American Settler Colonialism: A History
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Like the Indian savages and the Mexican mongrels, the Confederate rebels defied and disrupted the imagined community of the nation by making an independent claim on sovereignty. By clinging to what many now saw as a reactionary and immoral practice in slavery, the South undermined the national fantasy of America as a land of the free and a model for the world to emulate. By mid-century, with new lands opened up, a religious revival in force, and an antislavery movement gaining momentum, slavery had now become a problem for white people in America.
In the Civil War Americans turned their penchant for righteous violence onto themselves rather than projecting it as a unifying force against the indigenous savage or the Hispanic other. The romanticized history of the Civil War—the way that Americans choose to memorialize and remember the epic clash between the Blue and the Gray—occludes a striking level of rage-filled irregular and indiscriminate violence reflecting continuity with the Mexican and Indian wars. The great battles such as Antietam and Gettysburg, which brought on the bloodiest days in national history, figure prominently in American memory of the Civil War. Far less well known, however, Americans in communities throughout the South, the West, and the central borderlands wantonly killed one another in localized indiscriminate blood feuds.87 In recent years scholars have increased the estimated death toll from 620,000 to 750,000 on the basis of census data and more sophisticated evidence of the massive toll of irregular warfare.88
Though not a race war like the Mexican and Indian wars, the localized guerrilla conflicts of the Civil War otherwise reveal a striking continuity with the earlier history of American warfare. These struggles were “extremely brutal, with combatants ‘Othering’ their enemies in order to validate the most horrific acts of retribution.” Both Confederate and Union partisans “dehumanized their opponents as criminals or bushwhackers or Tories.”89 Only a handful of scholars (in the context of a gargantuan Civil War literature) have focused on this “uncivil war,” the “punitive war,” and the “savage conflict.”90
Combatants made frequent references to the Indian wars as they applied a ready vocabulary of “savagery” and “barbarity” to their new domestic enemies. Just as “the people of the Southern borders had slaughtered the Indians who stole their cattle,” a Richmond, Virginia, editor avowed, they would “shoot the Yankees who steal their Negroes.” Let the Yankees invade, declared DeBow’s Review, and the people of the South “will become as savage as the Seminoles and twice as brave.”91
By the summer of 1862, the Civil War had already taken on the character of a full-scale, atrocity-filled guerrilla conflict. Following the passage of the Partisan Ranger Act of 1862, the Confederacy unleashed irregular forces such as those led by John Mosby of Virginia—the “Grey Ghost of the Confederacy”; John Hunt Morgan of Kentucky; and Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee.92 Some of the most atrocious indiscriminate violence occurred in Missouri, which remained in the Union but was a slave state with masses of Confederate sympathizers. The pro-slavery Missourians viewed Northerners and neighboring “Jayhawkers” as degraded by their “sickly sycophantic love of the nigger” and intent on “crushing us of the South as a people.” Unionists viewed the pro-South Missourians as “bushwhackers,” “dregs,” and “pukes” who “should be punished for their secessionist, slaveholding sins.” In this climate of extreme hatred, with men on both sides believing they were doing God’s will, “rampant and seemingly random violence” prevailed in Missouri before, during, and after the Civil War.93
Indiscriminate violence in Missouri metastasized after the stunning attack on Lawrence, Kansas, led by the rebel guerrilla William Quantrill. After plundering and killing some 180 civilians in front of their wives and families, the raiders put the city to the torch and rode back to the Missouri backcountry.94 Traumatized Unionist forces responded with indiscriminate violence of their own, including summary executions of suspected bushwhackers. “The contest for the supremacy in this state must be made a war of extermination,” Union General Ben Loan declared. As in the Indian Wars and the Mexican War, punishment for indiscriminate killings was exceedingly rare. Not surprisingly, in the wake of Quantrill’s raid, Kansas Governor John J. Ingalls applauded the “take no prisoners” attitude and dismissal of “red tape sentimentalism” on the part of “Jennison’s Jayhawkers,” which he lauded as “a band of destroying angels.”95
