The only good Indian is a dead Indian.
PHILIP H. SHERIDAN, 1869
We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expect less?
PHILIP H. SHERIDAN, 1878
THE AMERICAN DRIVE to expand westward under the banner of Manifest Destiny was not without cost, and most of the cost was borne by Native Americans. The history of their treatment by the United States is a sordid tale, marred by greed, brutality, duplicity, corruption, and, at times, extermination. Brief intervals of government enlightenment buffered the spread of European civilization westward, and the eight years of the Grant administration were more enlightened than most. Grant felt a romantic kinship with the nation’s first inhabitants. He sympathized with their plight, regretted their degradation, and was determined to shepherd them into full membership in American society.1 His peace policy was exactly that: an attempt to substitute kindness for bloodshed. It marked a fundamental shift in official attitude and laid the foundation for the program by which the Plains Indians were eventually accommodated.2
Early North American settlers claimed title to Indian land by discovery and conquest.I Treaties of cession were concluded with tribal chiefs when possible, and it quickly became colonial policy to establish boundary lines demarcating Indian territory.3 In 1763, to further minimize friction, George III prohibited settlement west of the Appalachians. The colonies were forbidden to grant titles to land beyond the headwaters of the rivers that flowed into the Atlantic.4 The ban on settlement helped keep the peace. But it was sorely resented by Americans living along the frontier.
With independence from Britain, the westward surge of pioneers resumed. Land was wealth, and Indian land seemed to be there for the taking. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson suggested relocating the Indians west of the Mississippi.5 Monroe expanded the idea, recommending that the tribes be invited to remove to the region “between the present States and Territories and the Rocky Mountains.”6 Congress responded in 1830 with passage of the Indian Removal Act, appropriated half a million dollars for the purpose, and authorized the president to grant lands in the unoccupied portion of the Louisiana Purchase in exchange for those relinquished in the East.7
Some tribes went peaceably, others did not. President Jackson assumed responsibility for relocating four Indian nations of the Southeast Confederacy: the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.8 The Seminoles of Florida resisted relocation until 1842. Their removal eventually cost the United States some $20 million and the lives of 1,500 soldiers and settlers. By the end of John Tyler’s term in 1845, the Indian problem appeared to have been solved. Most tribes had been moved west. A new demarcation line running from Lake Superior to the Red River on the Texas border separated tribal land from white settlement. Behind this boundary the Indians were guaranteed possession “as long as grass grows and water flows.”9
But the march of pioneers was relentless. The discovery of gold in California and later in Colorado precipitated the great migrations of the late 1840s and 1850s. Prospectors, cattlemen, and farmers swarmed onto the Great Plains with complete disregard for Indian rights.10 New railroads brought thousands of additional settlers, disrupted traditional migration patterns, and placed a great strain on wildlife, particularly the buffalo, which were essential to the survival of the Plains Indians.
Indian resentment rose as their lands were overrun. The Sioux of Minnesota went on the warpath in 1862.11 Two years later the Cheyenne, following a series of incidents in eastern Colorado, took up weapons against encroaching white settlers. Aided by the Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches they virtually isolated the territory by midsummer. Mail and stage service was disrupted, and a general Indian uprising appeared imminent. In the autumn, tribal elders drew back. Led by Black Kettle and six other chiefs, the Cheyenne sought to make peace. In early November they surrendered their weapons and went into winter encampment on Sand Creek, forty miles northeast of Fort Lyon, near the Kansas border. Here, on the morning of November 29, they were attacked without warning by Colorado militia, and the butchery that followed is unparalleled in the annals of Plains warfare.12 Black Kettle hoisted first an American flag, then a white flag, but the slaughter continued unabated. Defenseless men, women, and children were shot and sabered, their bodies scalped and mutilated. Of some 700 Cheyenne encamped on Sand Creek, 500 were reported slain.13 Black Kettle and others escaped, but the massacre set the Plains aflame from Mexico to the Canadian border.
Sand Creek became a cause célèbre.II Three formal investigations were launched, each of which sharply condemned the nation’s mistreatment of the Plains Indians.14 Most of the clashes that had occurred were attributed to “the aggressions of lawless white men.”15 The reports fixed on the loss of tribal hunting grounds as a major source of unrest and urged a series of reforms within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to ensure the Indians got a fair shake. But the reforms were stillborn.16
Sporadic fighting continued along the frontier for the next two years. In 1867 Congress responded by establishing a Peace Commission to carry an olive branch to restive tribes. Composed of four distinguished civilians and three army officers, including Sherman, the commission toured the West, conducted hearings, and met with tribal leaders.17 In January 1868 it released its report, recommending that the Indians be resettled on protected reservations where they could be taught the white man’s ways. English was to be introduced, schools established, and resident farmers provided to teach the nomadic tribesmen agricultural techniques. “Let the women be taught to weave, to sew and to knit. Let polygamy be punished. Encourage the building of dwellings, and the gathering there of those comforts which will endear the home.”18 Two large reservations were designated, one on the southern Plains that took in the present state of Oklahoma; one in the north encompassing most of the present state of South Dakota. The commission then concluded a series of treaties, first with the southern tribes (Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche), then with those in the north (principally the Sioux), to put the recommendations into effect. The Indians agreed to move to the areas assigned, and the government undertook to provide food, clothing, and other supplies to ease the transition. In addition, three military posts located on what was designated as tribal land were razed.
Peace appeared in the offing. But that hope faded quickly. The House and Senate fell to feuding over the financial terms of treaties, the requisite funds were not appropriated, some of the treaties were not ratified, and the Indians became destitute waiting for succor.19 In the autumn of 1868 the truce was shattered on the southern Plains. Raiding parties of Cheyenne and Arapaho, desperate because promised supplies were not forthcoming, launched a series of attacks on white settlers in central and western Kansas. Sherman, who was in overall command on the frontier, resolved to punish the raiders and push the tribes onto the designated reservations. Sheridan was given tactical command, instructed to mount a rare winter campaign, and to show no mercy. “I want you to go ahead, kill and punish the hostiles, capture and destroy the ponies, lances, carbines, etc., etc., of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Kiowas,” said Sherman.20 As he wrote his brother, “The more [Indians] we can kill this year, the less we will have to kill next year.”21 The result was the Cheyenne War of 1868. Sheridan, back in the saddle, pressed his troopers relentlessly. In late November, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, at the head of the 7th Cavalry, came upon the Cheyenne encampment on the banks of the Washita. Attacking at first light, Custer routed the Indians and inflicted heavy losses. Whether the attack was necessary is debatable. Critics maintained the Cheyenne had gone into winter quarters and were actually on the reservation when Custer struck. “I cannot but feel that innocent parties have been made to suffer for the crimes of others,” the superintendent of Indian affairs told Congress.22 Sheridan disputed the charge, claimed only the guilty had been punished, and commended Custer for his conduct.23
The defeat on the Washita was a serious blow to the Cheyenne. But it scarcely settled matters. When Grant took office in March 1869, the Plains seethed with unrest. Congress still had not appropriated the requisite funds, the tribes were becoming increasingly militant, settlers were clamoring for protection, and the army was girding for battle. A president less confident of his military judgment, or who stood more in awe of wartime heroes, would likely have given Sherman and Sheridan their head. The result would have been total war. The Indian tribes would have been driven mercilessly. Tens of thousands would have perished, and ethnic cleansing would have been the order of the day. Instead, Grant abruptly changed direction. Rather than fight, he chose to make peace with the Plains Indians. This was a surprise. As one historian has written, “Suddenly and inexplicably, the nation’s preeminent warrior seemed to have gone over to the enemy.”24
The situation is analogous to that in 1952. Voters cast their ballots for Eisenhower, believing the former Allied commander would bring quick victory in Korea. Instead, Ike sized up the situation, concluded the war could not be won, and halted the fighting on the best terms he could get. With Grant it was much the same. He carried the frontier states easily in 1868.25 Voters believed that as president the general in chief would make fast work of the recalcitrant tribes who were blocking westward expansion. But like Eisenhower, Grant recognized the costs would be prohibitive. Even more important, he thought the Indians deserved better treatment. Curious as it may seem, the two soldier-presidents drew on their military experience to lead the nation out of war.
