depended on the fate of the Indians—that is, their eradication.
Richard Slotkin describes a mystique that developed around the persona of the ranger, involving a certain identification with the Native enemy, marking the settler as original American rather than European. “By dressing and fighting as Indians, the ranger appropriated the savage’s power and American nativity for himself and turned it against both savage and redcoat.”18 Following independence, this mystique became a part of popular culture, as well as military culture.
The formation of the Texas Rangers to extinguish Native presence in Texas after Southern slavers took it from Mexico magnified their mystique. Following the independence of Mexico from Spain in 1821, the territory of Mexico comprised the provinces of California, New Mexico (including Arizona and Colorado), and Texas, even though much of that territory was never actually settled by the Spanish, particularly the huge province of Texas. Mexico established “colonization” laws that allowed non-Mexican citizens to acquire large swaths of land under land grants that required development, and implied eradication of the resident Native people. By 1836, nearly forty thousand U.S. Americans, almost all of them Cotton Kingdom slavers, had moved to south Texas. Their ranger militias were a part of the settlement, and in 1835 were formally institutionalized as the Texas Rangers. Once they were state funded and sponsored, they were tasked with eradicating the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples from Texas, what historian Gary Clayton Anderson calls the “ethnic cleansing of Texas.”19 Mounted and armed with the newest killing machine, the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver, they used it with dedicated precision.
While continuing violent counterinsurgency operations against Comanches and other Indigenous communities, the Texas Rangers played a significant role in the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846–48. As seasoned counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico, engaging in the battle of Monterrey. Rangers accompanied General Winfield Scott’s army by sea; took part in the siege of Veracruz, Mexico’s main commercial port city; then marched on, leaving a path of corpses and destruction to occupy Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils, as the Rangers roamed the city terrorizing civilian residents. Brutalized by yet another foreign power, Mexico ceded the northern half of its territory (including the illegally Anglo-occupied Texas) to the United States. Texas became a state of the United States in 1845, seceding to join the Confederacy in 1860. The Texas Rangers returned to warring on Native communities and harassing resistant Mexicans.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Army of the West continued to combat the peoples of the Southwest and of the Northern Plains to the Pacific, formerly a part of Mexico. Military analyst Robert Kaplan challenges the concept of Manifest Destiny, arguing “it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire in the western part of the continent.” Rather, he argues, Western empire was brought about by “small groups of frontiersmen, separated from each other by great distances.” These groups were the continuation of settler “rangers” that destroyed Indigenous towns, fields, and food supplies. Kaplan downplays the role of the U.S. Army compared to the settler vigilantes, which he equates to modern Special Forces, but he acknowledges that the regular army provided lethal backup for settler counterinsurgency in slaughtering the buffalo, thus disrupting the food supply of Plains peoples, as well as making continuous raids on settlements to kill or confine the families of the Indigenous fighters. Kaplan summarizes the genealogy of U.S. militarism today: “Whereas the average American at the dawn of the new millennium found patriotic inspiration in the legacies of the Civil War and World War II, when the evils of slavery and fascism were confronted and vanquished, for many commissioned and noncommissioned officers the U.S. Army’s defining moment was fighting the ‘Indians.’”20
Although the U.S. Constitution formally instituted “militias” as state-controlled bodies that were subsequently deployed to wage wars against Native Americans, the voluntary militias described in the Second Amendment entitled settlers, as individuals and families, to the right to combat Native Americans on their own. However, savage war was also embedded in the U.S. Marines, established at independence, as well as the Special Forces of the Army and Navy, established in the mid-twentieth century. The Marine Corps was founded in 1775, a year after the thirteen colonies formed the Continental Congress and Army, a year before the Declaration of Independence, thirteen years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified forming the state, and twenty-three years before the U.S. Navy was founded. The following year, the Marines made their first landing, capturing an island in the Bahamas from the British, what in Marine Corps history is called “Fort Nassau.” In action throughout the Revolutionary War, the Marines were disbanded in 1783 and reorganized in 1794 as a branch of the United States Navy.
The character of a Marine is that of the colonial ranger, created for counterinsurgency outside U.S.-secured territory. The opening lyric of the eternal official hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, soon after the invasion of Mexico and during the occupation, is “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Tripoli hearkens back nearly a half century to the “Barbary Wars” of 1801–15, when the Marines were dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, continuing this aggression, shelling the city, taking captives, and marauding for nearly four years, ending with the 1805 “Battle of Derna.” It was there they earned the nickname “leathernecks” for the high collars they wore as defense against the Berbers’ saber cuts. This was the “First Barbary War,” the ostensible goal of which was to persuade Tripoli to release U.S. sailors it held hostage and to end what the U.S. called “pirate” attacks on U.S. merchant ships. Actually, the Berbers were demanding that their sovereignty over their territorial waters be respected. The Berbers did not give up their demands, and the Marines were withdrawn, returning a decade later, in 1815–16, for the “Second Barbary War,” which ended when Pasha Yusuf Karamanli, ruler of Tripoli, agreed not to exact fees from U.S. ships entering their territorial waters. This was the first military victory of U.S. “gunboat diplomacy,” as it came to be called nearly a century later, when historians mark the beginning of U.S overseas imperialism. The Marines and military historians know better.
The Marine Corps’s second large engagement was the Second Seminole War, which raged from 1835 to 1842 in Florida, the longest war in U.S. history until Vietnam. The Second Seminole War during the Jackson administration has been identified with the extraordinary leader of the Seminole resistance, Osceola. It was all-out war with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps involved. Although, they succeeded in killing Osceola, they lost the war as the Seminoles would not hand over the Africans who had escaped their slavers, which is what the United States demanded of them. The military did succeed in deporting captives, mostly women, children, and old men, to Indian Territory. Armed forces returned to try again in 1855, waging the Third Seminole War, but after four years of siege, lost again. Soon after, the Civil War and the abolition of slavery made further war against the Seminoles unnecessary.
Of course, the Marine Corps is associated with “the halls of Montezuma,” lyrics from their trademark hymn composed while they occupied Mexico City in 1847. While the U.S. Army invaded and occupied what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and occupied Veracruz, using counterinsurgency tactics in their march to Mexico City, burning fields and villages, murdering and torturing civilian resisters. They occupied Mexico City, along with Army divisions, until the Mexican government, under brutal occupation, signed a dubious treaty transferring the northern half of Mexico to the United States. In Marine Corps annals, the 1847 “Battle of Chapultepec” is legion, a battle in which a handful of teenage Mexican cadets—the Chapultepec Castle was used as a military training school—with few weapons and little ammunition held off the Marines, killing most of them over two days of endless fighting in the castle, until the cadets themselves were dead and the remaining Marines raised the U.S. flag and wrote their hymn, tracing their genealogy to the invasion and occupation of Tripoli.
In a 2017 portrait of President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps general James “Mad Dog” Mattis, journalist Dexter Filkins writes that Marines see themselves as a kind of warrior caste with “toughness
