Hidden History: Slave Rebellions and Forced Native American Evacuation

Episode 9: Rebellion and Removal: Tightening of Slavery

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

This lecture covers the major slave rebellions occurring in South Carolina and Virginia between 1830-1850, as well as the forced removal of Native Americans from the southeastern US.

Ayers begins by describing the slave rebellion freeman Denmark Vesey organized with a slave called Gulla Jack in Charleston South Carolina in June 1832. The plan was to free as many slaves as possible and escape with them to Haiti.* They called the rebellion off after another slave betrayed the plot. The city militia arrested and hung sixteen of the leaders.

Ayers talks at length about the background of Nat Turner, who organized the slave rebellion in Southhampton County Virginia in 1831. An enslaved African American preacher, Turner saw visions and heard the voice of God telling him to gather arms and free local slaves from their masters. Turner eventually recruited 28 men, who moved from farm to farm killing white families. They attacked 15 homesteads before other white families learned of the revolt spread and abandoned their plantations. Turner and his followers were eventually arrested and executed.

Increasingly paranoid, white residents of North and South Carolina and Virginia (being greatly outnumbered by their slaves) began to see slave rebellions everywhere. This led to heated debates in the Virginia legislature about the “debilitating” effects of slavery on economic development. Western Virginia, which had the fewest slaves, petitioned the legislature to take steps towards ending slavery. One proposal put forward was for the state to purchase all slaves born after 1840 and either colonize them in Africa or sell them to plantations further south. Instead legislators passed harsher laws to limit the ability of free Blacks to move or gather.

Ayers spends the last half of the lecture on the Indian Removal Act, overseen by President Andrew Jackson despite being overturned twice by the Supreme Court twice. At the time of the forced removals (to “Indian Territory,” ie Oklahoma). By 1830, many Native Americans in the Southeast had converted to Christianity and owned property and slaves.

The Choctaw of northern Georgia were the first to be forcibly moved (after speculators discovered gold on their land) after selling, at a loss, their land and all goods they couldn’t carry with them. Nearly one third died of starvation, exposure or disease during the 500-mile journey.

The Cherokee removal occurred between 1836-39. The US forcibly removed 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation and 1,000-2,000 from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. Roughly one quarter died.

The Creeks of Alabama were forcibly removed between 1830-36, with roughly 38% dying.

The Seminole of Florida were never evacuated. Jackson launched the second Seminole War started in 1836. Costing more than $20 million, it dragged on for six years. More than 5,000 (out of 36,000) US troops were killed with many more experiencing debilitating injuries.

The film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

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*Where slavery ended with the 1791 Haitian Revolution.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/rebellion-renewal-tightening-slavery

The Prehistory of the American South

Episode 1 The Geography of the American South

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward L Ayers

Film Review

In this first lecture of a Great Courses series about stuff we never study in school, Ayers begins by reminding us the South gave rise both to the most recognized corporation in the world (Coca Cola) and the largest third party in American history (the Populist or People’s Party of the late 19th century – see Populism: America’s Largest Democratic Moment). He goes on to discuss the basic geology of the South, emphasizing the poor soil quality. Lacking prehistoric glacial deposits (North American glaciers never extended further south than Kentucky), most Southern soil is a low fertility mixture of red clay, aluminum and iron. The Mississippi Delta, the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia and the Black Belt across Alabama and Mississippi are exceptions.

He gives a date of 40,000 BC for the arrival of indigenous Americans in North America from Siberia and describes fossil evidence suggesting they hunted (to extinction) mastodon, horses and camels  that foraged just south of the glacial ice sheet during the last Ice Age.

Around 1000 BC, there is evidence of corn being cultivated along the Mississippi. There is also evidence of early Native Americans using fire to clear forests for land cultivation and to drive the deer they hunted into open meadows. Numerous chiefdoms established settled communities in the southeast and abandoned them once they depleted their soils and wood stock. The chiefdoms built large mound-shaped monuments (and a handful of towers) and engaged in frequent resource wars with other chiefdoms.

A sudden severe cooling of the climate* between 1300-1850 AD led to a significant decrease in food production and population. At the time of first European contact, they had an estimated population (in the South) of 1.2 million.

When, in 1539, the explorer DeSoto led his army 4,000 miles from Florida to East Texas, he was looking for a rich society like that of Aztecs or Incas. Carrying none of their own provisions, they simply seized food from indigenous storehouses and either killed or enslaved any Native Americans who tried to stop them.

Three hundred Spaniards, including DeSoto, died on this expedition. Many chiefdoms lost between 2,000 – 3,000 warriors (each). In 1565 when Europeans settled in St Augustine Florida (the first European settlement in North America), Native Americans were further decimated by infections European illnesses and an ongoing process of warfare, enslavement, land expropriation and resource depletion.

Earlier chiefdoms reconstituted into the Choctaw, Cherokee and Katawba tribes, and by the time the English (who had no armies) arrived, southern indigenous people were helpless to resist further confiscation of their land.

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*Believed to be due to solar dimming caused by large South American volcanic eruptions.

This film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/geography-american-south

The First North American Civilizations

Episode 25: North American Peoples and Tribes

The Big History of Civilizations (2016)

Dr Craig G Benjamin

Film Review

As Benjamin describes in this lecture, early human civilization developed spontaneously on four isolated continents: the Afro-Eurasian zone, the Americas, Australasia and the Pacific. The American civilizations developed 2,000 years later than those of Afro-Eurasia. According to Benjamin, this delay stemmed from difficult climatic conditions that made it difficult to produce sufficient food for the development of complex cities.

