The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [166]
To be sure, equality remained a distant dream. The idea of a white America did not die with the Civil War, nor did blacks’ own emigration efforts. But colonization as an official policy was dead. Frederick Douglass offered the most fitting obituary. In a reply to a public letter by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair promoting the idea, Douglass dismantled one by one the arguments for colonization. Neither racism nor race conflict were immutable, and there was no such thing as a people being naturally fitted for a particular climate. More profoundly, the idea of colonization allowed whites to avoid thinking about the aftermath of slavery. It was an “opiate” for a “troubled conscience,” Douglass wrote, which deflected attention from the necessity of confronting the consequences of emancipation.30
The continuing evolution of Lincoln’s attitudes regarding blacks stands in stark contrast to the lack of change when it came to Native Americans. Lincoln’s paternal grandfather, Abraham, after whom he was named, had been killed by an Indian while working on his Kentucky farm, an event witnessed by the seven-year-old Thomas Lincoln. Not surprisingly, this traumatic incident became part of family lore, “impressed upon my mind and memory,” Lincoln later wrote. He mentioned it in the autobiographical sketches he produced for the 1860 campaign. But unlike many frontiersmen and military officers, Lincoln was never an Indian hater. He did not share the outlook, for example, of General John Pope, who wrote in August 1862 when he was dispatched to put down a Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota, “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so,” or of the state’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, who urged Lincoln to approve the execution of all 300 Indians condemned to death by courts-martial in the aftermath of that conflict. Lincoln carefully reviewed the trial records and commuted the sentences of all but thirty-eight. (Nevertheless, this still constituted the largest official execution in American history.) Lincoln subsequently signed a bill for the removal of the Sioux and Winnebago (who had nothing to do with the uprising) from their lands in Minnesota. Overall, not surprisingly, Lincoln devoted little attention to Indian policy during his presidency. He allowed army commanders free rein when it came to campaigns against Indians in the West, with the predictable result that the Civil War witnessed events like the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, where soldiers under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, killing perhaps 400 men, women, and children.31
Lincoln may not have had any special animus toward Indians but he shared the widespread conviction that they lacked civilization and constituted an obstacle to the economic development of the West. The influences that operated to change his views regarding blacks had no counterpart when it came to Native Americans. Blacks came to be identified with the fate of the Union, but key Indian tribes like the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek sided with the Confederacy, making them enemies of the nation’s survival. Indeed, Indian claims to independent sovereignty, while guaranteed by treaty, increasingly seemed at odds with the unified nation-state that emerged from the war. Although some 5,000 Indian soldiers fought for the Union on the western frontier, their numbers were too small to raise the issue of postwar citizenship. Lincoln had virtually no contact with Native Americans either before or during his presidency. He spoke in 1862 with the Cherokee leader John Ross, but nothing came of the encounter. In