In the spring of 1774, two members of the Shawnee tribe allegedly robbed and murdered a Virginia settler. As Thomas Jefferson recounts in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), “The neighboring whites, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way.”
In their quest for vengeance, the white settlers ambushed the first canoe they saw coming up the river, killing the one, unarmed man as well as all of the women and children inside. This happened to be the family of Logan, a Mingo chief, Jefferson says, “who had long been distinguished as a friend of the whites,” but who now took sides in the war that ensued. The Mingos fought—and lost—alongside the Shawnees and Delawares against the Virginia militia that fall, and Logan’s letter to Lord Dunmore after the decisive battle is, according to Jefferson, a speech superior to “the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero.”
“There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature,” Logan says of his decision to fight the white men. “This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”
Logan’s speech went viral by eighteenth century standards; it was reprinted in newspapers across the country and admired for its tragic eloquence. Its popularity and resonance among white colonialists illustrate a defining aspect of settler storytelling: an acknowledgement of the injustice of Indian killing alongside an affirmation of its inevitability and salience as a guide to action. In their authenticity, Logan’s words validated a structuring precept of the white settler colony: that those who are violently displaced and eliminated are distinct from kin, whose passing should be mourned, and also opaque to posterity because they are sundered from webs of social relatedness.
Through this sleight of hand, the settlers achieved a unique perspective—one that justified violence because it afforded them a certain freedom, the productive freedom of a blank slate. As historian Patrick Wolfe famously described it, settler colonialism is thus a “structure, not an event.” Its mindset is not backward but forward looking as it consciously blurs the lines between preemption and self-defense, allegation and retribution, dispossession and property right.
Consider Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. A defining feature of life in the “free and independent” states, he wrote, was constant warfare with the denizens of a vast territorial frontier, “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions.” From its inauguration, then, American freedom was founded on this unrelenting vision of a frontier populated by unjust enemies. Jefferson’s founding brief for continuous expansionary warfare in the name of collective freedom has animated the country’s sense of itself ever since. It is, as political theorist Aziz Rana has noted, a foundational yet unexamined precept within U.S. accounts of political liberty—one that continues to define practices, institutions, and American ways of living that exact a violent toll.