Review - "Lincoln and Native Americans" by Michael Green

[Lincoln and Native Americans by Michael S. Green (Southern Illinois University Press, 2021). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,108/170. ISBN:978-0-8093-3825-2. $24.95]

Having well over two-dozen existing volumes and still growing with multiple titles published most years, SIU Press's Concise Lincoln Library is continually building upon its goal of giving readers "the opportunity to quickly achieve basic knowledge of a Lincoln-related topic." Written by a host of scholars, series entries bring "fresh perspectives to well-known topics, investigate previously overlooked subjects, and explore in greater depth topics that have not yet received book-length treatment." The newest release, Michael Green's Lincoln and Native Americans, is yet another strong installment that meets one or more of those series characteristics.

Lincoln's relations with North American indigenous groups are far from completely neglected in the historical literature, but at the same time the topic has received very little book-length coverage. As Green reminds us, David Nichols's Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics has become a classic, but it is well over forty years old at this point and does not examine the pre-1860 decades of Lincoln's life at any depth. Green's study does venture into that earlier period, opening with a brief but fascination summary of the history of Lincoln's personal and family associations. Though his own paternal grandfather was murdered by a raiding party while planting corn in a field (with his own father very narrowly escaping a similar fate on that day), Lincoln himself, unlike many other frontier-raised citizens and politicians, never became an Indian "hater." In Green's view, while Lincoln's service as a militia captain in the Black Hawk War did more than a little to shape the future president's own course in public life (through friendships gained, an education in leadership, and beneficial enhancement of his own political network and reputation), it had a more uncertain impact on his attitudes regarding the region's indigenous population. Whatever Lincoln's views on reforming Indian affairs might have been early on in his political career, they clearly remained low priority during his contentious rise to the presidency. While the Republican Party successfully campaigned in 1860 against the corruption of previous Democratic administrations, Lincoln fully involved himself in territorial and Bureau of Indian Affairs patronage appointments that only perpetuated the old spoils system that benefited its operators far more than those under its charge. Green agrees with Nichols in characterizing Lincoln as being mostly detached from Indian affairs; however, Green does credit Lincoln for consistently passing on opportunities both before and during his presidency to cheaply score political points through public employment of anti-Indian rhetoric.

After the outbreak of Civil War, Lincoln was immediately confronted with what to do in Indian Territory, where US forces deployed there in 1861 were weak, logistically isolated, and threatened by rapidly growing Confederate military forces operating out of Texas and Arkansas. Green makes an interesting point in noting that events there provide us with a rare example of the Davis government politically and strategically outmaneuvering the Lincoln administration in a major way. While Lincoln basically abandoned the territory without consulting the treaty partners there, the Confederates swiftly moved in and established both a military department for defending the territory and alliance treaties with most large tribal groups. Lincoln has been criticized with some justification for creating the vacuum that the Davis government exploited to the full, but those same critics often fail to see how difficult, and perhaps impossible, it would have been to maintain any sort of effective US military presence there in 1861. As was the case elsewhere in dealing with Trans-Mississippi Indian relations, Lincoln was reactive rather than proactive in the territory. While a series of military expeditions did eventually restore most pro-Union tribes to their Indian Territory homes, this was only after extensive devastation in human lives lost, livestock killed or stolen, and property destroyed. Some have even argued that no other population suffered more from the directs effects of the war than the residents of Indian Territory.

In his very brief yet fine summary of topically relevant wartime events in the Pacific Northwest, California, Utah, Colorado, the Desert Southwest, and Minnesota, Green notes that Lincoln's personal involvement in military and political affairs in most of those places was minimal. However, the author does reasonably maintain that the president bears leadership responsibility for the litany of mistreatment and abuse conducted by or facilitated through his patronage appointments. Lincoln was forced to take a more direct role in Minnesota during the aftermath of the massacre of hundreds of settlers by the Dakota and the widening of the conflict into a Northern Plains war. He had his staff review the results of the deeply flawed legal process that resulted in over 300 capital sentences and commuted all but 39 (later reduced to 38). Though it is not the purpose of the book to provide any major new insights into the subject matter (the topic has been explored in numerous books and articles), Green does briefly ponder the possibility, though he finds no written evidence to support it, that Lincoln's dealings with the Dakota uprising and its aftermath had an impact on the framing of the Lieber Code issued four months after the Mankato hangings.

In discussing the few face to face meetings Lincoln had with tribal leaders, the author finds none of the hostility but much of the cultural dismissiveness characteristic of most citizens of the period. Somewhat oddly, even when assured of Chief John Ross's loyalty by respected citizens and military officers alike who either knew him personally or had extensive contact with him, Lincoln remained very skeptical and was decidedly cold toward the Cherokee statesman. Finding Lincoln intensely focused on emancipation and freedmen concerns but politically unengaged when it came to concurrent Indian reforms, Green maintains that Lincoln was disappointingly consistent in not including native groups alongside white and black Americans in his otherwise expansive vision of post-Civil War western settlement and shared economic prosperity.

Green clearly acknowledges that all of this creates a problem for the legions of Lincoln admirers. In his conclusion, Green concisely articulates the challenge, noting that "while Lincoln advanced considerably in his thinking about African Americans, Native Americans were another matter. He approved a mass execution, said nothing about massacres, had no conversations with Indigenous people that rivaled the respect he demonstrated for African Americans, stalled Indian reformers, and thought it necessary to explain the planet to a delegation of chiefs. He put economic growth ahead of those who had lived in the West for generations, and he denied their heritage by supporting taking their land and concentrating them (in reservations). He encouraged a free labor ideology for white Americans and sought to extend it to African Americans, but he saw no place in it for Native Americans" (pg. 106-107). Whether Lincoln's promise to devote his full attention to Indian reform once the Civil War was concluded would ever have come to pass remains one of the great unknowns. There are those that demand that Lincoln, in viewing everything else as secondary to winning the war and prioritizing his white and emerging black political constituencies, face unqualified condemnation for doing so little to improve Indian lives and their treatment at the hands of the government during the Civil War. On the other end of the spectrum, those that insist that we treat Lincoln only as a man of his time, and one lacking personal animus toward Indians and more sympathetic than most when it came to their plight, can be too blind to what might have been achieved with even a modestly greater expenditure of national treasure and political capital. Clearly doubts about what Lincoln might have been willing or able to do remain, but those with a hopeful nature, as well as being charitably inclined toward a president who demonstrated a fairly profound capacity for change and who was assassinated in the middle of his presidency when the Civil War still raging, might assign to Lincoln not failing marks but rather a grade of 'incomplete.'