It's Memorial Day, which isn't simply just an excuse to have a longer weekend,
it's officially the federal holiday to pay respect to those who died and all the wars
the United States has fought in. You know, World War II, Vietnam, the Civil War, the Quasi-War, the Cherokee Wars, the Boxer Rebellion...
Huh.
What Americans think about the wars their own country has fought in, they often think of just the big ones.
World War I, Korean War, Iraq War. But ever since the U.S. was just thirteen little states,
it's been involved in numerous brief wars, both local and abroad. And a surprising number of them have kind of just been..
forgotten about.
So I want to talk about some of the wars we aren't taught about in history class. Is this alternate history? No.
No, it is not. The real video I planned about Canada didn't seem too smart to release on Memorial Day weekend.
Call it bad planning. I don't care.
Intervention in North Africa is a touchy subject for Americans today.
It seems like for the last few decades we've done nothing but focus on North Africa in the Middle East.
So when was the first time we had a conflict in the region? How about 1801?
Yeah,
when the U.S. was still a young nation and Thomas Jefferson was it's president,
America fought a four-year-long war against pirates off the coast of North Africa.
These were called the Barbary Wars, and yes, there were two of them.
At the time, Muslim piracy was a major issue.
The coastline of North Africa was made up of a series of pirate states on what was called the Barbary Coast.
They included regions like Morocco, Ottoman-controlled Algiers, and even Tripoli.
The main thing that united them was they really liked to raid incoming ships.
European and now American ships that would cross into the area would often be attacked and had a ransom. Not be paid, it's sailors would be sold into slavery.
This was actually a crisis at the time. It became a debate whether or not to pay off the pirates, or to fight them.
Jefferson reasoned that paying off the ransoms only would encourage more piracy.
When Jefferson became President, the pirate states tried to force another ransom, but Jefferson didn't comply.
In response, Tripoli declared war on the U.S., and eventually all the Barbary States began raiding American ships.
We today debate about how the President can use the military without an official declaration of war.
Well, this conversation kinda began here. Congress concluded that Jefferson had the powers as commander-in-chief to stop the pirates, protect Americans, and destroy Barbary vessels.
Effectively, this was the 19th century version of intervening against terrorists without a declaration of war.
Battles were few in the period of four years.
It was really just a naval blockade of North African cities, with the occasional raid.
There was one time the Americans took the city of Derna, and raised the Stars and Stripes over foreign land.
After four years of this war, Tripoli surrendered and a peace deal was made between the U.S. and the Barbary Coast.
Piracy remained an issue for decades in the region, leading to another Barbary War in 1815.
Once European naval technology became far more advanced than the pirates,
Muslim piracy died in the region altogether.
Leaving behind the strange tale of when Jefferson sent the Navy to fight against North African pirates for four years.
What Americans learn about the relationship between
Americans and the natives, well, they don't really learn about it.
We talk about the Pilgrims and natives, then skip over to cowboys and Indians in the West.
So really most Americans only learn about the beginning and the end. We don't teach about the couple centuries of constant, and I do mean constant, conflict.
The United States spreading across the continent wasn't just people in wagons moving and taking empty land. It often involved American soldiers fighting against a guerrilla-style native resistance.
Florida once used to be Spanish land, and in that Spanish land, there was a native population mostly called the Seminole.
They lived there and formed an active military resistance to the United States.
After the Seminole massacred nearby American settlers,
the United States wanted retribution, and so the military was called in.
The problem was, Spain actually hadn't given Florida to the United States yet, but that didn't matter.
Andrew Jackson, a general at the time, gathered a force of 3,000 Americans and 1,400 Creeks to break the Seminole resistance.
Yes,
this meant that the Americans had to invade Florida.
The invasion mostly consisted of village burnings and leaders being hanged. The atrocities were condemned,
but it's Jackson. He didn't care.
There was a period of peace, Florida became a state, but the Seminole were still a problem to the U.S.
Well when Jackson became President, they weren't an issue anymore. The U.S created the Indian Removal Act,
which meant all the natives east of the Mississippi had to get out of there.
The Seminole understandably didn't like this, and the Americans knew it. And eventually, war did come. This war lasted...
wait...
Six years?
Wow. Yeah,
this conflict against natives lasted longer than the U.S. was in World War II.
The Americans could do little against a group which knew their land.
Seminoles would routinely kill American settlers, and Americans would routinely torch Seminole villages, but still,
even after years, the Americans would be stuck in that swamp.
Sometimes for so long, they had to resort to eating their horses.
To be honest, this war is so interesting, it requires its own video.
In fact, most native wars in the East do. But to cut it short,
eventually after years of whittling down native resistance, the U.S. was able to drive the Seminole to a reservation in South Florida.
I feel the war was just so brutal, and in such a regretful time in American history,
it's mostly just been swept under the rug, at least in the states that aren't Florida.
History sure is great at perspective.
There was a time that Mexico truly was sending their worst, and the border was legitimately so dangerous, the United States had to fight a war to keep the violence out.
This was a conflict that raged from 1910 to 1919, simply known as the Border War.
In 1910, Mexico pretty much collapsed and was in complete anarchic chaos.
Not even today's violence could come close to how bad it was.
This was called the Mexican Revolution.
Which is way too complicated to get into right now.
Long story short, imagine a far worse Syrian Civil War on America's border.
It lasted ten years, and two million Mexicans died.
The war was just complicated and confusing,
and the United States hated everybody involved, so they decided to just secure the border and fight anybody who tried to cross it.
At some points, revolutionaries would just attack American towns, and battles would rage to stop the Mexican rebels from seizing it.
Sometimes federal Mexicans try to attack in gangs, and Germans... (wut)
Like I said,
it was a confusing time.
In this time period, the United States basically just waited for Mexico to get it together.
To stop people from attacking inside, and the Americans invaded Mexican territory at times too. This was a back-and-forth
that continued until the Mexican Revolution ended by 1919. Was that the most interesting conflict?
No, but it's a little bit of context when we imagine how bad Mexico is today, and how bad border violence could be.
History teaches us that it could always be...
...far worse.
For the last few months, everyone has feared that we would fight with North Korea for the first time in 70 years.
But that's not true, because we actually fought against North Korea far sooner than that.
There was a time in the 1960s that America and South Korea fought against the North.
For three years.
There was just a tiny conflict against the North in the 60s that never
escalated into anything bigger. And when I mean tiny,
I mean 400 North Koreans died, 300 South Koreans, and 40 Americans.
The South tried to infiltrate the North and failed. The North tried to assassinate the South Korean leader,
it was just a strange time. The North didn't have nukes, and the South was still a backwater,
America was too busy with Vietnam,
so after three years of not wanting to escalate the fighting, it just stopped.
It was soon just called the Korean DMZ Conflict, and everybody just forgot that it ever happened.
The lesson here is you can always stop the war from escalating, if you're already fighting a bigger one.
So in conclusion Jimmy, why did I make this video? I don't really know. It's Memorial Day!
It's interesting to remember the less popular wars out there as well.
If there is one fight that people have recently began talking about, it's the fight for
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Oh well.
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