The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864
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Various >> The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864
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The Governor was getting deeper and deeper into the pit which he had dug
for the Indian. This last speech was most unhappy and impolitic for the
side he was advocating. It put dreadful weapons into the hands of Red
Iron, which the crafty 'old man eloquent' did not fail to use against
his antagonist.
He makes this manly answer, not at all abashed in the presence of the
chief magistrate:
RED IRON. 'You can take back your money! We sold our land to
you, and you promised to pay us. If you don't give us the money, I will
be glad, and all our people will be glad; for we will have our land back
if you don't give us the money. That paper was not interpreted or
explained to us. We are told it gives about three hundred boxes
($300,000) of our money to some of the traders! We don't think we owe
them so much. We want to pay all our debts. We want our Great Father to
send three good men here to tell us how much we do owe, and whatever
they say, we will pay; and (pointing to the Indians) that's what all
these braves say. Our chiefs and all our people say this.'
And the Indians responded with the usual 'Ho! ho!' of acquiescence.
But the Governor don't see it. A poor devil of an Indian, according to
his Christian conviction, ought to be content to pay unaudited, untaxed
bills, wherein the margin is broad enough for any scoundrel to do his
robberies by tens of thousands. So his excellency told Red Iron:
GOVERNOR. 'That can't be done!' [Nay, more confounding and
appalling still, he added:] 'You owe more than your money will pay, and
I am ready now to pay your annuity, and no more; and when you are ready
to receive it, the Agent will pay it.'
Red Iron replies in a speech full of pathos:
RED IRON. 'We will receive our annuity, but we will sign no
papers for anything else.' [You've swindled us enough, lied to us deep
enough already, and we have no belief in your words or agreements.] 'The
snow is on the ground, and we have been waiting a long time to get our
money. We are poor; you have plenty. Your fires are warm; your _tepees_
(wigwams, tents) keep out the cold. We have nothing to eat. We have been
waiting a long time for our moneys. Our hunting season is past. A great
many of our people are sick for being hungry. We must die because you
won't pay us. We may die! but if we do' [hold on, reader! no curses on
the white men are coming next, as one might naturally expect, either
from Christian or heathen orator, under the circumstances!]--'but if we
do,' he continues, 'we will leave our bones on the ground, that our
Great Father may see where his Dacotah children died!' [He has seen many
such shambles, O thou eloquent Indian! eloquent to ears of flint and
hearts of granite! and I never heard that the 'Great Father' ever shed a
single tear over them.] He goes on: 'We are very poor. We have sold our
hunting grounds, and with them the graves of our fathers. We have sold
our own graves.' [Out of all those hundreds of thousands of acres, not
six feet of earth, which they could call their own, left for any one of
them!] 'We have no place to bury our dead, and you will not pay us the
money for our lands.'
I give this interview, and what transpired there, as a sample of the
treatment which the Indians were in the habit of receiving at the hands
both of the General Government and the State authorities. Not the wisest
kind of treatment, one would think, this which Red Iron received, taking
all the circumstances into account. The reader will be surprised,
however, that Governor Ramsey, not content with 'breaking' the chief, as
he called it--the greatest dishonor which he could inflict upon an
Indian of rank--sent him, when the council broke up, to the guard house,
under an escort of soldiers! This impolitic official ought to have
remembered that the fire was even then ready for the kindling, which
finally burst out in such fearful devastation over his devoted State;
that it was enough to have cheated the Indians, without thus inflaming
their already excited passions, by heaping so great an indignity upon
the person of their chief. But he was regardless of everything except
the display of his own power and authority. No doubt he thought he was
acting for the best, and that the dirty redskins needed to be held with
a high hand. But it was bad thinking and doing, nevertheless; a most
shortsighted and foolish policy, which came wellnigh, as it was, to an
Indian outbreak.
The braves of Red Iron retired under the leadership of Lean Bear, a
crafty fellow, eloquent in his way, and now irreconcilably mad against
the whites; and when he had led them about a quarter of a mile from the
council house, they set up a simultaneous yell, the gathering signal of
the Dacotah. Ere the echoes died away, Indians were hurrying from their
_tepees_ toward them, prepared for battle. They proceeded to an eminence
near the camp, where mouldered the bones of many warriors. It was the
memorable battle ground where their ancestors had fought, in a Waterloo
conflict, the warlike Sacs and Foxes, thereby preserving their lands and
nationality.
