The Dangerous Book of Heroes (18 page)

The abolitionists genuinely thought that stopping the slave trade would lead the British plantations to free their slaves and employ them, as economist Adam Smith had earlier promoted. The majority of transported slaves had been male. With no more arriving—ever—it was in the planters' best interests to promote free families for future labor. Through the fears and stupidity of the plantation owners, this didn't happen.

Rising again to the challenge, the abolitionists mounted another social and political campaign. Granville Sharp, however, had died in 1813, while Wilberforce was then sixty-seven, with failing health, and Clarkson was sixty-six and going blind from cataracts. Thomas Buxton, a young Anglican MP, led the new campaign under the banner of the Anti-Slavery Society. On May 15, 1823, Buxton moved a resolution in the Commons to abolish all slavery in the British Empire. He saw freedom in the empire as the major step in the wider battle for freedom throughout the world, although he was realist enough not “to suppose that we can at once, by a single effort, solve the problem which lies before us.”

That year, in the new colony of Guiana (formerly Dutch Guiana), there was an uprising by thirteen thousand slaves in which two over
seers were murdered. The Dutch colonists proclaimed martial law, hanged forty-seven slaves, and sentenced to death English missionary and abolitionist John Smith for complicity in the uprising. He was imprisoned and died in jail. Smith's death, the first abolitionist martyrdom, became a catalyst for the new cause.

Buxton forced through sweeping reforms for the West Indian and Guiana colonies. They included automatic freedom for all female children born after 1823, abolition of flogging, holidays for religious instruction, a nine-hour working day, savings banks for slaves, and admission of evidence by slaves in court. In 1828 the landmark British ruling was made that “free people of colour in the colonies” have legal equality with their fellow citizens. The planters were not pleased.

Government in the British Empire was complicated by the fact that each colony had its own separate government. This allowed local representation and administration but also created policy differences with Parliament in London. In 1832, Jamaican colonists threatened to secede and join the United States. Slave conditions in the United States were then horrific, and this threat prompted an uprising by fifty thousand Jamaican slaves. The Jamaican administration was severe, executing one hundred slaves after peace was restored. Upon a wave of revulsion in Britain, Buxton again moved a motion in the Commons for the abolition of slavery in the empire.

On July 26, 1833, the final reading of this bill was passed by the Commons; it became law on August 29. At a stroke, some 800,000 people were freed.

In a clever move, Parliament compensated the planters for half of each slave's market value. On the one hand it pacified the planters; on the other the money enabled them to continue the plantations and other industries and provide employment and apprenticeships for the freed slaves.

William Wilberforce died on the morning of July 29 at his home in Chelsea, aware that the abolition of slavery had been secured. He is buried alongside William Pitt in Westminster Abbey. Thomas Clarkson lived until September 26, 1846, age eighty-seven, and was
buried at home near Ipswich. His last public appearance was to address the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840.

Successive British governments in the 1800s sent the navy and the army around the world to stop slavery, particularly in Africa. Antislavery squadrons patrolled the African coasts, and expeditions blazed paths inland, destroying slave markets and liberating slaves at source.

The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the British Aborigines Protection Society campaigned throughout the world, while Anglican and Methodist antislavery missionaries such as David Livingstone worked at private expense. One missionary, Arthur West, bought the entire slave market of Zanzibar and freed the slaves. Arab sheiks, African chieftains, Turkish emirs, Egyptian pashas, Persian princes, and Sudanese khedives were all coerced by the British to join foreign governments in signing slavery-suppression and abolition treaties. When Zanzibar became British in 1890, the slave market and stockades were blown up and the Muslim slave trade by sea almost totally stopped.

Throughout the 1800s, abolition of slave trades and slavery spread from Britain across the world, but the going was hard. The interests and moralities of African, Arab, and other slavers were far more difficult to change than the opinions of members of Parliament. Slavery ceased officially in the greatest slave nation of all, the United States, in 1865 and in the second-greatest slave nation, Brazil, in 1888.

Astonishingly, some modern revisionist historians criticize the abolitionists. One found it “reprehensible” that abolition of slavery was not the abolitionists' avowed aim until 1823. Yet the British abolitionists made slave trading illegal throughout the empire, believing that without resupply, slavery itself must stop. It didn't, so they then made slavery illegal.

