you administered the sort of justice that is in vogue in hell. Before
you _saw me, you heard him_. You adopted all his views, and never
asked me a question in regard to our controversy, or as to my own
action, or the condition of things in the Indian Country. I had been
infamously and assiduously slandered, from the moment when I began to
resist his illegal, impolitic and outrageous attempts to deprive the
Indian Department of every thing, to make it a mere appanage of, and
appendix to, North-Western Arkansas, to take the Indians again out
of their own country, and to compel me to unite in that insane and
miserable "expedition into Missouri," which was projected and planned
by Folly, mis-managed and misconducted by Imbecility and ended, as I
knew it would, in disaster and disgrace. Lies of all varieties were
ingeniously and laboriously invented at and about Head Quarters, and
despatches, by special and _fit_ agents, to be industriously
circulated throughout the Indian Country and Texas, as well as
Arkansas. The Indians were told that I had carried away into Texas the
gold and silver belonging to _them_; while the Texans were made
to believe that I was paying _their_ moneys to the Indians. It
was reported, in Bonham, Texas, by officers sent from Hindman's Head
Quarters, that I was defaulter to the amount of $125,000 and at last
there crawled out from the sewer under the throne, and sneaked about
the Indian Country and Texas, the damnable lie, that an Indian had
been taken, bearing letters from me to the Northern Indians, or, to
the enemy in Kansas; or, as another version had it, from Gen. James H.
Lane to me; and
three months ago it was whispered about that I was a member of the
secret disloyal organization in Northern Texas. Such lies could have
been counted by scores. Most of them are dead and rotten; but some
still live, by means of assiduous nursing. And all these lies, and
more either you or Hindman sent to the President at Richmond.
I say, sir, you never _inquired_ into _any_ thing. You
never wished to _hear_ any thing, whatever from _me_. You
disobeyed the orders with which you were sent as a public curse and
calamity into Arkansas, as if the State were not already sufficiently
infested by Hindman. Is it true that he has lately, upon his single
order, and without the ceremony of even a _mock_ trial, caused
three men "suspected of disloyalty" to be shot; and that, two of them
being proven to him to be true Southern men, he sent a reprieve,
which, either setting out too late, or lagging on the way, reached the
scene of murder after their blood had bathed the desecrated soil of
Arkansas? It has come to me so, from officers direct from Fort Smith.
At any rate, he has put to death nine or ten persons, without any
legal trial. Who is _he_, that he should do these things in this
nineteenth century? And who are _you_, sir, that you should
suffer, and by suffering, _approve_ and adopt them? How many
_more_ murders will suffice to awaken public vengeance?
Was the Star Chamber any worse than Hindman's Military Commissions,
that are ordered to preserve no records? Were the _Lettres de
Cachet_ of Louis XV, any greater outrage on the personal liberty of
_French subjects_, than Hindman's arrests and committal to the
Penitentiary of _suspected_ persons? Was Tristan l'Hermite any
more the minister of tyranny, than his Provost Marshals? or Caligula,
Caesar Borgia or Colonel Kirke any more cruel and remorseless than he,
that you have sustained all his acts, and made all his atrocities your
own? Take care, sir! You are not so high, that you may not be reached
by the arm of justice. The President is above you both, and God is
above him, and _sometimes_ interferes in human affairs.
Unless the late Secretary of War, through the President, sent an
official falsehood to the Congress of the Confederate States, you
were sent to Arkansas with _positive_ and _unconditional_
instructions, that, if Gen. Hindman _had_ declared Martial Law in
Arkansas, and adopted oppressive police regulations under it, _you
should rescind the_
_declarations of Martial Law, and the Regulations adopted to carry
it into effect_. You have not done so. You have not only _not_
rescinded _any_ thing; but you have, by a General Order, long
ago, continued in force all orders of General Hindman, not specially
revoked by you. That order could have no retroactive effect, to make
_his_ orders _to have been valid_ in the _past_. It
could only put them in force for the _future_; and you thereby
made them _your_ orders, as fully as if you had re-issued them.
In so doing, you became the enemy of your country, if not of the Human
race, and outlawed yourself.
You have _yourself_ established a tariff of prices exclusively on
articles produced by the farmers, including the sweet potatoes raised
by old women and superannuated negroes. You leave the Jews and
extortioners, some of the former of whom go about in uniforms,
claiming to be _officers_ and your agents to charge these same
venders of produce, whatever infamous prices they please for wares
they need to purchase with the pittances received according to your
scale of prices, for the vegetables that supply your and other tables.
