The Panic of 1837, Climate Change, & Hoping for Peace

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Martin Van Buren was better at acquiring presidential power than using it for himself. Van Buren was elected president in 1836, but he saw financial problems beginning even before he entered the White House.

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Crossposted at Progressive Historians &

Native American Netroots

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It turned out to be the worst economic depression that the young nation had yet known.

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First Depression in American history. Banks lost money, people lost faith in banks, and the country lost faith in President Martin van Buren.

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Thousands of people were out of work in a country that had never been through such an experience. In the cities, mobs stormed the warehouses for food, flocked to the poorhouses, and committed crimes so they could go to jail, where they could at least survive. Although prosperity began to return within two years, it came too late to save Van Buren politically. In the 1840 election, he was badly defeated by his former opponent, William Henry Harrison, and suffered what was to him the disgrace of being a one-term president.

The Panic of 1837 was part of the climate that led to the Trail of Tears. Have those lessons been learned yet?

(emphasis mine)

Climate change will lead to war

BALI: Global warming could lead to internal conflicts, regional unrest and war, with North Africa, the Sahel and South Asia among the hotspots, says a report issued at the Bali climate summit.

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“If global warming is not confined, fragile, vulnerable states which have already now fairly bad governance might implode under the pressure of global warming and then send shock waves to other countries so that you will have spill-over effects,” said one of the authors, Hans Schnellhuber, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin, Germany.

If warming rose by five degrees Celsius “we might have something like a global civil war,” said Schnellhuber.

Not being any kind of authority on sociological beliefs, I can’t say for certain. However, I am inclined to think less so than more so. All I can offer are my thoughts that are based on a couple of historical events.

This is a paradox I’ll never understand: why is innocence not protected by itself, since the innocent are innocent? It eternally begs the question and leaves no satisfactory answers. Either the paradox is itself the answer, or there is something else? Yes, there was a hope for peace in the face of being exterminated –

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…despite broken promises and attacks on his own life, speak of him as a great leader with an almost unique vision of the possibility for coexistence between white society and the culture of the plains…

– which I think began coming true one century later after Moxtaveto’s death.

Moxtaveto (“Black Kettle”) at Washita: 11- 27, 1868 (Re-introduction)

A line was formed after the reenactment with the grandsons of the 7th Calvary, who obviously wanted to help in this healing, at the front of the line. Lawrence Hart, a Mennonite pastor, felt very angry as he watched the bones of the child being passed down it towards the front. A Native woman then put a blanket over the little coffin containing the child’s bones, which continued to be passed down the line to Hart. The blanket was then handed to him…The lady I spoke with said there wasn’t a dry eye left.

I see that as a “doorframe” and this as a door to walk through,

David Gabbard’s essay entitled “Before Predator Came” in“Unlearning the Language of Conquest Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America” by editor Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs). p. 230

For European Americans in particular, we need to inquire into the history of our ancestors’ journeys across the Atlantic. Did they really leave Europe to escape religious persecution, or were the majority of our ancestors deemed elements of a surplus population whose deportation could help facilitate predator’s virulent spread to other corners of the earth? Did the enclosure movement and the subsequent deportation of the unemployed and “criminal” elements to the Americas, Africa, and Australia constitute our own “Trail of Tears”? Was it a forerunner to the reservation system imposed on the Indigenous People that predator would later establish? There and other questions abound. Seeking their answers is vital for the sake of remembering ourselves. First Nations scholars from the Indigenous Peoples of North America and elsewhere have shown us the door; it is up to us to walk through it. It’s the only path home.

for “coming home” and having the freedom to chose peace, just like the Sand Creek Massacre descendants and the grandsons of the 7th Calvary did.

Too many great leaders have died and given their lives for the answers leading to peace, that are now right in front of us, to not be used now. It can safely be said that economic collapse with dwindling natural resources, such as the following,

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We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars,  is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

will require a willingness to acknowledge our connectedness as one human family.

I say that because dehumanization in one form or the other precedes a Trail of Tears, a being forced to an Auschwitz, or a lynching after a Middle Passage. Of course, acknowledging the connection between one another and Mother Earth may not make much sense –

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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

– and that is a very great thing.