Roxanne says : "Beginning of Chapter 7:
These Spaniards [Mexicans] are the meanest looking race of people I ever saw, don't appear more civilized than our Indians generally. Dirty, filthy looking creatures.
--Captain Lemuel Ford, 1835
That the Indian race of Mexico must recede before us, is quite as certain as that that is the destiny of our own Indians.
--Waddy Thompson, jr., 1836
Not only U.S. army officers like Captain Ford and diplomats like Mr. Thompson dismissed Indigenous peoples as less than human with no rights to their lands, cultures, and self-governance. "Indian hating" was part and parcel of "democracy" and "freedom." The populist poet of Jacksonian Democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super-race through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war against Mexico, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand U.S. troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there, stating, "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country will find its way." Whitman made his views very clear, writing: "The n-word, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history…A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." Whitman's sentiment (and he was the most beloved writer of his time, and still beloved by contemporary U.S. poets, particularly enshrined by the Beat poets) followed the already established U.S. origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the native peoples, adding his own twist of prescient Social Darwinism." Sent from my iPhone