The article makes the case that the Indian policy of the Lincoln Administration was bad. Which we could justifiably say about every Presidential administration from Washington to Bunker Boy. But obviously - or maybe not so obviously - there were big variations.
But that argument is essentially prefaced by a few paragraphs on protests and one statue toppling in Denver that targeted Union Civil War monuments because during the war some of the Union Army was carrying on the brutal settler-colonial policy that Europeans and then Americans had been pursuing in the Western Hemisphere since 1492 or so.
I don't know enough about the local politics to know how clear the symbolism was locally on the statue-toppling. I can't work up the emotion to cry for statues. Unless they are at least 500 years old and some kind of world heritage thing.
But I also think, as I've written here before, that Status Quo Joe Biden made a good point recently about Confederate symbolism. But still, his (only somewhat garbled) point was that everyone understands that Confederate monuments represent white supremacy and white racism against African-American, although of course Confederate idolaters pretend otherwise. It's also an issue that lends itself well to simple-if-accurate dichotomies: patriotism (the Union) vs. treason (the other side), freedom versus slavery, democracy versus a slave republic. I think that for various reasons, people have become a lot more familiar with the argument over the last 20 years or so. People who didn't grow up hearing the Lost Cause hoo-ha endlessly (as us white Southerners of my age did) can actually pose literate questions in a regular conversation like, "Robert E. Lee's main accomplishment was killing large numbers of soldiers of the US Army. Is that something you really want to honor as an admirable thing?"
But I've also decided that for the general public, anything before 1860 is pretty much a blur. People at least have images and ideas from movies and the History Channel to be able to talk about Abraham Lincoln or emancipation. But the Compromise of 1820? Bleeding Kansas? The politics of the Mexican-American War? Only if you happen to be talking to a history geek.
And the same goes for the military actions against Indians in the West during the Civil War. Because military actions there were relatively small, they don't attract anything like the interest of the big battles between the Union and Confederate armies.
Part of Nelson's argument is that the Union basically had nothing to worry about from the Confederate Army in the West, at least not after the summer of 1862:
More than 600 men enlisted in the 1st Colorado Infantry and trained outside Denver, while several “independent” companies left for New Mexico in January 1862, joining a diverse fighting force of more than 3,000 Army regulars, Hispano New Mexican volunteers, and Ute and Pueblo scouts. One of the larger regiments in this army, the 1st New Mexico Volunteers, was commanded by Carson, who had enlisted at the outset of the war. In February 1862, the Army of New Mexico clashed with Confederates at the Battle of Valverde and lost.A HistoryNet review of her book (James Broomall, The Confederacy’s Bid for a Continental Empire n/d; accessed 07/13/2020) notes, summarizing and commenting on her account:
The Confederates took Albuquerque and Santa Fe before meeting the 1st Colorado Infantry and Army regulars at Apache Canyon and Glorieta Pass. At Glorieta, the commander of Union forces sent a contingent of Colorado troops to get behind the Confederate line and destroy the wagon train. Their success in this endeavor, led by a minister from Denver named John Chivington, meant that the Confederates’ conquest of the West was over. They could not hope to survive in the high deserts of the Southwest with no supplies. [my emphasis]
After the Texans retreated to San Antonio in the summer of 1862, some Colorado troops stayed in New Mexico for a few months.
The New Mexico Territory drew Confederates’ attention because it served as a key thoroughfare “to access the gold in the mountains of the West and California’s deep-water ports.” The mines and trade would underpin white Southerners’ future campaigns of conquest. The Confederates met early success and through proclamation stretched their new nation from the Atlantic to California. As war raged across Native homelands, Apaches and Navajos used military campaigns to gain resources vital to the recapture of lands lost during the antebellum era. They made peace treaties, raided military forts, and traded with Anglos as opportunity arose.That puts in better perspective something that is missing from the Atlantic piece, a picture of how Western Indian policy during the Civil War fit into the larger national strategy. That the West should be settled and developed with infrastructure like railroads was in itself not an issue between the slave and the freed states prior to the Civil War. (BTW, I'm having to get used to avoiding the term "antebellum", which prior to this year I had assumed was unburdened with ideological baggage.)
Nelson maintains that the summer of 1862 proved a watershed moment in the West. With military defeats, Confederates “put their dream of a continental empire of slavery on hold and focused all of their attention on winning the war in the East.” Yet the West continued to drive policy in the East. Federals turned their attention from Confederates to the expansion of empire. The Lincoln administration approved reservations and pushed for railroads. By the late 1860s, hundreds of thousands of Anglos had spread west and transportation networks, fully realized by the 1880s, tied the Atlantic to the Pacific by railroad. [my emphasis]
California was part of the large territory captured in the Mexican-American War, and became a state in 1850. Oregon became a state in 1859. Washington Territory was created in 1853. So the United States was already a West Coast nation when the Civil War began. The railroad project had been delayed because the slave states wanted a Southern route for the railroad and the free states wanted a route further north. The project was stymied in Congress because of that. The secession of the Confederate states allowed the project to be approved and proceed on the terms preferred by the free states. I know of no reason to think a victorious Confederacy would not have pushed for the railroad, although that is speculation.