Abolitionists were also accused of being blind to slavery in other parts of the world, in particular the colonies of Portuguese Brazil, Spanish Cuba, and the United States. Yet Clarkson attempted to gain French cooperation, Sharp created the Africa Institution, and Wilberforce forced anti-slave-trade clauses into the Vienna peace treaty. In addition, the British government paid Portugal and Spain to end their
slave trades, the navy stopped the trade at sea, and the government negotiated international boarding rights with every country it could. Short of going to war—and after twenty-two years of world war that was not an option—there's a limit to what can be achieved in a very short time. When you're first, you're breaking new ground.

As it was, the Atlantic slave trade had been stopped after a 420-year history. The abolitionists and British governments campaigned for and abolished slavery throughout most of the world.

The simple truth is that seven thousand years of slavery was turned on its head in just fifty-five years by the British abolitionists. Such was their fervor that they changed public and government endorsement of an economic practice into a perception of a monstrous evil. They changed the world. An amazing grace indeed.

Recommended

A Sailor Boy's Experience Aboard a Slave Ship
by Samuel Robinson

The British Anti-Slavery Movement
by Sir Reginald Coupland

William Wilberforce
by Robin Furneaux

The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery
by C. Duncan Rice

History of Slavery
by Susanne Everett

Gottlieb Mittelberger's Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754
by Gottlieb Mittelberger

T
atanka Iyotake, or Sitting Bull, is the most famous Native American in the world. There are others whose names are widely known—Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Cochise, Hiawatha, and Pocahontas, who lies buried in England—but Tatanka Iyotake is preeminent among them all. He has come to represent the defense and resistance of all Native American nations to invasion and eventual dominance by the United States.

A child of the Hunkpapa band of the Sioux nation, Sitting Bull was nicknamed “Hunkeshnee”—in English, “slow.” Slightly bowlegged, he was not one of the fast, loping Native Americans who could run all day long. But he was brave, he was strong, and even as a child he knew that
his spiritual destiny was to be a holy man. Hunkeshnee earned his proper name in traditional Sioux fashion—through an exploit or event.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

After a Hunkpapa buffalo hunt, the children were reenacting the day's hunting with some of the captured calves when Hunkeshnee was thrown by his pony. A large, angry bull calf turned upon the boy. Defying his nickname, Hunkeshnee quickly turned on the calf and took it by the ears. In a struggle of strength and balance, Hunkeshnee pushed the calf backward until it was forced to sit down on its haunches. His friends shouted, “He has subdued the bull calf! He's made it sit down!” He had earned his man's name.

The Sioux nation comprises seven distinct tribes in three geographical divisions—from east to west across the Great Plains, the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota. Each tribe is further divided into bands. Thus Sitting Bull was of the Hunkpapa band, in the Teton tribe, of the Lakota Sioux. Yet Sioux itself is not a Native American name; it is an English corruption of “Nadowesiwug,” “little snakes.”

A British officer in the mid-1700s, Lieutenant Gorrell, judged the Sioux to be “certainly the greatest nation of Indians yet found…. They can shoot [with bows and arrows] the wildest and largest beasts in the woods at 70 or 100 yds distance. They are remarkable for their dancing; the other nations take their fashion from them.” The living and hunting lands of the Sioux nation then stretched roughly twenty-five hundred miles north to south and six hundred miles east to west—the Great Plains of North America.

When Sitting Bull was born in present-day South Dakota in 1831, the borders of Sioux and U.S. government territory had been agreed upon in a treaty of 1816. Sioux territory included most of present-day North and South Dakota, much of Minnesota, and large parts of Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Wyoming, as well as lands north into Canada. The U.S. government had promised no further incursions into the Great Plains.

However, subsequent treaties were forced upon the Sioux, treaties in which they were persuaded under great pressure to sell their land to the government for practically nothing. Today it would be called compulsory purchase at well below market value. In 1837 all land
east of the Mississippi was sold, and in the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty the majority of Minnesota went the same way. Even so, white settlers and miners broke the new treaty and encroached upon more Sioux land. Although Sitting Bull was brought up along the busy Willow Creek and Grand River, at that time he had little conflict with the settlers.