Unlike Sherman and Sheridan, Grant believed most of the problems on the frontier were attributable to the settlers. This was a view of long standing. As a junior officer with the 4th Infantry in California, he wrote Julia: “You charge me to be cautious riding out lest the Indians get me. Those about here are the most harmless people you ever saw. It really is my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by whites.”26 The intervening years had not changed Grant’s mind. Peace with the Indians was preferable to war, he wrote Sherman in 1868, but “our white people seem never to be satisfied without hostilities with them.”27 Grant firmly believed that errant warriors should be punished. But he carefully distinguished those renegades who were at war with the United States from the Indian people. Grant also believed Indian affairs had been consistently mishandled. “Indian wars have grown out of mismanagement of the Bureau [of Indian Affairs],” he wrote Sheridan in disgust on Christmas Eve, 1868. “If the men who have to do the fighting could have the management in time of peace, they would most likely preserve peace, for their own comfort if for no other reason.”28 Above all, Grant believed Indians should be treated as individuals, not on a tribal basis, and that they should be afforded the opportunity to become citizens as quickly as possible.29
Grant’s conciliatory approach to Indian affairs was shocking to many Americans, especially Sherman and Sheridan.30 It also raised important constitutional issues. In 1831 the Supreme Court, speaking through Chief Justice Marshall, held the Indian tribes were “domestic dependent nations. . . . They are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief of their wants.” Marshall went on to hold that under the umbrella of federal protection, the tribes were distinct political societies capable of governing themselves.31 That did not preclude citizenship, but it implied that an Indian’s primary allegiance was to the tribe.III
More to the point, the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizenship and granted equality to African-Americans, was written in such a way to exclude Indians from its provisions. According to the text, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was held to exclude those Indians who were subject to tribal law.32 This is not conclusive. The Constitution gives Congress authority to enact legislation pertaining to citizenship.33 But for Grant to convince Congress to act, he was clearly swimming upstream.IV
Grant’s approach to administration differed little from his style in the army. As president, he delegated. During the war he had turned the Army of the Tennessee over to Sherman, the Army of the Cumberland to George Thomas, and the Army of the Potomac to George Meade. Grant provided overall direction, closer in Meade’s case than the others, but he did not micromanage. So too as president. Economic policy was Boutwell’s responsibility, foreign affairs fell to Fish, and Indian matters became the province of Jacob D. Cox, the secretary of the interior, and Ely S. Parker, commissioner of Indian affairs.V
Cox had been Grant’s candidate to succeed Stanton as secretary of war during the 1868 impeachment crisis. A former major general of volunteers and a law professor at the University of Cincinnati, Cox was an administrator of remarkable ability. He was also a man of contradiction and paradox. A staunch advocate of civil service reform, he immediately put the merit system into operation in his department, much to the dismay of Republican office seekers. An article he published in the North American Review did as much as any publication of the period to mobilize sentiment for the establishment of a classified civil service.34 But alone among Grant’s cabinet, Cox carried in his baggage a deep hostility to black equality. As governor of Ohio he opposed Negro suffrage in the state, and in a message to his abolitionist alma mater, Oberlin College, he advocated government-enforced segregation, with African-Americans placed on a reservation in the deep South.35
Grant’s principal adviser on Indian affairs was Ely Parker, his former military secretary. Parker personified Grant’s ideal of Indian assimilation. A chief of the Senecas and grand sachem of the Iroquois Confederacy, Parker was an accomplished engineer, lawyer, and soldier. As an aide, he had proved himself invaluable. At Appomattox, when other staff members were overcome with emotion, it was Parker to whom Grant turned to write out the official copy of the surrender terms he had given Lee. And it was Parker whom Grant used as his eyes and ears to keep tabs on frontier conditions after the war.
The name Parker derived from that of a British officer who had lived among the Iroquois.36 Ely’s parents resided on the Tonawanda reservation in upstate New York, and his father was among the 700 or so Indian warriors who fought alongside the United States during the War of 1812. Ely, who was born in 1828, was also known as Ha Sa No An Da and Donehogawa. He was educated at the Tonawanda mission school and Cayuga Academy, and as a schoolboy often acted as guide and interpreter to the leaders of the Iroquois on their trips to Washington. Serving as a bridge between two cultures, he became the principal source for the pioneer anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who dedicated his landmark study of the Iroquois “to HA-SA-NO-AN-DA, (Ely S. Parker), a Seneca Indian.”37
Parker worked initially as a director of work crews on the Erie Canal, served as resident engineer in charge of construction of the Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal linking Norfolk with Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, and then built lighthouses for the Treasury Department along the Great Lakes. In 1857 he was assigned to build the United States customshouse in Galena and decided to settle there. He and Grant, his fellow townsman, were well acquainted. When the Civil War came, Parker sought to join the army but it was not until 1863 that his request was approved. He was commissioned a captain on May 23 and joined Grant’s staff at Vicksburg shortly thereafter.38
Cox and Parker administered Indian policy, but Grant set the tone. His messages to Congress and the American people pleaded the Indian cause with an intensity rarely encountered in official communications:
Wars of extermination . . . are demoralizing and wicked. Our superiority should make us lenient toward the Indian. The wrongs inflicted upon him should be taken into account and the balance placed to his credit.39
Our dealings with the Indian properly lay us open to charges of cruelty and swindling.40
A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering in the citizens a disregard for human life and the rights of others, dangerous to society.41
Can not the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society? If the effort is made in good faith, we will stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and our own consciences for having made it.42
I do not believe our Creator ever placed the different races on this earth with a view of having the strong exert all his energies in exterminating the weaker.43
The first task for the Grant administration was to pry loose the Indian appropriation bill languishing in Congress. At the root of the delay was a classic turf battle between the House of Representatives and the Senate over the control of Indian policy. The Senate was setting policy through its ability to approve or disapprove of the treaties made with the tribes. The House resented playing second fiddle and was demonstrating its power by refusing to appropriate the money required by the treaties.VI At issue was $4 million in appropriations for 1869–1870, and neither the House nor the Senate was prepared to compromise.44 The big losers of course were the Indians, who were denied the funds the government had promised.
