Strong circumstantial evidence supporting piracy as a cause of the Civil War.

[Byrd]

That's the official reason.  

The official reason for the Civil War was the Proclamation Line?  I'm pretty sure this isn't so.

[Solvedit]

The official reason for the Civil War was the Proclamation Line?  I'm pretty sure this isn't so.

Pontiac's rebellion was the official reason for the establishment of the Proclamation Line of 1763.

I posited that an unofficial reason was the king may have wanted the colonies to fill up with a counterbalance for the enlightenment thinking which eventually led to the Revolution.  He may have known that some of the various tribes in the area may not have been able to fight off heavily armed newcomers.  Infighting among the natives may have weakened them at times.  The Creek War of 1814 was in part a civil war among natives and perhaps there were others.

Do you not like the South?  If you had just been pushed out of Dominica or Jamaica, would you walk right past the South so you could go to the place which led to the setting aside of much of the South? 

The natives might have appreciated the newcomers at first.  1812 war general and Choctaw chief Pushumatawaha Mushulatubee's last name sounds like a corruption of the Lithuanian words for "I am beating a Lithuanian."  Chief Selocta Chinnabee's name sounds like the Polish word for nobility, szlachta.  Sequoia, who designed the Cherokee alphabet, looks just like financier Kevin O'Leary.  A band of 2000 Chiaha from Georgia started calling themselves the Micosukees around the 1770s.  "Ukis" means "farm" in Lithuanian and "-os" is a feminine possessive suffix.  The Loxahatchee river sounds a bit like "al aqsa hajji" or "the furthest pilgrim" in Arabic.  

I only know scraps of a few languages.  Perhaps there is more etymological evidence of which I am not aware.

Thread synopsis in post #14.

[Byrd]

Pontiac's rebellion was the official reason for the establishment of the Proclamation Line of 1763.

I posited that an unofficial reason was the king may have wanted the colonies to fill up with a counterbalance for the enlightenment thinking which eventually led to the Revolution.

According to many sources, this was not the case.  They did NOT want colonists filling the area and farming because that would mean vegetables and other foodstuff could be gotten in America far cheaper than it could from England, and America was a prime export market for England.  England would lose a lot of money if America became self-sufficient.

They'd also managed to calm things down after the French-Indian war (The British colonists were supported at various times by the Iroquois, Catawba, and Cherokee tribes, and the French colonists were supported by Wabanaki Confederacy members Abenaki and Mi'kmaq, and the Algonquin, Lenape, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Shawnee, and Wyandot (Huron)).  Battles of that war took place all across the northeast US, from New York to Ohio and beyond.

Britain tapped Field Marshal Jeffery Amhurst as commander in chief for the French-Indian War.  He was the representative for the US when the Articles of Capitulation ending the French-Indian War were signed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_o...f_Montreal) 

You may remember him.  He was the ...gentleman... who authorized handing out blankets contaminated with smallpox to the Native Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Am...on_Amherst) 
(NOTE: Amhurst was later brought to trial for this and removed from his post.)  He ALSO refused to withdraw from (as agreed in the treaty) the Ohio and Allegheny Valley territory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Am...tiac's_War.)  

Native Americans went to war (literally) over these broken promises and early germ warfare, burning forts and killing settlers, and reprisal was swift.  Things escalated into Pontiac's War at that point  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac%27s_War)

Some of the Native Americans, afraid that they'd be massacred in the conflict, moved to Philadelphia to seek refuge.  Meanwhile, Pennsylvanian colonists were alarmed at the way the conflict was moving and a group of militia men known as "Paxton's Boys" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxton_Boys) formed, determined to march on Philadelphia and massacre all the Native Americans who fled there.  Ben Franklin met with them at Germantown and convinced them to abandon their plans.

 

  He may have known that some of the various tribes in the area may not have been able to fight off heavily armed newcomers.  Infighting among the natives may have weakened them at times.  The Creek War of 1814 was in part a civil war among natives and perhaps there were others.

The "Creek War" was about 70 years later and in an entirely different part of the US (Alabama) -- that's far south of the Proclamation Line -- and after 70 years, much had changed.  For one thing, Ohio (the cause of the Proclamation Line) was now part of the USA and there were many more states.

The Creeks weren't involved in Pontiac's Rebellion or the French-Indian Wars. 
 

Do you not like the South?  If you had just been pushed out of Dominica or Jamaica, would you walk right past the South so you could go to the place which led to the setting aside of much of the South? 

