Manifest Destiny and Race in America PDF

Okay, here's the conversion of the image's text into a structured markdown format. I've done my best to retain the original content, formatting it for better readability in Markdown. ### MANIFEST DESTINY **Conquering Mexico and the Invention of the Mexican American** Let us back up and cast our g...

Okay, here's the conversion of the image's text into a structured markdown format. I've done my best to retain the original content, formatting it for better readability in Markdown. ### MANIFEST DESTINY **Conquering Mexico and the Invention of the Mexican American** Let us back up and cast our gaze farther southward. While the U.S. cotton kingdom reigned supreme during the beginnings of the nineteenth century, wars were raging throughout the lands colonized by the Spaniards. Inspired by the successful. **John Gast's painting "American Progress" depicts Manifest Destiny.** American Revolution, many people oppressed by Spanish colonization, some of whom even fought with Washington's rebels, were fighting for their independence. "America," thought the Latin American patriots, "can identify with our struggle. It fought and won its freedom from European monarchs, and it will support us." But U.S. politicians, eager to expand westward, thought of Latin America as land that later could be exploited rather than as a country bravely wrestling for democracy. In fact, President James Monroe, when signing the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 (a treaty that gave the United States lands that now are Florida), promised the Spanish Crown that he would withhold support from the rebels. The United States did not extend its hand as Latin American rebels fought for independence. And fight they did. The Mexican War of Independence began in September 1810, when a parish priest, Padre Miguel Hidalgo, sounded the church bells and led an insurrection of indigenous peasants and miners against Spanish colonialism. The bloody conflict lasted eleven years, claiming over 600,000 lives-more than 10 percent of the country’s population. (By contrast, only 25,000 died fighting for American independence). Finally, in 1821, Mexico rested, having established itself as an independent nation whose borders included modern-day Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. A year later, President Monroe, surprisingly, recognized Mexican independence, announcing that the Americas were "henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers." Monroe's declaration was praised by Mexican leaders. "America for the Americans!" became the slogan that emerged from the Monroe Doctrine. That Latin America should not belong to Europe, few Americans disputed. However, many began asking, "Should Latin America belong to the Latin Americans?" Many North Americans did not believe so, and a new slogan soon emerged: "Manifest Destiny!" In other words, "The western frontier, all of North America and the lands of Mexico-yes, this is God's will-is ours for the taking!" In 1845, the United States forced Mexico to relinquish the lands that now are Texas, the end result of an uprising started by white settlers who had illegally emigrated to Mexico. With the annexation of Texas, the battle cry "Manifest Destiny!" grew ever louder. Consider one declaration, that of a politician named William Wharton, reflecting the public sentiment of many white Americans: "The justice and benevolence of God will forbid that... Texas should again become a howling wilderness trod only by savages, or... benighted by the ignorance and superstition, the anarchy and rapine of Mexican misrule. The Anglo-American race are destined to be forever the proprietors of this land of promise and fulfill-ment. Their laws will govern it, their learning will enlighten it, their enterprise will improve it.... The wilderness of Texas has been redeemed by Anglo-American blood and enterprise." A year after annexing Texas, the United States declared war on Mexico. The Mexican-American War was fought between 1846 and 1848. More than 100,000 U.S. troops descended on Mexican soil. Mexico, a country of only twenty-five years and still reeling from its costly war of independence, stood little chance, especially considering that most of the fighting done on the borderlands was carried out by untrained civilians. General Ulysses S. Grant, the most important Union general of the Civil War and eighteenth president of the United States, would call the Mexican-American War "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." Mexico was defeated in 1848, and, through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States acquired the land that today is California, Utah, Nevada, parts of Arizona and New Mexico, and disputed areas of Texas. **FIG 2.4 LAND MEXICO CEDED TO THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO** The image is a geographical map, showing: * The names of the states are labeled, and the portion in orange, labeled as "Mexican Cession-1848", includes California, Nevada, Utah, parts of Arizona, and New Mexico. But why did the United States stop there? Why did this superior military power show restraint instead of claiming all of Mexico? The answer lies in the ways white Americans viewed the people of Mexico. Recall that the Mexicans were a people of mixed heritage, a people birthed from the unions of Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans. Not surprisingly, white Americans understood Mexicans to be inferior. Thus, when U.S. troops marched on Mexico City, America's leaders had a decision to make: Should they lay claim to the entirety of Mexico, and thus absorb millions of "inferior" Mexicans into their borders, or should they capture only a portion of Mexico, the portion populated with the least numbers of Mexicans? So as not to threaten America's white majority, political leaders chose the latter option. