CHAPTER TEN

Abraham Lincoln and Native Genocide

NOT ONLY DID ABRAHAM LINCOLN reveal the social imagination that black lives do not matter in his speeches, his writings, and his actions as president, he also revealed a blatant disregard for Native lives. Living into the expectation of the US Constitution to protect the rights and privileges of white male landowners, Lincoln’s policies prioritized the flourishing of white landowners while disregarding the value of Native lives. Lincoln did not believe that Native lives mattered either.

In May of 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which “provided that any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. Claimants were required to ‘improve’ the plot by building a dwelling and cultivating the land. After 5 years on the land, the original filer was entitled to the property, free and clear, except for a small registration fee.”1 In July of 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act.2 This act “designated the 32nd parallel as the initial transcontinental route and gave huge grants of land for rights-of-way. The act was an effort to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean and to secure the use of that line for the United States government.”3

In the fall of 1862, the Dakota tribe in Minnesota found themselves in dire straits. They had signed a treaty with the US government, ceding some of their lands in exchange for the promise of money and supplies. The winter of 1861–1862 was particularly harsh and the US government was not meeting their treaty obligations to the Dakota people. Throughout the summer and into the fall of 1862, the Dakota were not able to adequately prepare for the upcoming winter. Much of their land had been taken, and the promised funds and provision were not forthcoming.

On Sunday August 17, four young Dakota warriors came across a white settlement. A few of them entered the settlement to steal some eggs, which tragically resulted in the killing of some of the settlers. They returned home to Rice Creek and reported what they had done. After deliberation among several of the Dakota chiefs, some who favored war and others peace, Chief Little Crow, who favored peace, reluctantly agreed to go to war alongside the young warriors.4 A short period of bloody conflict ensued between some of the Dakota people, white settlers, and the US military. After little more than a month, several hundred of the Dakota warriors surrendered and the rest fled north to Canada. Even after the surrender, violence against the Native tribes continued. Author Colette Routel writes, “following the end of hostilities in 1862, General John Pope, the commander of the U.S. Military’s Department of the Northwest, directed Henry Sibley to offer a $500 reward for Taoyateduta ‘dead or alive’ and a $50 reward ‘for each principal Chief of his band.’ ”5

The Dakota who surrendered were quickly tried in military tribunals and 303 of them were condemned to death. Historian Carol Chomsky describes the unfairness of the trial of the Dakota warriors:

The evidence was sparse, the tribunal was biased, the defendants were unrepresented in unfamiliar proceedings conducted in a foreign language, and authority for convening the tribunal was lacking. More fundamentally, neither the Military Commission nor the reviewing authorities recognized that they were dealing with the aftermath of a war fought with a sovereign nation, and that the men who surrendered were entitled to treatment in accordance with that status.6

Because these were military trials and because so many prisoners were condemned, General Sibley deferred the execution order to General Pope, who in turn deferred the decision to the Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln was reluctant to sign such an obviously genocidal order. Although any close examination of these trials would expose them as legal shams, Lincoln did not order retrials. Instead he simply modified the criteria by which charges warranted a death sentence as he explained in a letter to the US Senate on December 11, 1862: “Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females.”7

However, under his new criteria, only two of the Dakota warriors were sentenced to die. That small number seemed too lenient, and President Lincoln had to be concerned about the uprising by his white settlers in Minnesota, which was already taking place. “While President Lincoln was reviewing the records . . . a mob of citizens that included many women attempted ‘private revenge’ on the prisoners with pitchforks, scalding water and hurled stones.”8 And in another attack, many of the prisoners, most of whom were Dakota women and children “were assaulted by angry white citizens. Many were stoned and clubbed; a child was snatched from its mother’s arms and beaten to death.”9

Meanwhile, for a second time, instead of ordering retrials, President Lincoln simply changed the criteria of what charges warranted a death sentence, admitting in his own words, “Contrary to my expectation, only two of this class were found. I then directed a further examination and a classification of all who were proven to have participated in massacres, as distinguished from participation in battles. This class numbered forty, and included the two convicted of female violation.”10

Ultimately, thirty-nine Dakota men were sentenced to die. On December 26, 1862, by order of President Lincoln, with nearly four thousand white American settlers looking on, the largest mass execution in the history of the United States took place with the hanging of the Dakota 38.

