American Indian Wars: the roar of capital and a dirge of humanity

The records and narratives of Soule and other righteous officers who refused to participate in the massacre sparked such outrage that the authorities had to initiate an investigation. Despite Chivington's coercion and cajolery, Soule resolutely chose to testify about the war crime before the Colorado military commission. Because of this, he was eventually assassinated. The name Silas Soule is not known to many Americans, but as historian David Fridtjof Halaas put it, without people like him who had the courage to disobey orders,"the descendants probably wouldn't be around today, and there would be no one to tell the stories."

The Sand Creek Massacre is but one episode of the 100-year U.S. genocide against native Americans. Rapacious acts including ethnic cleansing, cultural erosion and environment destruction reinforced America's national strength and paved the way for its rise. The misdeed was seemingly driven by Washington's land policy to promote the westward expansion, but, in its essence, this was the one and only path for the U.S. to complete its primitive accumulation of capital and the transition from free competition to monopoly.

For a long time after the founding of the U.S., an extremely large portion of Congress seats were occupied by land opportunists, land brokers, big capitalists and those who had a close connection with them. In an era where the country had just emerged out of the rubble of war and had to start from scratch, the U.S. government did two things to ease financial difficulties.

For one, taking advantage of native Americans' ignorance of modern concepts such as sovereignty, territory, real right and human rights, it implemented an exploitative policy combining massacre, deceptive treaties, loans and forced assimilation to arbitrarily snatch away control over their ancestral homelands.

For another, it traded the "fruits" of war, namely lands, for scarce capital. Big capitalists and land opportunists sold lands to ordinary immigrants at a high price in the form of usurious loans to bankrupt the latter. This indirectly promoted the development of capitalist farms and the land tenancy system. In the meantime, they invested the profits from land opportunism in high-returning sectors such as the fur trade and the transportation industry.

If, in American Indian Wars, native Americans were the biggest victims, followed by the ordinary public, then investors including businessmen, bankers, financiers and factory owners, together with social elites and senior politicians, were the ultimate winners in the capital reshuffle.

Until this day, while the feats of American founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are much celebrated, there has rarely been any mention of the Indian lives that they trod underfoot and slaughtered like lambs.

When people eulogize the pioneering, aspiring and reformative American spirit fostered by the westward movement, they intuitively turn a blind eye to the blood of innocent American Indians flowing underneath capitalist lust and greed.

Captain Silas Soule's letters and fate unveiled, through the American Indian Wars, an age of roaring capital growth. As a witness of the tragedy of native Americans, a man of conscience and an army officer serving the government, he wrote a dirge of humanity that is supposed to be dedicated to American Indians.