adolf hitler, i mean andrew jackson's

[ericd]

Not claiming to be an expert, I would consider Jackson a minor player in comparison to Hitler.

[andyfox]

Any sources on the "sick and demented" Creek culture? Is it possible the Creeks were responding to American provocation and not vice versa, or that there were depredations and atrocities committed on both sides? The English massacred Indians in New England and Virginia with extreme brutality. Was the English culture a "sick and demented" culture?

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural...k_indians.html

[Felix_Nietsche]

Any sources on the "sick and demented" Creek culture?
************************************************** ****
Woe......talk about a hanging curve ball.
You....like most people believe that history starts the day you were born.

The OP talked about victors re-writing history. THE TRUTH IS is that politcal correctness towards American History has been white-washing the attrocities committed by indians and playing up the attrocites by the settlers. It is true that settlers committed attrocities towards indians and it is true the indians committed attrocities towards the settlers. THE DIFFERENCE WAS the Creeks initated the attrocities and the settlers retaliated with attrocities of their own. The American settlers in the 1800s who responded to the murders of 250 men, women, and children were not interested in giving 'probation' or 'counselling' to these murders. They wanted them dead so they would not murder again. When I was about 12, I first leared about the Creeks reading a children's book (the large print book for young readers) about the American indians and it expounded upon their love of war. It seems books like these are now politically incorrect and it is now vogue to white-wash this chapter of american history. Even those idiots in the NCAA want to ban football teams from having indian mascots (Florida State Seminoles, etc...) Lets be honest, our ancestors didn't screw around when people tried to kill them. It was a brutal time where sometimes to survive, you had to kill or be killed.... The settlers who followed the 'Oprah' philosphy died while the Andrew Jackson types lived.


Is it possible the Creeks were responding to American provocation and not vice versa,
************************************************** ***********
There were indian tribes that were unfairly brutalize. My point was the Creek Indians deserved everything that Andrew Jackson did to them. The Creek Indian culture celebrated war and killing. Their tribes even had a special chief whose job was to conduct war pep rallies. Scalping their enemies was they way of demonstrating their courage. Before the settlers came the indian tribes were contantly warring and conducting genocide of eachother. This was not a case where America was a peaceful 'Garden of Eden' where all the indians were peace-loving. The Creeks INITIATED attrocities on settlers and Andrew Jackson retaliated with attrocities of his own.

It is curious that few people mention Britain's role in the conflict between the indians and American settlers. After the colonies became independent from England, the foreign policy of England towards the USA was to conduct war on the USA via the indians. These wars were designed to keep the USA from expanding westward. England sent arms to hostile indians and offer bounties for scalps of american settlers. To an entrepreneurial indian, selling the scalps of American women/children settlers was a way to increase their income. The facts are the Creek culture had no moral reservations about killing the innocent.

Andrew Jackson hated the British. His mother and brothers were killed as a result of the British invasion of South Carolina. When his was 14 a British officer slash Andrew Jackson accross the face with a sabre when he refused to shine the officers boots. When Jackson discovered the indians were being paid to kill American settlers and being supplied with British arms he became doubly enraged. Most people today don't realize that a large numbers of Americans hated Britain up to WWI. And based on Englands role in early American history, this is quite understandable..... The British like to joke about the USA always arriving late to wars but in the case of WWI, the anger toward Britain's role in killing American settlers had not faded. After WWI, much of the ill feelings toward Britain faded and now Britain is considered one of America's closest allies. As I said before, most people act as if history didn't start until they were born.


THE YAMASEE WAR
http://www.cr.nps.gov/seac/benning-book/ch08.htm
Despite these limitations, a number of loose alliances arose among various Indian leaders to confront pressures on native societies forced by the Europeans. These networks became more obvious in 1715 when disenchantment with whites reached a boiling point and spilled over into war. The conflict began with the Indians launching coordinated attacks against English settlements along the South Carolina coast.

Warriors slipped into white homesteads, catching settlers by surprise. Simultaneously, they killed traders caught within Indian villages and stole their supplies. They killed more than 200 people and attacked traders as far west as Alabama in Creek and Choctaw villages. Various groups participated-the Creeks, Yuchis, Yamasees, possibly some Cherokees, and others. Despite the diverse collection of fighters, however, the uprising became known as the Yamasee War. The colonial response was swift. Officials slapped an embargo on selling arms to the Indians and launched brutal retaliatory attacks. Colonial armies killed many men, women, and children, and burned Indian villages.

http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ga/topic...IndianWars.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacres

[bobman0330]

[ QUOTE ]
According to your article, the Taino were a subset of the total Arawak population, so the number range of 100k-400k you provide is meaningless. Basically it just proves there had to have been AT LEAST that many Arawaks.

"The term Arawak (from aru, the Lokono word for cassava flour), was used to designate the friendly Amerindians encountered by the Spanish in the Caribbean. These include the Taino..."