A more favorable occasion, a more fitting locality for the display of
eloquence which should kindle the blood of the Indian into raging fire,
and persuade him to any the most monstrous and inhuman deeds, could not
have been chosen even by Indian sagacity. An old battle ground, where
the Sioux had been victorious over their enemies; the whitened bones of
the ghastly skeletons of their ancestors who fought the battle,
bleaching on the turf, or calling to them from their graves below to
take God's vengeance in their own hands; the memory of the old and new
wrongs inflicted upon them by the whites; the infuriating insult just
offered to their favorite chief--all conspired with the orator's cunning
to give edge to his eloquence and obedience to his commands.
Governor Ramsey has a good deal to thank God for, that, stimulated by
Lean Bear's rhetoric, the Sioux did not that night attack the whites,
and make an indiscriminate slaughter of the population, as they would
have done, if it had not been for the friendly Indians and half breeds.
Perhaps he thought he was strong enough, for the hour, to defeat them in
any attempt at an outbreak. But it is not strength so much as strategy
which is needed in Indian warfare. To whip the Indians, we must become
Indians in our plan and conduct of battle. The civilization and
mathematics of war, as practised by cultivated people, are useless in
the wilderness, and all our proud and boasted tactics are mere foolish
toying and trifling--a waste of time, strength, and opportunity. No one
doubts that if our troops could meet the Indians in open field, they
would slaughter them like rats; but they know better than to be caught
on the open field, except they are pretty sure of an advantage. They
steal upon you like thieves, shod with moccasons which have no sound;
they think it equally brave to shoot a man from behind a tree as to
sabre him in a hand-to-hand encounter.
It is dreadful to contemplate what an incarnate fiend we have roused in
this cheated, wronged, and despised Indian. I tremble to think of it. I
tremble when I remember also what Bishop Whipple says in the 'Plea,'
from which I have already quoted; they are words which ought to be
thundered continually into the ears of the 'Great Father,' until he
compels a total revolution in our Indian affairs--words which all
settlers in those regions should keep forever present in their minds;
and, with the Minnesota massacres still fresh in their memory, they
should be taught by them never for a moment to trust an Indian, and
never knowingly to give him just cause for complaint; to go always
armed; to organize, in towns, districts, and counties, the yeomen of the
soil, who must be ready at any moment, by night or day, to meet the
treacherous, ubiquitous enemy. These last will be found of more value
than the 'thundering' suggestion contained in the first of these
precautionary propositions. For it is upon themselves that they must
chiefly rely for defence, these hapless settlers! and upon no
Government, and no soldiers.
Think of it, our 'Great Father' at Washington! and you, his unruly
children, you Senators and Congressmen! One of your most loyal citizens
in the State of Minnesota, a Christian bishop, well acquainted with all
the facts, the dodges, lies, frauds, and all the ins and outs of your
Indian administration, declares, with the fullest solemnity which his
office and functions can give to words, and with the voice, not of
prophecy, but of logical deduction, that the same causes which brought
about the Sioux massacre, 'ARE TO-DAY, SLOWLY BUT SURELY, PREPARING
THE WAY FOR A CHIPPEWA WAR!' What a Chippewa war means, those who
did not know in 1861, found out through the Sioux in 1862 and 1863, to
their perpetual sorrow. Like the Bourbons, however, our Government
either cannot or will not learn lessons from experience. If they were
compelled to bear the penalties of their neglect and wanton
maladministration of affairs in the Indian districts, the loss would be
small and the retribution just. But they sit at ease, far away from the
scene of carnage, and 'get' nothing but the 'news,' which they read as
they would any other record of human passion and depravity. It is the
innocent settlers who pay the penalty for the guilt and transgressions
of their rulers.
