Part 3

A Shining City on a Hill

"...the Indian is DEAD in you...Let all that is Indian within you die!...You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the INDIAN within you is DEAD." Reverend A. J. Lippincott; Graduation Ceremony at Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania.

When the Vatican in the same breath asserts Catholicism and Ecumenism its Protestant accomplices in religious realpolitik turn their eyes to heaven and sigh. But the Vatican (the history of whose philosophy, the philosophy of whose history, is vast); the Vatican has the philosophical and historical right of it: that a properly dogmatic spirit is both prior to and, ultimately, generative of any mere dogma. Mere dogma, the accidents (and their arguments, refutations and executions) which litter ecclesiastical history, is neither here nor there. It is altogether incidental.

As countless generations of those little children who have suffered upon His coming (for, whatever about the son of god, the Son of Man also rises) can testify, catechetical Christianity is at once turbulent and tedious (though they are not taught to intone that it is also altogether incidental).

Monotheistic three card monte, it is an Augustinian take on the old Arian shell-game; telling how a son being double and triple crossed ascended into glory to sit at his own right hand. For easter and xmas, Amen.

And so, the basic truth of the survival of Christianity at the heart and in the head of things across the changing certainties of shifting centuries, is not due to any particular attachment to any mere dogma. Rather has it been a function of the wholly dogmatic spirit that lies at the core of, and infuses itself throughout, Christianity and its adaptability to the point of power.

Malleus Maleficarum is malleable. The hammer which betimes has shattered witches at other times may flatten witch-hunters. Witches or witch-hunters, that much is neither here nor there; altogether incidental. What is precisely here and entirely to the point is that there is a hammer.

It is the hammer that was forged by the self-appointed apostle Paul (not being able to claim personal acquaintance with the shadowy Jesus-figure, he had himself chosen in a vision on the road to "Damascus"—the desert capital of the Essenes). It is the hammer that is contained in the doctrine (no mere dogma this) that "the powers that be are ordained of God".

So-so Socialists have all too often stuttered into a notion of themselves as heirs of the early Christians; hoping perhaps the claim that they represent Christianity as it was before its promotion to state-religion corrupted it will draw poor Christians to them, or perhaps that Mammon Moneybags will take the hint (and the present British Labour Government which has marginalised the British working class and re-established war as the organising principle of European politics is led by born-again Christian Socialists).

Christianity has never in fact been other than it was at its foundation. Attributing a hodgepodge of prophetic statements from Deutero-Isaiah and the Apocalyptic Books of the Jewish tradition to an unknowable Jesus-figure (whose supposed surname of these latter days is not a Jewish name but is a Greek title), clothing the philosophically challenged Yahweh in Platonist robes, and borrowing an impossibilist morality from the Pharisees at whose feet he studied, Paul founded a religion that uniquely had no original doctrine other than raw, unreconstructed, unashamed worship of power.

Neiztsche, for all that I admire the boldness of his phrasing and his exquisite sense of timing, was a wimp. The man who really philosophised with a hammer also sermonised with a scythe, and that was Paul (and his successors in the Papacy have inherited his iron nerve—the Pauline succession presents itself as Petrine! Bravo!!)

So now then, here is Christianity as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; all of it all at once; not the tittle of a tithe of it missing:—

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:

For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

For this cause pay ye tribute also; for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.

Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.

Ahh...Christianity!! For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, the tribute, the custom and honour... and mine is...mine is the FEAR!!!

"Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid." (Matt., 5., 14.)

The first determined white invaders of North America (the origin of the impulse to call them "settlers" is both obvious and despicable, and the temptation is to be at least struggled with) were English religious dissidents who had a problem with the powers that be that then were. Good Christians though, they remained in awe of the power.

Taking their inspiration from the founder's second epistle to Corinthians ("Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord.") they fled the ungodly Anglican communion shrieking loud hosannas, at first to Holland, and then farther, to immeasurably more distant Virginia (and was it really intended to be even more distant in a frame of time, this NEW England?).

Here then is their "Mayflower compact":--

In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwriten, the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britaine, Franc, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc.

Haveing undertaken, for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian faith, and honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant the first colonie in the Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hereof to enacte, constitute and frame shuch just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witnes whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cap-Codd the .11. of November, in the year of the raigne of our soveraigne lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.

These "Pilgrim Fathers" were of a puritan disposition with a tendency to ecclesiastical fragmentation. They were followed by Puritans equally puritanical but with no such embarrassingly debilitating ambivalence towards the powers that then most certainly were, not least in New England.

At a conference of puritans held at Cambridge in August 1629 a cartel of godly businessmen headed by the most godly of them all, yet another brand plucked from the burning, John Winthrop, decided to take over the financially disadvantaged Massachussetts Bay Company for His purposes. This was what in business is called a good deal; in theology it is known as predestination.

And what it predestined was the United States of America. Forget George Washington; forget Abraham Lincoln and Teddy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the moment forget even Thomas Jefferson. Above all these and any other that might be mentioned, the one and only original Founding Father of it all was John Winthrop.

He being elected governor of His colony, the stockholding Saints then righteously resolved:—

It is fully and faithfully agreed amongst us...that...we will be ready in our persons...to embark for the said plantation by the first of March...to pass the seas (under God's protection) to inhabit and continue New England. Provided always that before the last September next, the whole government together with the patent for the said plantation be first by an order of the court legally transferred...[and will] remain with us...upon the said plantation.

ABOARD THAT SAUCY SHIP—THE ARBELLA

The first of 14 ships of this new wave of invaders, the Arbella, set sail in February 1630. America's future was by then settled in Winthrop's mind. He settled it as a determined policy for the forthcoming invasion in a sermon delivered on the Atlantic Ocean:—A Modell of Christian Charity.

GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.

The Reason hereof.

1 Reas. First to hold conformity with the rest of his world, being delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures, and the glory of his power in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole; and the glory of his greatness, that as it is the glory of princes to have many officers, soe this great king will haue many stewards, Counting himself more honoured in dispensing his gifts to man by man, than if he did it by his owne immediate hands.

2 Reas. Secondly that he might haue the more occasion to manifest the work of his Spirit: first upon the wicked in moderating and restraining them: soe that the riche and mighty should not eate upp the poore nor the poore and dispised rise upp against and shake off theire yoake. 2ly In the regenerate, in exerciseing his graces in them, as in the grate ones, theire love, mercy, gentleness, temperance &c., in the poore and inferior sorte, theire faithe, patience, obedience &c.

3 Reas. Thirdly, that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bonds of brotherly affection. From hence it appears plainly that noe man is made more honourable than another or more wealthy &c., out of any particular and singular respect to himselfe, but for the glory of his creator and the common good of the creature, man. Therefore God still reserves the property of these gifts to himself...There are two rules whereby we are to walk one towards another: Justice and Mercy. These are always distinguished in their act and in their object, yet may they both concurre in the same subject in eache respect; as sometimes there may be an occasion of showing mercy to a rich man in some sudden danger or distresse, and alsoe doeing of meere justice to a poor man in regard of some perticular contract &c....

...

