President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  Thirty-one years later the sometime captain in the Black Hawk War would be president of the United States. His rare encounters with Indian affairs would show him to be, although radically ignorant and loaded with stereotypes, amiably disposed and sympathetic, not likely to produce any of the bloodthirsty comments about Indians that would come from many westerners, and from generals in his army.

  A presidential audience he held on March 27, 1863, in the “big wigwam” on Pennsylvania Avenue for a group of Indian chiefs, of which the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle the next day printed a report, is to be sure patronizing and, if you want to say so, using our late twentieth-century epithet, “racist,” because he refers to “your race” and “our race.” But may one not also say that it is well intentioned, as a great many treatments—most treatments—of Indians by white Americans, especially in those days, especially by westerners, were not? One might also see in it a piece of high unintentional comedy, quite politically incorrect no doubt.

  The meeting was held in the East Room of the White House (also called the executive mansion in those days). There were present about fifteen Indian chiefs, from the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapahoe, Comanche, and Apache, and an assortment of “celebrated personages,” including Secretaries Seward, Chase, and Welles. The chiefs were seated on the floor in a line, and the celebrated personages in a ring around them, which “notwithstanding the assiduous but polite efforts of Mr. Nicolay” did not provide everyone a good view, and according to the Chronicle there was a good deal of whispering and jostling in the “restless and eager crowd of visitors.”

  “Still,” the Chronicle’s reporter said, “everything went off very well.” He calmly describes the chiefs, though favorably, as “savages” with “cruel lines” in their faces:

  These Indians are fine-looking men. They have all the hard and cruel lines on their faces which we might expect in savages; but they are evidently men of intelligence and force of character. They were both dignified and cordial in their manner, and listened to everything with great interest.

  Abraham Lincoln came into this scene in the East Room at eleven-thirty on a March morning. Commissioner William P. Dole introduced the chiefs, and the president shook hands with each of them, some of whom responded with “a sort of salaam or salutation by spreading out the hands,” some with “the inevitable ‘how’ of the plains Indians.”

  The president told the interpreter to tell them that he was very glad to see them and that if they had anything to say, it would afford him great pleasure to hear them.

  Lean Bear, a Cheyenne chief, spoke. Spotted Wolf, an Arapaho, spoke. Then President Lincoln began with a sort of geography lesson: “You have all spoken of the strange sights you see here, among your pale-faced brethren; the very great number of people that you see; the big wigwams; the difference between our people and your own. But you have seen but a small part of the pale-faced people. You may wonder when I tell you that there are people here in this wigwam, now looking at you who have come from other countries a great deal farther off than you have come.

  “We pale-faced people think that this world is a great, round ball,” he soberly explained to the chiefs. “One of our learned men will now explain to you our notions about this great ball, and show you where you live.”

  Professor Henry, according to the record of this event, then gave “a detailed and interesting explanation of the formation of the earth, showing how much of it was water and how much of it was land.”

  When the president came back on the program, he indicated that the pale-faced people had come “from all parts of the globe—here, and here, and here.” And he also, helpfully, gave his explanation, two reasons, of why the pale-faced people are “more numerous and prosperous” than their red brethren: “Because they cultivate the earth, produce bread, and depend upon the products of the earth rather than wild game.”

  And the pale-faced ones were more numerous because “we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.” Mark E. Neely, Jr., David Herbert Donald, and David Nichols all note the irony of the president making this claim in the midst of an immense war that would in the end kill 620,000 of the pale-faced people.

  Apparently the chiefs had asked for “advice about their life in this country.” Twice in his short remarks the president was careful to say that he did not know what was best for the red brethren: “I really am not capable of advising you whether, in the providence of the great spirit, who is the father of us all, it is best for you to maintain the habits and the customs of your race, or adopt a new mode of life.”

  Lincoln knew, by March 1863, if he had not known it before, that some of the numerous and prosperous pale-faced people had made themselves more prosperous by the way they took land from, and exploited, their red brethren. He made a sort of preemptive half apology to the chiefs: “It is the object of this government to be on terms of peace with you, and with all our red brethren. We make treaties with you, and try to observe them; and if our children should sometimes behave badly, and violate their treaties, it is against our wish.” Then he reminded them, just among us chiefs, how it is sometimes with the “children.” “You know it is not always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do.”

  The Chronicle’s report of the meeting ends, believe it or not, as follows: “‘Ugh,’ ‘Aha’ sounded along the line as the interpreter proceeded, and their countenances gave evident tokens of satisfaction.”

