The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  A second meaning of frontier became increasingly evident during the nineteenth century and helped make sense of the first. Ever more Americans journeyed deeper within themselves to explore their own creative frontiers through writing, painting, and other arts. In doing so they better defined who they were along with the nation that created them. But in all of this exploration and development of frontiers during the Age of Lincoln, the establishment of the world’s first national park in 1872 arguably had the most revolutionary impact of all.

  Imperialism is the conquest and exploitation of one people and their territory by another. By this definition America was imperialist from its inception when, in May 1607, a hundred or so Englishmen disembarked on foreign soil and began clearing land for a settlement they called Jamestown. British imperialism in America was a joint venture of the government and private companies. Enterprises received charters to establish colonies in demarcated parts of America; when they failed, the government took over and directly ruled the colony. Some imperialist groups had ambitions as broad as the continent. The Crown granted charters to several companies entitling them to strips of land stretching from the Atlantic Ocean westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Yet, however indomitable Britain’s empire may have appeared on a map, the monarchy’s grip over thirteen of its American colonies was insidiously eaten away as each generation of colonial inhabitants became less British and more American.

  The U.S. government formally inherited this imperial role when it declared independence from Britain in July 1776. Like its predecessor, American imperialism was a partnership whereby the government promoted and protected private companies that invaded and exploited designated lands and in the process killed or drove off whatever Indians were living there. No grand strategy guided American imperialism any more than it had British imperialism. The United States spread across the continent as different administrations took advantage of opportunities that arose to acquire new territory from the nation’s neighbors, either by diplomacy or by war followed by diplomacy. Each acquisition involved a two-step diplomatic process. The first was with whichever country had legal title to the land, whether it was Britain, Spain, France, or Mexico. The second was with whatever Indian tribes actually lived there, a process that took decades and even generations depending on the territory’s size, the accessibility of its resources to exploitation, and the resistance of its inhabitants.

  In this imperial process, the American president inherited from the British king the title of “Great Father” to the tribes. In Indian eyes this role demanded that the president be generous and just to his “red children.” Although most presidents took this moral and legal role seriously rather than approaching it cynically, they had to contend constantly with political forces beyond their control.

  Powerful interest groups sought to enrich themselves by seizing and exploiting Indian lands. They expected and demanded that not just the president but Congress and the courts collaborate with them to do whatever it took to realize their ambitions. These groups either pressured Washington to war against and take the land of tribes with valuable resources, or they bribed officials to violate federal laws, regulations, and policies so that they could wring more profits from their existing access.

  Although the details differed from one tribe to the next, American imperialism toward the Indians followed a distinct pattern. The influx of Americans onto a tribe’s land violated existing treaties and eventually provoked war. The U.S. Army inevitably won the war. The federal government then imposed a treaty whereby the defeated tribes ceded land in return for a “guaranteed” territory, usually farther west, a pile of goods upon signing the treaty, and annual receipt of goods thereafter. Then, sooner or later, greed-driven Americans would begin violating the new Indian territory, thus igniting the same vicious cycle of invasion, war, and dispossession.

  When peace prevailed it was anything but just. Indian policy enriched contractors and agents at the expense of the tribes. For every four dollars in the federal budget for Indian affairs, corruption stole and inefficiency squandered three dollars; only one dollar actually reached the Indians and it was often all but worthless. Tribes bitterly complained that their annuities consisted of spoiled or scanty food, rotten blankets, sickly livestock, and broken promises. As if this were not bad enough, ethnic cleansing became increasingly important to Indian policy as agents and missionaries tried to convert Indians into farmers, Christians, and second-class Americans. Genocide, however, was never a federal government policy. No administration ever sought to exterminate any one tribe, let alone all Indians.2

  Although American imperialism west of the Mississippi River began with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, it did not peak until the Age of Lincoln. Before then the federal government supported private interest groups by negotiating access treaties with tribes, issuing trade licenses, and dispatching several exploring expeditions across swaths of the West. During the 1830s President Jackson forced the eastern tribes to sign treaties that took their land and forced them west along a Trail of Tears to settle in allotments between the Red and Platte Rivers. From 1803 to 1854 the army fought only one Indian war west of the Mississippi River, in 1823 against the Arikaras after they attacked a trapping party encamped beside their villages on the Missouri River.3

  The first major assertion of American power did not come until 1846, when President Polk forced Britain to cede Oregon Territory south of the forty-ninth parallel and began a war with Mexico that led to the conquest of California and New Mexico. These huge acquisitions provoked a policy debate. The president and a congressional majority understood that Washington’s institutions had failed adequately to manage the existing lands west of the Mississippi River and were incapable of governing all this new territory, especially the populous Mexican settlements with their alien culture.