Grant took it upon himself to break the logjam. Recognizing that the House was in control, the president endeavored to find a face-saving formula by which the congressmen could vote the money without seeming to kowtow to the Senate’s treaty prerogative. The answer came to Grant uninvited. In mid-March 1869, with the House and Senate at loggerheads, a delegation of prominent philanthropists, led by Philadelphia’s William Welsh, requested an interview with the president and Secretary Cox to discuss Indian policy. Meeting in the White House on March 24, they urged Grant to appoint an autonomous commission to supervise the spending of federal funds on the Indians’ behalf. Because of graft and bureaucratic overhead, only 25 percent of the money appropriated ever reached the tribes, they said, and “without the co-operation of Christian philanthropists the waste of money would be great and the result unsatisfactory.”45
Grant agreed completely. After assuring his visitors of his desire “to make a radical change in the Indian policy of the government,” he dispatched them to Capitol Hill to lobby for the long-delayed appropriations.46 The suggestion of an independent commission to oversee expenditures broke the congressional deadlock. The House and Senate agreed that $5 million would be required for continued maintenance of the tribes, and then tacked on an additional $2 million to enable the president to secure peace. Grant was authorized to appoint ten men “eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy” to the commission, and the measure was enacted into law April 10, 1869.47
Grant’s peace policy was off to a good start. With the aid of Welsh and George H. Stuart of Philadelphia, Grant enlisted nine men noted for their philanthropic leadership to serve on the new Board of Indian Commissioners. Among those appointed, in addition to Stuart and Welsh, were Felix R. Brunot, an industrialist from Pittsburgh, and the immensely wealthy William E. Dodge, one of the founders of Phelps, Dodge and Company. Grant could not have chosen better.48 Like his blue-ribbon fact-finding panel to the Dominican Republic, the new Board of Indian Commissioners provided prestigious support for administration policy.VII Stuart and Dodge had contributed generously to fund freedmen’s schools in the South, and like their fellow appointees they saw the board as an opportunity not only to reform the corrupt administration of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but to initiate practical measures for the education and Christianization of the Indians.49
The president and Cox met the new board in the White House on May 27, 1869. Grant repeated his desire to reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then laid out the broad outlines of his peace policy: insofar as possible, the government would deal with the Indians as individuals, not on a tribal basis; those Indians living on reservations would be protected from white settlers and taught the arts of civilization; previous government pledges to the Indians would be strictly adhered to; and clear titles would be granted to those plots of land Indian families could be induced to cultivate. Grant said he wanted the board to have “the fullest authority over the whole subject,” and promised his complete support.50
The following week Grant issued an executive order giving the board plenary authority to inspect and report on all aspects on the nation’s Indian policy. Government officials were enjoined to allow board members full access to records and accounts, pay respectful heed to their advice, and “co-operate with them in the most earnest manner . . . in the general work of civilizing the Indians, protecting them in their legal rights, and stimulating them to become industrious citizens.”51
The board began work enthusiastically. Members went about their duties with tremendous goodwill, scrutinized vouchers presented for payment, verified the quality and quantity of goods provided for the Indians, and conducted rigorous inspections of conditions in the West. Advocates of reform were jubilant. The Nation reported “the complete overthrow of a most gigantic system of wrong, robbery, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty” and the triumph of “right, official integrity, and administrative economy.”52 Among other things, the board recommended the concentration of the Indians on small reservations, abolition of the treaty system, and immediate citizenship for the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory (Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole). Above all, the board recommended that Indian agents and district superintendents be selected on the basis of moral and business qualifications, without reference to political affiliation.53
Nothing could have pleased Grant more. The Indian agents were critical to the process of assimilation. A combination governor, teacher, supplier, and, theoretically at least, a defender of Indian interests, they were almost exclusively political appointees—ripe patronage plums that members of Congress considered an integral part of the spoils system. Not all agents were corrupt, but many were, and the opportunity for graft was enormous. Henry B. Whipple, the Episcopal bishop of Minnesota and a keen observer of Indian affairs, noted that it was “a tradition on the frontier that an Indian agent with [a salary of] $1500 a year could retire upon an ample fortune in three years.”54 Or as one prominent chief told Sherman, when his agent arrived “he bring everything in a little bag. When he go it take two steamboats to carry away his things.”55
Grant had already moved to enlist Quakers as Indian agents. After meeting with delegations sent by the Society of Friends in January, the president-elect had instructed Parker to obtain a list of nominees he might appoint. The Quakers were initially hesitant about accepting posts on the frontier, but soon responded favorably and by the middle of June 1869 had accepted two superintendencies and fourteen agencies, covering the Indians in Kansas and Nebraska, as well as the Kiowas and Comanches in the Indian Territory. Under what became known as Grant’s “Quaker Policy,” the Society of Friends not only nominated superintendents and agents but also undertook to supervise their work after they had been appointed. “The Friends were appointed not because they have any monopoly on honesty or good will toward the Indians,” said Secretary Cox, “but because their selection would of itself be understood by the country to indicate the policy adopted, namely, the sincere cultivation of peaceful relations with the tribes.”56
Armed with the report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Grant moved swiftly to replace the remaining Indian agents with army officers on active duty, men he was confident he could count on to carry out orders without reaching into the till. Grant saw no inconsistency in entrusting the peace policy to army officers. Aside from a high level of professional integrity, military officers held their position for life, and as he told Congress, they had a personal interest in establishing peace with the Indians.57
Public opinion reacted predictably. Reformers praised Grant down the line. “With full heart and most earnestly, we thank him,” wrote Wendell Phillips in the National Anti-Slavery Standard.58 Alfred H. Love, speaking to the Pennsylvania Peace Society, boasted “President Grant says amen to our wishes [for Indian rights]. Let this work be stamped upon the nineteenth century.”59 The New York Times praised the new policy and concluded that Congress would have “a clearer field than ever before for settling a broad Indian policy.”60 The Boston Evening Transcript stated there was uprightness, common sense, and common honesty in the new policy.61 On the other hand, Democratic papers like the New York World took no notice of the peace policy, while most Western editors, regardless of political affiliation, were openly critical.
By the end of 1869 Grant’s peace policy was in place. His appointments struck at the heart of the old Indian system—the patronage prerogatives of members of Congress. All Indian agencies were in the hands of Quakers or military officers, and a massive step had been taken to end the abuses of the past.
But Grant’s luck was about to run out. Regardless of the commander in chief’s determination to make peace with the Plains Indians, the army in the West followed its own bent. On the morning of January 23, 1870, elements of the 2nd Cavalry, seeking to punish renegade Piegan warriors (the Piegans were a band of the Blackfeet tribe), fell upon and destroyed a Piegan village along the banks of the Marias River in northern Montana. The troopers believed they were assaulting the lair of the villainous Mountain Chief.VIII Instead, the target was a defenseless tribal village, mostly women and children, many suffering the final stages of smallpox. It was another Sand Creek massacre. One hundred seventy-three Indians were killed; all but fifteen were women and children. Fifty of the casualties were children under twelve, many in their parents’ arms. The cavalry lost one man killed and another injured.62
Outrage swept the country. The New York Times called the attack “a sickening slaughter,” and demanded an immediate congressional investigation. The Tribune said the affair was a “national disgrace.” Lydia Maria Child, former editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, chastised Sheridan for believing that “the approved method of teaching red men not to commit murder is to slaughter their wives and children.” Wendell Phillips, speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Philadelphia Reform League, said, “I only know the names of three savages upon the Plains: Colonel Baker, General Custer, and at the head of all, General Sheridan.”
