Wounded Knee And The Bloody Birth Of Empire

Wounded Knee, December 29th, 1890 is full of meaning.  Not just for the Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota who were victims and perished in their hundreds, but for the course of imperial America.  Its violence an echo of the violence that was the settlement of this country.  The expropriation of the land from Native Americans necessarily involved a genocidal struggle, something evident very early in the history of Europeans on this continent.  That genocidal war was also bound up with an economy based on private property and in irreconcilable conflict with the economy of native peoples.  The Dawes Act of 1887 makes perfectly clear that the struggle against native peoples was also a struggle against native notions of collective property.  And look how the land itself reels from that war!

Fly over the country today and you’ll see division imposed upon the land; plots neatly parceled (and at odds with their terrain, with nature) in the interest of sale and of tax.  This pattern emerged 100 years before the Dawes Act in the Northwest Ordinance’s township and range system.  The way even the land was mapped being determined by the dictates of private property.  The Revolution meant the expansion of settlement, first into the Ohio River Valley, and expansion meant the commodification of land; speculation in becoming the source of great fortunes in the early ‘Republic’.  For the gentleman farmers of Jefferson’s generation and after, native land use was simply a waste of resources, the exploitation of which they hungered for themselves.  From the air private property is clearly visible, from the ground fences frame the story.

The settlement of the Americas was accomplished with as much racism as the slave trade, indeed it can be said to be a source of modern racism.  The history of capitalism is entwined with racism and none were the greater recipients of its poison than native Americans.  Yet, it would not be the first time that a race war was waged over property, nor the last.  It is necessary to dehumanize those you would do to the likes of which you would never tolerate being done to.  ‘Primitive accumulations’ are an ongoing, not historical, mode of capitalist appropriation.  They didn’t end at Wounded Knee.  It happens now in India, in Indonesia and in Ecuador to name but a few.  It was seen in the conversion of the formerly state properties of the East into private hands.  It  can be found even in the most developed of capitalist economies today; anywhere where sovereignty over land, labor and resources is wrenched from one group or class to another.  Where economies are brought forcefully into the market.  The closing of the west made gorily real on this day 120 years ago by that bitterly cold Dakota creek signaled the entrance of the United States into international struggle for markets and influence.  It is a bloody marker denoting the birth of an empire.

The Seventh Cavalry responsible for the massacre was Custer’s old troop, formed in 1866 with the expressed purpose of pacifying native resistance in the West.  A few short years after Wounded Knee, where 17 men were awarded the Medal of Honor, would see the Seventh in the Philippines putting down a different native rebellion, accompanied by more Medals of Honor.  The great wealth amassed from a continental appropriation would now be exported, in the name of democracy, in a manner as rapacious as the violation of the Americas, also under the name of democracy.  Today, the whole world lives in the shadow of Wounded Knee.

I have been to the mass grave on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the colored ribbons tied to the surrounding fence snapping in the wind coming off the plains.  It is a terribly sad place, a place befitting the terribleness it holds.  In my mind the site is this country’s most important monument.  Their grave holds not just the remains of the dead, but the reality, the horrible reality of the meaning of America; its birth, its growth, its present.

What would justice, genuine justice, be to the native peoples of this continent?  From my perspective as the descendant of some of those settlers and citizen of the state that now strides this land whose birthright was dependent on the historic denial of another’s, the only justice possible is a death sentence on the Empire, whose epitaph will surely contain the words ‘Wounded Knee’, as well as a restoration of collective ownership.  An irrevocable removal of those fences, those divisions that the geometry of capitalist expansion knifed into a blood-stained earth.

Wounded Knee: Never Forget, Never Forgive.

Secession: What Was It All About?

While a small and discredited minority of historians may still question slavery’s central war in the conflagration that was the Civil War, most historians, the vast majority and all of the serious ones, place the institution of slavery as the key reason for the war.  Most people have vaguer notions if they have notion at all, but still tend to see slavery as central to the story (though what about slavery is a different question) of the war.  That being said there are still redoubts of the Lost Cause and they are getting more attention than they deserve, including by this blog.  If they weren’t so pernicious I’d ignore them, if they didn’t find echo in the Teabaggers and anti-immigrant brownshirts one could just laugh them off.  But talk of ‘state’s rights’ has always been code for white rule in this country.  It wasn’t just slavery and Jim Crow, in the 1830s it was evoked to to ignore the Supreme Court and remove the Cherokee, in current times it is proclaimed in enacting anti-immigrant laws.  Etc. Etc.

