The Postwar Navy
In the post–Civil War era the Navy and Army returned to their traditional missions in support of national policy. Two aspects of postwar policy particularly affected the Navy. First, since “continentalist” assumptions dominated thinking about the national interest into the 1880s, the United States did not need a large, modern navy. Lacking a desire to compete with Europeans in an imperialistic struggle, the nation needed no navy to challenge them. Defense of the continental domain dictated only a modest naval force that in wartime could raid enemy commerce and supplement the fortifications protecting the coast. Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson correctly noted that the small and outdated postwar Navy was sufficient for the “defensive purposes of a peaceful people, without colonies, with a dangerous coast, and shallow harbors, separated from warlike naval powers” by the Atlantic.
Policy also required that the Navy protect lives and property abroad and, especially, foster trade by maintaining unimpeded access to foreign markets. Thus the Navy Department revived its prewar system of distant patrols. Although the European Squadron (successor to the old Mediterranean Squadron) had often been paramount in Navy planning, it declined in importance. Since European navies ensured stability in the Mediterranean, the United States made its major naval commitment to Latin America and Asia, where chronic instability provided ample opportunity for “gunboat diplomacy.” The Navy suppressed piracy, transported diplomats, stopped vessels flying the American flag to verify their nationality, provided a haven for missionaries threatened by “savages,” evacuated citizens endangered by war or epidemic diseases, and dispatched landing parties to deal with recalcitrant “barbarous tribes.” On numerous occasions marines and sailors went ashore to protect American merchants, investments, and strategic interests in Asia and in South and Central America. Naval officers also continued a diplomatic-commercial role, in the image of Matthew C. Perry. For example, in 1882 Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt negotiated the first treaty between Korea and a Western nation. Officers performed these missions partly to achieve personal glory and to preserve national “honor,” but they also shared the policymakers’ belief that expanding commerce and the nation’s welfare were inseparable.
The Navy’s deployment on distant stations required a return to wooden sailing ships. Advances in armor, rifled guns, and marine engines appeared with dizzying rapidity, but the debt-ridden U.S. government was not inclined to expensive naval experiments. Prolonged voyages could not be made with steam-powered vessels. Since even engineers did not perfectly understand thermodynamics, costly steam engines remained inefficient and consumed enormous amounts of expensive coal. Ships could not carry much coal and still have room for the crew and supplies. Although European navies could refuel at their colonial stations, the United States had few such bases. Finally, obsolete ships were sufficient to intimidate most Asians and Latin Americans, who were even less well armed.
Reinforcing these technological, financial, and military imperatives were sociological and psychological factors. The struggle between staff and line officers raged with new intensity, and steam symbolized the conflict. Believing they had made a substantial contribution to Union victory and that steamships would rule the oceans, engineers demanded equal rank with line officers. Considering the extreme flux in naval technology, engineers often uncritically hailed innovations in steam engineering to enhance their position. But line officers were not eager to share their authority aboard ships, and they opposed steam to assure their own prominence. Still, they were not blind reactionaries; most realized that ultimately steam would replace sails. They also understood an important political and strategic factor: National policy made steam ironclads temporarily unnecessary. Line officers prevailed, and in 1869 Vice Admiral David D. Porter, acting in the secretary of the navy’s name, ordered that all vessels “be fitted out with full-sail power” and that ships’ commanders justify any use of auxiliary steam power. He also dismissed Benjamin F. Isherwood, the chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, and reduced the relative rank of other engineers.
The Frontier “Constabulary”
After a hasty post–Civil War concentration in Texas to help convince the French to withdraw from Mexico, the Army, like the Navy, resumed its traditional tasks. Taking advantage of America’s domestic war, French Emperor Napoleon III had established the Archduke Maximilian of Austria as the Emperor of Mexico in 1864 and supported him with an army. The Union ineffectually responded with diplomatic protests against this violation of the Monroe Doctrine. When the Civil War ended, the government dispatched General Schofield to Paris to demand withdrawal, and, before the volunteer armies dissolved, 52,000 troops mobilized in Texas to buttress the demand. Faced with continuing guerrilla warfare in Mexico, with fear of Prussian ambitions in Europe, and with the military might of a reunited United States, Napoleon withdrew in 1867.