For Grant, however, Phillips had unstinting praise. “Thank God for a President in the White House whose first word was for the Negro and the second for the Indian; who saw protection for the Indian not in the rude and bloodthirsty policy of Sheridan and Sherman, but in the ballot, in citizenship, the great panacea that has always protected the rights of Anglo-Saxon individuals.”63
Grant’s peace policy survived the attack. Indeed, as Phillips’s comments suggest, support in the East was stronger than ever. But the spoilsmen in Congress seized upon the episode to eviscerate a vital element of the policy. The army appropriation bill for 1870 was amended to prohibit military officers from holding civil appointments. The measure was aimed at those officers serving in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By forcing army officers to resign as Indian agents, disgruntled lawmakers were reaching once more for the patronage levers Grant had taken away.64 The Piegan massacre provided the excuse. But if that were the intent, the congressmen underestimated Grant’s resolve. “Gentlemen, you have defeated my plan for Indian management,” he told a delegation from Capitol Hill, “but you shall not succeed in your purpose, for I will divide these appointments up among the religious churches, with which you dare not contend.”65 In effect, Grant raised the stakes. Rather than give in to the spoilsmen, he turned all seventy-three Indian agencies over to church groups. Given the separation of church and state, Grant’s move may have been of doubtful constitutionality. Yet it was never tested in the courts, and for the remainder of the Grant administration the Indian agencies were staffed by religious denominations.IX
Grant’s second annual message to Congress laid out the policy fully. No president before or since has taken responsibility for the Indians more earnestly. Said Grant:
Reform in the management of Indian affairs has received the special attention of the Administration from its inauguration to the present day. The experiment of making it a missionary work was tried with a few agencies given to the denomination of Friends, and has been found to work most advantageously. All agencies not so disposed were given to officers of the Army. The act of Congress reducing the army renders army officers ineligible for civil positions. Indian agencies being civil offices, I determined to give all the agencies to such religious denominations as had heretofore established missionaries among the Indians. . . . The societies selected are allowed to name their own agents, subject to approval of the Executive, and are expected to watch over them and aid them. . . . I entertain the confident hope that the policy now pursued will in a few years bring all the Indians upon reservations, where they will live in houses, and have schoolhouses and churches, and will be pursuing peaceful and self-sustaining avocations.66
On March 29, 1870, as Grant was dealing with the fallout from the Piegan village massacre and the refusal of the Senate to move on Santo Domingo, Sherman walked into the president’s office with sad news from the West Coast. The War Department telegraph office had just received a message from San Francisco. “I’m afraid Old Tom is gone,” said Cump. George H. Thomas, commander of the Pacific Division, suffered a massive stroke the evening before and died instantly. Sherman was closer to Thomas than to any other officer. They had been classmates at West Point and they shared a mutual respect that transcended rank or station. Grant was thunderstruck. He had often been impatient with Thomas, but he never doubted Old Tom’s ability or determination. Above all, he admired his loyalty to the Union. Thomas’s heroic service during the war was a matter of record. What was less well known was his complete dedication to the policy of Reconstruction. As The New York Times noted, though Thomas was a Virginian, “he took the part of the freedmen and helped them to protect themselves. He was the shield of order and society against anarchy and chaos in the South.”67 What Grant remembered best was that when Andrew Johnson inveigled to have Thomas succeed Sheridan in Louisiana, Old Tom had refused. And when the former president dangled three stars in front of him, Thomas turned a blind eye.
George Thomas, age fifty-four, was the first of the surviving senior Union generals to pass from the scene, and the outpouring of grief was extraordinary. The train carrying his coffin east was met by throngs of citizens in every city it passed through. Veterans organizations adopted resolutions of sympathy, military salutes were fired, and church sermons throughout the country were dedicated to Thomas’s military service. Arrangements were made for his body to be interred in Troy, New York, his wife’s hometown. Grant attended the funeral along with Sherman, Sheridan, and George Meade. Sherman gave the eulogy.68
When Grant returned to Washington a message was waiting for him. Red Cloud, mighty chief of the Oglala Sioux, wanted to meet the “Great Father.” In December 1866, Red Cloud, with Crazy Horse at his side, had led the massacre of Captain William Fetterman’s patrol near Fort Phil Kearny in the Wyoming Territory, closing the Bozeman Trail to white settlers. Now, he told military authorities, he and other Sioux chiefs wanted to come to Washington to talk to Grant about the possibility of going to a reservation. This was unexpected good news. Coming on the heels of the Piegan massacre it provided eloquent testimony of the effectiveness of the peace policy. Red Cloud, the best known and most intransigent of the warrior chiefs, wanted to parley. Sherman opposed the visit, but Grant overruled him.69 Parker was instructed to make the arrangements, and shortly thereafter the chiefs were on their way east. “If they can receive practical evidence of the nation’s determination to keep faith instead of repudiating solemn treaties,” said Secretary Cox, “we may reasonably expect good results.”70 After meeting Grant, Red Cloud never again took up arms against the United States.
Red Cloud’s visit to Washington mixed high carnival with serious purpose. The delegation numbered twenty-one, including Red Cloud’s archrival, Spotted Tail, chief of the Brule Sioux.71 “Physically, a finer set of men would be difficult to find,” wrote a reporter for the New York Herald. “All were tall, full chested, and with features decidedly those of the American Indian.” Red Cloud appeared “like a statue”; Big Bear seemed “fierce.”72 Ely Parker asked one of the chiefs, Little Swan, how he had become a great chief. Was it by killing people? “Yes,” replied the chief, “the same as the Great White Father in the White House.”73
When the chiefs met with Grant, Spotted Tail said he was for peace but the government had not reciprocated. White men continued to harass the tribes. Grant acted swiftly. The following day the War Department issued orders to all military commanders in the West: “When lands are secured to the Indians by treaty against the occupation by whites, the military commander should keep intruders off by military force if necessary.”74 Red Cloud complained that his people were poor and naked, and appealed for food and clothing. “Our nation is melting away like the snow on the side of the hills where the sun is warm, while your people are like the blades of grass in the Spring when summer is coming.” The chief said he trusted Grant, but Indian messages “never reached the Great Father. They are lost before they get here.”75
Grant was moved by the chiefs’ sincerity. He recognized the government’s shortcomings and was painfully aware that the 1870 annuity goods promised the tribes had not yet been delivered. Once again the Indian appropriation bill had run afoul of congressional opposition. This time the fight was between supporters of Grant’s peace policy and frontier representatives who were dead set against. The advocates of reform were pressing for passage, but the opposition had succeeded in keeping the bill bottled up in committee. Grant was convinced that if Congress did not act before the session ended, a renewal of hostilities was inevitable. Penning a special message to Congress, the president warned of the consequences if the money bill failed to pass. The suffering, loss of life, and vast expenditures that would be required in the event of another Indian war were awesome to contemplate, he said.76 Grant’s intervention did the trick. Over vigorous opposition from Western delegations, the House and Senate passed the Indian Appropriation Act for 1870–1871 one day before adjournment.
