On Thursday, August 21, 1862, the news from Minnesota rode the wires thirteen hundred miles to Washington, D.C., and the telegraph room on the second floor of the War Department building, a few hundred steps across the west lawn of the White House. There it was transcribed and added to a stack of messages in the converted library facing Pennsylvania Avenue that had become a strategic crow’s nest for Abraham Lincoln. The president’s standard practice when awaiting bulletins from various fronts was to wear out the path to the War Department, climb the steps, and look through all of the telegrams. He would keep the messages in order until he stopped, turned to the telegraph operators, and said, “Well, boys, I am down to the raisins.” Borrowed from a doctor ministering to a vomiting child, the metaphor meant that he’d reached a message he’d seen on his previous visit. More than a routine, this was Lincoln’s way of wresting control of the flow of information from his generals and wiring himself directly into the mechanism of the war. Earlier in the year all of the telegraph lines in the North had been placed under the control of the War Department, and since that time keeping up with the wired messages had become an obsession.
The first telegram from Minnesota was addressed from Governor Ramsey to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. It began, “The Sioux Indians on our western border have risen, and are murdering men, women, and children.” A second message followed hard after, from Minnesota’s secretary of state to Stanton’s assistant war secretary, C. P. Walcott: “A most frightful insurrection of Indians has broken out along our whole frontier. Men, women, and children are indiscriminately murdered; evidently the result of a deep-lain plan, the attacks being simultaneous along our whole border.” Other communications from the frontier would soon follow, all elbowing for room among the business of the Civil War. Dozens of other messages in the pile had arrived this day from every part of the Union, almost all of them concerned with Lincoln’s recent order that the states furnish 300,000 additional troops, asking questions about transport, outfitting, pay, mustering protocols, and timetables. There may have been no worse time during Lincoln’s presidency—or, for that matter, during the nation’s history—to convey such information with any hope of a speedy response.
Thirteen months earlier Lincoln had finished his extraordinary first hundred days in office, shaking off the last lingering sense in the North and South that he was a country bumpkin elevated far above his station. He had turned the shelling of Fort Sumter into a Union rallying cry while managing to keep the border slave states in the fold; he had corralled, if not unified, a seemingly uncorrallable cabinet; and he had created an army and put it into motion across the famous “thousand-mile front” of the Civil War. These developments seemed to be a series of small miracles. Then, in July 1861, naïve and high-spirited Union forces had been routed at Bull Run, just thirty miles southwest of the White House, and cold reality had set in.
Gray and frostbitten February had brought the sudden sickness and death of his favorite son, Willie, after which First Lady Mary Todd descended into a grief so deep and lasting that her husband feared permanent madness was finally setting in. In March the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack had fought their famous battle in Tidewater Virginia, resulting in a standoff that kept the Confederate navy from approaching Washington, D.C., and April had seen Ulysses S. Grant’s important victory at Shiloh. A growing attachment to Tad, his youngest son, began to mend Lincoln’s heart, and as his spirits returned, so did his energy for war: he reorganized and reassigned many of his senior generals, created new military districts, and watched with satisfaction as the Union army headed toward Richmond with 58,000 troops. Early summer was an optimistic time, even for a leader as naturally suspicious of good news as Lincoln, but it was not to last. As the summer of 1862 wore on, Union forces began to founder badly.
In June, Lincoln thought that General George B. McClellan had pinned Robert E. Lee to the ground at Richmond, but over a period of two discouraging weeks the Union forces had reversed direction, first mounting a fruitless siege and then conducting a series of retreats, a defensive strategy based on McClellan’s astounding overestimations of Confederate manpower. Then, as the Northern army sat impotent on Virginia’s James River, the greater portion of Lee’s men headed north along a line that seemed to point straight at the White House. The failure to take Richmond or adequately cover Washington created embarrassing headlines—THE CAPITAL IN DANGER!—and had persuaded Lincoln to import yet another general from the West, John Pope, a young, portly engineer with old family connections to President Lincoln, and give him the job of keeping the “secesh” from marching across the Potomac River and up Pennsylvania Avenue.
