Booknotes: Interrupted Odyssey

New Arrival:

• Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians by Mary Stockwell (SIU Press, 2025).

A short while ago, I reviewed a well-argued overview analysis of Abraham Lincoln's various interactions with the tribes of North America (to read it, go here). Of course, the 16th president, mired in the Civil War, could not devote much in the way of personal attention (or political capital) to broader Indian affairs, and his assassination left unfulfilled his promise to more closely address relations between the tribes and the United States government once the war ended.

Direct successor Andrew Johnson had similarly pressing matters of national reconstruction to attend to, but his administration managed to negotiate major new treaties with those that sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War as well as with the Plains Indians, agreements with the latter aimed toward safeguarding westward movement and settlement. Those treaties signaled a major new emphasis on resettling tribes to reservations with a long-term goal of assimilating them. Of course, work in those areas was far from over when U.S. Grant, who was involved in that earlier process in his capacity of US Army general in chief, was sworn into office as the nation's 18th president in 1869. The merits of his two-term administration's Indian policy, long disputed in the literature, are the focus of Mary Stockwell's Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians.

Upon taking office, Grant quickly appointed Ely S. Parker, a trusted Seneca lawyer, engineer, and brevet brigadier general who earlier served on Grant's staff during the Civil War, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and they collaborated on developing the administration's "Peace Policy."

From the description: In Interrupted Odyssey, "Stockwell rejects the common claim in previous Grant scholarship that he handed the reservations over to Christian missionaries as part of his original policy. In part because Grant’s plan ended political patronage, Congress overturned his policy by disallowing Army officers from serving in civil posts, abandoning the treaty system, and making the new Board of Indian Commissioners the supervisors of the Indian service. Only after Congress banned Army officers from the Indian service did Grant place missionaries in charge of the reservations, and only after the board falsely accused Parker of fraud before Congress did Grant lose faith in his original policy."

Many other elements of the Peace Policy did not go as planned. More: "Stockwell explores in depth the ousting of Parker, revealing the deep-seated prejudices that fueled opposition to him, and details Grant’s stunned disappointment when the Modoc murdered his peace commissioners and several tribes—the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Sioux—rose up against his plans for them."

Such failures aside, it's probably safe to say that Grant's Indian policies are viewed more positively overall by today's historians, and Stockwell has clearly joined this group of modern revisionists. In the author's view "Grant set his country firmly toward making Indians full participants in the national experience. In setting Grant’s contributions against the wider story of the American Indians, Stockwell’s bold, thoughtful reappraisal reverses the general dismissal of Grant’s approach to the Indians as a complete failure and highlights the courage of his policies during a time of great prejudice."