Native Americans in the US Civil War

For a majority of Americans, the American Civil War was a war to end slavery in the South. The nuances of the debate over a state’s right to secede or the degree of control by the federal government, indeed most issues related to the United States Constitution, are ignored in favor of a narrow, easy to understand idea. Yet within the indigenous nations of North America a separate Civil War was raging. The motivations for Indians were often similar to white Americans, but also included past grievances against the United States that were unique to Native Americans. Unlike the states that seceded from the Union, the American Indians who enlisted, either as part of their tribes’ support for a side or as individuals, considered themselves as sovereign people with the power to decide their own fate. However, the choices made by the leaders of the Indian nations gave further impetus to the white war on Native Americans.

The motivations for choosing a particular side in the Civil War compared favorably to white motivations, but were dissimilar in a number of respects. For the Cherokee, the plight of the South bore more than a passing similarity to the centuries of strife Native Americans faced from Europeans. In declaring themselves independent from the United States, the leaders of the Cherokee nation declared that

Foreign mercenaries and the scum of cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted and organized into regiments and brigades and sent into Southern States to aid in subjugating a people struggling for freedom, to burn, to plunder, and to commit the basest of outrages on women; while the heels of armed tyranny trod upon the necks of Maryland and Missouri, and men of the highest character and position were incarcerated upon suspicion and without process of law in jails, in forts, and in prison-ships, and even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a President and Cabinet ministers…[1]

Aside from the references to Maryland and Missouri, this declaration seemed more a reiteration of wrongs committed against Indians than an enumeration of Union injustices against the South. Further, a core issue raised by the Cherokee in their declaration of independence was the “fate befallen those of their race in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon…” which was very much a separate issue than the issue of slavery or states’ rights. The Cherokee, then, found common cause with other Indians as well as with the Confederacy.

The Cherokee declaration of independence from the United States did not come immediately with the secession of the South. A principal signer of the Declaration of Causes, John Ross, was a conditional Unionist. While other members of the Cherokee leadership, most notably among them the future Confederate general Stand Watie, urged Ross to accept an alliance with the Confederate States, negotiated by Confederate agent Albert Pike, Ross urged his people to forego any alliance with the Confederacy and adhere to a policy of strict neutrality.[2]

Other Indian nations, such as the Chippewa, were actively pursuing support for the Union. Hole-in-the-Day, a prominent Chippewa chief in Minnesota, volunteered a hundred of his warriors for the war against the Confederacy on May 1, 1861, but was dismissed out-of-hand a week later by Secretary of War Simon Cameron with the statement that the secession of states “forbids the use of savages.”[3] H.B. Branch, of the Central Superintendency, explained his opposition to the enlistment of Native Americans by stating, “The Indians…must follow the chase, and they cannot engage in war and also pursue the hunt, while civilization and humanity demand that they confine themselves to peaceful avocations…”[4] The imperial paternalism expressed, by viewing Indians as outside “civilization and humanity”, was a further contrast to the South’s willingness to accept Indians as a slaveholding class within its society.

For Native Americans who lived in Border States, such as Arkansas and in Indian Territory, the choice between the Union and the Confederacy was a choice similar to whites. However, for American Indians living on reservations far to the north of significant sectional conflict, the alliances formed between the CSA and Indian nations had profound repercussions on a people already willing to submit to US authority. A cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly during the war illustrates Northerners’ disregard for distinctions in Native American relations. In Figure 1, Indians attack two white settler families. The native men are shown with knives raised above the family in the foreground, with one native holding an infant by the foot and preparing to kill the baby while the baby’s mother begs for mercy for her child. The woman is being pulled backward by the hair, an Indian standing with arm raised in preparation to scalp her. A man, possibly her husband, lies on the ground beside the woman. Another man is shown knifed by an Indian. A jug of whiskey lies at the feet of the third Indian with the words “agent C.S.A.” on the jug. The caption of the cartoon is a quote from Confederate president Jefferson Davis with an explanatory comment