Pope had seen some small-scale success in early action along the Mississippi River and suffered no lack of confidence, but this didn’t help him against Lee, who just two months into his command of the Army of Northern Virginia had already made every Union commander in the eastern theater look like a boy inexpertly playing a tabletop game of war. On August 19 Lincoln told his cabinet that he was now “to have a sweat of five or six days” as he waited to see if and when McClellan would coordinate with Pope to create a force of sufficient size to protect the capital and deal Lee a real blow. McClellan had finally been ordered to withdraw from the Peninsula to a position halfway up the Potomac River to Washington, and the general was following those orders, albeit with excruciating slowness.
As Ramsey’s telegram arrived on August 21, in the middle of Lincoln’s “sweat,” generals, battles, and Indian uprisings took a back seat to a public letter written by Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. It was an era of enormous power for newspaper editors, and Greeley was the most powerful of all, a man with astonishing influence and reach whose newspaper boasted the largest circulation of any in the world. Lincoln’s early Whig principles had aligned with Greeley’s politics—the two had briefly served together in the House of Representatives—but when Greeley supported the Democrat Stephen Douglas against Lincoln in his 1858 run for Illinois’s open Senate seat, the two men had begun to walk around one another in wary, if mostly collegial, circles.
Both men were Whigs turned Republicans with modest upbringings, and both were riding out tumultuous marriages while they bent their minds to the largest and most pressing crisis in their country’s history. Greeley had admired Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, both for its plain poetry and because it was delivered with such aplomb and conviction to Greeley’s own people, New York’s intellectual and cultural elite. Their correspondence was frequent and usually friendly. But by the time the Civil War entered its second year, Greeley’s ever more vocal anti-slavery stance and Lincoln’s insistence that preserving the Union was his first and only priority put them in the situation of disagreeing fundamentally about executive policy while belonging to the same party and holding many of the same principles.
Now that Lincoln’s presidency had passed its first birthday and the war seemed ever more grim and intractable, Greeley had settled into a pattern of not-so-gentle prodding. What the editor wanted most of all was immediate emancipation. A proclamation to free all of the slaves was still far from an expression of the public will, nor was it Lincoln’s strategy, but the president paid attention because Greeley was very smart, commanded a wide audience, and was the standard-bearer for liberal Republicans who might hold one key to increased support for the war. Entitled “Prayer for Twenty Millions,” Greeley’s letter had been published in New York the previous day, but only on August 21, the same day that news of the Dakota uprising in Minnesota arrived, did a copy reach Lincoln’s desk. The president read the text with care. Greeley’s message, as he knew before he read the first word, was anything but a “prayer.” Rather, it was a 2,200-word accusation of dereliction laid at Lincoln’s feet. Greeley opened by throwing down a gauntlet: “[A] great proportion of those who triumphed in our election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the Rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels.”
Greeley demanded that Lincoln stiffen his spine and declare slavery to be illegal everywhere, shifting the war’s focus from preservation of the Union to the cause of human freedom. The letter’s third section contained the primary warrant of Greeley’s argument: “We ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason.” Defending the right to determine their own use of human property had been part of the Southern justification for war since before Fort Sumter, as Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens had made clear in his “Cornerstone” speech of March 1861 when he said that “the proper status of the negro in our civilization…was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” But at no point had Lincoln directed that any official law or policy declare the opposite principle, and so to many readers of the Tribune, and of the dozens of other papers in which Greeley’s letter was reprinted, it seemed that a major change was now being pressed on the president.
In truth, Lincoln needed no such call to order. One month earlier, during a cabinet meeting, he had first introduced his desire to pursue emancipation in the rebellious states, and was even in uncharacteristic fashion leaking that news to influential editors as long as they agreed not to publish the information. Greeley’s name was high on that list—in fact, Lincoln’s courier was en route to New York when the “Prayer” was published—but the editor hadn’t received his notice in time, and now the struggle to shape public perception intensified. In Lincoln’s mind, Greeley’s letter demanded a sure, speedy response. The president held as a matter of faith that it was always better to present unpopular positions yourself than to let others put words in your mouth. Reply he must, in the full knowledge that no response to Greeley’s letter could satisfy more than a minority of Americans. In a presidency full of tightrope moments, this was one of the most precarious yet.