It rests now to make some application of this discourse, by the present designe, which gaue the occasion of writing of it. Herein are 4 things to be propounded; first the persons, 2ly the worke, 3ly theend, 4thly the meanes. 1. For the persons. Wee are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ, in which respect onley though wee were absent from each other many miles, and had our imployments as farre distant, yet wee ought to account ourselves knitt together by this bond of loue, and live in the exercise of it, if wee would have comforte of our being in Christ. This was notorious in the practise of the Christians in former times...2nly for the worke wee haue in hand. It is by a mutual consent, through a speciall overvaluing providence and a more than an ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ, to seeke out a place of cohabitation and Consortshipp under a due forme of Government both ciuill and ecclesiasticall. In such cases as this, the care of the publique must oversway all private respects, by which, not only conscience, but meare civill pollicy, dothe binde us. For it is a true rule that particular Estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the publique. 3ly The end is to improve our lives to doe more service to the Lord; the comforte and encrease of the body of Christe, whereof we are members; that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evill world, to serve the Lord and worke out our Salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances. 4thly for the meanes whereby this must be effected. They are twofold, a conformity with the worke and end wee aime at. These wee see are extraordinary, therefore wee must not content ourselves with usuall ordinary meanes. Whatsoever wee did, or ought to haue done when wee liued in England, the same must wee doe, and more allsoe, where wee goe. That which the most in theire churches mainetaine as truthe in profession onely, wee must bring into familiar and constant practise; as in this duty of loue, wee must loue brotherly without dissimulation, wee must loue one another with a pure hearte fervently. Wee must beare one another's burthens. We must not looke onely on our owne things, but allsoe on the things of our brethren. Neither must we thinke that the Lord will beare with such faileings at our hands as he dothe from those among whome wee have liued; and that for these 3 Reasons; 1. In regard of the more neare bond of marriage between him and us, wherein hee hath taken us to be his, after a most strickt and peculiar manner, which will make him the more jealous of our loue and obedience...2ly, because the Lord will be sanctified in them that come neare him. We know that there were many that corrupted the service of the Lord; some setting upp altars before his owne; others offering both strange fire and strange sacrifices allsoe; yet there came noe fire from heaven, or other sudden judgement upon them, as did upon Nadab and Abihu, whoe yet wee may think did not sinne presumptuously. 3ly. When God gives a speciall commission he lookes to have it strictly observed in every article; When he gaue Saule a commission to destroy Amaleck, Hee indented with him upon certain articles, and because hee failed in one of the least, and that upon a faire pretense, it lost him the kingdom, which should have beene his reward, if hee had observed of his commission.

Thus stands the cause betweene God and us. Wee are entered into Covenant with Him for this worke. Wee haue taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to drawe our own articles. Wee haue professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. Wee have hereupon besought Him of favour and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath Hee ratified this covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if wee shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends wee have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnall intentions, seeking greate things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us...

Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke, and to provide for our posterity, is to followe the counsell of Micah, to doe justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make others' conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace.

The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his oune people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes. Soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome, power, goodness and truthe, than formerly wee haue been acquainted with. Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it like that of New England." For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deal falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of God, and all professors for God's sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither wee are a going.

I shall shutt upp this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithfull servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israell, Deutl 30. Beloued there is now sett before us life and good, Death and evill, in that wee are commanded this day to loue the Lord our God, and to loue one another, to walke in his wayes and to keepe his Commandements and his Ordinance and his lawes, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that wee may liue and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whither wee goe to possess it. But if our heartes shall turne away, so that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worshipp and serue other Gods, our pleasure and proffitts; it is propounded unto us this day, wee shall surely perishe out of the good land whither wee passe over this vast sea to possesse it;

Therefore lett us choose life that wee, and our seede may liue, by obeying His voyce and cleaveing to Him, for Hee is our life and our prosperity.

(The Amaleck episode to which Winthrop alludes there is one of those bloodsoaked humours which make the elder books such a joy to read. In these fallen times when even, or most especially?, the elite of God's own land are illiterate in His word it may appear seemly in His sight to remind them how the LORD of Hosts commanded Saul:—Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass...And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt. And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly. Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying. Bye-bye Saul, got me a brand new boy now.)

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. (1 Corinthians; 13, 1)

"Charity" is the Christian name for that structuring of power within which the poor, who are its material and moral supports, are constrained to be always with us.

In these days when organised charity is such big business it is all the more important to stress that Christian charity now is most particularly a process in which the working class of Western Europe and North America, whose labour establishes and cossets the leisure of its rulers, contributes to the machinery of oppression of the workers of other nations and countries, peoples and continents. The fault lines along which Western capital has insinuated itself into the new profit-mills of Eastern Europe and reinfiltrated its old colonies in Africa, Asia and South America, have been fissures of famine and war—disasters both natural and of capitalist manufacture. The first wave of invasion in these times is almost inevitably aid—UN aid, government aid and the aid of "voluntary agencies". From all and each of those outlets Western aid is that gift which most efficiently goes on giving, and giving; a syphilitic whore. Its recipients go on paying and paying, and, if Nato and Unesco and Oxfam have their way, will go on paying through all their generations.

The Christian Socialist governors of Britain are currently engaged in a crusade against the human charitable impulse which is perverted in its Christian form. They have not yet legislated against spontaneous fellow-feeling and are at present merely propagandising against poor and homeless beggars—Cathy Come Home to a sanitised (New) Labour Camp. The campaign itself highlights the domestic utility of organised charity, which is threefold. (I) It helps to reduce the proportion of the welfare budget which is paid to those in need, leaving more for the welfare industry which has in recent years been its primary object. (II) Those who give most are inevitably those who are themselves the most deprived, thus fulfilling the Christian principle that poverty should pay for itself; and incidentally giving the bourgeoisie a good laugh. (III) It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the impracticality of a needs-based, rights-fuelled, welfare state, which to the rich and powerful is wormwood and gall.

By and large the international agencies which administer Christian charity are no longer overtly, doctrinally or organisationally, Christian. But then Christianity itself is not what it was. Much of it is Christian Socialism. Even more of it passes itself off as Humanism in order to insist, as most Christians by name still cannot, that the wealth-disabled countries where famine is endemic should cull their populations with contraception and abortion (this despite the plain fact that throughout the world population density is greatest in Western Europe and least in Africa).

Above all else, as both founders, Paul the founder of Christianity and John Winthrop the founder in advance of the United States, recognised, Christian charity is not any specific action, charitable or otherwise. Rather, it is a general state of affairs. It is the practise of which the worship of power is the theory. And it is genocidal.

SOME DEFINITIONS

Towards the end of the Second World War Raphael Lemkin published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in which he coined the term "genocide". He defined this as "a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction", stating that "Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor".

In 1946 the United Nations General Assembly resolved:—

Genocide is the denial of the right of existence to entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these groups, and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations...The General Assembly therefore Affirms that genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices--whether private individuals, public officials or statesmen, and whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds--are punishable.

In 1948 that resolution became a Convention:—

United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Contracting Parties, Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96(I) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world; Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity; and Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required; Hereby agree as hereinafter provided.

Article I. The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III. The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.

Article IV. Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

Article V. The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

Article VI. Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by, such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.

Article VII. Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force.

Article VIII. Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

Article IX. Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

Article X. The present Convention of which the Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall bear the date of 9 December 1948.

(Just what the moral law and international law are by way of matters of fact I have not the least idea, suspecting nonetheless that if the moral had any legal, or the legal any moral, or either any military force the Security Council of the United Nations would have been straightaway wiped from the face of the earth on 9 December 1948. Ah well...wishful thinking.)

America did not sign that Convention until 1986, even then requiring the caveat of another UN resolution which declared:—

Nothing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.