You pretend, I learn, that the President gave you discretionary power,
in regard to Martial Law, and the Regulations in question. I do not
believe it; for, if he did, then he and the Secretary intentionally
deceived Congress by the equivalent of a lie. Do you pretend that the
President paltered with Congress in a double sense? I put you face
to face. Is it _your_ act, in _defiance_ of orders, that
continues Martial Law in force in Arkansas, stifles freedom of speech,
muzzles the Press, tramples on all the rights at once of the People of
that State, and makes the State itself only a congregation of Helots,
incompetent to be represented in Congress? Is it merely a contest
between you and Phelps, _which_ of the two shall be Military
Governor? If it _is_ your act, then justice ought at once to be
done upon you, lest the President, winking at the outrage, and not
stripping from your back your uniform of Lieutenant General, should
deserve to be impeached, as your accomplice.
Or, do you dare assert that it is _his_ act, because he gave you
discretionary power on the subject, after informing Congress that
Hindman never was Commanding General of the Department, and that you
had been ordered to rescind his declaration of Martial Law,--nay,
after publicly proclaiming that _no_ General had any power to
declare Martial Law? All the Confederacy thanked and applauded
him for so striking at the root of an immense outrage and abuse and
an unexpected public course; but if he has authorized or sanctions
_your_ course, he is unworthy longer to be President. If he has
not, you have defied his orders and justified men in judging yourself
authorized and him guilty; and so you are unworthy longer to be
General.
When I saw you in August, you were greatly exercised on the subject of
my printed address to the Indians, publication of which in Little Rock
you had suppressed, _as if it could do any harm in Arkansas_. You
suppressed it, because it exposed those whose acts were losing the
Indian Country. You wanted to keep what had been taken from _me_,
and to escape damnation for the probable _consequences_ of the
acts, the _profit_ of which you were reluctant to part with. I do
not wonder the letter troubled you; for it told _the truth_, and
condemned and denounced in advance _more_ unjustifiable courses
of conduct that you were about to pursue.
You pretended that it had produced a great "ferment" among the
Indians; and that even many of the Chickasaws had in consequence
of it, left the service. It had produced _no_ ferment, and
_none_ of the Chickasaws had left us. On the contrary, the
Indians were quieted by it, the Creeks re-organized, in numbers, two
regiments, and the Chickasaws five companies. That was its purpose,
and such was its effect.
But to _you_, its enormity consisted in its exposure of the
conduct of two Major Generals. I told the Indians _plainly_, that
it was not _my_ fault or the fault of the Government, but of
these two Generals, that moneys, clothing, arms and ammunition,
procured for them, had not reached them; that troops raised for
service among them had never entered their country; and that, finally,
troops, artillery and ammunition were carried out of it. This
censure of my _superiors_, in vindication of the President and
Government, shocked your tender sensibilities. You were ready to
follow in their footsteps, and already _had_ the plunder; and you
told me that "the act of the officer was the act of the Government."
Did you really _mean_, that the Indians should have been led or
left to suppose that these acts were the acts of the Government?
That would have been _almost_ as great an infamy, as it was to
_take_ the supplies, and so give them cause and reason to believe
the robbery the act of the Government, _and thus excite them to
revolt_. Moreover, when I told you that the act of
the officer was _not_, in the case in question, the act of the
Government; that, if I had permitted the Indians to suppose so,
they would long have left us; and that, to quiet them, I had been
compelled, for three months and more than a hundred times, to explain
to them what had become of their supplies, and how and by whom
they have been seized, you admitted that "that was right for local
explanation." As there could be no objection to telling all, what I
had often told part, that _they_ might tell the rest; and as it
was no more a crime to _print_ than to _say_ it; I have
the right to believe and I _do_ believe that your _real_
objection to its publication was that it exposed _to our own people
the actual_ conduct of other Generals, and the _intended_
conduct of yourself. Have _you_ left the Indians to believe that
the late seizure and appropriation, by _yourself_, of their
clothing and moneys, is the act of the Government? If you have, you
ought to be shot as a Traitor, for provoking them to revolt, and
giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
But you told me, that when you first read my letter, you held up your
hands, and exclaimed, "What! is the man a Traitor?" And you said that
not one of my friends in Little Rock, and I had, you said, a great
many, pretended to justify the letter. You have never found a friend
of mine, or an indifferent person, silly enough to think, like you,
that it savored of treason. It is only rarely one meets a man so
scantily furnished with sense as to misunderstand and pervert what is
written in plain English. I was vindicating myself, and still more
the Government, and persuading the Indians to remain loyal,
notwithstanding the wrongs they had endured. I, too, was an officer;
and _my_ acts _had_ been the acts of the Government.
