Beyond Freedom: New Directions in the Study of Emancipation

The 13th Annual Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition International

Conference at Yale University

Beyond Freedom: New Directions in the Study of

Emancipation

November 11-12, 2011

Yale University

New Haven, Connecticut

The South, the West, and the Imperial State

Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania

Available online at http://www.yale.edu/glc/emancipation/hahn.pdf

At the very time he was drafting the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in

September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln dispatched one of his generals, John Pope, to

Minnesota with orders to suppress a rebellion of the eastern, or Santee, division of the Sioux.

The rebellion was, in good part, the result of two decades of festering tensions with federal

officials and white settlers (mostly of German, Scandanavian, and Irish origin), which had forced

the surrender of ancestral grounds and the near starvation of some of the Sioux bands. But more

directly, the federal government’s determination to wage war against the Confederacy caught the

Sioux’s attention and encouraged them to take the measure of the consequences. Although the

Confederates made no efforts to win them as allies – as they did in Indian Territory and the

southern Plains – Confederate sympathizers in their orbit eagerly told of Union defeats; and as

federal troops moved in and out of nearby forts, some Sioux leaders imagined “that the South

was getting the best of the fight, and the North would be whipped.” When, in August 1862, a

Union officer came recruiting young men of mixed ancestry for military service, one of the

Sioux chiefs concluded that “the whites must be pretty hard up for men to fight the South, and

that now would be a good time to go to war with the whites and get the lands back.”

The Sioux rebellion would spread across the Minnesota countryside and into the Dakota

Territory, while alarms were raised as far south as Iowa and Nebraska. Lincoln hastily created a

new Military Department of the Northwest, and Pope, who had been hung out to dry after the

Union’s second defeat at Bull Run, determined “utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the

power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year.” It almost did.

Over the next ten months, 2,000 Sioux came under federal control, 38 were hanged in what

would be the largest mass execution in American history (303 had been sentenced to death),

treaties with the federal government were abrogated and the remaining Sioux pushed onto the

open plains, and Little Crow, one of the most influential of the Sioux leaders was hunted down

and killed, his scalp brought back for display at the Minnesota Historical Society.

My purpose here is not to argue for the commensurability of the Preliminary

Emancipation Proclamation and the suppression of the Sioux rebellion, but rather to suggest that

slave emancipation and the destruction of Indian sovereignties in the trans-Mississippi West,

through a variety of means, including exterminism, must be seen as fundamentally related

projects that emerged during what I would call the Wars of the Rebellions and ultimately created,

for the first time on the American continent, an imperial nation-state. Which is to say that these

projects, simultaneously looking South and West, were manifestations of state warfare and then

the main work of what we call Reconstruction as a national and international experience.

Now I recognize that I’m making sweeping claims that cannot possibly be defended in

the time allotted to me and the panel this morning. But what I would like to do is lay out the

logic of these claims and offer some evidence to support them. The logic and evidence concern

the crisis of sovereignty (slavery being at the center of it) that made warfare necessary; the

assortment of rebellions the federal state faced, most intensely between 1861 and 1865, but also

significantly for the following two decades; the conceptualization of social and cultural relations

that joined the problem of emancipation and that of Indian peoples; the political development of

the trans-Mississippi West, which in many ways anticipated the issues and challenges we tend to

associate with the very end of the nineteenth century, and especially with the Spanish-American

War; and the woefully understudied – or at least under-appreciated – history of the United States

military.

The geographical and chronological boundaries of emancipation in the United States

have, of course, a reach and complexity that we have rarely confronted. Although we tend to

cordon off the emancipations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the states of

New England and the Middle Atlantic (in truth they weren’t completed until at least 1857) as

minor acts in relation to the great emancipations of the Civil War era, they were in fact quite

arguably part of an extended emancipation – and possibly reconstruction – process. The

significant difference between what transpired between 1780 and 1857, and what transpired

between 1862 and 1865 was not, in my view, the scale of the emancipations or even the

centrality of emancipation to the political economy of the affected areas. The significant

difference was that the earlier phases of emancipation were initiated either by individuals or by

states, while the later phases were initiated, however reluctantly, by the federal government in a

context of social and political rebellion-turned-revolution.