In signing America also stipulated that no case to which the United States is party can be submitted to the International Court without its express consent and reserved to itself the right to itself decide if, when and in what manner the Genocide Convention can be applied to itself. And there is no point in denying that any self-respecting state with a halfway-reliable army, never mind a nuclear arsenal, would ever put itself to the annoyance of stipulating, reserving or requiring otherwise.

There is no other power than itself that can compel the United States to any court whatsoever to account for itself. That was impossible in 1948 and 1986 when the United States had a strategically significant core of enemies in the USSR and its allies. It is certainly no easier today.

America's refusal for so long to sign up to the United Nations Genocide Convention and the negative fashion in which it eventually did sign had nothing to do with any unreasoning fear of being set upon by a gaggle of moralising lawyers. It was due to an entirely reasonable fear of being itself forced to find itself unwarranted and objectionable in its own court of last resort; in fear for its characteristic image in its own eyes of itself.

America was founded by Puritans and refounded by Deists (for whom puritanism was, and is, an intellectual reflex). It was purged in the Civil War which another Deist forced upon it. Sixty years ago it was launched into an infinity of greatness by whatever Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his secret heart. And all along, from its earliest beginnings in the sermons and slaughters of John Winthrop to its genocidal war (with junior partner, England) against Iraq and its resumption (with junior partner, England) of the Fascist project in the Balkans, it has had to feel, and has felt, very, very good about itself.

THE GREAT NATION OF FUTURITY

Here then is the United States of America in 1839 feeling wonderfully good about itself. It is an article written by John L. O'Sullivan (who six years later coined the actual phrase 'manifest destiny') in his United States Magazine and Democratic Review:--

The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity.

It is so destined, because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul—the self-evident dictate of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man's rights as man. Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government.

How many nations have had their decline and fall because the equal rights of the minority were trampled on by the despotism of the majority; or the interests of the many sacrificed to the aristocracy of the few; or the rights and interests of all given up to the monarchy of one? These three kinds of government have figured so frequently and so largely in the ages that have passed away that their history, through all time to come, can only furnish a resemblance. Like causes produce like effects, and the true philosopher of history will easily discern the principle of equality, or of privilege, working out its inevitable result. The first is regenerative, because it is natural and right; and the latter is destructive to society, because it is unnatural and wrong.

What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect?

America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battlefields, but in defense of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy.

We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. We point to the everlasting truth on the first page of our national declaration, and we proclaim to the millions of other lands that "the gates of hell"—the powers of aristocracy and monarchy—"shall not prevail against it."

The far-reaching, the boundless future, will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High, the Sacred, and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere, roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation of Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling or owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood—of "peace and good will amongst men."

Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of states, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and, while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission--to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the lifegiving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure in existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?

I hope to be examining O'Sullivan's career and the fundamental notion of manifest destiny in more detail in a further article in this series. In the meantime I simply cannot resist quoting this from another article of 1845 (the one announcing the world-historical phrase appeared in July, this in October):—

Our way lies, not over trampled nations, but through desert wastes, to be brought by our industry and energy within the domain of art and civilization. We are contiguous to a vast portion of the globe, untrodden save by the savage and the beast, and we are conscious of our power to render it tributary to man. This is a position which must give existence to a public law...The acquisition of Texas, commencing with the earliest settlements under Austin down to the last conclusive act, may be admitted at once to be aggressive. But what then? It has been laid down and acted upon that the solitudes of America are the property of the immigrant children of Europe and their offspring. Not only has this been said and reiterated, but it is actually...the basis of public law in America. Public sentiment with us repudiates possession without use, and this sentiment is gradually acquiring the force of established public law...It will come to pass that the confederated democracies of the Anglo American race will give this great continent as an inheritance to man. Rapacity and spoliation cannot be the features of this magnificent enterprise, not perhaps, because we are above and beyond the influence of such views, but because circumstances do not admit of their operation. We take from no man; the reverse rather—we give to man. This national policy, necessity or destiny, we know to be just and beneficent, and we, therefore, afford to scorn the invective and imputations of rival nations. With the valleys of the Rocky Mountains covered into pastures and sheep-folds, we may with propriety turn to the world and ask, whom have we injured?

And is that not simply, monstrously, devilishly wonderful. Through desert wastes...Rapacity and spoliation cannot be the features of this magnificent enterprise...we give to man...whom have we injured? Who do we think we're kidding? is more like it! Themselves of course.

A VIRGIN LAND, JUST BEGGING TO BE RAPED (THE PENTATEUCH, anywhere, et seq.)

From the beginning the white invasion of North America knew that it was moving into an uninhabited, desert waste, a virgin wilderness, which their god had vouchsafed to His people. That it was inhabited was simply their god's good grace in also vouchsafing them many souls to plunder and anyway, as the Natives weren't using the land properly as god intended, it was as good as empty (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

Robert Cushman wrote in 1622 in his continuation of Mourt's Relation (an account of the early years of the plantation which was printed in England by Thomas Morton, hence Mourt's Relation):—

Their land is spacious and void, and there are few, and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and the wild beast. They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, &c. As the ancient patriarchs, therefore, removed from straiter places into more roomy, where the land lay idle and waste, and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them, as Gen. xiii, 6, 11, 12, and xxxiv, 21, and xii, 20, so it is lawful now to take a land which none useth, and make use of it...

Yea, and as the enterprise is weighty and difficult, so the honor is more worthy, to plant a rude wilderness, to enlarge the honor and fame of our dread sovereign, but chiefly to display the efficacy and power of the gospel, both in zealous preaching, professing, and wise walking under it, before the faces of these poor blind infidels.

The Royal Charter to the Massachussetts Bay Company of 1629 was unique in omitting to specify that the Company Headquarters should be in London (it located instead in Boston, which both encouraged and facilitated an altogether unhealthy degree of local self-government). It was entirely typical in declaring many good things and sundry wonders...

...for the directing, ruling and disposing of all other Matters and Thinges, whereby our said People, Inhabitants there, may be soe religiously, peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderly Conversation, maie wynn and incite the Natives of the Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie true God and Savior of Mankinde, and the Christian Fayth, which in our Royall Intention, and the Adventurers free Profession, is the principall Ende of this Plantation.

And so, also in 1629, John Winthrop wrote:—

...the whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved by them. Why then should we stand starving here for the places of habitation, (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of lands as would procure him many hundreds of acres, as good or better, in another place), and in the mean time suffer whole countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement.

And, of course, god was good to His Chosen People by way of Pestilence. In 1634, Winthrop wrote to a friend in England how the natives "...are neere all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess".

By way of the other Apocylyptic horsemen also, their god was good.

John Underhill who was second in command of the slaughter at the Pequot settlement of Mystic in 1637, wrote:-—

It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious? (as some have said). Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David's war. When a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man, and all confederates in the action, then he hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terribelest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.

Still and withal, as William Hubbard wrote in his 1677 Narrative of the Indian Wars in New England, the Natives had nothing to complain of. The City that was built on an hill was shining on, beacon of righteousness to a world of sin! and asking with propriety, whom have we injured? Hubbard simply could not imagine why the Natives were up in arms...

What can be imagined, therefore, besides the instigation of Satan, that envied at the prosperity of the church of God here seated, or else fearing lest the power of the Lord Jesus, that had overthrown his kingdom in other parts of the world, should do the like here, and so the stone taken out of the mountain without hands, should become a great mountain itself, and fill the whole earth: no cause of provocation being given by the English.