During his childhood and youth his skirmishes were with the traditional enemy, the Crow, another Plains nation. He first fought when he was fourteen. In a raid upon the Crow he killed his first man, to return with a scalp about the size of a silver dollar hanging from his belt.

By Sitting Bull's time the traditional dog-and-travois days of the Plains tribes were gone. Sitting Bull rode small horses, descendants of the first horses brought to the continent by the Spanish, British, and French. He rode the broad prairie as well as the uplands and pine forests of the sacred Paha-Sapa, the Black Hills of South Dakota. There he communed with his ancestors and the Great Spirit. Gradually, he became known as much for his spiritual as for his battle leadership, conducting songs and performing rituals such as the Sun Dance. Yet he also became a leader of the Strong Heart warrior society, uniting young warriors from the Lakota and Dakota bands. He was both warrior and holy man.

Sitting Bull's first dispute with the United States did not come until 1863. The Santee Sioux of Minnesota had “rebelled” and killed settlers after the government broke the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty. The U.S. Army conducted a general campaign against all Dakota Sioux, and Sitting Bull became involved. The Santee were defeated, their remaining Minnesota lands seized, and the thirteen hundred survivors transported to a reservation on the Missouri River. The water there was unfit for drinking, rainfall was low, the earth barren, and game scarce. In the first year more than a quarter of them died.

Among the visitors to that reservation was Sitting Bull. It was there that he realized that, despite treaties, he would have to fight to preserve Sioux territory and its peoples. He said of the United States: “This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys
all who are in its path.” This was true, but it's true of all invaders, and at some time every country in the world has been invaded by another. The British Isles, for example, have been invaded and settled by Britons, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Vikings. In turn, Britain invaded and settled other lands, such as Australia and North America.

Sitting Bull fought his first skirmish against U.S. soldiers in 1864 at Killdeer Mountain. The following year, in a major escalation, four columns of white men illegally invaded the Powder River country of the Sioux. One was an armed wagon train of prospectors heading for the Montana goldfields. It was allowed through. Under the 1851 treaty, wagon trains of emigrants bound for the west coast were permitted to pass through Sioux territory and usually managed the journey without incident. Despite the Wild West mythology, more than 250,000 pioneers traveled through Native American territory from 1851 to 1871, and fewer than 400 were killed, mostly in the far west.

Following the trail of two military columns, Sitting Bull and four hundred warriors came upon two thousand soldiers camped on the Powder River. A truce party approached the bluecoats but was shot at without warning. Sitting Bull then engaged the enemy, but fighting mainly with bows and old muskets against rifles and howitzers, he was forced to conduct harrying attacks. However, the soldiers had to kill their starving horses and retreat on foot along the river. The fourth army column arrived to escort the soldiers to Fort Reno, where they were besieged by Sioux throughout the winter. Sitting Bull, meanwhile, led another siege, of Fort Rice in North Dakota.

The 1865 Harney-Sanborn treaty guaranteed to the Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations the vital Powder River country. That area, lying between the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains, was those nations' traditional source of food and clothing, and the best buffalo country in the Plains.

Yet the following year more negotiators arrived from Washington. Because gold had been discovered in present-day Montana, the government wanted a new treaty to allow the building of the Bozeman Trail and a chain of army forts through the Powder River country. It was a direct contravention of the treaty only just signed. At those
negotiations, which took place at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, the Sioux discovered from the U.S. Army that the road was to go ahead with or without their approval. Chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail withdrew.

There followed two years of intermittent warfare, in which Crazy Horse of the Oglala band of the Lakota achieved military fame. In 1868 the road and forts were abandoned and a new Fort Laramie treaty was signed by Sioux chiefs and the government. The same year, Sitting Bull was elected a principal chief of the entire Sioux nation.

One of the terms of the 1868 treaty stated: “No white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the territory, or without the consent of the Indians to pass through the same.” Another stated that the territory, including the Black Hills and Powder River country, would remain Sioux forever. Chief Sitting Bull joined Red Cloud and Spotted Tail in their second visit to Washington and met President Grant, “the Great Father.” There they discovered that other terms of the treaty—written in English—were not what had been translated to them by Indian agents before they signed.

In the hundred years after 1778—the very first treaty between Native Americans and a U.S. authority—some 370 treaties were negotiated. Like that first treaty, promising the Delaware nation representation in Congress, almost every one was broken or revised by the government. Whenever the government wanted to change the terms, Native American nations were threatened, or attacked, and made to sign a new treaty.

