A Curse upon the Nation

Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World

Kay Wright Lewis

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820351261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the inception of slavery as a pillar of the Atlantic World economy, both Europeans and Africans feared their mass extermination by the other in a race war. In the United States, says Kay Wright Lewis, this ingrained dread nourished a preoccupation with slave rebellions and would later help fuel the Civil War, thwart the aims of Reconstruction, justify Jim Crow, and even inform civil rights movement strategy. And yet, says Lewis, the historiography of slavery is all but silent on extermination as a category of analysis. Moreover, little of the existing sparse scholarship interrogates the black perspective on extermination. A Curse upon the Nation addresses both of these issues.

To explain how this belief in an impending race war shaped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American politics, culture, and commerce, Lewis examines a wide range of texts including letters, newspapers, pamphlets, travel accounts, slave narratives, government documents, and abolitionist tracts. She foregrounds her readings in the long record of exterminatory warfare in Europe and its colonies, placing lopsided reprisals against African slave revolts—or even rumors of revolts—in a continuum with past brutal incursions against the Irish, Scots, Native Americans, and other groups out of favor with the empire. Lewis also shows how extermination became entwined with ideas about race and freedom from early in the process of enslavement, making survival an important form of resistance for African peoples in America.

For African Americans, enslaved and free, the potential for one-sided violence was always present and deeply traumatic. This groundbreaking study reevaluates how extermination shaped black understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the political, social, and economic worlds in which it thrived.

CHAPTER ONE

“Nits Make Lice”

Genocidal Violence in Colonial America

When Europeans first settled in the New World in the seventeenth century, they came with an inherited set of ideas about how to subdue those whom they would soon declare to be savages. In ancient times, it was not uncommon for enemy combatants to either exterminate their foes or enslave them.¹ First encounters in the New World included deep-seated fears that the Native population would plot revenge or attack a European colony that was already on the threshold of calamity. Those fears drove a mentality based on an “us versus them” dichotomy that demanded action. Such fears led to the death of thousands of Native people—men, women, and children—who were seen as collateral damage in what English colonialists viewed as “just wars.”² Colonists also believed in a divine right to exterminate those whom they deemed uncivilized, and they compared their struggle with that of the Israelites. Increase Mather, preaching to his Puritan congregation in Boston in 1710, argued that “there are Just Wars which the Lord Himself calls men to engage in. . . . God has put a principle of self preservation into his Creatures.” Mather also used the example of the Israelites’ war against the Ammonites to show how “battles fought with the Enemies of God” should be waged: “Therefore the Children of Israel fought against them and slew them with a great Slaughter: This was just.”³ The colonists, determined to secure lanes of commerce, control, and jurisdiction, enacted the royal command to keep any group that might oppose British imperialism in check and to make those perceived to be in the way of progress “stand in fear.”⁴

Uniquely fashioned ideas about just warfare and its necessary tactics and casualties were fundamentally sustained by greed. The more the fledgling colonies prospered and cities grew, the more a culture of violence came to undergird the economies of the new settlements. What began with the enslavement of Native Americans in the early decades of English colonization quickly expanded into a system of institutionalized slavery that imported labor from Africa. The natural resources, climate, and landscape of the American South allowed the development of a networked agricultural economy producing primarily rice and tobacco and eventually cotton, which depended on an enslaved workforce. Such a system, sustained by exhibitions of violence, brute force, and dehumanization, became normalized for its executioners, even as it became symbolic of their own underlying fear of annihilation.

Early European Warfare

Wars of extermination were not born on American soil but were practiced in Western Europe before colonists crossed the Atlantic.⁵ The English waged wars of this type against the Irish over land, religious and cultural factionalism in the aftermath of the Christian Reformation, and mercantile interests in the new economy of the mid-sixteenth century. The slaughtering of hundreds of “manne, woman and childe” during the first Desmond Rebellion in Munster, Ireland, in 1569 was rationalized by Thomas Churchyard, an English author and soldier of fortune in the sixteenth century, as the most expedient way to end conflict, since “terrour . . . made short warres.” For after “thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freendes, lye on the ground before their faces,” the people would be reformed, and “universall peace, and subjection” would prevail. Churchyard further explained that killing the women of Irish soldiers was particularly effective because it ultimately led to the starvation of the “menne of warre,” who were incapable of taking care of “their Creates . . . their victualles, and other necessaries.”⁶ Churchyard was no doubt referencing the brutal policies of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the appointed governor of Munster, a pioneer of proprietor colonization and an English soldier who was known for piling the slaughtered heads of men, women, and children along the pathway to his tent after battle. In 1566 Gilbert placed the entire village of Munster under martial law. Indifferent to the townspeople’s surrender, he ordered their decapitation to set an example of what other Irish people might expect if they resisted English rule.⁷