From Washington the Sioux chiefs traveled to New York. On June 16, 1870, the delegation made a triumphant appearance before a capacity crowd at Cooper Union. A packed auditorium heard Red Cloud deliver an eloquent indictment of past policy. “The riches we have in this world, Secretary Cox said truly, we cannot take with us to the next world. Then I wish to know why agents are sent out to us who do nothing but rob us and get the riches of this world away from us?”77 Red Cloud’s description of the wrongs suffered by the Indians held the audience spellbound. A reporter from The Nation noted that the emotional effect “was comparable to the public recital of a fugitive slave in former years.”78
The sympathy generated for the Indians by the Piegan massacre, followed by Red Cloud’s visit, stimulated support for Grant’s peace policy. During the summer of 1870 both the Connecticut and Pennsylvania branches of the Universal Peace Union congratulated the president, and at its next session Congress responded with the first general appropriation for Indian education.79 “Had the Republican Party done nothing more than rescue our Indian affairs from the errors and rascality that have heretofore characterized their management,” said the St. Paul Press, “it would deserve the gratitude of the country.”80
Peace with Red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux was a major achievement. Elsewhere, events moved apace. In December 1870 the Five Civilized Tribes, meeting in Okmulgee, about forty miles south of Tulsa, approved a constitution and bill of rights for a territorial government and a future Indian state. Grant immediately forwarded the documents to Congress and urged quick approval. “This is the first indication of the aborigines desiring to adopt our form of government, and it is highly desirable that they become self-sustaining, self-relying, Christianized, and civilized. If successful in this first attempt at territorial government, we may hope for a gradual concentration of other Indians in the new Territory.”81
But the Indian proposal for territorial government provided for more independence than Congress cared for. Amendments were proposed giving final authority over legislation and appointments to the government in Washington, and at that point the tribes backed away. The railroads, with a huge stake in rights-of-way across Indian land, also opposed territorial status, as did the increasing number of white settlers moving into the region. As a result, the most serious effort to extend citizenship to the tribes in Indian territory went for naught.82
The conciliatory effort of the Five Civilized Tribes was reflected elsewhere. Red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux, Spotted Tail and the Brule, and a host of lesser chiefs on the northern Plains moved to the Great Sioux Reservation in the early 1870s.83 In the Southwest, Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who had done yeoman service for Grant heading the Freedmen’s Bureau, rode unarmed and alone into Cochise’s stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona and convinced the legendary chief of the Chiricahua Apaches to move onto a nearby reservation.84 Howard’s bold gambit brought peace to a large portion of the Southwest, and for the first time since 1861 Cochise’s warriors posed no danger to the settlers.
Oliver Otis Howard was typical of a number of senior officers in the West who supported Grant’s peace policy. Known as “humanitarian generals,” they shared the president’s view that relations with the Indians should be based on honesty, justice, and eventual assimilation.85 Howard, who had lost an arm leading his brigade at Fair Oaks (Seven Pines) in 1862, was deeply pious. His approach to the Indians, just as to the freedmen, reflected Christian sentiments indistinguishable from those of the most dedicated churchman. Another humanitarian general was Benjamin Grierson, who had led Grant’s cavalry on a wave of destruction across Mississippi in 1863. Commanding the “Black Tenth,” the famous buffalo soldiers at Fort Sill, Grierson worked closely with the Quaker agent, Lawrie Tatum, among the Kiowas and Comanches. Whenever the Indians’ food ran short, Grierson simply ignored standing orders to the contrary and fed the tribes from cavalry rations.86 John Pope, an old acquaintance who had befriended Grant at Camp Yates in 1861 and who did an exemplary job defending the rights of the freedmen in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida until relieved by Andrew Johnson, was another general who supported the peace policy enthusiastically. Pope commanded the Department of the Missouri from 1870 to 1883, and although he directed several campaigns against warring tribes, always sought to avoid conflict and to protect the Indians from rapacious white men.87, X
Perhaps the greatest of the humanitarian generals was George Crook, who was also renowned as the army’s greatest Indian fighter. A West Point classmate of Sheridan’s, Crook had turned Jubal Early’s flank at Fisher’s Hill and later commanded a cavalry division in the Army of the Potomac. He served more than thirty years in the West and worked assiduously to make the Apaches capitalist farmers. Committed to making the Indians self-sufficient, he fought tenaciously against unscrupulous government functionaries both within the military and without. “The American Indian is the intellectual peer of most, if not all, the various nationalities we have assimilated,” said Crook. “He is fully able to protect himself, if the ballot be given and the courts of law not closed to him.”88 When Crook died in 1890 he was eulogized as a tower of strength for those who worked for Indian equality. Red Cloud said, “General Crook came, and he, at least, never lied to us. His words gave people hope. He died. Despair came again.”89 All four officers, Howard, Grierson, Pope, and Crook, had stormy relations with Sheridan—who distrusted their sympathy for the Indians. But Grant, who had assigned each of them to the West, consistently supported them over Little Phil’s objections. Together, they gave the president’s peace policy a human face.
Throughout 1871 Grant was under pressure from Western congressmen to take more aggressive action against the tribes on the frontier. As the election of 1872 approached, speculation grew that in order to secure the support of the Plains states Grant would back away from the peace policy. In late October, with election day approaching, George Stuart of Philadelphia wrote to ask if the rumors were true. Grant replied instantly. He had no intention of turning his back on the Indians to gain the frontier vote. The suggestion that the administration was planning to jettison the peace policy was preposterous, he told Stuart. “If any change takes place in the Indian Policy of the Government while I hold my present office,” said Grant, “it will be on the humanitarian side of the question.”90
Grant’s response to Stuart was publicized widely. Alfred H. Love, president of the Universal Peace Union, read the letter to 2,000 delegates at the society’s annual convention in Philadelphia. “Every sentence was loudly applauded,” he told Grant.91 From Iowa, an Indian missionary wrote the president that his letter to Stuart had “called forth fervent thanksgiving from multitudes who believe that ‘God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth.’ ”92 In the West, editorial response was predictably critical. Nevertheless, on November 5 Grant swept the Plains states, winning two thirds of the vote in Kansas and Nebraska, and taking almost 60 percent in the Far West. Only Texas, voting for the first time since the Civil War, went Democratic, and the contest there turned on Reconstruction, not Indian policy.93
Three weeks after the election, Grant’s peace policy was jolted by an outbreak of fighting near Tule Lake, along the California-Oregon border. The Modoc Indians, a small band of sixty to seventy families, restless with reservation life, had attempted to return to their old home among the lakedotted, lava-scored plateaus of southern Oregon and northern California. Homesteaders and ranchers who had moved into the region demanded protection, and a small detachment of troops was assigned to force the Indians back to the reservation. When the Modoc, led by a young chief dubbed Captain Jack because of the military trinkets he wore, defiantly refused to leave, the troops moved against them. Shots were exchanged, and the Indians took up a strong defensive position amid the lava beds. For two months the army attempted to dislodge them, but with no success.
