American Experiment (190 page)

An enfeebled government enabled a few to amass colossal riches; it had only marginal impact on the lives of the mass of people. Almost obscured in the din of battle over “tariff-for-revenue-only” and silver, for example, was the ironic fact that the federal government ran a surplus during many of these years and was embarrassed as to how properly to get rid of it. Grover Cleveland had a penchant for vetoing as “fraudulent” tiny pensions begged by impoverished widows of Union men. Cleveland’s successor, Benjamin Harrison, chose as Commissioner of Pensions a past commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, who took office with the war cry, “God help the surplus!” God didn’t.

Far more tragically, God did not favor the American Indian in the decades after the Civil War. Following a near-century of land seizures and cessions, Congress in 1871 ordered an end to treaty-making with Indian tribes. By then the early Americans, their old space on the Great Plains shrunk to the Indian Territory that would later become Oklahoma, could no longer follow the old and desperate strategy of simply “moving west.” In this vital human area too, federal action was marked by a volatility of policy operating through a weak and divided government, among a diffusion of interests. With no long-term program or principle behind it, policy shifted back and forth from treaty-making to subsidy to education to isolation to assimilation to relocation to force. The Interior and War Departments and the Board of Indian Commissioners fought for influence; President, Senate, and House differed; actual dealings with Indians were often controlled by settlers, traders, and local officials. For years the selection of Indian agents was left to the Catholic Church and various Protestant sects, until church officials fell to quarreling among themselves.

Reformers—among them old abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Wendell Phillips, and an eloquent new voice, Helen Hunt Jackson—criticized Indian policies, but western senators scoffed that the farther people lived from the Indians, the more they loved them. In 1887, however, Congress passed the Dawes Act, which dissolved Indian tribes as legal entities and allotted individual Indians portions of reservation land, in order to encourage both individual initiative and assimilation with the white culture. After twenty-five years Indians would
have full ownership and the rights of United States citizenship. But however well intended, the act as administered substantially disrupted Indian tribal and communal organization and indeed virtually atomized Indian cultures.

Despite the severity of its policies, Congress never seemed to focus consistently on the Indian situation. Rather the legislators debated their future, in Wiebe’s view, “as it might have discussed taxes.” Almost none saw any connection between the plight of Indians and that of blacks. Congress treated Indians as the enemy with which to make treaties (for land cessions), to isolate, to “civilize,” and finally, when all else failed, to fight, in a series of brutal encounters that preoccupied the United States Army during the late nineteenth century.

The Indian wars on the Plains curiously resembled the political fights in Washington: there were no clear battle lines or decisive clashes, just three decades of skirmishes between a constantly shifting array of small forces. The red warriors rallied behind a string of charismatic leaders: the Sioux nation’s Sitting Bull, “of compelling countenance and commanding demeanor, quick of thought and emphatic in judgments”; wily Geronimo of the Apaches; the stoic Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. Yet none of these tribal chieftains was able to reach across centuries-old clan rivalries to unite the 200,000 Plains Indians against the invaders from the east. Nor were the white generals successful in so maneuvering their disparate units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery as to pin the Indians down for a set-piece battle. Thus the “wars” were in fact a series of collisions, of regiment against tribe in hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and mounted clashes that usually ended in tactical draws—but ultimate strategic retreat for the native Americans.

As in the past, white settlers undercut federal efforts to contain the Indians on reservations. The army tried in vain to keep prospectors out of the Black Hills area assigned to Sitting Bull’s Sioux, but the gold rush accelerated in 1875, and within a year the Indians were on the warpath. Unscrupulous white traders sold the warriors ammunition and guns—including repeating rifles that were superior to the Civil War Springfields still being used by the army. But Indians too turned coats; individual warriors and sometimes whole clans helped the army to hunt down rival tribesmen.