I'm a Texan, and I'm not sure what you mean by this.  The Caribbean pirates were mostly Europeans, the Barbary pirates never showed up in any great force in the USA, and both had been reduced to trivial forces by 1830.  In addition, what you think of as "the South" was actually "New France" and had been French territory since 1682. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_(New_France))  The Texas area, of course, belonged to Spain.  These were colonies and there were many towns in the area and commerce up and down the Mississippi River.

The Spanish and French, if you'll remember, were the forces that helped destroy the pirates in the Caribbean area.

The natives might have appreciated the newcomers at first.  1812 war general and Choctaw chief Pushumatawaha Mushulatubee's last name sounds like a corruption of the Lithuanian words for "I am beating a Lithuanian."  Chief Selocta Chinnabee's name sounds like the Polish word for nobility, szlachta.  Sequoia, who designed the Cherokee alphabet, looks just like financier Kevin O'Leary.  A band of 2000 Chiaha from Georgia started calling themselves the Micosukees around the 1770s.  "Ukis" means "farm" in Lithuanian and "-os" is a feminine possessive suffix.  The Loxahatchee river sounds a bit like "al aqsa hajji" or "the furthest pilgrim" in Arabic.  

The tribes did NOT appreciate newcomers.  They already had experience with broken treaties, massacres, and so forth.  The Chiaha did not become Micosukees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaha) - Micosukees were Seminoles (https://miccosukee.com/miccosukee-tribe-history/).  You might be confusing the Micosukees with the Muskogees.

There were 500 nations in the United States when the Europeans came.  Each group of Native Americans is different in some ways from the other, and there were a lot of unrelated languages spoken in the land.  The history of Native Americans is a VERY complex topic.

And finally, don't try the "this sounds like this word in this language" form of pseudo-linguistics.  For one thing, the people writing down those words spoke different languages and that determined how they spelled things.

Consider this handy list of "what do dogs say"

• German: wuff, wuff; wau, wau; rawrau, rawrau
  
• Italian: bau, bau
  
• Russian: gav, gav; tyav, tyav (тяв-тяв, small dogs)
  
• Portuguese: au, au; ão-ão (nasal diphthong); béu-béu (toddler language); cain-cain (whining)
  
• Swedish: voff, voff; vov, vov; bjäbb, bjäbb
  
• Dutch: waf, waf; woef, woef
  
• Turkish: hev hev; hav, hav
  
• Polish: hau, hau
  
• Indonesian: guk, guk
  
• Norwegian: voff, voff or boff
  
• Danish: vov, vuf
  
• Arabic: hau, hau; how how 
  
• Japanese: wan-wan; kyan-kyan
  
• Chinese: wang, wang (Mandarin), wow, wow (Cantonese)
  
• Greek: ghav, ghav 
  
• Hebrew: hav, hav; hau, hau 
  
• English: woof, woof; ruff, ruff; arf, arf; bow, wow; yap, yap; yip, yip (small dogs)
  
• French: waouh, waouh; ouahn, ouahn; vaf, vaf; wouf, wouf; wouaf, wouaf; jappe jappe
  
• Spanish: guau-guau; gua, gua; jau, jau
  

We've all heard dogs bark, but if you went by that list you'd (falsely) conclude that Hebrew and Arabic and Polish and Cantonese were related languages and Norwegian and English were related languages  and Spanish and Greek were related, and that the Portuguese word for dog whining came from Japanese, that Portuguese toddlers speak Italian (and switch to Portuguese when they grow up) etc.

And more directly, Mushluatubee's name was also spelled: Mosholetvbbi, AmoshuliTvbi, Musholatubbee, Moshaleh Tubbee, and Mushulatubba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushulatubbee) and Selocta Chinnabe was also known as Se-Loc-Ta, Chinnabee Selocta, and Apuckshunubee

"This spelling looks like that" is not how you tell if words and languages are related.

[Byrd]

Sorry for the lecture.  Ask an anthropologist (linguistics is a sub-specialty of anthropology) a question about cultures... and you get an encyclopedia back (as the old-timers on ATS can tell you.)  Bad habit of mine.

...okay, maybe I'm not THAT sorry!  It gives me a chance to dust off some of the stuff I've learned.

[Hookindafoot]

? Who knows? Could of been part of the reason. I think most scholars know "the Civil War" was basically funded by the British Empire. If they felt they were getting ripped off by "The Northern States" could of been one of the reasons England started the agression. 
The War of 1812 wasn't that far removed from History at that time and for the most part England never really got over losing the Revolutionary war.

