Hacker News Reader

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11967608 and marked it off-topic.

I feel like you're missing a big piece of the puzzle. A friend of mine did a lot of research for the book Slave Nation, and he summed up the circumstances which sparked the revolution and united the US.

The way he very broadly sums it up was the South didn't have a reason to revolt until Lord Mansfield's ruling on slavery in the empire sparked fear and uncertainty of slavery's future in the South. That's what united the Northern and Southern states against the British. The book also goes on the explain the critical role slavery played in molding our constitution because it was the most contentious piece. It suggests that once the states reached a compromise on slavery, the rest of the pieces fell into place.

I think that's a better characterization than "The US united to commit genocide." My story at least tries to flesh out how the interests of real humans leads them to commit atrocities. Your obtuse characterization paints them as villains with the depth of a comic book character. You will never learn from history if you paint people like comic book characters, because they'll never resemble the complex real people you're trying to compare them to.

I think you both can be right: "The US united to commit both genocide and slavery."

When reading the parent post, I too thought it left out slavery. (Understandable, in a short comment.) As I understand, Europeans generally were against slavery, not heeding intellectuals in favor of it. (In part probably because in preceding centuries they'd been its victims more often than not.) Nation states are about promoting a certain culture to dominate its territorial boundaries, and central to US culture is the invention of modern racism, to make its slave society back then robust.

Europeans colonized what is now the US and brought slavery with them. When the US united, slavery was still legal in most of Europe.

and enacted brutal colonization all over the world, akin to slavery if not worse.

The French were the external enemy of the English and subsequently the loyalists in the US. At the time of the Revolutionary War, the French were instrumental in winning it by bombarding English ships en route to the US. At the time of the Revolutionary War, the English were the common enemy of the revolutionaries.

It wasn't cut and dry, there were many English loyalists in the colonies at the time of the war. After the US gained independence, most of them fled.

>The British were not an external enemy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

>The shared dream of settling the continent was real but - given that said continent was already occupied

I doubt you understand how large the US is if you think that. Most of it was empty. The union was already strongly formed before the genocide of the west got under way.

>Shared culture, language, religion? Language, mostly.

I think you might underestimate how much a single shared language helps mobility, doing business, spreading culture, etc. The fact that the EU embraces individual country identities will mean it will never be as cohesive as the US. If every state in the US spoke a different language, the US probably wouldn't have even made it past the size of the original colonies.

>The British were not an external enemy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

From your own link: "Colonists objected to the Tea Act because they believed that it violated their rights as Englishmen" (my emphasis)

The article then goes on to say that after the Tea Party, the colonists petitioned the monarch... not exactly something you'd to do an external force.

> I doubt you understand how large the US is if you think > that. Most of it was empty. The union was already strongly > formed before the genocide of the west got under way.

According to the book 1491 (which is a great read, highly recommended), the population of the New World was much larger, and more more historic than we may be lead to imagine. Millions of Native Americans lived on the east coast alone. What may have did them in was disease (smallpox, etc) that desecrated the people before even the pilgrims came on the scene. What the first colonist may have seen was just all that was left of a epidemic.

(I also agree a genocide also happened in the West, from what survivors there were)

Here is another good reference on the early stages of the colonisation of the Americas. I'd highly recommend it (Taylor's American Colonies) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002DBIO2U/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Right, but a disease like that has nothing to do with the union.

Huh, most of the continental U.S. was definitely not empty. It was all peopled. Unless you mean there were many miles between every settlement or something. But that's not really relevant.

The conflict between settlers and natives started pretty much right away (i.e. the early 1600s), long before there was any union.

>It was all peopled. Unless you mean there were many miles between every settlement or something. But that's not really relevant.

Of course it's relevant. If there are 1,000 miles between each settlement of a thousand people, that's fewer deaths than European countries inflicted on each other during WW2. The fact that you don't think numbers are relevant is baffling to me.

You're greatly over simplifying early American politics. Neither the French nor English were a consistent "common enemy". Rather there was extensive debate as to which would be/was a better ally or worse foe, and the US got into conflict with (and conducted mutually beneficial diplomacy with) both on several different occasions in the years after its founding.

(Below are several events in which the early US was aligned with either side, note this changed frequently)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revolut...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Alliance_(1778)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams%E2%80%93On%C3%ADs_Treaty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Neutrality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ_Affair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-War

You can ignore the fact that things like manifest destiny were very important to Americans in the past because it's an uncomfortable idea nowadays, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen

Is there any evidence that manifest destiny was a widely and deeply held conviction amongst common Americans? I'm not asking to be contrarian – I really have no clue.

It seems more believable that it would only be deeply held (if held at all) by the westward bound.

Sure, there is a ton of US history to support it. Seemingly every historical book on the subject lays out the premise that it was a very widely held cultural belief (but not universally agreed to). I've read three books on the subject, and they all agree that it was a common populist belief. In fact, it was still a commonly held belief right up until essentially the cultural shift of the 1960s and 1970s.

The USA was not originally created with the notion of "manifest destiny"; that was a concept of the 1800s, not the 1700s when the United States of a America was born. Wikipedia reports that "Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

"The Citizens of America, placed in the most evitable conditions, as the Sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast tract of Continent,comprehending all the various Soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledge to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independancy. They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity" -- George Washington, shortly after the Treaty of Paris (1783)

Even if manifest destiny was not primary in the hearts and minds of a majority of colonial American citizens, their most potent leader saw it as the common bond that would unite the colonies.

> given that said continent was already occupied and settling it meant exterminating the current residents

This is a false historical picture. Most of the continent was not settled at all, most of it was empty. Most of it is still empty space today. You'd have to claim there were billions of Native Americans to pretend it was entirely settled.