At first the soldiers, many of them Civil War veterans, held the Plains warriors in contempt. One captain boasted that he could ride through the Sioux nation with just eighty men; within weeks, he and his entire command were dead. In 1876, the flamboyant George Custer, after chasing Crazy Horse’s warriors for six months, attacked the Sioux army at Little
Big Horn; he and his force were annihilated. The truth was that the Indians were skillful fighters. Their culture centered on the horse, the hunt, and the honor of combat. Lightly equipped, deftly led, increasingly armed with modern weapons, the red warriors were “a match for any man,” as one cavalry general conceded.

But while the Indians could hold their own in battle, in defending their settlements and families they were at a disadvantage. Chief Joseph marched his entire tribe over 1,700 miles and outfought several columns of pursuers, only to be besieged in his camp and forced to surrender. In another camp, at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, a brawl started between the surrounded Indians and soldiers of Custer’s old 7th Cavalry; two hundred Indians of all ages, and twenty-five white soldiers, were gunned down, and the last halfhearted resistance of the Sioux nation ended in tragedy. For a time small groups of fighters, like Geronimo’s Apache band, continued a guerrilla struggle, but the very foundations of the Indian way of life were disappearing. From on foot, horseback, and even train, whites slaughtered the vast buffalo herds upon which the Plains natives depended for food and shelter.

Meanwhile, settlers streamed into the Plains. By 1890, there were five times as many whites as Indians between the Missouri and the Rockies and the U.S. census reported that the western frontier had disappeared. Military stalemate had in fact spelled decisive defeat for the native Americans.

The army that held the Indians in check received little support and much criticism from Washington. The soldiers, thirty-six regiments of whites and four of blacks, were ill housed, ill clothed, ill fed; their discipline was harsh, their weapons mismatched and often shoddy, their tasks usually boring in the extreme. The drab life and grinding routine produced a hard set of men—“villins, loyars, teeves, scoundhrils and … dam murdhrers,” they called themselves with perverse pride. Easterners sympathetic to the Indians and horrified by the cruelty of the frontier wars branded the soldiers as butchers and barbarians. Still, the small professional army kept alive in the West those lessons of leadership, tenacity, and improvisation that the volunteers had learned so painfully in the Civil War. The veterans of the Indian wars would be formidable opponents to any foreign foe.

Of foreign foes, however, there were very few in those years. Spain had reoccupied Santo Domingo during the war but prudently withdrew in 1865. French Emperor Napoleon III, under the pretext of collecting debts owed European investors, invaded Mexico in 1861 and set up a puppet government headed by the young Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. But, by 1867, the continued resistance of Mexican patriots led by President Benito Juárez, as well as the specter of a victorious American
army on the Rio Grande, convinced Napoleon to pull out of the venture; Maximilian’s regime quickly collapsed, and the erstwhile emperor was executed by his subjects.

No leader had so few followers as Secretary of State William Seward, who met constant frustration in his attempts to revive the Manifest Destiny expansionism of antebellum days. Congress rejected his bids to acquire Hawaii, Cuba, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Iceland, Greenland, and parts of Canada. His treaty to buy Alaska from the Russians for just over $7 million was approved only after Seward undertook a massive campaign to educate the public as to the potential value of the territory—and after the Russian ambassador bribed key members of the House to appropriate money for the deal. Aside from this 1867 purchase of “Seward’s Icebox,” the only territory added to the United States after the Civil War was the tiny Pacific island of Midway.

But there was always John Bull. Britain still loomed as both friend and rival. English loans and English-built ships had buoyed the Confederates during the war; Yankee and Canadian fishermen clashed in northern waters; a border dispute in the Far West simmered on; Irish nationalists began raiding Canada from New York. Pressure for war built up in the Senate, where Chairman Charles Sumner of the Foreign Relations Committee rose to demand that Britain pay more than $2 billion in damages for its aid to the Confederacy—or else transfer Canada to the United States in lieu of payment. The British responded with disdain to the senator’s claims, and war seemed imminent on several occasions; but President Grant and his able Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, eventually defused the crisis and hammered out an agreement. Fish and Grant also succeeded in resisting pressure to go to war with Spain, whose colony of Cuba was in the throes of a bloody revolt. After preserving the peace for eight years, the warrior-president left office in 1877—and immediately embarked on a triumphant tour of the world.

