{"id":85,"date":"2023-03-06T23:36:05","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T23:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-3-5\/"},"modified":"2023-04-26T22:55:42","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T22:55:42","slug":"module-3-5","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-3-5\/","title":{"raw":"3.5 Minority Rights in the New Republic\u202f","rendered":"3.5 Minority Rights in the New Republic\u202f"},"content":{"raw":"

Free and Enslaved Black Americans and the Challenge to Slavery<\/h2>\r\n
\r\n\r\nLed by the slave Gabriel, close to one thousand enslaved men planned to end slavery in Virginia by attacking Richmond in late August 1800. Some of the conspirators would set diversionary fires in the city\u2019s warehouse district. Others would attack Richmond\u2019s white residents, seize weapons, and capture Virginia governor James Monroe. On August 30, two enslaved men revealed the plot to their master, who notified authorities. Faced with bad weather, Gabriel and other leaders postponed the attack until the next night, giving Governor Monroe and the militia time to capture the conspirators. After briefly escaping, Gabriel was seized, tried, and hanged along with twenty-five others. Their executions sent the message that others would be punished if they challenged slavery. Subsequently, the Virginia government increased restrictions on free people of color.\r\n\r\nGabriel\u2019s Rebellion, as the plot came to be known, taught Virginia\u2019s white residents several lessons. First, it suggested that enslaved blacks were capable of preparing and carrying out a sophisticated and violent revolution\u2014undermining white supremacist assumptions about the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks. Furthermore, it demonstrated that white efforts to suppress news of other slave revolts\u2014especially the 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti\u2014had failed. Not only did some literate slaves read accounts of the successful attack in Virginia\u2019s newspapers, others heard about the rebellion firsthand when slaveholding refugees from Haiti arrived in Virginia with their slaves after July 1793.\r\n

The Haitian Revolution (1791\u20131804) inspired free and enslaved black Americans, and terrified white Americans. Port cities in the United States were flooded with news and refugees. Free people of color embraced the revolution, understanding it as a call for full abolition and the rights of citizenship denied in the United States. Over the next several decades, black Americans continually looked to Haiti as an inspiration in their struggle for freedom. For example, in 1829 David Walker, a black abolitionist in Boston, wrote an\u202f Appeal<\/em> \u202fthat called for resistance to slavery and racism. Walker called Haiti the \u201cglory of the blacks and terror of the tyrants\u201d and said that Haitians, \u201caccording to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.\u201d Haiti also proved that, given equal opportunities, people of color could achieve as much as whites.1<\/sup><\/a>\u202f In 1826 the third college graduate of color in the United States, John Russwurm, gave a commencement address at Bowdoin College, noting that, \u201cHaytiens have adopted the republican form of government . . . [and] in no country are the rights and privileges of citizens and foreigners more respected, and crimes less frequent.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> In 1838 the Colored American<\/em>, an early black newspaper, professed that \u201cno one who reads, with an unprejudiced mind, the history of Hayti . . . can doubt the capacity of colored men, nor the propriety of removing all their disabilities.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> Haiti, and the activism it inspired, sent the message that enslaved and free blacks could not be omitted from conversations about the meaning of liberty and equality. Their words and actions\u2014on plantations, streets, and the printed page\u2014left an indelible mark on early national political culture.<\/p>\r\nThe black activism inspired by Haiti\u2019s revolution was so powerful that anxious white leaders scrambled to use the violence of the Haitian revolt to reinforce white supremacy and pro-slavery views by limiting the social and political lives of people of color. White publications mocked black Americans as buffoons, ridiculing calls for abolition and equal rights. The most (in)famous of these, the \u201cBobalition\u201d broadsides, published in Boston in the 1810s, crudely caricatured African Americans. Widely distributed materials like these became the basis for racist ideas that thrived in the nineteenth century. But such ridicule also implied that black Americans\u2019 presence in the political conversation was significant enough to require it. The need to reinforce such an obvious difference between whiteness and blackness implied that the differences might not be so obvious after all.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Painting The idea and image of black Haitian revolutionaries sent shock waves throughout white America. That black slaves and freed people might turn violent against whites, so obvious in this image where a black soldier holds up the head of a white soldier, remained a serious fear in the hearts and minds of white Southerners throughout the antebellum period. January Suchodolski, Battle at San Domingo, 1845. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHenry Moss, a slave in Virginia, became arguably the most famous black man of the day when white spots appeared on his body in 1792, turning him visibly white within three years. As his skin changed, Moss marketed himself as \u201ca great curiosity\u201d in Philadelphia and soon earned enough money to buy his freedom. He met the great scientists of the era\u2014including Samuel Stanhope Smith and Dr. Benjamin Rush\u2014who joyously deemed Moss to be living proof of their theory that \u201cthe Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the leprosy.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> \u202fSomething, somehow, was \u201ccuring\u201d Moss of his blackness. In the whitening body of slave-turned-patriot-turned-curiosity, many Americans fostered ideas of race that would cause major problems in the years ahead.\r\n\r\nThe first decades of the new American republic coincided with a radical shift in understandings of race. Politically and culturally, Enlightenment thinking fostered beliefs in common humanity, the possibility of societal progress, the remaking of oneself, and the importance of one\u2019s social and ecological environment\u2014a four-pronged revolt against the hierarchies of the Old World. Yet tension arose due to Enlightenment thinkers\u2019 desire to classify and order the natural world. Carolus Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and others created connections between race and place as they divided the racial \u201ctypes\u201d of the world according to skin color, cranial measurements, and hair. They claimed that years under the hot sun and tropical climate of Africa darkened the skin and reconfigured the skulls of the African race, whereas the cold northern latitudes of Europe molded and sustained the \u201cCaucasian\u201d race. The environments endowed both races with respective characteristics, which accounted for differences in humankind tracing back to a common ancestry. A universal human nature, therefore, housed not fundamental differences but rather the \u201ccivilized\u201d and the \u201cprimitive\u201d\u2014two poles on a scale of social progress.\r\n\r\nInformed by European anthropology and republican optimism, Americans confronted their own uniquely problematic racial landscape. In 1787, Samuel Stanhope Smith published his treatise\u202f Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species<\/em>, which further articulated the theory of racial change and suggested that improving the social environment would tap into the innate equality of humankind and dramatically uplift nonwhite races. The proper society, he and others believed, could gradually \u201cwhiten\u201d men the way nature spontaneously chose to whiten Henry Moss. Thomas Jefferson disagreed. While Jefferson thought Native Americans could improve and become \u201ccivilized,\u201d he declared in his\u202f Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em>\u202f (1784) that black people were incapable of mental improvement and that they might even have a separate ancestry\u2014a theory known as polygenesis, or multiple creations. His belief in polygenesis was less to justify slavery\u2014slaveholders universally rejected the theory as antibiblical and thus a threat to their primary instrument of justification, the Bible\u2014and more to justify schemes for a white America, such as the plan to gradually send freed slaves to Africa. Many Americans believed nature had made the white and black races too different to peacefully coexist, and they viewed African colonization as the solution to America\u2019s racial problem.\r\n\r\nJefferson\u2019s\u202f Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em> sparked considerable backlash from antislavery and black communities. The celebrated black surveyor Benjamin Banneker, for example, immediately wrote to Jefferson and demanded he \u201ceradicate that train of absurd and false ideas\u201d and instead embrace the belief that we are \u201call of one flesh\u201d and with \u201call the same sensations and endowed . . . with the same faculties.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> Many years later, in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World<\/em>\u202f (1829), David Walker channeled decades of black protest, simultaneously denouncing the moral rot of slavery and racism while praising the inner strength of the race.\r\n\r\nJefferson had his defenders. White men such as Charles Caldwell and Samuel George Morton hardened Jefferson\u2019s skepticism with the \u201cbiological\u201d case for blacks and whites not only having separate creations but actually being different species, a position increasingly articulated throughout the antebellum period. Few Americans subscribed wholesale to such theories, but many shared beliefs in white supremacy. As the decades passed, white Americans were forced to acknowledge that if the black population was indeed whitening, it resulted from interracial sex and not the environment. The sense of inspiration and wonder that followed Henry Moss in the 1790s would have been impossible just a generation later.\r\n