_My_ promises to them were _its_ promises. The procuring of
supplies by _me_, was _its_ act; and when, reaching or not
reaching the frontier, the supplies were like the unlucky traveler,
who journeyed from Jerusalem to Jericho, _then_ the Government
_ceased_ to act, and unlicensed outrage took its place. And,
further, _my_ act was the act of the Government, when I told the
Indians _why_ they had not received their supplies and money, and
vindicated that Government at the expense of those who were guilty of
the act; and who having done it and reaped the profit, should not be
heard to object that all the world should know what they did, nor be
allowed to escape the responsibility of _all_ the consequences.
If to tell the Indians that other Generals had wrongfully stopped
their supplies, in any degree _resembled_ Treason, that could
only be so, because it _was_ treason to _do_ the act. It
cannot be wrong to make known what it was right and proper to do. The
truth is, that the acts done were outrages, which it was desirable for
the doers to conceal from the Indians. I refused to become a party to
those outrages, by concealing them. I would not agree in advance to
be _silent_, when _you_ should repeat and improve on those
outrages, and consummate what had been so felicitously begun.
I do not doubt that there are assassins wearing uniforms, who are
knaves enough to _pretend_ to read my letter as you do, and to
see in it the desire of a disappointed man to be revenged, even by the
ruin of his country. Power always has its pimps and catamites. These
would no doubt gladly have made my letter the means of murdering me
by that devilish engine of Military despotism, a Military commission,
that is _ordered_ to preserve no records. You, I think really
look upon it with alarm. It is, no doubt, _very_ desirable to
_you_, that the blame of losing the Indian Country, which, if not
already a fact accomplished, is a fact inevitable, should be made to
fall upon me. You, as the pliant and useful implement of Gen. Hindman,
are the cause of this loss; and you know I can prove it. You and he
have left nothing _undone_, that _could_ be done, to lose
it. And you may rest assured, that whether I live or die, you shall
not escape one jot or tittle of the deep damnation to which you are
richly entitled for causing a loss so irretrievable, so astounding, so
unnecessary and so _fatal_, and one which it will be impossible
to excuse as owing to ignorance and stupidity. No degree of
_these_ misfortunes, can be pleaded in bar of judgment.
_You_ will have _forced_ the Indians to go to the North for
protection. _You_ will have _given away_ their country to
the enemy. _You_ will have turned their arms against us. You will
have done this by disobeying the orders of your Government, continuing
the courses it condemned, and to put an end to which it sent you out
here; by falsifying its pledges and promises, taking for others' uses
the moneys which it sent out to pay the Indians, robbing them of the
clothing sent by it to cover their nakedness, and thus thrusting aside
all the considerations of common honesty, of justice, of humanity, and
even of policy, expediency and common sense.
When Mr. C.B. Johnson agreed, in September to loan your Quartermaster
at Little Rock, $350,000 of the money he was
conveying to Major Quesenbury, the Quartermaster of the Department of
Indian Territory, _you promised_ him that it should be repaid to
Major Quesenbury as soon as you should receive funds, and before he
would have disposed of the remaining million. _You got the money by
means of that promise; and you did not keep the promise_. On the
contrary, by an order that reached Fort Smith three hours before Mr.
Johnson did, you compelled Major Quesenbury, the moment he received
the money, to turn every dollar of it, over to a _Commissary_ at
Fort Smith; _and it was used to supply the needs of Gen. Hindman's
troops_; when the Seminoles, fourteen months in the service have
never been paid a dollar; and the Chickasaw and Choctaw Battalion, and
Chilly McIntosh's Creeks, each corps a year and more in the service,
have received only $45,000 each, and no clothing. Was this violation
of your promise, the act of the Government?
