american-holocaust

240 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTconverted, coerced, educated, enslaved, reorganized communities, and establishedan intricate caste system, bound by a distinctly Spanish mixtureof feudal and Renaissance customs." The Anglo-American colonists, incontrast, simply obliterated the natives they encountered, for they consideredthemselves, almost from the start, as "new men," in Crevecoeur'sfamous phrase, in a new land, and not as expatriates in a foreign place.Bercovitch illustrates what he calls the subsequent New World Spaniards'"profound identity crisis" as Americanos by citing Simon Bolfvar's JamaicaLetter of 1815, following the outbreak of revolution against Spain:we were "not prepared to secede from the mother country," Bolivar wrote,"we were left orphans ... uncertain of our destiny .... [W]e scarcelyretain a vestige of what once was; we are, moreover, neither Indian norEuropean, but an intermediate species between the legitimate owners ofthis country and the Spanish usurpers." 129The point is further sharpened if we compare Bolivar's lament-aftermore than three centuries of Spanish rule in Latin America-with theboastful and self-confident words of Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address,delivered more than a dozen years before Bolivar's letter and lessthan two centuries since the founding of the first permanent English colomes:A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seaswith the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nationswho feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyondthe reach of the mortal eye-when I contemplate these transcendent objects,and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved countrycommitted to the issue, and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation,and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking. 130It was in pursuit of these and other grand visions that Jefferson laterwould write of the remaining Indians in America that the government wasobliged "now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seatsbeyond our reach." For the native peoples of Jefferson's "rising nation,"of his "beloved country"-far from being Bolivar's "legitimate owners"­were in truth, most Americans believed, little more than dangerous wolves.Andrew Jackson said this plainly in urging American troops to root outfrom their "dens" and kill Indian women and their "whelps," adding inhis second annual message to (::ongress that while some people tended togrow "melancholy" over the Indians' being driven by white Americans totheir "tomb," an understanding of "true philanthropy reconciles the mindto these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to makeroom for another." 131Before either Jefferson or Jackson, George Washington, the father ofthe country, had said much the same thing: the Indians were wolves and