Native American Power and the United States<\/h3>\r\nThe Jeffersonian rhetoric of equality contrasted harshly with the reality of a nation stratified along the lines of gender, class, race, and ethnicity.6<\/sup><\/a> The foundation of the United States government, its Constitution, treated Native Americans as members of entirely foreign nations despite the reality that many native peoples, their tribes conquered or effectively dissolved, lived within the territory of the United States.\u00a0 Those people, aside from some of those of mixed raced able to \u201cpass\u201d as white and a few conquered and colonized tribes that individually secured marginally better arrangements, would be denied citizenship in the nation that dominated their social, cultural, political, and economic worlds until after the First World War.\r\n\r\nEven as early as the Washington Administration, and quite distinctly by the Jefferson Administration, the plan for the Native American future was clear.\u00a0 Conquest, expropriation of land, and the confinement of survivors to what came to be known as \u201creservations.\u201d\u00a0 A term arising from the ideas of \u201creserved lands\u201d and tracing its origins back beyond the praying towns of Puritan New England, these areas were allegedly places where native peoples would \u201clearn\u201d to practice the preferred agricultural systems, religions, gender relations, social structures, and cultures of dominant English-speaking white Americans and surrender their languages and cultures.\r\n\r\nYet these processes were in fact cultural colonization, the brutal use of deprivation, forcible coercion, and threats to terrorize helpless people into some of the most wrenching losses of lifeways and identities humans can endure.\u00a0 Common sayings to express this included \u201ckilling the Indian to save the man,\u201d shorthand for the abuse needed to force broken people to abandon languages, religions, cultures, and other lifeways tens of thousands of years in the making \u2013 as well as \u201cthe only good Indian is a dead Indian,\u201d a term born in borderland wars that fueled racist pogroms that bordered on legal genocide.\r\n\r\nThe lands themselves, tiny fractions of what the native peoples actually needed, were chosen to be the least attractive for agriculture to maximize the benefit to white settlers.\u00a0 The food and supplies needed to sustain the native peoples in their first attempts at new agricultural systems, and to carry out the new systems demanded, were regularly misappropriated by government officials tasked with providing them and sold to white settlers in a form of corruption rarely addressed at the time.\u00a0 These corrupt practices would compound the mass death and mass suffering created by the wholesale forced removals of native peoples across the 19th century, death marches without food, shelter, clean water, or even the limited medicine of the time that would in many cases collapse individual tribal nations\u2019 populations to fractions of what they had been before.\u00a0 Or drive them entirely extinct.\r\n\r\nAlong the way the shattering imposition of European ideas of patriarchy hobbled gender relations among native peoples, and the introduction of strong alcohol to societies with little to no experience with the means to address alcoholism within families and societies worsened every condition.\r\n\r\nThe reservation system would expand as the United States did, just as similar systems emerged and expanded in British North America and Canada.\u00a0 Along with it came new horrors, especially the horrific practice of seizing and removal of the helpless children of restrained native parents.\u00a0 Scenes of unimaginable grief and loss played out as children were taken for emotionally and physical brutal abuses intended to carry out what today would be called complete cultural genocide as their parents mourned the loss of their children\u2019s futures within their own ways of life \u2013 and the children\u2019s absence.\r\n\r\nRarely allowed to visit for long, and with the return of the children to these \u201cschools\u201d backed by military force, parents lost their children\u2019s entire youth \u2013 and often the children themselves.\u00a0 Horrifying mass deaths born of abuse, neglect, and worse continue to be uncovered across these schools for native children across North America.\u00a0 In other cases, children were adopted out by non-native families on grounds ranging from outright attempts at cultural colonization to accusations of the parents\u2019 inability to provide for their children \u2013 itself a product of the conditions enforced in the reservations.\u00a0 Though the reservation system in America has, of late, improved, the loss of Native American children continues \u2013 as do the brutalities of missing and murdered indigenous women, a nightmare that spans the entire history of Europeans and European-descent polities in the Western Hemisphere.\r\n\r\nNative nations not yet completely reduced to dependency, conquered, or colonized maintained a type of diplomatic relation that was nevertheless not equal to the international relations of European and European-descendant sovereign polities.\u00a0 Prior to the Seven Years War, many Native American nations had been able to delicately play one European empire and its colonies off against another.\u00a0 With the departure of France from almost all of North America and the expulsion of Spain east of the Mississippi, these opportunities faded \u2013 until the Revolution provided a brief window to try the same between the United States and the British Empire.\u00a0 Throughout that time, in many parts of eastern North America, indigenous peoples dominated social relations.\r\n\r\nDriven by the hunger for more land to the west from the effects of population expansion, soil-denuding plantation agriculture in the South, and eventually the psychological \u201cpressure valve\u201d effect of western opportunities in the North after the Industrial and Capitalist Revolutions, white Americans pushed for more land in almost all their interactions with native peoples, their leaders, and especially their diplomats.\u00a0 But these boundaries were only one source of tension.\r\n\r\nTrade, criminal jurisdiction, roads, the sale of alcohol, and complex alliances were also key negotiating points. Despite their role in fighting on both sides, Native American negotiators were not included in the diplomatic negotiations that ended the Revolutionary War. Unsurprisingly, the final document omitted concessions for Native American allies. Even as native peoples proved vital trading partners, scouts, and allies against hostile nations, they were often condemned by white settlers and government officials as \u201csavages.\u201d White ridicule of indigenous practices and disregard for indigenous nations\u2019 property rights and sovereignty prompted indigenous peoples to turn away from most white practices.\r\n\r\nIn the wake of the American Revolution, Native American diplomats developed relationships with the United States, maintained or ceased relations with the British Empire (or with Spain in the South), and negotiated their relationship with other native nations. The balancing of Britain against America was attempted, and British irritation with America\u2019s failure to meet the debt-based demands of the peace treaty and its successors kept a British military presence on ostensibly American soil.\u00a0 When conflicts erupted, Native Americans in and around those areas were often armed by the British in a proxy war strategy practiced for thousands of years across the world.\u00a0 British concerns to presence its remaining North American territories, including what is now Canada, and those francophone peoples and English-speakers in the area \u2013 many resettled Americans who had opposed and even fought against independence \u2013 ensured their interest in complicated the military and strategic defenses of the newborn United States.\u00a0 Native American nations and their diplomats provided successful means to do just that.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"488\"]\"Shown Shown in this portrait as a refined gentleman, Red Jacket proved to be one of the most effective middlemen between Native Americans and U.S. officials. The medal worn around his neck, apparently given to him by George Washington, reflects his position as an intermediary. Campbell & Burns, Red Jacket. Seneca war chief, Philadelphia: C. Hullmandel, 1838. \u202fLibrary of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFormal diplomatic negotiations between Native Americans and the various levels and types of American governance after independence included native rituals to reestablish relationships and open communications.\u00a0 Treaty conferences took place in native cities and towns, at neutral sites in the borderlands, and in state and federal capitals. While Native American leaders were politically important, skilled orators, intermediaries, and interpreters also played key roles in these diplomatic activities. Native American orators were known for metaphorical language, command of an audience, and compelling voice and gestures.\r\n\r\nThroughout the early republic, diplomacy was often preferred to war. Violence and warfare carried enormous costs for all parties\u2014in lives, money, trade disruptions, and reputation. Diplomacy allowed parties to air their grievances, negotiate their relationships, and minimize violence. Violent conflicts arose when diplomacy all too often failed.\r\n\r\nNative diplomacy testified to the complexity of indigenous cultures and their role in shaping the politics and policy of American communities states, and the federal government. Yet white attitudes, words, and policies frequently relegated native peoples to the literal and figurative margins as \u201cignorant savages.\u201d Poor treatment like this inspired hostility and calls for pan-tribal alliances from leaders and members of distinct native nations and communities, including the Shawnee leader Tecumseh.\r\n\r\nTecumseh and his brother, Tenskatawa, the Prophet, helped envision an alliance of North America\u2019s indigenous populations to halt the encroachments of the United States. They created pan-tribal towns in present-day Indiana, first at Greenville, then at Prophetstown, in defiance of the Treaty of Greenville (1795). Tecumseh traveled to many diverse American Indian nations from British Canadian lands to the American State of Georgia, calling for unification, resistance, and the restoration of sacred power.