element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations.8 During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine and more profitable following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Duston, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.9 However, it would be only in the 1820s that the Duston story was revived, and she was made famous as the first Euro American woman in North America to be celebrated with a statue. Duston was very famous for a few years after 1697, at the time of her escape from captivity, and her bloody scalp trophies were highly publicized at the time, but she had been pretty much forgotten until stories about her began to appear in print and increased in numbers through the 1880s. Not just one, but three major monuments were erected in her honor. Lionized as a folk hero, Duston and her story were employed during the continuing bloody and genocidal wars against Native peoples to characterize settler and Army violence as defensive and virtuous, necessary, even feminine.10
Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice from the early eighteenth century onward. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”11
In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During nearly two centuries of British colonization on the Atlantic shore of North America, generations of settlers gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution. The Anglo-French conflict may appear to have been the dominant factor of European colonization in North America during the eighteenth century, but while large regular armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the Indigenous communities.
Much of the fighting during the eight-year settlers’ war for independence, especially in the Ohio Valley region and western New York, was directed against Indigenous resisters who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of Indian-hating settlers with their own independent government, as opposed to a remote one in Great Britain with wider global interests. Nor did the fledgling U.S. military in the 1790s carry out operations typical of the state-centered wars occurring in Europe at the time. Even following the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method used by the U.S. to conquer the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley regions. Since that time, Grenier notes, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces. The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to pursue the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population. “In cases where a rough balance of power existed,” Grenier observes, “and the Indians even appeared dominant—as was the situation in virtually every frontier war until the first decade of the 19th century—[settler] Americans were quick to turn to extravagant violence.”12
Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided colonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that rather than racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred: the out-of-control momentum of extreme violence of unlimited warfare fueled race hatred.
Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of “Indian haters,” men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.13
By then, the Indigenous peoples’ villages, farmlands, towns, and entire nations formed the only barrier to the settlers’ total freedom to acquire land and wealth:
U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of warfare—before and after the founding of the U.S.—that reduced the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driving the refugees out—step by step—across the continent. . . . [V]iolence directed systematically against noncombatants through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part of Americans’ way of war.14
Most military historians ignore the influence that the “Indian Wars,” waged from 1607 to 1890, had on subsequent U.S. military operations. In his history of American “savage wars,” The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, counterinsurgent war enthusiast Max Boot does not even mention the Indian Wars as being related to his thesis.15 As Grenier notes, “Historians normally dismiss backcountry settlers’ burning of Indian villages and fields as a sideshow to the Army’s attempt to mold itself into a force like those found in Europe. Yet, the wars of the Upper Ohio Valley and on the Tennessee and western Georgia frontiers are vitally important to understanding the evolution of Americans’ military heritage.”16
Those wars are also vitally important to understanding one of the two rationales for the Second Amendment: The white settlers were clear in declaring that their intentions were to drive the Indians from lands on the western side of the mountain ranges and to claim those lands as their own. Andrew Jackson’s career arc personifies this dance of settler militias and the professional army. Jackson was born in 1767 in a Scots-Irish community on the North Carolina border with South Carolina. His father died in an accident a short time before he was born. Raised poor by a single mother, at age thirteen Jackson became a courier for the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of independence from Britain. Jackson’s mother and brothers died during the war, leaving him an orphan with no family. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in the Western District of North Carolina, which would later become the state of Tennessee. Through his legal work, most of which related to disputed settler claims to Indian lands, he acquired a plantation near Nashville and enslaved 150 people for use as labor. He helped usher in Tennessee as a state in 1796. As the most notorious land speculator in western Tennessee, Jackson enriched himself by annexing a portion of the Chickasaw Nation’s farmlands. It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command of the Tennessee militia as a colonel and began his ruthless Indian-killing military career, driving the Muskogee Nation out of Georgia. In the aftermath of “the Battle of Horseshoe Bend,” as it is known in U.S. military annals, Jackson’s troops fashioned reins for their horses’ bridles from skin stripped from the Muskogee people they had killed, and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given “to the ladies of Tennessee.” Following the slaughter, Jackson justified his troops’ actions: “The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders. . . . They have disappeared from the face of the Earth.”17
In 1818, President James Monroe ordered Andrew Jackson, by then a major general in the U.S. Army, to lead three thousand soldiers into Florida, at the time part of the Spanish Empire, to crush the Muskogee-led Indigenous Seminole guerrilla resistance. The Seminoles did not agree to hand over any Africans who had escaped from their white enslavers. The United States annexed Florida as a territory in 1819, opening it to settlement. In 1821 Jackson was appointed military commander of Florida Territory.
Jackson carried out the original plan envisioned by the founders—particularly Jefferson—initially as a militia leader, then as an army general who led four wars of aggression against the Muskogee Creek and Seminoles in Georgia and Florida, and finally as a president who engineered the forced expulsion of all Native peoples east of the Mississippi
