“A People before Useless”: Ethnic Cleansing in the Wartime Hudson Valley, 1754–1763

abstract:This article investigates the issue of ethnic cleansing against Native peoples in early America and the relationship between ethnic cleansing and genocide. It examines the efforts of colonial officials in New York and New Jersey to remove Native groups in the Hudson Valley region during the Seven Years’ War. In an atmosphere of suspicion and animosity, colonial authorities first sought to exert control over local Natives through surveillance and internment in colonial towns. Then, following an outburst of genocidal violence from ordinary colonials, they began to encourage the Natives to leave their homelands, first for refuge among the Mohawk allies of the British and then for Native settlements in the distant Susquehanna country. Cast as an effort at paternalistic protection of vulnerable Natives, the official effort at ethnic cleansing worked in tandem with indiscriminate violence from ordinary colonial, as officials both exploited and exaggerated the genocidal attitudes of the colonial population to encourage Native removal. Though colonial officials abandoned this ethnic cleansing program after the return of peace to the region in 1758, the evidence presented here shows that largely nonviolent efforts at removal or ethnic cleansing cannot easily be disentangled from the threat of genocide or extermination.