Do you remember the pillow shams of the gay nineties? For those of
you who don’t, I’ll tell you that they were clean, ruffled upright
coverings for pillows in the daytime. When they were laid aside
at night, they revealed too often a certain amount of real estate
underneath. What a cleanly view for the daily visitor and what an
unpleasant surprise for the nightly sleeper. I remember such a set of
shams. On the left one were embroidered in pink the words: “I slept and
dreamed that life was beauty.” On the right one in blue: “I woke and
found that life was duty.”
Now that we’ve laid aside the shams of our school histories and looked
upon the tragically soiled linen of the Civil War, we find even cleaner
shams laid over the period _right after_ that war. You know as we
scratch our head and try to look wise when our young son attacks us
with a question about his history lesson, we see, among the cobwebs
those days of ’65, ’66 and ’67 as a time of sleeping beauty. The tired,
worn soldiers of the war, in our misty memory, are beating their swords
into pruning hooks and all that sort of thing. Are we wrong? Yes, we
are. Life was anything but beauty for our country then. They were
days of frightful, alarming duty. For we were even in a worse fix than
when Sumter’s guns tumbled us helter-skelter into catastrophe. On
all sides were threatenings of big wars and slaughter. On the north
the Fenians were trying to carry on strife against Great Britain from
within our borders, and the Alabama claims were adding to the fuel. The
South, smarting under revengeful reconstruction laws, was angered to a
pitch of frenzy. In Mexico, Napoleon the third had set up an empire,
placing the Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne in defiance
of the Monroe Doctrine. The thousands of irreconcilables of the former
Confederacy could there find a foothold to work against us. And in the
West, a half million Indians, unrestrained during the Civil War, were
overrunning half our territory, and sprinkling the soil with death
and massacre. In the midst of all this trouble, Abraham Lincoln was
shot down in cold blood. We had gone from a sizzling frying pan into a
surrounding fire.
The situation in Mexico was so perilous that Sheridan was torn away
before the Grand Review in Washington, and sent immediately south. When
he arrived near the Rio Grande, the republican force in Mexico was
weak, worn and scattered. But it wasn’t hopeless long. For Sheridan
had something--we had something we’d never before had--a decent
sized, trained force. Even if it had been expensively trained under
the bullet, it was trained and well-trained. Sheridan just sat down in
Texas with almost three corps, and peered threateningly into Mexico.
Maximilian knew there wasn’t anything he had which could overcome such
a force. Little by little under the American display of strength, the
republicans gained power. In a year and a half the Empire fell, without
a single American gun being fired and with no bloodshed for us. We had
gained our ends by merely a show of force. Here is something for our
histories to brag about. Why do they cover it over with a sham? You
remember experts said that if we had had twenty-five thousand trained
men in 1860, the Civil War could not have lasted more than three
months. Well that statement, however careful, is at best theory, but
taken with the example of Sheridan’s force, it becomes a fact. And
there are other examples in our history where a sufficiently trained
force prevented bloodshed. The only reason we haven’t had more examples
is because we haven’t had more force.
But we had a force this once, and one part of it had as difficult
a task as ever fell to the lot of soldiers. Nineteen thousand of
them were scattered in one hundred thirty-four places in the South
to enforce stringent, cruel laws for a conquered people. The ire
of the North had vented itself in insulting control. No one who had
given aid to the Confederacy was allowed to hold office. The northern
carpetbagger swaggered in to lord over poverty-stricken communities.
This exhibition of revenge leads one to believe the statement of the
clergymen that peace treaties, peace reactions and peace societies are
our most fruitful causes of war.
But there was one saving grace--and that lay in the treatment of the
southern people by the soldier. You know it’s a funny thing about
fighters. After the fight is over, they seldom hold grudges. We can
all call up many instances where they were outstandingly friendly
with the former opponents. The Union soldier in the South was no
exception. He saw too clearly the injustice to these stricken people
and sympathized with them. He leagued up with the former Confederate
soldiers in efforts to help. He often got around the laws and sometimes
overrode them. His reports to Washington had much to do with rescinding
cruel legislation. So helpful was his attitude that a southern city
afterwards erected a monument to a Union general. The soldier’s
understanding sympathy was the big factor in overcoming riots,
disorders and slaughter.
Similarly trained troops took their places along the northern border,
and beyond a little wire cutting, overcame the disturbances from the
Fenians. And as these fearful threats to the north, east and south of
us were slowly calmed, we began to be over-confident and stupid again.
We failed to see that our unusual strength had been the reason for
coming through these calamities unscathed. In our customary way we
descended into weakness. And how we were going to pay in human life for
this let-down!