In February of 1863, President Lincoln signed into law a bill which nullified the treaties of the Dakota and Winnebago tribes in Minnesota. This law released the United States from any future obligation and forfeited lands from the Indians to the United States.11 On the heels of this abrogation of existing treaties, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in March of 1863 that gave him the authority to physically remove the tribes from the state of Minnesota. Specific Minnesota tribes were named to be removed to “unoccupied land outside the limits of any state.”12

Later in March 1863, the decision was made to remove the Dakota and the Winnebago to an area along the Missouri River in the Dakota Territory. By April the removal had begun. Members from both tribes were rounded up and imprisoned at Fort Snelling near Minneapolis while they awaited transport out of the state of Minnesota. By June, the “previously uninhabited area near the mouth of Crow Creek was transformed into one of the largest population centers in the [Dakota] territory.”13 One thousand five hundred Dakota people and nearly as many Winnebago were crowded onto boats and barges and crammed into train cars, often without adequate food and drinking water. Many died along the journey to their reservation near Crow Creek. That winter (1863–1864), without adequate food, clothing or shelter, many more perished while “imprisoned” at Fort Thompson.14

For those Dakota who managed to avoid capture and remain in Minnesota, they were faced with the threat of physical violence and death as the state took extraordinary measures to complete the ethnic cleansing. The governor of the state appointed Colonel Henry Sibley to lead the forces against the Dakota. Sibley organized a corps of volunteer scouts for a period of sixty days. They were each paid $1.50 per day and $25 for every Dakota scalp they collected. The state also encouraged individual citizens to take part in the ethnic cleansing by offering a $75 bounty paid to any non-militia member who collected an Indian scalp.15

On July 20, the daily rate of pay was increased to $2 per day and the bounty paid to scouts was increased to $75 per scalp. On September 22, 1863, after the course of the corps of volunteers had finished, the adjutant general increased the bounty offered to independent scouts to $200 for each confirmed killing of a Dakota warrior.16 The orders of the adjutant general were never repealed.

Less than a year after President Abraham Lincoln ordered the hanging of the Dakota 38 and less than six months after he nullified the Dakota treaties in Minnesota and granted himself the permission to remove them out of the state, virtually the entire populations of the Dakota and Winnebago people had been successfully removed and ethnically cleansed from the state of Minnesota.

In October of 1863, just a few months after the removal of the Dakota people was completed, President Lincoln issued a proclamation for the final Thursday of November to be commemorated as a national day of Thanksgiving. In his proclamation he acknowledged the death and violence against white people and by white people in the Civil War, but regarding the war of discovery and Manifest Destiny he stated: “Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.”17

According to this statement, Lincoln viewed westward expansion through an optimistic and positive expression that focused on the assumed triumph of an exceptional people. He failed to recognize how those very policies meant the annihilation of entire people groups. Lincoln’s policy towards Native Americans revealed a social imagination of white supremacy. White settlers had preeminence over the long-term claims of the indigenous population. The US government possessed the right of discovery, expansion, and dispossession, with minimal consideration of the genocidal impact on the Native people.

THE LONG WALK AND AMERICAN DEATH CAMPS

The genocide of the Native people initiated by the Lincoln administration and evident in Minnesota would have an even more profound impact upon the Diné in the Southwest. Throughout the fall and winter of 1863, on the orders of General Carleton, US Army Officer Kit Carson began ethnically cleansing the Navajo people from the territory of New Mexico. His orders were that “every Navajo male is to be killed or taken prisoner on sight. . . . Say to them ‘Go to the Bosque Redondo or we will pursue and destroy you. . . . We will not make peace with you on any other terms. This war shall be pursued until you cease to exist or move.’ ”18

The strength and numbers of the Navajo had already been depleted. Most of the crops were burned and livestock were killed. Raymond Friday Locke in The Book of the Navajo recounts the methodical steps of the operation. The US Army kept the Navajo people on the move, crisscrossing traditional lands, never allowing the Navajo to stay in place more than a few days at a time and thereby forcing them to survive without sufficient food, shelter, and clothing. Locke wrote:

By the middle of December most of the weak and aged had died. There is hardly a Navajo family that cannot remember tales of an aged grandfather, a pregnant mother, or a lame child who had to be left behind when the camp had to be quickly deserted. The patrols were not interested in taking captives; it was too much trouble to transport them back to the forts. Any Navajo they saw was shot on sight. Mothers were sometimes forced to suffocate their hungry, crying babies to keep their families from being discovered and butchered by an army patrol or taken captive by the slave raiders.19