Unlike South America, early North American settlements never produced the rigid hierarchies, tribute taking, powerful coercive rulers or organized warfare that characterized most Afro-Eurasian civilizations. That being said, several complex North American societies arose out of sedentary and semi-sedentary settlements that supplemented food production with hunting and gathering.

Woodland tribes east of the Mississippi River lived in semi-sedentary groups that grew corn and beans via horticulture.* Prior to 60 AD, they practiced woodworking, leather working, shelter building and tool production. From 600-800 AD, they abandoned their semi-nomadic life ways to establish permanent villages of up to 40,000 inhabitants and began using a bow and arrow, rather than spear, to hunt. By 1400 AD, the five Iroquois tribes formed a state-like structure referred to as the Iroquois Nation.**

Tribes in the Ohio River Valley traded with tribes across the continent, obtaining mica from the Appalachian Mountains, conch shells and sharks teeth from the Gulf of Mexico and copper from upper Michigan.

In the Southwest, the Pueblo people employed irrigation from 600 AD and built permanent adobe structure. They abandoned these dwellings around 1300 AD to return to a lifestyle of hunting and gathering. Benjamin claims this was due to drought, but in The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow maintain foraging is even more sensitive to drought than agriculture and residents either overthrew a tyrannical regime or simply opted out. See https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-so-called-civilization/

In the Northwest, Chinook and Yakima tribes established semi-sedentary settlements lasting several thousands of years after bow and arrow technology spread across the Great Plains.

The Nez Perce, Sioux and Cherokee were Great Plains tribes who developed strong tribal leaders and social;y structured hierarchies and experienced a fair amount of inter-tribal warfare.

The Paleo Eskimo tribes became expert fishermen and hunters. They lived in ice houses they heated with fire and crafted fur clothing, canoes and exquisite tool, spears and knives from bone, antler, stone and tusks.

Benjamin notes that all North American tribes developed shamanistic practices and grew corn and tobacco (which were first domesticated in South America).

The Vikings were the first Europeans to make contact with North American tribes in Newfoundland in 1000 AD. They returned to Scandinavia during the Little Ice Age (1400-1600 AD), when it became too cold to produce sufficient food.

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*Horticulture is the cultivation of domesticated plants at a small scale garden level, as opposed to agriculture, which focuses on mass production of food.

**Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca.

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/north-american-peoples-and-tribes

A British View of American History

The American Future: A History from the Founding Fathers to Barack Obama.

Simon Schama

Random House (2008)

Book Review

Written for a British audience, The American Future attempts to define the quintessential American national character by tracing historical movements that have shaped US society. The five political movements Schama considers most important are 1) the gradual rise of a professional military officer class, 2) the role of evangelical religion in the movement to abolish slavery, 3) the brutal imperialist war against Mexico and the Philippines, 4) the forced displacement of the Cherokee and four other Native American nations under Andrew Jackson, and 5) the development of large scale irrigation in to open the Southwest desert area to agriculture.

For me the primary value of this book is all the historical gems Schama includes that you never learn about in high school. For example:

• The founding of West Point military academy with its Jeffersonian emphasis on philosophy and civil engineering, as opposed to military tactics. Jefferson believed a sound liberal education for US military officers would help ensure the US never went to war except to defend liberty. Congress consistently refused to fund a US military or naval academy until an undeclared war with France broke out in 1796.* Over a period of ten months, the French seized 300 US merchant vessels. When Congress eventually authorized funding for West Point, its primary purpose was to train the Army Corps of Engineers, who built the levees, bridges, damns, dykes and forts that enabled westward expansion. They also drained the swamp in Washington DC and built the Capitol and other important federal buildings.

• President Lyndon Johnson’s role, in 1964, in blocking the credentialing of Mississippi’s Freedom Democratic Party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, after the Mississippi Democratic Party declared their support for the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. This blatant white cronyism would provide major impetus to the growing black power movement.

• The profound religious intolerance that persisted in the US even after the 1780 adoption of the Bill of Rights guaranteeing separation of church and state. ** In Massachusetts, Sunday church attendance was compulsory until 1833 – until 1840, blasphemy could be punished by one year in prison, public whipping or the pillory. In Maryland Jews weren’t allowed to vote or hold office until the state passed the Jew Bill in 1820.

• Anti-immigrant feelings, especially against Germans, Irish, Mexicans and Chinese were so intense during the 19th century that there were frequent riots in which immigrants were lynched or had their homes set on fire. An 1855 riot in Louisville would have affected my great grandfather, whose family arrived in the area after immigrating from Germany in 1840.

• President Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 National Reclamation Act, which led to the construction of 600 dams (including Grand Coulee and Hoover Dam) in thirty years. These would provide irrigation to millions of acres of desert in California and the Southwest. This project would include the diversion of the Colorado River to supply Southern California’s Imperial Valley, which supplies nearly half the fresh fruit and vegetables consumed by Americans, as well as Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and parts of Mexico.

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*Prior to reading this book, I had no idea the US and France had been at war (with each other).

**The early view of the Bill of Rights was that it only pertained to the federal government and didn’t apply to state law.