The American Indian Under Reconstruction. Annie Heloise Abel
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roar of Federal artillery, to flee away and leave you alone. A delegate has been appointed by the Convention to represent your Nation at Washington. Every effort is being made to secure for you your ancient privileges and customs. Citizens of the Choctaw Nation, it now devolves upon you to do your part. You were once possessed of the most beautiful country between the Arkansas and Red River. - It can again be yours. Not only your present generation, but your posterity demands that you make a quick and speedy return to that Government which has protected you for over half a century, and secure in the future for yourselves and children what you have lost in the past three years for associating with one of the most accursed foes that ever polluted your country.
Citizens, not only your fertile valleys and beautiful hills invite you to the homes which you have deserted, but the Government from which you must ever after look to for succor, bids you come. I take this method, in this, my first proclamation, to say to all of you who are desirous of possessing the homes which you have abandoned, and re-uniting your allegiance to the Government, that has ever been your friend, now is your time. You have nothing to fear and the former blessing which you have derived through a friendly intercourse with the United States Government, will again be renewed.
THOMAS EDWARDS, Provisional Governor Choctaw Nation
FORT SMITH, ARK., March 24, 1864
The governor's proclamation merits no word of praise. Its spirit is the spirit of the self-seeking, of the abjectly craven, and calls, not for commendation, but for execration. By virtue of its issue, Edwards and his associates put themselves into the position of rats that leave the sinking ship. General Thayer presumably sympathised with them and condoned their act since he appears, in the following December, to have honored the governor's requisition for transportation needed for the refugees, who were about to be removed to Fort Gibson; but not so Colonel Phillips. It was not that the doughty Scotchman was averse to what, from his Republican point of view, might be regarded as the political regeneration of the Indians. None had worked harder to reclaim them than had Phillips. He had personally distributed among the rebellious tribes copies of President Lincoln's amnesty proclamation, notwithstanding that he seriously doubted its strict applicability to the Indian country. Pioneer and hardy frontiersman though he was, the ex-newspaper correspondent was usually found to be magnanimous where Indians were concerned. Maugre that, he hesitated not to disparage the work of the New Hope convention, contemptuously disposed of Delegate Perkins, protested against the acceptance of his credentials, and ridiculed the authority from which they emanated. In his opinion, the Choctaw Nation was yet de facto rebel and deserving of severest chastisement. The minority at New Hope had no official status and were nothing but politic opportunists.
Anticipated chastisement was the open sesame, the cue to all that had transpired. Because of the prompt and wholesale character of their defection, the Choctaw had been a tribe especially singled out for condign punishment. It was its funds more particularly that had been those diverted to other uses by act of the United States congress. Recognized as a powerful foe and by many denounced as a treacherous enemy, the Choctaws had virtually none to state their case except traducers. Few there were among western politicians and army men that had the slightest inclination to deal mercifully with them and Colonel Phillips was not of that few. His animosity expressed itself in no uncertain terms in connection with his denunciation of the New Hope convention; but, perhaps, that was accountable to a sort of irritation caused by the fact that, as he himself reported, the Choctaw was the only Indian nation yet refractory. For the Creek, the Seminole, and the Chickasaw, the war was to all intents and purposes over. Governor Colbert of the tribe last-named was in Texas. He had fled there "on learning of the defeat at Camp Kansas." Into Texas, by the way, there was now going on "a general stampede." "That a handful of men about Scullyville would like to be the 'Choctaw Nation' " was very "probable and that a portion" who had "not fled from the northern section might be willing to accept an assurance of Choctaw nationality, and pay for acting as militia to expel all invaders" was "also probable;" but, all the same a much larger element, meeting in council above Fort Towson, had not even, so far as Phillips could learn, "made up their minds to accept peace."
All plans for the chastisement of recalcitrant Indians took one direction, the direction pointed out by economic necessity, by political expediency, call it what one will, land confiscation. This was the direction most natural and most thoroughly in accord with historical development; but, none the less, it had some special causes. Kansas wanted to divest herself of her Indian encumbrance, from the viewpoint of her politicians the reservation system having most signally failed. Never in all history, so it would appear, has the insatiable land-hunger of the white man been better illustrated than in the case of the beginnings of the sunflower state. The practical effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been to lift an entail, a huge acreage had been alienated that before had been sacred to Indian claims; white men had swarmed upon the ceded lands; and the Indians had retired, perforce, to diminished reserves. A few short years had passed and now those selfsame diminished reserves were similarly wanted for the white man's use; but the question was, Where next was the Indian to go? South of the thirtyseventh parallel the southern tribes were in possession and they were in possession of a glorious expanse as hermetically sealed to other Indians as it had proved to be to southern projectors, railway and other, before the war. Originally conferred by the United States government upon the Five Great Tribes as a sort of indemnity for the outrageous treatment accorded them east of the Mississippi, it had been conveyed by patent in fee simple and was now held under the most solemn of Federal guarantees. It was to be so held exclusively and inviolably forever.
Prior to the formation of the Indian alliance with the Confederacy, that Federal guarantee of exclusive and inviolable possession had been an insuperable obstacle to outside aggression but now all might be changed if only the United States government could be convinced that the great slaveholding tribes had legally forfeited their rights in the premises. In and out of Congress middle-western politicians harped upon the theme but were suspiciously silent on the concomitant theme of Federal responsibility in the matter of rendering to the Indians the protection against domestic and foreign foes, pledged by treaties. Strange as it may seem they never undertook to consider the question of Indian culpability in the light of that rather interesting and additional fact.
It was a fact, indisputable, however, and one that Commissioner Dole liked to insist upon, although even he finally succumbed to the arguments in favor of forcing the southern tribes to receive other Indians within their choice domain. Dole's change of front came subsequent to his visit to Kansas in 1863. On the occasion of that visit it was doubtless borne in upon him that Kansas was determined to accomplish her purpose, willy-nilly, and would never rest until she had forced the northern tribes across the interdicted line. Their aversion to removal was somewhat of an impediment; but that she might overcome by persecution. Persecute them she accordingly did and chiefly in the old familiar southern way, by the taxing of their lands, notwithstanding that it was a procedure contrary to the terms of her own organic law.
In his annual report for that year of his western visit, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs advised a concentration of the Indians since they seemed not to flourish on small reserves. For the man who had always heretofore apologised for the conduct of the Indians this was a sort of opening wedge to a complete change of view. By April of 1864 the change had come and Dole had then the conscience to say that he was "unwilling to renew the treaties with those people (the rebellious tribes) especially the Choctaws and Chickasaws without first securing to the Government a portion of their country for the settlement of other Indian tribes which we are compelled to remove from the States and Territory north of them." The confession was made to Phillips, a Kansas settler, a Kansas politician, if you please, who, in his letter of March 22, had invited it. Upon Schofield's ideas of identical tenor and better-reasoned basis, made some months earlier and referred to him, Dole had not seen fit to so much as lightly comment and he had repeatedly discouraged congressional action looking to the same end.
The mistrust of the Choctaws manifested by Colonel Phillips was fully warranted. The papers, inclusive of President Lincoln's amnesty proclamation, which he had caused to be distributed among the southern tribes, had had their effect and were the direct occasion for the calling of a general council to meet at Tishomingo, March 16 and therefore almost simultaneously with the convention at New Hope. "Seven delegates," reported Superintendent Coffin,