Introduction: Chosen Oblivion History would be a wonderful thing—if only it were true. —Leo Tolstoy Although not often examined in tandem, massacre, slavery, and oligarchy arose as the major, mutually reinforcing factors in the runaway expansion of the United States from 1783 through 1850. Many Euro-Americans resist seeing this truth put as bluntly as this, for the survival of their ideomythology requires them to sidestep the contiguity of these factors. White-’splainin’ has slipped lately as the only acceptable approach to history, allowing this text openly to address the massacre-slavery-oligarchy interface. It explores how the slaughter of one people supported the enslavement of another, with both crimes perpetrated by a third, its elite enriching itself by intertwining both offenses. Indigenous America has long pointed to these confluences. The Iroquois League had fingered slavery as the engine of invasion since the eighteenth century at least, one reason that the League, in particular, worked against settler slavery whenever it could. Escaped African slaves were freed, should they make it to Iroquoia. The eighteenth-century Seneca adoptee Mary Jemison recounted that one such African couple was granted land to farm. When she returned to Gardeau Flats, New York, in the famine occasioned by the genocidal Sullivan- Clinton attacks of 1779, it was to this African couple that she turned for aid.1 The League was hardly alone in its analysis of and opposition to settler slavery. In 1780, when the Shawnee homeland defense committee stopped a barge of squatters navigating down the Ohio River, they found a slave among the passen- gers. The Shawnee made a point of taking all of her mistress’s goods, giving them to the slave, now freed, and then forcing the mistress to wait on the African
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