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On 10/24/14 5:02 PM, Clay Claiborne wrote:
Since I'm now in San Antonio, I will add one more piece to this story. I
resentful got around to visiting the Alamo, but I didn't see one
indication that the real freedom Davy Crockett etc al were fighting for
was the freedom to own slaves. Mexico had recently outlawed slavery.
From my article on the Comanches behind a JSTOR paywall.
Long before sociobiology existed, American politicians in 1846 used
similar arguments when they went to war against Mexico. They wanted to
put a Hobbesian end to the “cycles of bloody vendettas” that the epicene
Spaniards were incapable of ending. A strong state had to subdue warring
tribes, no matter the cost in blood and treasure. Brian DeLay writes
about the racist ideology that was used to justify intervention against
the Mexicans and ultimately the ethnic cleansing of the Comanche:
Much of the intellectual nourishment this transformation depended upon
came from Europe, and it matured during America's long experiences with
African American slaves and with Indians. In both cases, controversies
during the 1820s and 1830s ignited feverish attempts to shore up the
intellectual foundations of racial science. Pseudoscientific monographs
on the phenomenon and consequences of race mixing, the emerging fields
of ethnological classification and phrenology (the study of character
and mental capacity through close examination of skulls), and historical
attempts to locate the genesis and developmental trajectory of the
Anglo-Saxon race all lent legitimacy to hardening and self-serving
racial values. Proponents of slavery defended their institution against
abolitionist rhetoric with increasingly complicated racialist logic.
Likewise, the architects of Indian removal relied upon a growing body of
literature heralding the inevitable extinction of inferior races before
the God-ordained march of the Anglo-American millions. (DeLay, 2008, 245)
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