Lincoln and the Indians Civil War Policy and Politics

AS DECEMBER PASSED, it became evident to the reformers that it was not going to be easy to translate presidential words into congressional action. Furthermore, Lincoln and his subordinates displayed an unwillingness to take any risks to support the program. Lincoln did not use his executive powers to, in Whipple’s words, “instruct the department” or alter the appointment process for the Indian System. On 27 December, Henry Rice wrote Bishop Whipple, “I fear that little or nothing will be done for your Indian project.¹

In retrospect, the decline in fervor for reform was predictable. After the executions of 26 December, the dramatic fuel that had fired the enthusiasm had been spent. Also, religious jealousies had surfaced, with Bishop Thomas L. Grace writing officials concerning his fear that because of the new policy, Roman Catholics might be excluded from missionary work with the Sioux.² Finally, other Minnesotans were more interested in removal than reform. Bishop Whipple tried manfully to link the two things, “This removal must not be done without a radical reform of the system.”³ However, the resistance to reform was discouraging to Whipple: “I have plead [sic] with all the earnestness of my nature for a reform in this wicked system but I fear I shall be powerless. How sad that a nation should be so deaf. Pray for me—my poor heart aches.”⁴ On 22 January, Bishop Whipple tried once more to convince Commissioner Dole that if there were no reform, there would be more warfare. “I have so often pressed upon the Department of a need of reform,” he wrote. He begged Dole to “examine carefully” the memorial to Lincoln from the Episcopal bishops and “further their prayer.”⁵

The crucial roadblock to reform was in Congress, especially the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. The House passed a resolution in January for the appointment of a commission, just as Bishop Whipple had asked, “to investigate the condition of the Indian tribes and remnants of tribes in the United States.”⁶ The Senate, however, was not interested. Rice gave Whipple the bad news:

I look for no aid here. In open Senate the other day I called the attention of the Indian Committee to that part of the Presidents message touching Indian affairs. I do not expect any action will be taken. I am powerless and discouraged.⁷

Morton Wilkinson told Whipple directly that he would not help. He agreed that policy should be changed, but his excuse was that there was not time to do it in the current session and no action should be taken in haste. That was Wilkinson’s way of killing the program. Rice succinctly summarized the situation, “The do nothing policy here is complete.”⁸

The new Chippewa treaty demonstrated how dead the reform cause was by early 1863. The treaty was negotiated in Washington in March, and Henry Rice claimed he wrote “every word in it (save amendments made by the Senate).” Rice found those amendments “very injurious.” The treaty provided for the concentration of the Chippewas and for a board of visitors consisting of two or three churchmen to oversee the payment of annuities, inspect, and report on conditions among the Indians. Rice recommended Bishop Whipple, who was appointed along with Bishop Grace and Thomas Williamson.⁹

The significance of the Chippewa situation is that Bishop Whipple became an instrument of the Indian System in order to implement the very corruption he hated. By June 1863, the Chippewas were intensely unhappy because their “Great Father” in Washington had led them to exchange good land for bad.¹⁰ In November, Bishop Whipple wrote Rice to tell him that the Board of Visitors had been used to sanctify fraudulent dealings. Whipple unsuccessfully tried three times to find out when the annuity payments would be made. Finally, when payments were made, he said, “We were sent blindfolded into the Indian Country, to attend as gentlemanly spectators on a payment without authority to advise or direct.” Whipple suspected fraud: “Col Thompson said that he brough[t] 12,000 in gold. You see that only about $5,500 was paid. Some one must make a liberal proffit [sic] on the balance.” The cleric reported that the annuity goods had been opened and placed in piles so that the board members could not even determine if the promised amount was delivered.¹¹

Whipple was angry and humiliated. Officials were talking of another treaty to replace the one that was not working. Whipple called such talk “madness,” and he deplored “the farce of another treaty.” Treaties were always used by politicians for personal gain. “What we need is not new treaties but honest manly fulfilling of old ones,” the bishop complained.¹²

It was not only the Chippewas who made Whipple “sick at heart.” It was the conditions of the Sioux prisoners and the removed Sioux and Winnebagos. In spite of all the promises, Whipple witnessed that the Indians of his diocese were worse off than ever before. “I tremble for my country,” he told Commissioner Dole, “when I remember that God will compel us to reap what we sow. There is a reason why every advance of civilization is marked with blood.”¹³

The dark mountain of injustice & wickedness has lowered over me so darkly, I have felt such loneliness in trying to do, that often it seemed as if my heart would break if I could not have carried my sorrows and laid them at a Heavenly Fathers feet.