Despite English tactics of slaughter, which they believed had “subdued the country,” many Irish did not concede defeat, and this led to even greater atrocities.⁸ For the English, the brutality of the wars in Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s was justified by claims that those fighting against colonization were barbarians and savages and therefore culturally inferior. Ideas of Irish barbarity and paganism were used to rationalize the imposition of martial law.⁹ To the English Privy Council, the Irish remained outside the realm of European standards of civilization. It was, they claimed, the duty of England to civilize barbarian people, as Rome had the ancient Brits. Ireland was a nation of “rebellious people” to whom “nothing but feare and force can teach dutie and obedience.”¹⁰ But even when they did comply, the Irish were ruthlessly murdered. Despite making unconditional submission to the Earl of Essex, and after three days and nights of “peace, sociality, and friendship” between Brian, the son of Felim Bacagh O’Neill, and the earl in 1574, “Brian . . . and all his people [were] put unsparingly to the sword, men, women, youths, and maidens. . . . This unexpected massacre . . . was sufficient cause of hatred and disgust of the English to the Irish.”¹¹

This type of warfare was not reserved for those who were enemies of the English. As another incident in 1577 attests, “a horrible act of treachery was committed by the English of Leinster and Meath . . . upon that part of the people of Offally and Leix [Ireland] that remained in confederacy with them, and under their protection . . . they were all summoned to shew themselves . . . and on their arrival at that place they were surrounded on every side by four lines of soldiers and cavalry, who proceeded to shoot and slaughter them without mercy, so that not a single individual escaped, by flight or force.”¹² And when the Irish remained loyal to Catholicism, despite the establishment of the Protestant Church of England, their loyalty fueled further ideas that they could not or would not assimilate. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this meant that the Irish faced either banishment from their lands or extermination until they respected the political will and cultural authority of England’s Queen Elizabeth I.

Genocidal warfare reached new heights as the English sought intentionally to achieve high casualties through military strategy in the seventeenth century. Historical accounts of the Irish rebellion against colonization and religious oppression in 1641 assert that from the beginning, the English Parliament, under the leadership of King Charles I, pressed for a war of extermination. By 1644 the Parliaments of both England and Scotland, which were engaged in civil war, passed ordinances that “no quarter be given to any Irish who came to England to the King’s aid.”¹³ There was brutality on both sides, and noncombatant populations were in constant jeopardy of becoming casualties of war.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the unprecedented and intentional slaughter of Irish people is well documented: “In one day eighty women and children in Scotland were flung over a high bridge into the water, solely because they were the wives and children of Irish soldiers” who were held there as prisoners of war. People from several villages in Ireland were deliberately trapped by fire in an enclave and “all burnt or killed—men, women, and children.”¹⁵ British ferocity was particularly memorable in the massacres of Drogheda and Wex-ford. Under the severe discipline and leadership of Oliver Cromwell, the lieutenant general of the English army in Ireland, at least three thousand people, “some women and children . . . were put to the sword on September 11 and 12, 1649.” Cromwell would later claim, “I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs.”¹⁶ John Nalson, an English clergyman and historian, was told by a captain in the English army that “no manner of Compassion or Discrimination was shewed either to Age or Sex, but that the little Children were promiscuously sufferers with the Gulley [large knife], and that if any who had some grains of Compassion reprehended the Soldiers for this unchristian inhumanity, they would scoffingly reply, Why? Nits will be Lice, and so would dispatch them.”¹⁷ It is at this point that “the saying ‘Nits will make lice,’ which was constantly employed to justify the murder of Irish children,” became part of English vernacular.¹⁸ The extermination of children was the ultimate solution in war, for it thwarted the possibility of revenge and made space for the settlement of a superior English race. It helped fulfill “the grand object of the Revolutionary Party . . . to carry out the wild scheme of unpeopling Ireland of the Irish, and planting it anew with English.”¹⁹ The antecedent of these war tactics began nearly a century earlier, but the English policies that sanctioned the final conquest of Ireland, that legitimized possession by force and colonization as God’s will, would continue to be employed in the subsequent conquest of America.²⁰