In 1703, Solomon Stoddard advised Governor Dudley to hunt down rebellious Indians with dogs. Twenty years later he wanted them dealt with otherwise; not less harshly, but differently.

And as we dread to go to Hell our selves, it should be awful to us to consider their damnation. Love and Pity calls for it, that we should help keep them out of their Danger. We should pity Beasts in Misery, much more Men: Tho, they be brutish Persons; yet, they are of Mankind, and so objects of Compassion. It is an act of Love to our own nature to seek their salvation...

Thomas Morton had noted as early as 1637, and he writing in a fulsomely hostile spirit, that the Indians were sensible, calm, at ease with themselves, and obdurately so.

Of their Religion.

It has been a common received opinion from Cicero, that there is no people so barbarous but have some worship or other. In this particular, I am not of opinion therein with Tully; and, surely, if he had been amongst those people so longe as I have been, and conversed so much with them touching this matter of Religion, he would have changed his opinion...

Of their acknowlegement of the Creation, and the immortality of the Soul.

Although these Savages are found to be without Religion, Law, and King (as Sir William Alexander hath well observed,) yet are they not altogether without the knowledge of God (historically); for they have it amongst them by tradition that God made one man and one woman, and bade them live together and get children, kill deer, beasts, birds, fish and fowle, and what they would at their pleasure; and that their posterity was full of evil, and made God so angry that he let in the Sea upon them, and drowned the greatest part of them, that were naughty men, (the Lord destroyed so;) and they went to Sanaconquam, who feeds upon them (pointing to the Center of the Earth, where they imagine is the habitation of the Devill:) the other, (which were not destroyed,) increased the world, and when they died (because they were good) went to the house of Kytan, pointing to the setting of the sun; where they eate all manner of dainties, and never take pains (as now) to provide it.

Kytan makes provision (they say) and saves them that labour; and there they shall live with him forever, void of care. And they are persuaded that Kytan is he that makes corne growe, trees growe, and all manner of fruits. . . .

I asked him (an Indian) who was a good man; his answer was, he that would not Iie, nor steal.

These, with them, are all the capital crimes that can be imagined; all other are nothing in respect of those; and he that is free from these must live with Kytan for ever, in all manner of pleasure. . . .

Which remarks served merely to incite the godly. Misery loves company; Christian misery, militantly so.

THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN IS A SAVED INDIAN IS A DEAD INDIAN

In his excellent essay The Ruines of Mankind: The Indians and the Puritan Mind (Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 13., 1952) Roy Harvey Pearce gives some statistics on the mission of militant misery:—

...the record of individual New England missionary efforts is relatively scattered, involving, as it does, almost as many organizations as men. Apparently money was first sent to New England for missionary work in the 1630's. During the 1630's, too, Roger Williams and perhaps John Eliot were active among the Indians. In 1630 Plymouth Colony enacted laws to provide for the preaching of the Gospel among the Indians, and in 1643 Thomas Mayhew began to carry on missionary work on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Little or nothing was achieved, however, until November 1644 when the Massachusetts General Court asked the ministers to recommend measures for converting the Indians; two years later the General Court directed the ministers to elect two of their number every year to engage in gospel work among among the heathen; and in 1646 John Eliot, having learned a local Indian dialect, began systematically to preach to them. Then, in 1649, Edward Winslow, acting as London agent for the United Colonies, managed to get Parliament to authorize the incorporation of "The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England." It was this organization, poorly administered, which financed missionary work in New England until the Restoration. When, with the Restoration, the charter of "The President and Society" was declared legally invalid, a royal Charter was granted, in February 1662, to the "Company for Propagacion of the Gospell in New England, and parts adjacent, in America." It was this Company which carried on most of the financing of missionary work in New England until 1779, when the Revolutionary War caused remittances to America to be cut off. A "Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge," formed in England in 1698, the"Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge," formed in 1709, and an abortive "Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge," incorporated in Massachusetts in 1762, also variously contributed to the holy cause. (The "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" was an Anglican corporation founded in 1701, which sent its missionaries mainly to the Indians in the middle colonies and which gave up work with the Indians late in the eighteenth century.) All these organizations issued, finally, in "The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, and Others, in North America," founded in 1787. A great number of intentions and organizations certainly—but few practical results. Only with such self-consciously dedicated souls as Eliot and the Mayhews in the later seventeenth century and with various evangelical missionaries such as Sargeant and Brainerd in the earlier eighteenth century, did the Gospel reach the heathen. There were, it seemed, only a few workers for this vast, wild vineyard.

Let one episode stand for all of that.

John Eliot, being in Massachusetts in 1646 in receipt of funds from "A Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England" went out to wage His war amongst (yes, and against) the heathen of the vicinity. Those heathen amongst whom (and against whom) Eliot fought His good fight, being by this time defeated and dispirited were at length disposed to worship Eliot's god and live in awe of the powers that be at that time in New England.

(It may be noted that in 1646, the Massachusetts General Court had, out of the goodness of its heart, agreed not to force any of the Indians within its power to convert to the one true faith. It had also, out of the much more extensive badness of its heart, specified the death penalty for any native who obdurately refused to convert to the one true faith or who spoke against the faith of the Massachusetts General Court "...as if it were but a polliticke devise to keep ignorant men in awe".)

Towns for these newly gospellised Christian Indians were then established in Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, New Plymouth, New Norwich...all over god's good green land of His pious and obedient colonies of New England.

Ahh...praying Indians! Praise the lord and keep your powder dry.

In August 1675 King Philip's War scattered thousands of these Red Christians to the four winds. At that time also those of the praying Indians who remained in the Christian Indian towns were ordered by the Governor and Council of Massachusetts not to travel further than a mile from their town centre, and warned that disobedience would be fatal.

At the same time the General Council considered removing them altogether from sight and mind of the godly. In October 1675 the surviving praying Indians, all 500 of them, were removed to and confined on Deer Island in Boston Harbour. Most of them proceeded then to die of starvation and exposure.

In May 1677 the remaining few were returned to the mainland; for what purpose, to what conclusion I do not know: perhaps Reverend John Eliot (who did not die until 21st May 1690) wanted to apologise to them, or more probably not.

The Missionary Societies set out to undermine the spirit of the independent Indian peoples as a genocidal prelude to genocide. The man who coined the phrase was clear about what it entailed:—"Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor". If the military effort were not of a piece with the kulturkampf, if the missionary did not hide a knife in his Bible, then either enterprise might be in some way defensible; but the cavalry rode quoting scripture and the preachers sabred women and children.

From its foundation in and about Boston in and about the beginning of the seventeenth century the United States of America set about a most Christian and fundamentally genocidal enterprise. And there was simply no stopping it.

FRONTIER FROLICS

The philosophical historian of manifest destiny, Frederick Jackson Turner, was PHDed in 1890. Three years later, at a meeting of the American Historical Association on the twelfth of July, he delivered a paper on The Significance of the Frontier in American History. There and then he pioneered the pioneering argument par excellence:—

Up to our day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development...

...In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: the "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars...

...Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system...

...The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important...

...The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement...

...So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit.

In 1920 that paper was published as the first chapter of The Frontier in American History. In the second chapter of that work, entitled The First Official Frontier of the Massachusetts Bay, Turner wrote:—

...in 1690, a committee of the General Court of Massachusetts recommended the Court to order what shall be the frontier and to maintain a committee to settle garrisons on the frontier with forty soldiers to each frontier town as a main guard. In the two hundred years between this official attempt to locate the Massachusetts frontier line, and the official announcement of the ending of the national frontier line, westward expansion was the most important single process in American history...

