Zinn, Chapter 7

This chapter talks about the history of how the United States (nearly) destroyed the Native Americans, or American Indians, in the continental United States. Through murder, coercion, bribery, slavery, brutality, lies, and the rule of the almighty Law, the new Americans systematically and "legitimately" (props to Will for that gem) eradicated a group of peoples and their sovereign way(s) of life. Why? To cheaply and quickly promote "civilization." Zinn uses direct quotations and facts to support his thesis. I pulled particularly striking quotations from the chapter and pasted them here. I also added commentary where I felt compelled to do so.

• "In 1820, 120,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi. By 1844, fewer than 30,000 were left. Most of them had been forced to migrate westward. But the word "force" cannot convey what happened."
• "In the Revolutionary War, almost every important Indian nation fought on the side of the British. The British signed for peace and went home; the Indians were already home, and so they continued fighting the Americans on the frontier, in a set of desperate holding operations."
• At one time, Washington's "Secretary of War, Henry Knox, said: 'The Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil.' His Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, said in 1791 that where Indians lived within state boundaries they should not be interfered with, and that the government should remove white settlers who tried to encroach on them." Seems reasonable, no? 
• And then the population grew. Jefferson and others changed their tune. "Jefferson's talk of 'agriculture . . . manufactures . . . civilization' is crucial. Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money, to the development of the modern capitalist economy." Obviously things to which free whites are divinely entitled. "Land was indispensable for all this, and after the Revolution, huge sections of land were bought up by rich speculators, including George Washington and Patrick Henry. In North Carolina, rich tracts of land belonging to the Chickasaw Indians were put on sale, although the Chickasaws were among the few Indian tribes fighting on the side of the Revolution, and a treaty had been signed with them guaranteeing their land."
• Andrew Jackson was a total asshole. He was a "war hero" in the War of 1812 and then systematically dismantled the American Indians' ways of life (in addition to cold-bloodedly murdering them): "Jackson's 1814 treaty with the Creeks started something new and important. It granted Indians individual ownership of land, thus splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal landholding, bribing some with land, leaving others out-introducing the competition and conniving that marked the spirit of Western capitalism. It fitted well the old Jeffersonian idea of how to handle the Indians, by bringing them into 'civilization.'" Jackson said quite clearly that in making treaties he appealed to the Indians' fear and avarice. Effective.
• Look up Lewis Cass, Jackson's Secretary of War and governor of Michigan, while you're at it. In addition to other belittling and arrogant quotations, Zinn shares these words by Cass: "A barbarous people, depending for subsistence upon the scanty and precarious supplies furnished by the chase, cannot live in contact with a civilized community." See, we had to kill them off in the name of progress, which is clearly superior to human life.
• The colonists liked to play with rhetoric as much as anyone else, but the native peoples were not so submissive: "Not all the Indians responded to the white officials' common designation of them as 'children' and the President as 'father.' It was reported that when Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison, Indian fighter and future President, the interpreter said: 'Your father requests you to take a chair.' Tecumseh replied: 'My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother; I will repose upon her bosom.'" 
• Jackson and other used force and coercion, but Zinn also talks about how they used the rule of law. When violence was not enough, those whites in power fell back, saying things like "It's the Law of the land; it's not our fault; we must simply abide by it" as though laws were not made by men in power for their own purposes, as though political laws superseded the laws of humanity. 
• Some Indians fled, some fought and perished, and some, like a portion of the Cherokees, tried to assimilate in order to survive. They, too, were ultimately eliminated. "The Cherokees even started to emulate the slave society around them: they owned more than a thousand slaves. They were beginning; to resemble that civilization the white men spoke about, making what Van Every calls 'a stupendous effort' to win the good will of Americans. They even welcomed missionaries and Christianity. None of this made them more desirable than the land they lived on."
• The Seminoles in Florida fought for eight long years, nearly exhausting the Americans (1500 died and $20 million was spent), but they were overwhelmed in the end.
• President Martin van Buren: also a major asshole.

Zinn, Chapter 6

This chapter is about sexism and the oppression of women. What strikes me first and most deeply is the litany of accounts of women transported from Africa as slaves or from Europe as indentured servants and enduring things like giving birth to a child while chained to a dead body the overseer didn't make time to remove.

Similiarly to (although more severely than) today, women who had children out of wedlock were prosecuted while the men who conceived the children were untouched by the law.

On the flip side, "The father's position in the family was expressed in The Spectator, an influential periodical in America and England: 'Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion; and ... as I am the father of a family ... I am perpetually taken up in giving out orders, in prescribing duties, in hearing parties, in administering justice, and in distributing rewards and punishments.... In short, sir, I look upon my family as a patriarchal sovereignty in which I am myself both king and priest.'"

Obviously, not all women submitted to subjugation so easily. Many women rebelled in the limited ways they could. Zinn recounts the story of Anne Hutchinson, who claimed that people could interpret the Bible for themselves and became a dynamic preacher on that and other subjects. She was, of course, put on trial for heresy and challenging the authority of men, and she was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Then, "[d]uring the Revolution [...], the necessities of war brought women out into public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions, wrote articles for independence. They were active in the campaign against the British tea tax, which made tea prices intolerably high. They organized Daughters of Liberty groups, boycotting British goods, urging women to make their own clothes and buy only American-made things."

A few interesting notes:

• the women we tend to hear about today are the genteel, beautiful, upper-class, gracious wives of wealthy men; the lower-class activists are belittled, rewritten as prostitutes (some of them were, but many were not), or completely ignored
• Abigail Adams wrote her husband a letter explicitly asking him to include rights for women, arguing (among other things): "Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could." I don't know if I agree with this, but it tickles me.
• Thomas Paine called for equal rights for women.
• Mary Wollstonecraft was awesome. I had never heard of her until now.
• The 1800s saw many primers and how-tos for women on being docile, virtuous, pious, meek pushovers.
• But many women, tired of being houseslaves or spinsters, spoke out. In 1819, Emma Willard said "Reason and religion teach us that we too are primary existences ... not the satellites of men."

Women's civil rights specifically are discussed in this chapter. But why did The Powers That Be find such a rigid class and caste structure necessary? For JLC in particular: "The new ideology [of women being domestic, subservient, teaching their multiple children the virtues of individuality, patriotism, and religion] worked; it helped to produce the stability needed by a growing economy."

Feminist Margaret Fuller made explicit the similarities between women and slaves. Indeed, many women were very active in antislavery protest and outreach. "What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded. . . ." This is true for all human beings, no?

Zinn also touches on Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Dorothea Dix, Frances Wright, Sojourner Truth, and many other feminists and general human rights activists. I recommend reading this chapter for the quotations by these wonderful women.

The chapter ends with a quotation by Sojourner Truth on what it means to be a woman and a human being. The power struggle continued and continued, and Zinn segues into the next chapter with these closing words:

"In the midst of these movements, there exploded, with the force of government and the authority of money, a quest for more land, an urge for national expansion."

More more more. Growth unlimited.