“The American Revolution was not simply an anti-colonial war for independence against the British—an attempt, in the words of Gordon Wood, of ‘eighteenth-century Americans [to] thr[o]w off their monarchical allegiance.’ It was also a colonial war of conquest against North America’s Indigenous peoples.”1
This is from a solid article by Jeffrey Ostler and Karl Jacoby that focuses on two of the most decisive contradictions in American history: African-American slavery and settler colonialism aimed against Indigenous peoples.
The fact that the realities of history don’t lend themselves to a saccharin, white Christian nationalist version of American history does not mean that there are no positive trends in the national community that has been dominated by white Christians. They give a good example with the Northwest Ordinance of 1785, which restricted a large part of the northern US from becoming slave states:
The US experimented with a variety of policies to mitigate the ensuing frictions with its Indigenous neighbours. In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a measure designed to regulate how the new nation would expand into Native-controlled territory. Conservatives have lavished praised on the Northwest Ordinance. [Larry] Arnn, the chair of the 1776 Commission [the Trump Administration rightwing history project], has argued that the Ordinance disproves the 1619 Project’s focus on the centrality of slavery to the US history, since the measure “forbids all slavery.” One of the US’s most beloved historians, David McCullough, though not associated with conservative history, has lauded it in similar terms. In The Pioneers, McCullough asserts that “the great Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stands alongside the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence as a bold assertion of the rights of the individual.” In reality, however, it is simplistic to see the Ordinance as an unalloyed victory for antislavery. The Ordinance contained a fugitive slave clause, and its passage was secured only through guaranteeing the security of the southern slave regime. [my emphasis]
This is how real history is done. Progress in democracy and freedom really happened. It hasn’t happened all at once and hasn’t proceeded without complications and, well, contradictions. Unless we want to imagine that at some point in history, the United States was Heaven on Earth this is just how the collective life of the nation works. Then and now.
If not quite the “guarantee … [of] the American way of life” claimed by McCullough, the Northwest Ordinance might at least seem to offer a benevolent policy towards Native Americans. The measure stated that the “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians.” But the ordinance contained an escape hatch: it declared that Indigenous communities “shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” This caveat meant that if Native nations did not agree to sell their lands to the US, the federal government believed itself justified in declaring a “lawful war” against them to force a territorial cession. The orders issued in 1790 by Secretary of War Henry Knox betray the brutality the US permitted itself in these “lawful wars.” Knox directed the new nation’s military to proceed against the “savages” in the Ohio country and “to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti.” As in its previous campaigns against the Haudenosaunee, the US pursued a scorched earth policy, destroying entire Native villages and killing opponents without regard to age or gender. The only reason the US did not achieve its genocidal objective “to extirpate, utterly, . . . the said Banditti” was the skill Indians demonstrated in eluding US soldiers and resisting the invasion of their homelands. [my emphasis]
This is why metaphors like slavery as the “original sin” of the United States can become problematic if taken in a narrow sense. The European colonial projects in the Western Hemisphere - by England, Spain, and Portugal - were founded on the conquest of the native peoples. And the standards of law and morality that were applied were often ones justifying the often shamelessly brutal methods used in that conquest.
This is not to say that there were no contemporary critics of such practices. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484?-1566) was an “early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary who was the first to expose the oppression of indigenous peoples by Europeans in the Americas and to call for the abolition of slavery there.”2
There was no shortage of sins in the European settlement/conquest of North and South America. The road from 1492 to a democratic republic in the United States has been a long one. Narrow nationalist viewpoints, including American Exceptionalism in its various forms, obscure the real historical process that took place.
Their article was a response to the ridiculous “1776 Project” promoted by Trump’s White House and the Trumpistas. Ostler and Jacoby write near the end:
A common objection to histories that expose systemic racism and settler colonialism is that they are divisive. The 1776 Report contends that such scholarship “shatters the civil bonds that unite all Americans, . . . breeding division, distrust, and hatred among citizens,” while Jeff Fynn-Paul ominously warns the “Cultural Marxists” he sees lurking behind scholarship documenting stolen lands and genocide that they undermine “Anglophone democracy” and risk provoking “an even wilder right-wing reaction to your irrational hate-mongering than we have already seen.” Even if stolen lands are not a myth, Fynn-Paul implies, we shouldn’t talk about them.
But calls for unity only suppress uncomfortable truths and disempower those who are doing the creative—if difficult—work of bringing into being new forms of truly democratic governance and just relations. [my emphasis]
Ostler, Jeffrey & Jacoby, Karl (2021): After 1776: Native Nations, Settler Colonialism, and the Meaning of America, Journal of Genocide Research, <https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2021.1968143> (Accessed 2021-22-09).
Ray, Michael (2023): Bartolomé de Las Casas. Britannica Online 02/26/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bartolome-de-Las-Casas> (Accessed 2021-22-09).