...In American thought and speech the term "frontier" has come to mean the edge of settlement, rather than, as in Europe, the political boundary. By 1690 it was already evident that the frontier of settlement and the frontier of military defense were coinciding...The thing to be defended was the outer edge of this expanding society, a changing frontier, one that needed designation and re-statement with the changing location of the "West."...

...The very essence of the American frontier is that it is the graphic line which records the expansive energies of the people behind it, and which by the law of its own being continually draws that advance after it to new conquests.

Turner's philosophical heart there drives straight to the heart of the matter. The political culture of America was determined on its first frontier (by Winthrop, though Turner does not to my knowledge acknowledge the Master) and recreated itself on each of the frontiers to come. Each of those frontiers was a crisis; each crisis the United States faced it experienced as a frontier. And the frontiers of the Œfall line', the Alleghanies, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the line of the arid lands and the Rocky Mountains have been succeeded by America's European and Asian frontiers. Today the frontier is a global one that shifts with the Dow-Jones Index. Be therefore afraid, be very afraid; for America's frontiers are experienced by it as crises and it only knows one response to crisis, genocidal force (oh, and by the way, it has the technology to deliver genocidal force anywhere it chooses).

The Puritan invaders of the early seventeenth century established a frontier and faced a crisis. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the frontier had moved westward, and it was similarly experienced as a crisis. The arguments and the response were, given more or less of a difference in tone here and there, exactly the same.

In 1825 John Quincy Adams was elected, by the House of Representatives rather than the people, 6th President of the United States. On the 22nd of December, 1802 he had made a speech in which he ordered the confusion of...

...moralists who have questioned the right of Europeans to intrude upon the possessions of the aborigines in any case and under any limitations whatsoever. But have they maturely considered the whole subject? The Indian right of possession itself stands, with regard to the greatest part of the country, upon a questionable foundation. Their cultivated fields, their constructed habitations, a space of ample sufficiency for their subsistence, and whatever they had annexed to themselves by personal labor, was undoubtedly by the law of nature theirs. But what is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like the rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the ax of industry and rise again transformed into the habitations of ease and elegance? Shall he doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the valleys which a beneficent God has framed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes be condemned to everlasting barrenness? Shall the mighty rivers, poured out by the hands of nature as channels of communication between numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence and eternal solitude to the deep? Have hundreds of commodious harbors, a thousand leagues of coast, and a boundless ocean been spread in the front of this land, and shall every purpose of utility to which they could apply be prohibited by the tenant of the woods? No, generous philanthropists! Heaven has not been thus inconsistent in the works of its hands. Heaven has not thus placed at irreconcilible strife its moral laws with its physical creation.

So, generous philanthropists, the moral law required the degradation and extermination of the aborigines. Heaven was not in the least inconsistent. The Christian doctrine (no mere dogma, this) that the end justifies the means implies also that the means should be vigorously employed and thoroughly enjoyed. Ahh...genocide. Exactly the arguments and precisely the response (and the devil take the difference in tone) of the founding fathers of the invasion.

MEANWHILE AT MONTICELLO

Thomas Jefferson, the Deist refounder of Winthrop's Commonwealth of Saints, though he hadn't a tittle of time for the Adams Family (or its Values), scraped along the bottom of the same barrel when it came to Indian policy.

In his second Inaugural Address on 4th March 1805, he declared:—

The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores; without power to divert, or habits to contend against, they have been overwhelmed by the current, or driven before it; now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter's state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals. We have therefore liberally furnished them with the implements of husbandry and household use; we have placed among them instructors in the arts of first necessity; and they are covered with the aegis of the law against aggressors from among ourselves.

But the endeavors to enlighten them on the fate which awaits their present course of life, to induce them to exercise their reason, follow its dictates, and change their pursuits with the change of circumstances, have powerful obstacles to encounter; they are combatted by the habits of their bodies, prejudice of their minds, ignorance, pride, and the influence of interested and crafty individuals among them, who feel themselves something in the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any other. These persons inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors; that whatsoever they did, must be done through all time; that reason is a false innovation; that their duty is to remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety, and knowledge full of danger; in short, my friends, among them is seen the action and counteraction of good sense and bigotry; they, too, have their anti-philosophers, who find an interest in keeping things in their present state, who dread reformation, and exert all their faculties to maintain the ascendancy of habit over the duty of improving our reason, and obeying its mandates.

That was policy for public consumption. In his private correspondence Jefferson was a little less restrained (not at all too much less; Jefferson was a serial correspondent, literally, and took himself very seriously; everything he wrote was written with all his faculties directed to posterity). This then is from a letter to William Henry Harrison, Governor of Indiana Territory and later to be the 9th President of those United States (for four weeks, pneumonia intervening). It is dated February 27, 1803:—

You will receive herewith an answer to your letter as President of the Convention; and from the Secretary of War you receive from time to time information and instructions as to our Indian affairs. These communications being for the public records, are restrained always to particular objects and occasions; but this letter being unofficial and private, I may with safety give you a more extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians, that you may the better comprehend the parts dealt out to you in detail through the official channel, and observing the system of which they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases where you are obliged to act without instruction. Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The latter branches they take up with great readiness, because they fall to the women, who gain by quitting the labors of the field for those which are exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses, too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges, so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians. In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing of the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.

The plan to let impecunious individuals run up debts and then encourage them to sell lands that they in no way owned is about as far as Jefferson could go in acknowledging the practical morality of all his inducing and promoting—corrupting "chiefs" who would put their mark to land seizures that were then enforced with naked steel was an old dodge, as ethical as the dodge of dual duplicitous translation in which what was translated from a treaty document was no way at all what was in the document and signed as the treaty.

The piece of nonsense about the Indians in time incorporating "with us as citizens of the United States" was a favourite rhetorical gambit of Jefferson's, and was pure nonsense. In September 1778 the first treaty between the United States and an Indian people was signed with the Lepane (Delaware) at Fort Pitt. It promised that the Lepane could, if they wished, send a representative to Congress. And it was broken within days when the Americans murdered (as was on so many occasions their wont) the most pro-American of the Lepane leaders, White-eyes. A century and a half later, in 1924, when the Indian peoples seemed at last utterly scattered, degraded, demoralised and broken, they were finally insulted with citizenship.

(A significant clue to the true causes of the American Civil War may be found in the fact that Indian representatives of Indian constituents sat in the Confederate Congress; the Southern States were flying in the face of Manifest Destiny!, with the author of the phrase in their midst!!)

Jefferson's expressions of high regard and warm sympathy for the Indian peoples would seem to have been genuine and sincere. He wrote about them at length in his Notes On Virginia, a piece of work he took very seriously indeed. The tenor of that work is reprised more succinctly in a letter he wrote in 1785 to Jean Francois, Marquis de Chastellux, who had fought with Lafayatte in the War of Independence:—

...I am safe in affirming, that the proofs of genius given by the Indians of North America, place them on a level with whites in the same uncultivated state. The North of Europe furnishes subjects enough for comparison with them, and for a proof of their equality. I have seen some thousands myself, and conversed much with them, and have found in them a masculine, sound understanding. I have had much information from men who had lived among them, and whose veracity and good sense were so far known to me, as to establish a reliance on their information. They have all agreed in bearing witness in favor of the genius of this people. As to their bodily strength, their manners rendering it disgraceful to labor, those muscles employed in labor will be weaker with them, than with the European laborer; but those which are exerted in the chase, and those faculties which are employed in the tracing an enemy or a wild beast, in contriving ambuscades for him, and in carrying them through their execution, are much stronger than with us, because they are more exercised. I believe the Indian, then, to be, in body and mind, equal to the white man. I have supposed the black man, in his present state, might not be so; but it would be hazardous to affirm, that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.

