A Question of Tactics
"Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our Virtues are passed by unnoticed. From the press and the pulpit with have suffered..." - Editorial Board of 'Freedom's Journal,' 1827
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
It is becoming abundantly clear that these posts, if they are to have any coherence and be of any readable length, are going to leave out a lot. I happened to read the Dunbar-Ortiz and half of the Kendi/Blain and wrote 90% of what follows “just to get my thoughts out.” These are dense and vital texts, please know that everything I write while reading feels woefully inadequate. But whaddayagonna do, Corlew? Stop now?
Read This Week
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn: “As Long As Grass Grows or Water Runs,” “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God,” “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom,” and “The Other Civil War”
Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain: Part Six (1819-1859) and Part Seven (1859-1864)
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: “Four: Bloody Footprints” and “The Birth of a Nation”
Thoughts
The first chapter in Part Six of Four Hundred Souls is by Robert Jones, Jr., and focuses on another name we should all know: Denmark Vesey. A quiet carpenter who had purchased his freedom and a man “around whom white people felt safe. So safe, in fact, that he rented or owned a house in the heart of Charleston…,” Denmark noticed that Black people made up 77% of the Charleston population. This was the early 1800s. He also thought, after white people shut down the AME church he belonged to, that Black people could “raid the banks and artillery storages and leave almost everyone of its white citizens, young and old, massacred in the streets, then escape to Haiti.” He recruited nine thousand people to this cause, but was betrayed and executed in 1822.
The second chapter is by Pamela Newkirk, who writes about the U.S.’s first Black-owned and -operated newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. You might remember them from the epigraph. Independent newspapers back then were kinda like today’s blogs, and I am grateful to live in an era where I don’t have to make my five-year-old hand-deliver these missives to you all every Wednesday and Friday. But it’s impossible to overstate how important a Black newspaper in the 1820s would be. Two dozen similar publications popped up in the next couple of decades. In their lead editorial (which the epigraph is taken from), they explicitly challenge depictions of Black people in media, even from well-meaning progressives: “Men whom we equally love and admire have not hesitated to represent us disadvantageously, without becoming personally acquainted with the true state of things, nor discerning between virtue and vice among us.” An early volley at Dr. King’s “white moderate,” and an important reminder that representation is not enough. People need space and audience to tell their own stories.
Here we have two tactics against white supremacy: violence and persuasion. Bashing skulls in or winning hearts and minds. Now, being a family man with a blog and three figures in my checking account at most times, I know where I’m at. Writing is my chosen field, which means I happen to believe in its power. I believe literature/pop culture/movies/etc play an underrated role in molding our imaginations, as does news coverage (no matter how much or little you follow the news). Movies and Kurt Vonnegut influenced me to believe I am unfit for combat, for instance. Anyway. That doesn’t mean I’m against all political violence. It’s just, of all the Big Lebowski characters, I’m probably Smokey. It’s fine, I sleep very well with my pacifism and emotional problems.
Then again, as I was reading those early Part Four chapters of 400 Hundred Souls—buried under a blanket on my couch in -7 degree weather, a reminder of my material comfort—I was also reading this New York Times interview with Andreas Malm, the Swedish author and climate activist. You’ve read before that it’s generally the policy of this blog not to engage with the Times, but exceptions are made for Wordle and interviews with people who write books called things like How To Blow Up A Pipeline. He argues in favor of things like property destruction and direct assaults on fossil fuel company operations as a moral good. And how can he be viewed as wrong, when the fate of the planet is at stake, and money’s still the loudest voice in the room?
What about people like Nat Turner and John Brown, what about the Quakers, what about the endless independent newspapers (the 16th-20th century version of blogs), what about all the people who at the time opposed slavery or expanding the U.S. beyond the Appalachian mountains? When the soul of a nation was at stake? Well, money was still the loudest voice in the room. Hey, Quincy.
How does a pacifist (a citizen of the state) respond to the state (those with a monopoly on violence) acting immorally? Will South Africa’s U.N. case against Israel and the U.S. have any enforceable action (let it be said that I hope so)? Is it necessarily true that the biggest guns always win? Chapter Four of the Dunbar-Ortiz, “Bloody Footprints,” traces the lineage of European colonialist through the Crusades, the Reconquista of Spain, the colonization of Ireland, and the colonization of the Americas. Does the enemy only respond to violence? The Biggest Cheerleaders Of Western Civilization On X Formerly Known As Twitter will tell you that they have empire-building perfected, honed to a sharp practice over centuries.
Speaking of railing against empire, Zinn also talks about how leading histories mostly use newspapers as sources when they say things like “all of the US cried out for war with Mexico” or whatever. Think about the NYT manufacturing consent for Israel’s genocide or Claudine Gay’s removal today. There were working people’s riots against the annexation of Texas in New York, Boston, and Lowell. Guess these were the days before unions, because “a convention of the New England Workingmen’s Assocation condemned the war and announced they would ‘not take up arms…’” Horace Greeley, writing for The New York Tribune in 1846 penned this banger: “…we can conquer and ‘annex’ their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us?…Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?” Bold there mine, because, I mean, yeah. Life sucks and we’re all going to die, do you really want to make war? We have guitars and kayaks and movies and legal weed and you want to make war?
