“I am fascinated by your exposition of the British plantation system in Early America. Early American history never made any objective sense until you pointed out that the Indians first served as allies of the slave masters. The accepted notion that the British did not want any more land, that they cared about the Indians and conservation is laughable—these were The British we are talking about! Besides, what empire does not want to expand? You do realize that your assertion that American institutions—including the very notion of personal liberty—were influenced by Native American customs flies in the face of all establishment thinking. Where did that theory come from and could you develop that theory in more detail?”

-Ulric, Kerensky

Thank you for the compliment and the opportunity to expand on this thought, Ulric.

The theory was born in my boyhood. My favorite TV show was Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker. The British and the Indians were the bad guys against the frontiersmen, which was explained away in school by the notion that the British did not want the colonists—who came to America for the reason of individual liberty and freedom of religious expression—to get over the Appalachian Mountains where they could live freely in the interior of this vast continent.

I noted, as a boy, two things: that Daniel Boone had an Indian friend, Mingo, who shared his values, and that the frontiersmen seemed to live in a manner halfway between that of the Indians and the people of the colonies they had left. If only by way of practical imitation, the frontiersmen and their families behaved in many ways, more like Indians than their relatives down by the sea, most notably in their choice of hunting as their primary economic activity. Where the colonists killed maximum numbers of trees as soon as possible to facilitate grain and cash crop cultivation, the frontiersmen cleared enough land to build shelters and fortifications and provide for a field of fire, and then engaged in hunting and gardening like Indians.

The distinctive stockade forts of the frontier were improvements on Iroquoian and Algonquin Indian stockades, in no way sharing a basis with existing European fortifications or with colonial Spanish fortifications. When we see paramilitary forts like Fort Bridger and military forts like Fetterman in the Rockies in the 1840s -80s, we are looking at an importation and adaptation of Eastern Woodland Indian fortification on the high plains, like the Romans taking the Iberian sword and using it against other barbarians. Interestingly, Iroquoian and American frontier stockades remind one of the daily Roman Legion fort raised before dusk.

The frontiersmen likewise operated in extended family bands with leaders elected on merit and reputation, not as militias under appointed governors, religious leaders [New England] and wealthy elites [New York and Virginia]. This was a point of contention in New England, with authorities sometimes vetoing elected officers.

English-speaking America and Canada were settled according to five economic models. The models were initiated in the North American wilderness in the following order:

French Trade-Mission: mid 1500s

Cavalier Plantation: first quarter of 1600s

Dutch Trade-Trafficking: first quarter of 1600s

Puritan Plantation: second quarter of 1600s

Quaker Trade-Plantation : fourth quarter of 1600s

Canada was settled as a trading post system in which the Jesuit desire to convert the heathen to Holy Mother Church was not coupled with a corollary system of cultural destruction by allied economic interests as with the Puritan, Quaker and cavalier system. Indeed, Frenchmen went native in huge numbers. After the Seven Years War the English inherited this system, with later historians misrepresenting the French system as the English system and applying it to the colonies [which were an administrative fiction until the 1770s] in retrospect.

There was no British Colonial system in America, but a plantation system, which took hold first in Virginia. Colonies were administrative fictions for assigning imperial oversight of the plantation system. The plantation system, debated by Bacon and Locke [against and for, respectively] was a profiteering scheme, whereby the poor, homeless, orphaned, criminal, dissident and prisoner of war were sold to land speculators, who would “plant” these people in an uncultivated location so that the place might augment the small land mass of the home country and also provide ports of call for shipping.

If all that this plantation system accomplished was to act as a supply anchorage for English pirates operating against the Spanish, the Crown would be pleased. Bacon thought this was a terrible idea, not out of a humanitarian interest, but because one would be founding a new society in which the laboring bulk were the worst of the Old Country and the ruling class were motivated solely by personal, material gain. Rather than engage the Indians as trading partner, the plantation owners employed them as slave catchers. Losses by disease among these Indians were augmented by adopting—rather than returning for payment in guns, powder and tools—runaway slaves.