\r\n\r\nTecumseh and Tenskwatawa\u2019s pan-American Indian confederacy was the culmination of many movements that swept through indigenous North America during the eighteenth century. An earlier coalition fought in Pontiac\u2019s War. Neolin, the Delaware prophet, influenced Pontiac, an Ottawa (Odawa) war chief, with his vision of native independence, cultural renewal, and religious revitalization. Through Neolin, the Master of Life\u2014the Great Spirit\u2014urged native peoples to shrug off their dependency on European goods and technologies, reassert their faith in native spirituality and rituals, and cooperate with one another against the \u201cWhite people\u2019s ways and nature.\u201d7 \u202fAdditionally, Neolin advocated violence against British encroachments on Native American lands, which escalated after the Seven Years\u2019 War. His message was particularly effective in the Ohio and Upper Susquehanna Valleys, where multi-lingual communities of indigenous refugees and migrants from across eastern North America lived together. When combined with the militant leadership of Pontiac, who took up Neolin\u2019s message, the many native peoples of the region united in attacks against British forts and people. From 1763 until 1765, the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Upper Susquehanna Valley areas were embroiled in a war between Pontiac\u2019s confederacy and the British Empire, a war that ultimately forced the British to restructure how they managed Native-British relations and trade.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Tenskwatawa Tenskwatawa as painted by George Catlin, in 1831. Caitlin acknowledged the prophet\u2019s spiritual power and Painted him with a medicine stick. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn the interim between 1765 and 1811, other Native prophets kept Neolin\u2019s message alive while encouraging indigenous peoples to resist Euro-American encroachments. These individuals included the Ottawa leader \u201cthe Trout,\u201d also called Maya-Ga-Wy; Joseph Brant of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee); the Creek headman Mad Dog; Painted Pole of the Shawnee; a Mohawk woman named Coocoochee; Main Poc of the Potawatomi; and the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. Once again, the epicenter of this pan-tribal resistance and revitalization originated in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions, where from 1791 to 1795 a joint force of Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Iroquois, Ojibwe, Ottawa, Huron, Potawatomi, Mingo, Chickamauga, and other indigenous peoples waged war against the American republic. Although this \u201cWestern Confederacy\u201d ultimately suffered defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, this native coalition achieved a number of military victories against the republic, including the destruction of two American armies, forcing President Washington to reformulate federal American Indian policy. Tecumseh\u2019s experiences as a warrior against the American military in this conflict probably influenced his later efforts to generate solidarity among North American indigenous communities.\r\n\r\nTecumseh and Tenskatawa articulated ideas and beliefs similar to their eighteenth-century predecessors. In particular, Tenskatawa pronounced that the Master of Life entrusted him and Tecumseh with the responsibility for returning native peoples to the one true path and to rid native communities of the dangerous and corrupting influences of Euro-American trade and culture. Tenskatawa stressed the need for cultural and religious renewal, which coincided with his blending of the tenets, traditions, and rituals of indigenous religions and Christianity. In particular, Tenskatawa emphasized apocalyptic visions that he and his followers would usher in a new world and restore native power to the continent. For Native peoples who gravitated to the Shawnee brothers, this emphasis on cultural and religious revitalization was empowering and spiritually liberating, especially given the continuous American assaults on native land and power in the early nineteenth century.\r\n\r\nTecumseh\u2019s confederacy drew heavily from indigenous communities in the Old Northwest and the festering hatred for land-hungry Americans. Tecumseh attracted a wealth of allies in his adamant refusal to concede any more land. Tecumseh proclaimed that the Master of Life tasked him with the responsibility of returning Native lands to their rightful owners. In his efforts to promote unity among Native peoples, Tecumseh also offered these communities a distinctly American Indian and First Nations identity that brought disparate native peoples together under the banner of a common spirituality, together resisting an oppressive force. In short, spirituality tied together the resistance movement. Tecumseh and Tenskatawa were not above using this pan-native rhetoric to legitimate their own authority within indigenous communities at the expense of other native leaders, especially those who cooperated with the Americans.\r\n\r\nWhile Tecumseh attracted native peoples from around the Ohio Valley (the modern American Midwest) and from the Tennessee Valley, the Red Stick Creeks brought these ideas to the Southeast. Led by the Creek prophet Hillis Hadjo, who accompanied Tecumseh when he toured throughout the Southeast in 1811, the Red Sticks integrated certain religious tenets from the north and invented new religious practices specific to the Creeks, all the while communicating and coordinating with Tecumseh after he left Creek Country. In doing so, the Red Sticks joined Tecumseh in his resistance movement while seeking to purge Creek society of its Euro-American dependencies. Creek leaders who maintained relationships with the United States, in contrast, believed that accommodation and diplomacy might stave off American encroachments better than violence, reflecting a divide that would dominate almost all Native American relations with the United States government in war and in later legal fights for the constitutional rights of Native American nations under the idea of reserved sovereignty of tribal nations.\r\n\r\nAdditionally, the Red Sticks discovered that most southeastern indigenous leaders cared little for Tecumseh\u2019s confederacy. This lack of allies hindered the spread of a pan-tribal movement like that in the Ohio Valley in the southeast, and the Red Sticks soon found themselves in a civil war against other Creeks. Tecumseh thus found little support in the Southeast beyond the Red Sticks, who by 1813 were cut off from the North by American general Andrew Jackson. Shortly thereafter, Jackson\u2019s forces were joined by Lower Creek and Cherokee forces that helped defeat the Red Sticks, culminating in Jackson\u2019s victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Following their defeat, the Red Sticks were forced to cede an unprecedented fourteen million acres of land in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. As historian Adam Rothman argues, the defeat of the Red Sticks allowed the United States to expand west of the Mississippi, guaranteeing the continued existence and profitability of slavery.8<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nMany native leaders refused to join Tecumseh and instead maintained their forced loyalties to the American republic. After the failures of pan-tribal unity and loss at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, Tecumseh\u2019s confederation floundered. The War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, driven in large part by Tecumseh\u2019s Ohio Valley War and its impact on American settlers, offered new opportunities for Tecumseh and his followers.9<\/sup><\/a> \u202fWith the United States distracted, Tecumseh and his confederated army seized several American forts on their own initiative. Eventually Tecumseh solicited British aid after sustaining heavy losses from American fighters at Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison. Even then, Tecumseh\u2019s confederation faced an uphill battle, particularly after American naval forces secured control of the Great Lakes in September 1813, forcing British ships and reinforcements to retreat. Yet Tecumseh and his native allies fought on despite being surrounded by American forces. Tecumseh told the British commander Henry Proctor, \u201cOur lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it is his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> Not soon thereafter, Tecumseh fell on the battlefields of Moraviantown, Ontario, in October 1813. His death dealt a severe blow to pan-tribal resistance against the United States for many years. Men like Tecumseh and Pontiac, however, left behind a legacy of pan-tribal unity that was not soon forgotten.\r\n\r\nYet the constant struggle between expanding American settlers and native peoples, while not always violent, existed as an almost fractal ebb and flow down to the smallest scale of individual families scattered across a landscape not yet unified by technologies of movement and communication.\u00a0 Trade, learning, and even intermarriage happened more often than violence, though these were often unequal.\u00a0 And while hatred certainly simmered from the experiences of all those caught up in violence and inequality, so did the construction of new families of people of mixed ancestry \u2013 European, Native American, African, and French- and Spanish-speaking peoples.\u00a0 Non-racist terms for these people in American English are sorely lacking, but in Spanish-speaking lands mestizos<\/em> come from mestizaje<\/em>, while in French-speaking lands m\u00e9tis<\/em> come from m\u00e9tissage<\/em>.\u00a0 In modern America, these people of mixed race may use these terms \u2013 the latter quite differently from its use in Canada \u2013 depending on whether their families arose or lived closer to areas where French or Spanish cultures predated the arrival of English-speaking Americans.\u00a0 In America, many of these people then and now carried tribal affiliation, and many more \u201cpassed as white\u201d or forgot, over generations, their ancestry.\r\n\r\nThe violence that did erupt was not always, or even most often, driven by powerful leaders and organized political or military forms.\u00a0 Weapons of many kinds, for hunting, dual-use as tools, or fighting, \u00a0existed in the hands of all the peoples of the borderlands \u2013 not a defined frontier line as in the American imagination, then as now, but rather outposts of different groups and cultures dotted across the land in increasing or decreasing numbers.\u00a0 Arguments turned violent, grief or desperation turned violent, and hatreds learned by rote or learned by trauma turned violent.\u00a0 These interactions, positive and negative, proved impossible for any political authority \u2013 native or American \u2013 to fully control or even manage.\u00a0 And from these arose the darkness of the future, and its hope \u2013 then as now.\r\n

