Civil War
No it wasn't about slavery - The South succeeded over tariffs on the textiles industry and taxes; the South, which made up 25% of the population was paying 87% of the taxes and almost the entire revenue was being dumped into NY, Boston and Phili.
To get the South to stay, the Lincoln proposed the Corwin Amendment, which enshrined slavery in the constitution; the South succeeded anyway.
Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri and New Jersey all had slaves before during and after the war, NJ signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1866; thereafter the US still had engendered servitude and used the Chinese for slave labor to build the rail-roads, paying them in script, which could only be spent at the company store.
Union General Ulysses S. Grant had slaves, while Robert E. Lee freed his slaves.
Slavery was on its way out anyway; none of the European countries needed civil cars to end slavery.
Northern aggression - The US invaded the South because they succeeded. The pretext was that, without killing anyone, South Carolina had fired on Fort Sumter. But this was because South Carolina had succeeded and the US army hadn't left yet, and was still trying to collect taxes.
Union generals were secretly paying the red legs, a Northern militia, to pillage, rape and burn down Southern farms. Many who took up arms were doing so in self defense.
Burning of Atlanta - General Sherman in a telegram to Grant: "I can make this march, and I will make Georgia howl!" Sherman ordered the burning of Atlanta before his March to the Sea; widespread fires consumed much of the city's downtown.
Rape - Half of Lincoln's army ware undisciplined mercenaries from Ireland and Germany. The reality of sexual violence affected Southern women greatly; modern scholarship documents hundreds of court-martial cases resulting from this.
The Sioux Wars
After brutalizing the South, the US continued genociding the Native Americans. Sherman coined the phrase: the only good indian is a dead indian.
Trail of Tears - The Trail of Tears was the forced relocation of roughly 100,000 Indigenous people from the southeastern United States to designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River between 1830 and 1850. Driven by white settler land hunger and the Indian Removal Act signed by President Andrew Jackson, tribes like the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole suffered extreme loss of life, with an estimated 15,000 individuals dying from disease, hunger, and exposure. Native women displaced by warfare, starvation, or destruction of their villages were frequently forced into military encampments and frontier forts. Lacking any other means of survival, many were exploited by soldiers as prostitutes or forced concubines.
In 1851 the Sioux signed a treaty at Fort Laramie with the US, setting their territorial boundaries, allowing travelers to pass and army forts to be built in exchange for an annuity.
In 1854, when soldiers tried to arrest tribesmen for theft. A dispute happened, the soldiers shot the chieftain, so the entire village massacred all 31 of the soldiers.
A year later in response the army raided a village of Sioux killing 86 with 27 deaths of their own. Peace reigned till the Civil War when two wars broke out.
In 1862, the government failed to pay the annuity to the Dakota Sioux in Minnesota, so the Dakotas attacked a settlement and killed as many as 800 Americans.
The US Cavalry began a two year long war with several battles. Some Dakota warriors were captured and eventually 38 were hanged in the US's largest mass execution. The Sioux were interned in wretched conditions, then expelled from Minnesota altogether.
The next began after several tribes, including the Lakota Sioux, were forced into a treaty by show of force and malicious dealings, which made them lose their hunting rights in Colorado.
Sand Creek Massacre - Raiding of settlements began in 1863 by a polyglot of tribes called Dog Warriors, but it was still fairly low level.
Chief Black Kettle was a prominent Southern Cheyenne peacemaker. He moved his band to Sand Creek in Colorado under explicit instructions from US authorities that they would be safe if they surrendered and camped near a military fort.