With the continent saved from monarchy and the volunteers returned to their homes, the regulars aided the nation’s territorial and economic growth, manned the coastal forts, and fought Indians. The Army protected railroad construction crews, opened new roads, charted unexplored regions, briefly occupied Alaska, and improved rivers and harbors. The coast artillery stood guard in old masonry forts that rifled guns had made obsolete. The War Department planned a postwar program of earth, brick, and concrete barbette batteries, but reduced funding, and the relentless technical advances in artillery, soon killed the program. Given the country’s security, why waste money on unnecessary defenses?
Regulars redeploying to the west found Indian wars engulfing the Great Plains. When the regulars marched eastward in 1861, western state and territorial militia and volunteers assumed the frontier constabulary mission. Indian-white conflict actually intensified, since citizen-soldiers were often extremely brutal toward both hostile and friendly Indians. Violence first flared in August 1862 with an uprising among the Santee Sioux of Minnesota, who had endured years of insults, greed, and deceit from whites. Erroneously believing that Confederate agents had provoked the outbreak, the Lincoln administration dispatched General Pope, fresh from his humiliation at Second Bull Run, to the scene. But Pope was no more successful against the Indians than he had been against Lee. The war spread westward into the Dakota and Montana Territories, engulfing all the powerful Sioux tribes, and merged with other conflicts that flared across the prairies farther south. The situation in the west became so critical that the Union had to divert troops, including six regiments composed of former Confederate soldiers, from the major battlefields east of the Mississippi. The worst incidents occurred in 1863 at the “Battle” of Bear River, near the present-day Utah-Idaho border, and in 1864 at the “Battle” of Sand Creek. California volunteers launched a near-dawn surprise attack on Chief Bear Hunter’s Shoshone village camped along Bear River, killing approximately 250 men, women, and children. At Sand Creek, Colorado volunteers attacked Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne village. An advocate of peace, Black Kettle raised American and white flags over his tepee, but this did not prevent the whites from massacring 200 Cheyennes, mostly women and children. As one observer wrote, the Indians “were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.”
The government signed a series of Indian treaties in 1865, blanketing the West in temporary peace. But gold and silver strikes, the Homestead Act, and railroad construction quickened the pace of settlement even during the Civil War. The idea of a permanent Indian frontier died under the deluge of land-hungry and gold-seeking whites, so the government devised a policy of concentrating the Indians on reservations, usually in areas that whites did not covet—at least immediately. The reservation system combined blatant greed and misguided philanthropy. Confined to unwanted land, the thinking went, the Indians would not interfere with white settlement. Denied their nomadic lifestyle, they could be “civilized”�
�taught the white man’s language, turned into sedentary agriculturalists, and Christianized. The policy’s flaw was that many tribes or tribal factions hated reservation life and rebelled against it. Then the Army had to force compliance.
The Army’s task was thankless and difficult. One problem was white society’s ambivalence about Indians. The opinions of frontiersmen and eastern humanitarians highlighted the ambiguity. “There are two classes of people,” Sherman wrote, “one demanding the utter extinction of the Indians, and the other full of love for their conversion to civilization and Christianity. Unfortunately the army stands between them and gets the cuff from both sides.” If the Army killed too many Indians, humanitarians cried “Butchery!” But if it killed too few, frontiersmen scorned the troops as cowards. Yet philanthropists demanded the forced acculturation that drove Indians onto the warpath, and westerners demanding “protection” often provoked violence by insisting that Indians move to smaller reservations.