In 1862, the country and its leaders were facing down questions of race strictly in terms of black and white; to speak of a Lincolnian approach to Indians would be fruitless. But had Lincoln lived to see the Civil War reach its end and had to deal with its aftermath, he would have had no choice but to engage with the turmoil in Indian country. By March 1869, in fact, the building pressures would become so acute that President Ulysses S. Grant would include a substantial statement on the “Indian question” in his inaugural address, declaring that “the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians—is one deserving of careful study,” not because Grant had a personal interest in the subject but because the potential for widespread violence, even war, was becoming a national crisis as the West was overrun with white settlers and fortune-seekers who weren’t waiting for federal policy to catch up with their desires.
The “Peace Policy” that grew out of this “careful study” was an aggressive federal effort to Christianize the nation’s Indians—or, put another way, to pacify them—that would became a focus and ultimately a failure of Grant’s presidency. Over the next three decades, the nation and the hundreds of tribes within its borders would endure an escalating spiral of conflict and violence. George Armstrong Custer’s death at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, the killing of Crazy Horse under cloudy circumstances in 1877, the murder of 150 Lakota Indians near Wounded Knee Creek in 1890: a line can be drawn from each of these notorious events back to the council outside Little Crow’s tent on an early morning in August 1862. To examine Lincoln’s role in the Dakota War is not to hold a random piece of his presidency up to the light; rather, it is to illuminate one section of a long trajectory with a very steep and bloody arc.
Many tribes, including the Dakota, referred to the president as “Great White Father” or “Great Father”—a term meant to indicate the government’s obligation more than an Indian’s fealty—and understood in substance if not in detail that the American government, for all its talk about the consent of the governed, had been structured from its inception such that one man often had a monarchical influence on their freedom and fortunes. George Washington had fought with and against Indians in the wilds of Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War and carried fewer fantasies about savage natures, dying races, or noble warriors than almost all of his contemporaries. In his days as a Virginia landowner and militia colonel, Washington had argued for the rights of individuals and corporations—such as the Potomac Navigation Company, of which he was a prime shareholder—to purchase land from Indian tribes without state or federal intervention. By the time he was sworn in as chief executive in 1789, though, he had reversed course to believe that Indians were autonomous peoples in sovereign nations capable of determining their own destiny. The philosophy was not as pro-Indian as it might sound: if that sovereign destiny was to sell lands to the federal government, lands the United States could then use to generate revenue, or to respond to provocation by starting wars that the whites were sure to win—thus vacating Indian lands for white settlement—so be it.
This paradox underpinned the Northwest Ordinance, crafted by the Confederation Congress in 1787 under the eye of Washington and penned by his most faithful general, Henry Knox. In the ordinance’s third article Knox wrote, “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.” Nine paragraphs earlier, however, the same document reserved to state and territorial governors the power “to lay out the parts of the district in which the Indian titles shall have been extinguished, into counties and townships.” From this point forward, then, the extinguishment of “Indian titles,” in one fashion or another, became the nation’s primary business, one to which the United States would eventually devote hundreds of thousands of men, millions of words of legal writing, and billions of dollars.
The first federal Congress spent much of its first two sessions considering two important issues that today seem arcane. One was the authorization and placement of the “federal city” that eventually became Washington, D.C., and the other was the federalizing of Indian relations implied by the Northwest Ordinance. One sentence in the Constitution’s first article had given Congress authority to “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes,” and from this seed the legislature generated a series of laws that all together became known as the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. The language was comprehensive and unambiguous: the federal government, by way of the War Department, was responsible for establishing boundaries between Indian and white lands, for securing those boundaries against white or Indian incursions, for regulating trade across those boundaries, and for meting out punishment should whites or Indians cross those boundaries to commit theft or do violence.