Notes<\/h4>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of The United States of America<\/em> (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 21, 56. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  2. John Russwurm, \u201cThe Condition and Prospects of Hayti,\u201d in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents<\/em>, ed. Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon (New York: Routledge, 2013), 168. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  3. \u201cRepublic of Hayti,\u201d Colored American<\/em>, March 15, 1838, 2. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Benjamin Rush, \u201cObservations Intended to Favour a Supposition That the Black Color (As It Is Called) of the Negroes is Derived from the Leprosy,\u201d Transactions of the American Philosophical Society<\/em> 4 (1799): 289\u2013297. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Banneker to Jefferson, August 19, 1791, Founders Online, National Archives<\/em>, http:\/\/founders.archives.gov\/documents\/Jefferson\/01-22-02-0049.\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  6. See, for example, Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca<\/em> (New York: Random House, 1969), 111. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  7. Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745\u20131815 <\/em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 33. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  8. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  9. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism <\/em>(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 149\u2013153.\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  10. Quoted in Edward Eggleston and Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet <\/em>(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1878), 309. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"

    Free and Enslaved Black Americans and the Challenge to Slavery<\/h2>\n
    \n

    Led by the slave Gabriel, close to one thousand enslaved men planned to end slavery in Virginia by attacking Richmond in late August 1800. Some of the conspirators would set diversionary fires in the city\u2019s warehouse district. Others would attack Richmond\u2019s white residents, seize weapons, and capture Virginia governor James Monroe. On August 30, two enslaved men revealed the plot to their master, who notified authorities. Faced with bad weather, Gabriel and other leaders postponed the attack until the next night, giving Governor Monroe and the militia time to capture the conspirators. After briefly escaping, Gabriel was seized, tried, and hanged along with twenty-five others. Their executions sent the message that others would be punished if they challenged slavery. Subsequently, the Virginia government increased restrictions on free people of color.<\/p>\n