Pathological violence reigned in Missouri. In September 1864 “Bloody Bill” Anderson, a participant in Quantrill’s Raid, and a group of about 80 men stopped a train and found that it held two dozen unarmed Union soldiers on furlough. They were forced to strip, then summarily executed and mutilated. As a Union officer later reported, “seventeen of them scalped, and one had his privates cut off and placed in his mouth.” When a Union patrol responded to the attack, Anderson’s heavily armed gang chased them down and ultimately killed and mutilated a total of 146 Union soldiers and three civilians. The Union army eventually hunted down and killed Anderson and posed his body for photographs. Similarly, another bushwhacker, Alfred Bowman, who claimed to have killed 40 pro-Union men, was beaten to death with an iron tool and his mangled corpse displayed for masses of citizen onlookers at a Union outpost.96
Arkansas plunged into “unrestrained guerrilla conflict” as the Mississippi River to the east and the ample swamplands and Ozark Mountains to the west made the Razorback state an ideal breeding ground for guerrilla war. From Memphis, William Tecumseh Sherman warned Arkansas officials, “You initiate the game, and my word for it your people will regret it long after you pass from earth.”97 Bushwhacking guerrillas ignored the Yankee general by picking off Union troops, attacking steamboats, federal riverboats, and carrying out hit-and-run raids, but Sherman proved as good as his word. The Union army hunted down guerrillas with orders to “shoot them whenever found … not one of them is to be spared.” The federals conducted search and destroy operations, “taxed” the people and burned their homes, towns, and businesses, leaving the state in ruins. As guerrilla and outlaw bands ran wild, and Union retribution showed no restraint, the Civil War became “a time of terror” for Arkansas residents.98
Early in the war in Tennessee, Southern irregulars rounded up more than 1,000 Unionists, sending many to prison in the Deep South, and summarily executed an unknown number of others. In a notorious incident in 1864 after a battle in Saltville, VA, Tennessee rebels executed 46 African-American soldiers while several whites lay injured on the battlefield. As the federals retook Tennessee later in the war, Unionists got their revenge by carrying out summary executions of their own.99
Despite a vigorous suppression policy in Kentucky, including summary executions, rebel guerrillas flourished in the Bluegrass state. One notorious partisan, Henry C. Magruder, who had taken part in Morgan’s raids, was charged with 17 murders, mostly of captured Union soldiers. Magruder also plundered Union homes, burned alive an African-American man, and violated southern gender codes by raping the wife of a Union soldier and six other “young ladies” at a school. Kentucky Unionists wounded and captured Magruder but kept him alive so that he could be hanged before a teeming crowd in Louisville in 1865.100
Unsurprisingly, some of the most egregious violence of the Civil War unfolded in Texas, where pockets of pro-Union sentiment prevailed in much of north Texas. In 1861, as Texas joined the Confederacy, the Texas Rangers “wrested control of the state from federal authority,” forcing out the Unionist Governor Sam Houston. Declaring that there was no place in Texas for federal sympathizers, Houston’s successor ordered “every exertion to effect their extermination as soon as possible.”101
Rumors of a supposed Jayhawk invasion spurred indiscriminate slaughter and mob justice before, during, and after the Civil War in Texas. In August 1862, Rangers and vigilantes descended on six counties populated primarily with German immigrants and carried out “a bloodbath in which more than thirty Germans were killed and nearly that many wounded.” In another area of the state, James G. Bourland, a slaveholder and politician soon
dubbed “the Hangman of Texas,” orchestrated the execution of some 40 alleged Unionists in what became known as the “Great Hanging” of 1862. Determined to extirpate Unionists, Texas briefly contracted with the infamous Missourian Quantrill to round up suspected deserters but his indiscriminate killing of them made Governor Henry McCullough squeamish. “I appreciate his services, and am anxious to have them,” he explained, “but certainly we cannot, as a Christian people, sanction a savage inhuman warfare, in which men are to be shot down like dogs, after throwing down their arms and holding up their hands supplicating for mercy.”102