“I am happy to inform you that, in spite both of blandishments and threats, used in profusion by the agents of the government of the United States, the Indian nations within the confederacy have remained firm in their loyalty and steadfast in the observance of their treaty engagements with this government.” The above extract from Jeff Davis’ last message will serve to explain the news from Minnesota. [5]

The situation in Minnesota in 1862, however, was only marginally related to the War Between the States. Rather than being encouraged by Confederate agents, the Sioux in Minnesota were fighting for their treaty rights and for survival. In 1851, the Santee Sioux, now known as the Dakota, ceded 24 million acres to the US government, which immediately opened the land to settlers. The Santee then were forced to cede control of an additional 1 million acres, reducing their reservation by half. Congress only paid 30 cents per acre two years later, less than the average price for prime farmland. 

Simultaneously, the US government was attempting to force American Indians to turn to farming. White traders fronted the Indian farmer’s credit on supplies and then, when the tribe was paid annuities, claimed inflated charges, leaving the native farmers with little or no money. Finally, in the winter of 1861-1862, a major crop failure left the Santee near starvation. Ultimately, the last straw came when the white traders refused to provide credit for food during the winter and spring, because Congress, engaged in funding a war with secessionist states, had not yet appropriated money for the Sioux. When the money did come, $71,000 in gold, it was two months late. On September 5, 1862, the Santee Sioux revolted, attacking the traders and white settlers who cheated them.[6]

The caption of Figure 1, then, becomes a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The Sioux in Minnesota rose against white authority, therefore, the fallacy states, the violence in the northern plains must be a result of Confederate incitement. Unfortunately, the split among Americans during the Civil War was not limited to Euro-Americans, but also to Native Americans. When war erupted between the states, the fourteen thousand Creeks in Indian Territory split roughly evenly along social and cultural lines. The Southern faction was comprised predominantly of educated, mixed-heritage slave-owners who were offered favorable treaties with the Confederacy. The Southern faction of the Creeks signed an alliance in 1861 and began raising troops for service in Indian Territory, Arkansas, and Missouri; the Northern Creeks, less formally educated and non-slaveholders, continued to support the Union.

One of the most ardent supporters among the northern Creeks was Opothleyoholo, who had led three thousand of his people into Kansas late in 1861. He considered Chief Ross “a man lying on his belly, watching for the opportunity to turn over.”[7] Opothleyoholo’s men were the nucleus of the First, Second, and Third Home Guards of Kansas. He best states the cultural split that occurred when he said, “The educated part of our tribes is the worst.”[8] It would ultimately be his fierce resistance against Confederate forces that would encourage the Union to accept the mass enlistment of Native Americans.

The Civil War rent asunder American society. Not only did white Americans face the agony of families divided, but Native Americans faced a more uncertain future if they chose the wrong side. The view that the Minnesota Sioux strife was connected to the Civil War only further muddied the politics surrounding Indian policy. While chiefs like Hole-in-the-Day and Opothleyoholo were as supportive of the United States as any white citizen, their ethnicity set them apart as unworthy, initially, to be Union soldiers. The Confederacy, ironically, had little issue with the formation of native units and the enlistment of Native Americans. The Civil War fought by Native Americans, then, was a war unto themselves.

Figure 1

Bibliography

Freeman, Charles. “The Battle of Honey Springs.” Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 1935, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v013/v013p154.html

Kachuba, John B. “Sioux Terror on the Prairie.” America’s Civil War vol. 10, no 1 (1997):30

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1900, Series 3, Vol. 1, pg 184, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ANU4519-0122

 “The Cherokee Nation Declaration of Causes.” October 28, 1861, http://www.civilwar.com/cherokeecauses.htm

Seccia, Patrick T. “An Officer and an Indian.” Civil War Times, vol. 45. no. 7 (2006): 46-52