On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington’s militia attacked the camp. Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white flag on a lodgepole to signal compliance, but troops opened fire anyway. Over 200 Cheyenne, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were massacred. Black Kettle survived and continued to preach peace, believing the attack was an unauthorized rogue action rather than official policy. Over 200 Cheyenne—mostly women, children, and the elderly, were massacred, with the militia severing the breast and pubic hair off of women to keep as trophies. Black Kettle survived and continued to preach peace, believing the attack was an unauthorized rogue action rather than official policy
The dog warriors to kill many more Americans in retaliation. A general military presence was made, and the US fought a guerrilla war for another couple of years in Colorado. Indians of numerous tribes, especially the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho from both wars, had fled to the mid-northwest. They continued reining along the Bozeman Trail and the US sent an expedition to stop them in 1865. It had a few successful battles and destroyed one village, but ultimately resulted in nothing. After a round of negotiations with a Sioux leader named Red Cloud failed, a second expedition fortified the trail and fought against raiding for two years. One attack managed to kill 81 US soldiers at once. After some defeats of large-scale attacks, the Indians took to small raids again for the next year. In 1868, the US abandoned the forts along the Powder River and made massive reservations for the Indians under Red Cloud. For nearly a decade, peace was maintained on the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne reservations covering all of western South Dakota. But in 1875, the US sent an exploratory party under the command of George Custer into the Black Hills. And Custer leaked information that there was gold in the black hills to the press, causing an illegal gold rush. Despite it being Indian territory, the Americans continued mining.
After a year of failed negotiations, the Indians under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse began raiding encroaching Americans. President Grant responded by sending the cavalry, but the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho banded together to take on the US Army. Most famously, they defeated the army at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Colonel Custer made his so-called "last stand." But most battles went the other way, and the Indians were beaten back into smaller and smaller territorial claims, until they could no longer resist the military and surrendered in 1877, ending the Great Sioux War. They would lose progressively more land until 1910, But many Indians despised their loss of land, so a prophet named Wovoka started a movement convincing many that it could be regained. They had a special dance that was supposed to summon the ghosts of their fallen and reignite territorial warfare in their favor. But in 1899, the US government took even more land and many US soldiers believed the Ghost Dance was a military movement and began shooting into a village near Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. This developed into a massacre as the survivors were hunted down and over 300 were killed, though the Sioux did kill 31 soldiers there. Angered, the Lakota launched raids on the US Army, but the war ended quickly after very little fighting. The US gave 20 medals of honor to the murderers of Wounded Knee.
Wounded Knee Occupation
In the 1970s, under the Family Planning Act approved By George Bush Sr., up to 50% of Native American women of childbearing age were targeted for sterilization through lying or coercion.
In 1973, 200 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement (AIM) members seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The 71-day standoff protested tribal corruption, broken US treaties, and federal mistreatment.
Later in 1975, two FBI agents drove into the Jumping Bull Ranch on the reservation while investigating an alleged robbery. A violent shootout erupted between the agents and AIM members, resulting in the deaths of two FBI agents and AIM activist, Joe Stuntz. Following a massive manhunt, artist and AIM activist, despite acting in self defense, Leonard Peltier was convicted of first-degree murder, serving nearly 50 years in federal prison before his sentence was commuted to home confinement.
Modern reservations suffer severe systemic poverty, inadequate infrastructure, high unemployment, obesity and alcoholism. Their tribal leaders are all half half native at best, from foreign tribes and embezzle funds meant to improve their communities.
The Coal Wars
The Coal Wars were a series of armed labor conflicts in the US between roughly 1890 and 1930. Impoverished coal miners, sick of being paid in script fought corporate mine operators, private detectives, and federal military forces over brutal working conditions, low pay, and the right to unionize.
Miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 wore red bandannas to identify each other, which is where the term redneck comes from. Roughly 10,000 armed coal miners clashed with 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers in Logan County, West Virginia, before federal troops and military aircraft intervened.
The aerial bombing during was carried out entirely by private, commercial biplanes rented by Sheriff Don Chafin. An exact count of casualties from the Battle of Blair Mountain does not exist, but historians estimate that between 20 and 100 people were killed during the fighting.
By: Ryan Dawson, The Cynical Historian...
Raped by: Otto Heckel
No comments:
Post a Comment