An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (21 page)

The two-year invasion and occupation of Mexico was a joyful experience for most US citizens, as evidenced by Walt Whitman's populist poetry. Its popularity was possible because of buoyant nationalism, and the war itself accelerated the spirit of nationalism and confirmed the manifest destiny of the United States. Besides new weapons of war and productive capacity brought about by the emerging industrial revolution, there was also an advance in printing and publishing techniques, which increased the book publishing market from $2.5 million in 1830 to $12.5 million in 1850. Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational “American literature,” with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active—each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists.

Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a
“true American” would be unable to resist “this pride in our victorious armies.” Emerson opposed the war as he did all wars. His opposition to the Mexican War was based, however, not just on his pacifism but also on his belief that the Mexican “race” would poison Anglo-Americans through contact, the “heart of darkness” fear. Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war.

Most of the writers of the era were obsessed with heroism. Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain. However, even the abolitionists believed in the “manifest destiny of the English race,” as Lowell put it in 1859, “to occupy this whole continent and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans.”
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President James K. Polk, who presided over the war, saw its significance as an example of how a democracy could carry on and win a foreign war with as much “vigor” as authoritarian governments were able to do. He believed that an elected civilian government with its volunteer people's army was even more effective than European monarchies in the quest for empire. The victory over Mexico proved to the European powers, he felt, that the United States was their equal. Standing tall through military victory over a weak country: it was not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush who thought up that idea. The tradition is as old as the United States itself.

The US war against Mexico did more than annex half of Mexico. A debate that turned deadly ensued over whether the acquired territory would allow slavery and it brought on a civil war that produced a million casualties. The US Civil War allowed for the reorganization and modernization of the military and streamlined counterinsurgency operations—that is, ones targeting civilians. A rehearsal for this streamlining is found in the aftermath of the Mexican War in the US Army counterinsurgency against the fierce resistance of the Apaches in the portions of the territory annexed from Mexico in 1848 that later became the states of New Mexico and Arizona, as
well as across the new border into what remained Mexico. The First and Second US Army Dragoons (cavalry troops) were employed for this purpose, elite mounted troops well equipped and trained for the desert terrain. During the period between the Mexican War and the Civil War, Indigenous resistance was led by Gila Apache leader Mangas Coloradas to maintain the Apaches' traditional lands and way of life. The dragoons employed the “first way of war,” total war, encouraging field units to attack Apache villages and destroy crops and kill livestock, slaughtering women and children and old men left in the villages while the young men were engaged elsewhere fighting the dragoons.
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This kind of warfare against Indigenous peoples continued throughout the Civil War and ratcheted up in the northern plains and Southwest afterward, producing the term that the US military use to this day all over the world when referring to enemy territory: “Indian Country.”

EIGHT

Buffalo were dark rich clouds moving upon the rolling hills and plains of America. And then the flashing steel came upon bone and flesh
.

—Simon J. Ortiz,
from Sand Creek

The US Army on the eve of the Civil War was divided into seven departments—a structure designed by John C. Calhoun during the Monroe administration. By 1860, six of the seven departments, comprising 183 companies, were stationed west of the Mississippi, a colonial army fighting the Indigenous occupants of the land. In much of the western lands, the army was the primary US government institution; the military roots to institutional development run deep.

President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861, two months after the South had seceded from the union. In April, the Confederate States of America (CSA) seized the army base at Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. Of more than a thousand US Army officers, 286 left to serve the CSA, half of them being West Point graduates, most of them Indian fighters, including Robert E. Lee. Three of the seven army department commanders took leadership of the Confederate Army. Based on demographics alone, the South had little chance of winning, so it is all the more remarkable that it persisted against the Union for more than four years. The 1860 population of the United States was nearly thirty-two million, with twenty-three million in the twenty-two northern states, and about nine million in the eleven southern states. More than a third of the nine million Southerners were enslaved people of African heritage. Within the CSA, 76 percent of settlers owned no
slaves. Roughly 60–70 percent of those without slaves owned fewer than a hundred acres of land. Less than 1 percent owned more than a hundred slaves. Seventeen percent of settlers in the South owned one to nine slaves, and only 6.5 percent owned more than ten. Ten percent of the settlers who owned no slaves were also landless, while that many more managed to barely survive on small dirt farms. The Confederate Army reflected the same kind of percentages.
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Those who, even today, claim that “states' rights” caused Southern secession and the Civil War use these statistics to argue that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but that is false. Every settler in the Southern states aspired to own land and slaves or to own
more
land and
more
slaves, as both social status and wealth depended on the extent of property owned. Even small and landless farmers relied on slavery-based rule: the local slave plantation was the market for what small farmers produced, and planters hired landless settlers as overseers and sharecroppers. Most non-slave-owning settlers supported and fought for the Confederacy.