Trickett, Dean. “The Civil War in the Indian Territory, 1862”, Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol, 19, No. 1, March 1941, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/chronicles/v019/v019p055.html

unknown artist, Harper’s Weekly. September 13, 1862, http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=September&Date=13

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[1] “The Cherokee Nation Declaration of Causes,” October 28, 1861, http://www.civilwar.com/cherokeecauses.htm

[2] Charles Freeman, “The Battle of Honey Springs,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 1935, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v013/v013p154.html

[3] Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1900), Series 3, Vol. 1, pg 184, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ANU4519-0122

[4] Dean Trickett, “The Civil War in the Indian Territory, 1862”, Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol, 19, No. 1, March 1941, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/chronicles/v019/v019p055.html

[5] cartoon, Harper’s Weekly, September 13, 1862, http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=September&Date=13

[6] John B. Kachuba. “Sioux Terror on the Prairie.” America’s Civil War vol. 10, no 1 (1997):30

[7] Trickett, “The Civil War in Indian Territory 1862”, 64

[8] Ibid

The Lingering Spanish Colonial Legacy of Latin America

Latin America has never truly thrown off the mantle of Spanish colonialism. In the years subsequent to independence from Spain, as political ideologies separated from each other in forms of conservatism and liberalism, conservative leaders would lay claim to the Spanish paternalist policy toward indígenas to garner native support.^[1] Latin American democracy has evolved from the dynamic of opposition by the masses to paternalist ideas promoted by ruling elites, colonial, military, or popular rulers. Paternalism is the lingering colonial legacy of Latin America.

The paternalist attitude has its roots in the earliest heroes of the Latin American wars of independence from Spain such as Simon Bolivar, “the Liberator.” Bolivar was an educated creole who was influenced greatly by Enlightenment ideals. However, in his description of an inherited senate ruling an independent Venezuela, Bolivar claimed that “[d]evoted to the government because of a natural interest in its own preservation a hereditary senate would always oppose any attempt on the part of the people to infringe upon the jurisdiction and authority of their magistrates.” Bolivar continues, “It must be confessed that most men are unaware of their best interests and that they constantly endeavor to assail them in the hands of their custodians…” In this statement, Bolivar simultaneously supports a paternal and conservative political vision. In ensuing years, Bolivar’s larger-than-life mythos would bequeath a heritage of paternalism to succeeding leaders.^[2]

Paternalism is often implied intrinsically in a variety of types of regimes. For example, paternalism is expressed in Argentine sociologist Fernando N. A. Cuevillas’ definition of the caudillo, the politico-military strongman who often controlled the state in Latin American countries:

I would use “caudillaje” to apply to that regime which consists of the personification or incarnation of authority, where he who governs acts with extraordinary charismatic moral ascendancy over his people: advising them, guiding them, leading them paternally. The power of the caudillos is inspired authority before it is juridical authority. Caudillaje appears as a social institution full of ethical content (political and military control, the authentic totality of power, the psychic leadership of the governed, the moral magnetism of the leader’s personality), which makes it most suitable for those States whose political life is determined by the integration of individual and collective traditional values.^[3]

Such a definition of the caudillo fits then Augusto Pinochet of Chile, a dictator who came to power in a 1973 coup d’etat of a democratically elected government. Pinochet established what has become known as a “protected democracy,” a concept incompatible with traditional liberal democracy such as the United States maintains. Protected democracy as described by Claudia Heiss is “the notion that people must be protected from themselves and from organizations that might subvert the existing political order…” Both Spanish imperial masters and New World conservative elites operated as paternalists to maintain the existing political order. Latin American military dictatorships used protected democracy reforms reinforce paternalist policies. For example, Pinochet used a form of protected democracy that imposed the preservation of traditional values such as Roman Catholicism, “love for the fatherland, and a particular understanding of the family…” In taking power, Pinochet claimed to defend these values from foreign as well as domestic threats.^[4]