The federal government’s embrace of emancipationism – and especially an

emancipationism that rejected compensation or any official partnership with owners in

supervising the transition out of slavery – marked an enormously important turning point in the

political history of the United States, and it came in the face of an assortment of rebellions

against its presumed authority. The slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s is surely the best known

and greatest of them, but it was not alone. Think of Nullification, the Second Seminole War, and

white settler rejections of Supreme Court decisions in the 1830s; of filibustering operations in

Texas, Canada, Cuba, northern Mexico, and Central America in clear violation of the

government’s Neutrality Law; and of the Mormon War of 1857 out in what the federal

government called the Utah Territory and what resident Mormons hoped to make the state of

Deseret. Think, too, in closer proximity, of efforts in the midst of the secession crisis to

construct independent political units on the Pacific coast, in the Midwest, and in the city of New

York; of copperheadism and working-class insurrections against the federal draft; and, most

consequentially, of slave rebellions not only against the authority of their masters but also

against the early policies of the Lincoln administration meant to keep the slavery question at the

margins of state warfare.

These rebellions were immensely dangerous but they enabled the federal government to

commence redefining its powers and extending its reach. Very quickly, in the face of

Confederate rebellion and its possible spinoffs, the federal government created new territories in

the trans-Mississippi West, admitted Kansas and soon thereafter Nevada to the Union, and

reorganized military districts in the West with a view to raising new volunteers and keeping both

disloyalty and potentially rebellious Indians in check. In 1862 a variety of initiatives put the

emancipationism of that year (beginning with the federal territories and the District of Columbia)

in context, not simply the well-known Homestead Act and Pacific Railway Act but also the

Morrill Anti-Polygamy Law passed that July, the first of many federal attacks on one of the

“twin relics of barbarism” (slavery being the other) that would continue for the next three

decades: together with the decision to suppress and brutally punish the Sioux uprising.

The political history of western territories and states during the last four decades of the

nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth has been passed over by many scholars –

though fortunately not by Howard Lamar whose early books on the northern Plains and far

Southwest remain essential – but it helps us understand both the imperial project of the new

American nation-state as well as the links between the state’s efforts to “reconstruct” the South

and the West. One of the things that distinguishes this history is not only the explosion of

territory-making during the years of warfare or the size of the territories that were created, but

the extended period of time that elapsed between the organization of territories and their ultimate

admission as states. Whereas new territories east of the Mississippi generally moved to

statehood relatively rapidly (on average 12 years), those west of the Mississippi were often kept

under federal jurisdiction for decades. The most striking examples are New Mexico, which

remained a territory for 62 years, Arizona for 49, and Utah for 46. But to these we may add

Dakota, which was territorialized for 38 years, Idaho for 27, Montana for 25, and Wyoming for

22. The only exceptions are Colorado, which had a 15-year territorial period (the average for all

being 36 years) and Nevada which was admitted after only 3 years, though largely to secure

Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864.

Territorialization allowed the federal state a stronger hand in western economic and

political development, appointing many key territorial officeholders (almost always outsiders)

while reducing their discretionary powers. This was no small matter given the increasingly

important Pacific trade, the gold, silver, and copper deposits discovered at various sites across

the region, and the stateless peoples to be found there who could threaten state authority. And

here the imperial projects had both cultural and political dimensions. Utah raised extremely

troublesome issues for federal officials because of Mormon suzerainty and especially because of

the practice of polygamy among them: a direct affront to the idea that monogamous households

served as the foundation of a stable republic. As early as 1861, Congress considered a bill to

eliminate the territory entirely (dividing it between Nevada and Colorado), and subsequently

looked for other ways to “blot out the Territory” in order to dispose of “the Mormon question.”

Federal courts soon joined in, launching assaults on polygamy and the authority of the Mormon

Church; only when Mormon elders publicly abandoned polygamy was Utah admitted to the

Union (1896).

In New Mexico and Arizona, the issues surrounding territorialization and statehood were

quite different though their meanings were no less significant. Since the signing of the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the civil and political standing of people of Mexican descent

remained liminal while their numbers remained very substantial. In effect, the federal state had

to confront a question that arose there as well as in imagined imperial moves against Cuba and

the rest of Mexico in the 1840s and 1850s, and would come up in connection with the Spanish-

American War in 1898: does the Constitution follow the flag, and if so, how? The populations in

the southwest were, in the view of many officials and observers, a “foreign people” speaking an

“alien language” who were not “Americans.” Albert Beveridge, chair of the Senate’s Committee

on the Territories in the early twentieth century, contrasted “American” Oklahoma with

“frontier” Arizona and “Mexican” New Mexico, regarding the Hispanic denizens as passive,

uneducated, and indolent – and perhaps “treasonous” is their apparent refusal to learn English.