The bishop considered giving up on Indian reform: “I have now decided that it is no use to try and coax.” He was unsure of his health, “I feel often my hold on life is very weak.” He considered turning his work over to someone else, but the discouraged crusader could not desert his cause. “I beg of you,” Whipple wrote Senator Rice, “for the love of God dont be discouraged.”¹⁴ In 1864, the bishop escorted Chippewa leaders back to Washington to negotiate a new treaty.¹⁵

It was evident that the government was not going to reform the Indian System, despite Lincoln’s pledge. Where, then, was policy headed? In the midst of a great war, clues could be found in the thinking of military men. Bishop Whipple wrote Henry Halleck in April 1864, “I hear that the Indian Bureau are down upon General Pope and the entire War Dept. especially Army officers for interfering in their business.”¹⁶

Actually, the military had long been a source of a type of reform agitation, although the soldiers’ motivations differed from the more idealistic reformers. Military men felt that they always had to clean up the situations caused by Indian officials, an example of which could be the Minnesota Indian war. The Indian Office had originated in the War Department and there were recurring calls, even among civilian leaders, to transfer it back. Cyrus Aldrich inquired of the Indian Office in 1861 concerning an amendment to accomplish this task. James Doolittle of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate Indian Committee, told the Senate in 1864 that he had concluded that this solution was best. His grounds were that Indians “respected” military force.¹⁷ This attitude at all levels of government was easily fostered by the war mentality.

Following his experience in Minnesota, Gen. John Pope had some specific ideas along these lines. By October 1862, he was bombarding the War Department with recommendations. Stanton informed him that his proposals had “been submitted to the President, and are now under consideration by him.”¹⁸ Pope may have had an impact on Lincoln’s recommendation for reform late that year. In 1864, Pope made comprehensive proposals in testimony to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.¹⁹

Pope corroborated many of the reformers’ judgments concerning the Indian System. He found the same corruption in land speculation, whiskey sales, trade, annuity disbursement, and agent activities. He even accepted the reformers’ contention that the root cause of recent Indian warfare “can be directly traced to the conduct of the white men who have swindled them out of their money and their goods.” The general pronounced the System an expensive and “woful [sic] failure.”

Pope agreed with Bishop Whipple on the need for a strong government to protect the Indians. He wanted to end treatymaking. He endorsed the proposal that the Indians receive annuities in payment in kind rather than in cash. Pope encouraged the application of “the influence of civilization, education, and Christianity.” He suggested a price-control system for traders under his jurisdiction. Pope, like Whipple, wanted to destroy tribal organization and take the first steps toward making Indians functioning individuals in American society.

There were some significant disagreements between the general and the reformers. One centered on the question of military control. The cornerstone of Pope’s proposals was the transfer of supervision of the Indians to the War Department. He wanted a military solution “without the interposition of Indian agents.” To that end, Pope proposed the establishment of sizable military posts in Indian country. He would concentrate tribes, isolate them (with or without their consent), and surround them with soldiers. Behind this shield, a forcible civilizing process could take place.

Concentration, segregation, military control, and forced civilization were the central features of Pope’s program. The old System, he said, “has worked injustice and wrong to the Indian; has made his present state worse, morally and physically, than it was in his native wilderness; and has entailed a heavy and useless expense upon the government.” Surely military control would be better. Pope sounded a bit unsure of the consequences of this action, partly because he was less sure than Bishop Whipple about the innate abilities of the Indian. As far as he was concerned, the safest course was to treat Indians as a military problem. That was an approach compatible with a government at war.

