Hi Joey,
I'll agree to a point. The most aggressive elite has certainly tended to be, initially new England calvanists, and later, new England, or at least, north eastern, post millenialist pietist (as opposed to liturgicals, such as Roman Catholics or Lutherans) Christians.
In both cases, religious assumptions strongly fed into the elite's treatment of others. The particular views concerned the "last days"
In the case of the Calvinists, they assumed universal damnation, apart from an "elect" few, for whom their god's favour would be reflected in greater success in this life.
The elite who assumed that they were the elect, began to demonstrate the level of contempt in which they held the rest of humanity, when the first Quakers began to show up in north America, and began to troll those who assumed to be god's favoured few.
The results included lashing naked to carts and whipping through town, caging and starving, branding and mutilation, banishing during winter, and ultimately, murder.
It is illuminating to look at the very different relationship between colonists and indigenous people, and the differences in land transactions between say Massachusetts as an example of the Calvinists, and New Amsterdam as an example of Lutherans, where new Amsterdam purchased land.
Similarly Rhode island and Pennsylvania, both largely Quaker, enjoyed peaceful and consensual relationship between settlers and indigenous people.
Regarding the various causes of the revolt. There was a prohibition against settling more than 200 miles from salt water.
George Washington, just happened to be the biggest land speculator in the colonies. Vested interests?
Vested interest would certainly go part way to explaining the claim by the Fe'ral government which emerged from the coup d'etat of the constitutional convention, of ownership of all land from coast to coast.
Anyway, regarding the Indian wars, and genocide.
Even as early as the war between the states, there was at least one railway speculator, using union soldiers to murder indigenous people along the proposed path of a rail track.
It is interesting that the tax funds ( not least the Morrill Tarrif, paid predominantly by the south and benefitting north eastern industrialist cronies, by making imported manufactured goods more expensive, hence less able to compete with inefficient American manufacturing. Dishonest Abe was elected on a pro tariff platform, his later support for abolition of slavery, appears very half hearted in his letters)
Anyway, tax funds were used to fund the breaking of treaties, and slaughter of indigenous peoples ahead of land grants, massive subsidies and restrictions on settlement outside of railroad corridors.
The beneficiaries, in a massive way, were the crony railroad speculators, and the politicians who got kickbacks from them. Everyone else, whether a half starved surviving Lakota, or a frontier farmer, was a loser.
Were the railroads worth it?
In a word, no.
Only the north pacific, which had been built without subsidy or land grants, was able to run at a profit. The others were simply massive pits to throw other people's money into.
Taking a quick look at the south.
It is unlikely that large scale slavery would have been viable without the largest slave owners ( some of the largest slave owners were free blacks, who's holdings rivalled those of the largest white slaver owners) being able to push the cost of providing slave patrols onto the non slave owners, and being able through the fugitive slave acts, to have runaways forcibly returned from the north.
Incidentally, the slave memoirs from the Fe'ral writers project of the 1930s, make fascinating reading. The history is far, far more complex than is commonly taught, eg, an old gentleman named Prince, in the Mississippi volume, reported that he frequently rode with the Klan, that it was the only way to keep order ( during "reconstruction"). Other testimonies lend support to the idea that that first Klan movement was far more anti carpet bagger than specifically anti black.
Jumping forward to the mid and late 19th century
The critical religious belief of the post millenialists, was that man had to establish their god's kingdom on earth for 1000 years, before christ could return and the faithful be rewarded on judgement day...
So they needed to stamp out sin, and the main chosen tool for that was the coercive machinery of government.
Interestingly they found sin in places that the bible never did, eg alcohol, jesus (and about 30 other middle Eastern offspring of unions between virgins and gods) was supposed to have turned water into wine... The progressives sought and achieved alcohol, and drug prohibition.
The fingerprints of special interests are there too, eg of the Dupont family, developers of nylon ropes and synthetic plastics... Who funded and produced the hillariously counterfactual and hideously racists film " reefer madness " and steered through the legislature the prohibition of their chief natural alternative base for ropes and plastics, hemp.
In Britain and America, black people,as the most clearly visible minority, tend to have come bottom in the chain of oppression and exploitation
But apart from elites and select special interest groups, every one else has been getting robbed, misled and variously used as cannon fodder or fed to special interest groups too.
It's interesting on the anarchist sites how many former soldiers whove had their fill of the elites wars are showing up, and how many Africans, inspired by Ayitty's accounts of indigenous African stateless orders, are showing up too.
