There’s an iconic painting of Daniel Boone of the moment he first laid eyes on the rich green woodlands and valleys of Kentucky. It was painted by William Tyler Ranney in 1849 and it shows Boone, surrounded by several fellow travelers and two beagles, standing in the Cumberland Gap, pointing west.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull called Dum Diversas. In it, he gave the power to King Alfonso of Portugal, “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit – by having secured the said faculty, the said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors.”
In 1455, that same Pope issued another bull called Romanus Pontifex in which he said, “seeking and desiring the salvation of all, wholesomely ordains and disposes upon careful deliberation those things which he sees will be agreeable to the Divine Majesty and by which he may bring the sheep entrusted to him by God into the single divine fold, and may acquire for them the reward of eternal felicity, and obtain pardon for their souls. This we believe will more certainly come to pass, through the aid of the Lord, if we bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes, who, like athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith, as we know by the evidence of facts, not only restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name, but also for the defense and increase of the faith vanquish them and their kingdoms and habitations, though situated in the remotest parts unknown to us, and subject them to their own temporal dominion, sparing no labor and expense, in order that those kings and princes, relieved of all obstacles, may be the more animated to the prosecution of so salutary and laudable a work.”
If we want to identify the point in time when human existence went deeply and horribly awry, this might be it.
What these bulls established for all time, was the divine right of Christians to do whatever they wanted to anyone who didn’t or to this day, doesn’t follow the “true faith.” Further edicts tried to prohibit one Christian nation from exerting territorial claims over another, but when Henry VIII left the church in 1534, all bets were off. The British kept the idea that Christians were the planet’s natural leaders but rejected Papal authority when it came to matters of international geography.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763, after the French and Indian War, forbade European settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains leaving that area to the indigenous tribes. It also stipulated that private citizens could not purchase land from Native Americans, only the Crown could.
Few Europeans were happy with this, and many settled west of the line anyway. Further treaties with the Iroquois and the Cherokee eventually extended the line westward to include much of what is, today, Kentucky and West Virginia.
It was at this point that Daniel Boone was hired by Richard Henderson to forge a path through the mountains to Kentucky and establish settlements there. While they were pushing west, the American Revolution was already approaching its boiling point.
The Iroquois and the Cherokee were not the original inhabitants of that area. For several thousand years, the Mississippian Culture had built towns and other permanent settlements throughout middle America. The giant earthen mounds scattered throughout the Mississippi area are just about all that is left of what had once been a thriving civilization with sophisticated trade routes. When Spanish explorers like de Soto first started exploring North America, the diseases they brought with them, like smallpox, decimated a huge swath of the indigenous population and caused an almost complete cultural collapse. When that happened, the Cherokee started moving in from the southeast and the Iroquois came in from the north. Other tribes also began hunting there.
That there were far fewer people living in the area than there had been two centuries before, helped support the idea that western land was “empty” and ripe for settlement. Paintings like Ranney’s “Boone’s First View of Kentucky,” reinforced the idea. In 1784, John Filson published a book called “The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke.” It made Boone a celebrity. His exploits became legend. The mythology around him grew. The exciting often greatly exaggerated story of his life made him a hero. Settlers, inspired by his adventures, flocked into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap on the two-hundred-mile-long road he had carved out of the wilderness.
By the end of the seventeen hundreds, over two hundred thousand people had moved into the Bluegrass area, including, of course, a whole branch of my family.
My paternal grandmother Eunice was born in Versailles, Kentucky. Going back on her mother’s side, the earliest Kentucky birth I can find is one of my 4th great-grandmothers named Nancy Slaughter who was born there in 1785. Her parents, Cadwallader Crabtree Slaughter and Sarah Hampton were both born in Virginia. Most of Cadwallader’s great-great-grandparents were born in either the early Virginia or Maryland colonies. Those from the East are some of my 9th great-grandparents.
THEIR parents, who would be my 10th great-grandparents are the ones that started coming over to the New World. They were all born in the late 1500s or very early 1600s. Keeping in mind that the original fort at Jamestown, Virginia was only constructed in 1607, they came over here close to the beginning.
Another family who came through the Cumberland Gap in those early years was the Linkhorns. Captain Abraham Linkhorn, whose name would travel down to his namesake grandson as Lincoln, settled in Kentucky in 1782. The Lincolns had been in the New World four generations prior to Grandfather Abraham. Samuel Lincoln left England with his family in 1637 and emigrated to what is now Massachusetts.
While working the fields with his three sons around their cabin, Captain Abraham was shot and killed by a Shawnee man. The boys ran to get help. Mordecai Lincoln, the future President’s Uncle got there and shot the man dead in the field. The rest of the party scattered.
When he became President, Lincoln wrote a letter to a relative that said, “the story of my grandfather’s death and of Uncle Mordecai, then fourteen years old, killing one of the Indians is the legend more strongly than all others imprinted among my mind and memory.”
At 23, Abraham Lincoln enlisted in the Illinois militia to fight the Black Hawk War of 1832. He was made commander of his unit but managed to keep his men out of combat. Near the end of the war, his company was given the job of burying a unit that had been killed. “I remember just how those men looked. . . as we rode up the little hill where their camp was. The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they lay, heads toward us, on the ground, and every man had a round, red spot on the top of his head, about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful, but it was grotesque, and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.”
One of the consequences of the war, was that the surviving members of the Sauk tribe were removed from Illinois to a reservation in Iowa.
Stories like this helped reinforce the idea that the non-European people living in North America were savages. They were decidedly one-sided accounts of conflicts between the two cultures. If looked at from a different point of view, they would be very different. They might seem to be tales of bravery and desperation by a people trying to defend their land and culture from relentless and ruthless invaders.
In the mid-eighteen hundreds, a journalist named John O’Sullivan came up with the phrase, “Manifest Destiny.” He was writing in support of Andrew Jackson who firmly believed in the superiority of the White man. O’Sullivan used it in an article advocating for the annexation of Texas. "…our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Because the British weren’t interested in spreading democracy, it was, therefore, the God-given right of the United States to take over those areas under their control and spread it for them.
Jackson was relentless in his banishment of tribal people from their homelands. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the Trail of Tears in which 60,000 people were forced to walk thousands of miles west onto inhospitable land. Ethnic cleansing is really the only way to describe it.
In Jackson’s words: “Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress never has for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth... But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another... In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes… Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
In February of 1823, the Supreme Court of The United States of America had handed down a decision that codified some of the ideas behind the concept of Manifest Destiny into law. In the case of Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, Justice John Marshall with the unanimous backing of the rest of the Court decided that “Land transfers from Native Americans to private individuals are void. When a tract of land has been acquired through conquest, and the property of most people who live there arise from the conquest, the people who have been conquered have a right to live on the land but cannot transfer title to the land.”
We have never let go of this idea that White Christian men are entitled to rule the world and to take who and what they want at will. It is a concept first sanctioned and codified by the Catholic Church that has persisted for five and a half centuries. We have allowed it to shape the entire political landscape of the Western world. Unimaginable bloodshed, hardship, and suffering have resulted.
Maybe it’s time to let it go.
EXCELLENT post! My friend and I were just discussing this exact same sad issue.