Traditional constitutional democracy requires that all military forces be subordinate to elected civilian authorities. However, because of paternalist tendencies in senior military leadership, where many caudillos in the Twentieth Century including Augusto Pinochet originated, democratic rule is often challenged by a military that is not effectively under civilian control. Civil-military relations are complicated nearly everywhere in Latin America and are a source of serious tension for many nations. Often this tension is simply a renewal of the struggle against paternalism by disfranchised populations.^[5]

Ultimately, argues Moises Arce, Bolivar’s paternalist heritage has led to a “…sense of marginalization and discrimination alongside a political system that produces strong barriers to genuine participation…” that has contributed to a renewal of protest politics in Latin America. Referring to Bolivia’s struggle for true liberal democracy, Arce offers that “[a]lthough the ability to form coalitions had given the Bolivian party system a measure of stability, these same coalitions had effectively shut out the opposition from access to the decision-making process.” Those frustrated groups shut out of governance have had to resort to “extrasystemic means,” such as demonstration and protest that are integral to a democratic system, to effect change. This conflict is a conflict against traditional paternalism.^[6]

In Bolivia, as in the rest of Latin America, paternalism has created a civil society where paternalism itself is the standard against which to judge the relative development of democracy. Leon Zamosc, in his article “The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador,” uses the definition of civil society as:

the ensemble of social practices that generate a space of voluntary association and the sets of relational networks, or social actors, that occupy that space. Within this scope, the cast of civil society actors includes all voluntary groups formed or the sake of the common aspirations and concerns of its members. This formula is useful because it grasps civil society on its own terms, avoiding the pitfalls of definitions that imply assumptions about its relationships with the political institutions, such as the idea that civil society is necessarily autonomous from the state, necessarily opposed to the state, or necessarily good for democracy.^[7]

By addressing Latin America on its own terms, paternalism, the implied or explicit idea that “men do not know what is in their own best interest,” comes into focus as a source of conflict, irrespective of the socioeconomic origins of a given regime.

In Pinochet’s departure from power and the ending of his Chilean dictatorship, he reinforced the state paternalist structure formally through arbitrary reforms of the Chilean constitution, this time by granting the military budgetary and administrative autonomy. In the new system that would fill Pinochet’s place, Heiss states the military was “…a guardian to defend the nation against threats but also to decide when such threats existed…” Even a duly elected legislative body or an independence judiciary was insufficient to protect the masses from themselves. Military functions were actually expanded in post-dictatorship, nominally democratic, Chile.^[8]

The idea that there needs to be a “watch dog” of sorts at the national level of governance was also a paternalist impulse expressed by Simon Bolivar in his proposed 1826 constitution of Bolivia. He devises a fourth branch of government he calls “the Censors” that “…are the prosecuting attorneys [fiscales] against the government in defense of the Constitution and popular rights…” The Censors would “safeguard morality, the sciences, the arts, education, and the press. The Censors exercise the most fearful yet the most august authority. They can condemn to eternal opprobrium arch criminals and usurpers of the sovereign authority. They can bestow public honors upon citizens who have distinguished themselves by their probity and public service. The scepter of glory has been placed in their hands…” Pinochet’s autonomous military filled much the same role as Bolivar’s Censors.^[9]

Similarly, because of Bolivar’s inherent paternalism, it is in him that an early dynamic, the conflict between a paternalist government and popular government, for the evolution of democracy in Latin America can be witnessed. In the same remarks to the 1812 Congress of Angostura, in which he declares that “most men are unaware of their best interests, Bolivar naively proclaimed that a “…hereditary senate, as a part of the people, shares its interests, its sentiments, and its spirit. For this reason it should not be presumed that a hereditary senate would ignore the interests of the people or forget its legislative duties.”^[10]