Pope’s proposals have been praised by some scholars.²⁰ His analysis of the evils of the Indian System was as cogent as that of any reformer. By implication, military control would have taken the control of Indian affairs away from the politicians. Pope assumed that military men would be more honorable than civilian Indian officials—a proposition that was eventually severely tested in New Mexico and Colorado. The general failed to note the fact that the political ambitions that underlay the Indian System also infected the military, as was demonstrated in Kansas. The Lincoln administration never formally espoused military control, but as the Civil War ground on, the military increasingly assumed responsibility for the Indians.

If anything, Pope’s proposals sapped the lifeblood of the reform movement. They were the old policy in new, militaristic dress, with the trappings of reform and not the substance. Pope undercut the reformers at the crucial points of Indian capacity and utility of beneficent policies. Under it, Indians would continue to be removed, concentrated, and generally made to serve the cause of white progress.²¹

Lincoln maintained the appearance of keeping his commitment to reform. In his 1863 annual message, he called on Congress to reform the Indian System, proclaiming the “urgent need for immediate legislative action.” Lincoln may have thought of Bishop Whipple as he wrote:

Sound policy and our imperative duty to these wards of the Government demand our anxious and constant attention to their material well-being, to their progress in the arts of civilization, and, above all, to that moral training which, under the blessing of divine Providence, will confer upon them the elevated and sanctifying influences, the hopes and consolations of the Christian faith.

These words were the skeleton at the feast. Congress was not going to remodel the System, and Lincoln surely knew it. More significant, Lincoln’s kind words for Indians directly followed sentences expressing pride concerning the removal of many tribes, “sundry treaties,” and “extinguishing the possessory rights of the Indians to large and valuable tracts of land.”²²

Lincoln communicated in this general language the fact that his administration had settled on an Indian policy. Commissioner Dole said it more plainly, “The plan of concentrating Indians and confining them to reservations may now be regarded as the fixed policy of the government.” Dole still praised the severalty idea as the best way to inculcate “the ideas of self-reliance and individual effort.” But his priorities were clear, and they constituted a rejection of any kind of depoliticization of the Indian System. John Usher’s report did not even mention reform ideas. Concentration was the policy, and he and Dole both pointed to examples of that policy. One was in New Mexico, where concentration was being carried out by the military. The other they proposed to implement in California by concentrating the tribes there onto two reservations.²³ With or without reform, concentration was being implemented and, with it, politics as usual.

The executive branch of the government had settled on a tough Indian policy that implicitly rejected depoliticization and placed highest priority on prosecution of the war and development of the West. By 1864, Lincoln and Dole ceased even asking for reform. The last refuge of the reformers was the Congress. It was a feeble reed. Early in 1864, Congress killed a bill “for the benefit and better management of the Indians.”²⁴

However, the Congress had become more sensitive to Indian problems because of a growing public furor over them. The war years had disrupted peaceful Indian-white relations in several regions. The mad scramble for mineral wealth in the West was a source of friction. The war in Minnesota and the refugees in Kansas had upset many white citizens. By the end of 1864, Commissioner Dole admitted that treatymaking policy “has recently attracted a large share of public attention.” The secretary of the interior was equally concerned, “Much has been said, and the public mind has late been agitated, against the policy of the Government in making treaties with the Indians.”²⁵

By June 1864, the accumulated problems were enough to touch off a great debate in the Senate.²⁶ The senators discovered that it was costing an extraordinary amount of money to implement Indian policies. The removal of the Minnesota Indians had cost $137,000 more than their appropriations. Damage claims in Minnesota exceeded appropriations by $125,000. The pending return of the Kansas refugees to the Indian Territory promised more of the same because they were moved too late to plant crops. Furthermore, there was the question of the government’s responsibility for paying the back interest due the Indians on securities issued by seceded states—a matter of $350,000.