At the end of January, with the nation’s attention focused on what the press was calling the Modoc War, Grant stepped in and called a halt. He told Sherman to stop the fighting and negotiate a settlement. On January 31, 1873, the general in chief dutifully informed Major General Edward Canby, the department commander, of Grant’s wishes. “Let all defensive measures proceed,” said Sherman, “but order no attack on the Indians till the former orders are modified or changed by the President, who seems disposed to allow the peace men to try their hands on Captain Jack.”94
Canby was instructed to make “amicable arrangements” for locating the Modoc on a new reservation, but the negotiations quickly bogged down. Sherman urged Canby to be patient—Grant wanted a peaceful solution—and discussions continued until April.95 Suddenly, on Good Friday, April 11, 1873, the meeting site erupted in a fusillade of gunfire. The Modoc delegation, on a signal from Captain Jack, drew revolvers from under their clothing and began firing across the table. Canby, who was unarmed, was killed instantly, as was the Reverend Eleazar Thomas, a Methodist minister who had agreed to serve as a peace negotiator. Another negotiator, Alfred B. Meacham, the resident Indian agent, was shot five times, knifed, stripped of his clothes, and left for dead. When rescuers arrived he was still alive and recovered to describe what had occurred.96
The murder of General Canby and the Reverend Thomas shocked the nation. Sympathy for the Modocs, who had conducted a spirited defense against overwhelming odds, vanished instantly. Sherman wired General Alvan C. Gillem, commander of the Pacific Division, to make total war on the Modocs. “You will be fully justified in their extermination.”97 Sherman sent the wire without consulting Grant, who abhorred the term and all that it implied. After visiting the White House to discuss the episode, the general in chief sent a follow-up to the West Coast: “The President now sanctions the most severe punishment for the Modocs.”98 What Grant actually said was that he wanted the offenders punished, not as “an act of passionate revenge . . . but as an act of justice as well as protection of peaceful settlers.”99 Grant had the highest regard for Canby, and his assassination distressed the president greatly. Yet Grant did not seek revenge, and he certainly did not want a war of extermination.100
The army resumed the offensive, more troops were brought in, and by June Modoc resistance had been crushed. Captain Jack and his five fellow negotiators were captured, taken to Fort Klamath, and tried by courtmartial for the murder of General Canby and the Reverend Thomas. All six were convicted and sentenced to hang. Grant commuted the punishment for two of the offenders, but Captain Jack and three of his companions were executed on October 3, 1873. The remainder of the tribe, 153 in number, were removed to the Quapaw Agency in the Indian Territory.101
Grant’s peace policy had suffered a body blow. Newspapers throughout the country saw the slaying of Canby and Thomas as dramatic evidence that the Indians could not be trusted. Anti-administration journals such as New York’s Herald and World and the Boston Daily Globe denounced Grant’s Indian policy and the humanitarians associated with it.102 The Daily Colorado Miner blamed the administration’s “experiments with the noble red man” for the tragedy.103 Sherman, never a friend of the peace policy, was outspoken as always. “Treachery is inherent in the Indian character,” he told the New York Times. “I know of a case where the Indians murdered the man who not two hours before had given them food and clothing.”104
Grant held firm. Always at his best when the going was hardest, he made it clear to a daily stream of visitors that the peace policy was in place to stay, and that it was in no way responsible for the Modoc troubles. “President Grant knows he is right, in his Indian policy,” said Felix Brunot, chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners. “Those who think they can move him from the right by personal denunciation, sneers at ‘Quakers’ and ‘peace commissioners,’ or flings at the ‘red devils’ and ‘humanitarians’ may as well give up.”105
By year’s end the furor had subsided. The peace policy, though badly shaken, had survived its first test. In December, Benjamin Potts, governor of the Montana Territory, wrote Washington praising the “humane policy of the President toward the Indian tribes.” Since the adoption of the peace policy, he said, the “frequent incursions from hostile Indians” had virtually ceased.106 From army headquarters in St. Louis, General John Pope reported that “with very trifling exceptions,” the Department of the Missouri had experienced no difficulties with the Indians during the past year.107 Most important, perhaps, the commissioner of Indian Affairs reported substantial progress in civilizing the Indians as well as his increasing satisfaction with the operation of the agencies by religious denominations.108
From all appearances, the peace policy had taken root. But it was touch and go. In 1874 the southern Plains erupted. The principal tribes of the region—Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—had been ensconced on reservations in the western portion of the Indian Territory since 1869. But reservation life proved confining; clothing and rations were scant; and the continued encroachment of white cattlemen, whiskey peddlers, hunters, and homesteaders was both irritating and debilitating. Particularly troubling, white buffalo hunters were gradually moving southward. In 1872 they had shipped 1.2 million hides east by rail. By the winter of 1873–1874, so many buffalo had been killed on the Plains north of the Cimarron River that new sources had to be secured. The obvious targets were the herds in the Texas panhandle, just west of the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation, the prime buffalo hunting ground for the Indians. In the spring of 1874 white hunters swarmed into the region, and on June 27 the Indians retaliated. At first light, 300 Cheyenne and Comanche warriors struck the hunters in their base camp at Adobe Walls, on the north fork of the Canadian River. The assault was repulsed, but the hunters beat a hasty retreat north.
When informed of the attack, Kansas governor Thomas Osborn asked General Pope to rush troops to protect the hunters. Pope, committed to Grant’s peace policy, refused. The hunters, he told Osborne, “have justly earned all that may befall them.” Pope said the hunting camps were unlawful, and that if he sent any troops to the region “it would be to break them up, not protect them.” Pope also noted the hunters were authors of their own fate. “Their continuous pursuit and wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, both summer and winter, have driven the great herds down into the Indian Reservation.”109
Sheridan saw the matter differently.110 The army commander in the West heartily approved of buffalo hunters, believing they were doing the country a service by depleting the Indians’ indigenous food supply. The sooner the buffalo were killed, the sooner the Indians would be brought under control.XI For Sheridan, the attack at Adobe Walls provided an excuse to destroy Indian resistance on the southern Plains once and for all. In what historians call the Red River War, Little Phil deployed his forces in five converging columns, isolated the hostile warriors among the breaks surrounding the headwaters of the Washita and the various forks of the Red, and pressed them relentlessly in a war of attrition. There were few clashes and little bloodshed, but gradually the exhaustion of the chase, the discomforts of weather and hunger, and the omnipresent fear of cavalrymen storming their camps at dawn wore the Indians down. By the spring of 1875 all had turned in their weapons and returned to the reservation.