The integration of religion in plantation life was no different in Anglican Virginia and Catholic Maryland, marking this as an English rather than Christian aspect of cultural nullification, the apex of which was the school for Indian children in Lehigh Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. [1]

One could conceivably imagine the strong strain of individual autonomy among Eastern Woodlands tribes as being as much motivated by the runaway slave roots of adopted whites as by the solitary stalking livelihood of woodland life. In any case, the defining aspect of current, white, rural masculinity is Indian-style deer hunting, which has zero European input and is entirely indigenous, and it is at this deer-hunting, rural, white man that the liberal elites of our great cities and sprawling suburbs point with the most venomous disdain when decrying what is wrong with “the white man,” when what is wrong with him is he retains the core Indian values of individual autonomy in a package in which lethality and economic independence is linked.

Our current radial political-racial landscape, in which white elites and mixed-race populations form major economic hubs, with working whites fleeing ever deeper into the hinterlands to escape the brutality and oppression, is an exact reflection of the early plantation system, in which the whites fled and rebelled and were replaced by African slaves. The plantation owners first paid the Indians to staunch the flow of runaways and financed their wars against poor whites. This backfired, with poor white refugees forming mixed white-Indian bands and striking back, an act which nearly wiped out Virginia in the 1620s. Even black slaves were used to fight the white insurgents. Eventually, with the British defeated, the plantation system evolved to employ the sons of former runaways to remove Indian tribes that lay in the path of expansion. This process continued into the late 1800s and the Far West as those most Indian-like whites were used to open the frontier for that which they hated, cities full of masters and slaves.

Generally speaking, this model encouraged two kinds of westward migration, would-be slave masters migrating cross the Alabama Plain and Mississippi watershed and discontented poor migrating into the Cumberland watershed of Tennessee and Kentucky in an attempt to distance themselves from the plantation system. Most of these people ended up heading to the far West or further up into the forested mountains in their quest to stay one step ahead of civilization.

Centered in New York, the Dutch system was a contemporary of the first Virginia plantations and was a combination of the French trade-based relationship with the Indians and human-trafficking to provide urban labor, as well as profitable sales to plantations. The operation of this trade hub did not change substantially under English and American rule, with two slave conspiracies put down ruthlessly under the British and slave labor continuing, with legal sanction, in New York factories, until 1929. This is a pure profiteering model, in which the Dutch simultaneously sold European, Indian and African slaves to New England, Barbados and Virginia plantations and also sold guns and ammunition to those Indian tribes fighting these systems, and when the Indians lost, selling the captives in the Caribbean.

One can clearly see the duplicitous, banking-based Dutch system on Manhattan Island as the basis for the current U.S. policy of simultaneously arming enemies and bombing allies even as the indigenous laboring class is discarded for more compliant human imports. Even though Manhattan is the longest lived administrative center in the U.S., the Dutch presence and impact in early America is generally disregarded by American historians.

This self-contained, collectively [not individually] armed model was a reaction to the unpaid soldiers of King James and his successor raping and pillaging Puritan communities in the first two quarters of the 1600s in England. The purpose of the Puritan community was to form “A New Isrаel,” a place embodying faith. This was to be accomplished by converting and assimilating or exterminating the Natives and transforming the landscape into something an Old Testament patriarch could look upon without a sense of dread.

The cornerstone of this philosophy was wholesale war upon the natural environment. Where the cavaliers of Virginia and Maryland would ring all of the massive trees to kill them and then plant tobacco under the dead branches in order to make a quick profit, the New England Puritan sought to clear the land and remold it just as primeval forested England had been—on the Mediterranean model. The biblical ideal of paradise as a garden was little different from the Roman ideal of the 100% cultivated plantation, where nothing was left to nature’s fickle hand and man literally formed the land to reflect his will. All forests, which provided nighted groves for fiendish powwows and cover for raiding warriors, must be leveled or cut with roads. The teeming fish in the rivers that fed the hated heathen must be used for tannery waste to deny the enemy of God this food. The heathen must be made to gather in large congregations so that the Angel of God [disease] might wax wroth among them. To the Puritan mind, pristine North America was the Devil’s abomination, where his evil children frolicked in the forests.

