> In the mid-1800s, the United States had thousands of miles of open land in the middle of the country and almost nobody who wanted to live there.
> Then, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln pulled the ultimate Manifest Destiny power move with the Homestead Act.
That's… not how my history book says it happened. Wikipedia seems to agree, though it doesn't go into much detail:
> The act depleted the Native Americans in the United States of much of their land and natural resources as a result of it being allocated and sold to settlers.
If you can get past "north good, south bad" in studying the politics surrounding the war, and look at/ include things other than just slavery, you'll realize pretty quickly that Lincoln was more about centralizing and solidifying national power at any cost than he was concerned with any moral crusade.
He is due his credit for maintaining the Union, but the sainthood often bestowed on him is misplaced, especially in regards to race.
The politics and power dynamics of building the transcontinental railroad might be the historical lens where it's easiest to see the bigger picture, that isn't clouded by and doesn't automatically collapse into a battle over the slavery narrative. (Especially given the labor used in its construction.)
In fact the secession of the Southern states was what finally gave Republicans the congressional majority necessary to pass the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act in the first place: https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2012/01/06/secession-con...
The South was still reeling from tariffs introduced a few decades earlier which favored the industrial Northern states and hurt the agricultural South, so they tended to be against westward expansion that would open up even more agricultural competition: https://www.thoughtco.com/tariff-of-abominations-1773349
Disclaimer: this is not intended to be any kind of defense for the hereditary chattel slavery system which comprised much of the southern agricultural workforce, which is horrific and basically indefensible. I just regret all those times I snidely asked “States’ right to what?” without really getting it lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_crisis
> I just regret all those times I snidely asked “States’ right to what?” without really getting it
All those other things you enumerate were not the central focus. It was centrally and foundationally about slavery, which Confederate leaders were quite eloquent in expressing:
“The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. [...]
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Manifest Destiny was basically the belief that the US was destined to span coast to coast, regardless of the Native Americans or Mexicans that stood in the way. It’s a very imperial mindset.
Why stop there? Don't forget that the Aztec empire was just that, an empire. They conquered land, sacrificed their enemies to their gods and were an altogether unpleasant bunch which explains why the Spanish conquistadores got help from natives in bringing down the empire. Before the Aztecs came the Chichimeca who conquered their predecessors, the Toltecs. Before the Toltecs came the Otomi, etcetera. Nahuatl, Itza’, Mixtec, Zapotec, Totonac, Otomi, Pame, Purépecha are all colonialist languages - and that covers only the last few thousands of years of history in meso-America.
Indeed it is, something to keep in mind when confronted with accusations of "colonialism" towards specific nations, peoples or cultures. Conquest and colonisation are part of all our histories, no matter our background.
That doesn't make them good, or justifiable. We are all descended from murderers; that doesn't make murder good. It's always happened, it's currently happening, and we need to stop it.
The moment we sit down and start singing Kumbayah some neighbour will take his chances to sweep us up. If ever we were to manage to tame the entire human race into singing Kumbayah we'd be taken over by a fleet of flying saucers, sapient gorillas or just rebooted because the simulation entered a state of deadlock. It isn't just humans either, strife and conquest are a fact of life from the most primitive life forms to homo sapiens and everything in between.
I think we can avoid genociding millions of unarmed people for lebensraum personally.
To that point I think indigenous societies were doing just fine. It wasn't a fact of life to lose a language or entire culture within a generation before settlers arrived. You didn't inherit a position of serfdom. Property rights weren't a thing. Women could get divorces and had political authority. In many tribes non-binary genders were accepted or even the norm. Tribal warfare did not kill millions indiscriminately.
Entropy may be a fact of life, you don't have to contribute to it more than necessary. If we are already warring with things like flatworms and COVID maybe warring with each other is counterproductive and a "dark pattern" to be worked on. Food for thought
Those "indigenous societies" - or, to use Rousseau's term, "noble savages" - simply lacked the technology to enslave more than their direct neighbours or they would have put the Spaniards (et al) to shame. Have a look at the history of ... well, more or less any "indigenous society" which is in close contact with others and you'll discover they are, after all, just as human and with that just as belligerent as the rest of us.
In other words, Rousseau was wrong, the savages have the same vices and the same virtues as we have. Wake up from your dream of the perfect past which came to an end when the evil white man came to conquer and welcome to the real world. Read some real history instead of Howard Zinn and Nikole Hannah-Jones, have a look into the different forms of slavery as practised by those "indigenous societies", read up on the Aztec's own claim of sacrificing 40.000 people over a 4-day period for the re-consecratino of the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan or the 50.000 to 200.000 (historians quibble over the actual number) who were sacrificed every year. Heading into the temple complex your eyes would be drawn to the steep double staircase on the Grand Templo Mayor. A trail of blood leads to the impressive top of the temple, a flat working area where the captives or the occasional volunteers were brought to be sacrificed where most of the city could see. Most of the temple-top sacrifices involved cutting through the abdomen and diaphragm to rip out a still-beating heart. Not to paint them with a black brush, just to realise those "indigenous societies" were just as "guilty" of "sin" as all others.