With the Red River War successfully terminated, the military pressed to prevent a recurrence. The best way to accomplish that, in the view of Sherman and Sheridan, was to exile the leading warriors and war chiefs far from the southern Plains. Grant approved the recommendation on March 13, 1875, and immediately thereafter the War Department selected seventy-four men, chained and shackled them, and shipped them to the old Spanish fortress Castillo de San Marcos (rechristened Fort Marion) at St. Augustine, Florida, where they remained for three years.XII
The army’s hawks had gained a clear victory in the Red River War, not only over the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, but also over the more outspoken proponents of the peace policy. Grant, who had held tight after the assassination of General Canby and the Reverend Thomas, now seemed willing to let Sherman and Sheridan have their way. It may well be that the president, now in his sixth year in office, no longer had the energy to pursue matters as diligently as he once did. The problems of Reconstruction and protecting the rights of the freedmen had moved to center stage in Washington, and Grant was focused on the deep South, not the Western frontier.111
The most serious military threat to the peace policy occurred in 1876, the last year of Grant’s presidency. On the northern Plains, in the land of the Sioux, the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway brought swarms of settlers to the Dakota Territory. The 1874 discovery of gold in the Black Hills turned the influx into a tidal wave. Under the Treaty of Fort Laramie, negotiated with the Sioux in 1868, much of the land, including the Black Hills, was reserved to the Indians in perpetuity. Grant was determined to enforce the treaty, and at one point offered to purchase the Black Hills, but the Sioux declined and the surge of settlers proved unstoppable. Recognizing that a crisis was fast approaching, Grant summoned Sheridan to Washington in the late autumn of 1875 to discuss the situation. Meeting at the White House on November 3, Sheridan informed the president that the army, undermanned and stretched to the breaking point, could no longer restrain the vast multitude of miners flocking to the Black Hills. Accepting Sheridan’s judgment at face value, Grant weakened. The presidential order protecting the Black Hills would not be rescinded, he said, but the army would no longer be obliged to enforce it. As Sheridan reported afterward, Grant believed that haphazard or only partial enforcement would merely increase the miners’ desire and would exacerbate the troubles.112 The fact is, however, that as a result of Grant’s decision the miners could now enter the Black Hills with impunity. To minimize the risk, the president instructed Sheridan to round up the Sioux in the Yellowstone and Little Big Horn regions and force them onto the reservation where they could be controlled.113
In retrospect, it is clear that Grant erred on two counts. First, it is likely that the army, given a firm directive by the commander in chief, could have policed the Sioux boundary indefinitely. But Grant valued Sheridan’s military opinion above all others, and he was always reluctant to second-guess a commander in the field. Second, by instructing Sheridan to corral the nonreservation Indians, Grant, no doubt unintentionally, was giving Little Phil a green light to launch a winter offensive to finish off the Sioux in whatever manner Sheridan saw fit.114
Sheridan moved quickly. The severity of the winter on the northern Plains made a winter campaign impossible. But with the melting snow Sheridan launched a three-pronged offensive against the Sioux, attempting to replicate the strategy of convergence that had proved so effective in the Red River War. In May, Major General George Crook was ordered north toward the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn from Fort Fetterman; Colonel John Gibbon headed another column, moving eastward from Fort Ellis in Montana; a third force, including the 7th Cavalry under Colonel George A. Custer, headed west from Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri. On June 25, 1876, Custer’s column made contact with the Sioux on the banks of the Little Big Horn. Seriously underestimating the size of the opposing Indian force, Custer launched a premature attack and he and his entire command were annihilated. Sheridan said after the slaughter, “it was an unnecessary sacrifice due to misapprehension and superabundant courage—the latter extraordinarily developed in Custer.”115 Grant, who had little regard or affection for Custer, said simply that the battle was “wholly unnecessary.”116
The battle of the Little Big Horn shocked the nation. Grant and Sheridan notwithstanding, Custer became an instant hero. In frontier towns, citizens eagerly offered their services to avenge Custer and exterminate the Sioux. Congress responded with breathtaking speed. Senator Algernon Paddock of Nebraska introduced legislation authorizing the president to raise five volunteer regiments of Indian fighters. Similar legislation was proposed in the House.117 In the West, “Remember Custer” became the watchword. In the East, patience seemed exhausted. The New York Times reported that many now thought the Indians should be exterminated “as though they were so many wild dogs.”118
Custer’s Last Stand brought Grant’s peace policy to the verge of collapse. Throughout the Plains and Rocky Mountain region, newspapers denounced the gentle approach. The Boulder (Colorado) News blamed the massacre on the “false philanthropic sentiment in the East,” which had spawned “the reprehensible policy of the government.”119 E. L. Godkin, whose Nation had consistently backed the peace policy, declared, “Our philanthropy and our hostility tend to about the same end, and this is the destruction of the Indian race.” Grant’s attempt to improve Indian policy had been worthy, he wrote, but now “the missionary expedient may be said to have failed.”120 Even such loyal supporters as Bishop Whipple expressed dismay. In a lengthy letter to Grant, he pointed out that although the peace policy had done more for the civilization of the Indians than any previous government efforts, it still led to massacre and war.121
The most serious threat to Grant’s peace policy, however, came not from the military or the Indians, but from long-standing corruption, incompetence, and decay. The replacement of political appointees by church personnel did not purify the Indian Service, and in surprising numbers the incompetent and even the corrupt slipped through the screen of the church associations.122 Worse, perhaps, the government soon found itself embroiled in sectarian strife as denominations waged unchristian battles over agencies and territory. Fraud and venality, a major target of the peace policy, continued to flourish in the Department of the Interior. Having lost a battle to the spoilsmen, Jacob Cox resigned as secretary in 1870. His successor, Columbus Delano, was an old-school Ohio politician ever ready to cut a deal. He departed under grave allegations of impropriety late in Grant’s second term.
Ely Parker, the president’s favorite appointee, was forced out as commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1871 in a dispute with the board over apparent purchasing irregularities. A full-blown congressional investigation exonerated Parker, but he was precluded from further government service.XIII Parker’s successors, Edward P. Smith and John Q. Smith, left office under suspicion of wrongdoing, though criminal charges were never filed. More ominous, the Indian Ring, the combination of bureaucrats, politicians, contractors, sutlers, and agents, always found ways to circumvent the most elaborate safeguards put in place by Grant, the churches, and the Board of Indian Commissioners. A possible solution would have been to transfer the bureau to the War Department. Grant tried repeatedly to do so, but the combination of interests, ranging from the most dedicated reformers to the most cynical spoilsmen, proved insurmountable.
Despite numerous setbacks and widespread public criticism, the peace policy proved to have a life of its own. The churches did not withdraw from the reservations, civilization remained the cornerstone of the nation’s Indian policy, and the Board of Indian Commissioners continued in place, battling corruption and fighting for Indian rights as best it could.
In the West, Sheridan pacified the northern Plains, Custer was avenged, and the Sioux driven onto the reservation. Hard-edged, unsentimental, uncompromising, Sheridan saw himself as the instrument of Western civilization. “This was the country of the buffalo and the hostile Sioux only last year,” he wrote in 1877. “There are no signs of either now, but in their places we found prospectors, emigrants, and farmers.”123 Grant identified with progress as well, but there was a deeper, more reflective streak in the president that valued the Great Plains in their pristine state. Grant believed deeply in human equality, and in his view, the Indian, no less than the former slave, deserved the government’s protection. Grant changed the way the United States thought about Native Americans. His decision in 1869 to pursue peace, not war, helped to save the American Indian from extinction.
Grant’s peace policy was nobly conceived. An occasional bad apple to the contrary, the churchmen made infinitely superior agents to the spoilsmen they replaced. Nevertheless, both the president and the churches thought in terms of transforming the Plains Indians into Christian citizens. Neither saw anything worth preserving in Indian culture, and as a consequence failed to build upon the social structure that existed in tribal communities. Today’s citizens see that as a grave error. Yet, for the 1870s, Grant’s policy was remarkably progressive and humanitarian. The president stood against the tide of public opinion, and for eight years held steadfastly to the goal of Indian assimilation.
I. In the leading case of Johnson v. McIntosh, 8 Wheaton 543 (1823), Chief Justice Marshall expressed skepticism concerning the “original justice” of the nation’s claim to Indian land. Nevertheless, he held it was a political matter beyond the Court’s jurisdiction. In Marshall’s words: “However extravagant the pretension of converting discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been converted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned. So too with the concomitant principle, that the Indian inhabitants are to be considered merely as occupants, to be protected, indeed, while in peace, in the possession of these lands, but to be deemed incapable of transferring absolute title to others.”
Marshall went on to hold that although the Indians (in this instance, the Piankesaw tribe in Illinois) did not own tribal land in fee simple, they were entitled to continued possession of it. Marshall’s recognition of the right of native possession established the basic rule of North American jurisprudence. As the Supreme Court of Canada observed, the chief justice’s opinion in Johnson is “the locus classicus of the principles governing aboriginal title.” Calder v. Attorney-General of British Columbia, [1973] S.C.R. 313, 380.