In 1796, after he had made his decision not to seek a third term, Washington wrote to Cherokee leaders in Georgia, imploring them to embrace agriculture and animal husbandry and adding that “what I have recommended to you I am myself going to do. After a few moons are passed I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm. There I shall attend to the means of increasing my cattle, sheep and other useful animals; to the growing of corn, wheat, and other grain, and to the employing of women in spinning and weaving; all which I have recommended to you, that you may be as comfortable and happy as plenty of food, clothing and other good things can make you.” The message was permeated with Washington’s sense of foreboding that Indians who did not thus civilize themselves would be overrun by whites and cast aside by history. The man who at the same time was developing plans to free all of his slaves upon his death was aware that the treatment of Native Americans held the danger of becoming a stain on the national character and a damaging wrench in the works of nation building.
Four years later, Washington was dead and so was the vision of a powerful, benevolent federalism that he, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison had established at the end of the War for Independence, repudiated by the defection of Madison to the opposing camp and the election of Thomas Jefferson, under whose watch the virtuous and self-sufficient yeoman farmer, loyal to his state as much as to his country, became the emblem of the nation. Never mind that Jefferson had encountered few yeoman farmers or, for that matter, Indians. Perched at Monticello, he saw the world in an abstract mode unfathomable to George Washington, casting his mind’s eye from his small mountaintop in Virginia over the eastern woodlands, past the Mississippi, and onto the grasslands beyond, a place he imagined as the perfect destination for all of the Indians who were continuing to make so much trouble about tribal lands in Georgia, Florida, the Ohio River Valley, and elsewhere. He expressed this transcontinental vision in his proposed “Indian Amendment” to the Constitution by way of an idea he called “removal,” the wholesale transfer of tribes from their eastern lands to the West, which Jefferson had made unimaginably spacious in 1803 when he offered Napoléon Bonaparte $15 million for all of the French holdings in North America, finalizing the Louisiana Purchase and pushing the boundary of the United States all the way to the Rocky Mountains.
The Jeffersonian impulse to transfer the entire Indian world westward over the Mississippi would have little purchase until it found someone to do the actual work of removal, to turn Jefferson’s “Indian Amendment” into government policy and dismantle the legal precedents established during Washington’s administration. Andrew Jackson ascended to the presidency in 1829, and once in the White House he completed Jefferson’s mission with a blunt purposefulness. A creature of will perfectly suited to an anti-aristocratic, hard-knuckle era, Jackson had killed two men in duels and was a veteran of many wars, including excursions beside and against the Creek Indians. He praised the courage of his adversaries and the resourcefulness of his allies, and considered himself a friend of the “red man,” but by the end of his time in office, few Indians who crossed his path would have agreed. Jackson was not the first Indian fighter to become president, but he was the first whose raw animus toward Indians became part of his public persona. He was serious about Indian war and serious, once president, about getting Indians out of the Deep South and moving them over the Mississippi River.
Jackson’s first salvo was to oversee the contentious passage, by five votes, of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a law that denied Indians the right to claim lands as their own and removed the military protection, treaty rights, and protection from execution by fiat that had been in place since George Washington’s time. Jackson wrapped this purge in a cloak of state sovereignty, denying that Indian tribes had the right to enter negotiations with the federal government as either foreign nations or, in the words of Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall, “domestic dependent nations.” When three separate challenges to the removal of the Cherokee arrived at the Supreme Court, Jackson simply pulled all federal troops out of the vicinity of reservations in Georgia and set in motion a series of legal and military maneuvers that would culminate after his presidency in the Trail of Tears, the infamous forced exodus that became a death march for thousands of Cherokee Indians on their way to the Oklahoma Territory. In 1833, Jackson told Congress that Indians “have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition,” a sentiment that would be repeated countless times, in countless wordings, over the next three decades. The logic, that a civilized Christian nation could not leave degraded and inferior Indians free to decide their own fates, was akin to the emerging Southern rhetoric holding that immorality lay more in freeing blacks than in keeping them as slaves, the only condition in which they were naturally capable of existing.