Democracy does not preclude paternalist ideas from being expressed. Most of Latin America’s political leadership today is market-oriented, centrist, or right-leaning. However, according to Antonio de Aguilar Patriota, Brazil’s ambassador to Washington. “The categories of leftists and rightists don’t apply so well to what’s happening today in South America…They don’t capture the political dynamics of the moment. These days democracy is taking root. All governments in South America are democratically elected.” Through the economic policies of Latin America governments, paternalism can still be observed.^[11]

Economically, paternalism can be seen in market reforms that are considered “neoliberal” in nature. Moises Arce notes that market reforms are executed from the top-down with little or no input from legislative bodies or social groups, excepting those groups that support the economic reforms. Latin American countries, and the majority of residents of those countries, were “presumed to be passive recipients of state initiatives, incapable of resisting, modifying, or reversing the implementation of these policy reforms…” Literature relating to Latin American economic reforms “remains overwhelmingly state centric, treating societal actors as too dramatically weakened and fragmented to react against the economic policies that challenge their lives.”^[12]

Paternalism as an ideology of a ruling elite, either elected or dictatorial, warps the perception of democracy by those in rule. It is the frosted lens that prevents popular democratic governments with a full cross-section of the diverse Latin American population. Eduardo Galeano best describes the schism between paternalist rulers and those ruled. “Reality is what it is, not what it is wished to be by those who first confuse it with heaven and then assume the right to confuse it with hell… And the reality is that Latin American democracies want to be real democracies…But any dynamic democracy, transformer of reality, is dangerous to the structure of impotence.”^[13]

Bibliography

Arce, Moises and Roberta Rice. “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia.” Latin American Research Review 44, no. 1 (2009): 88-101. http://proxy01.ccis.edu:2096/journals/latin_american_research_review/toc/lar.44.1.html

Bolivar, Simon. “The Congress of Angostura, 1819,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Bolivar, Simon. “The Constitution for Bolivia, 1826,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Burns, E. Bradford, ed. “The Challenge to Democracy,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993

Cuevillas, Fernando. Quoted in “The Caudillo in Spanish America,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Flamini, Roland. “The New Latin America.” CQ Global Researcher 2, no. 3 (March 2008): 57-84.

Galeano, Eduardo. “Masquerading Reality,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, edited by E. Bradford Burns. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Heiss, Claudia and Patricio Navia, “You Win Some, You Lose Some: Constitutional Reforms in Chile’s Transition to Democracy.” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 3 (March 2007): 163-190. http://proxy01.ccis.edu:2096/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/toc/lap49.3.html

Keen, Benjamin and Keith Haynes. A History of Latin America. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Zamosc, Leon. “The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador,” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 1 (Fall, 2007): 1-34. http://proxy01.ccis.edu:2096/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/toc/lap49.3.html

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[1]. Benjamin Keen and Keith Haynes, A History of Latin America, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2009) p. 196

[2] Simon Bolivar, “The Congress of Angostura, 1819,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns, p. 54

[3]. Qtd. in “The Caudillo in Spanish America,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns, p. 63

[4]. Heiss, Claudia and Patricio Navia, “You Win Some, You Lose Some: Constitutional Reforms in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 49, no. 3, March 2007. p.167

[5]. “The Challenge to Democracy”, Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns (Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 1993), p. 322,

[6]. Moises Arce and Roberta Rice. “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia”, Latin American Research Review, vol. 44, no. 1, p. 91

[7]. Zamosc, Leon. “The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador,” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 49, no. 1, pg. 3

[8]. Heiss, “You Win Some, You Lose Some,” 167

[9]. Simon Bolivar, “The Constitution for Bolivia, 1826,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, p. 57

[10]. Ibid

[11]. Flamini, Roland. “The New Latin America,” CQ Global Researcher, March 2008, p. 59

[12]. Arce, Moises and Roberta Rice. “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia”, Latin American Research Review, vol. 44, no. 1, p. 88-89

[13]. Eduardo Galeano, “Masquerading Reality,” Latin America: Conflict and Creation, ed. E. Bradford Burns., p. 144