It is time somebody, or some vast numbers, banded as one man, began to
think upon this threatening question, and to act upon it. It concerns
the faith and honor of this great republic before all the world, that
the wrongs alluded to should be speedily righted. We are not, in
reality, what our Indian legislation would almost seem to accuse and
convict us of, a nation of man-catchers, baiting our trap with fine
farms, and free government, and happy homes, and abundant prosperity of
all sorts, that so we may inveigle the simple minded, and then hand them
over to the tender mercies of the Indians! God forbid that such crimes
should be ours! But there is a coloring of truth about the whole
programme. We invite settlers to populate our vast and wellnigh
boundless wilderness, promising them protection from enemies abroad and
a happy peace at home; and in the same breath we cheat the savages, and
stir them up to hatred and violence against every white man, woman, and
child in the country. This is like preaching security and peace while
your lighted match is applied to the powder barrel. It is a logic which
confutes itself, and needs no _sillygism_ to prove its lying.
Why should we not bravely and manfully, with all the wisdom we possess,
confront and reform the evils and iniquities of this system? It is a
part and parcel of the work committed to our charge, that we shall
wisely deal with this people, until God, by His own mysterious means and
agencies, removes them finally from the continent and the planet. There
is no room for the red man where the white man comes. He _must_ give
way. It is destiny, and there is no help for it. He knows this as well
as we do; and he gnaws the grim fact with the teeth of the hopeless
damned. But why imbitter him needlessly against us, against the
Government, against the people among whom he resides, and over whose
dear lives and properties he holds suspended the scalping knife and the
flaming pine brand? We are unworthy of the sovereign possessions
reserved for us from before the foundations of the world--making the
title deeds, therefore, unusually sound and wellnigh unquestionable--if
we cannot deal like rational men with the hordes of savages, whose lands
we have robbed them of, whom we have reduced to mere pensioners upon
our caprice--not bounty--and so satisfy them and their claims that the
business of human life may be carried on safely in their vicinity and
actual presence. 'Who art thou that saith 'there is a lion in the way'?
Rise, sluggard, and slay the lion! The road has to be travelled.'
We are certainly not afraid of any lion, whether he be red or black;
and, until lately, _both_ these monstrous red and black animals lay in
the direct path of the nation, on which it must travel or perish. We
have pretty well mauled and knuckled the black animal, and wellnigh
settled with his keepers, one and all! but this red lion is of a
different sort, and requires altogether another kind of treatment. We
shall yet save the bruised and bleeding black to the service of
civilization and humanity. He never was half a bad fellow at the bottom
of his leonine bowels, and he already takes to white civility and
customs, like an educated, intelligent, and trusty dog of the 'poor dog
Tray' sort! And I, for one, have more than a sneaking affection for his
old black mug, and a world of hope in his future behavior, if we don't
spoil him for the field and for watch and guard at home, by our infernal
'culture,' as the thing is called.
Is this red lion a more terrible devil to combat, or harder to trick
into civility, or more impervious to the injunctions of the Ten
Commandments? I suppose it will be said that he is; that the black
fellow bolted the whole code at a gobble, and wagged his tail, as if the
feat must surely please his new masters; that he had long had the
benefit of civilized cooking, and knew a gentleman by his toggery; that,
moreover, he was of a teachable, plastic nature, and was meant to lie
down in due time upon the hearth rug before the fire, in any gentleman's
sitting room in the land. It may be true. I believe all this myself, and
a good deal more, about him; and I take renewed hope also for this great
republic--which is the hope of the world!--that it has thus, at last,
tamed him, and fitted him for exhibition upon a nobler theatre than that
of Barnum.
But the red lion, you say, is untamable--cannot be dealt with
successfully by the wit of white men; and that it is best, therefore, to
rob him of the golden apples which he guards, and which are his only
food, and so starve him out. But you can't deal that way with the Indian
lion, my friend, without feeling the taste of his claws. You have tried
it long enough. Bishop Whipple says, 'for fifty years'! And I ask you
how much nearer are you to the taming of him now, than you were those
'fifty years' ago? Echo answers: 'That's an impudent question!' and I
reply, so be it! but you can't shuffle it off in that way. I have tried
my hand at suggesting how imminent dangers, calamities, and horrors may
even yet be averted from the Western settlements; and if those who urge
that justice shall be done to them, equal to that which we here render,
or try or pretend to render to each other--if those who urge this are
not listened to now, their plea will be remembered when it is all too
late, and thousands of innocent people are again murdered, and their
homes laid waste and desolate.
I again say, let no one think by these statements that I am making a
special pleading for the Indians, or that I sanction their butcheries.
