DR: After the war is over, the British, to pay for their victory, started imposing taxes on the colonial settlers. That ultimately led to the Revolutionary War. What side did Native Americans take during that war?
PD: The last of the bill of complaints in the Declaration of Independence says that the king has brought on “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” Most—but not all—Native people sided with the British. And the Americans had a bad habit of killing Indian people at random, which tended to drive away even their own allies.
DR: The Revolutionary War is won by the colonies after a number of years, and then a new government is set up under the Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, is there any discussion of how to handle Native Americans, and what their rights might be?
PD: So many of the legal histories of the writing of the Constitution pay not much attention to Native people. Yet they appear in the commerce clause, where Congress is charged to regulate commerce between the United States and foreign nations, among the several states, and with the American Indian tribes.
They also show up in the three-fifths clause, where we’re told that the census for determining representation in Congress will take the shape of a math problem: to the “whole number of free citizens” add indentured servants. Then subtract “Indians not taxed.” Then add “three-fifths of all other persons.”
What does that mean, “Indians not taxed”? It suggests the ways in which Indians were, in fact, part of those discussions. If you can imagine an Indian not taxed, you can imagine an Indian who was taxed. That person presumably would have given up his or her citizenship in their tribal nation, and gone through a naturalization process to become an American citizen.
That tells you that Indians are put into the Constitution in order to exclude them. They’re excluded because they are seen to be political entities in and of their own right. This is why treaties end up being the most important political relationship between American Indians and the United States.
DR: What about intermarriage and relationships between the Indians and the settlers? Were there a lot of relationships that led to children who were part Indian and part European? How were they treated?
PD: This is one of these things that we see much more in New France. My family, the Deloria family, was a mixed family of French men and Indian women. What you tend to see in the British colonies, particularly among those Native people who stayed behind, is intermarriage between Native people and African-descended people.
DR: The most famous Native American in the colonial era was Pocahontas. Who was Pocahontas, and did she really exist?
PD: Pocahontas did exist. She was a much younger girl than we imagine her being. She was likely caught up in diplomatic rituals and ceremonies involving her people and her parents. She did marry an Englishman, John Rolfe, who took her back to England, where she died.
Her cultural meaning has taken on so much more weight than the actual historical personage that she was. This is because there is this thing that happens with colonizing. You can see it in the dynamic of the Revolution. The colonizers, when they land in North America, they look back over their shoulder at Great Britain and they say, “We’re not like them, we’re new people. We’re in this new land.” At the same time they look west, out at Indian country, and they say, “We’re not them either. We are civilized British people.”
So you have figures like Pocahontas, Sacagawea [who accompanied the explorers Lewis and Clark], and La Malinche [an interpreter for the conquistador Hernan Cortés], who end up being critically important Indian women who figure in the cultural mythologies that sustain these kinds of settler societies. They allow settlers to claim a kind of authenticity or connection to the land through a metaphorical marriage.
DR: In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson is president. He completes the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubles the size of the country. Did he actually get permission from anybody in the Native American community to buy that land?
PD: This is a very familiar kind of story, right? European empires navigate and negotiate their own understandings of who owns what territory, and they never think that they actually don’t own that territory at all.
This happens after the Revolution, and it certainly happens with the Louisiana Purchase. What it means is that the United States has to go out into this territory, which it now claims relative to other European nations, and figure out what’s going to happen with the Native people who are actually there, who very much own the land and are quite willing and ready to defend it.
DR: The first president of the United States who was seen as a westerner and not part of the “establishment” was Andrew Jackson. He was widely seen as being very anti-Indian, and in fact drove a lot of the Indians out of the East Coast. Is that a fair characterization of his perspective?
PD: It is. Andrew Jackson is part of a much longer trajectory of the idea of removing Indian people from the eastern part of the United States, exchanging their land, and getting them to go west of the Mississippi.
Jefferson starts thinking about this in the late eighteenth century. But Jackson is the person who brings it to fruition through the Indian Removal Act of 1830; through military campaigns to move southern Indians and also midwestern Indians from their home territories to the west of the Mississippi River; and, by clearing these massive amounts of land, allowing American settlement but also, importantly, allowing the formation of American states.
The Northwest Ordinance sets out the terms through which a colony will become a state—sixty thousand free people. What that means is if you’re a territory and you want to become a state, you need to get your Indian people out of there so that you can bring in more settlers. What that leads to is either removal—making them leave the state—or moving them onto reservation territories where they’re contained and compressed.
DR: As the U.S. is expanding under what some people would call manifest destiny, we’re moving across the continent, we’re building a transcontinental railroad, we’re looking for gold, we’re looking for new places for cattle to graze. We’re looking for new cities to build, more places where religion could be exercised the way people wanted to do it, such as the Mormons.
