Imperial Perspectives (Part VI)

by Jim Miles

2005

Following the war of 1812 the nascent American empire overwhelmed the native peoples of the United States, and suffered one of the worst wars of world history over the issue – indirectly – of slavery. Part VI of Imperial Perspectives looks at these two topics and how their ideologies helped shape the corporate agendas as beneficiaries of government welfare, and set the groundwork for an overseas empire.

VI. Native Genocide and Black Emancipation

The territorial expansion toward America's western frontier "was achieved by a combination of land hunger, religious zeal and military force – in that order." [1] Millions of new settlers pushed the frontier ever westward, missionaries preceded and followed this wave of settlement, and those tribes that proved fully recalcitrant had the army to deal with. John C. Calhoun was the Rumsfield of his day, serving in the cabinet of James Monroe, a War Hawk for the war with Britain of 1812. Calhoun was also an adamant pro-slavery advocate, and defended the rights of slave owners to their property. In those early days it was a War Department rather than the pleasantly euphemistic label we have today of the Department of Defence. While searching for information throughout many websites to substantiate a reference about his actions towards the Indians, I found no mention of the attribution of his inaugurating the policy of Indian Removal, although that policy is mentioned in biographies of Andrew Jackson. Instituted as law in 1830, the "act offered the Indians land west of the Mississippi in return for evacuation of their tribal homes in the east. About 100 million acres of traditional Indian lands were cleared under this law." [2]

Civilization vs. Barbarity

Lewis Cass, the War Secretary in the early 1830s, saw the benefits of removal as the "regions have been reclaimed, and over which freedom, religion, and science are extending their sway." He described the Indians as "A barbarous people, depending for subsistence upon the scanty and precarious supplies furnished by the chase," unable to live "with a civilized community." [3] This language of civilization overcoming primitiveness is an ongoing theme throughout American ideological rhetoric – and also always disseminated by the military – continuing all the way through to Woodrow Wilson after Versailles and up to George Bush and his religious crusade against the backwardness from the Orientalist point of view. With much coercion and manipulation of the various tribes and factions within the tribes, the natives exchanged their land for promises of land west of the Mississippi, lands that later again were also confiscated by treaty, ruse and war.

The War of 1812 and the ongoing Indian wars, "provided proof to many American politicians and military men that notions of limited war had no place on their continent." [4] The empire's unspoken policy of overwhelming force to defeat a supposed or created enemy had its debut during its early formative years, a policy that has been expressed in deed if not in word consistently throughout its history.

The westward expansion through Indian Territory greatly strengthened the power of the central government over the individual states as "the federal authority of the United States asserted its constitutional pre-eminence over state governments by exercising the exclusive power to make treaties or to make war with Indian nations on the republic's western frontiers." [5] Finally, once the government recognized its own pre-eminence, following the Civil War victory over the secessionist states of the South, Congress declared "That hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty." [6] The road lay open for indiscriminate accession of Indian land and the slaughter and containment of the remaining indigenous peoples.

Civilization and Slavery

The newly founded empire had another large group to deal with that has been an underlying force of one kind or another throughout its empirical history, touched on briefly above, that of slavery. Supported by rationalizations of religious groups, supported by the overall perceptions of the period of the rest of the world's people being savages and heathens and uncivilized in behaviour and primitive in their technology, the ownership of other persons was a consideration that did not enter into the founding documents of the new nation. As the nation developed and the rationales for supporting the ownership of persons weakened then became obviated, it became a power struggle between the industrialized North and the agricultural South with slavery as the ideology expressed at the time. The Northern elites wanted "economic expansion. The slave interests opposed all that," wanting to continue their "pleasant and prosperous way of life." [7] Property was the issue, the slaves were property, and the South advocated "the pre-eminent status of the slave owners' property rights over the inherent human rights of that most infamously privatized class of Black people." [8]

But it was not only the south that advocated for slavery, and trade offs and double standards abounded. Previously in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act, which in part referred to slaves as "merchandise", served as a concession accepting the rights of slave owners to repossess fugitive or imagined fugitive slaves in return for clearer definitions for admission of Mexican War territories into the Union as "the balance between slave and free states that had existed since the Missouri Compromise of 1820" would be destroyed. [9] The Emancipation Proclamation states "That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free;" [10] indicating that slave ownership was still acceptable in the states that supported the Union.

It was not until the war had been decided in the Union's favour that a full fledged freeing of slaves occurred with the Thirteenth Amendment; and the Fourteenth Amendment defined citizens and their rights, being in part "life, liberty, or property" (happiness I guess not being something that could be legislated), and equal protection under the law. But freedom and equality were not to be had. The legacy of this Reconstruction period left "4 million ex-slaves as property less, agricultural workers in a society in which nearly all economic and political power was wielded by landowning whites. Hardly surprising that blacks were exploited, discriminated against, and eventually stripped of rights, such as voting, that they had formally obtained." [11] The double standards, in spite of the laws, continued through the history of the United States as it took many gradual moments of civil disobedience to gain an arguable freedom and equality before the law.

