I fundamentally am skeptical of claims like those found in Stannard's book, because, in my experience, these kinds of claims usually do not withstand simple scrutiny. So, as an illustration, let's interrogate the claim that Cortes killed 40,000 Aztecs after taking Tenochtitlan. (Note that I picked this claim somewhat at random and did no prior research.)
Although you quoted page 80, page 79 appears to be where this fact first gets asserted, and it has an end note: "More than forty thousand were killed in that single day, and 'so loud was the wailing of the women and children that there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not bleed at the sound. ' Indeed, because 'we could no longer endure the stench of the dead bodies that had lain in those streets for many days, which was the most loathsome thing in all the world,' recalled Cortes, 'we returned to our camps.' 77."
End note 77 is "Cortes, Letters from Mexico, pp. 257-62." Per Stannard, apparently Cortes himself admitted to killing 40,000 Aztecs in a single day. Unfortunately for Stannard, Cortes did not admit to this fact.
In Cortes's Third Letter to Charles V (dated May 15, 1522, which described fighting during the 1521 siege), Cortes claimed that the day’s toll, including prisoners, “numbered in all more than forty thousand men.” Therefore, Cortes did not claim that more than forty thousand were killed in that single day. However, Cortes did report the following: "It appears [the Aztecs] had perished to the number of more than fifty thousand, from the salt water which they drank, or from starvation, and pestilence." This death resulted from Cortes's use of siege warfare over time. Cortes also reported that fifteen thousand ended up massacred, even though he claimed to have tried his best to avoid this slaughter, but the Spaniards, numbering ~900, could not constrain their Amerindian allies, numbering ~150,000. Again, Stannard takes this description of the events and asserts a clean fact that the Spaniards killed forty thousand Amerindians.
Anyways, I find the claim that the Spanish killed 40,000 Aztecs after taking Tenochtitlan formulation to be very sloppy at best (the truth is interesting enough), and I see no reason to trust Stannard. Again, I picked this claim simply because it seemed verifiable. It failed.
1491 is a fascinating book, but I did not find Mann's population estimates convincing. Yes, Tenochtitlan was extraordinary, Cuzco was impressive, but there were no great cities anywhere in North America or almost anywhere in South America. The technological level of most Indian civilizations was quite low. The Spanish conquered against odds partly with the aid of allies, yes, but steel and horses also made a huge difference, just like Jared Diamond said. It isn't an accident that Cortes, not one of his indigenous allies, wound up ruling Mexico.
I've seen claims that three or four million people lived on Hispaniola (Dominican Republic + Haiti) before Columbus. By contrast, David Reich's Harvard lab used DNA analysis to come up with a pre-Columbus Hispaniola population estimate in the tens of thousands. I don't know if that's right, but at least it's not a Number from Nowhere.
My understanding is that most natives died from European diseases. This was 3 centuries before germ theory, and neither side really understood how and why it happened.
This is exactly what medieval societies in Europe and the rest of the world did. I recently visited a charming castle near the English channel and read that the "job" of the lord of the castle was to make raids on the French countryside and either steal their possessions or take hostages to collect ransom.
Should we condemn every historical leader that followed this path? Not clear. How many successful historical leaders didn't follow this path?
We should all be extremely grateful to live in today's world where killing others and taking their possession is not the primary way to "succeed" in life.
The 90%+ numbers of deaths in the New World are bogus. Those figures come from non-quantitative books written by political activists. Quantitative estimates based on archaeological evidence yield figures closer to 30-50%.
I remember traveling in Northern Virginia and seeing "President Jefferson Davis Boulevard". I thought, at the time: hWhy are they honouring these pro-slavery losers? But gosh, Washington and Jefferson were pretty awful, too. But it would be an uphill battle to remove their names from street signs and their faces from money, etc.
Meanhwhile in Canada, they renamed "Dundas Square" to "Sankofa Square" because Henry Dundas, an abolitionist watered down some abolitionist legislation so that it could pass! For this, he is a "monster!"
All ridiculous. A serious historian takes into account the mores of the time. The Aztecs were pretty savage in nursing and enslaving others. The Inca ruled others also. Neither Cortes nor Pizarro (a nastier character) would have got far without the assistance of other natives happy to revolt against the Aztecs and the Inca. As for Jefferson Davis read his "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government". The Civil War was about secession not slavery. Lincoln said it was about the Union regardless of slavery. He did not abolish slavery in the border States.
Confederate vice president and top propagandist Alexander Stephens explained that recognition of the inequality of the races and that slavery was the black man's natural portion was the "corner-stone" of the Confederacy.
"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition...."
