The Custer fight demonstrated most of the themes of Indian warfare but also had unique features. Provoked by treaty violations and angered by efforts to confine them to reservations, large numbers of reservation Sioux joined the so-called “hunting bands” of Sitting Bull, which had never been on a reservation. In 1876 Sheridan planned an expedition of three converging columns to force all of the Sioux onto their reservation. Commanding more than 1,000 troops and 262 Crow and Shoshone allies, George Crook marched north from Fort Fetterman. John Gibbon with 450 soldiers and 25 Crow auxiliaries moved east from Forts Shaw and Ellis. Westward from Fort Abraham Lincoln came Alfred H. Terry leading 925 soldiers, including the 7th Cavalry, and 40 Arikara scouts. The commanders directed their attention to catching the enemy, giving little thought to then defeating him, since each column could deal with more warriors than anyone expected to fight in any single encounter. However, the Indians were concentrated in unprecedented numbers, perhaps 1,000 lodges (wigwams) in all, which meant about 2,000 warriors. They had no intention of fleeing, and many carried repeaters. They attacked Crook’s column on June 17 at the Battle of the Rosebud, where fighting raged for six hours, with Crook’s Indian allies repeatedly saving his position from being overrun. The battle badly mauled Crook’s command and forced it to retreat.
Unaware of the Indians’ uncommon determination and of Crook’s repulse, Gibbon, Terry, and Custer planned to trap the Indians in the Little Bighorn Valley. Custer would ascend the Rosebud, cross to the Little Bighorn, and descend it. Gibbon and Terry would go up the Bighorn River and assume a blocking position at the Little Bighorn’s mouth, bottling up the enemy. As soon as either force encountered Indians, it should give battle to prevent them from escaping. Custer declined to take a Gatling gun platoon, which would limit his mobility, and refused 2d Cavalry reinforcements, believing that he could “whip all the Indians on the Continent with the Seventh Cavalry.”
Approaching the Little Bighorn on June 25, the day before Gibbon and Terry could be in position, Custer fragmented his regiment into four battalions. He sent Captain Frederick W. Benteen off to the south with three companies to ensure the Indians did not flee in that direction. Locating a village, he ordered Major Marcus A. Reno’s three-company battalion to charge it immediately, perhaps assuming the Indians were surprised. Directly commanding five companies, Custer moved to the north, and one company stayed to the rear with the pack train. But instead of running, the Indians attacked, forcing Reno to withdraw and dig in and wiping out Custer’s battalion. Reinforced by Benteen and the pack train, Reno held out until the Gibbon-Terry column arrived on the 27th. The post-battle reactions of Indians and whites showed much about their respective warmaking abilities. The Indians were unable to sustain collective action, drifting apart into bands to celebrate, hunt buffalo, and find fresh grass for their ponies. But the Army poured troops into Sioux country by rail, steamer, foot, and horse. Crook and Nelson A. Miles, aided by Indian spies and scouts, spearheaded a winter campaign that ferreted out enemy camps and virtually ended Indian resistance.
Although the Army’s role in subduing the Indians should not be minimized, other factors were perhaps more important. By 1890 railroads crisscrossed the west, bringing new settlers. In 1866 fewer than 2 million whites lived in the west; twenty-five years later there were 8.5 million, planting crops, raising cattle, and depleting the timber, grass, and game that sustained Indian society. For the Plains Indians the buffalo’s destruction was especially harmful, for they depended on its hide and meat for almost every want. By the late 1880s commercial hunters had reduced the buffalo herds from 13 million to a thousand, and Sheridan believed that did more than the Army to pacify the Indians. In other regions of the west, white settlement and activity also severely reduced other types of game. The frontier was gone, and Indians had nowhere to go but the reservations.
The conquest of the Indians ended an era in the Army’s history. Indian fighting had been its primary function since the formation of the 1st American Regiment. Now the Army no longer needed to remain in the far-flung garrisons, and consolidation took place rapidly. By 1891 the Army had abandoned one-fourth of the posts occupied in 1889. Even before the troops settled into their fewer, more permanent installations, officers began debating a disturbing question: What was the Army’s purpose now that its foremost traditional mission was gone?
The Army and Reconstruction
“Of the slain there were enough to furnish forth a battlefield . . . all killed with deliberation,” wrote Albion W Tourgee in his 1879 novel A Fool’s Errand, “shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, mutilated beyond description, tortured beyond conception.” Tourgee was not describing a frontier massacre. Having been a Republican judge during Reconstruction, he was explaining the fate of many blacks and their white political allies. Allowing for literary license, the judge told the truth. Appomattox was only a truce that ushered in two years of nominal peace before the south renewed the conflict at a guerrilla level. President Grant refought many of the men he had already defeated once and whose purpose had been little changed by Lee’s surrender. Confederate veterans dominated the irregular warfare between 1867 and 1877, continuing the struggle against federal authority in order to preserve white supremacy and regional political powers. The renewed war forced the Army to participate in low-intensity military operations and to assume an untraditional duty. Garrisoning the south during Reconstruction was a deviation from its customary apolitical role.