The average settler never killed a single Native American. Up to 90% of the Native American population was killed off by Europeans through the spread of germs prior to the formation of the United States.

The infamous Trail of Tears involved 4,000 Native Americans being killed. Napoleon's wars murdered millions of Europeans by comparison.

This is such a weird, pedantic definition of 'empty'. When people say a place is settled, they don't mean there is no room for another human being.

Europe was also mostly empty in this sense in the 1930s. Why was there this big war, the Germans could have just walked into those big empty spaces in the Ukraine and built some farms.

Wait; your own logic was "the continent wasn't empty, therefore, the only way to settle it was genocide". So, in your own logic, there wasn't any possible place left to the settlers.

THIS: 100% this.

"* Shared culture, language, religion? Language, mostly. The Puritans in New England didn't really have much to say to the Quakers in Philadelphia, and both had even less in common with the not-particularly-religious folks down in Virginia. Yes, I guess they all were (or at least professed to be) Christians, but that's not too different than Europe today."

Let me expound upon this further:

The Puritans (not the Pilgrims, who they ended up forcibly annexing into their much larger colony) were by and large the "Roundheads" who won the English Civil War. Ethnically, they were non-gentry, descended from the Anglo-Saxons who lost to the 1066 invasion forces of the Normans.

In Virginia, the settlers were the younger sons of the English gentry, losers of the English Civil War, with lots of titles (if not tons of blood) descending from the Normans. They brought huge swathes of indentured servants with them (the bulk of the white population of Virginia was descended from indentures). They sought to recreate the English countryside in a strictly feudal sense.

In the Deep South, (South Carolina, Georgia, etc) the settlers were descended from the wealthy sugar planters on Barbados. They ran out of land for their sons on Barbados, and the sons came to the Deep South with tons of slaves and a specific goal of recreating the despotic Barbados chattel slavery system and it's huge profits.

Each of these colonies had strict rules on who could enter, and from where.

Pennsylvania was a different story. Founded by Quakers, they pretty much let anybody in, which leads to the Ulster-Scots aka Scots-Irish. Literally hundreds of thousands of Scots who were booted out of northern Ireland or fled the poverty of the Scotland/England borderlands came into Pennsylvania, and immediately went west into the Appalachian mountains, from there spreading themselves and their culture south into western Virginia, western North Carolina, Tennessee, and anywhere else in the US where you picture a rugged landscape that couldn't support plantations. (the places in the US South with rich soil and flat lands were taken over by the slave owners, but the Ulster Scots descendants took all the land that the plantation owners couldn't use, which is why northwest Arkansas is completely different than the rest of the state, or why western North Carolina and western Virginia were filled with Unionist supporters in the US Civil War.

All of these groups HATED each other, and there are still lots of tensions. The Ulster Scots (Appalachian folks) literally fought a rebellion against the US in the early days of the republic due to a financial scam run by Alexander Hamilton and his cronies that is like something out of 1980's Wall Street. (He first colluded with the governor of Pennsylvania to disallow veterans from paying their taxes with IOUs from the US government for war wages, rendering the IOUs worthless, then he and his speculator buddies bought the IOUs for pennies on the dollar. Immediately afterwards, he enacted the US government's plan for buying the IOUs at face value plus interest in hard currency, making his buddies rich. Following this, he leavied a tax on whiskey, which was a valuable medium of exchange in the frontier.)

Thanks to that Broadway musical, I now have to constantly remind my kid that Alexander Hamilton was, in fact, a Federalist, mercantilist, and central banker--all three synonymous with "jerk". He was the sort of politician that had not just a punchable face, but a murderable one, and Burr was just the man who broke first.

However, without the Federalists, the US would likely be more fragmented than it is now, with its 5-12 (depending on who you ask) disparate regional cultures.

>That would have been the French

Yes, our most valued and prized allies during Independence, whose supplies, blockades and expertise delivered to us our home... yes they were our enemy...

I wouldn't agree to your analysis. The French financed the US Independence movement. The Founding Fathers looked to the French for inspiration when drafting the US Constitution. From before its independence until roughly the Vietnam War, France was arguably the closest ally to the United States.

The shared dream did, indeed, mean exterminating the current residents. The current residents were often described in news accounts from the time as inhuman savages, not unlike how Africans were viewed. While it's not something I'd want to put forward as key to our identity, it most certainly was key to our identity. Predating the Manifest Destiny, the people of what the United States saw themselves as the right, God-given rulers of the land. It's disgusting, and lead to one of the few "successful" genocides in human history. But it most certainly did unite the early United States of America.

Shared culture? Yes, there were many different religions in the early United States. However, they all had a united cause--they were fleeing religious persecution in their home country. This includes the Catholics (fleeing England), Lutherans, Calvinists, Quakers, and Unitarians. It is so much a part of US history that the US Constitution guarantees religious freedom as its first Article. Religious freedom is at the very heart of the founding of the United States, and it is a result of this realization that many American immigrants were fleeing religious persecution in their country of origin.

So, basically, the differences between the US and the EU are exactly as the GP mentioned. They were very strong allies to France--the US constitution even includes almost direct quotes from French writers of the time; France both financed the US war of independence and the US bailed out France from the Napoleanic wars by purchasing the Louisiana Purchase. And while they didn't share the same religion, many fled from religious persecution--it was such a common cause that it was enshrined as the first Article to the US Constitution. The US was, indeed, actively engaged in genocide. This, at least, is one thing the US shared with Europe. Europe, from at least the time of the Crusades, but continuing through the slave trade and the many genocides in the 1800s and 1900s, most certainly shares this thread in common with the United States. Congratulations on making the point so clearly that the two cases, in this fashion, were very similar.

George Washington was British :-)