"Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode"
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"Powerful and enterprising" is doing a lot of moral laundering here. Miles frames conquest as a kind of natural economic weather system: energetic people expand, space gets rearranged, and the displaced simply discover they no longer have "certainty" anywhere. The sentence advances with the calm rhythm of inevitability - step by step, Atlantic to West - turning a centuries-long campaign of warfare, forced removal, broken treaties, and starvation policy into a tidy geographical glide.
That passive construction is the tell. He never names the machinery that made this possible: federal legislation, the Army, settler militias, railroads, land speculators, reservation systems. "Driven them back" briefly admits coercion, then retreats into abstraction. The emotional violence is outsourced to the map. Even "scarcely a spot of ground" sounds like a neutral observation, when it is really a report on success: Indigenous permanence has been reduced to a rounding error.
Context matters: Miles was not a distant commentator but a senior U.S. Army officer who fought in the Indian Wars and later became Commanding General of the Army. He’d seen the policy up close. That makes the phrasing read less like naive triumphalism than institutional self-justification - a way to describe ethnic cleansing without the scandalous vocabulary. The subtext is a hard argument about legitimacy: Americans deserve the continent because they are "enterprising"; Native nations lose it because their claim is treated as temporary, conditional, and ultimately revocable. The real subject isn’t Indians. It’s permission.
That passive construction is the tell. He never names the machinery that made this possible: federal legislation, the Army, settler militias, railroads, land speculators, reservation systems. "Driven them back" briefly admits coercion, then retreats into abstraction. The emotional violence is outsourced to the map. Even "scarcely a spot of ground" sounds like a neutral observation, when it is really a report on success: Indigenous permanence has been reduced to a rounding error.
Context matters: Miles was not a distant commentator but a senior U.S. Army officer who fought in the Indian Wars and later became Commanding General of the Army. He’d seen the policy up close. That makes the phrasing read less like naive triumphalism than institutional self-justification - a way to describe ethnic cleansing without the scandalous vocabulary. The subtext is a hard argument about legitimacy: Americans deserve the continent because they are "enterprising"; Native nations lose it because their claim is treated as temporary, conditional, and ultimately revocable. The real subject isn’t Indians. It’s permission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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