Grant's Reconstruction and Peace Policy with American Indians
* What: US Grant officially declared an end to the practice of exterminating Natives and replaced Indian Bureau agents with missionaries and military officers to end corruption on reservations. He also used military force to protect Black lives and civil rights during Reconstruction.
* The Number of Lives Saved: The number of battles between the US Army and Native tribes declined from 101 in 1869 to only 15 in 1875. Finding numbers on how many lives were saved from improved conditions on reservations is much harder, but there definitely was less corruption. KKK terrorism dramatically declined in states where Grant intervened.
* Who Also Gets the Credit:
* Grant's Director of the Indian Bureau, Ely Parker, the first American Indian director, was from the Seneca nation. Parker was a military engineer in the US Army and later Grant's military secretary. It was Parker who actually wrote out the surrender terms at Appomattox. Parker was only at the Bureau two years, but he set the policy under Grant's orders. An opponent fabricated a scandal that cost Parker his office. He was found innocent of all charges.
* Missionaries from churches who actually ran the reservations for an eight year period. The reservations were divided up between the denominations very arbitrarily. Most missionaries had honest records, but very paternalistic ones as well. Cultural assimilation was the goal, and many missionaries had a poor understanding of the people they were theoretically there to help. Culturally, they could be quite destructive. In terms of stopping deaths, they had a far better record.
* General George Crook spoke on behalf of the Ponca in the Standing Bear case, lobbied for Apache scouts falsely imprisoned, and spent his years in retirement speaking for better treatment of the same Indian tribes he fought.
* Newspaper editors and activists who took up the American Indian cause, notably Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Century of Dishonor, and Thomas Tibbles for his involvement in the Standing Bear case before the Supreme Court.
* Natives themselves, notably activists Standing Bear, Suzette Laflesche, and Sarah Winnemucca. Later Native activists George Eastman and Carlos Montezuma also played a role, though in the decades after the Peace Policy, in lobbying for more humane treatment.
* The Standing Bear case was the most important one in granting Natives legal rights under US law for the first time. Standing Bear was imprisoned for leaving the reservation for a funeral. He, Laflesche, and Tibbles successfully argued before the courts for a writ of habeas corpus. The court ruled the federal government was legally bound to treat Indians as wards of the state and provide healthcare, education and legal protection. Indians could now sue the federal government when treaties were not honored.
* So called Radical Republicans were not radical at all by today's standards. Their ideas seem fairly moderate today, that Blacks should have voting and civil rights and not be murdered for practicing either. It was Radical Republicans who fought President Johnson’s and former Confederates’ racism every step of the way and who pushed far more consistently than Grant.
* A more corrupt and mercenary wave of Republican leaders came into power when the Compromise of 1876 betrayed Black civil rights. In the Compromise, Republican leaders stole the presidential election and agreed to withdraw federal troops from southern states, giving up local control to white supremacist former Confederates.
* Grant came into office denouncing what the previous president, Johnson, had done. Johnson was notoriously incompetent, often a drunk, and a racist who did all he could to favor white southern racist elites over newly freed Blacks. (See Section Five.) In Reconstruction, Grant's policy was mixed. He sought to protect Blacks from terrorism and guard their civil rights as valued Republican allies. It was under Grant that the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, and he pushed states to ratify it. He put Georgia under martial law to stop KKK terrorism and suspended habeas corpus in South Carolina, arresting many Klansmen.
* Grant appointed an attorney general and solicitor general who ordered indictments of over 3,000 Klan terrorists, with about 600 convictions. But as the numbers show, Grant did not go far enough. Juries feared reprisals from terrorists. Most Klansmen were not convicted, and those that were got small sentences or fines. Grant finally decided he wanted reconciliation with Confederate traitors. He was far too lenient and granted many of them amnesty for their treason during the Civil War, pardoning all but a few hundred.
* It would not be until occupying Germany after World War II that the US learned the right way to deal with a defeated enemy with an evil ideology determined to start wars: execute all the leaders guilty of war crimes and waging aggressive war, while removing the rest from government for good. Germany even permanently banned the Nazi Party and its symbols. The US would have been a far better nation had the same been done to Confederate traitors. Instead the US sees the surreal situation of millions of Americans wearing a symbol of treason and being taught to admire traitors who tried to destroy the US because of their own fanatic belief in white supremacy.
