Ethnic Cleansing in the United States

Until 1492, all of North America belonged to its many indigenous peoples. With the coming of Europeans, that began to change. Said Europeans came as conquerors and colonial settlers. They brought new diseases which massively depopulated the indigenous nations. The ubiquitous abuses, which European and Euro-American governments perpetrated against the Indigenes, were “justified” with racial and religious prejudices. By 1900, the Indigenes had been: expelled from most of their lands, decimated, impoverished, and marginalized. Official United States history generally evades what was actually done and by whom.

Land cessions. Relevant history.

Colonial period. Between 1565 (when Spain established, in Florida, the first permanent European colony in what was to become the 48 contiguous United States) and 1783 (when the United States gained its independence from Britain), Euro-American colonial settler-states forcibly displaced the indigenous nations from most of the land east of the Appalachian divide. Said displacements were often effectuated through violent military action, often in wars provoked by abusive colonial-settler impositions upon their indigenous neighbors. Most of the displaced Indigenes, who survived, were thusly forced to relocate to territory further west.

US claims. During the War for United States Independence, some of the indigenous nations (and/or their internal factions) remained neutral, while others eventually took one side or the other. Of the latter, many more sided with the British than with the United States, because Britain (wanting to avoid costly armed conflicts) had attempted to protect indigenous territory from incursions by Euro-American land speculators and frontier settlers. With the end of the War in 1783, the United States laid claim to sovereignty over all of the territory between the Appalachian divide and the Mississippi River. At first, the US claimed the right to take ownership of all of the land in this new territory based upon a purported “right of conquest”. Naturally, the indigenous nations refused to accept either the claim of US sovereignty or the purported right of Euro-Americans to take their land.

Treaty cessions. As the United States seized indigenous land in response to pressure from wealthy land speculators and racist demagogues, war was the inevitable result. The US government soon recognized that negotiations for land cessions was an easier and far less costly means for enforcing the claimed sovereignty and obtaining the coveted land. In such negotiations, all of the advantages were with the US side, which used those advantages to gradually obtain nearly all of the coveted territory thru a series of unequal treaties. The treaties were, of course, always written: by the US side, in the language of the Euro-Americans, and using interpreters chosen by the US. US government agents (who often were territorial military governors) used intimidation, coercion, deceit, bribery, and exploitation of conflicts within and between the indigenous nations. Although the indigenous nations were paid for the land, that pay was a small fraction of its actual value and commonly included promised annuities. Said annuities were often subsequently withheld in order to extort cessions of additional territory. Moreover, the US side routinely recognized an indigenous go-between, who was willing to comply with US demands, as agent (or purported “Chief”) of an indigenous nation even though said go-between often had no authority to act for that nation. Naturally, the resulting treaties were generally fraudulent.

Land speculators. Until the middle of the 19th century, for Euro-Americans with money, the most popular and usual place to invest was in land, especially land on the frontier yet to be settled by Euro-Americans. Wealthy Europeans also often invested in such American land. Naturally, wealthy land speculators cast covetous eyes upon land owned and occupied by the indigenous peoples. Said land speculators were leading instigators of Euro-American aggressions and wars against the indigenous nations, aggressions thru which such lands were acquired by the governmental authority. Of course, “valid” title to land in frontier areas could only be obtained from the colonial governments or later the federal government. Politically connected land speculators used their influence with provincial and federal office-holders to purchase, on especially favorable terms, grants of large tracts of land newly extorted from the indigenous nations. Then, after the Indigenes had been expelled, said grant holders would contract surveys and sell the land in small lots at a great markup over their privileged purchase price. A notable example is the case of western New York.

Preemption. In the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the US acknowledged that ownership of western New York belonged to the Six Nations Confederacy. A 1786 agreement to resolve conflicting claims over this territory gave its governance to New York, but gave to Massachusetts a preemptive right to buy the land from the Haudenosaunee. In 1788, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham purchased (from Massachusetts) that preemptive right over nearly all of New York west of Seneca Lake (6 million acres occupying 14 present-day counties). The price was $1 million, but it was to be paid in Massachusetts scrip then worth about 20 cents on the dollar. The scrip rose in value to par, and Phelps and Gorham were then unable to complete payment. When they defaulted after having made their first of three payments, purchase rights over the western 2/3 (that is the part west of the Genesee River) reverted to Massachusetts. In 1791, Robert Morris (then the richest man in the US, also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and [like half of his fellow signers] a slave owner) purchased the rights over most of that 2/3 (for $333,333.33).