American Conceptions of War and Conquest

When the first settlers came to America, they anticipated that there would be trouble in the region. Historian Patrick M. Malone states that “the transmission of concepts of total warfare from Europe to America” was evident as early as 1637, but it began much earlier.²¹ Continuity is evident in 1578, when Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Humphrey Gilbert a six-year patent to “discover, finde, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people . . . to have, hold, occupie . . . forever.”²²

Theories about natural “rights and liberties” that prevailed during the English Reformation were conspicuously absent from the rhetoric concerning colonization of the New World.²³ What emerges instead is what historian Francis Jennings called the “conquest myth.” Europeans claimed that the New World was “virgin land” settled by savages who were not Christians. Native people were “demons” and “beasts in the shape of men,” and Europeans often refused to recognize them as fully human.²⁴ The designation of indigenous and eventually African people as savages by clergy and government authorities alike profoundly loosened the boundaries of just warfare. Because “savages” were viewed as “irrational” and uncivilized people, they were seen as committing senseless acts of “perpetual violence” rather than being capable of practicing the “rational,” organized form of violence that the English claimed defined European warfare.²⁵ These differences—much like race—were used to justify not only conquest but also enslavement and extermination, and many English settlers who gained their military experience in Ireland had the confidence and formula for how they would induce the “lesser breeds” to cooperate.²⁶

The clergy in the seventeenth century reinforced ideas that connected savagery to violence and heathens to damnation. From William Symmonds in England to Increase Mather in what is now Massachusetts, religious leaders were central to shaping and affirming conceptions of war in the American colonies. In 1609 King James I ordered church ministers to use their pulpit to encourage the English to Christianize North America by settling in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Rev. Symmonds was one of the first ministers to do so in England. He preached that a missionary impulse should guide colonization and that, like “Worthy Joshuah and most worthy David,” England, the country of God’s chosen people, had a moral mandate to expand so that its “dominion should be from sea to sea.”²⁷ In another sermon, the English reverend Robert Johnson argued that the intent was not to remove the “savages. . . . Our intrusion into their possessions shall tend to their great good and in no way to their hurt, unless”—and here is the conundrum that indigenous people faced—“as unbridled beastes, they procure it to themselves.”²⁸ Rev. Robert Gray, however, rather bluntly outlined the theocratic justifications and militant intentions for English settlement. Gray claimed that the English had always been “more warlike” than other nations and that “we may justly say, as the children of Israel say here to Joshua, we are a great people.” Joshua, “a faithfull and godly Prince,” responsible for Israel’s holy conquest and the annihilation of the idolaters settled in the land of Canaan, seemed to Gray emblematic of the mission that English adventurers faced in Virginia. Their task was to “bring the barbarous and savage people to the civill and Christian kinde of government, under which they may learne how to live holily, justly, and soberly in this world . . . rather then to destroy them, or utterly to roote them out.” If that did not work, however, Gray, who had never been to America, made clear that “we are warranted by this direction of Ioshua, to destroy wilfull and convicted Idolaters, rather then to let them live, if by no other meanes they can be reclaimed.”²⁹

The mission to encourage settlement in Virginia was effective, and the English arrived in the Americas with a “crusading mentality.”³⁰ God had given them, as superior people, the right to conquer those without religion and without civilization. Through these culturally driven beliefs and religious interpretations, the English believed themselves to be like the Israelites, and they believed that God, as described in the Old Testament, was a “man of warre.” If indigenous Americans caused trouble and resisted European settlement through violent means, God directed them, as he had the Hebrews, to “save alive nothing that breatheth.”³¹

The fact that there was no central authority governing and shaping policy in the early colonies enabled the colonists to determine the ways in which warfare was waged and how English expansion was rationalized. As such, wars fought in colonial America were distinctive for their brutality. They were more violent and terroristic in nature...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “Nits Make Lice”
• Chapter Two: A “State of War Continued”
• Chapter Three: “The Past Is Never Dead”
• Chapter Four: The Abridgment of Hope
• Chapter Five: “In the Hands of the Master”
• Chapter Six: Would Have to “See His Blood Flow”
• Chapter Seven: John Brown’s Mistake
• Chapter Eight: Making “Hell for a Country”
• Epilogue: The “Place for Which Our Fathers Sighed”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index