[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I'm doing my best here. Of course, your claim that the entire Arawak population was wiped out is untrue, since the Caribs survived, so I think you have to give me some leeway to shift the focus to the tribe that was actually the subject of the supposed genocide. The 3 million "on Haiti" is clearly ridiculous, as is the rest of that site you posted.

[ QUOTE ]
Here is what it actually says.

"The main reasons for the Taino's massive decline was their lack of resistance to disease introduced by Europeans, especially smallpox, and being mercilessly overworked and tortured by the Spanish in mines and on farms. The Spanish also murdered the Taino in countless massacres to try to create obedience through fear."

So it was a combination of disease and the fact that they were brutally murdered.

The actual numbers are insignificant. Who cares if Hitler oversaw the execution of 6 million Jews, and Columbus ONLY killed like 200,000 Native Americans. They both committed mass genocide. It is reprehensible to condone a National holiday that celebrates the achievements of a mass murderer

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, it says the main reasons were disease and overwork...

Furthermore, the difference between a population dying out of a combination of disease, slavery, and outright murder and an attempt to wipe out a population by systematic killing is huge. Huge. Slavery and massacres are not genocide as the term is generally defined. Disease is far out of the expanse of the term.

[andyfox]

"You....believe that history starts the day you were born."

With all due respect, no sir, I don't. I've literally read at least two hours of history every night of my life for at least the past thirty years. I have extensive familiarity with California's Indian history and also Southwest Indians. I'm also familiar, although somewhat less so, with the colonial history of Indian/White relations in New England and Virginia. I am only casually familiar with the Southeast, which is why I asked you the question I asked.

"political correctness towards American History has been white-washing the atrocities committed by Indians and playing up the atrocities by the settlers."

There's been no whitewashing of Indian atrocities. History books played them up--real, exaggerated, imagined--for hundred of years. With the 1970s came a new history as ethnohistorians shifted the pendulum towards a history without the whites defined as the good guys and the Indians defined as the bad guys.

Are there some leftists, such as Ward Churchill, who have swung the pendulum so that the Indians are defined as the goods guys and the white as the bad? Of course. But the histories today are much more accurate and balanced than those I read when I was 12, when the story of how the West was "won" was one of a heroic whites always battling bloodthirsty savages.

When you refer to the 250 who were murdered, I assume you mean those at Fort Mims who were attacked by a group of "Red Sticks." My understanding is that there was a civil war among the Creeks and that the Red Sticks were champions of traditional culture and challenged the authority of the older, more accommodationist tribal leaders.

You are correct to point out the role of the British in conflicts between Indians and America. One of the reasons for the American Revolution in the first place was that the British wanted to keep the colonists from expanding westward, which would lead to trouble with the Indians and therefore military expenses for the British.

At the time of the Creek civil war, British plans, directed by the strategic needs of the War of 1812, were aggressive. The United States correctly feared that the British (and the Spanish) would use the Creek civil war to their advantage in the Southeast. The United States intervened to prevent the Spanish in Florida from supplying the nativist Red Sticks and thus coincidentally allied with those Creeks who opposed the nativists.

On July 27, 1813, at Burnt Corn Creek, whites ambushed nativists under Peter McQueen [Europeans, of course, had mingled in Creek society and that resulted in mixed-blood descendants whose names--Alexander McGillivary, William Weatherford, Peter McQueen, William McIntosh--disguise, for our modern ears, their influence in and ties to their Indian culture.] The ambushers were vanquished, and they retreated to Fort Mims.

There is no question that on August 30, about one thousand Red Sticks under William Weatherford descended on Fort Mims with such frenzy and ferocity that even had the militia been prepared and the gates closed, it would not have made much difference.

The massacre completed revised American attitudes about the Creek Civil War. Now U.S. forces moved into the field to take over the campaign rather than to merely supply one side of it. Thus the Creek Civil War was transformed into the Creek War.

While Jackson may well have hated the British, he hated Indians as well. As far back as 1793 he wrote, "Why do we attempt to Treat with Savage Tribe [sic] that will neither adhere to Treaties, nor the law of Nations?" The nativist religious prophecies, such as those of the Red Sticks, were prompted by many controversial land-cession treaties. Jackson himself, of course, was a land speculator, and such activity made him a wealthy man by the time he became president.

So the situation is certainly much more complex than the good guys/bad guys historians on both sides would make it. While one cannot deny the viciousness of the Red Sticks attack on Fort Mims, the Creeks had established complex governmental and economic practices in the 1700s and they had the sedentary customs of town habitation (mixed with hunting-gathering, no doubt) since even before European colonization. A Creek Confederation in some form had existed for a long time before Jackson came on the scene. The acculturating "civilizing" efforts of Benjamin Hawkins, U.S. Agent to the Creek Indians, created a ton of problems for both Creeks and whites. He attempted to radically alter their culture by honing its agricultural skills and breaking down its tribal-clan kinship patterns. He had them sweating behind plows in one breath and privatizing their communal lands in the next. He encouraged them to adopt the habits of the southern cotton culture, including black slave ownership.

