1862 WAS A YEAR OF CRISIS for the Lincoln administration. The North was doing badly in the war with the South, and Lincoln was pressured into emancipating slaves and enlisting black troops. It was hardly an ideal time to push for reform of the Indian System.
However, a peculiar juxtaposition of events changed all that. Lincoln was forced to give attention to Indian affairs, because the difficulties with the Indians seemed to be linked to other problems. The Confederate alliances with the southern Indians and the refugee and expedition troubles in Kansas highlighted the bankruptcy of the Indian System. Then came the Minnesota war, fears of a conspiracy in Minnesota by Confederate infiltrators, and the executions. These dovetailed with Lincoln’s problems in the South and demanded his personal attention.
Thus, for a brief moment, there was an opening for men who sought reform of the Indian System. When Indian affairs appeared to affect the national welfare and the course of the Civil War, even a president as preoccupied as Lincoln might be ready to listen to some new ideas.
The Commissioner and the Reformers
When the Lincoln era began, most government officials were not interested in reforming Indian affairs. The great cause of the time was abolitionism, and Lincoln’s somewhat ambiguous resolution to that question was not reached until the end of his second year in office. The prospects were dim for Indian reform, even though some prominent abolitionists promoted it. William Lloyd Garrison, the arch-symbol of abolitionism, had written an editorial as early as 1829 denouncing the attempt to remove the Indians from the southeastern United States.1
John Beeson was another crusader who linked abolitionism and Indian reform. Beeson aided fugitive slaves in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois. In the late 1850s, he migrated to Oregon and got involved in Indian causes. He was very nearly the victim of violence as a result of letters and pamphlets he wrote concerning the Rogue River war in 1856. In 1859, the reformer sponsored a meeting in Boston at which abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke favoring Indian reform. Beeson briefly published a pro-Indian journal, The Calumet, but it was a financial failure.2
Not long after the Battle at Fort Sumter, Beeson paid a visit to the new commissioner of Indian affairs. Dole took an immediate dislike to the reformer, who attempted to obtain an appointment of special commissioner to the Indians from the commissioner. Dole’s response was polite but icy, “Some of your plans are ahead of the age.” Dole admitted that the Indian System was often “a legal machine to swindle the ignorant and helpless Indians out of their possessions,” but he did not want John Beeson meddling with that mechanism. He told the reformer that the Indian Office already had too many employees and only needed ones that were more honest.3
Beeson was an evangelical reformer with scant appreciation for political and social realities. Dole patronized him as one who “fails to appreciate practically, the complicated subject of our relations with the Indian tribes.” But the commissioner could not prevent Beeson from pestering everyone in Washington about Indian reform. In December 1861, Beeson petitioned the House Committee on Indian Affairs for a “suspension of hostilities against the Indians generally.”4
Dole’s problems with reformers went deeper than irritation with fanatical crusaders. The commissioner profited from the very system they sought to transform. As a political appointee, he was distinctly uninterested in undoing the patronage process that had served him so well. There was an empty sound to his complaints during his first year about “liquor sellers” and “unprincipled traders.” The commissioner professed to find this corruption overwhelming, “I know not what remedy to propose.”5
Dole did adopt some reform ideas, including the notion of assigning farms to individual Indians. He noted with pride the “marked success” of severalty experiments in Minnesota, and he agreed with the reformers’ argument that land should be allotted to Indians as distinct individuals. It “is the only plan yet devised by which the end we profess to see, viz., the elevation of the Indian as a race in the scale of social existence, can be secured,” the commissioner wrote.6
Nevertheless, Dole was not a reformer. The policy he espoused most firmly was a policy to concentrate the Indian population in order to accommodate the continued exploitation of Indian lands. Concentration of Indian tribes was the inevitable outgrowth of the increase of white population and subsequent Indian removals. It was an updated removal policy, the logical next step when the continent no longer contained any great uninhabited regions. Reformers were not always comfortable with this policy, although some supported it as a necessary evil. Commissioner Dole had no such qualms. He always coupled the desire “to foster and protect our own settlements” with “the concentration of the Indians upon ample reservations.”7 With a man with this disposition in the commissioner’s chair, it would take more than emotional pleas from reformers to move him and the president he served.