Sitting Bull said of the 1868 treaty: “You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of some fat bacon, some hard tack and a little sugar and coffee.” He did not sign. He and Crazy Horse refused to live in the reservations. On their return home, they took their respective bands northwest into Montana. They lived in the so-called Badlands area of the Bighorn River.

 

Farther south that September, the flamboyant Civil War soldier George Custer, lieutenant colonel to the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Dodge,
Kansas, had winter orders to campaign against villages in the independent Indian Territory (Oklahoma), in retaliation for raids into Kansas. At first light on November 27, in heavy snow, he attacked a Cheyenne encampment at Washita with four columns of cavalry. He captured fifty-one lodges and nearly nine hundred ponies and killed more than a hundred men, women, and children. Unable to take the booty away, he burned the canvas teepees and shot the ponies. So “Long Hair” Custer became known to the Plains nations.

Farther north, relative peace was maintained in Sioux territory with all signatories keeping fairly close to the terms of the treaty—until 1872. Prospectors had passed through the Black Hills, the sacred Paha Sapa, illegally and reported gold deposits. Despite the treaty, a small gold rush began and the Lakota Sioux defended their land, killing some prospectors and chasing others away.

President Grant promised “to prevent all invasion of this country by intruders so long as by law and treaty it is secured to the Indians.” Yet the prospectors and mining lobbies in Washington, D.C., demanded other action from the government.

An army expedition, one thousand of the Seventh Cavalry under the command of General Custer, illegally entered Sioux territory and camped in the Black Hills. Custer wrote that there was gold “from the grass roots down” as well as rich farming and timber land—and gave his report to the newspapers. The gold rush escalated, with hundreds of miners traveling to the Black Hills by the Missouri River and the Thieves' Road.

Another Civil War general, Crook, made a second trip to the Black Hills in 1875 and found more than a thousand miners prospecting for gold. He told them they were in violation of the treaty and ordered them to leave. No action was taken.

Red Cloud and Spotted Tail protested to Washington. The U.S. government responded by sending a commission “to treat with the Sioux Indians for the relinquishment of the Black Hills.”

Chief Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were invited to meet the commission. Sitting Bull responded, “I do not want to sell any land to the government.” He took a pinch of dust from the earth, saying, “Not
even as much as this.” He added: “We want no white man here. If the whites try to take them [the Black Hills], I will fight.” Crazy Horse also refused to attend.

The commission offered to purchase the Black Hills or purchase the mineral rights, and further requested that the Sioux hand over the Powder River country, their vital buffalo lands. Fully within the terms of the 1868 treaty, all offers were rejected; the Paha Sapa was not for sale or lease. Returned to Washington, the commission recommended that Congress appropriate a sum of a “fair equivalent of the value” and force purchase the Black Hills. In other words, break the treaty.

This Congress did, and some fifteen thousand miners flooded into the Black Hills. By February 1876, Generals Crook and Terry had been ordered to prepare military incursions into the headwaters of the Powder, Rosebud, Tongue, and Bighorn rivers in the northern Sioux territory. The first action was by Crook's forces on March 17. Attacking a village of reservation and non-reservation Sioux and Cheyenne, the cavalry rode in without warning at dawn, firing indiscriminately. The survivors fled northeast to Crazy Horse's camp. In turn, Crazy Horse moved everyone north to join Chief Sitting Bull.

In spring, those several thousand assorted Sioux and some Cheyenne moved farther north to the Rosebud River in Montana. It was the annual hunt for food and skins to supply them for the coming year. Forty-five-year-old Sitting Bull led them in a major Sun Dance.

For three days at the huge camp the
warriors danced, shuffling the earth into dust clouds among the teepees. Chief Sitting Bull danced around the Sun Pole for eighteen hours continuously, bled himself with fifty cuts to each arm, and stared into the sun until, in an exhausted trance, a vision came to him. A voice called: “I give you these because they have no ears.” When he looked into the sky he saw bluecoat soldiers falling like grasshoppers, headfirst, into the Sioux camp. Because the white men had no ears and would not listen, the Great Spirit was giving these soldiers to the Sioux to be killed.