The treatment of Indian tribes had thus far been an issue most often determined in the realms of law and policy. But in 1845, with the ruling Democratic Party clamoring for war with Mexico in order to extend the nation’s reach south to the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific Ocean, a New York editor and professional visionary named John L. O’Sullivan wrote what he called the “truth at once in its neglected simplicity,” grounding the expansionist urges of the United States in “our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”
O’Sullivan’s sentiment quickly became a kind of meeting ground for various ideologies, as political descendants of Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson, and Jackson all found in it something to like. Divisive arguments might occur as to how expansion should happen, but the reality of expansion was now cast as divinely ordained fact. No European monarch had ever made a more grandiose claim on the will of God, and the editor found a ready acolyte in President James K. Polk, a devotee of Jackson whose adoption of the phrase “manifest destiny” sealed the words inside the national vocabulary and shoved naysayers to the sidelines. “Away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, and contiguity,” O’Sullivan added, giving the removal of stubborn Indian tribes a new metaphysical cast. There was the land, ready to take. Whites would work it, make it pay, make it theirs. What, they asked, could be a more self-evident good? The federalism of Washington, the anti-federalism of Jefferson, and the populism of Jackson were now subsumed by a theocratic zeal that harked back to claims made during Europe’s Crusades, not the right but the holy duty of godly men to subjugate heathen races.
Polk also moved the offices of the commissioner of Indian affairs and its treaty-making functions from the War Department to the newly created Department of the Interior, hastening the role of presidential patronage in making treaties and operating Indian agencies by removing lifetime military men from the equation. In 1851, at the same time Little Crow and a small group of Dakota leaders were giving up the Upper Mississippi River Valley in exchange for yearly payments in gold, the first Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed after a majestic council in Wyoming involving thousands of Indians from the Lakota, Arapaho, Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikira, and other tribes. The treaty set formal tribal boundaries, promised peace, and allowed the United States to build forts in and roads through territory that encompassed twelve million acres—including the current or future sites of Denver, Kansas City, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Des Moines, and Sioux Falls—in exchange for protection against encroachment by whites, permanent tribal boundaries, and $50,000 in goods each year. Whether or not the treaty was made in good faith, it would prove impossible to enforce and, like most such agreements, was altered by Congress in ratification to the dismay of the signatory Indian nations. So commenced the heyday of the “treaty era” in the West, a patchwork of overlapping agreements more immense and fraught with complication than any other foreign policy initiative before or since.
Any serious student of American history during the 1860s, a cohort that certainly included Abraham Lincoln, understood that Indians had participated in every major military conflict on North American soil: King Philip’s War, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War. The Civil War was no different. All tribes originating in the eastern theater had been removed, concentrated, or scattered before 1861, but the war was also fought along the Mississippi River, Jefferson’s dividing line between white and Indian worlds. And no state was fought over more bitterly than Kansas, due to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had decreed that residents of these new states were entitled to make their own choice regarding the legality of slavery. Pro- and anti-slavery crusaders swarmed across the Mississippi into Kansas and began killing each other almost immediately, most notoriously in May 1856, when John Brown and his followers murdered several pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin County. Once war broke out across the country, the Indian tribes of the Oklahoma Territory found themselves in a geopolitical quandary: to secure Kansas and Missouri for the South, Confederate troops would need to use their lands as staging grounds, while the Union effort against the lower Mississippi River could hardly ignore them either.
Yet ignore them the Union did. A loose arrangement of reservations set aside for the tribes that had been forced out of the Southeast, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, the Oklahoma Territory held tens of thousands of potential soldiers, many from warrior cultures, and so there is some mystery as to why it was so thoroughly disregarded by the North. Some Oklahoma Territory tribes owned slaves, it was true, but others worried about becoming slaves themselves, and in any case secession held no appeal for the Indians in the Oklahoma Territory; in a manner of speaking, they had already been forcibly seceded. Leaders and citizens of Confederate states—especially those in the Deep South—had been the busiest builders of the Trail of Tears. But in the absence of tangible support from Lincoln and the Union, some chieftains began to raise companies of men for the Confederacy, while others, choosing no side, pondered flight to Kansas or beyond. In May 1861, shortly after Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s first war secretary, Simon Cameron, had decided to suspend annuity payments to the Oklahoma tribes and to remove all troops from the territory’s federal forts, deeming the effort to hold the region too costly and failing to see any strategic advantage. These measures created a vacancy that the South quickly filled when Texas troops rushed north to occupy the installations and Jefferson Davis opened diplomatic negotiations with the Oklahoma tribes.