And to John Adams he wrote in 1812...

...Indians, a people with whom, in the very early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the revolution they were in the habit of coming often, and in great numbers to the seat of our government, where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Outassete, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees. He was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before his departure for England. The moon was in full splendour, and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence. His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated actions, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, altho' I did not understand a word he uttered. That nation, consisting now of about 2000 warriors, and the Creeks of about 3000 are far advanced in civilisation. They have good Cabins, inclosed fields, large herds of cattle and hogs, spin and weave their own clothes of cotton, have smiths and other of the most necessary tradesmen, write and read, are on the increase in numbers, and a branch of the Cherokees is now instituting a regular representative government...

The turmoil which the Creeks and the Cherokees were undergoing as Jefferson wrote, culminating in the Trail Of Tears, will have to be dealt with at length in a future article (the great article of futurity?). For the moment, I hope it is clear that the Philosopher President's sympathy for his victims was genuine. What he thought he knew of Indians, Jefferson liked.

TRANSCENDENTALISTS AMONG THE SAVAGES

That last point was made to me in conversation a year or so ago by Brendan Clifford, and has intrigued me since. The American genocide was carried out, was determined upon and executed, in large measure by people who genuinely liked the Indians. (At the point of execution, on the killing fields, Kit Carson comes immediately to mind. As Dee Brown describes him in Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Carson had been a trader and had lived among Indians. He was a great friend of the Utes. At one time he lived with a Cheyenne woman. Another time he was with an Arapaho who bore his child. He made money and entered the counsels, company and convenient relations of rich and powerful men; married Josefa, the daughter of Don Francisco Jamarillo of Taos. But while he mixed with the rich and powerful he never ceased to be intimidated by them. An illiterate mountain man, he was all along always in awe of the powers that be's. Comes the Civil War and Carson signs up to fight the Confederacy. But he was kept more or less at home and employed against the Navaho of New Mexico. After a year, two years of that he tried to resign but, as ever in awe of superior authority, could not carry his resignation through. Pursuing a scorched earth policy then he starved the Navaho into surrender and herded the survivors into their concentration camp at Bosque Redondo. All the way along liking Indians, but in awe of power and authority.)

The question which intrigues me is one of conscience, the social disabling of so many individual consciences; how was it so successfully achieved? And the answer I think (at present, this is very much inquiry in progress) lies in Western Christianity's obsession with the idea (or rather its raw, unrefined and undefined, notion) of civilisation.

For the eighteenth century as it ran on through to the nineteenth, civilisation was understood in contrast with savagery. In America in particular savagery was understood as the state of being of its native peoples. The first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary defined savagism as...

...the state of rude uncivilized men; the state of men in their native wildness and rudeness.

It defined the savage as...

...a human being in his native state of rudeness, one who is untaught, uncivilized or without cultivation of mind or manners.

In his excellent Thoreau and the American Indians, from which those definitions are taken, Robert F. Sayre summarises white histories and studies which...

...simply rephrased the tragic saga implicit in the idea of savagism. A tribe, Œonce a powerful nation' as these writers liked to say, was met and corrupted by civilization, its land purchased or lost in war, and though a heroic leader tried to resist, he failed and the tribe was now almost extinct. In such cases, the generic singular had further logic because a chief like Pontiac, Corn Planter, or Tecumseh did speak for and lead his people. He was Œthe Indian' in both the representative and honorific senses. But the focus was also on him because the tragedy was more dramatic when embodied in one person. (page 12)

In a Journal entry of January 23rd, 1858, Transcendentalist Thoreau wrote:—

Who can doubt that men are by a certain fate what they are, contending with unseen and unimagined difficulties, or encouraged and aided by equally mysterious auspicious circumstances? Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? Individuals accept their fate and live according to it, as the Indian does. Everybody notices that the Indian retains his habits wonderfully,--is still the same man that the discoverers found. The fact is, the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation." (quoted page 153)

Sayre contends that Thoreau's literarified trips into Maine's antique woodland with Indian guides enabled him to "break through many of the prejudices of savagism". I can't agree with that judgment. Thoreau transcended his social environment, to the extent that he did, in his head. The genocide continued and Thoreau continued to go along with it. He was a militant abolitionist in respect of slavery; not a militant at all in respect of racial slaughter. But, his passivity notwithstanding, his to some extent liberation of himself in his head is to some extent interesting.

Sayre quotes the following from an undated Journal entry:—

For the Indian there is no safety but in the plow. If he would not be pushed into the Pacific, he must seize hold of a plow-tail and let go his bow and arrow, his fish-spear and rifle. This is the only Christianity that will save him.

Jefferson could have written that. Indeed Jefferson did write that, often and at some length. But Jefferson could not have written the entry as it continued.

...I confess I have no little sympathy with the Indians and hunter men. They seem to me a distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of the white man.

Jefferson could not appreciate that the measures he saw as being necessary to save the Indian peoples were guaranteed to destroy them. The idea of a tribe of Lepane or Lakota as sturdy yeomen following the plough, ploughing their surplus into agricultural improvement and the University of Virginia and abandoning their families to the nuclear disaster of American Family Values is simply absurd. If it had been realised the sturdy yeomen and their families may have been any manner of thing, they would not have been any kind of Lakota or Lepane. And of course there was never any attempt to realise it as a policy. It was a gloss on the theory that underpinned the genocidal policies that in actuality were realised. Thoreau in his head had at least transcended all that.

So I have some time for Thoreau, and I have a great deal more time for Thoreau's Transcendentalist friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The removal of the Cherokees from sight and mind of the state of Georgia, which had been in the offing, in the courts and out, for many years, finally began in April 1838. Emerson wrote an open letter of protest to President Van Buren, saying...

A crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more? (quoted in Sayre, page 23/24)

The letter changed nothing in the civilised world, but writing it saved, if nothing else saved, Emerson's soul. It took him out of the civilised nexus that condemned the uncivilised to misery and death, or, worse, to the civilisation of the Bosque Redondo.

Thoreau seems to have grasped, though he could not bring himself publicly to stand to, the absent centre of a savagist apologetic:—that the inevitability of the progress of civilisation which must inevitably steamroller all the uncivilised and unfit in its path is only so to the extent that so many believe it to be so. Emerson stood to that, and for all the good it does to say it now, it must be said that if more had stood with him the juggernaut of genocide may have been halted, or at least slowed. But they didn't and it wasn't.

At one level it could be argued that Jefferson and Carson were constrained to their work by pervasive notions of inevitability. But really that's not good enough. Theories of racial determinism facilitated the working up of dilemmas and the making of what Christian Socialist Blair calls "hard choices"; but Jefferson and Carson were not constrained to the determination and implementation of genocide by anything external to themselves. They constrained themselves. Liking Indians they saw how their material interest required that those Indians had to go. And they liked their material interest better than they liked any Indian. So bye-bye noble savage, hello Bosque Redondo.

AS CHARLIE'S MATE FRED SAID

Notions of savagism and the inevitability of civilisation were part and parcel of scientific socialism in the nineteenth century.