[Solvedit]

? Who knows? Could of been part of the reason. I think most scholars know "the Civil War" was basically funded by the British Empire. If they felt they were getting ripped off by "The Northern States" could of been one of the reasons England started the agression. 
The War of 1812 wasn't that far removed from History at that time and for the most part England never really got over losing the Revolutionary war. 

The idea was Britain and France may have been offended by the USA failing to keep the people within its borders in line because it was the USA's responsibility.  

Perhaps the US even denied there was an issue?  

Perhaps it led Britain and France and perhaps other seafaring nations to find a way to cut the South back but make the USA do the hard work.

As for the War of 1812, perhaps Britain hoped its pre-positioned allies would rise up after they experienced a few years of Federal rule or fighting Natives who no longer had Royal guidance and treaties?  This would dovetail with the US having a hands-off approach toward the pirates because they chose to tolerate US rule and didn't rise up in large numbers to support Great Britain.

[Solvedit]

Thread synopsis in post #14.

According to many sources, this was not the case.  They did NOT want colonists filling the area and farming because that would mean vegetables and other foodstuff could be gotten in America far cheaper than it could from England, and America was a prime export market for England.  England would lose a lot of money if America became self-sufficient.

Could you think they imported vegetables from England in the 18th century?  Could you think the official colonies had no room to grow vegetables? 
Was every colonist growing cash crops like tobacco, rice, and cotton? What would the colonists buy the English food with? Of course they grew their own food.

Britain tapped Field Marshal Jeffery Amhurst as commander in chief for the French-Indian War. 
You may remember him.  He was the ...gentleman... who authorized handing out blankets contaminated with smallpox to the Native Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Am...on_Amherst) 

Epidemics tend to spread. Perhaps the idea was to make some room in land that was officially off-limits to settlement? Even if it's not in official history books?

Native Americans went to war (literally) over these broken promises and early germ warfare, burning forts and killing settlers, and reprisal was swift.  Things escalated into Pontiac's War at that point  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac%27s_War)

Some of the Native Americans, afraid that they'd be massacred in the conflict, moved to Philadelphia to seek refuge.  Meanwhile, Pennsylvanian colonists were alarmed at the way the conflict was moving and a group of militia men known as "Paxton's Boys" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxton_Boys) formed, determined to march on Philadelphia and massacre all the Native Americans who fled there.  Ben Franklin met with them at Germantown and convinced them to abandon their plans

Relevance?

The "Creek War" was about 70 years later and in an entirely different part of the US (Alabama) -- that's far south of the Proclamation Line -- ...

Different part?  Did you notice the point was about the land outside the Proclamation Line in English North America? What is the relevance of a little of the referenced land being to the south of the southern end of the Proclamation Line?  The history books say settlers pushed into the Creek lands in Georgia and Alabama after the war.  Do they know exactly where they all came from?  Or do they simply know settlers took advantage of the war?  
So, Amherst's epidemics made some room in the 1760s, and the Creek war made some room in the 1810s.  How does that change the point?  The settlers hypothesized in this thread need not have arrived at one time or for one reason. 

...and after 70 years, much had changed.  For one thing, Ohio (the cause of the Proclamation Line) was now part of the USA and there were many more states.

The Creeks weren't involved in Pontiac's Rebellion or the French-Indian Wars. 

Their war, which was in part a civil war among natives, may have cleared room just like the epidemics started by Amherst. Even if it wasn't directly caused by the British, it may have facilitated the pirates moving in.
Pontiac's Rebellion may have precipitated the Proclamation Line.  The reason for the line was to keep land purchases orderly and under the control of the King's officials and not just in Ohio.  An unofficial reason may have been the King's wish to hold back enlightenment thinkers and allow others to settle.  Unless there's research proving settlement was fairly and evenly enforced?  

The only point of mentioning the Creek War was that it weakened the Creek enough to let settlers start taking their land.  The settlers hypothesized in this thread need not have arrived all at once or due to one cause.  

I'm a Texan, and I'm not sure what you mean by this. 

If you had been displaced from the Caribbean, would you even know about or care why the British set aside the mentioned states as an Indian reserve? Why would you go to the Ohio valley with its British forts when what became Alabama or Mississippi was defended by natives who had been thinned out by Amherst's epidemics? Or the Creek War?  Remember, epidemics spread.

The Caribbean pirates were mostly Europeans, the Barbary pirates never showed up in any great force in the USA,

How do you know?