Secession debates in the southern states focused on whether slavery could be better defended in the Union or out of it. See, e.g. B.H. Hill as reported in the New York Times in November 1860:
Yes, in 1862 Lincoln said his aim was preserving the Union, not ending slavery. But that changed. In 1864 the Republican platform was that the war would would continue until slavery was wiped out everywhere. The Democrats declared that the war was a bloody and costly failure and that peace should be sought. The Republicans won.
By early 1865 slavery had been abolished in every border state. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was passed through Congress while the war was still going on. And the south was debating freeing and arming slaves in a desperate attempt to stave off defeat.
As Lincoln put it unsurpassably well in his second inaugural (March 1865)
"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding....The Almighty has His own purposes."
A good comment. Maybe better to distinguish proximate and underlying causes or motives. As for secession let us not forget Nee England States wanted to secede in the War of 1812.
I wouldn't pat the Canadians on the back too much. How many cities and areas in Canada are still named after radically pro-colony British leaders? Victoria, etc.
Queen Victoria was a virtuous Christian Queen. She instructed Her Governors to have regard to protecting Her native subjects. She took Her Coronation Oath seriously.
Oh well, so long as she signed a little peace of paper who cares what her actual government actually did. I'm sure all the murdered people took great comfort in her nice words
What the Europeans did in America was horrible. It's worth mentioning though that a handful of Europeans themselves didn't overthrow the Aztecs. It required local help as well from those subjugated by the Aztecs. Whether they eventually regretted their choice I do not know.
The wider truth is that ALL CULTURES WORLDWIDE FOR ALL OF HISTORY believed that if you could conquer another tribe you owned the land and could enslave them. The more sucessful tended to be literate and wrote extensively about their sins which is why we now focus blame on them. Not until Wilberforce did anyone anywhere rage against slavery. No pope condemned all slavery until after the US civil war. No leader in any culture spoke for self determination until the League of Nations. The standard attitude for millenia was first corrected by European culture.
How so? I have read 1491 and found it fairly convincing on numbers and the impact of disease. I also read Las Casas 'short account' which I took to be perhaps exaggerated / cherry picked but mostly accurate in that there was terrible brutality. I intend to also read Cortez and Diaz, but what would you argue is the correct attitude to take and what would you recommend reading?
The most straightforward reading of the ending of Apocalypto is that the arriving Spaniards are just another band of well armed, well organized psychos on the march through Jaguar Paw's land.
The film does not use any standard cinematic language to support the reading of the Spaniards as a moral or civilizing force. Their appearance is not accompanied by any heroic swelling music, they're lighted like corpses, they do not speak, and barely even move. They might as well be alien zombies landing on the beach.
Jaguar Paw correctly reads them as bad news and gets away as quickly as possible. Remember, it's the Mayan state's slaver minions who walk over to greet them.
It's an analytic mistake to use a simple "colonizers vs. natives" framework to interpret the film. The film consistently portrays agents of sedentary agricultural states as malicious or indifferent existential threats to the virtuous tribal bands and family units of the forest.
Thank god they killed these inferior races and settled it with superior white people, making modern America. Can you imagine the opposite? That backward savages would continue squatting on the most valuable real estate in the world and America never existed.
---
“Let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages, which they certainly were not. … What was it that they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal?”
Disease is a two way street. Let's compare the toll in America's to the toll of diseases inflicted on Europe, like malaria and the plague. They too were imported.
Perhaps open borders has some downsides? Or are immigrants and political and economic refugees only acceptable when they come ashore today, but must be condemned in the past?
I'm still reading Joseph Ellis book The Great Contradiction, the tragic side of American founding. It explains the many tradeoffs that were made, the political sacrifices of one cause to advance another, and the danger of backdating today's simplified morality onto the past.
I fundamentally am skeptical of claims like those found in Stannard's book, because, in my experience, these kinds of claims usually do not withstand simple scrutiny. So, as an illustration, let's interrogate the claim that Cortes killed 40,000 Aztecs after taking Tenochtitlan. (Note that I picked this claim somewhat at random and did no prior research.)
Although you quoted page 80, page 79 appears to be where this fact first gets asserted, and it has an end note: "More than forty thousand were killed in that single day, and 'so loud was the wailing of the women and children that there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not bleed at the sound. ' Indeed, because 'we could no longer endure the stench of the dead bodies that had lain in those streets for many days, which was the most loathsome thing in all the world,' recalled Cortes, 'we returned to our camps.' 77."
End note 77 is "Cortes, Letters from Mexico, pp. 257-62." Per Stannard, apparently Cortes himself admitted to killing 40,000 Aztecs in a single day. Unfortunately for Stannard, Cortes did not admit to this fact.
