Loaded. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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the genealogy of U.S. militarism today: “Whereas the average American at the dawn of the new millennium found patriotic inspiration in the legacies of the Civil War and World War II, when the evils of slavery and fascism were confronted and vanquished, for many commissioned and noncommissioned officers the U.S. Army’s defining moment was fighting the ‘Indians.’”20
Although the U.S. Constitution formally instituted “militias” as state-controlled bodies that were subsequently deployed to wage wars against Native Americans, the voluntary militias described in the Second Amendment entitled settlers, as individuals and families, to the right to combat Native Americans on their own. However, savage war was also embedded in the U.S. Marines, established at independence, as well as the Special Forces of the Army and Navy, established in the mid-twentieth century. The Marine Corps was founded in 1775, a year after the thirteen colonies formed the Continental Congress and Army, a year before the Declaration of Independence, thirteen years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified forming the state, and twenty-three years before the U.S. Navy was founded. The following year, the Marines made their first landing, capturing an island in the Bahamas from the British, what in Marine Corps history is called “Fort Nassau.” In action throughout the Revolutionary War, the Marines were disbanded in 1783 and reorganized in 1794 as a branch of the United States Navy.
The character of a Marine is that of the colonial ranger, created for counterinsurgency outside U.S.-secured territory. The opening lyric of the eternal official hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, soon after the invasion of Mexico and during the occupation, is “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Tripoli hearkens back nearly a half century to the “Barbary Wars” of 1801–15, when the Marines were dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, continuing this aggression, shelling the city, taking captives, and marauding for nearly four years, ending with the 1805 “Battle of Derna.” It was there they earned the nickname “leathernecks” for the high collars they wore as defense against the Berbers’ saber cuts. This was the “First Barbary War,” the ostensible goal of which was to persuade Tripoli to release U.S. sailors it held hostage and to end what the U.S. called “pirate” attacks on U.S. merchant ships. Actually, the Berbers were demanding that their sovereignty over their territorial waters be respected. The Berbers did not give up their demands, and the Marines were withdrawn, returning a decade later, in 1815–16, for the “Second Barbary War,” which ended when Pasha Yusuf Karamanli, ruler of Tripoli, agreed not to exact fees from U.S. ships entering their territorial waters. This was the first military victory of U.S. “gunboat diplomacy,” as it came to be called nearly a century later, when historians mark the beginning of U.S overseas imperialism. The Marines and military historians know better.
The Marine Corps’s second large engagement was the Second Seminole War, which raged from 1835 to 1842 in Florida, the longest war in U.S. history until Vietnam. The Second Seminole War during the Jackson administration has been identified with the extraordinary leader of the Seminole resistance, Osceola. It was all-out war with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps involved. Although, they succeeded in killing Osceola, they lost the war as the Seminoles would not hand over the Africans who had escaped their slavers, which is what the United States demanded of them. The military did succeed in deporting captives, mostly women, children, and old men, to Indian Territory. Armed forces returned to try again in 1855, waging the Third Seminole War, but after four years of siege, lost again. Soon after, the Civil War and the abolition of slavery made further war against the Seminoles unnecessary.
Of course, the Marine Corps is associated with “the halls of Montezuma,” lyrics from their trademark hymn composed while they occupied Mexico City in 1847. While the U.S. Army invaded and occupied what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and occupied Veracruz, using counterinsurgency tactics in their march to Mexico City, burning fields and villages, murdering and torturing civilian resisters. They occupied Mexico City, along with Army divisions, until the Mexican government, under brutal occupation, signed a dubious treaty transferring the northern half of Mexico to the United States. In Marine Corps annals, the 1847 “Battle of Chapultepec” is legion, a battle in which a handful of teenage Mexican cadets—the Chapultepec Castle was used as a military training school—with few weapons and little ammunition held off the Marines, killing most of them over two days of endless fighting in the castle, until the cadets themselves were dead and the remaining Marines raised the U.S. flag and wrote their hymn, tracing their genealogy to the invasion and occupation of Tripoli.
In a 2017 portrait of President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps general James “Mad Dog” Mattis, journalist Dexter Filkins writes that Marines see themselves as a kind of warrior caste with “toughness under fire, and savagery in battle. Being much smaller than the Army, its budgets are skimpier and the equipment sometimes antiquated, while its fighters are often pitched into terrible conditions. But, the Marines take their scant resources as a source of pride. Where the Army scatters recruits across a vast institution that includes accountants and mechanics who have little contact with the harsher realities of military work, every Marine is trained as a rifleman, a combatant.”21
Later in the century, Marine actions, particularly the infamous war in the Philippines, and others up to the present, are well known, but they themselves take pride in their origins, which most U.S. Americans, including leftists, know little or nothing about. If they did, they would have to reconsider the overlooked violence in the nation’s founding narratives.
The United States is a militarized culture. We see it all around us and in the media. But, as military historian John Grenier notes, the cultural aspects of militarization are not new; they have deep historical roots, reaching into the nation’s racist settler past and continuing through unrelenting wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing over three centuries. Grenier writes, “Beyond its sheer military utility, Americans also found a use for the first way of war in the construction of an ‘American identity.’ . . . [T]he enduring appeal of the romanticized myth of the ‘settlement’ (not calling it conquest) of the frontier, either by ‘actual’ men such as Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone or fictitious ones like Nathaniel Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s creation, points to what D.H. Lawrence called the ‘myth of the essential white American.’”22
The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.
THREE
SLAVE PATROLS
Following the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and the development of Cop Watch groups in cities around the United States, along with the widespread incarceration of Black men in the 1990s,1 what had long been known by scholars, but rarely acknowledged in media or history texts, became increasingly clear on a national level: The origins of policing in the United States were rooted in slave patrols.2
In a study of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas in 1700–1865, historian and law professor Sally E. Hadden writes: “People other than masters or overseers had legitimate rights, indeed, legal duties, to regulate slave behavior.”3 Black people escaping to freedom were hunted down to prevent labor loss to their white slavers, and also to send a message to those enslaved who might be strategizing to lose their chains through rebellion or insurrection.
Because chattel slavery was uncommon in the 1500s in England itself, the existing legal system that colonists brought to the early British colonies in North America did not suffice, so nearly all law related to slavery was forged in the colonies, borrowing from existing practices in Spanish, Portuguese, and English Caribbean plantation colonies, and specifically borrowing the use of slave patrols from the Caribbean and adapting them to local conditions on the continent.
The 1661 and 1688 slave codes in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados extended the task of controlling enslaved Africans from overseers and slavers to all white settlers, in effect shifting