On January 15, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln approved the creation of the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation in the southeast corner of the New Mexico territory.20 After the fields, homes, and livestock of the Navajo people had been destroyed by Kit Carson, nearly ten thousand Navajos were rounded up by President Lincoln’s army and marched to his newly created reservation. The term “reservation” is used loosely because for all ten thousand Diné marched there, Bosque Redondo would be their prison for the next three to five years and for nearly a quarter of the people, Bosque Redondo would be their death camp. In Diné this place is called Hwéeld,i and the removal is known as “The Long Walk.” Throughout the forced marches to Bosque Redondo, hundreds of Navajo people died at the hands of the US soldiers, as well as from exposure and starvation. Those who survived the march and arrived at Bosque Redondo found no comfort or relief. Their pain and suffering had only just begun.

In the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, author Dee Brown describes the conditions at Bosque Redondo. He reports that even the US government deemed the land as “unfit for cultivation of grain because of the presence of alkali”21 in the soil. The water was dark and brackish, and the Navajo people were fed “meal, flour, and bacon which had been condemned as unfit for soldiers to eat.”22 Brown further describes the wretched conditions facing the Navajo people:

The soldiers prodded them with bayonets and herded them into adobe-walled compounds. . . . Only roots were left for firewood. To shelter themselves from rain and sun they had to dig holes in the sandy ground, and cover and line them with mats of woven grass. They lived like prairie dogs in burrows. With a few tools the soldiers gave them they broke the soil of the Pecos bottomlands and planted grain, but floods and droughts and insects killed the crops, and now everyone was on half-rations. Crowded together as they were, disease had begun to take a toll of the weaker ones. It was a bad place, and although escape was difficult and dangerous under the watchful eyes of the soldiers, many were risking their lives to get away.23

Ultimately, nearly one quarter of the people, over 2,300, died while imprisoned at the Bosque Redondo death camp.

THE MASSACRE AT SAND CREEK

In July 1864 President Lincoln signed the second Pacific Railway Act. This act doubled the amount of land set aside for the transcontinental railway and reversed the exception for mineral lands, meaning the railway companies could now also procure lands containing iron and coal in their government land grants.

Later that same year in November of 1864, the US Army, still under Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln, committed the Massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado. In 1851 the United States signed a treaty with the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, establishing much of what today is eastern Colorado, western Kansas, southern Wyoming, and southwest Nebraska as their treaty lands. In 1858 gold was discovered in the Rocky Mountains, and over the next three years, Cheyenne and Arapaho lands were overrun with more than one hundred thousand prospectors and settlers.

In February of 1861, less than one month before the inauguration of President Lincoln, the US signed another treaty with the Cheyenne and Arapaho at Fort Wise, Colorado. The Treaty of Fort Wise was suspect because it was signed only by a minority of the Cheyenne Chiefs and the Eastern Arapaho Chiefs and was never given consent by the broader tribes. In the Treaty of Fort Wise, “the Indians settled for a tract between Sand Creek and the Arkansas River, less than one-thirteenth the size of the 1851 reserve.”24

With the treaty not having received approval from all of the tribes, certain Cheyenne and Lakota tribes opposed white settlers moving into their lands. In 1864, a group of Civil War soldiers under the command of Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister, began to attack several Cheyenne tribes.25 Two chiefs attempted to establish a truce by setting up camp near Fort Lyon as a friendly gesture. They were advised to fly an American flag as an expression of their peaceful intentions. Colonel Chivington, however, ordered the slaughter of the camp while the majority of the males were out hunting.

On November 29, 1864, approximately 675 United States soldiers under the command of Colonel John Chivington killed more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers, mostly elderly men, women, and children, approximately 180 miles southeast of Denver near Eads, Colorado. Despite assurance from American negotiators that they would be safe, and despite Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle raising both a United States flag and a white flag as symbols of peace, Colonel Chivington ordered his troops to take no prisoners and to pillage and set the village ablaze, violently forcing the ambushed and outnumbered Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers to flee on foot. Colonel Chivington and his troops paraded mutilated body parts of men, women, and children in downtown Denver in celebration of the massacre.26

Initially this massacre was celebrated, but after the gruesome details became public, an investigation was eventually initiated by the military into Colonel Chivington’s actions. He was reprimanded but then allowed to retire. Within eighteen months after the Massacre at Sand Creek, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were completely removed from Colorado to a reservation in Oklahoma.