Well, we don't live in the imperial hegemony of the Spanish empire, let alone the Aztec. We live in the imperial hegemony of the United States. The imperial power that is still violating treaties, sterilizing natives, and maintaining "reservations".
It's also kind of gross that westerners need to equate every state with their specific settler-colonial ones. All of those "colonialist languages" co-existed for hundreds of years and were only endangered by the introduction of European settlers. The wholesale liquidation of entire cultures was something uniquely western, and as a consequence the only languages I have left to describe the crime are those belonging to the criminals that did it. In 100 years the Aztecs did not do what the Spanish did in a decade. I'm sure you'll say the Aztecs simply lacked the means, but then you're comparing them to an actual settler-colonial empire.
You say Aztecs were an unpleasant bunch and that's why other tribes helped the Spanish, but as I remember it the conquistadores were welcomed as Gods in Tenochtitlán. Doesn't seem like a very unpleasant welcome, the reward for which was razing the city and killing millions. Seems to me like the other tribes might have helped the Spanish because they knew which way the wind was blowing? Or maybe they also viewed them as gods. Can you ask them how they felt about the Spanish once the Aztecs were gone and the conquistadores enslaved everyone, mutilating people for not mining enough silver?
It’s kind of telling why people need the victims of genocide to have somehow “earned” it, either from being “weaker” or “just as bad”. I choose to not minimize the slaughter of around 100 million indigenous Americans in the "New World". There is no justification for it nor was there precedent.
"As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you."
— Jamaica Kincaid
It was a populist law passed in the middle of the Civil War. The entire continent was on fire. And the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba, and Creek tribes sided with the Confederacy against the United States.
> And the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba, and Creek tribes sided with the Confederacy against the United States.
I knew they were opposing the United States (at the time, an aggressively-expansionist neighbour with an order of magnitude more arms manufacturing), but were they all definitely allied with the Confederacy? Your enemies aren't necessarily friends with each other.
(Also, keep in mind: Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba and Creek weren't countries. I vaguely remember that internal Cherokee politics was complicated, and that the US acted as though certain people were representatives when they weren't.)
You can read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Territory_in_the_Americ... for more information, but yes, several of the tribes in the Indian Territory did in fact make alliances with the Confederacy and fought on the side of the Confederacy against the Union.
The article said leaders from several tribes acted without the consensus of their councils. The Cherokee were split.[1] A Confederate source said just the Choctaw weren't.[2]
History is best viewed from the perspective of the individuals or groups with substantial power, because outcomes are their acting in their own best interests. Or what they perceived to be their best interests.
In the context of the Cherokee (which I'm more familiar with than other tribes), you initially have a group of mostly-independent city states, surrounded by neighboring tribes (with which there is good and bad history), dealing with substantial population decrease (due to smallpox), trying to negotiate with a fundamentally different culture (colonies/US) encroaching on their lands. Think 10th century Europe.
There were a diversity of opinions on how to move forward, and so a diversity of approaches, as groups jostled for personal advantage. Fundamentally though, it was a delaying action, fought (economically, politically, and militarily) until ceaseless European migration made coexistence as equals untenable.
The Cherokee have a somewhat unique history in that, by the late 1700s, they were moving to colonial style economics (land ownership, farming), politics (central government), language (invention and dissemination of written language in the 1820s), and religion [0].
Unfortunately, 1829 also saw gold discovered in northwest Georgia, at which point there was too much money to be made by seizing and exploiting land, and any burgeoning cultural similarities and human rights were conveniently ignored so fortunes could be made.
Ah, the US civil war was three decades after the Indian Removal Act, so most of them were in modern-day Oklahoma (bordering Texas, Arkansas and Missouri). That makes sense. For some reason I placed the US civil war about 50 years earlier.
> Then, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln pulled the ultimate Manifest Destiny power move with the Homestead Act.
That's… not how my history book says it happened. Wikipedia seems to agree, though it doesn't go into much detail:
> The act depleted the Native Americans in the United States of much of their land and natural resources as a result of it being allocated and sold to settlers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts#Homestead_Act_o...
I'm no history buff, but I'm pretty sure the Homestead Act of 1862 violated some treaties in a major way, and soldiers were involved.