  I COULD NOT AFFORD TO HANG MEN FOR VOTES

  BUT LINCOLN had had a much more serious encounter with Indian affairs in the late summer and fall of 1862, some months before this gathering of the chiefs. The long, sad history of the treatment of the red brethren had been particularly long and sad in the state of Minnesota. The Episcopal bishop of the state, a man named Henry Whipple, had predicted in a letter to President Buchanan in 1860 that the corruption in the administration of Indian affairs in that state would lead to a Sioux uprising. “A nation which sowed robbery would reap a harvest of blood,” Whipple warned.

  When the Lincoln administration came to power, Whipple made an attempt to have the “Indian system” reformed. The core of the corruption was the use of the posts of Indian agents and traders entirely as political rewards; in a well-established tradition, the political appointees, who needed to have no knowledge of, or sympathy with, their Indian charges whatsoever, would make money from the post. In some cases they made themselves rich.

  Whipple’s hopes that the new Lincoln administration would reform this Indian system were doomed to disappointment. By the time Bishop Whipple made his appeal, Lincoln the politician had already made appointments of Indian administrators on the old basis of political reward. Lincoln’s administration was clearly not going to be much better on this score than the previous Democratic administration.

  Later in Lincoln’s administration, after he had been educated both by Whipple’s arguments and by harsh experience, Lincoln did, in his annual message of December 1862, call for reform of the Indian system. But his administration, which had other matters on its mind, did not accomplish that reform.

  Antecedent to the corruption in the Indian administration had been the robbery of land and violation of treaties with respect to it; some of Lincoln’s pale-faced “children” had behaved very badly indeed toward their red brethren. David A. Nichols’s monograph Lincoln and the Indians, the leading treatment of the subject, gives pungent and shocking details and quotations. With respect to land, he quotes Senator William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, almost the only defender of Indian rights in Congress, as having said disapprovingly, of proposals for Indian “removal,” that “all the rights and all the justice…are to be reserved for the whites and…Indians do not seem to have any rights in relation to the matter.” As to treaties guaranteeing territory to tribes “forever,” Nichols quotes Senator Fessenden as saying that “forever” really meant “until the white people want it.” And with respect to the ro
le of the traders and providers, Nichols quotes a supplier who was supposed to provide food for the Indians: “[S]o far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”

  In 1862 the harvest of blood that Bishop Whipple had predicted arrived. Some young Sioux men, desperate, as we may say, raided a farm for eggs; in the resulting melee they killed five white settlers. Violence spread from that beginning throughout southwestern Minnesota. When it ended, it left 350 white persons killed and produced a racially charged frenzy in the white population of the Upper Midwest.

  The president in Washington, preoccupied with Civil War events, made the mistake of sending General John Pope, the defeated general from Second Bull Run, to command the troops who would quell the outbreak. Arriving in Minnesota on September 16, General Pope felt he knew enough already on September 17 to write:

  The horrible massacres of women and children and the outrageous abuse of female prisoners, still alive, call for punishment beyond human power to inflict. There will be no peace in this region by virtue of treaties and Indian faith. It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year. Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plains, unless, as I suggest, you can capture them. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.

  The rebellion was quelled, and a military commission sentenced 303 Sioux warriors to be executed for killings and “outrages,” by which the commission meant rapes.

  Lincoln brought to his dealings with this matter, as his pidgin English address to the chiefs would suggest, no sophisticated understanding of the American Indian and certainly no late twentieth-century sympathy for “Native Americans.” What he did have, though, was not only a basic charity but also an inclination to be very careful in the presence of passionate “malice”—to pause, to check, to seek out the particular facts, not to be carried along in a rush of passion. In a crucial action in this event, he promptly directed the angry authorities in Minnesota to execute no one without further word, and he ordered that the complete records of the trial be sent to him.

  General Pope, a Minnesota senator, and the Minnesota governor all told him that the people of the state were so infuriated that if the Sioux were not all executed legally, they would be killed illegally. A representative letter from Minnesota argued:

  [W]e kill the wolfes that prey on our sheep…Shall we not kill those savages who not only kill our sheep, but kill & steal all our stock, murder & rape our mothers, wives & daughters, depopulate counties, burn towns, & turn thousands of acres of hay & wheat, oats & corn out to destruction? The voice of this people calls for vengeance…Not only does justice require the blood of these savages, but vengeance will have it—the people of this State…are so exasperated against the Indians that if the authorities do not hang them, they will. This is a settled purpose.

  But Lincoln resisted all that. He did have a voice telling him a different story: Bishop Whipple. In addition, the politician William P. Dole, whom Lincoln had appointed commissioner of Indian affairs (not because he knew anything about Indian affairs but as a political reward), also turned out to have a certain sympathy for the Indians. Dole and Bishop Whipple were lonely dissenting voices in the angry chorus calling for the execution of the entire group of 303 Sioux, but Lincoln listened to them. Learning from his judge advocate general that presidential powers could not be delegated, he personally—in the midst of Civil War pressures and woes—went through the records, one by one, of the convicted Sioux and sorted out those who were guilty of the serious crimes.