During the Civil War the Army became involved in developing loyal governments in the seceded states and working out the freedmen’s place in society. Lincoln appointed military governors with civil and military powers for occupied states, hoping they could mobilize loyal electorates, and Army officers initiated educational and free labor programs for exslaves. To support the Army’s work with blacks, in March 1865 Congress created the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) in the War Department. Staffed primarily by Army personnel, the bureau represented a unique social welfare experiment and an unprecedented extension of federal power into the states, since it had authority over the economic, legal, and political affairs of the former slaves.
Northerners assumed that martial law and the military’s role in the south would end in 1865. They expected southerners to acknowledge defeat by treating blacks justly, rejecting Confederate leaders, and embracing southern Unionists. None of these things happened. Encouraged by President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy, which imposed no severe penalties on the south, unrepentant southerners elected former Confederates to state, local, and national offices, formed militia units composed of exsoldiers, passed “black codes” restricting the freedmen’s rights, slaughtered blacks in race riots, refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and bullied loyalists. Most important from the Army’s viewpoint, southerners frequently insulted and sometimes assaulted soldiers and filed scores of damage suits in state courts against federal military personnel. In these suits claimants asked for damages for actions that the soldiers had taken under martial law during and after the war. Since the claimants, judges, and jurors were inevitably former rebels, the courts were unsympathetic to the defendants. Army personnel, whose legal status in the south from 1865 to early 1867 was ambiguous, were reluctant to exercise authority under martial law or support the Freedmen’s Bureau for fear of provoking damage suits.
The problem of protecting the Army from vengeful southerners and establishing its legal position was one of the main factors that drove a wedge between Johnson, on the one hand, and Congress, Secretary of War Stanton, and Commanding General Grant, on the other. Johnson’s position, expressed in proclamations issued in April and August of 1866, was that the rebellion was over, the southern states were restored to the Union under his lenient policy, and the civil authority was ascendant over the military. He wanted the Army out of the reconstructed states since, he said, “standing armies, military occupation, martial law, military tribunals, and the suspension of the wr
it of habeas corpus are in time of peace dangerous to public liberty” and incompatible with free institutions. In the Milligan, Garland, and Cummings decisions, the Supreme Court agreed with him that continued martial law was unconstitutional. But from the perspective of the Army and a growing number of Republican congressmen, if prevailing conditions did not change, the wartime sacrifices would have been in vain, for only loyal people would suffer any penalties.
Rather than see Appomattox reversed, Army personnel and white Unionists suffer further abuse, and blacks returned to virtual slavery, Stanton and Grant defied the president and turned to Congress for help, resulting in an alliance between the Army and Congress that wrested Reconstruction policy from Johnson’s hands. In 1866 Grant, with Stanton’s concurrence, issued orders permitting military personnel who believed the south’s civil courts denied them justice to have suits transferred to federal courts or the Freedmen’s Bureau’s tribunals. He also issued a secret circular urging commanders to act discreetly but authorizing them to employ martial law when necessary despite Johnson’s proclamations. Congress further protected the Army by amending the 1863 Habeas Corpus Act to provide for federal jurisdiction in suits against soldiers and to assist the defendants with government legal aid.
Laws passed in March 1867 signaled a complete victory for the Congress-Army alliance over the president and in essence established a separate army for Reconstruction duty. The Command of the Army Act and the Tenure of Office Act kept Grant and Stanton in their positions and enhanced the commanding general’s authority over the entire Army. Although frontier garrisons remained under executive control and the precise extent of the president’s loss of authority over the occupation forces remains subject to debate, Grant and Stanton, acting in concert with Congress, were the dominant voices affecting the Army in the south. To prevent organized resistance, Congress disbanded southern militia units and prohibited new ones from being raised without its approval.
Finally, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act setting forth its own policy. The act legalized Army occupation, reinstated martial law, and divided the south into five military districts, each commanded by a general. The Army became a political instrument, a role that it did not relish but undertook as a means of self-preservation. Under the act the Army had the power to remove and appoint officials, register voters, hold elections, regulate court proceedings, and approve state constitutions. Grant interpreted the law to mean that commanders had “entire control over the civil governments” and were not responsible to any United States civil officer, and Congress agreed. Thus a general’s political inclinations were important. A few lacked zeal for the goals of congressional Reconstruction and worked with Conservatives (Democrats) to limit its impact. But others favored the Republican Party, and their tutelage fostered Radical Republican governments. By 1871 Congress had readmitted most of the states, Conservative or Republican. After a state’s restoration military rule ended and civil government began. However, southerners so detested most of the new regimes that, having created Republican governments, the Army had to help defend them.
White racists considered three organizations besides the Army provocative. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau helped plantation owners by keeping blacks tied to the land as agrarian laborers, it also enhanced the freedmen’s political and civil rights. The Union League, a northern patriotic society, spread to the south, where freedmen comprised the bulk of its membership and its main purpose was to mobilize black voters. To provide for local protection, most of the governments received congressional permission to raise militias. Composed of both blacks and white Unionists, the militias undertook general police and specific election duties, ensuring that freedmen voted and that ineligible former rebels did not. Paradoxically, the militias weakened rather than strengthened the Republicans. Congress used their formation as a pretext to reduce the Army, and the sight of armed black men intensified the white southerners’ reaction to Republican rule.
