(October 31, 1867)
Though generally forgotten in the history and historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, the government’s Indian policy nevertheless attracted considerable attention from contemporaries. When a Sioux rebellion erupted in Minnesota in August 1862, a military commission sentenced 303 warriors to death for “murders and outrages” against whites. President Lincoln later pardoned all but thirty-eight of the Indians. Lincoln, following conventional wisdom of his day, considered Indians a separate “race” and advocated reform of the nation’s policy toward them. Native peoples should become wards of the state, abandon their nomadic ways, live on reservations, and grow crops. In other words, one historian quipped, “They should surrender most of their land and cease to be Indians.” The Nation’s solution to the Indian problem was simple: offer them the same legal protection and hold them accountable to the same responsibilities as whites. “The truth is,” the editor concluded, “the Indians have always been more ready than we. Our work has been one of continual repression.”
It is plain that something must be done with the Indians, and that it must be something different from anything yet done. We must have peace by some means. The frontiers must rest in security and the highways to the Pacific must be unobstructed. But peace involves one of two things—either the extermination of the Indian or his subjection to law and habits of industry. Extermination is a word easily said; but to put it in execution will cost untold millions of money and a life for a life. Let it be remembered that the Indians number nearly 300,000, and it has cost $70,000 per head to kill those we have put out of the way. To many minds the work of their regeneration is an equally desperate and hopeless undertaking; but those who are more intimately acquainted with the question are able to prove the contrary. The civilization of the Indian is the easiest and cheapest as well as only honorable way of securing peace.
But if we expect to civilize the Indian, it must be attempted by more rational methods than we have heretofore used. Is it reasonable to expect recovery from disease, or a healthy growth, unless the causes of the disease are removed and the conditions of life supplied? Now, the prime conditions of true social order and personal well-being are wanting in Indian society. The first condition is LAW to protect person and property, to restrain crime, encourage industry, and favor such prosperity as will give the Indian more interest in peace than in war. No community can develop material prosperity, social order, or individual character without the protection of life and the fruits of labor. Indians are no exception to this rule, or they would be our superiors. It is a well-known fact that the Indians have no government worthy the name. What they have is not sufficient to secure justice between man and man, nor does it even attempt it. The tribes of the Indian Territory are a partial exception. Nor is this state of anarchy altogether the fault of the Indians; it has been perpetuated and made worse by the action of our own Government. In many respects the relations of our Government to them have made their advance in civilization harder instead of easier. What wonder that they have not made greater progress? Something has been done by private citizens for their advancement, and it has been successful enough to prove that better things may be expected under better conditions. But this is not a work for private citizens alone. The United States Government can only supply social order by law, and until this is done benevolent efforts are as water poured out on the sand.
What the Indians most need is the extension of our laws over them. We are responsible for not having done it before. And the law must be brought home to each individual. It must surround every man for his personal protection and restraint. It may seem needless to say this, but all our talk and action in the past has only regarded general justice and has amounted to nothing. We have gone no further than to try and control the international intercourse of Indians and whites, and this in a most general way. We have not thought of controlling, or allowing any control of, Indians among themselves. But there can be no prosperity where each man is not defended against his neighbor, nor can the law have any restraining power unless it at the same time creates an interest in itself by the protection it affords.
There is no great difficulty in carrying this plan into effect. We only need to treat Indians like men, treat them as we do ourselves, putting on them the same responsibilities, letting them sue and be sued, and taxing them as fast as they settle down and have anything to tax. The times are ripe for this movement. Experience has convinced us that the theory on which our Indian affairs have been administered is wrong. We have conceded a tribal sovereignty to them which has had no existence in fact, and which, had it originally existed, was of late years impossible, in view of the sovereignty of the United States. On this ground we have treaties with them as foreign nations. And much of our inconsistent and seemingly treacherous dealing with them has been more the necessary result of this vicious theory than of wilful wickedness. Not that the latter has been wanting, however. Again, our Government is itself purified of the false idea of State sovereignty, which has doubtless countenanced the same error in regard to the Indian tribal governments. There is now a consciousness of sovereignty in the nation which is ready to assert its power in behalf of the general welfare; and the progress of the nation in regard to the recognition of human rights, the exaltation of manhood for its own sake, irrespective of race, color, or position, opens the way to this work, while the methods and agencies developed by the necessities of the freedmen solve the question of ways and means.
But are the Indians ready for it? Will they submit to the government of our laws? Is it possible to get the wild Comanches or the terrible Sioux to come under the control of law, assume the habits and occupations of civilized life, and appeal for redress of injuries to a court of justice instead of to the war-club? We think it is. The Indians are now, in large numbers, ready and anxious for the protection and order which our laws would bring; and those who are now wildest and most intractable are not beyond reach. They will be ready as soon as we. In proof of this, look at the Sioux nation; it is the most numerous body of Indians on the Continent, and covers all lands, we may say, between the Pacific Railroad and the British line, and from the western border of Iowa and Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains. It has many different tribes, going under all sorts of names; some of them the fiercest and most dreaded Indians of the plains, and others as peaceable and tractable as the very best. What makes the difference? Simply this: some of these tribes or bands have for fifty or sixty years been planting, more or less, and have been greatly affected by their semi-agricultural life; the others are of the same stock, but their life is more roving and in consequence wilder. But this change has all been produced in little more than half a century, and the same cause has been working change of late years among the Indians of the plains, driven by scarcity of game to depend more on the fruits of the farm. Its results may as yet be imperceptible to the distant observer, but careful study of the facts proves that none of these Indians are unchangeable as to habits of life or even personal characteristics. The Comanches are often mentioned as the eminent types of incorrigible wildness; but it is a fact that previous to the war of the rebellion a large number of them had settled down on a reservation. When we look at the poor inducements they had to do so, we wonder they did it; but if they did it then, will they not do the same when protection, order, prosperity, and life shall be their inducement—in fact and not in words?
The truth is the Indians have always been more ready than we. Our work has been one of continual repression. When the State constitution of Minnesota was adopted in 1857, it was expected from its wording that educated Indians able to read and write their own language and having a knowledge of the constitution of the State would be admitted to citizenship and the ballot. At least they believed it, and the prospect gave a wonderful impulse to their labors in the schoolroom and in the field. They were preparing to live like men. But such a thing could not be thought of by their white brethren; and in the act of denying citizenship to the Indians in 1857–8 the State of Minnesota threw away the opportunity of preventing the terrible massacres of 1862. Had law been permitted to reign among the Sioux in 1858, when they were anxious for it, the massacres of 1862 would have been impossible. This very summer the Indians in North-eastern Nebraska and Dakota have been restrained by the United States agents by force from going forth into the harvest-fields around, where their labor was wanted and where they might have earned bread for their families. It takes the strong hand of government to push them back into barbarism. Who is it that is not ready for civilization?