America Aflame (18 page)

This was a pipe dream. The money to free four million slaves and transport them to Africa was beyond the capacity of any government or private group. The logistics of such an enterprise were daunting as well, even assuming enough vessels and crew existed to implement the plan. And what African nation could suddenly support millions of destitute freedmen who were as familiar with that continent as they were with the desolate steppes of Russia?

Lincoln's “curse” was Clay's, that they could not adopt the self-righteousness of northern evangelical abolitionists or southern slavery apologists. Instead, they appreciated the agony of the slave, the dilemma of the slaveholder, and the difficulty of reconciling the two short of revolution, which would bring horrors far beyond what the benefits of freedom were worth. Lincoln came to understand the flaws of colonization, even as he held on to the notion into his presidency. In October 1854, Lincoln admitted that, while he would like “to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia … a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope … there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.” He threw up his hands. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution” of slavery.
28

But he knew very well what to do about slavery's extension. Lincoln acknowledged that the Kansas-Nebraska Act caught him and his fellow Illinois Whigs “by surprise—astounded us.… We were thunderstruck and stunned.” It took Lincoln a while to find his voice, but, invigorated by the upcoming fall election campaign and the signs that Illinois was in full revolt against its favorite son, he responded in September 1854. Douglas had defended the act to his constituents as a democratic measure, leaving the fate of the territories in the hands of their settlers. For Lincoln, popular sovereignty was nothing less than a mask for dashing the opportunities of white middle- and working-class northerners. As he wrote, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them. New Free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition.” It was a theme Lincoln returned to again and again over the next six years. For the territories to be a white man's country—an objective that resonated deeply with his constituents—slavery must be barred forever. The West must remain pure.
29

The confrontation that transformed Lincoln's public position on slavery occurred at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield in October 1854. Douglas neither sought nor desired to debate Lincoln. He was worn out from defending his actions up and down the state since the late summer. In August 1854, shortly after Congress adjourned, he left Washington for his home in Chicago, to rest and mend political fences. He did not enjoy a pleasant journey home. “I could travel,” he later recalled, “… by the light of my own effigy on every tree we passed.” Arriving in Chicago, he addressed a large hostile crowd outside his hotel balcony. As he departed, he lost his temper and blurted, “It is now Sunday morning, I'll go to church, you can go to hell.”
30

Exhausted, yet adamant in his position, Douglas offered a spirited defense of popular sovereignty and a strong condemnation of Know Nothingism to the throng at the state fair. Lincoln responded the following day, with Douglas present. He believed with all his heart in the principle of government by the consent of the governed, and he agreed that residents of the territories knew best when framing the laws by which they would live. But protecting slavery was unlike any other legal question because it involved encumbering another human being. This is where Lincoln and Douglas parted ways. Douglas, Lincoln averred, “has no very vivid impression that the negro is a human; and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.” The simple statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” included all men, regardless of race, capacity, or other limitation. “No man,” Lincoln declared, “is good enough to govern another man,
without that other's consent
. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” To Lincoln, this was the real popular sovereignty, the right to govern one's self.
31

Like many political leaders of the day, Lincoln blended religious and secular images in his speeches. Although he often struggled with his faith, Lincoln believed in the guiding hand of Providence even if he could not discern its meaning or existence. Explaining the intent of the Founding Fathers toward slavery four years later, Lincoln noted that in their “enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into this world to be … imbruted by its fellows.” It is arguable whether this was an accurate account of the framers' intentions, but Lincoln believed it. Historians debate whether Lincoln was a religious man. He was. His religion was America, and that faith ran very deep.
32

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was no longer a political issue for Lincoln; it was a moral cause. It was not enough to oppose the
extension
of slavery; it was time to express a moral outrage at the
existence
of slavery—a significant transformation of the public Lincoln, heretofore a moderate Clay Whig. It also marked Lincoln's reentry into the political arena. He talked now about “the monstrous injustice of slavery.” “There can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another,” and it followed that it was wrong to extend that immorality to the territories and “to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it.”
33

Lincoln's global perspective was not a rhetorical flourish. Like many other Americans, he believed in the nation's special mission to spread democracy and Christianity throughout the world. The failed revolutions in Europe set American democracy in bold relief as a distinctive and fragile experiment. Lincoln believed along with Clay “that the world's best hope depended on the continued Union of these States.” And now, by permitting the extension of slavery, “we are proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of Human Freedom.” It was this contradiction that troubled Lincoln most: the disconnect between American ideals and American reality.
34