Abraham Lincoln's campaign for the presidency appealed to the vote of land-poor settlers who demanded that the government “open” Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi. They were called “freesoilers,” in reference to cheap land free of slavery. New gold rushes and other incentives brought new waves of settlers to squat on Indigenous land. For this reason, some Indigenous people preferred a Confederate victory, which might divide and weaken the United States, which had grown ever more powerful. Indigenous nations in Indian Territory were more directly affected by the Civil War than anywhere else. As discussed in
chapter 6
, the southeastern nations—the Cherokees, Muskogees, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws (“Five Civilized Tribes”)—were forcibly removed from their homelands during the Jackson administration, but in the Indian Territory they rebuilt their townships, farms, ranches, and institutions, including newspapers, schools, and orphanages. Although a tiny elite of each nation was wealthy and owned enslaved Africans and
private estates, the majority of the people continued their collective agrarian practices. All five nations signed treaties with the Confederacy, each for similar reasons. Within each nation, however, there was a clear division based on class, often misleadingly expressed as a conflict between “mixed-bloods” and “full-bloods.” That is, the wealthy, assimilated, slave-owning minority that dominated politics favored the Confederacy, and the non-slave-owning poor and traditional majority wanted to stay out of the Anglo-American civil war. Historian David Chang found that Muskogee nationalism and well-founded distrust of federal power played a major role in bringing about that nation's strategic alliance with the Confederacy. Chang writes: “Was the Creek council's alliance with the South a racist defense of slavery and its class privileges, or was it a nationalist defense of Creek lands and sovereignty? The answer has to be ‘both.'”
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John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, at first called for neutrality, but changed his mind for reasons similar to the Muskogees and asked the Cherokee council for authority to negotiate a treaty with the CSA. Nearly seven thousand men of the five nations went into battle for the Confederacy. Stand Watie, a Cherokee, held the post of brigadier general in the Confederate Army. His First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi was among the last units in the field to surrender to the Union Army on June 23, 1865, more than two months after Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. During the war, however, many Indigenous soldiers became disillusioned and went over to the Union forces, along with enslaved African Americans who fled to freedom.
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Another story is equally important, though less often told. A few months after the war broke out, some ten thousand men in Indian Territory, made up of Indigenous volunteers, along with African Americans who had freed themselves and even some Anglo-Americans, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Confederate Army. They fought from Oklahoma into Kansas, where many of them joined unofficial Union units that had been organized by abolitionists who had trained with John Brown years earlier. This was not likely the kind of war the Lincoln administration had desired—a multiethnic volunteer Union contingent fighting pro-slavery forces
in Missouri, where enslaved Africans escaped to join the Union side.
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The self-liberation by African Americans, occurring all over the South, led to Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which allowed freed Africans to serve in combat.

In Minnesota, which had become a non-slavery state in 1859, the Dakota Sioux were on the verge of starvation by 1862. When they mounted an uprising to drive out the mostly German and Scandinavian settlers, Union Army troops crushed the revolt, slaughtering Dakota civilians and rounding up several hundred men. Three hundred prisoners were sentenced to death, but upon Lincoln's orders to reduce the numbers, thirty-eight were selected at random to die in the largest mass hanging in US history. The revered leader Little Crow was not among those hanged, but was assassinated the following summer while out picking raspberries with his son; the assassin, a settler-farmer, collected a $500 bounty.
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One of the young Dakota survivors asked his uncle about the mysterious white people who would commit such crimes. The uncle replied:

Certainly they are a heartless nation. They have made some of their people servants—yes, slaves.… The greatest object of their lives seems to be to acquire possessions—to be rich. They desire to possess the whole world. For thirty years they were trying to entice us to sell them our land. Finally the outbreak gave them all, and we have been driven away from our beautiful country.
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To free the professional soldiers posted in the West to fight against the Confederate Army in the East, Lincoln called for volunteers in the West, and settlers responded, coming from Texas, Kansas, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, and Nevada. Having few Confederates to fight, they attacked people closer to hand, Indigenous people. Land speculators in the trans-Mississippi West sought statehood for the occupied former Mexican territories in order to attract settlers and investors. Their eagerness to
undertake the ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous residents to achieve the necessary population balance to attain statehood generated strong anti-Indian hysteria and violent actions. Preoccupied with the Civil War in the East, the Lincoln administration did little to prevent vicious and even genocidal actions on the part of territorial authorities consisting of volunteer Indian haters such as Kit Carson.

The mode of maintaining settler “law and order” set the pattern for postwar genocide. In the most infamous incident involving militias, the First and Third Colorado Volunteers carried out the Sand Creek Massacre. Although assigned to guard the road to Santa Fe, the units mainly engaged in raiding and looting Indigenous communities. John Chivington, an ambitious politician known as the “Fighting Parson,” led the Third Colorado.
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By 1861, displaced and captive Cheyennes and Arapahos, under the leadership of the great peace seeker Black Kettle, were incarcerated in a US military reservation called Sand Creek, near Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. They camped under a white flag of truce and had federal permission to hunt buffalo to feed themselves. In early 1864, the Colorado territorial governor informed them that they could no longer leave the reservation to hunt. Despite their compliance with the order, on November 29, 1864, Chivington took seven hundred Colorado Volunteers to the reservation. Without provocation or warning, they attacked, leaving dead 105 women and children and 28 men. Even the federal commissioner of Indian affairs denounced the action, saying that the people had been “butchered in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States.” In its 1865 investigation, the Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War recorded testimonies and published a report that documented the aftermath of the killings, when Chivington and his volunteers burned tepees and stole horses. Worse, after the smoke had cleared, they had returned and finished off the few survivors while scalping and mutilating the corpses—women and men, young and old, children, babies. Then they decorated their weapons and caps with body parts—fetuses, penises, breasts, and vulvas—and, in the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, “Stuck them / on their hats to dry / Their fingers greasy / and slick.”
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Once back in Denver, they displayed the trophies to the adoring public in Denver's
Apollo Theater and in saloons. Yet, despite the detailed report of the deeds, neither Chivington nor any of his men were reprimanded or prosecuted, signaling a free field for killing.
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