The debate on monetary matters evolved into a debate on Indian policy that gave senatorial reformers one last hurrah. John Sherman of Ohio sharply attacked a system that worked so badly and still cost four million dollars a year. “The whole relation between the Indian tribes and the United States is the most ridiculous possible,” said the senator, “and I hope some day or other a gentleman familiar with the subject will bring in a bill abolishing the whole system.” Sherman maintained that, for all its expenditures, the System did not protect Indians and “our white people constantly encroach on them and do them great wrong.”

An agitated Sen. Reverdy Johnson of Maryland joined in the debate, “Of all the injustice that has ever been perpetrated by man upon man the injustice perpetrated upon the Indians is the grossest.” The great western states progressed at the expense of the Indians, and the result was that “these poor creatures are houseless and homeless and penniless.” The senator shouted: “I protest against it for the credit of the Government. I protest against it in the name of humanity. I protest against it in the name of that higher humanity, Christian civilization.”

Unfortunately, the senators on the Indian Committee did not share these sentiments with the reformers. Chairman Doolittle responded that the government had done all it could do. He maintained that the problem was not government policy but the Indians themselves: “We are a different race. God, in His providence has opened this New World to the colonization of a different race from that which inhabited it when our forefathers first landed upon the shores of New England.” Indians were inferior, and so they were “a dying, dying race.” The government was not wrong, said Doolittle. It was simply a case of “the contact of two races side by side upon the frontiers of Christian civilization.” Senator Harlan supported Doolittle’s view, contending: “If they refuse to merge into and become part of the superior race, they must necessarily be destroyed. It is a law of humanity.”²⁷

Morton Wilkinson of Minnesota could not resist such a debate. A longtime opponent of reform, Wilkinson also blamed the problems on Indians and their nature. He called them “a lazy, miserable, thriftless set of beings” and pronounced missionary efforts among them “an utter and entire failure.” Besides, to Wilkinson, there was a larger problem—“the character of the American people.” Americans just naturally moved into new regions seeking new wealth. No reformed Indian system could stop that great drive.

The character of the Indian country changes every six months. A gold mine is discovered upon an Indian reservation and you may as well undertake to dam up the Mississippi river and prevent it flowing down toward the Gulf as to stop the tide of emigration in this country. Our people go wherever those developments open an opportunity for wealth and prosperity.

Wilkinson’s remarks drew fire from an unexpected source, “Bloody Jim” Lane: “I am surprised that any man from the west should be found advocating, or even excusing, or attempting to excuse, our Indian system.” Thus joined in debate were two of the great congressional figures in Indian affairs in the Lincoln years. Lane told the senator from Minnesota that a man who knew the frontier, “with common sense and judgement, must have learned that our Indian system was a failure, an utter failure.”

Wilkinson was angered at these words, but Lane pressed his attack. He held up the English system, applied in Canada, as much superior and, in the process, Lane endorsed much of the reform program.

It is not an absurdity that we should pass laws recognizing the Indians as subjects for a time, and then after reaching a certain point of civilization and advancement to recognize them as citizens, and permit them to take the oath of allegiance, if you please or oath of civilization and advancement.²⁸

It was remarkable to hear such words from the mouth of a man who had so profited from the Indian System.

Nevertheless, this rhetoric was the only tool of the reformers. They had neither the votes nor the influence in the Indian Committee necessary to pass any kind of reform bill. Doolittle, Harlan, and Wilkinson were opposed to reform, and unless their committee acted, no legislation could ever be enacted. The senatorial debate was a mirror to the reform struggle, ideologically and politically. The reformers had lost in Congress, as elsewhere, because they lacked the political clout to undo a politically and financially profitable system.