Reflecting society, Army officers were often ambivalent about fighting for “civilization” against the “savages.” Many of them despised pontificating humanitarians, disliked rapacious frontiersmen, and lamented their government’s record of broken treaties. They viewed some aspects of Indian behavior (torturing captives and mutilating the dead) with revulsion. Yet they found much about the Indians commendable and commiserated with their fate. They lauded the Indians’ fighting abilities. Such praise served professional and psychic needs, since the Indians’ superb skills justified the Army’s frequent failures, but many officers genuinely admired the Indians as warriors. They also praised the Indians’ defiant fight for freedom. “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them and it was for this and against this they made war,” wrote Sheridan. “Could anyone expect less?” Holding such sentiments, many officers preferred negotiations to bloodshed and took an active interest in Indian welfare. However, officers fulfilled national policy, insisting that Indians stay on their reservations and fighting them when they did not.
Divided responsibility for Indian affairs was another difficulty. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs administered the reservation system, but the War Department enforced it, leading to confusion over the respective roles of civil and military officials. The government never imposed a clear solution to this problem, but the Army inevitably assumed increased authority because of Indian resistance. “Peace by kindness” could not make them accept the reservations.
It did not help that the Army campaigned at the outer rim of the American empire; projecting military power at an empire’s edge is never easy. In the hostile western environment, the small number of troops and their inadequate training and weapons were severe handicaps. Extremes in topography, drought, cold, and vast distances made campaigning an ordeal. The lack of navigable rivers and the rugged terrain created logistical problems that the extension of the railroads only partially eased. The Army relied on wagons, horses, and mules, but boulders and gullies shattered axles and wheels, forage was scarce, and animals collapsed from hard usage. Always too few to police the west properly, regulars were often poorly trained and armed. Based on European-style tactical manuals, what little training they received left them ill-prepared to fight an unconventional foe who sometimes had superior shoulder arms. In 1873 the Army adopted the single-shot, breechloading, black-powder Springfield rifle. Not until 1892, when the Indian campaigns were over, did it adopt a repeating rifle, the smokeless-powder Krag-Jorgensen. Long before then some Indians had acquired repeaters, especially Winchesters. Whether armed with repeaters or bows, the Indians were worthy adversaries. In the east Indians moved on foot, but in the west they rode ponies, giving them greater mobility. With no towns to defend, no encumbering supply trains, and an uncanny ability to live off the land, the western Indians were adept at guerrilla warfare. Relying on stealth and ambushes, they appeared to be everywhere without being anywhere and generally refused to engage in pitched battles. On those few occasions when they did stand and fight, the Army had its hands full.
The factors that shaped colonial Indian wars, and the subsequent two centuries of native-white conflict, still prevailed. First, microbes continued to inflict a biological catastrophe, killing far more Indians than bullets did and thereby eroding their ability to resist. Since diseases were recurring—in the northern Plains an epidemic occurred about every six years in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a tribe barely recovered from one epidemic before a new wave of death and anguish swept over it. The Comanche population, for example, peaked at 40,000 in the 1770s but, ravaged by periodic outbreaks of smallpox and cholera, dwindled to no more than 10,000 by the 1850s. Second, whites retained an advantage in their superior discipline and organization. While Native Americans were excellent strategists and tacticians, they primarily relied on transitory cooperation among tribes and tribal factions to achieve their goals. On the other hand, the Army’s high command planned comparatively far ahead and campaigned relentlessly. Third, the primary problem was making the Indians stand and fight. The Army utilized converging columns, sending several forces into an area simultaneously, which occasionally forced the Indians into battle. Although the columns invited defeat in detail, officers assumed they would not encounter a large enemy force. The grass and game in any one region would normally not support substantial Indian concentrations.
A fourth theme was that to achieve decisive results, whites had to wage ruthless total war against the Indians’ fixed camps. Since Indians dispersed into hunting and war parties during the summer, this often required winter campaigns. When the regulars found a winter encampment, the occupants were doomed. The Army invariably surprised the Indians, who were notorious for their lax security and thus could not put up a successful defense. The elements, the grass-fed ponies’ weakened condition, and the presence of women and children made escape difficult. If the Indians fled, the Army destroyed their shelter and food supplies, leading to death from starvation and exposure.