Very often you see this on television westerns when you’re growing up—at least when I was growing up: the nice eastern settlers are moving west and all of a sudden they’re being raided by Indians coming in with tomahawks. What was the real story?
PD: It’s pretty much the other way around. These are Indigenous people who are in their home territories, and they look up and all of a sudden they’re seeing a huge wagon train full of immigrants coming through their territory. They ride down and they say, “If you’re going to cross our land, we’re going to charge you a toll.” Of course the settlers don’t want to be charged a fee, and you get conflicts.
The story that we haven’t really told is the story of what happens in the West during the Civil War. The Civil War is such an important watershed in American history, and it leads us to think about things only in terms of the North and the South.
But if we think about what happened in the West during the Civil War—the Minnesota uprising, and the resulting military campaigns across the Dakotas; the Navajo Long Walk, in which Navajo people were basically removed from their land and marched over to New Mexico; the Bear River Massacre [in present-day Idaho], in which three hundred people were killed by militia; the Sand Creek Massacre [in Colorado Territory]—there’s so much violence that is militia-based and also state military–based that happens in the 1860s. This leads to a large number of clearances of Native people, and sets the stage for a really short burst in the 1870s and ’80s where the United States Army comes in and basically mops up the rest of the West.
DR: When I was growing up and watching TV and movie westerns, the good guys were the settlers and the U.S. Army. Did the scriptwriters not know what the reality was?
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br /> PD: I think they just thought it was a better story. It plays into a whole set of American myths, which go all the way back to the founding colonies, of the frontier wilderness, of struggle with Indians, and that struggle making Americans into Americans. These are dueling notions, but they’re all interlocked. The mythic potential of these stories is just so strong.
DR: During the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s, a lot of treaties were entered into between the U.S. government, or states and territories, and local tribes or Indian groups. Who broke those treaties, typically?
PD: There has not been a treaty made between the United States and American Indians that has not been broken by the United States. Let’s just be up-front about that. Sure, some of these things are complicated. There are moments when it’s hard for Native people to restrain their young men, it’s hard for Americans to restrain their young men. Next thing you know, you’re in a fight and the treaty starts to fall apart.
But Americans have had a cynical view of their own treaties for a very long time. One of the things Jefferson says to William Henry Harrison goes something like this: “We can’t let the Indians think about the future in the way that we’re thinking about it. Make sure they’re living in the present, so when we negotiate a treaty it feels like it’s going to hold water, when we know that in fact over time it’s not.”
DR: Custer’s Last Stand is a very famous thing in American mythology—that [General George Armstrong] Custer was there to protect the rights of the United States, and he was slaughtered by Indians. What was the reality in the situation there?
PD: Custer just goes looking for a fight. There’s a series of fights between Lakota, Sioux people, and the American government—Red Cloud’s War—that results in the Treaty of 1868, in which Lakota territory is codified. It’s a quite extensive portion of land, and it includes the Black Hills [in the Dakota Territory]. In 1874, Custer leads an expedition into the Black Hills. They discover gold and, before you know it, there’s a huge land rush.
The army refuses to enforce the 1868 Treaty, which would have required moving white settlers out of Indian land. In January of 1876, the government says, “Any Indian who’s not at their agency is considered a hostile.” This has nothing to do with the treaty. There’s no reason why the United States should be able to make that kind of claim on Native people. That’s just the pretext for a war. The military goes out. Custer wants the glory for himself. He rides ahead and attacks the largest Indian village ever assembled on the Great Plains, to his peril.
DR: What happened at Wounded Knee?
PD: In 1877, the government wages a winter campaign, which basically breaks Lakota resistance. Sitting Bull flees to Canada, Crazy Horse is killed. Then things settle down, and people are forced onto reservations.
Native people on reservations end up becoming dependent upon the United States—the bison fail, Indians are confined, and the government has promised rations, which it used to force Native compliance. The United States is a trustee—it takes on those obligations through treaties—but it fails to uphold its end of the bargain. So Native people are starving in 1889, 1890.
They begin, on the Lakota reservations, doing a thing called the Ghost Dance. It actually comes from a prophet in Nevada named Wovoka. This is a dance of desperation. It’s not a violent dance. But the agents who were there completely lose their minds about this. “The Indians are uprising!”
These are demoralized people, not particularly dangerous—but the agents call in the military. And what you have is the largest military mobilization since the Civil War. Trainloads of troops are coming in.