    Gabriel\u2019s Rebellion, as the plot came to be known, taught Virginia\u2019s white residents several lessons. First, it suggested that enslaved blacks were capable of preparing and carrying out a sophisticated and violent revolution\u2014undermining white supremacist assumptions about the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks. Furthermore, it demonstrated that white efforts to suppress news of other slave revolts\u2014especially the 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti\u2014had failed. Not only did some literate slaves read accounts of the successful attack in Virginia\u2019s newspapers, others heard about the rebellion firsthand when slaveholding refugees from Haiti arrived in Virginia with their slaves after July 1793.<\/p>\n

    The Haitian Revolution (1791\u20131804) inspired free and enslaved black Americans, and terrified white Americans. Port cities in the United States were flooded with news and refugees. Free people of color embraced the revolution, understanding it as a call for full abolition and the rights of citizenship denied in the United States. Over the next several decades, black Americans continually looked to Haiti as an inspiration in their struggle for freedom. For example, in 1829 David Walker, a black abolitionist in Boston, wrote an\u202f Appeal<\/em> \u202fthat called for resistance to slavery and racism. Walker called Haiti the \u201cglory of the blacks and terror of the tyrants\u201d and said that Haitians, \u201caccording to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.\u201d Haiti also proved that, given equal opportunities, people of color could achieve as much as whites.1<\/sup><\/a>\u202f In 1826 the third college graduate of color in the United States, John Russwurm, gave a commencement address at Bowdoin College, noting that, \u201cHaytiens have adopted the republican form of government . . . [and] in no country are the rights and privileges of citizens and foreigners more respected, and crimes less frequent.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> In 1838 the Colored American<\/em>, an early black newspaper, professed that \u201cno one who reads, with an unprejudiced mind, the history of Hayti . . . can doubt the capacity of colored men, nor the propriety of removing all their disabilities.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> Haiti, and the activism it inspired, sent the message that enslaved and free blacks could not be omitted from conversations about the meaning of liberty and equality. Their words and actions\u2014on plantations, streets, and the printed page\u2014left an indelible mark on early national political culture.<\/p>\n

    The black activism inspired by Haiti\u2019s revolution was so powerful that anxious white leaders scrambled to use the violence of the Haitian revolt to reinforce white supremacy and pro-slavery views by limiting the social and political lives of people of color. White publications mocked black Americans as buffoons, ridiculing calls for abolition and equal rights. The most (in)famous of these, the \u201cBobalition\u201d broadsides, published in Boston in the 1810s, crudely caricatured African Americans. Widely distributed materials like these became the basis for racist ideas that thrived in the nineteenth century. But such ridicule also implied that black Americans\u2019 presence in the political conversation was significant enough to require it. The need to reinforce such an obvious difference between whiteness and blackness implied that the differences might not be so obvious after all.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Painting
    The idea and image of black Haitian revolutionaries sent shock waves throughout white America. That black slaves and freed people might turn violent against whites, so obvious in this image where a black soldier holds up the head of a white soldier, remained a serious fear in the hearts and minds of white Southerners throughout the antebellum period. January Suchodolski, Battle at San Domingo, 1845. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Henry Moss, a slave in Virginia, became arguably the most famous black man of the day when white spots appeared on his body in 1792, turning him visibly white within three years. As his skin changed, Moss marketed himself as \u201ca great curiosity\u201d in Philadelphia and soon earned enough money to buy his freedom. He met the great scientists of the era\u2014including Samuel Stanhope Smith and Dr. Benjamin Rush\u2014who joyously deemed Moss to be living proof of their theory that \u201cthe Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the leprosy.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> \u202fSomething, somehow, was \u201ccuring\u201d Moss of his blackness. In the whitening body of slave-turned-patriot-turned-curiosity, many Americans fostered ideas of race that would cause major problems in the years ahead.<\/p>\n

    The first decades of the new American republic coincided with a radical shift in understandings of race. Politically and culturally, Enlightenment thinking fostered beliefs in common humanity, the possibility of societal progress, the remaking of oneself, and the importance of one\u2019s social and ecological environment\u2014a four-pronged revolt against the hierarchies of the Old World. Yet tension arose due to Enlightenment thinkers\u2019 desire to classify and order the natural world. Carolus Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and others created connections between race and place as they divided the racial \u201ctypes\u201d of the world according to skin color, cranial measurements, and hair. They claimed that years under the hot sun and tropical climate of Africa darkened the skin and reconfigured the skulls of the African race, whereas the cold northern latitudes of Europe molded and sustained the \u201cCaucasian\u201d race. The environments endowed both races with respective characteristics, which accounted for differences in humankind tracing back to a common ancestry. A universal human nature, therefore, housed not fundamental differences but rather the \u201ccivilized\u201d and the \u201cprimitive\u201d\u2014two poles on a scale of social progress.<\/p>\n

    Informed by European anthropology and republican optimism, Americans confronted their own uniquely problematic racial landscape. In 1787, Samuel Stanhope Smith published his treatise\u202f Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species<\/em>, which further articulated the theory of racial change and suggested that improving the social environment would tap into the innate equality of humankind and dramatically uplift nonwhite races. The proper society, he and others believed, could gradually \u201cwhiten\u201d men the way nature spontaneously chose to whiten Henry Moss. Thomas Jefferson disagreed. While Jefferson thought Native Americans could improve and become \u201ccivilized,\u201d he declared in his\u202f Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em>\u202f (1784) that black people were incapable of mental improvement and that they might even have a separate ancestry\u2014a theory known as polygenesis, or multiple creations. His belief in polygenesis was less to justify slavery\u2014slaveholders universally rejected the theory as antibiblical and thus a threat to their primary instrument of justification, the Bible\u2014and more to justify schemes for a white America, such as the plan to gradually send freed slaves to Africa. Many Americans believed nature had made the white and black races too different to peacefully coexist, and they viewed African colonization as the solution to America\u2019s racial problem.<\/p>\n