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised citizenship rights to Mexicans in ceded lands; however, that promise was never fulfilled. The United States continued to refuse complete citizenship rights to nonwhites. In the eyes of American law, Mexican identity was determined by blood quantum. Those with one-hall or more of Mexican blood were classified as Mexican. Those classified as such were then brought under the governance of race-based law, which denied them privileges. Mexicans were not allowed to vote. And under the Homestead Act of 1862, many Mexicans were dispossessed of their land, which Congress promised to citizens of the United States or immigrants eligible for naturalization (read: white settlers). As a result, "Mexican Americans of the Southwest became a foreign minority in the land of their birth." As the United States grew rich off gold and silver acquired through the Mexican-American War, as well as off the cattle- and sheep-ranching industries booming throughout the Southwest, Mexicans, denied rights, descended into poverty. With the construction of the political border separating the United **FIG 2.5 EUROCENTRIC AND NATIVE AMERICAN VIEWS OF EXPANSIONISM** Two maps of the United States are displayed. They are: **Eurocentric View** * The Western part of what is now the United States is subdivided. It is labeled with the year of establishment or acquisition. Some of the labels are: Washington 1889, Oregon Country Title Estab. 1846, California 1850, Texas 1845 * The rest of what is now the United States is simply labeled United States 1783 * Florida, on the Southeast, is labeled Ceded by Spain 1819 **Native American View** * Tribal locations are drawn on a map that otherwise resembles the modern United States. From West to East the tribes labeled are: California Indians, Apache, Navajo, Ute, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Osage, Sioux, Chippewa, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Seminole. States from Mexico came the construction of a racial border, one separating whites from Mexicans, Mexicans from "Indians," and Mexicans from Africans. This also was an economic border, separating landowners from landless, and a psychological border, separating "superior" from "inferior." Citizenship rights finally would be extended to Mexicans born in the United States in 1898. Mexicans who immigrated to the United States, however, could not apply to become citizens. Until 1940, that right was reserved only for "free white immigrants." With African Americans, Mexicans within American borders were subjected to Jim Crow segregation. In the Southwest, Mexican students would attend segregated, rundown schools until legal segregation was outlawed in the middle of the twentieth century. "The Indian Problem" Shouts of "Manifest Destiny" were not only directed at Mexico. They echoed across Indian country as well. Before the nineteenth century, American business relied on Native American labor to carry on the fur trade. By 1800, the fur trade had bottomed out, and what mattered to America's swelling capitalist economy was not Native Americans' labor but Native America itself, the land. The question as to what would be done with tribes and their valuable land came to be known as "the Indian problem." Broadly speaking, two strategies for acquiring tribal land, for solving "the Indian problem," were put forth: assimilation and removal. Assimilation required the dashing out of indigenous ways of life. Native Americans would be taught to treat the land the "American" way; that is, to parcel up the land into homesteads "owned" by individuals (not by tribal communities), to develop that land for profit (not for sustenance), and to abandon vast hunting grounds. Removal simply meant that tribes would be kicked off their land at gunpoint. Assimilation proved costly and time-consuming. Removal, then, would solve "the Indian problem." A series of laws passed between 1830 and 1890 created what was called Indian Territory, or land allotted by the U.S. government for tribal use. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, permitted the forcible removal of Native Americans occupying fertile lands east of the Mississippi River. Native Americans were pushed west into "the Great American Desert," as it was then known, "which white men would never covet since it was thought fit mainly for horned toads and rattlesnakes." Over the next fourteen years, more than 70,000 Native Americans were driven from their homes and marched west of the Mississippi. A particularly violent removal took place in 1838, when the U.S. military rounded up approxi-mately 17,000 Cherokees from Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama as well as an unknown number of their black slaves. (Some Native Americans, especially those belonging to the Five "Civilized Tribes"-the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole-owned African slaves.) Corralled into camps with only the possessions they could carry, the Cherokees and their slaves were transported to Oklahoma and the western edge of Arkansas, a 1,200-mile journey. They traveled by foot, on horse, and by wagon, forever leaving behind the land of their ancestors. Along the way, nearly 4,00o Cherokees and an unaccounted-for number of black slaves died, which is why the **FIG 2.6 REMOVAL OF THE SOUTHEASTERN TRIBES** The image shows a map of the Southeastern United States, with arrows representing the routes of the forced relocations of several Native American tribes. The tribes and their routes are labeled as follows: * **Cherokees** route originates from North Carolina towards Indian Territory * **Chickasaws** route originates from Mississippi towards Indian Territory * **Choctaws** route originates from Mississippi towards Indian Territory * **Creeks** route begins in Georgia toward Mississippi and ends in the Indian Territory * **Seminoles**route originates from Florida, south towards the Gulf of Mexico The Indian Removal Act of 1830 drove more than 70,000 Native Americans from their homes on the fertile land east of the Mississippi over fourteen years. Cherokees refer to this ordeal as nunna daul Isunai: “The Trail where we Cried," or the Trail of Tears. "People feel bad when they leave Old Nation,” observed one Cherokee exile. "Women cry and make sad wails. Children cry and many men cry, and all look sad when friends die, but they say nothing and just put heads down and keep on going towards West." The Indian Intercourse Act of 1834 further delineated the boundaries of Indian Territory and ordered several tribes to relocate themselves within these boundaries. Those who refused could be put to death. Nomadic tribes were imprisoned within the confines of land set forth by Congress. By the mid-1800s, the reservation system we know today began to crystallize. And in 1887, the two strategies to solve "the Indian problem,” assimilation and removal, were brought together under the Indian Allotment Act. The act dissolved tribal landholding by allotting certain pieces of land to individual Indians residing on reservations: heads of households were allotted 160 acres, single individuals a smaller parcel. “The General Allotment Act of 1887 marks the acme of U.S. political control over Native Americans. Indians were to be incorporated as individuals into both the economic and political structures of the larger society. It was the ultimate form of control: the end of the tribe itself as a political and social entity." The Indian Allotment Act was the brainchild of Northern abolitionists who sought to humanize Native Americans by giving them that which, by the standards of Anglo-American culture, made one fully human: land and property. But indigenous farming declined under the act, since many of the most fertile parcels of tribal land were claimed by whites. Nor did the allotted land remain in Indian hands for long. Between 1887 and 1934, go million acres passed into white hands. The Indian Allotment Act, after all, did not allot Native Americans any additional land. Rather, it dispossessed tribes of land already in their possession. The allotment of 160 acres per Indian household actually freed a surplus of tribal land for white settlers. (It was as if you owned a large mansion and then, one day, the government knocked on your door and declared it was giving you a bedroom and bathroom to live in. The rest of your mansion was up for grabs.) Additionally, a significant amount of Native American land was sold or leased to non-Indians, since Native Americans were accused of failing to develop the land "up to white standards." In the end, the Indian Allotment Act dispossessed Indians of more than 60 percent of their remaining landholdings. Author Vine Deloria has observed, "Often when discussing treaty rights with whites, Indians find themselves told that "We gave you the land and you haven't done anything with it.' ... [But] never did the United States give any tribe any land at all. Rather, the Indian tribe gave the United states land in consideration for having indian title to the remaining land confirmed."110 Native Americans resisted in large numbers. One form of resistance melded anguished cries for help with indigenous spirituality. In iaag, a paiute spiritual leader named Wovoka claimed to have experienced a powerful vision during a solar eclipse. The walls of heaven were opened before him, revealing God and the Paiute, living in paradise. Wovoka urged his people to live in peace with the whites, since their rewards would come in the afterlife. He also developed a dance that would uplift the Paiute, the Ghost Dance. News of the Ghost Dance spread throughout the West, and tribes incorporated it into their traditional belief systems. While Wovoka was, by and large, a pacifist, other tribes interpreted Wovoka’s prophecies as foretelling the destruction of the whites. The Lakotas, in particular, believed that the Ghost Dance would usher in a new era, one marked by the return of the buffalo and the fall of the whites. Reservation agents and white settlers soon grew fearful of the Ghost Dance movement. As tensions mounted, U.S. troops were mobilized to suppress the dance. These tensions finally exploded on a cold December morning in 1890. Troops were ordered to disarm the Lakotas, and as they did so, a shot was tired, sparking a massive shoot-out that felled as troops and more than 150 Iakotas, a third of whom were women and children. This bloody event, known as the wounded knee Massacre, marked the gruesome finale to the 350-year-old Indian Wars. The nineteenth century witnessed the virtual destruction of tribal sovereignty, massive loss of Native American life, and near-total dispossession of tribal land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, much of the land that now makes up the continental United states had still been intribal hands By the end of the century, nearly all that land was controlled by whites por the American Indian, therefore, white colonialism in the Americas brought a threefold infliction an infliction of the body, in the form of disease and bullet wounds' an inflection of the spirit, in the form of cultural reeducation, religious suppression, and Anglo-American simila- tion, and an inflection of the land, in the form of the eradication of tribal property.