Bishop Whipple Begins His Campaign
The man best equipped to promote the cause coincidentally resided in Minnesota—notorious for its problems with Indians. Henry Benjamin Whipple, the Episcopal bishop of that state, dominated the Indian reform movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His appointment in 1859 brought him into direct conflict with the corrupt Indian System in Minnesota and he called at once for reform. In a letter to President Buchanan in 1860, he predicted a Sioux insurrection unless something were done to end the corruption. “A nation which sowed robbery would reap a harvest of blood,” the bishop warned the president.8
After Lincoln was elected, Whipple determined to make a grand attempt to reform the Indian System. In spite of his Democratic sympathies, Whipple had hopes for the new regime. On 23 February 1861—days before Lincoln took the oath of office—he began his campaign. “I do hope the new administration will give them honest, manly men who have a heart to pity & a hand to help,” the bishop wrote Senator Rice. Whipple urged Rice to attempt to influence patronage even though he was a Democrat. The same day he wrote Rice, Whipple corresponded with outgoing secretary of the treasury, John A. Dix. He asked Dix to endorse and pass along a letter to the new secretary of the interior.9
Whipple’s plea to Caleb Smith was for a change in the method of selecting officials to the Indian service. He wanted “men of unswerving honesty” and urged the secretary to “let men who seek political rewards go somewhere else.” It was too late. Lincoln was already busy doing just the opposite by allowing Republican congressmen to select the officials for their region.
Nevertheless, Whipple then turned his rhetoric on two of those appointees, Clark Thompson, the new superintendent of the Northern Superintendency, and Thomas Galbraith, agent to the Santee Sioux. The latter he lectured on “dishonest agents” and “corrupt whites” and urged him to watch his step, “May I not believe your agents will be honest & pure men?”10
Bishop Whipple failed in his first attempt to influence the Lincoln administration. Lincoln’s appointees were as corrupt and bungling as their predecessors, and they helped to bring about the war Whipple had predicted in 1860. It was not easy for the clergyman to continue his crusade. “I have been accused of neglecting my white field & wasting money on Indian missions,” he lamented.11
Any small hope Whipple had for advancing the reform cause seemed to be destroyed by the outbreak of Civil War. By the time he mailed his letters to Thompson and Galbraith, the fighting at Fort Sumter had already begun. The bishop’s attempt to reform the Indian System would have to wait for a more propitious moment.
Bishop Whipple Tries Again—with Lincoln
At the close of Lincoln’s first year in office, the reform movement was going nowhere. In spite of Commissioner Dole’s views, Lincoln had chosen no clear path in Indian policy. Lincoln tended to discuss Indians only in terms of their impact on the War for the Union.12 On 6 March 1862, Bishop Henry Whipple set out to change that by writing directly to Abraham Lincoln.13
“Where shall a Christian Bishop look for justice if not to you whom God has made the Chief Ruler of the Nation,” the bishop asked Lincoln. He told the president that Buchanan had ignored his earlier pleas, and he urged Lincoln to “so instruct the department that something like justice be done to a people whose cry calls for the vengeance of God.”
Whipple went beyond exhortation and provided Lincoln with a cogent analysis of the problem and a clear program for action. Instead of criticizing the government for any malign intent, the bishop blamed the Indian System, with its “dishonest servants, ill conceived plans, and defective instructions.” The Indians were degraded because the treaty system destroyed native governments and left Indians without protection. The corrupt patronage system used for selecting agents and the dishonesty of those officials were at the root of the problem.
Whipple believed change was possible. “The first thing needed is honesty,” he told Lincoln. Select agents on the basis of merit and character, not politics. Make Indians wards of the government and give them aid so they can build homes, begin farming, and adopt “civilized” life. Provide for the adequate education of every Indian child. Pay Indian annuities in goods, not cash, and thereby undercut dishonest traders. Finally, Whipple urged Lincoln to appoint a three-man commission to investigate Indian affairs and propose further reforms. These commissioners should be “men of inflexible integrity, of large heart, of clear head, of strong will, who fear God and love man.” In short, the commission should be “above the reach of political demagogues.”
Bishop Whipple proposed a root-and-branch reform of the Indian System that struck at the heart of its political and financial corruption. He wanted a “strong government” because much of the corruption came from an inability of the System to control itself. The centerpiece of the Whipple program was the divorce of this strong system from politics. The present agent, trading, and treaty processes would be wiped away, and price controls would be introduced. The new system would “place the weight of Government on the side of labor.” Labor and agriculture were, to the bishop, linked to godliness.
