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  When compared to other countries that carried out colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America, the United States was not exceptional in the sheer amount of violence it imposed to achieve sovereignty over the territories it appropriated. The British colonizations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were equally genocidal. Extreme violence, particularly against unarmed families and communities, was an inherent aspect of European colonialism, always with genocidal possibilities, and often with genocidal results. What distinguishes the U.S. experience is not the amount or type of violence involved, but rather the historical narratives attached to that violence and their political uses, even today. From the first settlement, appropriating land from its stewards became a racialized war, “civilization” against “savagery,” and thereby was inherently genocidal. In the words of historian Richard Slotkin, “‘Savage war’ was distinguished from ‘civilized warfare’ in its lack of limitations on the extent of violence, and of laws for its application. The doctrine of ‘savage war’ depended on the belief that certain races are inherently disposed to cruel and atrocious violence. Similar assumptions had often operated in the wars of Christian or crusading states against the Muslims in Europe and the Holy Land, and massacre had often enough accompanied such wars.”3

  Military historian John Grenier offers an indispensable analysis of the white colonists’ warfare against the Indigenous peoples of North America. The way of war largely devised and enacted by settlers formed the basis for the founding ideology and colonialist military strategy of the independent United States, and this approach to war is still being practiced almost as a reflex in the twenty-first century.4

  Grenier explains that he began his study after September 11, 2001, in the wake of the U.S. reversion to irregular warfare—savage warfare—in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, his goal to trace the historical roots of U.S. use of unlimited war as an attempt to destroy the collective will of enemy people, or their capacity to resist, employing any means necessary but mainly by attacking civilians and their support systems, such as their food supply. Today called “special operations” or “low-intensity conflict,” that kind of warfare was first used against Indigenous communities by colonial militias in the first British colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts. Those irregular forces, made up of landed settlers, sought to disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence through scouting and taking prisoners. They did so by destroying Indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering unarmed women, children, and elders.5 These voluntary fighting crews made up of individual civilians—“rangers”—are the groups referenced as militias, as they came to be called, in the Second Amendment.

  Grenier analyzes the development of the U.S. way of war from 1607 to 1814, during which all the architecture of the U.S. military was forged, leading to its extension and development into the present. Esteemed U.S. historian Bernard Bailyn labeled the period “barbarous,” but Bailyn, like most of his fellow U.S. historians, portrays the Indigenous defenders of their homelands as “marauders” that the European settlers needed to get rid of.6 From this formative period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic characteristics of the U.S. way of war and thereby the characteristics of its civilization, which few historians have come to terms with and many, such as Bailyn, justify as necessary.

  During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New England began the routine practice of scalp hunting and “ranging.” By that time, the non-Indigenous population of the British colony in North America had increased sixfold, to more than 150,000 people, which meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous farmlands and fishing resources. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called “King Philip’s War.” Wampanoag people and their Indigenous allies attacked the settlers’ isolated farms, using a method that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating, and possessing of course a perfect knowledge of the terrain and climate.

  The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as “skulking,” and responded by destroying Indigenous villages and everyone in them who could not escape, burning their fields and food storage. But as effective Indigenous resistance continued, the commander of the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Wampanoag tactics in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption or counterinsurgency. He petitioned the colony’s governor for permission to choose sixty to seventy settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed “wilderness warfare,” although they were attacking developed Indigenous villages and fields. In July 1676, the first settler-organized militia was the result. The rangers’ force was made up of sixty male settlers and 140 already conquered Indigenous men. They were ordered to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or subdue” the enemy, in Church’s words. The inclusion of Indigenous fighters on the colonists’ side was not unique to British colonists in North America; rather, the practice has marked the character of European colonization and occupations of non-European peoples from the beginning. The settler-rangers could learn from their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades, Church perfected his evolving methods of annihilation, and those methods spread as more colonies were established.7

  The Native people of New England continued to fight back by burning British settlements and killing settlers or capturing them for ransom. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting 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 ha
ve 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 to the designated “Indian Territory.” As historian Alan Brinkley has observed, Jackson’s political fortunes 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