Other Highlights:
You’ll notice I don’t talk much about the Civil War in this blog. I grew up at the site of the Battle of Stones River, I am tired of talk about the Civil War. Zinn’s pretty good on it, though. Blew right by it in the Kendi/Blain—the conflict reduced to one chapter by the excellent Jamelle Bouie. I sincerely appreciate this approach. We do not need to re-litigate the causes of the US Civil War, nor is there a shortage of spilled typeface on the subject. Reconstruction is a significantly underrated story in this country’s history, in fact, I’d argue the whole period between the end of the Civil War to the Great Migration (1865-1910ish) is underrated in popular imagination.
Mitchell S. Jackson’s essay on “Oregon” in Four Hundred Souls is excellent. Prompted me to go back and re-listen to this Behind The Bastards on Oregon being founded as a white supremacist paradise. I think that history got lost with the popularity of Portlandia and then violently remembered from like 2016-present.
If you, like me, have a slightly-better-than-AP-high-school-level-but-not-much-more grasp of pre-20th century U.S. history, you might have the phrase “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” running through your head sometimes without much context. Please know that it was an encroachment by settlers—Kentucky and Indiana rangers especially—to dismantle a growing pan-Indigenous movement led by Tecumseh (conveniently-for-colonizers away, organizing other tribes) and his brother, Tenskwatawa. White people dug up Indigenous graves and mutilated corpses.
If you, like me, are enough of an NBA sicko to know the Indiana G League team used to be called the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, please associate that name with Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne: a man who George Washington thought was an unreliable alcoholic, yet knew that would make him perfect for the “unconventional war” of the Ohio territory.
George Washington, by the way, was an unequivocally evil person. So we’re clear.
It cannot be underrated that by winning independence, the U.S. both 1) cut off Indigenous access to potential European allies and 2) showed itself to be wholly unready to expand as much as it wanted to. Without, y’know, resorting what we would totally call “war crimes.”
Howard Zinn basically sums up why I’m doing this project on pages 128-129: “The leading books on the Jacksonian period, written by respected historians (The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger; The Jacksonian Persuasion by Marvin Meyers), do not mention Jackson’s Indian policy…school textbooks in American history…will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people—not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.”
It’s sort of a cliché to refer to alcoholism in Indigenous populations today, but I think we underrate how much alcoholism is a disease. When we talk about smallpox blankets, we should refer to booze the same way.
“They want us divided” alert—settlers in Georgia were slick enough to offer some society treats to a small elite of Muskogees. This privileged class embraced slavery and became planters, marginalized insurgents within their own people, and you’re not gonna believe this one: “…the federal government increased grants, and the wealthy class of Muskogees established trading posts, making whiskey cheaply available to impoverished Muskogees.”
In 1831, Mississippi made it a crime for a Choctaws to discuss the Indian Removal Act amongst themselves. White supremacists love “free speech for me but not for thee.”
Zinn highlights the weird norm of Andrew Jackson being referred to as “your father” and Indigenous people as “his children,” so if you’ve ever made fun of That Cuck Mike Pence for calling his wife “mother?” Pour one out (of something repulsive) for Andrew Jackson, too.
On the hawkish buildup to the Mexican War and the beginnings of Manifest Destiny, Zinn says: “Accompanying all this aggressive was the idea that the United States would be giving the blessings of liberty and democracy to more people. This was intermingled with ideas of racial superiority, longs for the beautiful lands…and thoughts of commercial enterprise across the Pacific.” Masterfully constructed sentences. We move from “aggressiveness” to “blessings of liberty” and “racial superiority” to “beautiful land” like a Mariano Rivera two-seamer, and reach our final destination of more “commercial enterprise” as snugly as a catcher’s mitt.
“John Wayne Niles … .--…--.- …/ - --- Ermias Joseph Asghedom” by Mahogany L. Browne is my favorite poem in Four Hundred Souls so far.
I am a direct descendent of John Sevier, the settler-ranger who led the charge into Tennessee. I’m not special, he had 18 kids. Here’s how Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes my ancestor: “[Scots-Irish settlers in Tennessee] hated both the Indigenous people who they were attempting to displace as well as the newly formed federal government. In 1794, a group of North Carolina settlers, led by settler-ranger John Sevier, had seceded from western Carolina and established the independent country of Franklin with Sevier as president. Neither North Carolina nor the federal government had exerted any control over the settlements in the eastern Tennessee Valley region. In the summer of 1788, Sevier ordered an unprovoked, preemptive attack on the Chickamauga towns, killing thirty villagers and forcing the survivors to flee south. Sevier’s actions formed a template for settler-federal relations, with the settlers implementing the federal government’s final solution, while the federal government feigned an appearance of limiting settler invasions of Indigenous lands…Sevier and his rangers invaded the Chickamaugas’ towns in September 1793, with a stated mission of total destruction. Although forbidden by the federal agent to attack the villages, Sevier gave orders for a scorched-earth offensive. By choosing to attack at harvesttime, Sevier intended to starve out the residents…A year later, Sevier demanded absolute submission from the Chickamauga villages lest they be wiped out completely. Receiving no response, a month later 1,750 Franklin rangers attacked two villages, burning all the buildings and fields—again near the harvest—and shooting those who tried to flee. Sevier then repeated his demand for submission, requiring the Chickamaugas to abandon their towns for the woods, taking only what they could transport…in squatter settlements, ruthless leaders like Sevier were not the exception but the rule. Once they had full control and got what they wanted, they made their peace with the federal government, which in turned depended on their actions to expand…Sevier went on to serve as a US representative from North Carolina and as governor of Tennessee.” Hey, he’s not the first family member I’ve disowned.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Sorry abt the civil war Chris.
Tbh, I can’t get over 9 thousand people. That so many!!!