The Indian must have a home; his wandering tribal relations must be broken up; he must be furnished with seed, implements of husbandry, and taught to live by the sweat of his brow. The Government now gives him beads, paint, blankets and scalping-knives, teaching him to idle away his time, waiting for an annuity of money which he does not know how to spend. This very autumn the Indian Bureau advertises for hundreds of dollars’ worth of goods, and the only implements of labor are one hundred dozen weeding hoes and fifty dozen spades.
This program was overtly assimilationist. The Indian System would be transformed from a political machine that served whites to a mechanism for bringing Indians into the mainstream of American life. It is what Whipple called “a radical reform of the system.”14
The problem was that Whipple’s appeal to depoliticize Indian affairs was made to a man who was a master practitioner of the patronage process. Lincoln responded to Whipple’s appeal in a perfunctory manner. He referred the matter to the “special attention of the Secretary of the Interior.” Still, the bishop’s strategy was not a total failure. Writing the president resulted in a long letter from Caleb Smith on 31 March.15 At least, this time Whipple was not ignored.
Smith granted that there was truth to much of what Whipple contended, but he claimed that the evils “cannot be remedied without the intervention of Congress.” Smith endorsed a partial reform that Congress had thus far refused to consider—concentration, a breakup of the trading system, and payment of annuities in kind, mostly with agricultural implements. Conspicuously missing in Smith’s commitment to reform was any mention of Whipple’s call for depoliticization.
Nevertheless, Whipple kept the dialogue alive. He responded with approval of the concentration plan but urged that Indians who left the “wild life” have their land secured by inalienable patents. The bishop warned Smith not to break up the trading system without replacing it with a more satisfactory arrangement. “This trade will either be carried on under wise persons, or be done clandestinely by bad men whose cupidity leads them to the Indian country, or else the Indian will seek a market amid the temptations of the nearest border town.”
Whipple returned to the patronage theme. The crux of the problem, Whipple insisted, was personnel—“competent, faithful and honest men.” Supervision was not tight enough: “There is too much left to the discretion of the agent. No system guides him.” Even in-kind payment of annuities would not end the corruption if agents and traders were not held accountable. What Whipple wanted was a “definite plan” to govern Indian affairs with justice.16
The same day that he responded to Smith, the bishop wrote Lincoln again.17 He enclosed further recommendations and urged Lincoln to pass them on to the department. Less than a week later, Whipple shared with Lincoln some of his insights on law and government for the Indians, “The Indian must be under law—the good must feel its protection and the bad fear its punishment.” The bishop explained to Lincoln that Indians had no protection against theft or murder—no legal framework for protection or self-government.18 Whipple’s contention was that vacuums are inevitably filled, and where no legitimate governmental structure exists, government by thievery and corruption takes its place. On another occasion, Whipple repeated this insight to Alexander Ramsey:
It is based on a falsehood that these heathen are an independant [sic] nation & not our wards. We leave them really without any government—then after nurturing every mad passion, standing unconcerned to witness Indian wars with each other looking on their deeds of blood, and permitting every evil influence to degrade them we turn them over to be robbed & plundered & at last wonder we have reaped what we sowed.19
Bishop Whipple and the Congressmen
Bishop Whipple had managed to engage the president and the secretary of interior in dialogue on reform. He reinforced this small beachhead by obtaining references from Washington friends, including John Dix. Dix praised Whipple to the president, “I know him as a most able, indefatigable man, and am satisfied that any confidence the administration may repose in him will be faithfully responded to.”20
Whipple next asked for help from his old friend, Senator Rice. Rice told the Bishop, “I will do all in my power to carry out your views.” The senator complained that he had little power. He was a Democrat, and the Republicans had taken the places on the Indian Committee, with Morton Wilkinson assuming his seat. Minnesota’s Cyrus Aldrich, another Republican, served on the Indian Committee in the House.