II. Grant was facing Lee before Petersburg when the Sand Creek massacre occurred, but he took time out to tell Governor John Evans of Colorado that the affair was not a battle but “a murder of Indians who were supposed to be under the protection of the Federal Government.” Samuel F. Tappan, “Autobiography,” Samuel F. Tappen Papers, Kansas State Historical Society, in Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian 49 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971).
III. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 5 Peters 1 (1831). The issue was whether the Cherokee nation was a “foreign nation” and thus entitled to bring suit in federal court. Marshall held that it was not. His reluctance is evident from his dicta:
If Courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them cannot be imagined. A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive domain than is deemed necessary to their comfortable subsistence.
Subsequently, in Worcester v. Georgia, 6 Peters 515 (1832), the Supreme Court, speaking again through Marshall, held that the Constitution delegated to the federal government broad legislative authority over Indian matters, and that the treaties made with the Cherokee nation reserved to the Cherokees tribal self-government within Cherokee territory free of interference from the state. The decision in Worcester remains one of the five most frequently cited Supreme Court cases of the pre–Civil War era.
IV. It was not until June 4, 1924, that Congress adopted legislation granting citizenship to the Indians. Even then, some states, such as New Mexico, continued to prohibit Indians from voting in state elections. 43 United States Statutes at Large 253 (1924).
V. Grant’s military style of delegation, the essence of the modern presidency, drew mixed reviews. Rutherford B. Hayes, a former major general of volunteers, was enthusiastic. By delegating broadly and holding cabinet officers accountable, he said, “Grant’s leadership and rule is beyond question.” 3 The Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes 59, Charles R. Williams, ed. (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1922).
The more traditional view was put forward by Senator John Sherman. Like most at the time, Sherman believed cabinet officers were primarily responsible to Congress, not the president. He lamented that Grant “regarded these heads of departments as mere subordinates” and attributed it to his failure to understand “the true theory of our government.” In Senator Sherman’s view, which later critics of the Grant administration rushed to adopt, the former general in chief lacked experience “in the complicated problems of our form of government. . . . The limitation of the power of the President [over cabinet members] is one that an army officer, accustomed to give or receive orders, finds difficult to understand and to observe when elected President.” John Sherman, 1 Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet 449 (Chicago: Werner, 1893).
Grant’s innovation, in making his cabinet officers responsible to him but not to Congress, was ultimately sustained in the magisterial decision of Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft, speaking for the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926).
VI. Although the Constitution specifies that treaties are the supreme law of the land (Article VI, Section 2), the House of Representatives is not bound thereby, and is under no obligation to appropriate the funds a treaty may specify. The definitive precedent was set during the administration of George Washington concerning the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. The Washington administration argued that since the treaty had been approved by two thirds of the Senate and had become part of the supreme law, the House was bound to obey it and vote the money required. James Madison led the opposition in the House and introduced a resolution stating, “It is the clear constitutional right and duty of the House of Representatives . . . to deliberate on the expediency or inexpediency of carrying such Treaty into effect, and to determine and act thereon, as, in their judgment, may be most conductive to the public good.” Eventually a compromise was reached. Madison’s resolution was attached to the appropriation bill providing the money needed, and President Washington signed the measure, thus conceding the point to the House. 2 Writings of James Madison 264, Gaillard Hunt, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906).
VII. The annual reports issued by the Board of Indian Commissioners did much to arouse public support for the Indians. The first report, submitted by Brunot on November 23, 1869, was a caustic indictment of past policy, which it called “unjust and iniquitous beyond the power of words to express.” The report damned the frontiersmen who wronged the Indians and placed the primary blame for Indian wars on them. “Paradoxical as it may seem, the white man has been the chief obstacle in the way of Indian civilization.” Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1869 7–9.
VIII. “If the lives and property of the citizens of Montana can best be protected by striking Mountain Chief’s band, I want them struck,” Sheridan ordered. “Tell [Colonel Edward M.] Baker to strike them hard.” Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army 190 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).
IX. Grant, who was a staunch advocate of the separation of church and state (see Chapter Eighteen), seems not to have considered the application of the First Amendment to Native Americans, and throughout his term of office the issue was rarely raised. After 1878 the application of the Establishment Clause was debated hotly in Congress. Legitimate concern for First Amendment principle dovetailed with the legislators’ eagerness for Bureau of Indian Affairs patronage, and the two were often difficult to distinguish. The Hayes administration, led by Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, moved to reduce church involvement on the reservations but, again, the motives were mixed. A more serious, and more often overlooked infringement of the First Amendment relates to the Free Exercise Clause. The enforced Christianization of the Plains Indians, which was at the heart of the peace policy, unquestionably denied to Native Americans the freedom to practice their own religion. Basically, Grant’s desire for assimilation and the preservation of tribal customs and traditions were mutually exclusive. For a balanced and thorough discussion of the First Amendment issues, see Robert H. Keller, Jr. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869–82 167–87 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
X. Pope was among the first to argue that the Plains Indians were different from the tribes in the East, and should be treated differently. The nomadic tribesmen were hunters not farmers, he told Washington, and it would be as difficult to force them to undergo the daily toil of plowing, hoeing, and reaping “as it would be to force an Arab or a Tartar to adopt so artificial a mode of life.” Pope said stock raising was a better bet. It was more suitable to the climate and topography of the reservations and provided a closer fit to the temperament of the Plains Indians. In 1875 Pope began using army funds to purchase cattle for the Indians, who quickly demonstrated their ability to care for the livestock. Richard N. Ellis, General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy 230–42 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970); also see Annual Report of the Secretary of War, 1877 60.
XI. In 1881, when Congress was considering legislation to protect what was left of the buffalo herd on the northern Plains, Sheridan wrote the War Department to protest. “The destruction of this herd would do more to keep Indians quiet than anything else that could happen. Since the destruction of the southern herd, which formerly roamed from Texas to the Platte, the Indians in that section have given us no trouble.” Sheridan to the Adjutant General, October 13, 1881, Box 29, Sheridan Papers, Library of Congress. For a revisionist view, see Drew Isenberg, The Destruction of Bison: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Also see, New York Times, November 16, 1999.
XII. At Fort Marion the Indians were under the benign supervision of Lieutenant Richard H. Pratt, who treated them with kindness and consideration. Pratt was so taken with the experience that he soon resigned from the army and founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania for the education of reservation youths. Carlisle became the model for the government’s Indian school system, and Pratt dominated Indian education for almost two decades. Philip Weeks, Farewell My Nation: The American Indian and the United States, 1820–1890 167–68 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1990).
XIII. Parker resigned as commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 29, 1871, protesting that congressional legislation made the commissioner a mere clerk to the Board of Indian Affairs. Grant accepted his resignation with regret. “It severs official relations which have existed between us for eight consecutive years, without cause of complaint as to your entire fitness for either of the important places which you have had during that time. Your management of the Indian Bureau has been in entire harmony with my policy, which I hope will tend to the civilization of the Indian race. It has also been able and discreet. In leaving public service to pursue a more independent course of life, you take with you my sincere wishes for your prosperity and my hearty commendations to all with whom the accidents of life may bring you in business relations for integrity and ability.” Grant to Parker, July 13, 1877, 22 The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant 71, John Y. Simon, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).