During his annual addresses to Congress in December of 1864, President Lincoln announced that a total of 1.5 million acres had been successfully homesteaded through the Homestead Act. Regarding the transcontinental railway, he reported that “the great enterprise of connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific States by railways and telegraph lines has been entered upon with a vigor that gives assurance of success.”27 Both of these acts were hugely symbolic in the quest to fulfill the nation’s self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny.

The transcontinental railway had several proposed routes. The primary route was to take the railway from Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco, through the lands of southern Wyoming and northern Colorado. And of the next four routes to be completed, a northern route was proposed that ran from Duluth through the state of Minnesota to the coast of the Pacific Northwest near Tacoma, Washington. And of the southern routes, one was proposed to run directly through the territory of New Mexico toward Los Angeles. Within three years of signing the first Pacific Railway Act in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had ethnically cleansed the Dakota and Winnebago from Minnesota (northern route), the Cheyenne and Arapaho from Colorado and Wyoming (central route), and the Navajo and some Apache from the Territory of New Mexico (southern route).

The expansion of the Americas could now progress unimpeded. The Homestead Act and the explicit goal of completing the transcontinental railway had generated concrete ways by which the imagination of Manifest Destiny could be enacted. The legal action stemming from this deeply embedded social imagination found expression under the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Acts of Congress, executive orders, broken treaties, and military actions enacted under Abraham Lincoln would serve to remove the most significant obstacle to westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. It would also mean that President Abraham Lincoln is responsible for some of the most significant negative impact on the Native American population in US history. Abraham Lincoln’s actions, both direct and indirect, resulted in the ongoing and intentional genocide of the Native peoples. Native lives did not matter to Abraham Lincoln.

THE MESSIAHSHIP OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Despite Abraham Lincoln’s horrific record on the systematic genocide of Native peoples, he is still regarded as one of the greatest presidents in US history. He is viewed as a near messianic figure who lost his life because of his commitment to the causes of freedom. The fact that his assassination occurred on Good Friday, 1865, appears to be a divine confirmation of his legacy as the savior of our nation.

But this legacy is a mythology. The mythology ignores his deliberate actions that led to his attempted extermination of Native peoples. The mythology also ignores his own words, which betray that his social imagination did not accept the equality of the races, but instead sought to preserve the union at all costs. The full record of Abraham Lincoln reveals a president who directly contributed to the genocide of the Native community and perpetuated the dehumanization of the African American community.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech which many hail as the most significant 272 words spoken in American history. The Gettysburg Address begins with a reference to the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and concludes with the often-quoted line, “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”28 Many believe this speech to be the perfect capstone to his life and political career. But, like the inclusive language used by the authors of the Declaration of Independence (“all men”) and the US Constitution (“We the people”), Lincoln does not, in the immediate context of his words, define who he is including when he refers to all men and people. His mythology argues that he transformed the definition of “all men” and “we the people” to include “all the people.” But a close examination of his life, his speeches, his policies, and his legacy paints an extremely different picture.

We cannot forget that the victors write the history, and this is incredibly dangerous. Prior to and throughout World War II, Nazi Germany celebrated Adolf Hitler as a God-ordained ruler who was making Germany great again. In the twenty-first century, Nazis and neo-Nazis deny that the Holocaust ever happened and glorify the exploits of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. As Americans, we credit Abraham Lincoln with winning the Civil War, preserving our Union, and reestablishing the United States of America as a God-ordained beacon of freedom and equality. But that is a myth. The war Abraham Lincoln actually won was the war of discovery and Manifest Destiny.

The Civil War was an internal spat between the North and the South, who could not agree on the best way to keep white supremacy intact. Lincoln stated this priority in his debates with Douglas: “What is it that we hold most dear amongst us? Our own liberty and prosperity. What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this institution of Slavery?”29 Lincoln was concerned that the issue of slavery was pitting sides of the superior white race against one another and that conflict had the possibility of destroying their carefully constructed union.

Had Lincoln won the Civil War but not been able to ethnically cleanse the Dakota and Winnebago from Minnesota, the Cheyenne and Arapaho from Colorado, and the Navajo and Apache from New Mexico—which cleared the path for the transcontinental railway and the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny—he may have been deemed a failure. Had he kept the union together in spite of emancipating some of the slaves but not developed the constitutional tool of mass incarceration (a tool perfected by presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton) to keep in check the civil liberties enjoyed by people of color, he may have been a similar unknown with benign historical significance as that of his predecessor James Buchanan, or of his successor Andrew Johnson.