Rice’s view of Lincoln’s Washington was cynical, “All, everything country, Constitution, right—sacrificed upon the Altar of party.” The Republican congressmen controlled the Indian patronage in Minnesota and “the Secretary of the Interior and the Comr of Indian Affairs give much attention to their suggestions.” Rice believed that making Whipple’s plan into law would mean nothing “so long as Agents and Superintendents, even Commissioners are appointed as rewards for political services.” Rice told Whipple he would try “but I fear the demagogue, the politician & those pecuniarally [sic] interested.”21
Whipple refused to be discouraged. He asked Rice to see Lincoln and urge “the appointment of a commission—simply to devise a plan.” Whipple believed Lincoln was “an honest man.” “I believe he is not afraid to do his duty. If he could hear the cries which ring in my ears, if he could see what I have seen, if [he] had prayed as I have ‘how long, how long O Lord!’—he would act.”22
Perhaps the bishop thought he saw other signs that the time to act was at hand. Morton Wilkinson introduced a bill in the Senate on 6 March 1862 to protect Indians who had taken their land in severalty. The bill instructed agents to pay “civilized” Indians, as well as whites, for the depredations of “wild Indians.”23 Was it possible that Minnesota’s congressmen were ready to listen to the reformers?
On 13 April, Whipple decided to go to work on both Aldrich and Wilkinson. He wrote Aldrich and asked him to deliver another letter to Lincoln. Aldrich had already met the bishop’s influence coming from another direction. His House Indian Affairs Committee had been asked by the secretary of the interior to give “very special attention” to Whipple’s proposals. Aldrich, however, intended to sidetrack the reform plan. The congressman was not interested in contributing to the destruction of a portion of his own power base.
Aldrich simply denied the need for change. He accused Bishop Whipple of making “general allegations and indefinite charges.” The congressman said he knew the Indian agents were honest because he helped select them—a demonstration of the political selection process Bishop Whipple had identified as the wellspring of corruption. But Aldrich said that the real problem was not the System but the Indians. Reform would mean nothing because of “the capacity of the Indian race.”24
Morton Wilkinson’s response to Whipple was so similar to Aldrich’s that they must have discussed it. He too accused the bishop of making “general charges.” He contended that Lincoln’s appointments had eliminated the problem of corrupt agents, thus ignoring the bishop’s fundamental point concerning the political premises of the appointment system. Wilkinson also shifted the burden to the Indian. Wilkinson believed Indians were “idle barbarians” and incapable of being civilized. As far as the senator was concerned, “missionary efforts … have not produced any adequate or corresponding results.” Why reform the System when the real problem lay with the Indians as a race?
It is easy enough to pull down the present System, to point out defects and to assail the manner of its execution—But it is quite another and more difficult matter to devise and frame in detail a plan which will accomplish all that the good people of our country desire.25
Wilkinson and Aldrich either had not read Whipple’s program or, more likely, they did not like what they read. The bishop’s proposals were not vague. They were especially specific in their attack on political patronage in the Indian System. Neither man was even mildly interested in joining an attempt to undercut his own influence and power.
Thus far, Bishop Whipple’s second campaign for reform had elicited words but no action. There had been some encouraging response from Lincoln and Secretary Smith. Commissioner Dole expressed some interest in reform ideas. The commissioner was angry over problems in California and placed reform of that Indian jurisdiction high on his priority list. Dole may have reflected Whipple’s influence in his conclusion that
an honest, upright, true-hearted missionary, I care not what church, who will with his family, settle down with or near some of these people and by example and kindness teach them the arts of husbandry etc., etc., will do more good than all the traveling agents in the Union.
But Minnesota’s congressmen, who occupied key seats on congressional committees, had rejected reform. Commissioner Dole, while he complained about the government’s Indian policy, still maintained, “I can’t see how to change it.”26
War and a Visit to the President
In July 1862, Bishop Whipple began to lay plans for a trip to Washington. Confident of his ability to sway people, the bishop hoped he could move reluctant officials and President Lincoln. Henry Rice was skeptical and concluded the bishop would have to learn for himself. “When you visit here next fall you will be able to satisfy yourself as to the intentions of those in power…. From the bottom of my inmost thoughts I wish you success.”27
Events dramatically changed that gloomy situation. In July, Commissioner Dole traveled to Minnesota to negotiate a treaty with the Chippewas. While there, he found himself in the midst of that “most terrible and exciting Indian war.”28 The Minnesota war appeared to work to Bishop Whipple’s advantage. The conflict apparently convinced Lincoln that there was substance in the churchman’s arguments. When Whipple reached Washington in September, the war was at its zenith. John Ross was already in the city educating the president about violations of treaty obligations and injustices done to his people. Whipple carried a memorial that identified the new war as a symptom of the need for reform. Whipple said that the real causes of the war lay in the corruption of the Indian System. He skillfully fought opponents of reform with evidence of bloodshed, implying sanction for the suffering in their opposition.