The Puritan system is a workable conquest by occupation model that formed the basis for the American expansion cross the continent and also inspired George Washington to declare that deforestation and animal eradication in great hunts was to be the cornerstone of American expansion into the Godless interior. Puritans tended to keep their slaves close and use them as urban domestics, which made for a more stable system than the cavalier model, which encouraged concentric rings of social discontent. Nevertheless, significant indentures escaped and otherwise won their freedom to form a small class of Indian [heathen]-identified frontiersmen. Puritan communities negotiated with the Crown via emissaries in regards to the laws governing their conduct, internally and externally. The mastery of Indian affairs by allying with the stronger and more murderous tribes against the weaker and more peaceful—a strategy which won the west—was pioneered by the Puritan congregations of New England, who always had more Indian allies than enemies.

William Penn’s model plantation was, like the Cavalier model in Virginia intended to consist of vast numbers of unarmed slave laborers stuck between the administrative centers on the sea and the savages in the forested hinterlands. Blacks were the favorite class of domestic slave with whites—mostly Irish—being preferred as agricultural slaves. Trade with the Indians was intended to buy their indulgence and their protection as military allies.

However, the unfair trade practices and the addiction of young Indian men to the wares of the rum peddlers sowed the seeds of discontent among the Indians, and the French managed to buy them off. Faced with extermination, the Quakers were forced to give up their unarmed plantation model in the 1750s and rapid emancipation of the Irish and deforestation of the 98% forested territory of Pennsylvania ensued, spilling over into the Ohio valley within a generation, and forming an autonomous-minded mass immigration of former white slaves, with a tendency to be anti-government and anti-black, seeing in the mass importation of blacks back East the hand of displacement.

The history of American municipalities voting in laws in opposition to Federal mandates can be traced to the Ohio Territory in the 1780s, when laws forbidding slavery were passed, later to be struck down by the federal government [i.e. Founding Fathers]. The various state-level marijuana legalization initiatives follow on this example. There was also a dark side to this frontier spirit of autonomy, with frontier communities raising militias and supporting individual Indian killers, toward the goal of exterminating Indians. The U.S. federal government rarely supported such ethnic cleansing initiatives. Of course, the frontiersmen knew that the Indians were seen by the central powers they sought to escape as a check on their autonomy and were accordingly outraged at treaties. Clearly, much of this rancor harkened back to the days of Indian warriors acting as border police and slave catchers, an aspect of American history which was almost successfully scrubbed from the extant records and has found no place in the accepted narrative.

Ulric, I cannot say I have a theory but rather have noticed various patterns of whites operating as individuals and in small groups that came far closer to the higher levels of individual autonomy found in hunting and gathering [Indian] tribal hierarchies than found in labor-based [slave-based] European hierarchies, particularly on the grain-addicted Mediterranean model. There was a time when the Mediterranean basin was a lush forested world, where mixed agriculture, fishing, gathering and hunting could support sizeable populations, just as New England had before the arrival of small pox and the flu. However, the westward expansion of Indo-European culture was based on a grassland mindset, grazing and grain cultivation, the foundation of ancient and medieval militaries operating largely by horsepower and massed manpower, fueled by stored grain reserves harvested by slaves.

The Epic of Gilgamesh documents the sense of loss the warrior-hunter class experienced as the forests (where dwelled the beasts that the hero tested himself against), were destroyed for roof beams, navies and firewood. This scythe leveled a forested world, until the late 1500s, when there remained no more oaks in Britain to build ships, where a man would have to journey a day to find firewood for his fire, where the only forests were sacred patches of hunting habitat maintained for the use of the men whose ancestors had long ago conquered a largely forested nation and were privileged to relive a stag hunt from horseback on occasion, and where a common man found guilty of eating a rabbit would be hanged from a gibbet, where his family would have to fight for his body with medical students looking for cadavers.