The Civil War was a conflict between two groups of states over slavery, its existence and its expansion. The political community was all but exclusively a white one, with no voting rights for women, in both the US and the Confederacy. But there were free blacks in both halves, obviously more so in the North, and black soldiers played an important role as soldiers in the Union Army. And that war took place within the longer span of the settler colonial project that both sides of the Civil War shared.
Nelson's Atlantic article probably leaves the impression on many readers that the Lincoln Administration was carrying on a concerted Indian war in the West, maybe even in disregard of the goals of the Civil War. But, as she writes, as quoted above, "After the Texans retreated to San Antonio in the summer of 1862" - after what she calls the point when "the Confederates’ conquest of the West was over" - "some Colorado troops stayed in New Mexico for a few months".
Many of these were reorganized and sent east to fight Confederate guerrillas; others served as a “home guard” along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, to defend white communities against Plains Indian raids. The 3rd Colorado Cavalry, organized specifically to fight Native peoples, moved south in November 1864 and launched an unprovoked attack on a nearby Cheyenne and Arapaho camp.She describes what happened there and its aftermath as an ugly village massacre with a gruesome display of their victory by this cavalry.
And the implications of the brutal conduct she describes isn't always clear. For instance, she describes directions given by a commander, James Henry Carleton, to the famous Kit Carson. At first reading, it leaves the impression that Carleton directed him to kill all the men among a particular group of Mescalero Apaches and Carson does it. But looking a bit more closely, was Carleton actually emphasizing the psychological effect of killing some of the men in battle? And did Carson actually execute all the men of the targeted group? I'm willing to believe Carson was a bad guy. But this description really isn't as clear as one might wish.
Moral judgments, national strategy, and historical understandings
Since the opening paragraphs link the story about the Union and the Indians in the West to the current use of Confederate symbolism by antiracism protestors and by Trump's White Power Presidential campaign theme, the article inevitably invites American readers to insert the story into that framework somehow. But beyond the good/bad binary judgment of the incidents she describes, the present-day symbolism story takes place in a much less binary historical context.
When the conversation gets beyond familiar "woke" concepts - slavery bad, emancipation good, US Indian policy bad - you start getting into messy issues, where among other things ethnic-national narratives start stepping on each other. In the case of the Civil War, there were some Indian tribes fighting on the side of the Confederacy, including some Indians that owned black slaves.
Then there is the problem of what I think of as the Tragedy/Happy Ending problem. Contemporary criticism of the European settler colonial project in the Western Hemisphere started early, with Bartolomé de las Casas (Bartolomé de Las Casas, (1474 or 1484-1566) as the earliest significant figure applying what we could call fundamental critiques of the endeavor, using the European and Christian values of his time to make his case. I have no problem viewing the whole project as a kind of Original Sin at the macro level.
But then, we're already bumping up against contemporary "woke" political language, in which African slavery is commonly described as the Original Sin of the United States.
The Original Sin metaphor also raises the gigantic, centuries-long process of settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and within what is now the USA into a sort of immutable fate, which then obscures the actual choices that people and their nations were making during those centuries. The same applies to the tragic framework that is still heavily influential in popular understanding of US history. In that view, the subjugation of the Indian tribes to the United States was inevitable, because the US had a more advanced civilization with military capabilities, an ecobnomic organization for both agriculture and industry, and a level of political unity and effective governance that the Indian tribes had not achieved and could not achieve in time.
The tragic outlook can limit our understanding of the historical events as well as making sensible judgments on actual decisions made. For instance, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the post-Civil War decision to place Indian affairs in the Western territories under the jurisdiction of the War Department were two decision that had huge effects on the native populations affected. Both decisions were heavily contested in real time by Indians and non-native Americans. Whatever larger historical or economic forces may have been at work, those were concrete decisions for which plausible alternatives were available. To use some fashionable academic jargon, the tragic narrative tends to deny agency to the historical actors.
What I think of as the "happy ending" problem has to do with the fact of the United States since the Revolution as a state operating in a system of nation-states that is conventionally dated to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe. Britain, Spain, and France all had North American colonial possessions. The Russian Czar made a minor attempt to establish a colony at what is now Fort Ross, California. Even an Argentine pirate, Hipólito Bouchard, sacked Monterey, then serving as the capital of Spanish California in 1818.
Given this situation, any President in the 18th or the 19th century up until Wounded Knee in 1890 would be heavily inclined to see controlling the continental land mass as a national security imperative. And that meant bringing Indian controlled areas under the control of the United States, as well as taking large parts of what became Mexico after it won independence from Spain. Ugly as the consequences were, what came to be known as Manifest Destiny was not only a part of the larger settler colonial project, it was also reasonably seen by American leaders as a necessary national security imperative.
So when it comes to statues in prominent public places, there will always be room for evolving narratives about them. But the history and the larger judgments about it will always be complicated. The Civil War ended 155 years ago, and we're still working on getting the monuments to the Confederacy down even though the majority understanding of those monuments is based on an anti-Confederate and pro-democracy narrative. But if we take a broad moral view that settler colonialism was such a sin that it "cancels" the validity of everything about political systems that benefitted from it, we arguably have no larger for valuing the Union side in the Civil War as substantively superior to the Confederacy, because both embraced the longtime Indian policy of the country.
And once you start making that argument, you're at a point where neo-Confederate hacks will be happy to pick it up. Because denying the moral superiority of the Union is a central aspect of the neo- Confederate narrative.
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