years. The lives of thousands of innocent people were disrupted and even destroyed
without any pretense of legal due process. Few people spoke out in defense of the
Japanese Americans. Even the Supreme Court hesitated to challenge the “military
necessity” argument advanced by the government and the military. Only a few, such
as Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu
vs United States (1944), objected to locking up American citizens in “concentration
camps” simply because of their race.

Beginning with America’s first settlements, American Indians lost their land and
their lives, as colonists and settlers usurped the home of the native peoples to build a
new nation. Some people say the treatment of Native Americans constitutes geno-
cide. The army sometimes deliberately spread smallpox; they warred with superior
weapons, moved large populations from fertile native lands to barren deserts and
attempted to destroy native cultures. One early slaughter happened in Connecticut:

. . . The Puritans of New England were not immediately presented
with an Indian problem, for diseases introduced earlier by trading
ships along the coast had badly decimated the Indian population. Yet
when the Pequots resisted the migration of settlers into the Connect-
icut Valley in 1637, a party of Puritans surrounded the Pequot village
and set fire to it. About five hundred Indians were burned or shot to
death while trying to escape; the whites devoutly offered up thanks
to God that they had lost only two men. The woods were then
combed for any Pequots who had managed to survive, and these
were sold into slavery. Cotton Mather was grateful to the Lord that
“on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell.”9

Americans held conflicting views about the Indians. The first settlers often
thought Indians were not quite human. With closer observation, some people came to
look upon them as “noble savage” survivors of an earlier time, before the corrupting
influences of civilization. In time, Indians were viewed as human beings, though
heathens, and there were efforts to convert the tribes to Christianity. But as settlers
advanced westward and encountered tribes unwilling to give up their land, conflicts
arose and Indians were most often viewed as bloodthirsty savages who must be
eliminated.

In 1830 the United States Congress passed the Removal Act which gave the new
president the right to move all Indians east of the Mississippi to territories in the West.

… All in all, an estimated seventy thousand Indians are believed to
have resettled west of the Mississippi, but the number may have
been closer to one hundred thousand. No figures exist, though, as to
the numbers massacred before they could be persuaded to leave the
East, or on the tremendous losses suffered from disease, exposure,
and starvation on the thousand-mile march westward across an
unsettled and inhospitable land.10

The tragedy of the Indians did not end with this resettlement. No sooner were the
Eastern Indians located in the West than America discovered the area’s rich
resources and expansion pushed into the region. Indians still stood in the way of the
new nation’s “manifest destiny.” Treaties, nearly four hundred written by 1868, were
broken one by one, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Indian realized that
the white people could not be trusted. During the last decades of the century, Indians
and whites warred incessantly, with terrible brutality by both sides. The whites,
however, had the advantage and Indians continued to die.

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