To replace the clothing I had procured for the Indians in December,
1861, and which, with near 1,000 tents, fell into the hands of the
troops of Generals Price and Van Dorn, I sent an agent, in June, to
Richmond, who went to Georgia, and there procured some 6,500 suits,
with about 3,000 shirts and 3,000 pairs of drawers, and some two or
three hundred tents. These supplies were at Monroe early in September;
and the Indians were informed that they and the moneys had been
procured and were on the way. The good news went all over their
country, as if on the wings of the wind; and universal content and
rejoicing were the consequences.
The clothing reached Fort Smith; and its issue to Gen. Hindman's
people commenced immediately. I sent a Quartermaster for it and he was
retained there. If _any_ of it has ever reached the Indians, it
has been only recently, and but a small portion of it.
You pretend to believe that the Indians were in a "ferment" and
discontented; and you took this very opportune occasion to stop all
the moneys due their troops and for debts in their country and take
and appropriate to the use of other troops the clothing promised
to and procured for _them_. The clothing and the money were
_theirs_; and you were in possession of an order from the
War Department, forbidding you to divert any supplies from their
legitimate destination; an order which was issued, _as you knew_,
in consequence of _my_ complaints, and to prevent moneys and
supplies for the _Indians_ being stopped: _and yet you stopped
all_.
You borrow part of the money, and then seize the rest, like a
_genteel_ highwayman, who first borrows all he can of a traveler,
on promise of punctual re-payment; and then claps a pistol to his
head, and orders him to "stand and deliver" the rest. And you did even
more than this.
For you promised the Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, when he
was at Little Rock, about the 1st of October, on his way to the Indian
Country, to give the Indians assurances of the good faith of the
Government--_you promised him_, I say, _that the clothing in
question should go to the Indians_. He told the Chickasaws and
Seminoles, at least, of this promise. You broke it. You did _not_
send them the clothing. You placed the Commissioner and the Government
in an admirable attitude before the Indians; and the consequence has
been, I understand, the disbanding of the Chickasaws, and the failure
of the Seminole troops to re-organize. The consequence will be far
more serious yet. Indians cannot be deceived, and promises made them
shamelessly broken, with impunity.
While _you_ were thus stopping their clothing, and robbing the
half-naked Indians to clothe other troops, the Federals were sending
home the Choctaws whom they had taken prisoners, after clothing
them comfortably and putting money in their pockets. No one need be
astonished, when _all_ the Indians shall have turned their arms
against us.
Why did you and Gen. Hindman not procure by your own exertions what
you need for your troops? He reached Little Rock on the 31st of May.
You came here in August. I sent my agents to Richmond, for money and
clothing, in June and July. I never asked either of _you_ for
_any_ thing. I could procure for _my_ command all I wanted.
You and he were Major Generals; I, only a Brigadier; and Brigadiers
are plenty as blackberries in season. It is to be supposed that if I
could procure money, clothing and supplies for _Indians_, you and
he could do so for white troops. Both of you come blundering out
to Arkansas with nothing, and supply yourselves with what _I_
procure. Some officers would be ashamed _so_ to supply
deficiencies caused by their own want of foresight, energy or sense.
_You_ do not even know you need an Engineer, until one of mine
comes by, with $20,000 in his hands for Engineer Service in the
Indian Territory, some of which belongs to _me_ for advances
made, and with stationery and instruments procured by _me_, for
_my_ Department, in Richmond, a year ago; and _then_ you
find out that there are such things as Engineers, and that you need
one; and you seize on Engineer, money, and stationery. You even take,
notwithstanding Paragraph VI, of General Orders No. 50, the stationery
procured by me for the Adjutant General's Office of my Department, by
purchase in Richmond in December, 1861; for the want of which I had
been compelled to permit my own private stock to be used for months.
I no longer wonder that you do these things. When you told me that you
could not judge me fairly, because I told the Indians that others had
done them injustice, you confessed much more than you intended. It
was a pregnant sentence you uttered. By it you judged and convicted
yourself, and pronounced _your own sentence_, when you uttered
_it_.
The Federal authorities were proposing to the Indians _at the very
time when you stopped their clothing and money_, that, if they
would return to the old Union, they should not be asked to take up
arms, their annuities should be paid them in money, the negroes taken
from them be restored, all losses and damage sustained by them be paid
for, and they be allowed to retain, as so much clear profit, what had
been paid them by the Confederate States. It was a liberal offer and
a great temptation, to come at the moment when you and Hindman were
felicitously completing your operations, and when there were no
breadstuffs in their country, and they and their women and children
were starving and half-naked. You chose an admirable opportunity to
rob, to disappoint, to outrage and exasperate them, and make your own
Government fraudulent and contemptible in their eyes. If any human
action _can_ deserve it, the hounds of hell ought to hunt your
soul and Hindman's for it through all eternity.