In Cortes's Third Letter to Charles V (dated May 15, 1522, which described fighting during the 1521 siege), Cortes claimed that the day’s toll, including prisoners, “numbered in all more than forty thousand men.” Therefore, Cortes did not claim that more than forty thousand were killed in that single day. However, Cortes did report the following: "It appears [the Aztecs] had perished to the number of more than fifty thousand, from the salt water which they drank, or from starvation, and pestilence." This death resulted from Cortes's use of siege warfare over time. Cortes also reported that fifteen thousand ended up massacred, even though he claimed to have tried his best to avoid this slaughter, but the Spaniards, numbering ~900, could not constrain their Amerindian allies, numbering ~150,000. Again, Stannard takes this description of the events and asserts a clean fact that the Spaniards killed forty thousand Amerindians.
Anyways, I find the claim that the Spanish killed 40,000 Aztecs after taking Tenochtitlan formulation to be very sloppy at best (the truth is interesting enough), and I see no reason to trust Stannard. Again, I picked this claim simply because it seemed verifiable. It failed.
1491 is a fascinating book, but I did not find Mann's population estimates convincing. Yes, Tenochtitlan was extraordinary, Cuzco was impressive, but there were no great cities anywhere in North America or almost anywhere in South America. The technological level of most Indian civilizations was quite low. The Spanish conquered against odds partly with the aid of allies, yes, but steel and horses also made a huge difference, just like Jared Diamond said. It isn't an accident that Cortes, not one of his indigenous allies, wound up ruling Mexico.
On a specific example of the unreliability of ancient population figures, see David Henige's He Came, He Saw, We Counted about Caesar's depredations in Gaul. https://www.persee.fr/doc/adh_0066-2062_1998_num_1998_1_2162
Henige wrote a book about about pre-Columbus population estimates, succinctly titled Numbers from Nowhere. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Numbers_from_Nowhere/1MJ9HPsGsrUC?hl=en&gbpv=1 Mann talks about it in his introduction to 1491, but if he ever adequately addressed its arguments, I missed it.
I've seen claims that three or four million people lived on Hispaniola (Dominican Republic + Haiti) before Columbus. By contrast, David Reich's Harvard lab used DNA analysis to come up with a pre-Columbus Hispaniola population estimate in the tens of thousands. I don't know if that's right, but at least it's not a Number from Nowhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opinion/dna-caribbean-genocide.html
98% to 99% of the army of Cortez were indigenous. Mainly Tlaxcaltecas. So, who killed Aztecs where mainly other Americans.
Also Aztecs conquered his territory less than 200 year before, not peacefully, of course.
So, what is the moral lesson here?
My understanding is that most natives died from European diseases. This was 3 centuries before germ theory, and neither side really understood how and why it happened.
Very interesting post.
This is exactly what medieval societies in Europe and the rest of the world did. I recently visited a charming castle near the English channel and read that the "job" of the lord of the castle was to make raids on the French countryside and either steal their possessions or take hostages to collect ransom.
Should we condemn every historical leader that followed this path? Not clear. How many successful historical leaders didn't follow this path?
We should all be extremely grateful to live in today's world where killing others and taking their possession is not the primary way to "succeed" in life.
The 90%+ numbers of deaths in the New World are bogus. Those figures come from non-quantitative books written by political activists. Quantitative estimates based on archaeological evidence yield figures closer to 30-50%.
I remember traveling in Northern Virginia and seeing "President Jefferson Davis Boulevard". I thought, at the time: hWhy are they honouring these pro-slavery losers? But gosh, Washington and Jefferson were pretty awful, too. But it would be an uphill battle to remove their names from street signs and their faces from money, etc.
Meanhwhile in Canada, they renamed "Dundas Square" to "Sankofa Square" because Henry Dundas, an abolitionist watered down some abolitionist legislation so that it could pass! For this, he is a "monster!"
All ridiculous. A serious historian takes into account the mores of the time. The Aztecs were pretty savage in nursing and enslaving others. The Inca ruled others also. Neither Cortes nor Pizarro (a nastier character) would have got far without the assistance of other natives happy to revolt against the Aztecs and the Inca. As for Jefferson Davis read his "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government". The Civil War was about secession not slavery. Lincoln said it was about the Union regardless of slavery. He did not abolish slavery in the border States.
"nursing" - damned auto correct! How it got that from "conquering"??
I suspected all along that the barbarism was iatrogenic.
The Civil War was roughly 99 44/100% about slavery.
The declarations of the seceding states made crystal clear that they were seceding because of the threat to slavery.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp (South Carolina)
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp (Mississippi)
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_texsec.asp (Texas)
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_geosec.asp (Georgia)
Confederate vice president and top propagandist Alexander Stephens explained that recognition of the inequality of the races and that slavery was the black man's natural portion was the "corner-stone" of the Confederacy.
"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition...."
