Britain and the United States, with which these wars overlapped, the situation did not return to things being as they had been before, but rather culminated in the elimination of Indigenous power east of the Mississippi. US conquest was not determined by the defeat of the British in battle in 1815, but rather by genocidal war and forced removal. US leaders brought counterinsurgency out of the pre-indepen-dence period into the new republic, imprinting on the fledgling federal army a way of war with formidable consequences for the continent and the world. Counterinsurgent warfare and ethnic cleansing targeting Indigenous civilians continued to define US war making throughout the nineteenth century, with markers such as the three US counterinsurgent wars against the Seminoles through the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to Wounded Knee in 1890. Early on, regular armies had incorporated these strategies and tactics as a way of war to which it often turned, although frequently the regular army simply stood by while local militias and settlers acting on their own used terror against Indigenous noncombatants. Irregular warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the "valiant" settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence's "myth of the essential white American"-that the “essential American soul" is a killer.