God knows how far all this is from my thought or feeling! I am a white
man right through all the inmost fibres of my being: too white, I often
fear; for I find my love of race, and pride of blood and ancestry, often
encroach too far upon the proper regions of my humanity, and threaten to
blear my eyesight to the fair claims of the inferior races.
But I have to do with a thoughtful, reflective, and, at the bottom, just
and humane people; and knowing this, I felt safe, or nearly so, against
all misconstruction, in this my attempt to show that the late Indian
massacres were not instigated merely and solely by the passion of the
Indian for blood, but that they had deeper, broader, more tangible
causes than this, some of which I have briefly hinted at. Woe to them by
whom these butcheries came! Woe also to them who, knowing what must
inevitably result from their foul dealings, continued to deal foully
with the Indian--until the doomsday came!
I have not put in a single tithe of the evidence which I might adduce to
prove my case. It is of no use appealing to the higher powers for
redress. 'I am sick at heart,' says the good Bishop Whipple; 'I fear the
words of one of our statesmen to me were true: 'Bishop, every word you
say of this Indian system is true; the nation knows it. It is useless;
you will not be heard. Your faith is only like that of the man that
stood on the bank of the river, waiting for the water to run by, that he
might cross over dryshod!'' And then he continues, with solemn emphasis
and pity: 'All I have to say is this, that if a nation, trembling on the
brink of anarchy and ruin, is so dead that it will not hear a plea to
redress wrongs which the whole people admit call for reform, God in
mercy pity us and our children!'
BURIED ALIVE.
A Dirge.
"There may be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily."
"A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted."
Deep, deep in the tender heart
Make a grave for the joys of the Past!
Let never a tear fall hot on their bier,
But hurry them in as fast
As we bury the Beautiful out of our sight,
Ere corruption and horror have saddened our light.
Deep, deep in the sinking heart
Make a grave for the dreams of the Past!
Let the shrill cries of pain still assail thee in vain,
Though they follow so wild and so fast:
Through the fibres and sinews, and hot, bloody dew
Let the sharp strokes fall piercing, unceasing, and true.
Call, call on the feverish brain
To bring aid to the gasping heart!
To sustain its quick throbs, to suppress its fierce sobs,
As it must with its idols part:
While the ruthless spade in the grave it has made
Hurries forever the beautiful Dead!
Call, call on the tortured soul
To stand close by the sinking heart,
While the nervous mesh of the writhing flesh,
Shuddering and shivering in every part,
Its strange anguish renews as the hot, bloody dews
Follow the track of the rude spade through.
Call, call on the gifted brain
To send on in the funeral train
Her fair children enwrought from the tissue of thought--
Though their wailing will all be in vain--
Yet shrouded in robes of funereal woe
Let them move on to monotones, solemn and slow!
Rouse, rouse the immortal soul
With its hopes and its visions so bright,
To send them in the train with the thoughts of the brain,
Though their vesture seemed woven of light,
To sigh, wail, and weep o'er the pulse-rhythmed sleep
Of the Dead in their living urn!
Heave, heave the weird sculptured stone;
Press it deep on the throbbing grave!
With a wildering moan leave the Buried alone
In their tomb in the quivering heart:
While it pours its wild blood in a hot lava flood
Round its beautiful sepulchred Dead.
But my God, they are _not_ at rest!
Can they neither live nor die?
See, they writhe in their throbbing grave!
While the nervous mesh of the quivering flesh
Its strange anguish renews as the hot, bloody dews
Follow the track of my Beautiful back
As they rush into life again,
Bringing nought but a sense of pain!
We may bury deep the Past--
Vain is all our bitter task!
It is throbbing, living still, for beyond all power to kill,
It can never find a rest in a woman's stormful breast,
It can never, never sleep rocked by anguish wild and deep,
It can never quiet lie with shrill sobs for lullaby;
And since woman cannot part from the idols of her heart,
And as severed life is Hell for the souls that love too well,
Better far the tender form whose lorn life is only storm,
With the coffined dead should seek
To lie down in a dreamless sleep--
And find rest in the dust with the worm.
Dig a quiet, lowly grave
In the earth where willows wave!