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
Secession debates in the southern states focused on whether slavery could be better defended in the Union or out of it. See, e.g. B.H. Hill as reported in the New York Times in November 1860:
https://www.nytimes.com/1860/11/27/archives/disunion-in-georgia-hon-bh-hills-speechan-able-argument-for.html
Yes, in 1862 Lincoln said his aim was preserving the Union, not ending slavery. But that changed. In 1864 the Republican platform was that the war would would continue until slavery was wiped out everywhere. The Democrats declared that the war was a bloody and costly failure and that peace should be sought. The Republicans won.
By early 1865 slavery had been abolished in every border state. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was passed through Congress while the war was still going on. And the south was debating freeing and arming slaves in a desperate attempt to stave off defeat.
As Lincoln put it unsurpassably well in his second inaugural (March 1865)
"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding....The Almighty has His own purposes."
https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm
To sum Lincoln up.
1. Slavery was the cause of the war, as everyone understood.
2. At the beginning, the federal government claimed no more than the right to restrict the spread of slavery beyond the south.
3. Neither side anticipated that the cause of the war, slavery, would not even survive the war.
A good comment. Maybe better to distinguish proximate and underlying causes or motives. As for secession let us not forget Nee England States wanted to secede in the War of 1812.
I wouldn't pat the Canadians on the back too much. How many cities and areas in Canada are still named after radically pro-colony British leaders? Victoria, etc.
Queen Victoria was a virtuous Christian Queen. She instructed Her Governors to have regard to protecting Her native subjects. She took Her Coronation Oath seriously.
lol. This her? I imagine some Indians of the time saw things differently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857#Consequences
Queen Victoria's proclamation cited in the reference shows she wished to be benevolent.
Oh well, so long as she signed a little peace of paper who cares what her actual government actually did. I'm sure all the murdered people took great comfort in her nice words
/s
By the way, it was the East India Company which governed before 1858. The Crown took over administration afterwards.
What the Europeans did in America was horrible. It's worth mentioning though that a handful of Europeans themselves didn't overthrow the Aztecs. It required local help as well from those subjugated by the Aztecs. Whether they eventually regretted their choice I do not know.
The wider truth is that ALL CULTURES WORLDWIDE FOR ALL OF HISTORY believed that if you could conquer another tribe you owned the land and could enslave them. The more sucessful tended to be literate and wrote extensively about their sins which is why we now focus blame on them. Not until Wilberforce did anyone anywhere rage against slavery. No pope condemned all slavery until after the US civil war. No leader in any culture spoke for self determination until the League of Nations. The standard attitude for millenia was first corrected by European culture.
Slavery through most of human history was seen as the fate of defeated enemies. African kings sold their captives to Europeans and Arabs.
My gosh! That's brutal!
Maybe it's time for the author to do more research and readings on the subject?
How so? I have read 1491 and found it fairly convincing on numbers and the impact of disease. I also read Las Casas 'short account' which I took to be perhaps exaggerated / cherry picked but mostly accurate in that there was terrible brutality. I intend to also read Cortez and Diaz, but what would you argue is the correct attitude to take and what would you recommend reading?
Maybe it's time for commenters to share what they think is incorrect and provide evidence to back up their opinions, otherwise what is the point?
The most straightforward reading of the ending of Apocalypto is that the arriving Spaniards are just another band of well armed, well organized psychos on the march through Jaguar Paw's land.
The film does not use any standard cinematic language to support the reading of the Spaniards as a moral or civilizing force. Their appearance is not accompanied by any heroic swelling music, they're lighted like corpses, they do not speak, and barely even move. They might as well be alien zombies landing on the beach.
Jaguar Paw correctly reads them as bad news and gets away as quickly as possible. Remember, it's the Mayan state's slaver minions who walk over to greet them.
It's an analytic mistake to use a simple "colonizers vs. natives" framework to interpret the film. The film consistently portrays agents of sedentary agricultural states as malicious or indifferent existential threats to the virtuous tribal bands and family units of the forest.
Thank god they killed these inferior races and settled it with superior white people, making modern America. Can you imagine the opposite? That backward savages would continue squatting on the most valuable real estate in the world and America never existed.
---
“Let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages, which they certainly were not. … What was it that they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal?”
-Ayn Rand
That was a surprising Caplan post. If it was. Could the Caplan-twins do a review?
Disease is a two way street. Let's compare the toll in America's to the toll of diseases inflicted on Europe, like malaria and the plague. They too were imported.
Perhaps open borders has some downsides? Or are immigrants and political and economic refugees only acceptable when they come ashore today, but must be condemned in the past?
I'm still reading Joseph Ellis book The Great Contradiction, the tragic side of American founding. It explains the many tradeoffs that were made, the political sacrifices of one cause to advance another, and the danger of backdating today's simplified morality onto the past.
When is Bryan leaving the Americas?