Grant’s two-year procession around the globe highlighted a subtle but important change at home. It was during this period that Americans began to look outward on the world with a new interest, a new understanding, and a new level of personal and economic involvement—all of which would help to reshape foreign policy in the 1890s and beyond. Sam Grant of Ohio, as he addressed crowds of English workers, discussed realpolitik with Germany’s Prince Bismarck, and shook the hand of the Emperor of Japan, was not the only American taken up with a desire to see the world. Each year the State Department issued as many as 30,000 passports for travel abroad. It was the age of the Cook tour, when low-fare steamships made Europe accessible to middle-class families. Well-to-do families like
the Astors and the Roosevelts sent their children abroad as a matter of course; immigrants sought to revisit their old homes; archeologists went to dig, engineers to build and measure, and the ordinary tourists—in Henry James’s sour view—to “stare and gawk and smell, and crowd every street and shop.” The most numerous Americans abroad were the students and scholars—such as young Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton—who brought home European ideas.

In the books of traveled authors like Henry James and William Dean Howells, Americans encountering Europe was a recurring theme. Henry James based half-a-dozen novels on the idea, while Mark Twain made his own sardonic contribution with
The Innocents Abroad.
Magazines and newspapers, most of which boasted at least one foreign correspondent, filled in those Americans who lacked the money or the inclination to see things for themselves, as did the new picture postcards introduced by the Eastman Company. America’s new outward gaze was not fixed exclusively on Europe, however. For two decades, readers of the New York
Herald
could thrill to the adventures of the paper’s African correspondent, explorer Henry M. Stanley. Congress briefly overcame its parsimony to vote funds for several expeditions to the Arctic.

The Far East became a subject of special fascination. Americans helped to finance Japan’s first railroad and to modernize its education and farming methods. Lafcadio Hearn enlivened American literature with a dozen enthusiastic and sensitive books on oriental culture. The government became involved in this turn toward the East, sometimes in spite of itself. Commodore Robert Shufeldt was recalled from Korea after a political gaffe, but not before he opened that country to American merchants and diplomats. Congress ratified a series of reciprocal-trade agreements with Hawaii, and then strengthened ties with that island kingdom by leasing a naval station at Pearl Harbor in 1887. America’s involvement in Samoa nearly resulted in a war with Germany in 1889, until a hurricane sank the rival German and American fleets off the islands, giving peace efforts time to succeed.

In looking toward America’s nearest neighbors, however, the country’s gaze seemed to lack focus altogether. Pan-Americanism, sponsored by Benjamin Harrison’s Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, bore its first fruit in 1889 when delegates from eighteen North and South American states—including Andrew Carnegie for the U.S.—met in Washington. Yet Blaine came close to provoking war with Chile in late 1891 when a group of American sailors was assaulted in Valparaiso, and many Latin Americans were irked by the heavy-handedness of President Cleveland’s intervention on behalf of Venezuela in its 1895 border dispute with Britain’s colony of British Guiana. Nor could the various administrations in Washington make
up their minds about the assorted schemes being discussed for a canal across Central America. Yankee investment in the southern nations—reaching several hundred million dollars by the end of the century—seemed the only consistent factor in U.S. policy toward Latin America.

The great corporations, however, had a most consistent foreign policy, as they reached out for new markets and new investments: Rockefeller’s Standard Oil began selling its products abroad in 1879; J.P. Morgan floated loans for Peru; Cyrus McCormick introduced his wire binder to Russia in the 1880s, just as the Equitable Company began selling life insurance to the Czar’s subjects. The impact of foreign sales reached down through the economy, to Pullman workers making railroad cars for England and to midwestern farmers raising wheat for Germany and hogs for Bulgaria.

“If all thim gr-great powers … was ... to attack us,” Mr. Dooley said, “I’d blockade the Armour an’ Company an’ th’ wheat ilivators iv Minnysoty. I tell ye, th’ hand that rocks th’ scales in th’ grocery store is th’ hand that rules th’ wurruld.”