The Christian memory, as far back as the composition of Beowulf [2], was wedded to the image of the garden as a paradise, that Man did not emerge from a wilderness, but rather sprang from a God-cultivated land. The idea of forests merely existing was an affront to Christianity, as forests were the Devil’s own haunts, and also to the rising urban sensibilities of the merchant class with their cavalier affectations—for they were only caricatures of the earlier chivalric class and who would form the managerial class of the southern plantations—who resented the forest as a symbol of hereditary rural aristocratic pretentions and as a place where the exploited classes that were the human fuel for their material ambitions might flee to.

In 1585, this Moral End Time, a depleted resource economy on the brink of collapse, unable to feed its population discovered a forested land—a totally forested land that would look to us like something out of Tolkien, with trees such as oak and poplar reaching sizes we would find improbable, trees of such size that the lumbering toolkit of Late Medieval Europe was inadequate to the task of felling them. Furthermore, these forests were populated by savages every bit as frightening as the Vikings who sacked Lindesfarne, the Picts who came over Hadrian’s Wall, the Germans who slaughtered Varus, legions in a forest no less and the Celts who sacked Rome—for Rome was the history these people looked back to for an image of their grandfathers, not the land of their birth, but to the father city that raped their motherland and spawned their bastard kind.

These men saw not a New World for the taking, but a New World for the making or the raping, depending on their particular moral compass. We speak here of a forest so vast that one gains the sense that he cannot leave, a forest hundreds of miles in every direction, broken only by treacherous rivers, clinging to low rugged mountains for over a thousand miles, from Georgia to Maine.

According to H.P. Lovecraft, our unique American notion of horror—a category no longer listed by publishers—comes from this Christian regard of the untamed forest. I think it is far more and far deeper than Christian, but essentially Indo-European and first reflected in the battle between Humbaba, the Guardian Demon of the Cedar Forest, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu—Gilgamesh the king, made great by this demon killing, and Enkidu the Wildman, extinguished by this same heroic act. For a reflection of these dualistic sentiments and also a hint at the transformation wrought by the forested land that was Eastern America upon the mind of the one being for whom it was a fairy tale refuge from iniquitous toil and suffering—the paleface slave—I leave off with a quote from two sources:

“Once men might not see the light of the sun,

With night growing dark over the earth,

The shapes of shadows came gliding along…

From the moors that were thick with mist,

Grendel emerged, wrapped in the anger of God…’

-Beowulf, England, 700-1000 A.D.

“…the toil and dangers of the wilderness… A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests… While the husband-man shrank back from the dangerous passes, within the safer boundaries of the more ancient settlements [4]…[armies] to bury themselves in these forests, whence they rarely returned but in skeleton bands… The alarmed colonists [4] believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west.”

-James Fenimore Cooper, last of the Mohicans, 1826

1. The Church Warden system was used to manage slave births and out-of-wedlock births from the early 1700s, despite the common academic assertion that there was no religious grounding in the Virginia plantations.

2. 700-900 A.D.

3. I regard Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and most religions—most extremely the Aztec mythos—militaries as expressions of the deep human slave urge—of the weak to be a slave and of the powerful to make slaves. Religions facilitate enslavement ideally and with little friction and arose concurrent with agriculture, which requires enslavement in its early intensive forms. Both the Old Testament and New Testament have numerous passages justifying and excusing slavery. Islam is the very sanctifying of enslavement, the faith conceived as a dedication to comprehensive worldwide enslavement to one ideal. Atheism, in this view, is an evolution of slave ideals which discards the divine and elevates the squalid, human form in its place in order to facilitate a less passionate form of worldwide enslavement. I suspect the final act in the mainstream evolution of the human mind will be the outcome of the battle between Atheism and Islam, the rest of humanity crushed between.

4. These are both terms that were not in general use until the late 1700s and were rare during the 1600s. Cooper, here, uses the patriotic terminology of his own day and also explains his archaic and anachronistic terms in the introduction.