Loaded. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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existed,” Grenier observes, “and the Indians even appeared dominant—as was the situation in virtually every frontier war until the first decade of the 19th century—[settler] Americans were quick to turn to extravagant violence.”12
Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided colonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that rather than racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred: the out-of-control momentum of extreme violence of unlimited warfare fueled race hatred.
Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of “Indian haters,” men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.13
By then, the Indigenous peoples’ villages, farmlands, towns, and entire nations formed the only barrier to the settlers’ total freedom to acquire land and wealth:
U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of warfare—before and after the founding of the U.S.—that reduced the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driving the refugees out—step by step—across the continent. . . . [V]iolence directed systematically against noncombatants through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part of Americans’ way of war.14
Most military historians ignore the influence that the “Indian Wars,” waged from 1607 to 1890, had on subsequent U.S. military operations. In his history of American “savage wars,” The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, counterinsurgent war enthusiast Max Boot does not even mention the Indian Wars as being related to his thesis.15 As Grenier notes, “Historians normally dismiss backcountry settlers’ burning of Indian villages and fields as a sideshow to the Army’s attempt to mold itself into a force like those found in Europe. Yet, the wars of the Upper Ohio Valley and on the Tennessee and western Georgia frontiers are vitally important to understanding the evolution of Americans’ military heritage.”16
Those wars are also vitally important to understanding one of the two rationales for the Second Amendment: The white settlers were clear in declaring that their intentions were to drive the Indians from lands on the western side of the mountain ranges and to claim those lands as their own. Andrew Jackson’s career arc personifies this dance of settler militias and the professional army. Jackson was born in 1767 in a Scots-Irish community on the North Carolina border with South Carolina. His father died in an accident a short time before he was born. Raised poor by a single mother, at age thirteen Jackson became a courier for the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of independence from Britain. Jackson’s mother and brothers died during the war, leaving him an orphan with no family. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in the Western District of North Carolina, which would later become the state of Tennessee. Through his legal work, most of which related to disputed settler claims to Indian lands, he acquired a plantation near Nashville and enslaved 150 people for use as labor. He helped usher in Tennessee as a state in 1796. As the most notorious land speculator in western Tennessee, Jackson enriched himself by annexing a portion of the Chickasaw Nation’s farmlands. It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command of the Tennessee militia as a colonel and began his ruthless Indian-killing military career, driving the Muskogee Nation out of Georgia. In the aftermath of “the Battle of Horseshoe Bend,” as it is known in U.S. military annals, Jackson’s troops fashioned reins for their horses’ bridles from skin stripped from the Muskogee people they had killed, and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given “to the ladies of Tennessee.” Following the slaughter, Jackson justified his troops’ actions: “The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders. . . . They have disappeared from the face of the Earth.”17
In 1818, President James Monroe ordered Andrew Jackson, by then a major general in the U.S. Army, to lead three thousand soldiers into Florida, at the time part of the Spanish Empire, to crush the Muskogee-led Indigenous Seminole guerrilla resistance. The Seminoles did not agree to hand over any Africans who had escaped from their white enslavers. The United States annexed Florida as a territory in 1819, opening it to settlement. In 1821 Jackson was appointed military commander of Florida Territory.
Jackson carried out the original plan envisioned by the founders—particularly Jefferson—initially as a militia leader, then as an army general who led four wars of aggression against the Muskogee Creek and Seminoles in Georgia and Florida, and finally as a president who engineered the forced expulsion of all Native peoples east of the Mississippi to the designated “Indian Territory.” As historian Alan Brinkley has observed, Jackson’s political fortunes depended on the fate of the Indians—that is, their eradication.
Richard Slotkin describes a mystique that developed around the persona of the ranger, involving a certain identification with the Native enemy, marking the settler as original American rather than European. “By dressing and fighting as Indians, the ranger appropriated the savage’s power and American nativity for himself and turned it against both savage and redcoat.”18 Following independence, this mystique became a part of popular culture, as well as military culture.
The formation of the Texas Rangers to extinguish Native presence in Texas after Southern slavers took it from Mexico magnified their mystique. Following the independence of Mexico from Spain in 1821, the territory of Mexico comprised the provinces of California, New Mexico (including Arizona and Colorado), and Texas, even though much of that territory was never actually settled by the Spanish, particularly the huge province of Texas. Mexico established “colonization” laws that allowed non-Mexican citizens to acquire large swaths of land under land grants that required development, and implied eradication of the resident Native people. By 1836, nearly forty thousand U.S. Americans, almost all of them Cotton Kingdom slavers, had moved to south Texas. Their ranger militias were a part of the settlement, and in 1835 were formally institutionalized as the Texas Rangers. Once they were state funded and sponsored, they were tasked with eradicating the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples from Texas, what historian Gary Clayton Anderson calls the “ethnic cleansing of Texas.”19 Mounted and armed with the newest killing machine, the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver, they used it with dedicated precision.
While continuing violent counterinsurgency operations against Comanches and other Indigenous communities, the Texas Rangers played a significant role in the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846–48. As seasoned counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico, engaging in the battle of Monterrey. Rangers accompanied General Winfield Scott’s army by sea; took part in the siege of Veracruz, Mexico’s main commercial port city; then marched on, leaving a path of corpses and destruction to occupy Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils, as the Rangers roamed the city terrorizing civilian residents. Brutalized by yet another foreign power, Mexico ceded the northern half of its territory (including the illegally Anglo-occupied Texas) to the United States. Texas became a state of the United States in 1845, seceding to join the Confederacy in 1860. The Texas Rangers returned to warring on Native communities and harassing resistant Mexicans.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Army of the West continued to combat the peoples of the Southwest and of the Northern Plains to the Pacific, formerly a part of Mexico. Military analyst Robert Kaplan challenges the concept of Manifest Destiny, arguing “it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire in the western part of the continent.” Rather, he argues, Western empire was brought about by “small groups of frontiersmen, separated from each other by great distances.” These groups were the continuation of settler “rangers” that destroyed Indigenous towns, fields, and food supplies. Kaplan downplays the role of the U.S. Army compared to the settler vigilantes, which he equates to modern Special Forces, but he acknowledges that the regular army provided lethal backup for settler counterinsurgency in slaughtering the buffalo, thus disrupting the food supply of Plains peoples, as well