The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist. Annie Heloise Abel
their better judgment too, that the red man would be forever unmolested in the western country because the federal government owned it absolutely and could give a title in perpetuity, argued, in the fourth and fifth decades, that the states were the sole proprietors, that they were, in fact, the joint owners of everything heretofore considered as national. Inferentially, therefore, Indians, like negroes, had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
The crucial point has now been reached in this discussion. From the date of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the sectional affiliation of the Indian country became a thing of more than passing moment. Whatever may have been John C. Calhoun’s ulterior and real motive in urging that the trans-Missouri region be closed to white settlement forever, whether he did, as some of his abolitionist enemies have charged, plan thus to block free-state expansion and so frustrate the natural operations of the Missouri Compromise, certain it is, that southern politicians, after his time, became the chief advocates of Indian territorial integrity, the ones that pleaded most often and most noisily that guaranties to Indians be faithfully respected. They had in mind the northern part of the Indian country and that alone; but, no doubt, the circumstance was purely accidental, since at that time, the early fifties, the northern16 was the only part likely to be encroached upon.17 Their interest in the southern part took an entirely different direction and that also may have been accidental or occasioned by conditions quite local and present. For this southern part, by the way, they recommended American citizenship and the creation of American states18 in the Union, also a territorial organization immediately that should look towards that end. Such advice came as early as 1853, at least, and was more natural than would at first glance appear; for the southern tribes were huge in population, in land, and in resources. They were civilized, had governments and laws modelled upon the American, and more than all else, they were southern in origin, in characteristics, and in institutions.
The project for organizing19 the territories of Kansas and Nebraska caused much excitement, as well it might, among the Indian immigrants, even though the Wyandots, in 1852, had, in a measure, anticipated it by initiating a somewhat similar movement in their own restricted locality.20 Most of the tribes comprehended to the full the ominous import of territorial organization; for, obviously, it could not be undertaken except at a sacrifice of Indian guaranties. At the moment some of the tribes, notably the Choctaw and Chickasaw,21 were having domestic troubles that threatened a neighborhood war and the new fear of the white man’s further aggrandizement threw them into despair. The southern Indians, generally, were much more exercised and much more alarmed than were the northern.22 Being more highly civilized, they were better able to comprehend the drift of events. Experience had made them unduly sagacious where their territorial and treaty rights were concerned, and well they knew that, although the Douglas measure did not in itself directly affect them or their country, it might easily become the forerunner of one that would.
The border strife, following upon the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, disturbed in no slight degree the Indians on the Kansas reservations, which, by-the-by, had been very greatly reduced in area by the Manypenny treaties of 1853-1854. Some of the reserves lay right in the heart of the contested territory, free-state men intrenching themselves among the Delawares and pro-slavery men among the Shawnees,23 the former north and the latter south of the Kansas River. But even remoteness of situation constituted no safeguard against encroachment. All along the Missouri line the squatters took possession. The distant Cherokee Neutral Lands24 and the Osage and New York Indian reservations25 were all invaded.26 The Territorial Act had expressly excluded Indian land from local governmental control; but the Kansas authorities of both parties utterly ignored, in their administration of affairs, this provision. The first districting of the territory for election purposes comprehended, for instance, the Indian lands, yet little criticism has ever been passed upon that grossly illegal act. Needless to say, the controversy between slavocracy and freedom obscured and obliterated, in those years, all other considerations.
As the year 1860 approached, appearances assumed an even more serious aspect. Kansas settlers and would-be settlers demanded that the Indians, so recently the only legal occupants of the territory, vacate it altogether. So soon had the policy of granting them peace and undisturbed repose on diminished reserves proved futile. The only place for the Indian to go, were he indeed to be driven out of Kansas, was present Oklahoma; but his going there would, perforce, mean an invasion of the property rights of the southern tribes, a matter of great moment to them but seemingly of no moment whatsoever to the white man. Some of the Kansas Indians saw in removal southward a temporary refuge—they surely could not have supposed it would be other than temporary—and were glad to go, making their arrangements accordingly.27 Some, however, had to be cajoled into promising to go and some had to be forced. A few held out determinedly against all thought of going. Among the especially obstinate ones were the Osages,28 natives of the soil. The Buchanan government failed utterly to convince them of the wisdom of going and was, thereupon, charged by the free-state Kansans with bad faith, with not being sincere and sufficiently persistent in its endeavors to treat, its secret purpose being to keep the free-state line as far north as possible. The breaking out of the Civil War prevented the immediate removal of any of the tribes but did not put a stop to negotiations looking towards that end.
All this time there was another influence within the Indian country, north and south, that boded good or ill as the case might be. This influence emanated from the religious denominations represented on the various reserves. Nowhere in the United States, perhaps, was the rivalry among churches that had divided along sectional lines in the forties and fifties stronger than within the Indian country. There the churches contended with each other at close range. The Indian country was free and open to all faiths, while, in the states, the different churches kept strictly to their own sections, the southern contingent of each denomination staying close to the institution it supported. Of course the United States government, through its civilization fund, was in a position to show very pointedly its sectional predilections. It will probably never be known, because so difficult of determination, just how much the churches aided or retarded the spread of slavery.29
Among the tribes of Kansas, denominational strength was distributed as follows: The Kickapoos30 and Wyandots31 were Methodists; but, while the former were a unit in their adherence to the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the latter were divided and among them the older church continued strong. The American Baptist Missionary Union had a school on the Delaware reservation and, previous to 1855, had had one also on the Shawnee, which the political uproar in Kansas had obliged to close its doors. These same Northern Baptists were established also among the Ottawas, as the Moravians were among the Munsees and the Roman Catholics32 among the Osages and the Potawatomies. The Southern Baptists were likewise to be found among the Potawatomies33 and the Southern Methodists among the Shawnees. The Shawnee Manual Labor School, under the Southern Methodists, was, however, only very grudgingly patronized by the Indians. Its situation near the Missouri border was partly accountable for this as it was for the selection of the school as the meeting-place of the pro-slavery legislature in 1855. The management of the institution was from time to time severely criticized and the superintendent, the Reverend Thomas Johnson, an intense pro-slavery agitator,34 was strongly suspected of malfeasance,35 of enriching himself, forsooth, at the expense of the Indians. The school found a formidable rival, from this and many another cause, in a Quaker establishment, which likewise existed on the Shawnee Reserve but independently of either tribal or governmental aid.
If church influences and church quarrels were discernible among the northern tribes, they were certainly very much more so among the southern. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Congregational) that had labored so zealously for the Cherokees, when they were east of the Mississippi, extended its interest to them undiminished in the west; and, in the period just before the Civil War,36 was the strongest religious force in their country. There it had no less than four mission stations37 and a flourishing school in connection with each. The same organization was similarly influential among the Choctaws38 or, in the light of what eventually happened, it might better be said its missionaries were. Both Southern and Northern Baptists and Southern Methodists likewise were to be found among the Cherokees;39 Presbyterians40 and Southern Methodists among the Chickasaws and Choctaws; and Presbyterians only among the Creeks and Seminoles. In every Indian nation south, except the Creek and Seminole,41 the work of denominational schools was supplemented, or maybe neutralized, by