The southerners’ violent answer to Reconstruction was the Ku Klux Klan. Begun as a social fraternity in Tennessee, that state’s leaders made it into a paramilitary arm of the Conservative Party. The Klan spread to every state between the Potomac and the Rio Grande and spawned a host of similar organizations, such as the Knights of the Rising Sun and the Knights of the White Camellia. Manned by undemocratic Democrats and racist reactionaries, the terrorist groups beat, whipped, raped, and murdered lone blacks and white Republicans, especially those active in the Freedmen’s Bureau, Union League, and militias. Many incidents were simple brutality. But the violence also served a counterrevolutionary purpose, undermining the reconstructed governments by inducing some Republicans to leave the South and assassinating and intimidating others. Wherever the terrorists were active, Republican voting drastically declined.
“The Ku Klux organization is so extensive, and so well organized and armed, that it is beyond the power of any one to exert any moral influence over them,” wrote a general serving in Tennessee. “Powder and ball is the only thing that will put them down.” But who would supply the powder and ball? The reign of terror was so extensive that state governments were powerless to control it. Only the national government and its Army had the resources to quell the south’s challenge to federal policy. Most Army officers were willing to engage the rebels again—even those who sympathized with southern goals deplored the lawless terrorists—and whenever the beleaguered state governments requested aid, they responded as best they could. But severe problems hampered the Army’s war against the Klan. Too few regulars were available. In 1868 only 17,657 men were on occupation duty, and three years later the number was only 8,038. While numbers are not necessarily an indication of power, the Army was nevertheless too small to quash the violence. Constitutional and legal safeguards against military power also restricted the Army. When Congress readmitted a state, the Army could intervene only upon the application of, and in subordination to, state civil authorities. These officials, either afraid of or in sympathy with the terrorists, often inhibited effective action. Moreover, even when officials called upon the Army to assist in enforcing the law, its legal authority was as murky as it had been in 1865–1867. Thus officers facing a delicate political situation often hesitated to act decisively.
Perhaps the most fundamental problem was the north’s flagging determination. Representing a minority in each southern state and utterly dependent on federal support, were the Republican governments worth saving? Increasing numbers of northerners thought not, and erstwhile backers of congressional policy gradually retreated. An important test between northern resolve and southern resistance came in the early 1870s, when Congress passed the Enforcement Acts. The most important one, called the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawed the Klan and similar groups, permitted President Grant to declare martial law and suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and gave federal officials and troops unprecedented authority of enforcement. However, the enforcement record in the south was pitiable, and by 1874 the program retained little vitality. In nine South Carolina counties, where Grant for the first and only time suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the act did achieve measurable success and demonstrated what might have been achieved. The commander there, Major Lewis M. Merrill, deployed the 7th Cavalry so effectively that he broke the Klan’s grip on the state. But South Carolina was the exception.
Despite the Enforcement Acts, not because of them, the Klan’s activity declined as it lost the community support essential for irregular operations. The grosser Klan outrages repelled simple humanity, and the exile and demoralization of the black labor force hurt the economy. More important, Democratic leaders, unable to control the Klan, could not mobilize it to help them win elections. With the KKK, violence spawned violence, all too often unharnessed to political purpose.
But southerners did not give up their war for white supremacy and home rule. The north’s obvious desire for peace and its growing indifference to the fate of southern Republicans encouraged Democrats to act boldly. In the
mid-1870s a new white terror arose to “redeem” those states still under Republican rule. Openly directed by Democratic leaders, such well-armed organizations as the White League of Louisiana and the Red Shirts of South Carolina were essentially Conservative militias formed to counter Republican militias. Although relying heavily on economic pressure and threats, which were unlikely to provoke federal intervention, they resorted to violence when it served political purposes. Democrats planned race riots and battled Republican militias prior to elections, in time to keep Republicans from the polls but too late for Washington to send regulars to police the voting. What occurred between 1874 and 1877 was not indiscriminate Klan-style violence, but a calculated insurrection as the last unredeemed states fell to Democrats.
One unexpected result of Reconstruction was the difficulty in enacting legislation to reform and modernize the armed forces. The Democratic triumph in the south led to a reunited national Democratic Party. Based on its experiences between 1861 and 1877, it became an antimilitary party, giving new birth to the attitudes of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras. For the next generation congressional Democrats, especially those from the south, generally opposed forward-looking military legislation. At times Democratic intransigence threatened the Army’s operational ability. For example, in 1877 Congress appropriated no money for the Army until November 30, forcing soldiers to rely on loans from bankers, who were often usurious. Frequently joining the antireformist Democrats were the War Department’s bureau chiefs, whose political power had been enhanced during Reconstruction. With the Army responsive to Congress’s direction, the chiefs exerted even greater independence from their traditional superior, the secretary of war, and developed closer ties to Congress, thus gaining political leverage in fighting line-sponsored reforms.
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