  To remedy this, they established the Interior Department and transferred the War Department’s Indian Bureau to it in 1849. Forts were erected along trails leading to the west coast, up the Missouri River, on the Texas frontier, and in New Mexico and California. Congress divided then subdivided the West based on white settlement. After five thousand or more Americans settled in a region, Washington organized it into a territory with an appointed governor and three judges; when the population surpassed sixty thousand, the people could apply for statehood. The Interior Department drew its own lines across the map that encompassed groups of tribes; designated an Indian superintendency for each; appointed superintendents and agents and awarded contracts to companies to supply annuities; and eventually negotiated a treaty or more with each tribe on issues of war, peace, trade, and land. The most ambitious effort was the 1851 Fort Laramie council, when Indian commissioners signed treaties with most of the northern plains tribes, including the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Gros Ventres, Assiniboines, Mandans, and Arikaras. A similar set of treaties was signed with the southern plains tribes the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches at Fort Bent on the Santa Fe Trail in 1853. These agreements designated tribal regions and sought to keep the peace among the tribes as well as between them and the Americans.

  Violence erupted despite these efforts. In August 1854 a war broke out with the Brule band of Sioux after an emigrant complained to Fort Laramie’s commander that an Indian had killed and butchered his stray cow. Lt. John Grattan marched with thirty men to the nearby village, demanded compensation, and after Chief Conquering Bear dismissed the notion, ordered his men to open fire. Although the initial volley killed Conquering Bear, the enraged Brules slaughtered Grattan and all but one of his men, then packed up and fled northward. The army was so thinly spread across the West that a retaliatory expedition was not organized until 1855. Col. William Harney and his six hundred dragoons and infantry finally reached and attacked the Brules at Ash Hollow in western Nebraska in September. The troops killed eighty-five Brules and captured seventy women and children while losing four killed, seven wounded, and one missing. Harney sent the captives with an escort to Fort Kearney a
s he marched northward after the hundred or so Brules who escaped. In October the expedition reached Fort Pierre on the Missouri River without having found any Indians along the way. In March 1856 Harney signed a treaty with the Brules and several other Sioux bands whereby the chiefs agreed to a system in which a head chief would be responsible for any violence or theft by any village member.

  War after war followed, some with as trivial a cause as the Brule war, others with far more at stake, like gold in the Black Hills. The army fought the Jicarilla Apaches and Utes in 1854; the Mescalero Apaches in 1855; the Yakamas in 1855 and 1856; the Cayuses, Walla Wallas, Pelouses, and Umatillas in 1856 and 1857; the Cheyennes in 1856; the Comanches and Kiowas from 1857 through 1859; the Chiricahua Apaches from 1857 to 1860; the Mohaves from 1858 to 1859; the Navajos from 1858 to 1861; the Mescalero Apaches from 1861 to 1864; the Gila Apaches from 1861 to 1865; the Dakota Sioux from 1862 to 1864; the Shoshones, Bannocks, Utes, and Gosiutes from 1862 to 1863; the Navajos from 1863 to 1865; the Cheyennes and Oglala Sioux from 1863 to 1865; the Comanches from 1864 to 1865; the Yanktonais, Santee, and Teton Sioux in 1865; the Oglala, Brule, Hunkpapa, Sans Arc, Miniconjou, Blackfoot, and Two Kettle Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos from 1865 to 1868; the Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas from 1867 to 1868; the Mescalero and Gila River Apaches from 1867 to 1869; the Paiutes from 1866 to 1869; the Piegan Blackfeet from 1869 to 1870; the Modocs from 1872 to 1873; the Chiricahua, Warm Spring, Mimbre, and Mogollon Apaches from 1872 to 1873; the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Kiowas from 1874 to 1875; and finally, the Hunkpapa, Brule, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, Blackfoot, and Miniconjou Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos from 1876 to 1877. This was hardly the end of the bloodshed. Most Indians died during the 1850s, when gangs of armed civilian men, at times backed by the army, slaughtered thousands among the largely peaceful tribes of California and Oregon west of the Sierras and Cascade Mountains to steal their land, in retaliation for usually minor crimes, or just for sadistic pleasure.4

  These wars shared characteristics across the different regions where the army operated and the different tribes that the army fought. Virtually all soldiers, especially West Point graduates and Mexican or Civil War veterans, found Indian warfare frustrating. All the tribes fought hit-and-run guerrilla wars against the Americans. Man for man, Indian warriors surpassed the soldiers in endurance, courage, stealth, riding, and shooting. Their villages were mobile and nearly impossible to catch up to as they hurried across the West’s vast plains, deserts, or mountains.

  At the rare times when an army column actually found a village, it was as likely to be peaceful as hostile. Despite the uncertainty, commanders often ordered an attack without bothering to determine the band’s status. The most important reason was that surprise reduced one’s own casualties and inflicted more on the enemy, while forcing the survivors to abandon their lodges and thus their ability to sustain themselves. But at times commanders and troops alike vented an explosive mix of racism and rage against known peaceful Indians and slaughtered women and children along with the men. Of the half-dozen massacres of peaceful villages, the most notorious was the murder of a hundred or more of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne band at Sand Creek by Col. John Chivington and his Colorado volunteers in December 1864. For practical as well as moral reasons, the federal government disavowed these deliberate massacres.

