THE SAVGERY OF THE BIRTH AND HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The birth of the United States of America,
our democracy, was borne of the savgery
of slavery and genocide, and its history
and growth were perpetrated by the same.
It is an incalculable and unconscionable trav-
esty that so few citizens today know the
horror of this dual devilry, the history of our
country.
Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the
Declarartion of Independence, which included
in it the indelible phrase “all men are created
equal,” and became our third president, was
the owner himself of over 600 slaves. He was
one of eight U.S. presidents who were at one
time or another slave owners, the first of whom
was George Washington.
The Constitution of the United States, when
ratified, thereby legalized the brutality of
slavery, through the 3/5ths and Fugutive Slave
clauses therein, in all of the 13 new states.
Both the northern and southern states prospered
mightily through the evils of slavery, the northern
states through processing the cotton and shipping
it to England, the southern by growing it through
slavery.
Over time, the northern states gradually declared
slavery to be illegal, but in 1861, the year the Civil
War began, there were still 4,000,000 blacks in
slavery in the Deep South. If you happen to be white
and not black while reading this, give eternal thanks,
and while you’re at it, pray for atonement, because
our entire country still suffers greatly from the legacy
of slavery, which we now call racism.
If you were a slave, you had no legal rights. If you fell
in love as a slave, you probably would have done what
most human beings do when they fall in love: make
love and probably give birth to a baby, whom you would
also love. But if your slave master had a whim and wanted
to **** the mother of the new baby, or if he wanted to ****
her 13-year-old daughter, all the slave master had to do was
to decide which whim was greater in him, because he
could do either with impunity, and did. If any slave said
a word, he or she was subject to 60 lashes while tied
to a tree trunk.
If you were a slave and dared to begin to learn how to
read and write, and if you were caught doing either or
both, you were whipped to near death. And if you had
the incredible courage to try to escape this hell on Earth
and were caught in your attempt, either you were killed,
or wish you had been. (Read about Harriet Tubman and
Sojouner Truth, for starters.) And, of course, your slave
master could sell any of his slaves whenever he wanted
to.
You, the reader, may glean from this brief overview some
insight as to why we, as a country, are still struggling
terribly with what we now call euphemistically “race
relations.” Only 160 years ago, we called it slavery, and
it was LEGAL.
Now genocide. As our new nation grew, it grew obviously
westward, which meant, of course, the United States committed
genocide against countless nations of indigenous peoples who
had lived on this continent for centuries before Columbus showed
up in the Caribbean in 1492. Treaties they had signed with the U. S.
government were routinely broken. The final campaign against these
proud and heroic peoples took place between 1860 to 1890,
culminating in the massacre of Wounded Knee, where old men,
women, and children were slaughtered.
If you have the guts to witness the detritus our government left
behind, take a trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the
southwest corner of South Dakota, the poorest place in the
United States today: rampant alcoholism; widespread clinical
depression; a suicide rate of children 12 and younger, three
times the national average.
If you are a reader, you might want to pick up Howard Zinn’s
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES and
Dee Brown’s BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE.
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet and human-rights advocate his entire adult life. He just finished his first novel, A CHILD FOR AMARANTH.