Cultural Influences

While marginalized from economic and political power, the blacks and indigenous peoples have had a powerful influence on American culture. After the Second World War, the image of the wild west played out on television and radio for many decades until growing awareness of the calamities of war in the Vietnam era made such images untenable, along with the rise in publicity of the more militant American Indian Movement and the more pacifist perceptions of the natives of having been much more ecologically attuned to the environment. Black culture has been a major influence in the areas of sports, entertainment, and politics: black athletes have risen to prominence in many sports from baseball to golf, formerly all white bastions; black music and performing arts essentially provide most of the innovative new ideas and pop fads entering the entertainment culture; many black politicians have drawn pointed recognition to the inequalities within the United States, from Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, through the likes of the Black Panther movement, down to the individual activists in large and small communities throughout America. These two communities, over-ridden by the American Empire, having made immense involuntary contributions to the wealth of the country, are continuing their struggle for equality and rights that are supposedly there for everyone on an equal basis.

America expanded beyond the bounds of the original thirteen colonies, overtaking the Indian territory, purchasing the French Territory of Louisiana, conquering the Mexican territories, negotiating the northern frontier with the British along the forty-ninth parallel, then jumping over it to purchase, at bargain prices, the state of Alaska from the Russian empire. That is the history of the textbooks, of landmarks and dates, of big names and wonderful deeds, concealing the history as looked at above as one of possession of property, both human and territorial, as the key ingredient to imperial expansion.

Corporate Welfare

Another aspect of historical amnesia is that of the rule of wealth as the nation expanded westward. Having guaranteed their right to property in the constitution, then protecting themselves against the common rabble with the establishment of the electoral college, the wealthy and the politicians, being one and the same people, retained their control as the nation over-rode the continent. As mentioned before, the ability to open up large tracts of land to the poor who wished to farm and escape the poverty of the cities of the eastern seaboard provided great relief to the social strains of the original colonies. The simple ownership of a parcel of property, while it created wealth to a degree, did not create the amount of wealth guarded by the empire builders.

Instead, Thomas Jefferson's vision of a "property-owning democracy" was quickly "overpowered with the force of a capitalist plutocracy" with the previously mentioned financiers undertaking "many of the mergers and banking innovations that laid the groundwork for the rise of a newer generation of global corporations." [12] The life of a settler, of someone pre-empting the void of unutilized land, peopled by only a handful of primitive savages, was a hard-scrabble existence made no easier because the wealthy controlled the main corridors of transportation, the railways, controlled the many land companies that opened up the west, and continued to control the military, the means of communications, and carried huge influence on the political decisions of the day. It is this era that sees the rise of corporate welfare for the wealthy and laissez faire rugged individualism for the masses, as the "rights thought to be invested in Anglo-American individuals were largely organized, advanced, and pre-empted by an increasingly sophisticated array of corporate entities".

Having made themselves the "most prolifically rewarded beneficiaries from the extinguishment of Indian Country", they shaped "the expansionary ethos and methods of American corporate culture." [13] That ethos, as is well known from the "Indian wars" that deprived the natives of their homelands at the point of a gun, includes military support of the interests of the rich. Another aspect is the ability of the rich to lobby the legislative branches of government for business friendly laws, be it tax laws or acquisition laws or corporate laws of "person", and then to hire lawyers to have those laws adjudicated by someone of their own class within the judicial branch of government. With all that in place, the burgeoning military-industrial-political complex, it was time to expand the empire offshore.

Notes

[1] Ferguson, Niall. Colossus – The Price of America's Empire. Penguin Press, New York, 2004. p. 36.
[2] Andrew Jackson from the State Library of North Carolina.
[3] North American Review 1830.
[4] Carr, Caleb. The Lessons of Terror, A History of Warfare Against Civilians. Rnadom House, New York, 2003. p.149.
[5] Hall, Anthony J. The American Empire and the Fourth World. McGIll-Queens University Press. Montreal, 2003. p. 157.
[6] Ibid, p.157.
[7] Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492 – Present. Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, New York. p. 189.
[8] Hall, ibid, p. 123.
[9] Compromise of 1850.
[10] Emancipation Proclamation.
[11] Kevles et al. Inventing America – A History of the United States Volume 2: From 1865. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2003. p. 559.
[12] Hall, ibid. p. 84.
[13] Ibid, p.123-4.

© Jim Miles. Used with permission.