The problems inherent in such fundamental changes were tremendous. For example, Creek gender roles specified that only women engage in horticulture, therefore efforts to transform Creek culture to one of agriculture and husbandry encountered resistance from many warriors who saw Hawkins's efforts as attempts to emasculate them. The Lower Creeks in the eastern part of the nation, lived close to white society. Because they experienced, therefore, more cultural, social, and economic interaction with whites, they proved less resistant to white customs. The Upper Creeks had less contact with whites, and so they suspected Americans and their acquisitive ways. Most of them therefore intellectually resisted acculturation as resolutely as they opposed the running of American roads through their territory.

The Fort Mims Massacre freed whites to declared open season on the Red Sticks. Angry Andy Jackson was just the man to do the job. In March 1814 his force slaughtered nearly eight hundred Red Stick men, women, and children. He imposed a peace treaty that forced the Creeks to yield 22 million acres to the Untied States. (Of course that treaty, with one exception, was signed not by Red Sticks but by accomodationist Creeks who had in fact fought alongside the U.S. militiamen.)

For Jackson, there was no distinction between friendly and hostile Indians. He had no authority to negotiate a treaty. He took it upon himself to replace the U.S. commissioners originally appointed for the job, because he deemed their instructions too mild. This was always his way. The Treaty of Ghent, for example, which ended the conflict between the U.S. and Britain guaranteed to Britain's Indian allies the land they had held before the war. However, Jackson ignored both the treaty and the instructions of the Madison administration and continued his conquest of Indian country. In 1818, he illegal invaded Spanish territory; he illegally tried two British subjects for the crime of assisting the Indian enemies of the United States and he executed both of them. He also had two Indian leaders summarily executed and dragged off to unmarked graves.

The Red Sticks who attacked Fort Mims might well fit your description of them as Savages. Jackson surely fits mine. It would be as wrong to accuse the entire Creek nation of the crimes of the Red Sticks as it would be to blame all Americans for the crimes of Andrew Jackson.

[Felix_Nietsche]

Good Post and on most points I aggree what you wrote.
The OP was attacking Andrew Jackson as Nazi-like in his actions to indians without including the context of the Creek's actions on innocent settlers. Jackson was a ruthless man towards the enemies of the USA. His goal was to destroy their ability to ever make war on the USA again. He was successful in this regard although harsh in his methods. One of his goals was to take their land and force this tribes to move to Oklahoma.

I'm not saying Jackson was an angel but I do take offense to people attacking Jackson unfairly. To me this is like criticizing the Israelis for killing/kidnapping ex-nazis in other other countries. These actions may be in violation of international treaties but their actions are completely understandable....

PS
When I mentioned the political correctness of re-writing history, I'm referring to the last 40-45 years. The indian rights movement took off in the 1960s and many sypathetic history professors have allowed their sympathy for the indians to cloud their objectivity....

[andyfox]

First, I just made a very sarcastic post in a somewhat mean-spirited manner to your "C English Student" post in the other thread. I kind of felt you asked for it, but my apologies for my churlishness. We should just debate the issues.

No doubt the pendulum has swung the other direction since the 1960s, not just in Indian/White history, but in many other areas of historical inquiry. I still think the resulting works are more accurarate, in general, than history was before. The dean of American historians, not so long ago, talked of the contest of cultures in the New World of one between an advanced, civilized culture, and a backward, savage one. He did not need to mention which was which for us to know what he meant. Our professional historians were, up until the 1960s, triumphalists to a man. He also talked, in the wake of the anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s of "backward peoples getting enlarged notions of nationalism and turning ferociously on Europeans who have attempted to civilize them."

That is the kind of history up with which we should not put.

I'm always uneasy when comparisons with Nazis or Hitler are made glibly.

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
I would compare Andrew Jackson's war against the Creeks with the Allies war against Nazi Germany.

[/ QUOTE ]
I think you are exaggerating.

And I'm understating this.

[Aytumious]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I would compare Andrew Jackson's war against the Creeks with the Allies war against Nazi Germany.

[/ QUOTE ]
I think you are exaggerating.

And I'm understating this.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just a smidge.

[ericd]

I'd like to address a couple of points you made.

1. Glibly is a good choice for describing how Nazi and Hitler comparisons are frequently made. It is a subject that requires the utmost care and sadly is not always treated that way.

2. The manner that an historical event/figure is treated often changes either over time or from different factions. One of my favorites is Nigel Hamilton's treatment of Monty. American authors treat Monty quite differently. The truth, I assume, lies somewhere in between.

On a side note, last night PBS in New York had a show on the sixties. I was wondering if the Bush speech writers used some of Johnson's speeches as a basis to explain how the war is progressing.