  He was shocked by what he found in the trial transcripts, but not in the way the angry Minnesota population was shocked. The governor of the state, a man named Henry Sibley, who had himself become wealthy and therefore politically prominent by fraudulent dealings with the Sioux, had determined that the number of executions “will be sufficiently great to satisfy the longings of the most blood thirsty.” The “trials” had become shorter and shorter, averaging less than fifteen minutes each. “The lack of evidence against the accused was manifest. Indians who honestly admitted their involvement in battles had condemned themselves. Hearsay evidence and a denial of the process and counsel were characteristic of General Sibley’s trial proceedings.” The leading scholarly article on this affair reports that forty-two Indians were “tried” in a single day.

  Among the most shocking features was a conspicuous betrayal. Indians who had peaceably surrendered, having been told they would be safe, were then convicted on the slimmest basis; if one admitted to firing a gun, that was enough for a sentence of death. Lincoln worked through the transcripts for a month, sorting out those who were guilty of serious crimes. The number kept shrinking. To his surprise, he found only 2 who were clearly guilty of rape, and only 39—out of the 303 condemned by the military—who were guilty of killing innocent farmers. One of these was later exonerated, so that finally only 38 were to be executed by the president’s order. David Herbert Donald presents the touching picture of Lincoln conscientiously going over each individual case, and then, when he had sorted out the 39, carefully writing out in his own hand the names—“Te-he-hdo-ne-cha; Tazoo alias Plan-doo-ta”—and telling the telegraph operator to be particularly careful because a slight error with these unfamiliar names might lead to the execution of the wrong man.

  On the day after Christmas 1862 the 38 Sioux were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota. On the one hand, that was the largest mass execution in American history, and it was carried out under the administration of Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, there were 265 Sioux who would have been hanged but were still alive because the conscientious president stopped the process and went through the cases one by one.

  There was much resentment in Minnesota against his radical reduction in the number of condemned men—against, in effect, his multiple pardons. In the 1864 election Republicans did less well than before in Minnesota. A Minnesota senator, and a former governor, said that Lincoln would have had a larger majority in Minnesota if he had hanged more. Lincoln responded: “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”

  A modern interpretation might argue, as the scholar Carol Chomsky does, that the Indians in this case—the Dakota—should have been treated not as criminals but as prisoners of war in a contest between sovereign treaty-bound nations. But that perspective was not available to Lincoln or anyone else in the nineteenth-century American setting; even Bishop Whipple did not reach that understanding.

  Lincoln did not make many of the just and humane changes in Indian policy that we may now, looking back, wish he had done. He did not reform the corrupt Indian system, although he did at one point endorse that reform. He did not oppose the sometimes cruel policy of Indian “removal,” which often meant forced displacement of Indians from their ancient lands so the prosperity-seeking pale faces could take over. In fact, part of the settlement with angry Minnesota whites who wanted many more hangings was the removal of the Sioux from Minnesota and, just for good measure, the removal also of the Winnebago, who had done nothing but occupy land that white men wanted.

  The chief scholar dealing with Lincoln and the Indians, in the illumination of twentieth-century enlightenment, David Nichols, criticizes Lincoln for not doing more. Although Nichols acknowledges that “Lincoln was clearly more humanitarian toward Indians than most of the main military and political figures of his time,” he then writes:

  While Lincoln was a cautious reformer, that does not completely answer the question as to whether his Indian policies support his traditional image as a humanitarian. One might point to what happened to Indian people following Lincoln’s interventions in both Kansas and Minnesota. While his attention was elsewhere the Kansas refugees suffered. Lincoln’s armies killed more Indians than he pardoned in Minnesota. While he pardoned a large number, he still executed thirty-eight men on superficial evidence and permitted even m
ore to die in miserable prison conditions and under forced removal.

  Hans Trefousse responds to Nichols that “[Lincoln’s] commutation of the sentences of the Indian prisoners, no matter what their fate afterward, was an act of courage and compassion as well as of justice. The political risks were great; yet Lincoln did not really hesitate.”

  And for all the limitations evident to another age, that unhesitating “act of courage and compassion as well as of justice” toward utterly distant strangers whom most of his peers wanted to hang surely is enough to contradict Herndon.

  Bishop Whipple, moreover, did report, about a meeting he had with Lincoln toward the end of the war, that Lincoln promised: “If I live, this accursed system shall be reformed.” But he did not live, and it was not reformed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Must I Shoot a Simple Soldier Boy?