In February 1864, Bishop Whipple was still pushing for reform. He was writing articles on Indian affairs and still attempting to persuade General Sibley to help the suffering Sioux. In March, he journeyed to Washington to help the Chippewas renegotiate their treaty. While there, he went again to see Lincoln, but this time the meeting brought no dramatic results. Lincoln gave Whipple a perfunctory letter of introduction to the new chairman of the House Indian Committee, William Windom of Minnesota. “Please see & hear Rev. Bishop Whipple about Indians,” Lincoln wrote Windom. “He has much information on the subject.”²⁹

John Beeson was also greeted politely, but his requests were perfunctorily dismissed. Beeson sponsored a meeting at the Hall of the House of Representatives on 9 April 1864. A committee of three was delegated to visit Lincoln and discuss the Indian question. Four months later, the committee had still been unable to secure an audience with Lincoln “on account of the pressure of business.” Beeson finally got to see Lincoln and he recalled that the president told him “to rest assured that as soon as the pressing matters of this war is settled the Indians shall have my first care and I will not rest untill Justice is done their and your Sattisfaction [sic].” Lincoln had returned to putting off reform until the Civil War was over.³⁰

A disillusioned and ill Bishop Whipple left the country for a restful trip to England. He had given up on Lincoln and his administration. He found hope only in the possibility of a different president and administration. In September, during his voyage, Whipple wrote Lincoln’s opponent for the presidency, General McClellan. “I know you too well to appeal to your generous heart to do all you can, if elected Prest to reform this atrocious Indian system,” the weary reformer wrote, and he assured McClellan of his support.³¹

Bishop Whipple was disappointed again, because Lincoln won a second term. Whipple wrote his wife from England: “I think most of the Americans here felt gloomy…. I confess I see no help but in God.”³²

Was Lincoln’s 1862 proposal genuine or mere rhetoric? An evaluation is not easy. Although Lincoln promised a great deal and delivered little, mid-nineteenth century presidents did not generally act as chief legislators in their relations with Congress. Lincoln was Whiggish in his approach on many nonwar issues.³³ However, Lincoln appears to have pushed much harder on other matters, notably the transcontinental railroad and mineral development. More important, Lincoln did not use his executive powers to change what he could without congressional action, especially in the appointment of something besides political supporters to Indian positions. Lincoln never did specifically endorse depoliticization of the Indian System.

To be fair, Lincoln was no worse than the congressmen who profited most directly from the political system the reformers wanted to destroy. Men like Wilkinson and Aldrich were even less willing than Lincoln to talk about giving up a major source of their power. Lincoln at least endorsed the general principles of reform. Given the demands of the War for the Union, he may have believed there was little else he could do.

There is some historic importance to the Lincoln proposal. Historians have long marked the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 as a watershed in American Indian history. That act enshrined in law the idea that Indians must be assimilated into American civilization to emulate the white agrarian values of individual ownership of property. The Dawes policy proved disastrous in practice, partly due to mismanagement and partly because it ignored cultural patterns thousands of years old. The passage of the legislation required an alliance between the land-hungry and the reformers. It thereby opened Indian lands for settlement so that between 1887 and 1934 the Natives lost 86 million acres of their 138 million acres.³⁴

Historians have often described the severalty movement that produced the Dawes Act as an eastern movement. Actually, westerners supported it from the outset, among them Bishop Whipple, Lincoln, Smith, and Dole. This distortion derives, in part, from the scholars’ neglect of Indian policy during the Civil War years. The movement began well before 1865 and got its most significant early presidential endorsement from Abraham Lincoln.

The significance of the Lincoln proposal recedes somewhat in the face of the administration’s failure to endorse the fundamental political reform sought by Bishop Whipple. Nevertheless, new ideas were raised and significant precedents were set. The corruption of the Indian System received national exposure. Whipple’s request for a commission of worthy men paved the way for the Board of Indian Commissioners, begun in 1869 and lasting until 1934. His ideas provided the intellectual foundations for the “peace policy” of the Grant administration under which churchmen administered Indian affairs. All this sprung from that moment when Bishop Henry Whipple confronted Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln responded: “This Indian system shall be reformed!”³⁵

1. Henry Benjamin Whipple to Abraham Lincoln, 6 March 1862, Box 39, Henry M. Rice to Whipple, 27 December 1862, Box 3, Henry Benjamin Whipple Papers.

