Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

gospel truth by most settlers that in a "Free" society,
where Afrikans would be faced with "competition" (their
phrases) from whites, they as inferiors must perish. The
comparison was usually made to the Indians-who "died
out" as white farmers took their land, as whole villages
were wiped out in unprovoked massacres, as hunger and
disease overtook them, as they became debilitated with addiction
to alcohol, as the survivors were simply driven off
to concentration camps at gunpoint. Weren't free Afrikans
losing their jobs already? And weren't there literally
millions of new European farmers eager to take the
farmland that Afrikans had lived on and developed?
Nor was it just the right-wingers that looked forward
to getting rid of "The Negro Problem" (as all whites
referred to it). All tendencies of the Abolitionists contained
not only those who defended the human rights of
Afrikans, but also those who publicly or privately agreed
that Afrikans must go. Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the major
abolitionist journal National Era, promised his white
readers that after slavery was ended all Afrikans would
leave the U.S. The North's most prominent theologian,
Rev. Horace Bushnell, wrote in 1839 that emancipation
would be "one bright spot" to console Afrikans, who were
"doomed to spin their brutish existence downward into extinction
..." That extinction, he told his followers, was only
Divine Will, and all for the good. Rev. Theodore Parker
was one of the leading spokesmen of radical abolitionism,
one who helped finance John Brown's uprising at Harper's
Ferry, and who afterwards defended him from the pulpit.
Yet even Parker believed in an all-white Amerika; he firmly
believed that: "The strong replaces the weak. Thus, the
white man kills out the red man and the black man. When
slavery is abolished the African population will decline in
the United States, and die out of the South as out of Northampton
and Lexington. "(22)
While many settlers tried to hide their genocidal
longings behind the fictions of "natural law" or "Divine
Will", others were more honest in saying that it would
happen because Euro-Amerikans were determined to make
it happen. Thus, even during the Civil War, the House of
Representatives issued a report on emancipation that
strongly declared: "...the highest interests of the white
race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Scandinavian, require
that the whole country should be held and occupied by
these races alone." In other words, they saw no contradiction
between emancipation and genocide. The leading
economist George M. Weston wrote in 1857 that: "When
the white artisans and farmers want the room which the
African occupies, they will not take it by rude force, but by
gentle and gradual and peaceful processes. The Negro will
disappear, perhaps to regions more congenial to him,
perhaps to regions where his labor can be more useful,
perhaps by some process of colonization we may yet
devise; but at all events he will disappear."(23)
fought to reserve the new territories and states of the West
for Europeans only. This was the main forerunner of the
Republican party of 1854, the first settler political party
whose platform was the defeat of the "Slave Power".
The Republican Party itself strongly reflected this
ideology of an all-White Amerika. Although most of its
leaders supported limited civil rights for Afrikans, they did
so only in the context of the temporary need for Empire to
treat its subjects humanely. Sen. William Seward of New
York was the leading Republican spokesman before the
Civil War (during which he served as Lincoln's Secretary
of State). In his famous Detroit speech during the 1860
campaign, he said: "The great fact is now fully realized
that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element,
like the Indian incapable of assimilation.. ." Both would,
he promised his fellow settlers, "altogether
disappear. " Lincoln himself said over and over again
during his entire political career that all Afrikans would
eventually have to disappear from North America. The
theme of Afrikan genocide runs like a dark thread, now
hidden and now visible in the violent weaving of the
future, throughout settler political thought of that day.
It should be remembered that while most Northern
settlers opposed Afrikan slavery for these reasons by the
1860's, even after the Civil War settlers promoted Indian,
Mexicano and Chinese enslavement when it was useful to
colonize the Southwest and West. One settler account of
the Apache-U.S. wars in the Southwest reveals the use of
slavery as a tool of genocide:
"More than anything else, it was probably the incessant
kidnapping and enslavement of their women and
children that gave Apaches their mad-dog enmity toward
the whites ... It was officially estimated that 2,000 Indian
slaves were held by the white people of New Mexico and
Arizona in 1866, after 20 years of American rule - unofficial
estimates placed the figure several times higher ...
'Get them back for us,' Apaches begged an Army officer
in 1871, referring to 29 children just stolen by citizens of
Arizona; 'our little boys will grow up slaves, and our little
girls, as soon as they are large enough, will be diseased prostitutes,
to get money for whoever owns them.. .' Prostitution
of captured Apache girls, of which much mention is
made in the 1860's and 1870's, seemed to trouble the
Apaches exceedingly. "(24)
So that at the same time that the U.S. was supposedly
ending slavery and "Emancipating" Afrikans, the
U.S. Empire was using slavery of the most barbaric kind in
order to genocidally destroy the Apache. It was colonial
rule and genocide that were primary.
National political movements were formed by settlers
to bring this day about. The Colonization movement,
embodied in the American Colonization Society, organized
hundreds of local chapters to press for national legislation
whereby Afrikans would be removed to new colonies
in Afrika, the West Indies or Central America. U.S.
Presidents from Monroe in'1817 to Lincoln in 1860 endorsed
the society, and the semi-colony of Liberia was started
as a trial. Much larger was the Free Soil Party, which 30