...and both had been reduced to trivial forces by 1830.

But where did they go? If you had been displaced from Jamaica, would you really just fade away instead of moving to Indian land whose defenders had been decimated or halved by an epidemic?  

In addition, (part of-FIFY) what you think of as "the South" was actually "New France" and had been French territory since 1682. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_(New_France))  The Texas area, of course, belonged to Spain.  These were colonies and there were many towns in the area and commerce up and down the Mississippi River.

The Spanish and French, if you'll remember, were the forces that helped destroy the pirates in the Caribbean area.

Destroy or displace? And how do you know? Besides, what difference does it make?  None of the pirates fled?  Even though they stripped down their ships for speed?  Do you really see them making a heroic last stand instead of finding a new place to live?  Why not go to America instead of fighting navies and well-trained and equipped soldiers?  Can you think of a reason? 

The tribes did NOT appreciate newcomers.  They already had experience with broken treaties, massacres, and so forth. 

Perhaps some of them did at first for the reasons outlined. Perhaps some members were bought off. Cultures or nations aren't a political monolith.  

The Chiaha did not become Micosukees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaha) - Micosukees were Seminoles (https://miccosukee.com/miccosukee-tribe-history/).  You might be confusing the Micosukees with the Muskogees.

https://thehistoryjunkie.com/miccosukee-...d-history/ "The Miccosukee historically inhabited the upper Tennessee Valley in present-day Georgia, where they were originally part of the Upper Chiaha."
The name implies they may have purchased European slaves which suggests Barbary pirates were in N. America or in league with the Buccaneers, and it also implies they had encountered European farmers on land they went on to inhabit, perhaps when they recovered from Amherst's epidemics. The first recorded use of the name in English is the 1770s which is about right.

There were 500 nations in the United States when the Europeans came.  Each group of Native Americans is different in some ways from the other, and there were a lot of unrelated languages spoken in the land.  The history of Native Americans is a VERY complex topic.

But the first recorded use of the name Miccosukee was in the 1770s. Historians guess it was derived from "Micos Sukis" in Spanish but who would willingly call themselves such a thing?

And finally, don't try the "this sounds like this word in this language" form of pseudo-linguistics.  For one thing, the people writing down those words spoke different languages and that determined how they spelled things.

You are conflating proof and evidence.  My point hardly depends on exact spellings.

We've all heard dogs bark, but if you went by that list you'd (falsely) conclude that Hebrew and Arabic and Polish and Cantonese were related languages and Norwegian and English were related languages  and Spanish and Greek were related, and that the Portuguese word for dog whining came from Japanese, that Portuguese toddlers speak Italian (and switch to Portuguese when they grow up) etc.

No, I'd conclude the words in disparate languages were all onomatopoeias for the sound of a barking dog.

And more directly, Mushluatubee's name was also spelled: Mosholetvbbi, AmoshuliTvbi, Musholatubbee, Moshaleh Tubbee, and Mushulatubba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushulatubbee) and Selocta Chinnabe was also known as Se-Loc-Ta, Chinnabee Selocta, and Apuckshunubee

"This spelling looks like that" is not how you tell if words and languages are related.

If a word sounds like a word in another language, it is evidence (but not proof) the two cultures encountered each other somehow. Would it make sense to insist on standardized spellings from pre-literate cultures?  Can it be the spelling closest to the sound of the name is the one most often used?

[Solvedit]

The triggering point for the Proclamation was Pontiac's Rebellion (Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-1765) was an armed conflict between the British Empire and Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and Siouan-speaking Native Americans following the Seven Years’ War)  It originated in the Great Lakes area and the battles were fought throughout the Ohio Valley area.  This would mean that the pirates somehow turned up in Ohio and beyond in great numbers --

I never said the pirates caused Pontiac's rebellion.
Even if the rebellion which led to the Proclamation Line started in the Ohio valley, the line itself excluded settlement west of about the central Appalachians and reserved it for Indians. Meaning pirates could hypothetically have taken advantage of Amherst's epidemics and secretly moved in to the southeast before any official colonists did. 

...larger numbers than the people sent in by investors like Benjamin Franklin. 

No, the King and later the United States officially banned settlement so there were no official law-abiding settlers to compete with.

And the pirates would have to be undetected by the British who were by that time stationed in a lot of military forts.  Forts that were well armed and well supplied.

That's a reason they wouldn't go to the Ohio valley, but why wouldn't they go to what is now Alabama or Mississippi?  Besides, the idea may have been to secretly allow settlers who wouldn't likely align with freedom-minded revolutionaries. 

