US Leaders’ Racism in pre-1900 Origin of US-Viet Nam War
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Cites for some facts are in Corporate Tsunami in Countryside Paradise: 1875–1900 Origin of US War in Viet Nam (2021). See briandroesch.com
During the late 1800s, US leaders began commercial trade with French invaders in Sai Gon, Viet Nam. The French invasion was notably violent. So, in 1873, Viet Nam emissary Bui Vien arrived in Washington, D.C., requesting that the invasion stop. Why couldn’t the US and France just have friendly trade with Viet Nam?
But Viet Nam was a country of yellow and brown people.
In the US in post-Civil War years, Black citizens were being murdered in large numbers by white Southerners, condoned by government. In allowing the murders, the US government was undoing much of the Northern victory over the South in 1865, which had freed 4 million enslaved Black people. This era receives extensive treatment in The 1619 Project: A new origin story (2021), by 12 eminent professors and 6 top-caliber investigative journalists. Other works also provide important information.
US leaders’ economic interest in Viet Nam. The French conquest had started in 1859, and the US State Department observed in 1870 that Viet Nam’s main port at Sai Gon was important in world commerce. For three or four months each year after rice harvest, US vessels took on cargoes of rice there. By 1872, an estimated 30 US ships a year were sailing into Sai Gon.[1]
In 1873, US leaders rejected Bui Vien’s request. He returned in 1875 and was again rejected. Instead, in 1876 the US gunboat Ashuelot sailed into Sai Gon harbor. While the official purpose was to check on an exhibit for an exhibition, it was also a show of force.[2]
A purpose of the killings in both Viet Nam and the US was to establish economic domination over people of color. Equal Justice Initiative writes that US General Carl Schurz reported that the murders were to let other Blacks know that quitting work for their former slavers would bring certain destruction.
Memorial: About to be killed for economic domination of a race of US citizens. Reconstruction in America - Read Report | Equal Justice InitiativeEJI Reports
Punctuating that purpose during 1868–1934, whites were given free 160-acre land plots under the Homestead Act. But Blacks were largely denied farms.
Murdering Openly. In Congress in 1871, supporters of Blacks managed to pass an anti-violence law, but the US Supreme Court struck it down. After that, Congress and President Grant basically abandoned Black people. They passed the Amnesty Act of 1872: It restored office-holding qualifications for most Confederate leaders and other officials who had been disqualified for having rebelled against the United States.
That opened the gates of hell. White racists openly campaigned on promises to ensure white domination. They won elections as governors and state legislators. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in January 1865 by six former Confederate soldiers, increased its terror throughout the South.
Between 1872 and 1876, encompassing Bui Vien’s two visits, white Southerners committed at least 12 large scale massacres of Black US citizens. During 1865–77, at least 2,000 Black women, men, and children were lynched. These killings have been documented by the Equal Justice Initiative.
On Easter Sunday in 1873, 300 white people attacked a courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, where Black protestors fled after peacefully challenging fraudulent election results. In the assault, scores of unarmed Black men were shot and killed. About 50 more were taken prisoner and later executed by the white militia. As many as 150 Black citizens were killed in the massacre.
In August 1874, an armed mob of several hundred white men abducted 16 Black US citizens from jail in Trenton, Tennessee. The mob drowned 10 of the Black people in a nearby river and shot the other 6 to death. A letter in a local newspaper said that if allowed to live, the Black men “might violate the persons of a dozen ladies, burn a hundred houses and kill as many men,” Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) reported.
The Ku Klux Klan and other terror groups gained boldness over the years following the war, regularly raiding entire communities, to intimidate all Black people. “Community-wide massacres grew terrifying in their frequency, as individual incidents of violence escalated into large-scale attacks,” reports EJI.
The US leaders’ acceptance of murders for economic domination in both the US and Viet Nam in those years presents a historical question: Was a view that murders against people of color were acceptable for economic domination a factor in a later decision by US leaders to attack Viet Nam? This question regarding the war in the 1960s is analyzed in this writer’s book, Corporate Tsunami.
Recommended Readings.
· January 21, 2022 book review by this writer on the book 1619 Project (2021). briandroesch.com navigate to Voter Knowledge page.
· Hannah-Jones, N., Roper, Caitlin, Silverman, Ilena, Silverstein, Jake, & New York Times Company. (2021). The 1619 Project : A new origin story (First ed.). New York: One World.
· Reconstruction in America - Read Report | Equal Justice InitiativeEJI Reports eji.org/reports/reconstruction-in-america-overview/.
[1] Early US shipping and Viet Nam. Miller, R. (1990). The United States and Vietnam, 1787–1941. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, pp. 70–79.
[2] 1876 American gunboat Ashuelot visits Saigon “Cochinchina.” Dictionary of American Fighting Ships, Vol. A, 1991, Navy Department, Washington, p. 427.