2. Thomas L. Grace to Lincoln, 29 December 1862, Roll 599, M234, LR, Northern Superintendency, OIA, RG75, NA.

3. Whipple, “What Shall We do with the Indians,” Box 40, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers.

5. Whipple to William P. Dole, 22 January 1863, Roll 599, M234, LR, Northern Superintendency, OIA, RG75, NA.

6. Cyrus B. Aldrich to John P. Usher, 6 January 1863, Roll 21, M825, LR, ID, OSI, RG48, NA.

8. Morton Wilkinson to Whipple, 1 March 1863, Rice to Whipple, 7 February 1863, ibid.

9. Rice to Whipple, 18 March 1863, Box 3, Whipple Papers; Rice to Lincoln, 13 April 1863, Roll 1, M825, LR, ID, OSI, RG48, NA; Dole to Whipple, 4 August 1863, Roll 71, M21, LS, OIA, RG75, NA.

10. Hole-in-the-Day to Lincoln and Dole, 7 June 1863, AR, CIA, 1863, pp. 448–51.

13. Whipple to Dole, 16 November 1863, Letterbook 3, Whipple Papers. See “The Sioux Prisoners” in Chapter IX.

15. Whipple to Alexander Ramsey, 12 January 1864, ibid.; Chippewa Treaty, Roll 154, M234, LR, Chippewa Agency, OIA, RG75, NA; James Harlan to Whipple, 24 February 1864, Dole to Whipple, 9 April 1864, Box 3, Whipple Papers; Whipple to Dole, 11 April 1864, Roll 154, M234, LR, Chippewa Agency, OIA, RG75, NA.

17. Aldrich to A. B. Greenwood, 28 February 1861, Roll 456, M234, LR, Miscellaneous, OIA, RG75, NA; U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe, Debate on the Indian Appropriation Bill, 38th Cong., 1st sess., 11 June 1864, pt. 3:2873; William E. Unrau, “Indian Agent vs. the Army: Some Background Notes on the Kiowa-Comanche Treaty of 1865,” p. 135.

18. Edwin M. Stanton to Pope, 14 October 1862, Minnesota in the Indian and Civil Wars, 2:276.

19. Pope to Stanton, 6 February 1864, JCCW, 2:192–209, also found in Roll 599, M234, LR, Northern Superintendency, OIA, RG75, NA.

21. See Chapter XII concerning military policy in the last years of the Lincoln administration.

24. U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 1st sess., pt. 3:2117, the bill had been introduced by William Windom on 29 January 1864, U.S., Congress, House, Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 1st sess., pt. 1:411.

26. U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe, Debate on the Indian Appropriation Bill, 38th Cong., 1st sess., 10 June 1864, pt. 3:2846–47, 2850, 2871.

29. Charles Norton to Whipple, 9 February 1864, Henry H. Sibley to Whipple, 17 February 1864, Box 3, Whipple Papers; Lincoln to William Windom, 30 March 1864, Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7:275.

30. Beeson to Lincoln, 12 August 1864, Roll 458, M234, LR, Miscellaneous, OIA, RG75, NA; Robert Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian, p. 13.

31. Whipple to George B. McClellan, 30 September 1864, Box 40, Letterbook 5, McClellan to Whipple, 20 October 1864, Box 4, Whipple Papers.

32. Whipple to Mrs. Whipple, 23 November 1864, Box 40, Letterbook 5, Whipple Papers.

34. William T. Hagan, American Indians, p. 147; Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860–1890, pp. 212–13.

35. Hagan, American Indians, pp. 110–12, 141–47; Fritz, Indian Assimilation, pp. 34, 56–86; Mardock, The Reformers, pp. 30–84, 192–228; the idea of individual allotment actually dates back as far as 1633. Treaties featuring allotment were signed in the 1850s. See Howard W. Paulson, “The Allotment of Land in Severalty to the Dakota Indians before the Dawes Act,” pp. 132–41; Whipple, Lights and Shadows, pp. 136–37.

XI. The Failure of Reform “The Do Nothing Policy Here Is Complete”

XI. The Failure of Reform
“The Do Nothing Policy Here Is Complete”