Dispossession. In 1792 and 1793, Morris contracted the sale of most (3,250,000 acres) of his subject land to the Holland Land Company (a syndicate of wealthy investors in Amsterdam, Netherlands). In order to deliver clear title, Morris had to buy the land from the Haudenosaunee, its actual owners. In 1797, their agreement to sell (for $100,000) was fraudulently extorted in the Treaty of Big Tree thru a combination of: (1) threat that the US would likely not recognize their ownership rights, and (2) bribery of their leaders and negotiators. As a concession, the Haudenosaunee were left with 200,000 acres (about 6%) for reservations. The Holland Land Company hired a survey (cost $71,000) and divided the land into lots which it then sold between 1801 and 1840.

End result. Massachusetts, which had never paid anything to the Haudenosaunee, received from 9 to 15 cents per acre (respectively from Morris and Phelps-Gorham). The surveyors were paid about 2.2 cents per acre. The actual owners, the Haudenosaunee, received about 3 cents per acre. The land in post-survey lots was then sold, initially at $2.75/acre. Thus, the land speculators (Morris and the Holland Land Company) apparently received, between them, gross profits in excess of $2.50/acre.

Principal source: Wikipedia: “Treaty of Fort Stanwix” (1784) (2025 April 06); “Treaty of Hartford” (1786) (2025 July 11); “Phelps and Gorham Purchase” (2025 July 13); “Holland Land Company” (2025 July 10); “Treaty of Big Tree” (2024 February 26).

Purchasers. Land, in the fully settled eastern part of the newly independent United States, was mostly all privately owned, and it was relatively expensive. Consequently, working tenant farmers and farm laborers generally could not afford to purchase farms there. Meanwhile, land in the western frontier areas possessed certain relative disadvantages; specifically: less of it had been cleared of woods, its roads and other transportation infrastructure were few and crude, and access to markets and established Euro-American communities was more distant and difficult. So, whenever land became available on the western frontier, it was relatively cheap. With every tract of territory ceded by the Indigenes to the US, the federal government asserted ownership of the ceded land. In the old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin), the Indigenes received pennies per acre for their land, which the US government then surveyed and offered at auction to individual family farmers at prices of no less than $1.00 or $2.00/acre, often after having previously sold large tracts to wealthy politically-connected speculators at lower prices. The speculators, who never settled on the land, purchased it only to re-sell at a sizable mark-up to later settlers. Moreover, such speculators were a major influence on US policy to take the land from its indigenous peoples, as they (along with racist demagogues and war-profiteering military contractors) lobbied their friends in government to induce said government to seize and/or extort ever more cessions of territory from the indigenous nations. ^[3]

Interracial relations. In order to justify the dispossession of the original owners and to obscure the fraud and theft utilized in the process, the proponents (land speculators, other advocates of US expansionism, and their apologists) routinely resorted to rationalization, misrepresentation, and bigotry.

Firstly, although there was brutality on both sides in the “Indian” wars (invariably provoked by the Euro-American side), the expansionists dehumanized the Indigenes by one-sidedly vilifying them as murdering heathen savages.

Secondly, they portrayed white settlement as bringing civilization to an untamed wilderness and falsely portrayed the indigenous peoples as incapable of making productive use of the land. In fact, the indigenous peoples throughout almost the whole of the territory between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River were farmers, who cleared tracts of the woodland in order to raise the crops which included their staple foods (maize [corn], beans, and squash) plus various other vegetables. Meat obtained in the hunt was a supplement to the staples. If the Indigenes did not clear as much of the woodland as the Euro-Americans, this was: because their lower population density and their land rotation practice made it unnecessary; and (until after European contact) because they lacked the steel saws and axes and the draft animals of the Euro-Americans, which made forest removal much easier.

Despite the disparaging propaganda against the indigenous peoples, most settlers sought to avoid conflict with the remaining local natives. Some, as attested in contemporary reports, went further and established neighborly and mutually beneficial trade relations with neighboring Indigenes. It was the avaricious profiteering men of wealth and power who created the conditions for ethnic cleansing and genocidal policies.

Principal sources:

Jack Lynch: “A Principal Source of Dishonor: Indian Policies in Early America” (C W Journal, 2009 Spring).

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