The Lincoln Memorial refers to itself as a temple and shares many striking architectural similarities to the temple to the goddess Athena in Greece. This temple has been among the most visited monuments of all the US national memorials. Lincoln’s face was selected to be among those this nation used to desecrate the sacred mountain of the Dakota people. Lincoln looks over the United States from his exalted position at Mount Rushmore, his temple in Washington, DC, in movies and pop culture, and in the history books as the greatest president to whom the nation owes a great debt. He serves as a messianic figure for the American narrative of exceptionalism and triumphalism.

As Eusebius demonstrated in the fourth century, in order to effectively promote the heresy of Christendom, one first has to remove Christ. Eusebius constructed a mythology of the emperor Constantine as a God-ordained ruler for such a time as his. Eusebius effectively wrote Christ out of ecclesiastical history and replaced him with the mythology of Constantine. Thirteen years later, Constantine embraced that mythology and related a tale to Eusebius of a fantastic vision, where Christ himself told him that he would triumph over his enemies beneath the symbol of the cross. Eusebius in his book The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine affirms this triumphalistic Christendom narrative with chapters titled, “He was the servant of God and the conqueror of nations,” and “He conquered nearly the whole world.” The church affirmed Christendom and replaced the messiahship of Jesus with the messiahship of Constantine.

Jesus opposed the creation of a Christian Empire. The role of the Messiah was not to establish another worldly kingdom. The heresy of Christendom rejects the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth regarding the role of the Messiah and, therefore, Christendom cannot coexist with the teachings of Jesus. In order to promote Christendom, Jesus the Messiah must be rejected and a new messiah must take his place. As the United States fully embraced the narrative of exceptionalism and triumphalism, the Jesus of the Bible was no longer sufficient. Instead, a new messiah needed to emerge to cement the Christendom stature of the United States. At the conclusion of his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln embraced his budding mythology as the savior of the Union as well as embracing the heresy of Christian empire when he said “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”30 The mythology of Abraham Lincoln has subsequently grown unchecked as the messianic figure of Lincoln continues to loom over the triumphant history of America since the Civil War. This messianic assignation continues despite the known words, rhetoric, actions, and impact of Abraham Lincoln.

In 1492, at the start of the war of discovery and Manifest Destiny, the estimated Native population of Turtle Island (North America) ranged between 1.2 million and 20 million. For the sake of argument, we will use the median of the two numbers, which is 9.4 million. Then excluding the approximately three to four million who lived in what is now Canada and Alaska, we will estimate the Native population of the lower continental United States in the year 1500 to be six million people. Between 1492 and 1900 the estimated population of indigenous peoples in the continental United States dropped to 237,000. That gives the war of discovery a 96 percent rate of genocide (i.e., 96 percent of the Native population was wiped out during the ongoing war). From 1800 to 1900, often referred to as the century of expansion, the indigenous population of Turtle Island was depleted from 600,000 to 237,000, giving the war of discovery and Manifest Destiny a genocide rate of 60 percent. And from 1860 to 1870, the decade which included the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the actual number in the US Census of off-reservation, taxpaying, assimilated American Indians living in the United States fell from 44,000 to 25,713, a decrease of 41 percent. Nearly half of that drop came from the population in New Mexico, where Abraham Lincoln marched ten thousand Navajo men, women, and children to what for nearly a quarter of them was a death camp, which he approved, called Bosque Redondo.

By comparison, Nazi Germany had a genocide rate for the Jewish people of 35 percent.

It may be challenging enough to draw a comparison between Robert McNamara and Oskar Gröning. It would be even more challenging to even hint of a comparison between Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. But an objective comparison of their words, rhetoric, action, and impact may reveal a different story. However, the most challenging comparison is that we—the United States of America, the leaders of the modern-day heretical kingdom of Christendom, one exceptional nation that for centuries has been thriving, growing, and expanding (supposedly) under God—are not that dissimilar from Nazi Germany.

The United States of America does not hold a morally exceptional position greater than Nazi Germany. We are not more just. Our sense of equality is not any superior. Our nation has never been Christian. We have just won our wars. And therefore, for centuries, we wrote our own history. And that has proven to be incredibly dangerous.