american-holocaust

120 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTthe victorious troops had amused themselves by skinning the bodies ofsome Indians "from the hips downward, to make boot tops or leggings."For their part, the surviving Indians later referred to Washington by thenickname "Town Destroyer," for it was under his direct orders that atleast 28 out of 30 Seneca towns from Lake Erie to the Mohawk River hadbeen totally obliterated in a period of less than five years, as had all thetowns and villages of the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga. Asone of the Iroquois told Washington to his face in 1792: "to this day,when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, andour children ding dose to the necks of their mothers." 90They might well have dung dose to the necks of their mothers whenother names were mentioned as well-such as Adams or Monroe or Jackson.Or Jefferson, for example, who in 1807 instructed his Secretary ofWar that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their landsmust be met with "the hatchet." "And ... if ever we are constrained tolift the hatchet against any tribe," he wrote, "we will never lay it downtill that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi," continuing:"in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them."These were not offhand remarks, for five years later, in 1812, Jeffersonagain concluded that white Americans were "obliged" to drive the "backward"Indians "with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains";and one year later still, he added that the American government had noother choice before it than "to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, ordrive them to new seats beyond our reach." Indeed, Jefferson's writingson Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives areto be given a simple choice-to be "extirpate[d] from the earth" or toremove themselves out of the Americans' way. 91 Had these same wordsbeen enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at EuropeanJews, they would be engraved in modern memory. Since they were utteredby one of America's founding fathers, however, the most widely admiredof the South's slaveholding philosophers of freedom, they conveniently havebecome lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson'swisdom and humanity.In fact, however, to the majority of white Americans by this time thechoice was one of expulsion or extermination, although these were by nomeans mutually exclusive options. Between the time of initial contact withthe European invaders and the close of the seventeenth century, most easternIndian peoples had suffered near-annihilation levels of destruction;typically, as in Virginia and New England, 95 percent or more of theirpopulations had been eradicated. But even then the carnage did not stop.One recent study of population trends in the southeast, for instance, showsthat east of the Appalachians in Virginia the native population declined by93 percent between 1685 and 1790-that is, after it already had declinedby about 95 percent during the preceding century, which itself had fol-