Neighboring Louisiana, with its river traffic and swamp havens as well as “blurred loyalties and simmering animosities” proved to be “a near perfect incubator for guerrilla warfare.” The Union seizure of New Orleans profoundly embittered the city’s residents and spurred guerrilla opposition throughout the state. As irregulars conducted sniping and sabotage missions, the federals responded with unrestrained violence of their own. In August 1862, Admiral David Farragut indiscriminately shelled Donaldsville while General Benjamin Butler’s army sacked Baton Rouge, plundered homes, destroyed the town, and shipped its art and riches off to the north. Displaced people, deserters, and criminals created a climate conducive to depredations, panic, and despair both during and well after the war.103
Sherman’s “March to the Sea” late in 1864 has long been singled out as uniquely vindictive in its ruthlessness. In actuality the same style of punitive war had long since become the norm for the Union army. Sherman and Grant—”two of punitive war’s greatest proponents”—had concluded as early as 1862 that the only way to respond to persistent rebel resistance and guerrilla assaults was through summary execution and collective punishment of southern communities. The Union generals viewed the Partisan Ranger Act as a dishonorable and inexcusable resort to guerrilla warfare for which the South deserved undiscriminating retribution. They seized upon a code of wartime behavior developed in 1863 by the German Francis Lieber, which deemed irregulars as ineligible for protection under the international laws of war.104
With Union forces suffering the traumatic effects of sniping, bushwhacking, partisan raids, and other guerrilla assaults, the federals authorized “a destructive, often murderous, orgy of retaliation.” The Union taxed and torched southern cities and towns that refused to turn over guerrillas. Like American attacks on Indian communities, “no real effort was made to determine if the targeted towns and villages did, in fact, house or supply guerrillas before they were set aflame,” Clay Mountcastle notes. “Entire towns, sometimes cities, were destroyed and the inhabitants forced to flee even though these locations had no real operational or strategic value.” Summary executions “became so routine that the killing of captured guerrillas required little or no justification in dispatches.”105
By the time Sherman’s army marched to the sea, his primed and hardened veterans had already internalized indiscriminate warfare as a matter of routine. Sherman’s army meted out punishment to the rebels, burning their homes, farms, and stores, but at the same time continued to take losses as they navigated through a “gauntlet of guerrillas” during the five-month drive on Atlanta.106 Sherman’s army ratcheted up the destruction in South Carolina, carrying out a deliberate reign of terror aimed at ripping the heart out of the southern rebellion. South Carolina guerrillas fought to the bitter end, however, as they “hanged, shot, or slashed the throats of over a hundred federals.”107
The war would end in Virginia, where in 1864 the Union army under General Philip Sheridan conducted a scorched-earth campaign through the Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan deliberately targeted Loudon County, the home of the long-time Union tormentor, the “Grey Ghost” Mosby, leaving it destitute and in smoldering ruins. The federals plundered and burned everywhere they went, slaughtering farm animals and living off the land, but whenever a Blue-clad soldier strayed too far from the ranks, others would find “our dead comrades suspended conspicuously from the limbs of trees along our line of march,” a Union soldier recalled. General George Crook ordered his troops to “destroy all substance for man or beast,” to leave behind “a belt of devastation … where these bushwhackers are harbored.” The Union army “continued to exterminate guerrillas” until Lee finally faced up to the inevitable and surrendered at Appomattox Court House.108
By the time of Lee’s surrender, guerrilla war could no longer be sustained amid waning popular support in the South. Deserters, pro-Union resisters, escaped slaves, and outlaws plagued the war effort. The mountains of north Georgia had long been inflamed with “vicious local struggles between Confederate deserters, Unionist guerrilla bands, outlaws, and scattered militia companies.” In North Carolina, “Bands of destitute deserters roamed the Tar Heel State, plundering homes and wreaking havoc, often upon their own neighbors.”109
