The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, by Walter Johnson (New York: Basic Books), 2020.

Walter Johnson traces the racial history of  metropolitan St. Louis from the exploration of Lewis and Clark to the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.  He is a native of Columbia, MO, personally identifying with the history he investigates. “I came to this book less as a professional historian than as a citizen taking the measure of a history that I had lived through, but not yet fully understood. This is a history that I have resisted, but also a history from which I have benefited, as a white man and a Missourian” (Prologue).

Having lived in St. Louis less than two years, I came to this book with a patchwork of history that needed some sewing together. I wanted to understand the racial tensions of this city through a historical lens. I was glad to read a historian with a stake in a good outcome for this city, because I also hoped for that outcome. Johnson expresses my wishes when he concludes: “I offer the result, not in the spirit of academics’ too-common conceit that injustice is everywhere but in their own biographical backyard, but rather in the hope that we may all seek to do better– to walk humbly, to act justly, to love mercy” (Prologue).

Chapter 1 – The dark side of capitalism in St. Louis is the history of eviction and extraction, as much as exploitation and production.  Johnson describes the eviction of the Osage and other tribes in the early 1800’s as a consequence of deliberate imbalances in the beaver trade. Subsequent evictions reflect the ideology of white supremacy driving the dispossession of races and ethnicities in St. Louis.  Borrowing from Cedric Robinson, Johnson calls this history “‘racial capitalism:” the intertwined history of white supremacist ideology and the practices of empire, extraction, and exploitation’ (6).

The earliest encounters of white people with natives in the northwest resulted in trading for wild animal pelts, especially beaver, coveted by the elite of Europe for soft and stylish hats. The Osage, Mandan and Blackfeet tribes became the exclusive suppliers for the traders, who offered guns and finely woven textiles in return. It  appeared to be a relationship for mutual profit.

But as early as 1803 President Thomas Jefferson had a strategy for dispossessing the native people of their land. In a letter to William Henry Harrison, he wrote: “We shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential Indians . . . run into debt, because we observe when these debts get beyond what the individual can pay they become willing to lop them off by a cession of land.”

During the War of 1812 the Osage tribe fought alongside the Americans against the British and their allied tribes. In the summer of 1813 the word went out that a thousand hostile Indians were gathered in St. Charles County for an assault on St. Louis. Governor William Clark ,of Lewis and Clark fame, and French trader Pierre Chouteau arranged for a garrison of 260 Osage warriors to defend the city for the duration of the war.

The peace treaty ending the War of 1812 allocated territories to the British in the north and the Americans to the south, but nothing for the Indian tribes who did most of the fighting.  Meanwhile, the fur trade progressed as Thomas Jefferson foresaw; the Osage tribes were gradually divested of their land south of the Missouri and west of the Mississippi.

Empire: William Clark maintained the trade and social balance between the tribes and the white traders in the early 1800’s.  He settled disputes and negotiated the trades that brought large swathes of Indian land under federal control. Between 1808 and 1835 he obtained 419 million acres for the United States and removed 81,000 Indians from their homelands.

During the first third of the nineteenth century, the city that had once been the economic center of the fur trade was transformed into the administrative center of midwestern Indian removal — the largest forced relocation camp on the continent.(34)

Extraction: Predictably the European demand for hats began to outstrip the supply of beaver and the western Indians refused to trap at the pace expected by the fur companies.   When the white traders tried to establish their own trading posts upriver, the Blackfeet attacked and destroyed their fort. Later the U.S. Army was summoned to clear the passages to the hunting grounds, but the Blackfeet continued to command the upper reaches of the Missouri River. As the beaver supply declined, the demand for silk hats arose in Europe and importers turned their gaze toward Asia. By 1840 the western beaver was close to extinct.

Exploitation: The hunger for land and for profit among the white settlers was described by Alexis de Tocqueville as follows: “This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die.” Eventually white settlers moved into Osage territory without regard for the negotiated settlements of William Clark.

The relationship of William Clark to his life-long slave York is a sad postscript to exploitation. They were raised together on his father’s farm, and York accompanied Clark westward and on his entire northwest expedition. In Johnson’s words:

[York] had suffered the heat and mosquitoes of the Upper Midwest summer; the freezing hungry winter at Fort Mandan; and the torturous uncertain passage over the mountains. He had rowed a boat upstream against the current of the river and portaged the expedition’s goods around the Great Falls of the Missouri. He had cared for his owner when Clark was disabled for days on end with irritable bowel syndrome that left him not only physically incapacitated, but also unable to control the crew of mountain men allegedly under his command. York had seen his owner utterly dependent upon Indians for food and for the directions that guided him along the trail that today bears the white man’s name. York had been celebrated by the Indians who had never seen a man with skin so dark as his, who wondered at it, caressed it, and understood it as a sign of his vitality and potency. (38)

Two years following the expedition, York traveled to Virginia with Clark, who was  courting his future wife. On the return trip they stopped in Louisville, where the Clark family owned a farm and and where York’s wife remained enslaved. York told Clark he wished to stay in Louisville with his wife while Clark returned home with his bride. Clark refused and returned to St. Louis with York and nine other Clark family slaves, some also leaving family behind. Clark wrote back to this brother, ” I have been obliged [to] whip almost all my people, and they are now beginning to think that  it is best to do better and not Cry.” Clark was dissatisfied with York after this and apparently returned him to Kentucky, asking his brother to find the slave a “severe master” who would make him wish he were in Missouri again and to “give over that wife of his.”

In an interview with the famous author Washington Irving, Clark claimed he had emancipated York and provided him with a wagon and horses to run a transport between Nashville and Richmond. “He could not get up early enough in the morning,” reported Clark”–his horses were ill-kept–two died– the others grew poor. He sold them and was cheated.” “Damn this freedom,” said York, according to Clark. “I have never had a happy day since I got it.”

Indeed, Clark declared, he had emancipated several slaves, and always the story had the same moral: “They all repented and wanted to come back.” They could not live without him (39).

The racist convictions of William Clark were evidenced by his inability to see his dependency on human beings he considered his inferiors:

• his dependence on the Osage warriors during the War of 1812 and his transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of their land to Pierre Chouteau for their alleged debt in the fur trade
• his dependence on his Indian guides, especially the Shoshone woman Sacajawea, to find the passages to the Pacific
• his dependence on  his personal black slave throughout the expedition in the Northwest

But when it came to land settlement, William Clark was a humane presence compared to the angry white settlers who just wanted to occupy land without regard for purchase. By the time he was defeated as governor of Missouri, Clark was considered an Indian appeaser, because he had tried to negotiate land deals instead of letting white settlers invade the native people’s land.  Thus racial capitalism in mid-century descended to “white settler imperialism and ethnic cleansing” (39).