The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism by Gerald Horne

Author:Gerald Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Spirit of 1676: The Identity Politics of “Whiteness” and Prelude to Colonial Secession

The fatuous idea that the routing of the Pequots in the 1630s indicated smooth sailing for the settlers in what they called New England became even more foolish when war erupted once more in the mid-1670s.1 As ever, settlers were upset when evidence emerged that the French and the Dutch were selling “guns, powder, shot,” and trading and the like “with Indians to our great prejudice and strengthening and animating the Indians against us.” The authorities demanded that no boats be sold to indigenes, perhaps hampering their escape from enslavement and routing. Though the settlers had arrived in North America purportedly to enjoy religious liberty, indigenous religious liberty was curtailed, that is, “worship to their false Gods or to the Devil” was forbidden. Catholics too were restrained: “no Jesuit or spiritual or ecclesiastical person” was allowed to alight or any “ordained by the authority of the Pope” were allowed to “come within this jurisdiction.” They were to be barred initially, and if they came a “second time” they “shall be put to Death.” The death penalty for poisoning provided a foretaste of their real fears, while “firing and burning” was illuminatingly reproved.2

News then reached London of the “bloody Indian war from March till August 1676.” Highlighted was the allegation that if victims were “women, they first forced them to satisfie their filthy lusts and then murthered them.”3 Londoners focused not on the fact that their compatriots had invaded a foreign land and began to oust and enslave, giving rise to a fierce reaction but instead stressed “New England’s present sufferings under their cruel neighboring Indians.”4 The prominent Bostonian Increase Mather laid down a steady drumfire of propaganda against the indigenous, tracing their purported perfidy from “the year 1614 to the year 1675.”5

After European rule had been fastened firmly upon New England, it was conceded that indigenous “captive women and children were sold into slavery,” that is, “more than five hundred” were “sold into slavery from Plymouth alone” in what was termed “King Philip’s war.”6 Rationalizing this crime against humanity, the Plymouth elite, it was argued, averred that “the Sachem of Pascanacutt” was working with the “French against the English in New England.”7 Still, even after it appeared that an indigenous revolt had been quelled, one settler was still sweating about what a resident termed “many secret attempts … by evil minded persons to fire the town of Boston, tending to the destruction” of that rapidly growing urban center.8

It turns out that this deportation policy may have exported revolt. The “heathen prince” who perpetrated these “notorious and execrable murders and outrages” and sought to “totally destroy, extirpate & expel settlers” was to see his comrades sold into slavery, seemingly in Jamaica, which was akin to pouring boiling oil on a raging fire.9 Thus the “heathen malefactor, men, women and children” were “sentenced & condemned for perpetual servitude,”10 where they could then plot alongside ungovernable Africans. Jamaica also seemed to invite disaster when it accepted enslaved indigenes from Florida.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.