    Jefferson\u2019s\u202f Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em> sparked considerable backlash from antislavery and black communities. The celebrated black surveyor Benjamin Banneker, for example, immediately wrote to Jefferson and demanded he \u201ceradicate that train of absurd and false ideas\u201d and instead embrace the belief that we are \u201call of one flesh\u201d and with \u201call the same sensations and endowed . . . with the same faculties.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> Many years later, in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World<\/em>\u202f (1829), David Walker channeled decades of black protest, simultaneously denouncing the moral rot of slavery and racism while praising the inner strength of the race.<\/p>\n

    Jefferson had his defenders. White men such as Charles Caldwell and Samuel George Morton hardened Jefferson\u2019s skepticism with the \u201cbiological\u201d case for blacks and whites not only having separate creations but actually being different species, a position increasingly articulated throughout the antebellum period. Few Americans subscribed wholesale to such theories, but many shared beliefs in white supremacy. As the decades passed, white Americans were forced to acknowledge that if the black population was indeed whitening, it resulted from interracial sex and not the environment. The sense of inspiration and wonder that followed Henry Moss in the 1790s would have been impossible just a generation later.<\/p>\n

    Native American Power and the United States<\/h3>\n

    The Jeffersonian rhetoric of equality contrasted harshly with the reality of a nation stratified along the lines of gender, class, race, and ethnicity.6<\/sup><\/a> The foundation of the United States government, its Constitution, treated Native Americans as members of entirely foreign nations despite the reality that many native peoples, their tribes conquered or effectively dissolved, lived within the territory of the United States.\u00a0 Those people, aside from some of those of mixed raced able to \u201cpass\u201d as white and a few conquered and colonized tribes that individually secured marginally better arrangements, would be denied citizenship in the nation that dominated their social, cultural, political, and economic worlds until after the First World War.<\/p>\n

    Even as early as the Washington Administration, and quite distinctly by the Jefferson Administration, the plan for the Native American future was clear.\u00a0 Conquest, expropriation of land, and the confinement of survivors to what came to be known as \u201creservations.\u201d\u00a0 A term arising from the ideas of \u201creserved lands\u201d and tracing its origins back beyond the praying towns of Puritan New England, these areas were allegedly places where native peoples would \u201clearn\u201d to practice the preferred agricultural systems, religions, gender relations, social structures, and cultures of dominant English-speaking white Americans and surrender their languages and cultures.<\/p>\n

    Yet these processes were in fact cultural colonization, the brutal use of deprivation, forcible coercion, and threats to terrorize helpless people into some of the most wrenching losses of lifeways and identities humans can endure.\u00a0 Common sayings to express this included \u201ckilling the Indian to save the man,\u201d shorthand for the abuse needed to force broken people to abandon languages, religions, cultures, and other lifeways tens of thousands of years in the making \u2013 as well as \u201cthe only good Indian is a dead Indian,\u201d a term born in borderland wars that fueled racist pogroms that bordered on legal genocide.<\/p>\n

    The lands themselves, tiny fractions of what the native peoples actually needed, were chosen to be the least attractive for agriculture to maximize the benefit to white settlers.\u00a0 The food and supplies needed to sustain the native peoples in their first attempts at new agricultural systems, and to carry out the new systems demanded, were regularly misappropriated by government officials tasked with providing them and sold to white settlers in a form of corruption rarely addressed at the time.\u00a0 These corrupt practices would compound the mass death and mass suffering created by the wholesale forced removals of native peoples across the 19th century, death marches without food, shelter, clean water, or even the limited medicine of the time that would in many cases collapse individual tribal nations\u2019 populations to fractions of what they had been before.\u00a0 Or drive them entirely extinct.<\/p>\n

    Along the way the shattering imposition of European ideas of patriarchy hobbled gender relations among native peoples, and the introduction of strong alcohol to societies with little to no experience with the means to address alcoholism within families and societies worsened every condition.<\/p>\n

    The reservation system would expand as the United States did, just as similar systems emerged and expanded in British North America and Canada.\u00a0 Along with it came new horrors, especially the horrific practice of seizing and removal of the helpless children of restrained native parents.\u00a0 Scenes of unimaginable grief and loss played out as children were taken for emotionally and physical brutal abuses intended to carry out what today would be called complete cultural genocide as their parents mourned the loss of their children\u2019s futures within their own ways of life \u2013 and the children\u2019s absence.<\/p>\n

    Rarely allowed to visit for long, and with the return of the children to these \u201cschools\u201d backed by military force, parents lost their children\u2019s entire youth \u2013 and often the children themselves.\u00a0 Horrifying mass deaths born of abuse, neglect, and worse continue to be uncovered across these schools for native children across North America.\u00a0 In other cases, children were adopted out by non-native families on grounds ranging from outright attempts at cultural colonization to accusations of the parents\u2019 inability to provide for their children \u2013 itself a product of the conditions enforced in the reservations.\u00a0 Though the reservation system in America has, of late, improved, the loss of Native American children continues \u2013 as do the brutalities of missing and murdered indigenous women, a nightmare that spans the entire history of Europeans and European-descent polities in the Western Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

    Native nations not yet completely reduced to dependency, conquered, or colonized maintained a type of diplomatic relation that was nevertheless not equal to the international relations of European and European-descendant sovereign polities.\u00a0 Prior to the Seven Years War, many Native American nations had been able to delicately play one European empire and its colonies off against another.\u00a0 With the departure of France from almost all of North America and the expulsion of Spain east of the Mississippi, these opportunities faded \u2013 until the Revolution provided a brief window to try the same between the United States and the British Empire.\u00a0 Throughout that time, in many parts of eastern North America, indigenous peoples dominated social relations.<\/p>\n

    Driven by the hunger for more land to the west from the effects of population expansion, soil-denuding plantation agriculture in the South, and eventually the psychological \u201cpressure valve\u201d effect of western opportunities in the North after the Industrial and Capitalist Revolutions, white Americans pushed for more land in almost all their interactions with native peoples, their leaders, and especially their diplomats.\u00a0 But these boundaries were only one source of tension.<\/p>\n