It is because I would forever prevent such scenes that for three years I have plead [sic] with the gover[n]ment to reform a system whose perrenial [sic] fruit is blood. Canada has not had an Indian war since the revolution. We have hardly passed a year without one…. we shall find that we have reaped exactly what we sowed.29
Armed with that argument, Bishop Whipple went to see Lincoln. He took Gen. Henry Halleck, his cousin, along for support. Whipple made the whole case to the president—the corruption of agents and traders, the lack of government protection for the Indians, and examples of how the corruption led directly to bloody war. Whipple believed the president “was deeply moved.” Lincoln later told a friend that Bishop Whipple “came here the other day and talked with me about the rascality of this Indian business until I felt it down to my boots.” Lincoln’s response was a folksy story:
Bishop, a man thought that monkeys could pick cotton better than negroes could because they were quicker and their fingers smaller. He turned a lot of them into his cotton field, but he found that it took two overseers to watch one monkey. It needs more than one honest man to watch one Indian agent.
The story was a curious one. Did it imply agreement with Whipple on the need to take Indian affairs out of politics? Or was it a way to say that any reform would be difficult to oversee? After thinking over the bishop’s arguments, Lincoln appeared to make a commitment, although it was hedged with two significant “ifs” that betrayed his priorities: “If we get through this war, and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed.”30
The Executions and Reform
Lincoln pledged reform of the Indian System once the War for the Union was over. However, events intervened once again. The news that Minnesotans wished to execute three hundred and three Sioux prisoners confronted Lincoln with the brutality of the Indian System more directly than ever. Reformers were able to argue to the president that both the war and the execution controversy were the result of corruption. “Our government is responsible for this inhuman and horrible neglect and the day of retribution seems now at hand!” one crusader wrote Lincoln.31
The controversy over the executions may have been illustrative of Bishop Whipple’s arguments. It did not make life simple for the clergyman in war-torn Minnesota. Whipple was attacked in the press. He even became an issue among the congressmen. Senator Rice wrote his wife, “Col Aldrich got knocked down the other night in a saloon for abusing Bishop Whipple.” Whipple defended himself, contending that he cared for the suffering whites as much as anyone. They had been hurt because of “a bad system of Indian affairs.” If his reform program had been implemented long ago, Whipple maintained, “I believe no blood would have been shed.”32
Despite his own uneasy position, Whipple understood that the situation was equally uncomfortable for Abraham Lincoln. On 12 November 1862, Whipple sought to exploit the situation by writing Senator Rice and enclosing another letter for Lincoln. This time he linked reform with the war and the executions, “You know it is our culpable mismanagement, robbery & sin which has brought this harvest of blood.” The burdens of being a reformer in hate-filled Minnesota were beginning to wear on the usually tireless Whipple. He praised Rice as “the only public man who from the first has recognised the justice of my plea.” While maintaining, “We cannot hang men by the hundreds,” the bishop worried about executing those actually guilty. He knew anything else would “call down on me a pack of harpies and do no good—but I do earnestly ask a reform, I have the right to demand it and I do so in the fear of God.” Rice could only respond, “I shall at the earliest moment place before the President the Memorial and will … back it with my entire strength.”33
Before Rice could reach the president, John Beeson decided to attempt to use the controversy over the executions to convert Lincoln to Indian reform. In a letter to the president, he attacked Commissioner Dole as a man “whose lack of knowledge of Indian nature, and of human rights was shockingly manifested.” Beeson’s language may have been sufficiently radical to make Bishop Whipple appear more moderate. He called for the recognition of Indian sovereignty and the restoration of land to the Indians, whereas the bishop advocated abandoning the idea of dealing with the Indians as an independent nation. Beeson, however, supported Whipple and praised him to the president. “There can be no measure of reform which you can reccomend [sic] that would meet with more general approval than reform of the Indian Department,” he told Lincoln.