Frederick Douglass also viewed the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a transforming event. In a speech given to an abolitionist gathering in Chicago in October 1854, Douglass recounted the strengthening of the Slave Power since the annexation of Texas in 1845. The Fugitive Slave Law altered his view about the use of violence, though only in self-defense. Now, he wondered if more proactive measures would be necessary. Like a growing number of evangelicals, he saw in the pattern of southern power “the wisdom of that great God, who has promised to overrule the wickedness of men for His own glory.” For Douglass, a war of liberation was inevitable.
35

Horace Greeley issued a warning to the South following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “If Slavery may encroach upon the domain of freemen,” he wrote, “freemen may encroach upon the domain of Slavery. If slavery thinks this is a safe game to play at, let it be pursued as it has begun.” The South would pick up the challenge, Senator David Atchison of Missouri vowed. As he wrote to his colleague Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, with more than a hint of glee, “We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to ‘Mormonize' the Abolitionists,” a reference to Missouri's earlier war to exterminate the Mormons. Within months, blood, not only white blood, would flow on the Plains, portending a broader confrontation with the Revolutionary legacy.
36

CHAPTER 5

BLOOD ON THE PLAINS

ON A HOT AFTERNOON
shortly after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a scraggly footsore cow wandered into Conquering Bear's camp near the North Platte River. Or maybe someone in Conquering Bear's camp “assisted” the cow's visit. A lean summer had followed a leaner winter. The trails to California and Oregon, carved out in the early 1840s, had become broad avenues, westbound traffic dispersing the buffalo into a wider arc until they disappeared altogether beyond the horizon. Now, after Douglas's railroad bill, the Sioux had become as expendable as the buffalo, more so because at least the hides and tongues of the animal still fetched handsome prices back east.
1

There seemed no end to the white migration, or to the destruction of the Sioux land, the buffalo, the grasses, and the water. Only disease flourished. Some of the young Sioux talked resistance. But the elders knew that was futile. Some had gone to the white capital at Washington, D.C. They had traveled over iron rails, through small towns and large cities, had met the Great Father. They understood that challenging such wealth, power, and numbers could only end in extinction.

By the early 1850s, both the worsening plight of the Plains Indians and the mounting complaints of white migrants moved the federal government to act. Like the slaveholder and the Mexican, the Indian stood athwart the inexorable progress of a great nation chosen by God to spread His blessing to all mankind. It was the Native American's manifest destiny to succumb both to the superior race and the superior ideal. Perhaps democracy and evangelical Christianity could flourish among these people some day. In the meantime, they must step aside and defer to destiny. In February 1851, Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act compensating Indians for their land and providing for their relocation and financial support during their transition to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. In the mind of Congress, transforming a nomadic, marauding people into tillers of the soil not only protected white overlanders but also enabled the Indians to secure their own salvation, both in body and soul.

As the first step in this process of relocation and concentration, the government, in September 1851, invited the Plains Indians to a meeting at Horse Creek in what is today western Nebraska, thirty-five miles east of Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail. The response was overwhelming—nearly ten thousand Plains Indians trekked to the site, the largest gathering of Indians ever on the Plains. The unprecedented response among the Native Americans, despite deep animosities within their own ranks, reflected burgeoning white traffic on the Oregon Trail and the consequent dispersion of the buffalo and the spread of disease among the tribes. The flood of whites onto Indian land had also generated sporadic violence between natives and the white migrants. Hungry, tired, and angry, the tribes readily responded to the government's invitation and its promise to “amply compensate for all the depredations of which they complain, on account of the destruction of game, timber, &c, by the passing of white men through their country.”

Under a large tent, David D. Mitchell, representing the United States government, greeted headmen from various tribes, who arrived in their finest feather bonnets and colorful animal-hide shirts. Mitchell set out his terms: free and unmolested passage for overlanders on the Oregon Trail; an end to intertribal warfare, which had worsened as the buffalo disappeared; and the establishment of discrete boundaries for each tribe using natural topographic features such as mountains and rivers whenever possible. The tribes would also agree to recognize the right of the government to build roads and military posts along the trail. Mitchell assured the elders of the government's understanding and sincerity: “In times past you had plenty of buffalo and game to subsist upon, and your Great Father well knows that has always been your favorite amusement and pursuit. Your condition has changed, and your Great Father desires you will consider and prepare for the changes that await you.” In return, Mitchell promised an annual payment of $50,000 in food and goods for the next fifty years to be shared among the tribes (the treaty did not specify how), permanent title to their new land, and eternal peace with the United States government. Mitchell believed that fifty years was sufficient “to give the experiment [of transforming the Indian from a hunter to a farmer] a fair trial, and solve the great problem whether or not an Indian can be made a civilized man.”
2

The assembled headmen reacted variously to the proposals, some not understanding the specifics, as it proved too difficult to translate the government's terms into the nine different languages represented. Even for those who grasped the full meaning of the offer, skepticism abounded. “Tell the wind to stop blowing” was the Lakota Sioux reaction to Mitchell's plea to end intertribal warfare. The demand to allow migrants to traverse the Plains unmolested also incurred mixed reviews. The Lakota derisively called the Oregon Trail the “Holy Road,” for it obviously held sacred meaning for the white man. As for the geographic boundaries, such limits appeared on white men's maps but not in the Indians' minds. Hunger, disease, and warfare, however, had taken their toll on the Plains Indians. The large gathering itself underscored the Indians' willingness to reach an agreement that would secure their survival, even if they had to sacrifice their land and culture to achieve it.
3

Following the negotiations, Mitchell provided a show for the assemblage, firing one of the army's big artillery pieces that shattered trees far distant into so many sticks of firewood. The Sioux warriors were not impressed. A few fast horsemen could kill the gunners before they had the chance to reload their machine, they thought.

In the end, the headmen watched their names etched on the document containing Mitchell's terms, which became the law of the land. Almost. Congress scaled back the annuity from fifty to fifteen years before ratifying Mitchell's work. The Indians moved closer to the forts to begin their new life protected by and dependent on the United States government. Not all the Indians, however. Many of the Lakota Sioux spurned the treaty, preferring to maintain their way of life, difficult though it was, rather than follow the promises of the white man. They resumed their hunting, their campaigns against other tribes, and their trading and confrontation with the white migrants. As the promised government annuities, food, and blankets arrived late and incomplete, the Lakota decision seemed prescient.

The whites kept coming. In 1852, the largest contingent of migrants in American history traveled west. From Council Bluffs in present-day western Nebraska, wagons formed “an unbroken column fully 500 miles long.” Observers called it “the greatest crowd of adventurers since the invasion of Rome by Goths[;] such a deluge of mortals had not been witnessed as was now pouring from the states … for the golden shores of California.” To the Lakota Sioux, it did indeed seem like a barbarian invasion. One migrant likened the trail west from Fort Laramie to the crowds on Broadway. The same energy, determination, and hope roamed the streets of New York and the dusty summer trails of the West. Migration had consequences, however, as Stephen Douglas, the migrants themselves, and Americans everywhere would soon discover.
4

Most Americans harbored the same dismissive view of Indians as Douglas. They held out little hope that the Indian could become a “civilized” race, federal policy notwithstanding. Prevailing scientific theories suggested that race, like other natural phenomena, reflected a hierarchy of order. Whether that hierarchy derived from God or from scientific principles, or both, remained open to discussion, but the variable abilities and potentials of the races attained the status of established fact. Mexicans, Indians, the Irish, and black people were clearly inferior, as their status, behavior, and culture confirmed. The superior race held a responsibility to help inferior races achieve their ultimate, though limited, potential. If these subordinate groups embraced such guidance, they would be saved both spiritually and physically. If not, they risked extinction.

Historians embraced the scientific view of race as well. William H. Prescott's histories of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru (published in 1843 and 1847, respectively) distinguished the Spanish and Indian “races” and concluded that the “Anglo-Saxons” who settled to the North established a superior civilization. Francis Parkman espoused similar views in his epic book on the Oregon Trail (1849), and in other works narrating the struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and the “Celtic” French for control of North America. The Celts also fared poorly in John Lothrop Motley's book on the rise of the Dutch Republic (1856), with the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races overcoming the inferior people. The Anglo-Saxon carried “in his blood a love of liberty, a spirit of individual enterprise and resourcefulness, and a capacity for practical and reasonable behavior,” which the Celtic race lacked.
5

It was perhaps ironic that slaveholders rarely evinced the degree of animosity toward the black that was found in press and policy statements about the Indian. The difference was, as Frederick Law Olmsted noted in his tour of the South, “Where the negro is a slave, natural antipathy of the white race to associate with him is lost.” Slavery was the Africans' “natural” state, and in that position they would reach their highest potential, albeit well below the white man. Removal from Africa was a godsend. “Slavery has made the black man in America, in a few centuries,” Virginia jurist William C. Daniell explained in 1852, “what thousands of years had failed to accomplish for him at home, cultivating the aptitudes of the negro race for civilization and Christianity.”
6

As Daniell's boast implied, it was incumbent upon white Americans, as part of their Christian duty, to rescue inferior races by offering instruction and the possibility of salvation. This was a key argument of white southerners for the institution of slavery, that it raised a downtrodden race from its primitive African origins to the possibility of salvation through Jesus Christ, inculcated discipline, and fashioned a family life unburdened by the need or concern for daily subsistence.

The Indians would also benefit from white civilization. The plan was simple, for the slave and for the Indian: work and live by the white man's standards, or die. But the Indians took poorly to farming, and a good many continued to roam the land convinced that freedom, however hard, was superior to an uncertain dependence on an unreliable government. Back east, sentiment grew that, regardless of federal ministrations, the Indian was congenitally committed to his destructive course. Horace Greeley recorded his observations of the Plains Indians after a trip out west. He noted their inability or unwillingness to work and improve themselves and their environment, a failing that guaranteed their extinction: “To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to human nature—a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion save by the more ravenous demands of another. As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas … and saw their owners sitting around the doors of their lodges at the height of the planting season and in as good, bright planting weather as sun and soil ever made, I could not help saying, ‘These people must die out—there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree.'”
7

The impending disappearance of an unworthy race provided its own rationale for American migration and settlement. As undeserving stewards of God's bounty and heedless to the efforts of a higher civilization, the savages justly reaped the whirlwind of destruction. The transformation of the barren Plains into a garden would invariably follow. Now that Douglas's railroad bill had passed, these inevitables would accelerate. The Indians did not read these predictions of their demise, or if they did, they paid them little attention. In the meantime, they would not fade away.

The stray cow, or the stolen cow, quickly became dinner for Conquering Bear's camp, a welcome meal in a dry, hot season when dust had replaced the prairie grasses. Besides, the annuities promised by the government were late, and the four thousand Lakota Sioux in the camp were hungry. The cow had belonged to a group of Swedish Mormon emigrants traveling to Brigham Young's new city in the Utah territory. They reported the loss to Lieutenant Hugh B. Fleming at Fort Laramie, who questioned Conquering Bear about the animal. Since the cow's return was no longer possible, Conquering Bear offered a horse as compensation, a more than generous exchange. Ordinarily, the matter would have ended there, but Fleming had arbitrated a series of thefts since the overland season began in May 1854, and he determined to end the pilfering once and for all. Fleming rejected the offer, demanding that the chief turn over the young man who had dispatched the cow.
8

The next day, Second Lieutenant John L. Grattan, fresh out of West Point, and eager for action, gathered troops and two large cannons mounted on wagons from Fort Laramie and rode to Conquering Bear's camp to enforce Lieutenant Fleming's order. Conquering Bear explained to Grattan that the offending Indian did not even belong to his tribe but was visiting from another camp and had no intention of turning himself in. While the two sides continued their negotiations, the young warriors from a nearby Sioux camp streamed quietly into Conquering Bear's settlement to join their colleagues in preparation for battle.

Lieutenant Grattan, sensing the futility of continued discussions, broke off the negotiations and ordered his troops to fire on the settlement. Conquering Bear fell wounded, but three hundred warriors rose from the dry creek bed below the camp and swarmed over Grattan's twenty-nine soldiers, killing all but one. When a party from the fort arrived to identify and collect the bodies, they found Lieutenant Grattan with twenty-four arrows in his body. They could identify him only by his watch. The Sioux, realizing they would probably not receive their annuities now, raided a nearby post for supplies and galloped out of the North Platte Valley for higher country. Conquering Bear, transported on a travois, died of his wounds. Thus began the Plains Indian Wars, a conflict that would not end until 1877.