    Trade, criminal jurisdiction, roads, the sale of alcohol, and complex alliances were also key negotiating points. Despite their role in fighting on both sides, Native American negotiators were not included in the diplomatic negotiations that ended the Revolutionary War. Unsurprisingly, the final document omitted concessions for Native American allies. Even as native peoples proved vital trading partners, scouts, and allies against hostile nations, they were often condemned by white settlers and government officials as \u201csavages.\u201d White ridicule of indigenous practices and disregard for indigenous nations\u2019 property rights and sovereignty prompted indigenous peoples to turn away from most white practices.<\/p>\n

    In the wake of the American Revolution, Native American diplomats developed relationships with the United States, maintained or ceased relations with the British Empire (or with Spain in the South), and negotiated their relationship with other native nations. The balancing of Britain against America was attempted, and British irritation with America\u2019s failure to meet the debt-based demands of the peace treaty and its successors kept a British military presence on ostensibly American soil.\u00a0 When conflicts erupted, Native Americans in and around those areas were often armed by the British in a proxy war strategy practiced for thousands of years across the world.\u00a0 British concerns to presence its remaining North American territories, including what is now Canada, and those francophone peoples and English-speakers in the area \u2013 many resettled Americans who had opposed and even fought against independence \u2013 ensured their interest in complicated the military and strategic defenses of the newborn United States.\u00a0 Native American nations and their diplomats provided successful means to do just that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \n
    \"Shown
    Shown in this portrait as a refined gentleman, Red Jacket proved to be one of the most effective middlemen between Native Americans and U.S. officials. The medal worn around his neck, apparently given to him by George Washington, reflects his position as an intermediary. Campbell & Burns, Red Jacket. Seneca war chief, Philadelphia: C. Hullmandel, 1838. \u202fLibrary of Congress<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Formal diplomatic negotiations between Native Americans and the various levels and types of American governance after independence included native rituals to reestablish relationships and open communications.\u00a0 Treaty conferences took place in native cities and towns, at neutral sites in the borderlands, and in state and federal capitals. While Native American leaders were politically important, skilled orators, intermediaries, and interpreters also played key roles in these diplomatic activities. Native American orators were known for metaphorical language, command of an audience, and compelling voice and gestures.<\/p>\n

    Throughout the early republic, diplomacy was often preferred to war. Violence and warfare carried enormous costs for all parties\u2014in lives, money, trade disruptions, and reputation. Diplomacy allowed parties to air their grievances, negotiate their relationships, and minimize violence. Violent conflicts arose when diplomacy all too often failed.<\/p>\n

    Native diplomacy testified to the complexity of indigenous cultures and their role in shaping the politics and policy of American communities states, and the federal government. Yet white attitudes, words, and policies frequently relegated native peoples to the literal and figurative margins as \u201cignorant savages.\u201d Poor treatment like this inspired hostility and calls for pan-tribal alliances from leaders and members of distinct native nations and communities, including the Shawnee leader Tecumseh.<\/p>\n

    Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskatawa, the Prophet, helped envision an alliance of North America\u2019s indigenous populations to halt the encroachments of the United States. They created pan-tribal towns in present-day Indiana, first at Greenville, then at Prophetstown, in defiance of the Treaty of Greenville (1795). Tecumseh traveled to many diverse American Indian nations from British Canadian lands to the American State of Georgia, calling for unification, resistance, and the restoration of sacred power.<\/p>\n

    Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa\u2019s pan-American Indian confederacy was the culmination of many movements that swept through indigenous North America during the eighteenth century. An earlier coalition fought in Pontiac\u2019s War. Neolin, the Delaware prophet, influenced Pontiac, an Ottawa (Odawa) war chief, with his vision of native independence, cultural renewal, and religious revitalization. Through Neolin, the Master of Life\u2014the Great Spirit\u2014urged native peoples to shrug off their dependency on European goods and technologies, reassert their faith in native spirituality and rituals, and cooperate with one another against the \u201cWhite people\u2019s ways and nature.\u201d7 \u202fAdditionally, Neolin advocated violence against British encroachments on Native American lands, which escalated after the Seven Years\u2019 War. His message was particularly effective in the Ohio and Upper Susquehanna Valleys, where multi-lingual communities of indigenous refugees and migrants from across eastern North America lived together. When combined with the militant leadership of Pontiac, who took up Neolin\u2019s message, the many native peoples of the region united in attacks against British forts and people. From 1763 until 1765, the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Upper Susquehanna Valley areas were embroiled in a war between Pontiac\u2019s confederacy and the British Empire, a war that ultimately forced the British to restructure how they managed Native-British relations and trade.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Tenskwatawa
    Tenskwatawa as painted by George Catlin, in 1831. Caitlin acknowledged the prophet\u2019s spiritual power and Painted him with a medicine stick. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    In the interim between 1765 and 1811, other Native prophets kept Neolin\u2019s message alive while encouraging indigenous peoples to resist Euro-American encroachments. These individuals included the Ottawa leader \u201cthe Trout,\u201d also called Maya-Ga-Wy; Joseph Brant of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee); the Creek headman Mad Dog; Painted Pole of the Shawnee; a Mohawk woman named Coocoochee; Main Poc of the Potawatomi; and the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. Once again, the epicenter of this pan-tribal resistance and revitalization originated in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions, where from 1791 to 1795 a joint force of Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Iroquois, Ojibwe, Ottawa, Huron, Potawatomi, Mingo, Chickamauga, and other indigenous peoples waged war against the American republic. Although this \u201cWestern Confederacy\u201d ultimately suffered defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, this native coalition achieved a number of military victories against the republic, including the destruction of two American armies, forcing President Washington to reformulate federal American Indian policy. Tecumseh\u2019s experiences as a warrior against the American military in this conflict probably influenced his later efforts to generate solidarity among North American indigenous communities.<\/p>\n

    Tecumseh and Tenskatawa articulated ideas and beliefs similar to their eighteenth-century predecessors. In particular, Tenskatawa pronounced that the Master of Life entrusted him and Tecumseh with the responsibility for returning native peoples to the one true path and to rid native communities of the dangerous and corrupting influences of Euro-American trade and culture. Tenskatawa stressed the need for cultural and religious renewal, which coincided with his blending of the tenets, traditions, and rituals of indigenous religions and Christianity. In particular, Tenskatawa emphasized apocalyptic visions that he and his followers would usher in a new world and restore native power to the continent. For Native peoples who gravitated to the Shawnee brothers, this emphasis on cultural and religious revitalization was empowering and spiritually liberating, especially given the continuous American assaults on native land and power in the early nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

