Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo

Author:Allen C. Guelzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190454814
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

By 1870, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming all had territorial governments, and Kansas, Nevada, and Nebraska had been admitted to the Union as states. The wartime Homestead Acts unloaded publicly owned land there at fire-sale prices, often without much regard for the arability of lands where average rainfall fell undependably short of what was needed to sustain commercial agriculture. Nevertheless, settlers began moving into the new lands, and railroads laid track to open conduits to markets, beginning with the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Almost all of the financing of the railroads came through federal grants which were the virtual equivalent of the Homestead Acts—over 131 million acres west of the Mississippi. The chief hindrance to this expansion was the presence of the Plains Indians, who had been crowded westward by successive Indian removal campaigns between the Revolution and the Civil War. President Grant’s impulses toward the Plains tribes were well-intentioned but paternalistic. “The Indians require as much protection from the whites as the white does from the Indians,” Grant sharply observed in 1865. “My own experience has been that little trouble would have been had from them but for the encroachments & influence of bad whites.” But at the same time, Grant’s notion of protection included “placing all the Indians on large reservations” where “they will live in houses, have schoolhouses and churches, and will be pursuing peaceful and self sustaining avocations”—which, in a word, meant that they too would become part of the new world of free labor. While still general-in-chief, he invited Ely S. Parker, his military secretary and a Tonawanda Seneca sachem, to create a national inspection board to oversee and enforce treaties with the tribes. In 1869, Grant persuaded Congress to create a Board of Indian Commissioners “eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy,” and in the summer of 1870, Grant took the unprecedented step of hosting a meeting in Washington with Red Cloud, the chief of the Oglala Sioux, and Spotted Tail, chief of the Brulé Sioux.

Still, little of what the commissioners recommended in their first report in 1869 would have struck the Plains Indians as especially philanthropic and the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory resented the suggestion that they were a racial problem similar to Southern blacks. (The Cherokee, in particular, complained that they were “vastly superior, in every respect, to any portion of the Negro race” and urged whites “to draw the necessary distinction between Indians and negroes.”) Even Ely Parker dismissed the notion of signing treaties with the Plains tribes because “the Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government.” Moreover, whatever effectiveness the commissioners hoped to exercise was undermined by squabbling within the board, accusations of corruption (which led to Parker’s resignation and a congressional investigation in 1871), bickering over jurisdiction between the Interior Department and the War Department, and an ongoing rumble of tribal

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