States was not exceptional in the sheer amount of violence it imposed to achieve sovereignty over the territories it appropriated. The British colonizations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were equally genocidal. Extreme violence, particularly against unarmed families and communities, was an inherent aspect of European colonialism, always with genocidal possibilities, and often with genocidal results. What distinguishes the U.S. experience is not the amount or type of violence involved, but rather the historical narratives attached to that violence and their political uses, even today. From the first settlement, appropriating land from its stewards became a racialized war, “civilization” against “savagery,” and thereby was inherently genocidal. In the words of historian Richard Slotkin, “‘Savage war’ was distinguished from ‘civilized warfare’ in its lack of limitations on the extent of violence, and of laws for its application. The doctrine of ‘savage war’ depended on the belief that certain races are inherently disposed to cruel and atrocious violence. Similar assumptions had often operated in the wars of Christian or crusading states against the Muslims in Europe and the Holy Land, and massacre had often enough accompanied such wars.”3
Military historian John Grenier offers an indispensable analysis of the white colonists’ warfare against the Indigenous peoples of North America. The way of war largely devised and enacted by settlers formed the basis for the founding ideology and colonialist military strategy of the independent United States, and this approach to war is still being practiced almost as a reflex in the twenty-first century.4
Grenier explains that he began his study after September 11, 2001, in the wake of the U.S. reversion to irregular warfare—savage warfare—in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, his goal to trace the historical roots of U.S. use of unlimited war as an attempt to destroy the collective will of enemy people, or their capacity to resist, employing any means necessary but mainly by attacking civilians and their support systems, such as their food supply. Today called “special operations” or “low-intensity conflict,” that kind of warfare was first used against Indigenous communities by colonial militias in the first British colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts. Those irregular forces, made up of landed settlers, sought to disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence through scouting and taking prisoners. They did so by destroying Indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering unarmed women, children, and elders.5 These voluntary fighting crews made up of individual civilians—“rangers”—are the groups referenced as militias, as they came to be called, in the Second Amendment.
Grenier analyzes the development of the U.S. way of war from 1607 to 1814, during which all the architecture of the U.S. military was forged, leading to its extension and development into the present. Esteemed U.S. historian Bernard Bailyn labeled the period “barbarous,” but Bailyn, like most of his fellow U.S. historians, portrays the Indigenous defenders of their homelands as “marauders” that the European settlers needed to get rid of.6 From this formative period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic characteristics of the U.S. way of war and thereby the characteristics of its civilization, which few historians have come to terms with and many, such as Bailyn, justify as necessary.
During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New England began the routine practice of scalp hunting and “ranging.” By that time, the non-Indigenous population of the British colony in North America had increased sixfold, to more than 150,000 people, which meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous farmlands and fishing resources. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called “King Philip’s War.” Wampanoag people and their Indigenous allies attacked the settlers’ isolated farms, using a method that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating, and possessing of course a perfect knowledge of the terrain and climate.
The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as “skulking,” and responded by destroying Indigenous villages and everyone in them who could not escape, burning their fields and food storage. But as effective Indigenous resistance continued, the commander of the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Wampanoag tactics in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption or counterinsurgency. He petitioned the colony’s governor for permission to choose sixty to seventy settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed “wilderness warfare,” although they were attacking developed Indigenous villages and fields. In July 1676, the first settler-organized militia was the result. The rangers’ force was made up of sixty male settlers and 140 already conquered Indigenous men. They were ordered to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or subdue” the enemy, in Church’s words. The inclusion of Indigenous fighters on the colonists’ side was not unique to British colonists in North America; rather, the practice has marked the character of European colonization and occupations of non-European peoples from the beginning. The settler-rangers could learn from their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades, Church perfected his evolving methods of annihilation, and those methods spread as more colonies were established.7
The Native people of New England continued to fight back by burning British settlements and killing settlers or capturing them for ransom. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations.8 During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine and more profitable following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Duston, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.9 However, it would be only in the 1820s that the Duston story was revived, and she was made famous as the first Euro American woman in North America to be celebrated with a statue. Duston was very famous for a few years after 1697, at the time of her escape from captivity, and her bloody scalp trophies were highly publicized at the time, but she had been pretty much forgotten until stories about her began to appear in print and increased in numbers through the 1880s. Not just one, but three major monuments were erected in her honor. Lionized as a folk hero, Duston and her story were employed during the continuing bloody and genocidal wars against Native peoples to characterize settler and Army violence as defensive and virtuous, necessary, even feminine.10
Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice from the early eighteenth century onward. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”11
In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During nearly two centuries of British colonization on the Atlantic shore of North America, generations of settlers gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution. The Anglo-French conflict may appear to have been the dominant factor of European colonization in North America during the eighteenth century, but while large regular armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the Indigenous communities.
Much of the fighting during the eight-year settlers’ war for independence, especially in the Ohio Valley region and western New York, was directed against Indigenous resisters who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of Indian-hating settlers with their own independent government, as opposed to a remote one in Great Britain with wider global interests. Nor did the fledgling U.S. military in the 1790s carry out operations typical of the state-centered wars occurring in Europe at the time. Even following the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method used by the U.S. to conquer the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley regions. Since that time, Grenier notes, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces. The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of extreme violence against civilians, in this case the