Guerrilla resistance had boomeranged back against the Confederacy. The irregular war had intensified and prolonged the conflict, heightened the destruction, and ultimately ensured that Union strategy and occupation policies had become increasingly draconian. Like the volunteers in the Indian and Mexican Wars, thousands of southern men had wanted to maintain their freedom of movement, avoid regimentation and taking orders, to fight on their own terms. In 1864 the Confederate leaders, recognizing that the irregular war had offered a pretext for “depredations” and “grave mischief,” repealed the Partisan Ranger Act.110
Sectional hatred kept the South in a state of violent upheaval for years after the war’s end. “Union men and former Confederates alike appeared willing to continue their blood feuds after Appomattox,” George Rable notes. In opposition to Reconstruction policies, southerners, both “organized and unorganized, intimidated, whipped, hanged and shot Union men, blacks, and Republicans of both races.” Accustomed to rejecting authority and carrying out violent assaults, many former guerillas became Klansmen or Night Riders. Others like the James and Younger brothers in Missouri became outlaws.111
While violence was commonplace during Reconstruction, as usual “nowhere was it more pervasive and deadly than in Texas.” Divisions, hatreds, and “the persecution of freed slaves and Union men contributed to leading Texas to the nation’s highest homicide rate by 1870,” David P. Smith explains. The wartime hatreds between Confederates, Unionists, deserters, and outlaws “spilled over into the postwar years and lingered in smoldering partisanship for decades.”112
White Americans gradually restored national unification through racial solidarity in which violence could be focused once again on the South’s African-American population. Racial formation and phobias of miscegenation and “black rule” provoked staggering levels of violence to be directed at African-Americans with virtual impunity, as it was “no sin to kill a nigger.”113 Moderate southern whites could be subjected to violence or at a minimum branded as traitors for supporting Yankee Reconstruction policies, which gradually gave way to the “redeemers.” A different sort of irregular resistance continued as the South mounted “successful guerrilla warfare against Republicanism.”114 By the time of the 1876 election and subsequent compromise, redemption and counterrevolution were already virtually complete.
Caught in the Middle: Indians and the Civil War
Indians, even those who had been forcibly removed to “Indian country,” could not escape the torment of the Civil War. The conflict among the whites offered opportunities for some Western tribes such as the Comanche, who exploited the war to increase the tempo of their raiding in Texas and the Southwest, but for most indigenes the Civil War was as destructive to them as it was to Americans of the North and the South.
Those Indians who joined “the war between the two fires” out of a “desperate hope of obtaining a larger and more secure land base” would be disappointed.115
The outcome of the Civil War ultimately strengthened the Union and the military while spurring industrialization, homesteading, and railroad development, all of which would help Americans destroy indigenous cultures.
So
me 20,000 Indians served in the Civil War, mostly but far from exclusively on the Union side. For some Indians the conflict offered an outlet for their masculine warrior drives while others hoped simply to improve their lives through military service. In the northeast, the Pequot and Mohegan joined the Union cause as mercenaries because they were extremely poor and had few other opportunities. In Michigan, the Ottawa and Ojibwa hoped to improve their declining status in the wolverine state through military service. The Delaware and Seneca also aided the North, the latter inspired partly by Grant’s selection of the Seneca Ely Parker as his military secretary. In the South the Pamunkey of Virginia and the Lumbee of North Carolina fought against the Confederacy in hopes of liberation from their increasingly precarious enclaves within those states. Conversely, the Catawba had become collaborationists to survive in South Carolina and thus served as volunteer infantrymen in the Army of Northern Virginia.116
The Civil War badly divided and severely damaged the southeastern tribes who had been forcibly relocated west into the Indian Country. Their “entire social fabric disintegrated” as farms, homes, schools, and churches were destroyed in the conflict.117 Thousands of Indians became refugees. The devastation resulted partly from the neutral space and vulnerability of Indian Country, as Unionist forces raided from Kansas to the north and southerners entered from the south and east. More importantly, however, the tribes divided against each other and amongst themselves as they joined in the spirit of internecine strife.