Beeson regarded the injustice against Indians and the “slave power” as entities in an evil organic whole. It was not going to be enough to end slavery. Injustice to the Indians predated slavery and its source was the same; the nation would achieve salvation only by rooting out the original injustice, “This can be done only by the immediate recognition of the Indians as human beings.” Beeson alleged that the “slave power” controlled the Indian Office and connected this with the expulsion of the tribes from the southeastern United States a generation earlier. To reform Indian policy was, in Beeson’s mind, “to dry up the principle source from which rebellion has derived its strength.” Beeson integrated the Minnesota war into this total picture and closed his letter with a powerful plea not to execute any of the condemned Sioux.34
Meanwhile, Senator Rice was finding it difficult to promote Bishop Whipple’s proposals. On 25 November, he called on Commissioner Dole to urge more efforts to supply Minnesota Indians with agricultural implements. The commissioner “replied that his hands were tied, that Senator Wilkinson had amended a Bill so as to preclude him from advertising for anything not estimated by the Superintendent!” Rice was discouraged and told Whipple, “I can do nothing I fear, without the aid of my colleague, which I know will not be given.” Rice decried the situation: “I will do my best—Alas! The poor Indian is kept in a savage state by a giant government and his condition renders him, not an object of pity, but of plunder.”35
Morton Wilkinson’s resistance to reforming Indian policy was not passive. He was spearheading a campaign to force Lincoln to execute the three hundred Sioux prisoners. The last week in November was the crucial period for that agitation. Senator Rice, despite his worries, was able to obtain “a long interview with the President” on 26 November, two days before Wilkinson got to see him. Rice carried with him Bishop Whipple’s letter and a memorial from several Episcopal bishops.36
Lincoln Supports Reform
Events had made Abraham Lincoln extremely sensitive to Indian affairs for weeks. He had been educated on the evils of the Indian System. He had been confronted with Indian warfare in the Indian Territory and Minnesota. By 26 November, he was only days away from a decision on the proposed executions in Minnesota. It is in that context that he met with Senator Rice.
Rice presented Lincoln with Whipple’s memorial. Lincoln read it aloud and “said that he would in his [annual] message, call the attention of Congress to the subject.” That message was to be delivered on 1 December. Lincoln had apparently changed his mind about waiting until after the Civil War to recommend reform. On 26 November, he led Rice to believe he would seek it immediately. “He is disposed to do all he can,” Rice informed Bishop Whipple.
On 1 December 1862, Abraham Lincoln asked Congress to remodel the Indian System. “Many wise and good men have impressed me with the belief that this can be profitably done,” he said. Lincoln urged the congressmen to give the matter their “especial consideration.”37 For the moment, it appeared that Bishop Whipple had achieved a great triumph. The president of the United States had endorsed reform of the Indian System.
However, the vagueness of Lincoln’s recommendation was troubling. Above all, an endorsement of Whipple’s cornerstone proposal—the depoliticization of the System—was conspicuously absent. Instead, the proposal was made in a general way to the men who directly controlled Indian patronage.
That ambiguous posture carried over to subordinate annual reports. Caleb Smith did spell out some details of the reform proposal. He demanded an end to the treaty process and to the tribes’ status as independent nations. “They should be regarded as wards of the government, entitled to its fostering care and protection,” said the secretary. His words could have been written by Bishop Whipple:
The duty of the government to protect the Indians and prevent their suffering for the want of the necessaries of life should be fully recognized. They should be taught to earn their subsistence by labor, and be instructed in the cultivation of the soil.
Among Smith’s recommendations were payment of annuities in goods rather than cash and many other aspects of the reformers’ program. Smith called it “a radical change in the mode of treatment for the Indians.”38
Commissioner Dole joined the reform chorus, calling severalty for Indians “the best method yet devised for their reclamation and advancement in civilization.” Dole even went so far as to call for “their ultimate admission to all the rights of citizenship.” However, Dole was less enthusiastic than Smith. He reserved his greatest attention for his own pet policy, “concentration.”39 But neither official said anything about changing the method of selecting Indian officials, the first step in assuring the successful implementation of the other programs.
Nevertheless, the reformers were ecstatic. A New Yorker, Lewis H. Morgan, wrote Lincoln immediately to support his proposal for reform, “No work is more needed.”40 Bishop Whipple joined in the exultation: “With all my heart I thank you for your reccommendation [sic] to have our whole Indian system reformed. It is a stupendous piece of wickedness and as we fear God ought to be changed.” Whipple sent Lincoln more material to read and appeared to believe that his proposed reform commission was a certainty, an implication that Lincoln had promised Whipple that it would be created.