Round the burning anguish deep wrap the cooling winding sheet,
Shroud the children of the brain, and the soul's high-visioned train:
Ah, o'er the snowy sleep let no pitying mortal weep,
For the _weary seek repose_ with the worm!
Creeping pines and mosses grow
O'er the fragile form below!
Violets, bright-eyed pansies wave o'er the lowly, harmless grave;
Let the butterfly and bee all the summer flutter free,
O'er the flowers grown from a heart which no wrongs could ever part,
Nor torture e'er remove from the creatures of its love;
With the wild and feverish brain, and thought's bright but blighted train,
With strong heart, but anguished soul, and pain's weird and heavy dole--
Let the weary, tired form, whose lost life was only storm,
In the shroud's pure snow
Find release from woe,
Nor hope, nor joy, nor love it e'er again would know!
NEGRO TROOPS.
There was a time not long since when the serious consideration of a
question like this would have met with little favor. We remember seeing,
in this city of New York, one genial October day, not very many years
ago, a small company of negro soldiers. They were marching in Canal
street, not in Broadway, and seemed to fear molestation even there. The
writer was a schoolboy then, cadet in a military school (one of the
first established of those excellent institutions), and had, of course,
a particular interest in all military matters. So he stopped to look
upon these black soldiers--marching with all the more pride (as it
seemed to him) because they marched under the floating folds of the
stars and stripes. His boy's heart was stirred by the spectacle, and
full of a big emotion; but the fashion of the times overpowered the
generous impulse, and he treated the negro soldiers with contempt.
This was in the palmy days of the old _regime_. The stifling of that
generous impulse was one of the glories of the old _regime_. Not a
decade of years went by, and the writer stood again in the streets of
New York city, and saw another sight of negro soldiers. It was, indeed,
and in all respects, another sight. This time the black men marched in
Broadway; this time they feared no molestation. It was a balmy day in
spring, and God's sunshine glistened gladly from the bright bayonets of
United States black soldiers. What a spectacle it was! There marched the
retributive justice of the nation--'carrying the flag and keeping step
to the music of the Union.' That march was a march of triumph, and its
sublime watchword was: 'LIBERTY AND UNION, NOW AND FOREVER, ONE AND
INSEPARABLE!'
What a marvellous change in public opinion! Now, negro companies are
treated with respect, negro regiments are honored; because we honor the
defenders of our national ensign, which is the representative and symbol
of our national life. The men who joined so gallantly in the assault on
Port Hudson; who fell so nobly at Milliken's Bend, in repelling the
attack of men whose blackness was not, like theirs, of the outside skin,
but of a blacker, deeper dye, the blackness of treason in their inner
hearts; the men whose blood drenched the sands of Morris Island, and
made South Carolina more a sacred soil than it had ever been before,
because it was blood poured out in defence of the nation's honor, and to
wash out the stain of Carolina's dishonor; these men cannot be contemned
now. They have shown themselves noble men. They have made for themselves
a place in American history, along with their fathers at New Orleans,
and their grandfathers under Washington. And the rebel epitaph of the
brave Colonel Shaw, who led them unflinchingly against the iron hail of
Wagner, is no reproach, but a badge of honor: 'We have buried him under
his niggers.'
Since that memorable assault, another State has witnessed the patriotic
gallantry of these despised 'niggers;' and in the first Virginia
campaign of Lieutenant-General Grant, negroes have borne an honorable
part. There is a division of them attached to the old ninth corps, under
Burnside, in the present organization of the Army of the Potomac. While
that noble army was fighting the battles of the Wilderness, this
division was holding the fords of the Rapid Ann. When Grant swung his
base away from the river, after the disaster to his right wing, and
moved upon Lee's flank, the ninth corps, with its negro division, held
an honorable post in the marching column; and at Spottsylvania Court
House the correspondents tell us how, with the war cry of Fort Pillow in
their mouths, these 'niggers' rushed valiantly to the assault, and
elicited the highest praise for their steadiness and courage. Not less
honorable is the record of the negro troops attached to the cooeperating
Army of the Peninsula. The three extracts from official despatches,
which follow, show what the record is.
May 5th, General Butler telegraphs to Secretary Stanton: 'We have seized
Wilson's Wharf Landing. A brigade of Wild's colored troops are there. At
Powhatan Landing two regiments of the same brigade have landed.'
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