In his preface to the first edition in 1884 of The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, Engels wrote:—

The following chapters constitute, in a sense, the fulfilment of a bequest. It was no less a person than Karl Marx who had planned to present the results of Morgan's researches in connection with the conclusions arrived at by his own—within certain limits I might say our own—materialist investigation of history and thus to make clear their whole significance. For Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilisation was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx had arrived at. And just as Capital was for years both zealously plagiarised and hushed up on the part of the official economists in Germany, so was Morgan's Ancient Society treated by the spokesmen of "prehistoric" science in England. My work can offer but a meagre substitute for that which my departed friend was not destined to accomplish. However, I have before me, in his extensive extracts from Morgan, critical notes which I reproduce here wherever this is at all possible.

Footnotes make it clear that the Morgan he was referring to was Lewis Henry Morgan. A further footnote in the fourth, 1891, edition claimed a strange level of ignorance about this Morgan.

On my return voyage from New York in September 1888 I met an ex-Congressman for Rochester who had known Lewis Morgan. Unfortunately, he could tell me little about him. Morgan, he said, had lived in Rochester as a private citizen occupying himself only with his studies. His brother was a colonel in the army, and held a post in the War Department at Washington. Through the good offices of his brother, he had succeeded in interesting the government in his researches and in publishing a number of his works at public cost. This ex-Congressman said that he himself had also assisted in this while in Congress.

Morgan was born and lived in New York State, practicing law in Rochester from 1844. He was passionately interested, as an ideological savagist, in the fate of the savages about whom he wrote. This led him to enter politics. From 1861 to 1868 he was a member of the New York state assembly, becoming chairman of its Committee on Indian Affairs. In 1868 to 1869 he was a member of the New York state senate. He died in 1871. On at least one occasion he lobbied for appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, but that was a lucrative piece of patronage and he was unsuccessful, or rather, as will soon become apparent, he succeeded at second hand.

Why Engels, who had an interest in knowing at least that much about Morgan succeeded in knowing not just less, but other, I do not know.

Anyway...the core of Morgan's views on the prospects of the Indian peoples is contained in this extract from his League Of The Ho-de-No-Sau-Nee, or Iroquois of 1851:—

All the Indian races now dwelling within the Republic have fallen under its jurisdiction; thus casting upon the government a vast responsibility, as the administrator of their affairs, and a solemn trust, as the guardian of their future welfare...

There are now about four thousand Iroquois living in the state of New York. Having for many years been surrounded by civilization, and shut in from all intercourse with the ruder tribes of the wilderness, they have not only lost their native fierceness, but have become quite tractable and humane. In addition to this, the agricultural pursuits into which they have gradually become initiated, have introduced new modes of life, and awakened new aspirations until a change, in itself scarcely perceptible to the casual observer, but in reality very great, has already been accomplished. At the present moment their decline has not only been arrested, but they are actually increasing in numbers, and improving in their social condition. The proximate cause of this universal spectacle is to be found in their feeble attempts at agriculture; but the remote and the true one is to be discovered in the schools of the missionaries.

To these establishments among the Iroquois, from the days of the Jesuit fathers down to the present time, they are principally indebted for all the progress they have made, and for whatever prospect of ultimate reclamation their condition is beginning to inspire. By the missionaries they were taught our language, and many of the arts of husbandry and of domestic life; from them they received the Bible and the precepts of Christianity. After the lapse of so many years, the fruits of their toil and devotion are becoming constantly more apparent: as, through years of slow and almost imperceptible progress, they have gradually emancipated themselves from much of the rudeness of Indian life. The Iroquois of the present day is, in his social condition, elevated far above the Iroquois of the seventeenth century. This fact is sufficient to prove, that philanthropy and Christianity are not wasted upon the Indian; and further than this, that the Iroquois, if eventually reclaimed, must ascribe their preservation to the persevering and devoted efforts of those missionaries who labored for their welfare when they were injured and defrauded by the unscrupulous, neglected by the civil authorities, and oppressed by the multitude of misfortunes which accelerated their decline.

There are but two means of rescuing the Indian from his impending destiny; and these are education and Christianity...There is now, in each Indian community in the State, a large and respectable class who have become habitual cultivators of the soil; many of whom have adopted our mode of life, have become members of the missionary churches, speak our language, and are in every respect discreet and sensible man. In this particular class there is a strong desire for the adoption of the customs of civilized life, and more especially for the education of their children, upon which subject they often express the strongest solicitude. Among the youth who are brought up under such influences, there exists the same desire for knowledge, and the same readiness to improve educational advantages. Out of this class Indian youth may be selected to a higher education, with every prospect of success, since to a better preparation for superior advantages, there is superadded a stronger security against a relapse into Indian life...

...A new order of things has recently become apparent among the Iroquois, which is favorable to a more general education at home and to a higher cultivation in particular instances. The schools of the missionaries, established as they have been, and are, in the heart of our Indian communities, have reached the people directly, and laid the only true and solid foundation of their permanent improvement. They have created a new society in the midst of them, founded upon Christianity; thereby awakening new desires, creating new habits, and arousing new aspirations. In fact they have gathered together the better elements of Indian society, and quickened them with the light of religion and of knowledge. A class has thus been gradually formed, which if encouraged and strengthened, will eventually draw over to itself that portion of our Indian population which is susceptible of improvement and elevation, and willing to make the attempt. Under the fostering care of the government, both state and national, and under the still more efficient tutelage of religious societies, great hopes may be justly entertained of the ultimate and permanent civilization of this portion of the Iroquois.

Ah...Christianity! Ahh...Civilization! The only good Indian is a saved Indian is a dead Indian. "...the Indian is DEAD in you...Let all that is Indian within you die!...You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the INDIAN within you is DEAD.". Then its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, if Bosque Redondo don't get you, the Carlisle Indian School must.

KEEPER OF THE WESTERN DOOR OF THE LONG HOUSE OF THE IROQUOIS

Morgan's magnum opus of 1851, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, was written in collaboration with a young Iroquois to whom the work is dedicated:—

To Ha-sa-no-an-da (Ely S. Parker), A Seneca Indian, this work, the materials of which are the fruit of our joint researches, is inscribed in acknowledgement of the obligations, and in testimony of the friendship of the author.

Iroquois is a Frenchification of the name given by Algonquin-speaking enemies to the "rattlesnakes" whose name for themselves was Hodenosaunee, the "people of the long house". The Iroquois were the 5 nations which had become 6 nations in 1722 with the addition of the Tuscarora as non-voting members of the Confederacy. The Seneca were the "Great Hill People" or "Keepers Of The Western Door".

Parker was the name taken by a leading family of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca (they were descended, in a matrileneal line, from Handsome Lake; so it would not, I suspect, be out of order to refer to them as aristocratic) for use in their dealings with Europeans. And so the one who was called Hasanoanda among the Iroquois (until 1851, when he underwent a renaming), which meant simply Leading Name, was known in the white world as Ely Parker.

Brendan Clifford one time quoted Carson McCullers as writing that "things accumulate around a name", which struck me as seriously true. Names are important here.

In 1851 when he was 23 Ely Parker/Hasanoanda was chosen by the Mothers of the Wolf Clan to succeed John Blacksmith, who had just died, as chief. He also inherited the sacred name Donegohawa and so became Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois.

I only have space here (and hence time elsewhere) for the briefest mention of the things that accumulated around the names Hasanoanda\Donegohawa/Ely Parker. There was a lot. He was a complex individual whose life was complicated by being lived in and between two worlds (strangely, he was not a stranger in two strange lands, but flourished in very many ways in both).