At first we pared the Army down to thirty-eight thousand. The day
before General Grant took the oath of office as President, we again
reduced it, against his urgent recommendation, by twenty regiments. By
1876 it was a scant twenty-five thousand soldiers, at which figure it
remained up until the time of the Spanish-American War--during almost
a quarter of a century. Thus we stagnated while our population was
increasing, savages were roaming over half our territory and we had
acquired Alaska. There was a war party who wanted to keep peace and a
peace party who let us fall into war. Naturally you’d know which party
would win in the United States. A paltry seventeen thousand soldiers
were strewn around the west in little groups. Their task was to control
hundreds of thousands of Indians in protection of the advancing
settlers. It was the dark age for the soldier. Impossible was his
struggle to be everywhere at once and to do the government’s bidding
against odds of twenty-four to one. In return the government often
armed the Indian with fine repeating rifles and always gave the soldier
a single-loader.
Then came the tragedies that follow in the wake of helplessness. In
our history books, we have placed an embroidered, starched sham over
them, but underneath none the less lie very dirty pillows. Massacres
of our settlers and soldiers were too frequent. The Indian was one of
the shrewdest warriors of all time to sense the size and strength of
his opponents. Weakness to him meant a call for scalps. At Fort Phil
Kearney in Nebraska the officers and men were engaged in building their
own barracks and quarters (if they were going to have a roof to cover
them) and the work was going along quite smoothly, when one morning
two thousand Indians swooped down on the small garrison of two hundred
fifty and killed and mutilated one hundred seventy-four of them. In
Kansas when eighty-four settlers were slain or captured by a band of
Cheyennes, Major Forsyth with fifty scouts tried to trail the Indian
desperadoes. When he came upon them he was trapped, had to fight for
his life, lost half of his command, (among whom was the nephew of Henry
Ward Beecher,) and barely escaped with the remnants of his force.
Later came the Custer affair. Probably no action in our history has
been more discussed and less understood. The story goes back a long
way and doesn’t show us up in any fine colors. The government had made
a treaty with the Great Sioux Nation in which it gave to these tribes
the Black Hills and all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River.
Gave them what was theirs in the first place. Kind of us. Another law
confirmed by our Senate, made it a crime for a white settler to go
into this region. Well, the whites as usual went in, because the land
appealed to them. And they went out of their way to trespass because
the Indians were six hundred miles from the nearest railroad and far
from white settlements. When the Indians complained and got no redress,
they went upon the warpath. Did so for the same reason that we took up
arms in the Revolution--from behind each “farmyard fence and wall.”
The Secretary of the Interior ordered the troops to put the Indians
on their reservations. He made a consistent sweep of things for he
not only violated the treaty, but did not uphold the law. So, little
companies of Infantry and Cavalry under General Terry, were ordered
to drive the victimized Indians to where neither the Indian nor the
soldier wanted to go. Fifteen hundred troops, half of whom were afoot,
were sent against six thousand hardy Sioux who were well-mounted. Why
such a small body of soldiers? Because other little groups were busy
with Assineboines, Piegans, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Pawnees, Commanches and
Flatheads. And there weren’t any more troops. The entire regular force
on the plains would scarcely have been a match then for the Great Sioux
Nation, but we were content to send this paltry number out against this
overwhelming force. Terry’s command accordingly advanced toward the
Indians. Custer, who was in command of the Cavalry, was sent ahead with
instructions to move toward the Tongue River, keep on the flank of the
Sioux, and not let them escape. It was an impossible task in the face
of so many Indians. But the soldier couldn’t know that such a big force
was there, for there were too few troops to scout the Sioux country
and find out. And if they could have found out, what was there to do
about it? They had to go against the Indians. No matter how perfectly
Terry’s force might act, it was in for a licking. So Custer split his
command into three parts in order to keep the Indians from escaping.
The irony!--from escaping. Well, it happened just as you would expect.
Custer’s little band was overwhelmed and annihilated. The other two
parts were backed against the wall and had to fight in desperation for
their lives. It was not a real massacre. It was a fight in which the
Indian used his normal methods of no quarter. We knew his methods.
And we unjustly and murderously sent a puny force against him to be
butchered to the extent of two hundred sixty-five killed and fifty-two
wounded.
The Indians could have overwhelmed the rest of the force, but feeling
they had taught the white man a lesson in fair play, they drew off. But
the ones who bore the brunt of the punishment by paying the extreme
penalty, were innocent soldiers, who had had nothing to do with the
cause of the fight. The instigators were walking the eastern streets
crying for an investigation. And how the affair was investigated! After
reams of testimony had been taken down, and much money expended, it was
found that we had sent a pigmy out barehanded to fight a giant. The
result? True to form.
Would we have been a little more decent, had we spent more on soldiers
beforehand and less on testimony afterward? If we had, it’s quite
possible we wouldn’t have needed the testimony. For it’s an accepted
fact that had we had ten thousand trained men for the Sioux alone,
placed in some conspicuous spot, the Custer fight would never have
been. The Indian would have been too wary. He always was. And many
another fight would not have taken place, as we’ll see. Going back
over the true events of these times, are we made to wonder whether we
really do care about human life? We talk a lot about it. Is it another
starched sham?
_X_