Bishop Whipple knew that his cause had taken only a tentative first step. The significant omission in the government’s recommendations had not escaped his scrutiny. “Will you not see that the commission is made up of better stuff than politicians,” he addressed the politician in the White House. “It needs the best men in the nation.” That same day, Whipple wrote cousin Gen. Henry Halleck. “You have his ear,” the bishop wrote, referring to the president. “Do, for the sake of the poor victims of a nations wrong, ask him to put on it something better than politicians.”41 But the reformers had hope where there had been none. Indian affairs had been linked with national concerns and the success of the struggle with the South. As a result, a president of the United States had publicly endorsed reform of the Indian System.
1. Robert Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian, p. 8.
2. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
3. William P. Dole to John Beeson, 3 May 1861, Roll 65, M21, LS, OIA, RG75, NA.
4. Dole to Cyrus B. Aldrich, 18 December 1861, Roll 67, M21, LS, OIA, RG75, NA.
5. AR, CIA, 1861, p. 633.
6. Ibid., p. 637.
7. Ibid., pp. 633, 647.
8. Mardock, The Reformers, p. 10.
9. Henry Benjamin Whipple to Henry M. Rice, Whipple to John A. Dix, Whipple to the Secretary of the Interior, all 23 February 1861, Box 39, Letterbook 3, Henry Benjamin Whipple Papers.
10. Whipple to Clark W. Thompson, 14 April 1861, Whipple to Thomas Galbraith, 15 April 1861, ibid.
11. Whipple to R. M. Larned, 15 April 1861, ibid.
12. LAM, 1861, p. 22.
13. Whipple to Abraham Lincoln, 6 March 1862, Box 39, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers, also found in Henry B. Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate, pp. 510–14; Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860–1890, pp. 40–41.
14. Whipple, Lights and Shadows, pp. 514–19.
15. Lincoln to Whipple, 27 March 1862, Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham. Lincoln, 5:173; Caleb B. Smith to Whipple, 31 March 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers.
16. Whipple to Smith, 10 April 1862, Box 39, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers.
17. Whipple to Lincoln, 10 April 1862, ibid.
18. Whipple to Lincoln, 16 April 1862, ibid.
19. Whipple to Alexander Ramsey, 8 November 1862, Box 40, Letterbook 4, Whipple Papers.
20. Dix to Lincoln, 21 April 1862, Roll 1, M825, LR, ID, OSI, RG48, NA.
21. Rice to Whipple, 22, 26 April 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers.
22. Whipple to Rice, 30 April 1862, Box 39, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers.
23. U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 2d sess., 13 May 1862, pt. 3:2082; Box 2, Clark W. Thompson Papers.
24. Aldrich to Whipple, 12 June 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers.
25. Whipple to Morton Wilkinson, 30 April 1862, Wilkinson to Whipple, 8 May 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers; Fritz, Indian Assimilation, pp. 41–42.
26. Dole to Elijah White, 9 June 1862, Roll 59, M574, SF201, OIA, RG75, NA.
27. Rice to Whipple, 4 July 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers.
28. Wilkinson, Dole, John G. Nicolay to Lincoln, 27 August 1862, Roll 40, Lincoln Papers, LC. See Chapter VII.
29. Whipple, “The Duty of Citizens concerning the Indian Massacre,” Box 40, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers.
30. Whipple, Lights and Shadows, pp. 136–37.
31. B. B. Meeker to Edward W. Bates, 2 November 1862, Roll 599, M234, LR, Northern Superintendency, OIA, RG75, NA. See Chapter VIII.
32. Whipple to F. Driscoll, 5 December 1862, Box 40, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers; Rice to his wife, 17 October 1862, Henry Mower Rice Papers; Whipple to Ramsey, 8 November 1862, Box 40, Letterbook 4, Whipple Papers.
33. Whipple to Rice, 12 November 1862, Box 40, Rice to Whipple, 19 November 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers.
34. Beeson to Lincoln, 18 November 1862, Roll 20, M825, LR, ID, OSI, RG48, NA; Fritz, Indian Assimilation, p. 37.
35. Rice to Whipple, 27 November 1862, Box 3, Whipple Papers.
36. Ibid.
37. LAM, 1862, p. 1.
38. Ibid., p. 5.
39. AR, CIA, 1862, pp. 169–70, 188, 192.
40. Lewis H. Morgan to Lincoln, 3 December 1862, Roll 20, M825, LR, ID, OSI, RG48, NA.
41. Whipple to Lincoln, Whipple to Henry Halleck, 4 December 1862, Box 40, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers.