America Aflame (19 page)

News of Grattan's misfortune did not reach the public until about three weeks later. The
Missouri Republican
broke the story under the headline “Treacherous Slaughter of U. States Troops at Fort Laramie.” Similar headlines soon appeared in the eastern press, led by “Troops Massacred by the Indians” in Greeley's
New York Tribune
. Commanding General of the Army Winfield Scott promised a “singular punishment” for the Sioux and dispatched General William S. Harney with six hundred men for that purpose. Harney vowed, “By God, I'm for battle—no peace.”
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Not everyone thirsted for revenge. Missouri Democratic congressman Thomas Hart Benton believed there was more to the Grattan story than a contrived ambush. If treachery occurred, the government and the migrants shared in the deception. The death of Conquering Bear, who had resigned himself to accommodation and who had promoted peace between the Sioux and the white man, pained Benton in particular. He read the following tribute into the
Congressional Globe
:

We knew him well, and a better friend the white man never had. He was brave, and gentle, and kind—a wise ruler, a skillful warrior, and respected chieftain. Even in accepting his position, assigned to him some four years ago at the treaty of Laramie, he only consented after much persuasion; and then remarked when he did so, that he gave his life to the Great Spirit. So far from any charge of treachery attaching to his conduct, his own fate is a sufficient proof of his fidelity; in recording it, we feel like inscribing a worthy memorial of one of the most high-toned and chivalric of all Indians we have known.
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The tribute fell on deaf ears. This was not a time of nuance, of mourning Grattan and his men yet understanding the circumstances that led to their deaths. It was a time for righteous retribution.

In the spring and early summer of 1855, the Lakota continued their raids on trading posts and migrants' livestock. Thomas Twiss, the federal Indian agent stationed at Fort Laramie, warned the Lakota about General Harney's mission and urged them to come to the fort to avoid certain destruction. Most Lakota warriors understood the long odds of fighting an army regiment, well armed and well provisioned. They heeded the warning and left for Fort Laramie. By August, Twiss could write to the secretary of the interior, “the Sioux difficulties have been magnified by false and malicious reports. There is not, as I can find, within this Agency, a hostile Indian. On the contrary, all are friendly.” Three bands of Lakota Sioux, however, remained north of the Platte River, and beyond the protection of Fort Laramie. Little Thunder headed one of the bands. Though friendly to whites, Little Thunder had decided to remain in his camp to supervise and protect the women who were drying meat from the hunt.
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General Harney approached Little Thunder's camp and dismissed a request to negotiate: “As we had come for war and not for peace, we paid no attention to them.” Cavalry blocked the band's retreat. Trapped, the Indians fell under withering rifle fire. Of the 250 Lakota, Harney killed 86 and captured 70. Most were women and children. Harney lost four men. Most of the soldiers did not realize that they were killing mainly women and children, though General Harney and some of the senior officers knew there were families in Little Thunder's camp.
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That evening, or maybe the next one, a young Lakota Sioux called Light Hair returned to Little Thunder's camp. As a boy, he and his friends had watched the long wagon trains stir up billowing clouds of dust as they passed along the Oregon Trail. When the trains had reached the far horizon, the boys scampered down from their ridge and collected items discarded by the migrants as they lightened their load for the tougher journey ahead. Slight of build, with wispy light brown hair, a rarity among the Sioux, Light Hair had overcome his unimposing physical stature to earn the respect of younger Lakota by the time he had reached the age of fifteen. On this occasion, Light Hair had been out hunting with several other young Sioux. The scene they found astonished them: acrid smoke rose from the camp; lodge poles lay broken and scattered over the terrain; bodies, now stiff, strewn about like sticks. Light Hair stumbled upon a woman; both of her breasts had been cut off. Almost all the bodies he encountered bore marks of mutilation. He covered the corpses as best he could. The Lakota Sioux chose a name for General Harney: Woman Killer.

The Black Hills of present-day South Dakota remain sacred to the Lakota Sioux. Deep in the interior of the hills, there is a high granite summit where the Sioux performed religious ceremonies and where warriors came for visions and courage. This holy place is now called Harney Peak.

In such a place, Light Hair went to dream. In his dream, a young man on horseback burst from the bottom of a lake and galloped across the plains, long hair flowing in the wind and a reddish brown stone tied behind his left ear. Blue hailstones adorned his bare chest, and a painted lightning bolt shot across one side of his face. The rider and his horse were running, running from an ominous rolling cloud filled with thunder and lightning that unleashed a relentless volley of bullets and arrows. Remarkably, the horse and rider remained unscathed, protected perhaps by a red-tailed hawk soaring above them. But then his own people suddenly appeared and surrounded the rider and pulled him from the horse. The dream ended.

Light Hair climbed down from the mountain, exhausted yet awed by the vision, a dream that occurred only to a chosen few of the Lakota Sioux. What it meant for him and for his people, he could not tell, except that the dark rolling cloud was coming closer.

By the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the Plains Indians agreed to allow the government to build roads through their land. Douglas's railroad bill accelerated the road-building program by opening up the Kansas and Nebraska territories to settlement. Clashes between Indians and whites increased, as did the interventions of the United States Army. The Indians were demonstrating that they were indeed “obstacles” to white civilization, as Douglas had called them, but their removal or subjugation proved considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. As the Plains war lurched along in a cycle of Indian raids on wagon trains followed by retaliation from federal troops, which, in turn, inspired more Indian attacks, a conflict erupted among white settlers in Kansas.

Migrants came to Kansas to make a living and to fulfill a mission. Eli Thayer was one of those men whom only the nineteenth century could have produced, an individual typifying the unending curiosity and thirst for new things that characterized America at that time: an educator, inventor, founder of a colony of anti-slavery families in Virginia, and a politician. His latest enterprise was the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, organized to subsidize anti-slavery settlers who wished to migrate to Kansas. He formed the society with the financial support of several wealthy New Englanders in April 1854. Although only 1,240 settlers took up Thayer's offer, the mere formation of such an organization raised the stakes of the contest. Speaking for the anti-slavery forces, William H. Seward declared in the Senate, “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give this victory to the side which is strong in numbers as it is in right.” South Carolina editor Robert Barnwell Rhett welcomed the challenge, urging fellow southerners to “send men to Kansas ready to cast in their lot with the proslavery party there and able to meet Abolitionism on its own issue, and with its own weapons.” Especially promising from the southern perspective was the proximity of Missouri, a slave state, next door to Kansas. Missouri senator David Atchison, who had already vowed to “Mormonize” Thayer's minions, rallied his fellow Missourians to take the fight across the border to Kansas: “We are playing for a mighty stake; if we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean, if we fail we lose Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas and all the territories.”
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Not only did men from Missouri pour across the border to vote illegally in the first territorial legislature election in March 1855, but they harassed free-soilers passing through their state. In one such instance, Missourians attacked the Rev. William Moore, a Methodist preacher, forced alcohol down his throat, and threatened to kill him. In Missouri, pro-slavery mobs set upon anti-slavery ministers, occasionally tearing them from the pulpit, tarring, shooting, or otherwise abusing them. Such stories circulated widely in the evangelical press and further polarized northern and southern religious communities. Henry Ward Beecher raised money to purchase weapons for anti-slavery settlers in Kansas to defend themselves from the Missouri ruffians. “Beecher's Bibles” contributed to a growing arms race in the territory that only fueled the violence.

Day-tripping Missourians, some twelve hundred of them, helped themselves to ballots in neighboring Kansas on election day to cast five thousand votes (this is Missouri math) and, with anti-slavery forces boycotting what they considered a fraudulent process, succeeded in electing a pro-slavery territorial legislature. Roughly half the total votes cast were illegal. Strange irregularities appeared, such as one district that counted over six hundred votes though only twelve eligible voters resided there. The voting rolls of another district included names copied directly from the Cincinnati city directory.

The actions of the pro-slavery legislature confirmed the worst fears of those in the North who suspected a Slave Power conspiracy. Among the laws inscribed by Kansas lawmakers included a statute mandating the death penalty for aiding a fugitive slave, and another making it a felony to question slaveholding in Kansas. For good measure, the pro-slavery majority expelled the few free-staters elected to the assembly. In response, the free-staters established their own government in Topeka and vowed to make Kansas white.

By November 1855, Kansas had two territorial governments and a civil war. That beat Congress, which, when it convened in December 1855, could not agree on any government for Kansas. The House did not organize itself until February, confounded by the multitude of parties and factions. The contending parties in Kansas continued to spar with each other in isolated acts of violence through the early spring of 1856. On May 21, 1856, a group of pro-slavery men subjected the free-state stronghold of Lawrence to a heavy artillery barrage. No one was killed, but the town suffered substantial damage. The eastern press, monitoring the simmering contest unfolding in the new territory, transformed the episode into the beginning of Armageddon. The
New York Tribune
posted a banner headline: “Startling News from Kansas—The War Actually Begun—Triumph of the Border Ruffians—Lawrence in Ruins—Several Persons Slaughtered—Freedom Bloodily Subdued.” The parts about the town's total destruction and the loss of life were palpably false, but they sold newspapers. The “sack of Lawrence” now took its place alongside the Visigoth hordes descending upon Rome.
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The disintegration of law and order on the Plains reminded many Americans of the failed European revolutions of 1848. The actions of the pro-slavery territorial legislature were especially troubling, and northern congressmen drew parallels between Kansas and the restoration of oppressive regimes in Europe. Indiana congressman Schuyler Colfax compared the territorial legislature's pro-slavery statutes, “dictated and enacted by usurpers and tyrants,” to Louis Napoleon's wresting of democracy from the French people and confirming his ascension to power with a fraudulent plebiscite: “the mockery of the pretended freedom of elections … the shackles upon the freedom of speech; all … emanate from an autocrat who … governs France with a strong arm and an iron rule.”
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For evangelicals, the desecration of democracy and the escalating violence in Kansas were mere preludes to a larger conflict to cleanse America, and the world, from sin. If the West held the brightest promise for the fulfillment of America's divine mission, then Kansas was now its vital center. “It is obvious … that the great conflict is … marshaling the two orders of civilization to a final encounter.… Kansas … the geographical centre of the western continent, is also the pivot of its most vital and determinative controversy.… [W]hat France is to Europe—this region of Kansas will be to the great valley of the west. It holds the key to … civilization.… [F]rom its capacious womb shall proceed the busy millions destined to redeem or to disgrace the extensive fields beyond.” Would America lose or sustain its role as a light unto the world?
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Though the retreat from the rule of law in Kansas troubled Americans, violence per se no longer seemed a sinister subversion of democracy. Rather, more Americans believed that the fate of their institutions, and now their very lives, depended on meeting the enemy with force in kind. Violence as a solution to removing threats to American destiny, whether in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in Texas, or on the Great Plains, was nothing new. The enemy now, however, was not an alien religion or alien “races” but each other. Abolitionists, who, for all their rants against compromise, the Constitution, and the laws of the land, had rarely abandoned their pacifism, now advocated a strong-armed response. The swift restoration of reactionary regimes in Europe, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had prepared them for this moment. But it was the blood on the Plains that stirred the fires of retaliation in the hearts of the righteous. They now associated cries for “law and order” with Europe's despots, not with democracy. Pennsylvania congressman Galusha Grow argued, “Law and order is the excuse of despotism the world over.… It was to preserve law and order that … the dungeon and the rack silenced the voice of patriotism in Hungary. To preserve law and order, the streets of Naples are crowded with chained gangs … guilty of no offence save that they hate oppression and love liberty.”
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