Instead of co-operating with the Federal authorities, and doing all
that he and you _could_ do to induce the Indians to listen to
and accept their propositions, _he_ had better have expelled the
enemy from Arkansas or "have perished in the attempt;" and you
had better have marched on Helena, before its fortifications were
finished, and purged the eastern part of the State of the enemy's
presence. If you had succeeded as admirably in that, as you have in
losing
the Indian Country, you would have merited the eternal gratitude of
Arkansas, instead of its execrations; and the laurel, instead of a
halter. I said that you and your Lieutenant had left _nothing_
undone. I repeat it. Take another _small_ example. Until I left
the command, at the end of July, the Indian troops had regularly had
their half rations of coffee. As soon as I was got rid of, an order
from Gen. Hindman took all the remaining coffee, some 3,000 lbs.,
to Fort Smith. Even in this small matter, he could not forego an
opportunity of injuring and disappointing them.
You asked me, in August, what was the need of any white troops at all,
in the Indian Country; and you said that the few mounted troops, I
had, if kept in the Northern part of the Cherokee Country, would have
been enough to repel any Federal force that ever would have entered
it. As you and Hindman never allowed any ammunition procured by me, to
reach the Indian Country, if you could prevent it, whether I obtained
it at Richmond or Corinth, or in Texas, and as you approve of his
course in taking out of that country all that was to be found in it, I
am entitled to suppose that you regarded ammunition for the Indians
as little necessary, as troops to protect them in conformity to the
pledge of honor of the Government. One thing, however, is to be said
to the credit of your next in command. When he has ordered anything
to be seized, he has never denied having done so, or tried to cast
responsibility on an inferior. After you had written to me that you
had ordered Col. Darnell to seize, at Dallas, Texas, ammunition
furnished by me, you denied to him, I understand, that you had given
the order. Is it so? and _did_ he refuse to trust the order in
your hands, or even to let you see it, but would show it to Gen.
McCulloch?
Probably you know by this time, if you are capable of learning
_any_ thing, whether any white troops are needed in the Indian
Country. The brilliant result of Gen. Hindman's profound calculations
and masterly strategy, and of his long-contemplated invasion of
Missouri, is before the country; and the disgraceful rout at Fort
Wayne, with the manoeuvres and results on the Arkansas, are pregnant
commentaries on the abuse lavished on me, for not taking "the line of
the Arkansas," or making Head Quarters on Spring River, with a force
too small to effect any thing any where.
I have not spoken of your Martial Law and Provost Marshals
in the Indian Country, and your seizure of salt-works there, or, in
detail, of your seizure of ammunition procured by me in Texas, and on
its way to the Indian troops, of the withdrawal of all white troops
and artillery from their country, of the retention for other troops
of the mountain howitzers procured by me for Col. Waitie, and the
ammunition sent me, for them and for small arms, from Richmond. This
letter is but a part of the indictment I will prefer bye and bye, when
the laws are no longer silent, and the constitution and even public
opinion no longer lie paralyzed under the brutal heel of
Military Power; and when the results of your _im_policy and
_mis_management shall have been fully developed.
But I have a word or two to say as to myself. From the time when I
entered the Indian Country, in May, 1861, to make Treaties, until the
beginning of June, 1862, when Gen. Hindman, in the plentitude of his
self-conceit and folly, assumed absolute control of the Military and
other affairs of the Department of Indian Territory, and commenced
plundering it of troops, artillery and ammunition, dictating Military
operations, and making the Indian country an appanage of Northwestern
Arkansas, there was profound peace throughout its whole extent. Even
with the wild Camanches and Kiowas, I had secured friendly relations.
An unarmed man could travel in safety and alone, from Kansas to Red
River, and from the Arkansas line to the Wichita Mountains. The Texan
frontier had not been as perfectly undisturbed for years. We had
fifty-five hundred Indians in service, under arms, and they were as
loyal as our own people, little as had been done by any one save
myself to keep them so, and much as had been done by others to
alienate them. They referred all their difficulties to me for
decision, and looked to me alone to see justice done them and the
faith of Treaties preserved.