Let's run the scenario so we can see what's likely to turn up:

• pirates come ashore in 1650.  Nobody's around.  They have guns, so they can shoot game but have no way of making more gunpowder and they don't know where to find lead ore to smelt to make lead for bullets.  They have to find shelter, find food, find a way to live while surviving the American winters in the area of Ohio, which killed a lot of people (if they ended up in the Ohio Valley to cause problems with the Native Americans, then the quickest way would be to march through that area.  
  
• They have their shipboard supplies, no women, no farming tools -- and no horses, so they're on foot. 
  
• Once their food from the ship runs out, they have to hunt and the only edible animals that are easily found are squirrels (and they're not easy to hunt.  My dad was a squirrel hunter.)  Any deer hunter can tell you can spend weeks hunting them and not get close enough to kill one.  The pirates could fish, of course, but that means they have to stay near reasonably large bodies of water (because the only fish you get in tiny creeks are minnows.)
  
• The only clothing they have is what they owned so if pants or shoes or shirt wear out, nobody's coming with replacements. They can tear down the sails and use the canvas, but somebody's got to haul the stuff around.
  
• If knives or guns break, there's no forge around.
  
• To walk to Ohio is going to take more than a month and they don't have pack animals to carry supplies.  
  

At this same time, settlers who came prepared and had supply ships landing frequently in these areas died in large numbers.  (The Jamestown Colony, which had 105 men and boys to start, had a very difficult time in spite of picking a good deepwater defensive site and having farming tools and seeds with them.)

• If the total number of men who landed was more than one ship's worth, we'd find an entire graveyard of ships (or scuttled ships) in a certain area of the coast that wasn't associated with a port.
  
• What if they broke up their ship?  Well, carrying around a lot of lumber is a lot of trouble.  You're not going to trek 600 miles carrying boards and ropes strapped to your back.
  
• So what if Native Americans took them in?  We'd find their artifacts in Native American villages (they found some artifacts that de Soto left (he was travelling up through the Appalachians in the 1540's) so artifacts by pirates would be found)  About 1/3 of DeSoto's men died on that trip, and they had horses and pack animals and supplies.  DeSoto had native guides and trade goods.  If you're walking and the choice is between food and trade goods, you will live longer if you take the food.
  

I don't see any way for more than a handful of pirates to survive and reach that area.   Those numbers are far too tiny to have an impact on the Proclamation Line.

This reasoning may be a disingenuous attempt to deny human trafficking and slavery. The pirates could have taken captives from whom they pried out all the secrets of surviving in the southeast.

[Byrd]

If a word sounds like a word in another language, it is evidence (but not proof) the two cultures encountered each other somehow. Would it make sense to insist on standardized spellings from pre-literate cultures?  Can it be the spelling closest to the sound of the name is the one most often used?

No, it's not proof.  Humans can only make a limited number of sounds, and there are lots of words that "sound like" something in another language but aren't related.  You look for multiple "root words" and you also look at how the language is formed... subject-verb-object or verb-subject-object (etc, for all sorts of combinations.)  "Loan words" and "calques" (like "sushi" in English) are fairly uncommon and don't mean that English is a Japanese subgroup or Japanese is an English subgroup.

Related languages are "somewhat" mutually understandable.  English and German or German and Norwegian (etc.)  But a handful of words that are "spelled like" something is meaningless.  Anthropologist Franz Boas did a big study on this (looking at how the French wrote down what they heard Native American speakers say and compared it to what English and German speakers wrote.  Everyone "heard" something different and none of them were quite what the Native Americans were saying.

[Byrd]

I never said the pirates caused Pontiac's rebellion.
Even if the rebellion which led to the Proclamation Line started in the Ohio valley, the line itself excluded settlement west of about the central Appalachians and reserved it for Indians. Meaning pirates could hypothetically have taken advantage of Amherst's epidemics and secretly moved in to the southeast before any official colonists did. 
...
This reasoning may be a disingenuous attempt to deny human trafficking and slavery. The pirates could have taken captives from whom they pried out all the secrets of surviving in the southeast.

Your ideas seem to dance all over the place.  Humor me, please, and let's start with your timeline.

Tell me what you think happened (what date) and how many men/pirates were involved.  Are we talking 8,000 Barbary pirates fleeing to America in 1790 or 4,000 Caribbean pirates fleeing to Ohio in 1820? 

Set me up a "who did what when" timeline and let's discuss.