There is an attempt to disarm a Lakota band that has come down from Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservation to the Pine Ridge Reservation, and it goes awry. The army opens up with these Hotchkiss mountain cannons, which are horrific, powerful weapons. It’s Custer’s Seventh Cavalry basically taking revenge for the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
DR: How many Native Americans were killed at Wounded Knee?
PD: It’s hard to know the exact number, but we think over three hundred people. People were chased for miles across the prairie. These soldiers were giving no quarter. They killed women and children as often as they could. The stories that come out of Wounded Knee are just horrific.
DR: At some point the U.S. government says, “We’re going to take the Indians who are left and give them some territory.” Did the United States actually honor some of these commitments?
PD: It’s useful to make the distinction: Was this land given them as a place to go and settle and be safe? There’s a dimension to that when we talk about removal to Indian Territory, or what’s now Oklahoma.
In most of these treaties, though, the land is retained rather than given. In other words, Native sovereignty on those reservations is continuous from before the United States until after the United States, and continues to be sovereign today. This is the reservation system. It goes all the way back to the late eighteenth century. It’s really codified in the 1850s and developed in the post–Civil War period.
DR: How many Native Americans would you say there are in the United States today?
PD: It depends on how you count, but Native Americans make up something like 1.7 percent of the American population. And it is a growing population. Native American numbers bottomed out in the 1900 census, when there were about 250,000 Native people who showed up in the census. We’re talking several millions today.
DR: What percentage of them are living on reservations, and how many reservations are there?
PD: There are 326 Indian land areas, with a range of names, that are administered as reservations. There are 574 federally recognized tribes at this point in time. But most Native people actually don’t live on reservations.
In the 1950s, the United States started policies like Termination and Relocation, which brought many Native people into cities. Native people had been moving to cities and moving around for a very long time as well. People have connections to reservation home territories, and to urban, or suburban, or small-town kinds of places. There are a lot of connective webs across that geography.
The bottom line is that Indian people’s unique political status, their self-determined management of sovereign Native lands, their resurgent demography and culture, and their control over significant natural resources means that Indian people are critical to the past and present of the United States. Native peoples make up 1.7 percent of the population, but Americans don’t often give Indians even 1.7 percent of their attention. That ought to change, and the sooner the better.
DREW GILPIN FAUST on Death and the Civil War
Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor of History, Harvard University; President Emerita, Harvard University
“We feel so strongly now that we are responsible for those who die in the nation’s service…. This attitude is one that would have seemed very alien in 1858. It was really the Civil War that changed that attitude.”
At the outset of the Civil War, many in the North thought the war might be over quite quickly, given its greater wealth, population, and military strength. Indeed, in the first battle of the war, Bull Run in Virginia, a number of northern civilians went to watch what they thought would be a festive quick victory for the Union troops. But the Confederate troops prevailed handily, presaging not a quick win for the Union but rather an epic four-year struggle (which could well at times have been won by the Confederacy).
That the war lasted so long obviously contributed to an enormous, unprecedented number of deaths. The war’s length was not the only reason for the deaths of more than three-quarters of a million soldiers. Two other factors were also present. The traditional warfare tactics of straight-on soldier charges were now conducted with far more lethal weaponry than during the Revolutionary War; and medical treatments and capabilities were generally not helpful in later saving those injured severely on the battlefield.
In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust, an eminent antebellum a
nd Civil War scholar and former president of Harvard, addresses the relatively novel challenges during the Civil War of identifying the dead; burying them on the battlefield; reburying them in appropriate cemeteries when possible; and separating the Confederate and Union soldiers, who were never to be buried in the same cemeteries. During this interview, which took place on June 12, 2019, at the Library of Congress as part of the Congressional Dialogues series, Drew discussed the challenges that Union and Confederate soldiers and their families faced in dealing with the absolutely unprecedented levels of death during the Civil War.
There is no doubt that Drew’s book makes one think much more about death and the manner in which it is handled—now or at any time. Her focus was on the Civil War, but similar issues have arisen in subsequent wars, though more modern medical relief and transportation methods have ameliorated some of the Civil War issues.
Dealing with large-scale death in the U.S. has occurred twice since the Civil War: during the Great Influenza of 1918–19 and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, though spaced by a century, the U.S. health-care system, far more modern than it was in the 1860s, has struggled to deal with the human toll. One can only imagine how the citizens of the North and South struggled during the Civil War.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): In the Civil War, how many Americans were killed?
DREW GILPIN FAUST (DGF): There’s been research since my book came out that indicates a higher death toll than the one I suggested in 2008. I talk about 620,000 dead. The number that now is agreed upon by epidemiologists and analysts and demographers is more like 750,000.
The American Experiment Page 11