Only a growing influx of Anglos, which portended a shift in the demographic balances, made

admission possible.

In important respects, of course, these were the very problems the federal government

had to grapple with in relation to the political reconstruction of the former Confederate South.

Commencing with Lincoln’s Ten-Percent Plan, federal officials – and Republicans in particular –

struggled over the terms of reunification, the extent of central state authority, and the required

cultural dispositions of resident populations. What, in fact, was the former Confederate South?

Did those states truly leave the Union, and should they now be remanded to territorial status?

What criteria did they need to meet in order to gain readmission, and should those criteria be

imposed or coaxed? Although the most far-reaching proposals were defeated, the former

Confederacy was effectively territorialized in the early phases of Radical Reconstruction, placed

under military authority, and subject to extended federal oversight as to political conduct. Even

when federal power was ultimately rolled back and “home rule” conceded, the federal state had

wholly shifted the balances of policy-making in its favor – and in the favor of its strongest

supporters who had gained enormous leverage in the course of defeating the slaveholders’

rebellion.

To be sure, the chief socio-economic problem of the emancipationist era was the

remaking of a slave-based political economy in the South. But it is well to remember that federal

officials and their allies understood many of the challenges in cultural terms. What, after all, was

“free labor” to mean and how was such a regime to be designed and instated? Not surprisingly,

one of the first important federal initiatives along these lines was the creation of the American

Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, which was to report on the legacy of slavery, the impact of

emancipation, and the future of people of African descent in the United States. The

Commission, headed up by Robert Dale Owens, was especially concerned with slave and ex-

slave practices regarding private property, marriage, parenting, education, faith, and sexuality.

Quite aware of the shortcomings of the British system of apprenticeship in the 1830s, they hoped

to determine whether the freedpeople would be ready to work without the coercions of slavery,

and believed the answer was closely related to an assortment of cultural questions: Did they

understand the difference between meum and tuum (or, would they steal)? Did they grasp the

responsibilities of the marital relation? Did they (and especially freedwomen) have a casual

attitude about extra-marital sex? Did they have acquisitive dispositions and could they respond

to market incentives? The Commission report was relatively optimistic but it was joined to

recommendations for constitutional prohibitions against enslavement (it was clear that

slaveholders needed legal restraints that would withstand court challenges together with tutelage

in the requirements of a post-slave world) and the creation of what became the Freedmen’s

Bureau to supervise the transition from slavery to freedom.

The work of the AFIQ, as we know, was accompanied by a raft of “free labor”

experiments across the war-torn South, which were also meant to reveal the capacities of the

freedpeople and especially the prospects of rehabilitating the cotton economy in the aftermath of

emancipation. They ranged from the contract labor system, to the laboratories at Port Royal in

the east and Davis Bend in the west, to freedmen’s villages in connection with contraband

camps. Important to all of these were northern administrators, planters, reformers, and

missionaries who often fought with one another yet shared an interest in promoting new forms of

character and behavior – and who reported extensively on what they found and on what they

achieved (or failed to achieve). Together they set the terms of what, for more than the next

century, would be called the “negro problem” and the idea of “race relations” that emerged in

close relation to it, and that would be integral to the projects of the new imperial nation-state.

So would the “Indian problem.” The Indian peoples of the trans-Mississippi West did not

pose the same sort of challenges as the freedpeople of the former Confederate South. They were

far fewer in number and were never imagined as important components of a national economic

system. Quite the contrary. They were obstacles to the consolidation of federal authority and to

plans for western development. But by putting their experience in relation to that of the

freedpeople, we can get a deeper sense of what was unfolding across the country. Without

question, the “Indian problem” had a history as long as European settlement in North America

and well before the Civil War policy-makers and reformers alike seemed to share a view of what

needed to be done: Indians had to be removed from the path of white settlement, concentrated in

defined territories, and “civilized” by means of education and detribalization.

Yet, with the Civil War, the “Indian problem” entered a new phase. For one thing,

Confederate alliances with plains Indians, together with the initial refusal of the Lincoln

administration to collect its own native allies, both increased the likelihood of violent encounters

in the West and turned the Union side to a more general policy of subjugation and pacification

(the Confederates offered representation in their Congress). As General Pope suggested, the

suppression of the Sioux rebellion effectively initiated more than two decades of warfare, some

of the most wide-ranging and devastating of which (think of the Sand Creek massacre in

Colorado or Kit Carson’s campaign against the Navajo in 1863-64) took place before the

Confederate surrender.