* For his Peace Policy, Grant appointed a ten man Board of Indian Commissioners to advise him and oversee the Indian Bureau. All ten were Protestant ministers or missionaries, serving without pay. The reservations were no longer run by corrupt agents. Instead, missionaries (including Catholic ones) or Army officers were the ranking bureaucrats on agencies.
* Grant's approach, combined with that of public reformers and Natives themselves, was one of cultural assimilation. Grant, reformers like Tibbles and Helen Hunt Jackson, and even Native activists like Laflesche and later Eastman and Montezuma, all favored an end to some Native traditions. All believed in integrating Natives into capitalism and most aspects of western culture. Most Native activists like Winnemucca and Eastman, and even a few white ones, did want to see many aspects of Native cultures continue, though integrating them with adaptation to white society.
* Grant was largely unconcerned with cultural issues. He was elected with the slogan, “Let us have peace.” In his address to Congress in 1872, he spoke of “wars of extermination” as “wicked and demoralizing” and wanted to limit violence. Unlike the later Indian Boarding Schools (See Section Eleven) Grant's methods tried to avoid force. Native reservations, once intended to be dumping grounds with the worst land few whites wanted, were now to be safe havens from white colonists' violence.
* This did mean getting tribes to reservations and asking them to give up hunting lifestyles. Though almost all tribes were already farmers, their farming was now to be for markets, not for subsistence. Tribes who had before entered into treaties with Congress now could only turn to military officers for agreements. Where tribes had been independent peoples, now Natives became US citizens if they left the reservation and assimilated. Putting missionaries in charge of reservations guaranteed that not only would there be a push to train Natives in vocations, but also to Christianize them.
* Grant personally met with Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and treated them much like any other foreign dignitary. Both men told Grant about invasions of their homeland, so Grant ordered the military to keep white colonists off Native land even though it made him very unpopular with western voters. Yet there were limits to Grant's claimed good intentions. If tribes did not move to designated land by choice, they were taken by force. Ultimately the federal government still insisted on the final say, and the intent was still to remake Natives in the white man's image.
* But in largely stopping warfare and turning away from extermination, Grant's change in approach was largely permanent. The list of Native peoples outright massacred by the US Army and white colonists before Grant is disturbingly long. (See Sections Two and Five.) In California alone there were dozens of extermination attempts and outright genocide. During eight years of the Peace Policy, there were still five massacres of Natives. After the Peace Policy, the list of massacres is thankfully shorter, five massacres in thirteen years. The last massacre was in 1890, over 300 dead at Wounded Knee. It may seem strange to point to “only” hundreds of deaths compared to hundreds of thousands of deaths as an improvement. But it clearly was, by a factor of over 100, and one Grant deserves credit for.
* What started Grant's Peace Policy was his disgust at the massacre of Indians. Custer's defeat, and the shocked public reaction, largely marked its end. Though Custer was the aggressor and his men's deaths were largely his fault, to much of the white public he became a martyr. (See Section Ten.)
* Parts of the Peace Policy stayed in place. Indian Commissioners continued until the 1900s. The end of treaties, replaced with federal agreements negotiated by officers, also stayed. Some parts worsened. Indian boarding schools abused Native children, killing thousands by disease. (See Section Eleven.)
* For both his efforts in Reconstruction and his Peace Policy, Grant was inconsistent and did not go nearly far enough. His missionaries did not break up the corruption, only lessened it. He did not use enough troops or enough force to stop white racists from killing either Blacks or Indians. The best solution is one he did not consider, giving both Blacks and Natives the means with which to defend themselves and become self-sufficient.
* But for saving many lives and fighting racism, though not saving all he could have and fighting as strongly as he should have, Grant still deserves credit. Thousands of Blacks and Natives living is worthy of praise. Grant, though not as much as Lincoln, was a strong example of an early anti-racist president. There were other potential presidents, William Butler and Hannibal Hamlin, who would have gone even farther than Grant or Lincoln did. (See Section Ten.)