Parker's early education was received at Elder Stone's Baptist School. Then at the prestigious Yates Academy and the Cayuga Academy in Ontario. From the age of 15 he was busy representing his reservation in treaty and land disputes in Washington. He was a personable big guy and Washington took to him. Aged 18 he was dining with President Polk and Mrs. President, informally at the White House.

He studied law in New York which, as an already public person, involved him immediately and publicly in politics. In respect of requisite patronage he chose wrongly (against Tammany I suppose or a faction on the way out, whatever). Having wrong-footed himself at the first hurdle he fell at the second; being declared ineligible for the American bar, he not being an American citizen. Around the same time, in 1847, he joined Batavia Lodge Number 88 and remained, increasingly prominent with time, a freemason for life. He was busy also in the New York State Militia.

From 1849 Parker worked as a civil engineer on the Genesee Valley and Erie canals. He rose through the ranks of the Masons and the Militia, becoming a Knight Templar in the Royal Arch and a captain of engineers. In 1857, his political patrons having revived somewhat, he was appointed Superintendent of lighthouse construction on the upper Great Lakes. At this period, for reasons of work and masonic business, he called often at Galena, Illinois, where he befriended an obscure clerk and infamous clerical error, Ulysses S. Grant.

Another political error, energetically supporting Douglas against Lincoln, cost him his job. At the outbreak of the Civil War he offered to raise a regiment of Iroquois to fight for the Union cause, which offer was spurned with contempt. Two years later Grant who was on the rise, obliging to friends and in need of engineers had him breveted as a captain of engineers. From mid-1864 Parker served on Grant's staff as his personal military secretary, at first informally, then formally with the rank of Lt. Colonel. Famously, he drafted the articles of surrender for Lee to sign.

He stayed on with Grant's staff until 1869, rising to the rank of Brigadier General. Most of his post-war activity was of a diplomatic character, among the Indian peoples of the Great West. He submitted a plan to the government for ethnic peace in his time. During Grant's period of office it became known as the peace policy, summarised as "assimilate, educate and Christianize".

Grant having won the presidential election of 1868, Grant's friends followed him into office. On April 26, 1869, Parker was appointed the first Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Seeing himself as a new broom, he was determined to sweep clean. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was notoriously corrupt, so he appointed a raft of new Indian agents from the Army and the Society of Friends. Once appointed his Quakers decided that as a brute savage himself Parker was not fit for exalted rank, sensitive post and all the rest. They accused him of responsibility for the corruption he was trying to eradicate. He was tried before the House of Representatives and acquitted of all charges. But, despite exonerating him, Congress ordered him by law to obey his Quakers in all matters of Indian policy. After a few months of that, late in 1871, Parker resigned.

And so Lewis Henry Morgan, who was dying as Parker was quaking, succeeded (and it might, though not fairly, be said, failed) by proxy. Parker's peace policy—assimilate, educate, Christianate—was Morgan's. What Morgan wrote, Parker put into practice. Whatever Donehogawa thought in his long-house, for the White House Ely Parker said (as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1869):—

...a treaty involves the idea of a compact between two or more sovereign powers, each possessing sufficient authority and force to compel a compliance with the obligations incurred. The Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations, capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government of such inherent strength as would secure a faithful obedience of its people in the observance of compacts of this character. They are held to be wards of the government, and the only title the law concedes to them to the lands they occupy or claim is a mere possessory one. But because treaties have been made with them, generally for the extinguishment of their supposed title to land inhabited by them, or over which they roam, they have become falsely impressed with the notion of national independence. It is time that this idea should be dispelled, and the government cease the cruel farce of thus dealing with its helpless and ignorant wards. Many good men, looking at this matter only from a Christian point of view, will perhaps say that the poor Indian has been greatly wronged and ill treated; that this whole country was once his, of which he has been despoiled, and that he has been driven from place to place until he has hardly left to him a spot to lay his head. This indeed may be philanthropic and humane, but the stern letter of the law admits of no such conclusion, and great injury has been done by the government by deluding this people into the belief of their being independent sovereignties, while they were at the same time dependents and wards. As civilization advances and their possessions of land are required for settlement, such legislation should be granted to them as a wise, liberal, and just government ought to extend to subjects holding their dependent relation.

Or, to put it another way, on the other side of manifest destiny is a manifest lack of any.

Assimilated, educated and Christianized as he was, powerful in awe of the powers that be, Ely Parker said to Donehogawa to be gone. Between the Knight Templar in the Royal Arch of the Batavia Lodge and the Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois stood the Brigadier General whose white wife was given away to him by Hiram Ulysses Grant, the future President standing also as his Best Man.

Really, almost the only good Indian was a Freemason.

by JOE KEENAN

Touching, be it ever so briefly, on the trail of tears of the Cherokees, the judgments of Chief Justice Marshall and the ups and ups of manifest destiny, this series of articles is to be continued.

ELECTRO—BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Much of the primary source material quoted in this article is to be found on the world wide web (god bless Tim Berners-Lee and all who surf on it!) and the Bible. The best way of doing anything at all about it is to set the best search engine I know of (Google at www.google.com) to work on whatever combination of key words and phrases take your fancy; then its off you go juggernauteer, and don't spare the horses.

By way of a beginners Baedeker, sort of a webhikers guide to the history, politics and culture of American Genocide, the following sites should be of some, and some a great deal of, aid:—

Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia has not forgotten Thomas Jefferson. Everything and more than you could ever want to know of his life and works may be found here.

Also at the University of Virginia is the Free Ebook Library for the Microsoft Reader which is generally useful and has many relevant books and articles. It is here

The American Transcendentalism Web is at the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Winthrop's Modell of Christian Charitie is at the Hanover Historical Texts Project.

Turner's seminal work is elsewhere in Virginia.

O'Sullivan's Great Nation of Futurity is to be found here.

The enormously useful Metalab site seems to have changed a great deal since I downloaded a lot of Dixie material some months ago. It is now called ibiblio. Go to the American South Internet Resources Center which links to the collection of etexts in the Library of Southern Literature.

More useful than any other site, absolutely indispensable in fact, is J. S Dill's First Nations Index. Among many other crucially important projects this is host to James Horsley's Washita, Genocide On The Plains, and Lee Sultzman's First Nation Histories. If going online to go anywhere go there as well.

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Continued in Part Four

Return to America The Beautiful? (Series Contents)

Contents

Home Page

Reason And Authority

Peter Abelard And Bernard Of Clairvaux

Deliver Us From Evil

What's God Got To Do With It?

The Lord Thy God Is A Jealous God

In A Concluding Homage To Sextus Empiricus…

Of Prods, And Gods, And Dancing Girls; And Censorship, And Things

Coleridge And The End Of Christian Economics

Innocent's Ward—The Wonder Of The World

A Sufficiency Of Grace

Beware The Ides Of March!?

Suspensions Of Disbelief

Hugh Shapland Swinny—Nationalism And Anti-Theology In Ireland At The Start Of The Twentieth Century

The Wage The Faithful Earn

An Overview Of Slavery In The Southern United States

The Darwin Controversy

America The Beautiful?

Puritanism And The Theatre

Meet the editorial staff of the Heresiarch

Index To Past Issues

Athol Books Web

Athol Books HomePage

Aubane Historical Society

Athol Books Secure Sales

Labour & Trade Union Review