Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

on the Western frontier. These new cotton areas became
primarily Afrikan in population. And the ambitious
planter bourgeoisie started seeding slave labor enterprises
far outward, as tentacles of the "Slave Power". So at a
salt mine in Illinois, a gold mine in California, a plantation
in Missouri, aggressive planters appeared with their
"moveable factories" of Afrikan slaves. Southern adventurers
even briefly seized Nicaragua in 1856 in a premature
attempt to annex all of Central Amerika to the "Slave
Power".
If the clearing away of the Indian nations had
unlocked the door to the spread of the slave system, so too
it had given an opportunity to the settler opponents of the
planters. And their vision was not of a reborn Greek
slaveocracy, but of a brand-new European empire,
relentlessly modern, constructed to the most advanced
bourgeois principles with the resources of an entire continent
united under its command. This new Empire would
not only dwarf any power in Old Europe in size, but would
be secured through the power of a vast, occupying army of
millions of loyal settlers. This bourgeois vision could hardly
be considered crackpot, since 20th Century Amerika is
in large part the realization of it, but the vision was of an
all-European Amerika, an all-white continent.
We can only understand the deep passions of the
slavery dispute, the flaring gunfights in Missouri and
"Bloody Kansas" between pro-slavery and anti-slavery
settlers, and lastly the grinding, monumental Civil War of
1861-1865, as the final play of this greatest contradiction in
the settler ranks. It was not freedom for Afrikans that
motivated them. No, the reverse. It was their own futures,
their own fortunes. Gov. Morton of Ohio called on his
fellows to realize their true interests: "We are all personally
interested in this question, not indirectly and remotely as
in a mere political abstraction-but directly, pecuniarily,
and selfishly. If we do not exclude slavery from the Territories,
it will exclude us."
To millions of Euro-Amerikans in the North, the
slave system had to be halted because it filled the land with
masses of Afrikans instead of masses of settlers. To be
precise: In the 19th Century a consensus emerged among
the majority of Euro-Amerikans that just as the Indian nations
before them, the dangerous Afrikan colony had to be
at first contained and then totally eliminated, so that the
land could be filled by the loyal settler citizens of the Empire.
This was a strategic view endorsed by the majority
of Euro-Amerikans. It was an explicit vision that required
genocide. How natural for a new Emprie of conquerors
believing that they had, like gods, totally removed from
the earth one family of oppressed nations, to think nothing
of wiping out another. the start was to confine Afrikans to
the South, to drive them out of the "Free" states in the
North. Indeed, in the political language of 19th Century
settler politics, the word "Free" also served as a codephrase
that meant "non-Afrikan."
The movement to confine Afrikans to the Slave
South took both governmental and popular forms. Four
frontier states-Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Oregon-passed
"immigration" clauses in their constitutions which barred
Afrikans as "aliens" from entering the state.(20) It's 29
interesting that the concept of Afrikans as foreign "immigrants
9 '-a concept which tacitly admits separate
Afrikan nationality-keeps coming to the su~
race uver ar~d
over. Legal measures to force Afrikans out by denying
them the vote, the right to own land, use public facilities,
practice many professions and crafts, etc. were passed in
many areas of the North at the urging of the white mobs.
White labor not only refused to defend the democratic
rights of Afrikans, but played a major role in these new
assaults.
Periodic waves of mass terror also were used
everywhere against Afrikan communities in the North. The
Abolitionist press records 209 violent mob attacks in the
North between 1830-1849. These violent assaults were not
the uncontrolled outpouring of blind racism, as often suggested.
Rather, they were carefully organized offensives to
achieve definite. goals. These mobs were usually led by
members of the local ruling class (merchants, judges,
military officers, bankers, etc.), and made up of settlers
from all strata of society.(21) The three most common
goals were: 1) To reverse some local advance in Afrikan
organization, education or employment 2) To destroy the
local Abolitionist movement 3) To reduce the Afrikan
population. In almost every case the mobs, representing
both the local ruling class and popular settler opinion,
were successful. In almost no cases did any significant
number of Euro-Amerikans interfere with the mobs, save
to "restore order" or to nobly protect a few lives after the
violence had gained its ends.
But to most settlers in the North these attacks were
just temporary measures. To them the heart of the matter
was the slave system. They thought that without the
powerful self-interest of the planters to "protect"
Afrikans, that Afrikans as a whole would swiftly vanish
from this continent. Today it may sound fantastic that
those 19th Century Euro-Amerikans expected to totally
wipe out the Afrikan population. Back then it was taken as