Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS279 In less than 150 pages the author discusses the growth of black slavery among the Cherokees and its abrupt end. He maintains that its image as a relatively mild institution was due to the prejudices of the authors of the reports on which such an assessment was based—authors who were missionaries and Indian Service officials of Southern origin. Halliburton argues that Cherokees were as racist, or more so, than the whites. Moreover, if they differed in their attitudes on the institution it was principally that they "never experienced the inner conflict between slave-owning and conscience, never felt the need to justify slavery morally." A growth in legislation confirming the inferior position of the black slave in Cherokee society, paralleling comparable legislation in the South in the thirty years before the Civil War, is clearly documented. Halliburton is much better on the life style of Cherokee planters than he is on the condition of their slaves. We are told how many windows are in the owner's mansions, and the oft-told story of the marriage of Cherokee youths to white girls of Cornwall, Connecticut, is again repeated. However, there is a distressing lack of evidence dealing with his real subject, Cherokee-black relations. Nor is his thesis quite as original as he suggests. William G. McLaughlin said essentially the same thing in an article in American Quarterly in October, 1974. True, McLaughlin did not provide some of the detail that Halliburton has, but the latter's practice of printing in their entirety legal instruments and personal correspondence not only detracts from the readability of his book, it unnecessarily lengthens the narrative. In an appendix Halliburton presents ten interviews of former slaves in Oklahoma in the 1930's. Unfortunately, they have not been edited and illustrate all the problems one has come to expect from oral history accounts reproduced just as they come from the lips of the informants. Halliburton had a good subject, and his thesis is undoubtedly correct. It is too bad he did not marshal his evidence more effectively. William T. Hagan State University of New York, College at Fredonia Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics. By David A. Nichols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Pp. viii, 223. $16.00.) The Civil War years brought tragedy to western Indians as well as the Blue and Gray on the eastern front. Crushed militarily, the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches were exiled to Fort Sumner on the barren plains of east-central New Mexico. Gold miners overran the Nez Perce country in Washington Territory, forcing this friendly tribe to surrender aboutninetenths of its reservation. Drought-stricken Dakota Territory became the new home of the Santee Sioux, who were driven from the green prairies 280CIVIL WAR HISTORY of western Minnesota following their uprising, provoked in part by the slipshod treatment of federal bureaucrats. Faced byhostile Confederate cavalry, 7,000 loyalist tribesmen from the Indian country beyond Arkansas fled north to Kansas. Many perished there because ofWashington 's neglect. Death came more quickly to nearly 300 Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek; they were massacred by Colorado troops under Colonel John M. Chivington. The uprooting of these and other Native Americans occurred because the Civil War slowed but did not stop the persistent encroachment of frontiersmen on Indian lands throughout the Trans-Mississippi West. The Interior Department's Office of Indian Affairs, charged with protecting these areas and teaching natives the white man's way of life, lacked the capacity and at times the will to reverse the trend. In a volume written a few years ago, this reviewer described the many difficulties encountered by the Indian Office in administering the government's reservation policy in the field—out West on the cutting edge of the frontier. Two of the most serious had their roots in the nation's capital and are the focus of David Nichols' book: the Lincoln administration's preoccupation with the Civil War, and its failure to reform the corrupt and self-serving Indian System. Minnesota Senator Morton S. Wilkinson boasted in 1863 that "there has been a great revolution in the conduct of our Indian affairs since this Administration came...