Finally, the Army compensated for its weaknesses by the time-honored method of employing friendly Indians. At times the Army linked a tribe to a fort, forming a symbiotic military colony. The Tonkawas at Fort Griffin, Texas, and the Northern Cheyennes at Fort Keogh, Montana, were examples of this. Friendly Indians represented at least half the Army’s strength in some encounters, and in a few instances the only U.S. soldiers engaged with the enemy were Indian allies. A general estimated that one Indian scout unit was more valuable than six cavalry companies. Yet many officers hesitated to rely on Indians. Within the context of American-style war they were not good soldiers, lacking discipline and refusing to sacrifice themselves in mini-Gettysburgs. Doubts lingered about their loyalty, though scouts turned on white soldiers only once, at the Battle of Cibicu Creek in 1881. Depending on Indians reflected badly on the Army, tainting the regulars’ prestige. But the most successful officers utilized Indian allies.
For three centuries the conflict between whites and Native Americans followed the course of white settlement, which is why the final campaigns occurred on the Great Plains and in the intermountain west rather than the west coast. The tide of white settlement flowed steadily westward to the Mississippi, then inched across that mighty waterway to form a belt of well-watered states running from Minnesota to Louisiana. From there the Americans jumped across the west’s interior and settled in California and Oregon. Only as the Civil War came to an end and in the succeeding quarter century did they backfill the Great Plains and intermountain west, and they did so by approaching from both the east and west.
The Indian “wars” between 1866 and 1890 consisted of little more than pursuits and skirmishes; only an occasional incident involved enough men to classify it as a “battle.” Conflict flared intermittently in three zones. The regulars’ nemesis in the arid southwest was the Apaches. In the Rocky Mountains and the northwest, the foremost adversaries were Utes, Bannocks, Shee
peaters, Paiutes, Shoshones, Modocs, and Nez Perce. And on the Plains the Army fought Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and, especially, Sioux.
The most deadly conflict in the final stage of the Native Americans’ defeat throughout the continental U.S. was the so-called Snake War, a dreary, sputtering guerrilla conflict against Shoshones, Northern Paiutes, and Bannocks (whites collectively referred to these groups as “Snakes”) who roamed the Great Basin where Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada converge. Lasting from 1864 to 1868, the war claimed 378 soldiers, civilians, and Indian scouts, while 1,254 Indians died or were wounded. Although the Snake War was the deadliest, the Great Sioux War was the most famous, even though it had only about half the Snake War’s total casualties. Among the Army’s approximately 950 engagements in the post–Civil War West, the best known, by far, occurred during the Great Sioux War: The Battle of the Little Bighorn (known to the Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass), where the Sioux, reinforced by Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho allies, defeated George A. Custer’s 7th Cavalry.
Conquering the Sioux was not easy because they were stronger than many other tribes. Not only did their nomadic lifestyle protect them from the worst ravages of the epidemics that swept the Great Plains, but the government had also inoculated some Sioux bands against smallpox in 1832. Fortunately for the whites, the Sioux had been such aggressive expansionists that they alienated many weaker tribes; before the Great Sioux War ended, Crows, Assiniboines, Shoshones, Arikaras, Pawnees, Utes, and Bannocks fought for the Americans. Moreover, by the early 1870s the Sioux and their Northern Cheyenne allies had purposefully shifted from an offensive to a defensive strategy. They would no longer attack whites outside the region between the Yellowstone River and the Black Hills, but they would do all they could to defend themselves if the whites invaded that area. In order to put up the most effectual defense, they tinkered with new forms of centralized command to overcome the factionalism that so often sundered tribes. Sitting Bull became the foremost chief, with Gall and Crazy Horse his foremost subordinates. Perfect unity among the Sioux remained impossible to achieve, but strategic thinking underlay the effort.
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