    Tecumseh\u2019s confederacy drew heavily from indigenous communities in the Old Northwest and the festering hatred for land-hungry Americans. Tecumseh attracted a wealth of allies in his adamant refusal to concede any more land. Tecumseh proclaimed that the Master of Life tasked him with the responsibility of returning Native lands to their rightful owners. In his efforts to promote unity among Native peoples, Tecumseh also offered these communities a distinctly American Indian and First Nations identity that brought disparate native peoples together under the banner of a common spirituality, together resisting an oppressive force. In short, spirituality tied together the resistance movement. Tecumseh and Tenskatawa were not above using this pan-native rhetoric to legitimate their own authority within indigenous communities at the expense of other native leaders, especially those who cooperated with the Americans.<\/p>\n

    While Tecumseh attracted native peoples from around the Ohio Valley (the modern American Midwest) and from the Tennessee Valley, the Red Stick Creeks brought these ideas to the Southeast. Led by the Creek prophet Hillis Hadjo, who accompanied Tecumseh when he toured throughout the Southeast in 1811, the Red Sticks integrated certain religious tenets from the north and invented new religious practices specific to the Creeks, all the while communicating and coordinating with Tecumseh after he left Creek Country. In doing so, the Red Sticks joined Tecumseh in his resistance movement while seeking to purge Creek society of its Euro-American dependencies. Creek leaders who maintained relationships with the United States, in contrast, believed that accommodation and diplomacy might stave off American encroachments better than violence, reflecting a divide that would dominate almost all Native American relations with the United States government in war and in later legal fights for the constitutional rights of Native American nations under the idea of reserved sovereignty of tribal nations.<\/p>\n

    Additionally, the Red Sticks discovered that most southeastern indigenous leaders cared little for Tecumseh\u2019s confederacy. This lack of allies hindered the spread of a pan-tribal movement like that in the Ohio Valley in the southeast, and the Red Sticks soon found themselves in a civil war against other Creeks. Tecumseh thus found little support in the Southeast beyond the Red Sticks, who by 1813 were cut off from the North by American general Andrew Jackson. Shortly thereafter, Jackson\u2019s forces were joined by Lower Creek and Cherokee forces that helped defeat the Red Sticks, culminating in Jackson\u2019s victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Following their defeat, the Red Sticks were forced to cede an unprecedented fourteen million acres of land in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. As historian Adam Rothman argues, the defeat of the Red Sticks allowed the United States to expand west of the Mississippi, guaranteeing the continued existence and profitability of slavery.8<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Many native leaders refused to join Tecumseh and instead maintained their forced loyalties to the American republic. After the failures of pan-tribal unity and loss at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, Tecumseh\u2019s confederation floundered. The War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, driven in large part by Tecumseh\u2019s Ohio Valley War and its impact on American settlers, offered new opportunities for Tecumseh and his followers.9<\/sup><\/a> \u202fWith the United States distracted, Tecumseh and his confederated army seized several American forts on their own initiative. Eventually Tecumseh solicited British aid after sustaining heavy losses from American fighters at Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison. Even then, Tecumseh\u2019s confederation faced an uphill battle, particularly after American naval forces secured control of the Great Lakes in September 1813, forcing British ships and reinforcements to retreat. Yet Tecumseh and his native allies fought on despite being surrounded by American forces. Tecumseh told the British commander Henry Proctor, \u201cOur lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it is his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> Not soon thereafter, Tecumseh fell on the battlefields of Moraviantown, Ontario, in October 1813. His death dealt a severe blow to pan-tribal resistance against the United States for many years. Men like Tecumseh and Pontiac, however, left behind a legacy of pan-tribal unity that was not soon forgotten.<\/p>\n

    Yet the constant struggle between expanding American settlers and native peoples, while not always violent, existed as an almost fractal ebb and flow down to the smallest scale of individual families scattered across a landscape not yet unified by technologies of movement and communication.\u00a0 Trade, learning, and even intermarriage happened more often than violence, though these were often unequal.\u00a0 And while hatred certainly simmered from the experiences of all those caught up in violence and inequality, so did the construction of new families of people of mixed ancestry \u2013 European, Native American, African, and French- and Spanish-speaking peoples.\u00a0 Non-racist terms for these people in American English are sorely lacking, but in Spanish-speaking lands mestizos<\/em> come from mestizaje<\/em>, while in French-speaking lands m\u00e9tis<\/em> come from m\u00e9tissage<\/em>.\u00a0 In modern America, these people of mixed race may use these terms \u2013 the latter quite differently from its use in Canada \u2013 depending on whether their families arose or lived closer to areas where French or Spanish cultures predated the arrival of English-speaking Americans.\u00a0 In America, many of these people then and now carried tribal affiliation, and many more \u201cpassed as white\u201d or forgot, over generations, their ancestry.<\/p>\n

    The violence that did erupt was not always, or even most often, driven by powerful leaders and organized political or military forms.\u00a0 Weapons of many kinds, for hunting, dual-use as tools, or fighting, \u00a0existed in the hands of all the peoples of the borderlands \u2013 not a defined frontier line as in the American imagination, then as now, but rather outposts of different groups and cultures dotted across the land in increasing or decreasing numbers.\u00a0 Arguments turned violent, grief or desperation turned violent, and hatreds learned by rote or learned by trauma turned violent.\u00a0 These interactions, positive and negative, proved impossible for any political authority \u2013 native or American \u2013 to fully control or even manage.\u00a0 And from these arose the darkness of the future, and its hope \u2013 then as now.<\/p>\n

    Notes<\/h4>\n
      \n
    1. David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of The United States of America<\/em> (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 21, 56. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. John Russwurm, \u201cThe Condition and Prospects of Hayti,\u201d in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents<\/em>, ed. Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon (New York: Routledge, 2013), 168. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. \u201cRepublic of Hayti,\u201d Colored American<\/em>, March 15, 1838, 2. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Benjamin Rush, \u201cObservations Intended to Favour a Supposition That the Black Color (As It Is Called) of the Negroes is Derived from the Leprosy,\u201d Transactions of the American Philosophical Society<\/em> 4 (1799): 289\u2013297. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. Banneker to Jefferson, August 19, 1791, Founders Online, National Archives<\/em>, http:\/\/founders.archives.gov\/documents\/Jefferson\/01-22-02-0049.\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. See, for example, Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca<\/em> (New York: Random House, 1969), 111. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    7. Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745\u20131815 <\/em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 33. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    8. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    9. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism <\/em>(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 149\u2013153.\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    10. Quoted in Edward Eggleston and Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet <\/em>(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1878), 309. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"menu_order":23,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-85","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":228,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/85\/revisions\/690"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/228"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/85\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}