  How can a war be won against such an elusive foe? Generals like William Sherman and Phil Sheridan concluded that they could defeat the Indians only with the same total war strategy that had crushed the Confederacy. This meant destroying the hostile bands’ ability to sustain themselves. Converging columns that kept Indians on the run prevented them from harvesting, hunting, or stealing food. The best season for pursuit was winter, when food and fuel were most scarce. To increase the army’s mobility, supplies were packed on mules instead of in wagons. To increase the ability to find hostile bands, as many friendly Indians as possible were recruited as scouts. This strategy resulted in far more bands eventually giving up to avoid starvation than because of lost battles.

  The dependence of the plains Indians on buffalo for their livelihoods made them especially vulnerable to Washington’s total war and ethnic cleansing policies. Interior Secretary Columbus Delano candidly explained how in January 1874 testimony before the House Military Affairs Committee: “The buffalo are disappearing rapidly. . . . I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization.” Before the same committee, Gen. William Sherman noted that the decimation of the buffalo was doing “more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular Army has done in the last thirty years.”5

  Although Abraham Lincoln genuinely sympathized with the Indians’ plight, he had little time to devote to Indian policy during his presidency. On March 27, 1863, in a meeting with fifteen plains chiefs at the White House, he at once apologized for and asked for understanding of the times when American officials or citizens violated treaties: “It is the object of this government to be on terms of peace with you, and try to observe them; and if our children should behave badly, and violate their treaties, it is against our wish.” Most likely with a wry smile as he imagined his own rambunctious offspring, he said, “You know it is not always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do.” To their request for “advice about their life in this country,” he offered an answer that they likely found at once frustrating and refreshingly honest: “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 customs of your race or adopt a new mode of life.”6

  Lincoln was especially sensitive to the dilemmas of Indian policy. Just the previous year, one of the bloodiest Indian wars had erupted, followed by the largest mass execution in American history, and as president Lincoln made critical choices about who among the Indians convicted of murder and rape would live or die.7

  The chiefs of the Dakota Sioux had succumbed to pressure in 1851 to sign a treaty whereby they gave up twenty-four million acres of land and their nomadic way of life to live in two narrow reservations along the Minnesota River; the federal government promised to turn them into farmers and annually give them money and food. Few Dakotas adapted to the plow and by the summer of 1862 corruption, cheating, and incompetence by the Indian Bureau and its contractors brought them to starvation’s brink. The annuities of food and money were late and deficient. When Indians protested, a storekeeper named Andrew Myrick quipped, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”8 Four desperate and enraged Sioux men murdered a white farm family that refused to share their food with them, then admitted to the tribal council what they had done. A majority of warriors called for an uprising that caught the whites by surprise. The Indians struck on August 18 and over the next couple of weeks slaughtered over four hundred men, women, and children and captured hundreds more; some of the women were raped. Among those killed was Myrick; his body was found mutilated and his mouth stuffed with grass.

  Gen. John Pope received orders to crush the Dakota Sioux. He expressed the collective outrage and demand for vengeance: “The horrible massacres of women and children and the outrageous abuse of female prisoners . . . 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. . . . Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plain. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.”9

  Pope partly fulfilled his vision. Within a month the army had forced most Dakota bands to surrender and hand over any warriors who had participated in the uprising. This relatively easy victory came because the Indians ran out of ammunition and food and had no place to go for m
ore. Under a treaty signed in 1863, the Dakotas surrendered all their land in Minnesota for land farther west, along the Missouri River in the Dakotas.

  Meanwhile a five-man military commission tried those suspected of committing crimes during the uprising. The result was the most notorious example of “victor’s justice” in American history.10 The presiding judge was Henry Sibley, Minnesota’s governor and a man who had enriched himself in part by skimming a fortune from contracts to supply provisions to the Dakotas. Transcripts of the proceedings reveal that most of the court’s sentences were not grounded on hard evidence. Those who admitted to having participated in an attack were treated as having admitted to committing a crime. The commission tried 392 prisoners, sentenced 307 to death on charges of murder and rape, imposed 16 prison terms for lesser crimes, and released the rest.

  President Abraham Lincoln was stunned by the verdicts. He had two legal experts spend weeks carefully examining the transcripts. Acting on their advice, he wielded his pardon power to either reduce or dismiss the sentences of 264 of those condemned to death. The announcement of his decision provoked a chorus of criticism, not just from Minnesotans and others in frontier states but from across the country. Although he did not publicly reply to his critics, he did unleash a pointed rejoinder to a remark that the Republicans might win more votes in the next election had more Indians been hanged: “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”11 This grim reply reveals Lincoln’s paramount commitment to the rule of law. Nonetheless, the largest mass execution in American history took place at Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, when trap doors dropped beneath thirty-eight men with nooses tightened around their necks.