If justification was needed—and the point is that it usually wasn’t—the new Americans were just punishing their predecessors for having taken the low road first. “The known rule of warfare with the Indian Savages is an indiscriminate butchery of men, women, and children,” Thomas Jefferson maintained in 1779. It was scandalous when white men visited such cruelties on fellow white people. But it was noble or at least necessary when the “Savages” themselves needed to be cleansed from the land, and Jefferson cheered two years later when seven hundred Virginians burned and terrorized Cherokee
...more