White Man Encroaching

by poputonian

On Monday, the General departed from his normal ironic wit to post from MLK about the American presence in Vietnam. This passage is especially interesting where Dr. King is in turn quoting a Buddhist leader:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

That excerpt reminded me of Ben Franklin’s letter to a friend in Old England:

How long will the insanity on your side the water continue? Every day’s plundering of our property and burning our habitations, serves but to exasperate and unite us the more. The breach between you and us grows daily wider and more difficult to heal. Britain without us can grow no stronger. Without her we shall become a tenfold greater and mightier people. Do you choose to have so increasing a nation of enemies? Do you think it prudent by your barbarities to fix us in a rooted hatred of your nation, and make all our innumerable posterity detest you? Yet this is the way in which you are now proceeding. Our primers begin to be printed with cuts of the burnings of Charlestown, of Falmouth, of James Town, of Norfolk with the flight of women and children from those defenseless places, some falling by shot in their flight.

And of Tecumseh writing in 1809 to William Henry Harrison, the Governor of the Indiana Territory:

The being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor until lately, there was no white man on this continent; that it then all belonged to red man, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit that made them, to keep it, traverse it, to enjoy its productions, and to fill it with the same race, once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people, who are never contented but always encroaching. The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it never was divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. For no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers who want all, and will not do with less.

Or U.S. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey who in an 1830 speech protested the forced removal at bayonet-point of the Cherokee from Georgia:

Our ancestors found these people, far removed from the commotions of Europe, exercising all the rights, and enjoying the privileges, of free and independent sovereigns of this new world. They were not a wild and lawless horde of banditti, but lived under the restraints of government, patriarchal in its character, and energetic in its influence. They had chiefs, head men, and councils. The white men, the author of all their wrongs, approached them as friends — they extended the olive branch; and being then a feeble colony and at the mercy of the native tenants of the soil, by presents and profession, propitiated their good will. The Indian yielded a slow, but substantial confidence; granted to the colonists an abiding place; and suffered them to grow up to man’s estate beside him. He never raised claim of elder title; as white man’s wants increased, he opened the hand of his bounty wider and wider. By and by, conditions are changed. His people melt away; his lands are constantly coveted; millions after millions are ceded. The Indian bears it all meekly; he complains, indeed, as well, but suffers on; and now he finds that his neighbor, whom his kindness had nourished, has spread an adverse title over the last remains of his patrimony, barely adequate to his wants, and turns upon him and says, “away we cannot endure you so near us! These forests and rivers, these groves of your fathers, these firesides and hunting grounds, are ours by the right of power, and the force of numbers.” Sir, let every treaty be blotted from our records, and in the name of truth and justice, I ask, who is the injured, and who is the aggressor?

15,000 Cherokee died on the forced march to Oklahoma.

Or how about these quotes from an Ohio Valley Indian speaking to an English missionary in 1758:

“We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away, and settle the country; or else, why do you come to fight in the land that God has given us?”
…
“Why don’t you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.”

The author who reported the above quotes also described how the invading whites overran the locals, but also identified how it was the boundless personal freedom of the encroachers that transcended any notion of community law:

White settlers and traders aggressively pushed into that region and prevented accommodation between the British and the Ohio Indians. These “Frontier People” sought not accommodation with the Ohio Indians but rather their removal. Compromise did not enter their thoughts, and magnanimity never governed their actions. Respecting personal freedom more than law and advocating their right to take unused land rather than to await negotiated settlements with trans-Appalachian Indians, these frontier people moved relentlessly into the Ohio Valley. By 1774, approximately fifty thousand whites lived on the trans-Appalachian frontier, and the British army could not control them. By that time, the British no longer remained the principal enemy of the Ohio Indians. Instead it was the relentless westward-moving Americans.

And then there were the Blacks in Massachusetts who in 1777 recorded this passage in the legislative journals:

The petition of a great number of blacks detained in a state of slavery in the bowels of a free & Christian country humbly sheweth that your petitioners apprehend we have in common with all other men a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind, and which they never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever. But they were unjustly dragged by the hand of a cruel power from their dearest friends and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender parents–from a populous, pleasant, and plentiful country and in violation of laws of nature and nations–and, in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity, brought here to be sold like beasts of burthen & like them condemned to slavery for life among a people professing the mild religion of Jesus–a people not insensible of the secrets of rational beings nor without spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others to reduce them to a state of bondage and subjection. Your honours need not to be informed that a life of slavery like that of your petitioners, deprived of every social privilege, of every thing requisite to render life tolerable, is far worse than nonexistence.

Even the White Spaniard who led the invasion of New Mexico in 1598 confused the indigenous population with what today we would call an insurgency. When the locals responded violently by killing a handful of the the encroaching white man, the leader of the invaders — also known as The Last Conquistador — summarized the mission to his faithful followers:

Men! Heaven knows my heart bleeds at the loss of our valiant comrades. In the deaths of the Maese de campo and his companions we have suffered an irreparable loss. They cannot be replaced, for they had no equals. We have heard how nobly they died in the service of their God and of their King. Their work is done. It is essential now that our labors should continue.

I know of no one present who is not worthy of the name of a true soldier of Christ …. We have heard from eyewitnesses who came to us, grievously wounded in body and soul, the terrible fate our comrades met. They were beaten and torn to pieces. And they died like martyrs …

But, my soldiers, let us keep true Christian spirit. Whether death, hardships, or sufferings come, we shall meet them as behooves brave men … so let us lay aside our sorrow and place trust in the Almighty.

Exactly how many data points does it take to make a pattern?
At least it’s somewhat refreshing there are non-White, non-male candidates running for president, which perhaps provides an opening to elect someone whose cultural roots don’t include so much conquest.