Race and Radicalism in the Union Army

3. War in the Far West

: three War in the Far West The day after Christmas in 1861, a small army closed on thousands of civilian Indian Territory residents at Chustenahlah, or Patriot Hills. By late afternoon the Texans rolled over the few outgunned and outnumbered warriors who had challenged them.As the Indians scattered, nobody had much detailed information about how many they left behind. The Confederate authorities reported capturing about 160 women, children, and runaway slaves and killing 250 of those who had resisted them. The ratio of killed to captured underscores accounts that the white soldiers slaughtered many Creeks and blacks.The rebels tried to return some runaway slaves who had been “shot and wounded so bad the blood run down the saddle skirts,” until some of them toppled from the mounts,dead.1 The number of fatalities in the short fight surely made this forgotten clash between the new Confederacy and its own civilians proportionately one of the bloodiest of the year. The secession crisis disintegrated the structure of national power, with particularly dire consequences for the peoples of the western border. Nowhere else did the conflict have a more immediately disruptive and devastating impact than it had among the most systematically marginalized Native Americans. Presaging the future of the war among the whites, among people of color the conflict never drew clear lines between soldiers and civilians. The war almost immediately began to destroy slavery, with little regard for War in the Far West / 47 antebellum legal niceties. As a result, this new kind of war created an inescapably multiracial refugee problem that demanded innovative multiracial proposals. : The election of 1860 shattered the Democratic Party’s control over national affairs, which had continued, with few breaks, for a generation.The Republican Abraham Lincoln won by a plurality over the Constitutional Unionists (formerly Whigs) and the Democrats, split between the regulars and the “Southern Rights” faction—the only one of these four that considered secession a viable solution to the sectional tensions.Voters in Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee,Virginia, and much of the South found other alternatives preferable to even the threat of secession, while mere pluralities carried Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, and Maryland for the Southern Rights Democrats, who won a total of only about 570,000 slave-state ballots. Given the long history of rhetorical brinkmanship and sectional posturing, many of those voters probably intended to express no more than a bluff or a willingness to entertain secessionist arguments. Reflecting one southern perception, a Virginian living in St. Louis later dismissed secession as “started by a number of politicians who had been defeated in the national election and were sore on that account.”2 Nevertheless, the president-elect avoided anything that might translate prosecessionsts into a majority after his election. The conservatism of the white southerners provided an initial brake on their political machines, and at first more slave states remained in the Union than seceded from it. State conventions in Missouri and Arkansas flatly rejected secession, although the governors of both states ignored the popular will to order their officials to seize federal property. When a U.S. soldier tore down a secessionist flag in Arkansas and defied an officer’s order to replace it, both civilians and other soldiers cheered as the fellow defiantly tore it up on his way to the guardhouse, and the local blacksmith refused to place the man in irons.3 Nonetheless, the government that admitted Kansas to statehood in March teetered on the brink of disintegration. On April 12–13, 1861, U.S. authorities refused to abandon Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, resulting in Confederate bombardment, the fort’s surrender, and President Lincoln’s call for the states to provide troops for the suppression of the rebellion. This presented the eight slave states still in the Union the alternatives of secession or cooperation in the “coercion” of the seceded Southern states. 48 / race and radicalism in the union army Delaware never seriously considered secession, and hesitant Kentucky adopted neutrality, while armed clashes erupted in Maryland and Missouri between Unionists and secessionist local officials.Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas,andTennessee seceded,and the Confederacy subsequently claimed Missouri and Kentucky as well. The white male voters of these thirteen Confederate States generally had little voice in the matter. Only three—Texas,Virginia, and Tennessee— submitted the politicians’ decision to the voters, and two of these referenda took place only after the onset of war,martial law...