And while we’re talking about the conquest of frontier land from aboriginal inhabitants: People deploring the Trail of Tears,...
And while we’re talking about the conquest of frontier land from aboriginal inhabitants:
People deploring the Trail of Tears, Indian Removal and all that - I don’t think the national government really had a choice on that one. Or rather, to the extent they had a choice, it wasn’t between ethnic cleansing and peaceful coexistence; it was between ethnic cleansing by expulsion by the federal government and ethnic cleansing by extermination by independent settler warlords, who would have then established their own sovereign states, shattering federal unity and leaving Anglo-America vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics from European powers. (Remember, in 1812 the British fielded a successful expeditionary force, and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight - and federal unity - clear that they wouldn’t come back to finish the job.)
The American founders were thoroughly bourgeois, in both the sense of “well-off merchants” and the more literal one of inhabiting and drawing power from the developed coastal cities. As soon as the revolution ended and the federal government was established, tensions between the mercantile coasts and agricultural interior came to the fore, most prominently in Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellions.
(The whiskey tax at the heart of the latter was considered on the urban coast as a sin tax to be passed on to consumers, but in the interior where a lack of transport options made bulky unrefined grain an uneconomical commodity and a lack of specie prompted a turn to liquor as an alternate store of value, it was effectively an income tax and a drag on every aspect of the economy.)
A policy of coexistence with natives seems noble and honorable to moderns, and indeed it was the noble and honorable policy of the coastal elite of the time, who preferred a policy continuous with the Proclamation of 1763, disfavoring Anglo settlement of native-inhabited lands. To frontier settlers, however, this policy, by cutting off the possibility of further homesteading, meant that with the natural growth of the settler population, family holdings would either have to be further subdivided or surplus population shunted into unlanded migrant labor, reducing the agricultural population to a state of European-style peasant immiseration for the benefit of natives who were even at the most charitable not their fellow countrymen.
Settlers chafed at this and before Indian removal became a federal policy local militias in Georgia and Florida - militia being, of course, a fancy term for “whoever shows up with guns” - were of their own initiative conducting extermination campaigns against local tribes. The Creek and Seminole wars were basically a nationalization of these campaigns, as a reactive attempt by the federal government to keep control of the southeast from being wrested away by either the tribes and their escaped slave allies on one hand, or by independent settler armies on the other. “There go the people. We must follow them, for we are their leaders.”
In the end Andrew Jackson, hero of these wars, was elected President, broke the coastal mercantile hold on the federal government, and pursued a federal policy of Indian Removal. But he was elected President, with emphasis on “elected” and “President”. By coopting settler genocide the United States remained intact under the aegis of the federal government (well, for a generation). The notion of some alternate history in which the federal government holds firm and the settler militias just slink away saying “sorry” is inane. We aren’t Canadians, after all. (And even the Canadians, so proud of their First Nations relations, are changing spots now those relations are getting in the way of their petrochemical economy.) The only possible timeline that would leave the natives in control of their lands is one in which the coastal merchant classes allied with the tribes to militarily suppress their own countrymen (and even then, I’m not sure they would have had the money and manpower to pull it off).
People say “violence never solves anything”, which is insane, holding only for ridiculous definitions of “solves”. And even if, for those definitions, it doesn’t solve problems, it at least makes them stop being problems. Throughout American history, there was a regularly recurring problem: “I want that land, but it’s got injuns on it.” And so each time we applied violence, and that’s not a problem anyone faces anymore. Have you ever seen the land that’s got injuns on it these days? No one wants that land.There’s certainly an alternate history where the federal government goes to war with the settler militias and wins.
That’s what I was thinking as I was reading OP. “If we didn’t use our power to do bad thing, other guy would do bad thing.” Or, stop me if I’m crazy, use your power to stop the other guy.
Colonial news headline: “American troops open fire on their own citizens in brutal massacre.“ “Americans march on DC to put a stop to the cruel and merciless federal government.“
I mean, the criticism there has to be the Christian question of “who is my brother”. Which is to say how and why did both civilians and the government construct an ideology where whites had land rights and Indians didn’t?
Or, why is “I want that land, but there are Indians on it” a problem that can be solved with violence, but “I want that land, but there are white settlers on it” is either a problem which shouldn’t be solved with violence or not a problem at all.
Because the white settlers were ensconced in a capitalist civilization built up by a steady investment of violence over centuries, “I want that land, but there are settlers on it” could be more efficiently be addressed through a falling rate of profit which required constant investment to maintain profitability, a mortgage market constrained by drastic shortages of fluid capital, and a severe business cycle that brought on total economic collapse every two decades or so