Quote:
Originally Posted by PochoPatriot
I know I am late this thread, but I was wondering if you could site any sources for the arguments made in the initial post?
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You can start with
The Cousin's Wars by Kevin Phillips,
Five Points by Tyler Anbinder, and perhaps the first half of
Who Are We? by Samuel P. Huntington. There is a hodge podge of sources from which I put my stuff together, I'll make another post to further describe my methodology.
I've gone off on different tangents in this thread due to the whim of the moment and there are things alluded to in the first few posts of the thread that I need to get more of a look at before I enlarge the view - and I've learned a lot more about the issues which are brought forth in the first post than I knew then. Most of us like the simple explanation, but it's actually much more complicated than black or white and even shades of gray in most cases.
For example (and off the top of my head), the first person to own a black man in the colonies in a permanent manner was a black man in 17th century New England (even went to court to affirm his claim).
90% of the black slaves who were transported to the New World were obtained through trade with a black west African slave culture. There was not a great pounding through the African jungle by Europeans to capture black African slaves like the popular narrative likes to state.
You can google
Cherokee slaves and get quite a narrative concerning the subject of Cherokees who owned black slaves.
I have since found that many of the Cherokee moved west decades before Jackson forced the rest out, some even wound up in Mexico and the Cherokee played a role in Spanish, Mexican, and American Texas.
Some things I need to look more into but seems to have happened:
The Blackfeet of the northern western plains were pushed out from east of the Great Lakes before European contact, and seems to have been moving south about 1800. The Sioux were pushed out of Minnesota into the plains by the Chippewa. There was a general migration of the southern plains Indians towards what became New England. The Apache and Navajo may have originated in Alaska, but the Comanches from what became Wyoming drove the Apaches out of Texas and raided to within 120 miles of Mexico City. The Pawnee may have practiced a small scale form of Human Sacrifice for crop fertility. There was more than a lot of inter-tribal barbarism and warfare over territory and food sources (and women) long before European contact and white expansion - nothing new concerning Manifest Destiny except the scale of territory taken and migration into the territories taken.
The 1675 King Phillip Indian war (the kill ratio was more than the Civil War) and use of Indians by the English and French against the colonists may have been a large and lasting factor of white American perception of Indians down through the 20th century. I believe there was some attempt to assimilate Indians prior to Andrew Jackson's policy of removal, but I may have been mistaken as to the extent as expressed in the first post. Indian and white interaction was much more complex than the simplistic "white racism" or "Indian Savages" explanations, and I would like to explore more of it and contrast it with the Spanish Colonial system. It seems to me that both mission and reservation systems, at least originally, had a vision of assimilation and eventual participation in mainstream society, but this was primarily sabotaged by both Spanish friars and crooked reservation agents.
I'm not a professional historian, I don't get paid to go to distant locations and rummage around in obscure, minute notes of the ancients to reach conclusions directly from the source. But I read a lot, and while there are different focuses and interpretations (as well as outright dishonest, biased bunk from any direction) I put a picture together of what reasonably really was. I've concluded that history (like a divorce) has four sides to every story - what one says, what the other says, what everyone else involved or not says (who's dog is in the fight or what there is to "prove"), then there's what really happened and here are the causes.
There is some wisdom in the modern biographer of Confederate president Jefferson Davis who said that there was a lot to dislike Jefferson Davis for, but that he wasn't going to judge the man according to modern society. The same could probably said for just about anyone who played a part on any side of the post 1492 New World - doesn't matter what name the hero or villain went by or culture he came from.