Seventy-two-year-old John Ross was Cherokee only insofar as his mother and her mother had been mixed-blood Cherokees, but still he had become principal chief of the Cherokee nation in 1828, after sixteen years as the tribe’s primary delegate to Washington. A slave-owning businessman of considerable wealth with a sharp legal mind, Ross held off Congress, governors, and presidents for a decade in their efforts to push the Cherokees off their land, finally riding the Trail of Tears in 1838 and watching his wife, Quatie, become one of thousands to die along the way. The lists of friends and enemies he made inside the tribe during his fight against removal were long, and these internal frictions were only amplified by the Civil War.
Ross wanted to organize Cherokees to fight for the North and had sent messages directly to Lincoln raising the possibility of tens of thousands of Indian troops for a Union army that in the summer of 1861 numbered no more than 200,000 men. But after Cameron’s abdication of the federal forts, the Confederates had organized the Oklahoma Territory into a military department under Brigadier General Albert Pike, a former schoolteacher, fur trapper, poet, newspaper correspondent, and legal scholar who aimed three regiments of Indian soldiers straight at Kansas. Still Ross had held out, declaring neutrality, but in August 1861 he’d acquiesced and joined with the Confederacy on remarkable terms: the Indians could fight under their own field officers and would be granted representation in the Confederate Congress. Though this new political clout would amount to only a single seat, the recognition was a radical step, one the Union had never so much as hinted at.
In January 1862, awakened to the potential calamity building in the Oklahoma Territory, Lincoln reversed course and decided to arm refugee Indians in Kansas and Missouri, except that one week later Edwin Stanton replaced Simon Cameron as secretary of war and Stanton didn’t like the idea of Indian troops. The whipsaw back-and-forth finally ended in March, when Union forces won the Battle of Pea Ridge in northwest Arkansas, severing the Confederate supply line to the tribes of the Oklahoma Territory. When Southern troops retreated, the federal forts were quickly recaptured by relieved Northern forces, meaning that in the space of one calendar year the Cherokees had been abandoned by the Union and by the Confederacy.
Congress followed up the reoccupation of Indian lands by passing a set of punitive acts granting the president unilateral power to abrogate treaties with any tribe “in actual hostility to the United States.” Some anti-Ross Cherokees became guerrilla fighters for the South, striking at the reoccupied federal forts in Oklahoma Territory and making excursions into Kansas, while others went about their lives with little reference to the war that was now consuming the world of black and white. Ross, for his part, was feeling his advanced age and tired of broken promises. In late August 1862, as the Dakota War erupted to the north, he set out with letters of introduction and the paper records of the Cherokee nation to seek an audience with President Lincoln. He aimed to present arguments that the United States had broken treaty promises by pulling out of the territory’s forts in May, that the Cherokee had had no choice to ally with the Confederacy, and that the tribe needed considerable federal protection against the guerrilla forces and Southern sympathizers now surrounding them on all sides.
For John Ross and Henry Whipple to head to Washington at the same time was nothing more than coincidence. But if their pleas were very different in the particulars, their basic point was the same: the United States had failed in its responsibility to Indian tribes and bloodshed had been the result. They were also trying to shoehorn their concerns into a consciousness—national and personal—that was fixed elsewhere. Where did treaty relations and the evils of the Indian system fit into a world consumed by rebellion and the question of emancipation, a world in which battles were fought with 75,000 men on a side? A discussion about freeing slaves, for all its bitterness and complexity, had a clarity that arguments about Indian policy did not. The job in front of Ross, as he headed toward the White House, was to focus Lincoln’s attention on the plight of the Cherokee and obtain some assurance of security in the Oklahoma Territory. The job in front of Bishop Whipple, now that the northwestern frontier had exploded, was less immediate and more ambitious. He wanted to rip down a system that had operated one way for forty years and replace it with something else entirely.