Although subsequent years are often portrayed in terms of the twists and turns of federal

policy and the struggles involving the War Department, the Department of the Interior, and

social reformers, the period between 1862 and 1871 was crucial. It was then that the federal

state commenced pursuit of Indians regarded as rebellious (meaning that they resisted

confinement on reservations), lowered the boom on the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (“erring

children” they were called) for aligning with the Confederacy, and, perhaps most important,

abolished the treaty system. “The time has come,” the Indian Peace Commission resolved in

1868, “when the Government should cease to recognize the Indian tribes as “domestic dependent

nations [except owing to existing treaties] . . . and hereafter all Indians should be considered and

held to be individually subject to the laws of the United States.” Three years later, in an Indian

appropriation bill, the Congress made it official: “hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the

territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation,

tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” This was a decade and a

half before the Dawes Severalty Act provided a framework for detribalization and the extension

of citizenship.

As part of the process, the federal state moved against slavery among various Indian

tribes, most notably the Cherokees, Seminoles, Creek, Choctaws, and Chickasaws who held

slaves of African descent (and who were ordered to incorporate them on an “equal footing”), but

also against the captive economies of the southwest and southern Plains. It proved a lengthy and

complex road of emancipation, in good part because the line between slavery, captivity, and debt

bondage could be indistinct. It may, however, be useful for us not only to think about

emancipationism in its western as well as southern settings, but also to consider the languages of

“civilizationism” deployed in the Indian context in relation to developing languages of race and

racial prospect deployed against African Americans, and of course the relation between the logic

(and choreography) of reservations and that of segregation.

The connections and complications in these matters between South and West were in

many ways embodied in military personnel. Although most of us associate the names of William

Sherman, Philip Sheridan, Nelson Miles, E.R.S. Canby, and a host of other Union officers with

the war against the Confederacy and then the reconstruction of the former Confederate states,

they had important subsequent careers in the trans-Mississippi West that throw their roles in the

defeat of one rebellion and transition out of slavery into meaningful relief. Sherman, who

advanced the idea and practice of “total warfare” and then issued Field Orders No. 15 in January

1865, went on to negotiate an agreement with the Sioux in 1868 at Fort Laramie which both

delineated the boundaries of their reservation and demanded that they “withdraw all opposition

to the construction of railroads now being built on the plains”; not long after, as General-in-Chief

of the Army, he pressed for War Department control of Indian affairs and argued that Indian

peoples of the plains “be made self-supporting” through means of livestock raising.

Perhaps even more compelling is the case of O.O. Howard, wartime officer and

subsequently Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, who brought missionary zeal and

shortsightedness to the question of what “shall we do with the negro?” For this he is best known.

But Howard, who cut his military teeth in the Seminole War, spent far more time criss-crossing

the trans-Mississippi West, from the far southwest to the far northwest, bringing Apaches,

Modocs, Nez Perce, Crows, and Sioux to heel through military and diplomatic methods. He was

by no means hostile to them and readily conceded the misdeeds that had been committed by

whites; he believed that some of them might well be capable of moving from “savagery” to

“civilization.” Yet as was true for the freedpeople in the Reconstruction South, his vision

required that they accommodate to the relations of power and cultural practices that a new-nation

state was imagined to represent. “In dealing with the Indians,” he later wrote, “we must neither

fear nor hate them; after instructions are given by the proper authority see to it that the Indians

are made to understand the orders; afterwards, see to it that they are carried into execution

without hesitancy or delay.”

Historians have long debated the appropriate chronologies of emancipation and

Reconstruction in the United States, and although some of them recognize the national

perimeters of the processes, they have mostly looked to the former Confederacy and have

effectively exported issues about “class,” “race,” and “race relations” when shifting (usually

fleetingly) to the North and West. This, of course, makes a good deal of sense. But I would

suggest that nation-state formation – and imperial nation-state formation in particular – might be

a better hub around which the spokes of emancipation and Reconstruction turned. So

considered, we may find new episodes to mark the era’s end points: the Dawes Act and Plessy v.

Ferguson, the Spanish-American War and the admission of the last of the continental states, and

perhaps even the Mexican Revolution.