The gala ball held recently to commemorate South Carolina’s slaveholders rebellion, the Sons of Confederate Veterans television ads peddling racially coded falsehoods wholesale, the kerfuffle over Virginia’s official declaration on the sesquicentennial, all these and many more even before we’ve reached Sumter’s anniversary opening the War in April, bodes poorly for the public discourse on the war.  It is hard to dignify some of the characterizations of the causes of the US Civil War brought up by this week and the way they were largely handled by the mass media.  The media’s shaky footing is a reflection of the continued myopia this country has on the War; on our history in general for that matter.  The only question on the US citizenship test with two correct answers is ‘what was the cause of the Civil War?’  Both ‘slavery’ and ‘state’s rights’ are counted right.  Wrong.

State’s rights?  Southern elites had no problem with Dred Scott extending slavery’s writ to every state whether they liked it or not.  State’s rights?  Sure, the right to own and trade in slaves and the right of new states to as well.  I’ll let James McPherson give the argument in the video below on the causes of the Civil War and how and why views on the causes changed over time. McPherson may have mellowed a little, but he remains invaluable.  All of his books are worth finding and, unlike many of the best works on the period, available at your local library.  Comrades who haven’t yet could do no better than to pick up McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom- perhaps the best single volume of history in the last 40 years- to read during the period of the anniversary.

While the meaning of the war has changed over time, history tells a damning story.  I did a quick word search of the secession declarations of the Confederate States (not all issued declarations), including the one celebrated by the gala in Charleston this week (where’s the 54th Massachusetts when you need them?), for slave, slaveholding and slavery.  While the Son of Confederate veterans may say different, the actual Confederates weren’t as shy.  It was slavery folks. Yes, I know.  It’s more complicated than that, but without slavery there is no Civil War.  Lincoln famously said in the Second Inaugural of 1864:

‘One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.’

‘All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.‘  And from far less lofty, but no less reliable sources here are the secession declarations:

South Carolina, December 24th 1860, where slavery is mentioned 18 times is the most clear, secession happens because the slave-holding party lost control of the Federal government for the first time.

”On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.  The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.’

Mississippi, January 9th 1861: 8 times in a very short declaration.

‘Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.’ (pretty clear, that)

Florida, January 10th 1861: slavery is mentioned 14 times and among other choice quotes states:

‘A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them. It is denied that it is the purpose of the party soon to enter into the possession of the powers of the Federal Government to abolish slavery by any direct legislative act. This has never been charged by any one. But it has been announced by all the leading men and presses of the party that the ultimate accomplishment of this result is its settled purpose and great central principle.’

Alabama, January 10th doesn’t issue a declaration but the Ordinance of Secession states (I’ll let the reader guess what the ‘domestic institutions’ mentioned are) :

‘Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and manacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security’

Georgia, January 19th 1861:

Slavery is mentioned 33 times and opens with these lines: ‘The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery…’

…and from Texas on February 2nd 1861 where slavery is mentioned 14 times comes this nugget: ‘In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States. ‘

Straight from the source y’all.  OK, over to McPherson.

The only question on the US citizenship test with two correct answers is “what was the cause of the Civil War?’.  Both ‘slavery’ and ‘state’s rights’ are counted right.  Wrong.

Subjects And Sovereigns

Suffering through the cold winds of winter and a semester’s pile of projects teetering and about to topple over….then the students and youth of Britain brighten a December day and stoke the imagination.  I have a feeling in twenty years, if I’m living, seeing this picture will still bring the same joy as it does tonight.  I wonder if  the Prince had visions of his great-great-uncle, Alexander II, in his carriage on that Sunday drive 130 years ago and those young Narodniks with bombs held hidden in their coats among the crowds gathered by the Catherine Canal?

The movement has been magnificent and a surprise.  I don’t know what is next, but I know it will be in a better position than before.  Think about it friends; if it’s possible in Britain then it has to be possible here.  There is nothing comrades, absolutely nothing, like militant, conscious and creative young people.  It is, and always has been, the axis on which the world of hope spins.