Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  In the spring of 1875, Red Cloud returned to Washington with a retinue of chiefs and interpreters to hear the government’s terms: sell the land or suffer the consequence—war—and if war, no more beef would be delivered to the reservations. Red Cloud would not yield. He said he needed to take the proposal (really, a threat) home to a council of tribal leaders. After the leaders passed around the ceremonial pipe, they mostly concurred with Red Cloud: hold on to the Black Hills and do not abandon the hunting grounds near the Tongue River. The Sioux were not a sedentary people; theirs was a life of freedom, the freedom to hunt, to roam, to live as they had been living before the white men had slaughtered the buffalo herds.

  A congressional commission traveled West to cajole the chiefs. Sitting Bull was unmoved.

  “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell or lease any land to the government,” he said, picking up a smidgen of dirt with his fingers, “—not even as much as this.”

  IN THE FALL of 1875, Grant consulted with his generals and decided to reverse his policy. He would allow miners into the Black Hills. He knew that that meant war. And it almost seems as though the government wanted one. Calling any Indian not on a reservation a hostile Indian, the government ordered Indians of any band or tribe to move to a reservation by January 31, 1876. Otherwise, they would be crushed. But it was winter, and word traveled slowly. The Sioux may not have heard of the new conditions being imposed on them, and even if they had and had been willing to comply, how could they ride through the blinding snow of the Dakota winter to arrive at the reservation on time? Sheridan didn’t care. Roaming Indians were the enemy.

  Yet when Custer smoked a peace pipe with the Southern Cheyenne after the Washita battle, he had sworn not to attack them again. Taking no chances, Chief Medicine Arrows sprinkled tobacco ashes into the bowl of Custer’s pipe when it was almost empty to make sure Custer kept his word. If he didn’t, he would be “destroyed like ashes.”

  And so he would be. Before that, though, he had been removed from his command again, this time for failing to call on President Grant before he rode out west again in 1876. Truth be told, Grant hadn’t actually wanted to see Custer, who had recently testified before Congress that Secretary of War Belknap had received kickbacks; what’s more, he had implicated Grant’s brother Orvil in the sleazy business. Though Grant wasn’t close to Orvil, he stood by friends and family, all the more so when their reputations were impugned.

  Once more Sheridan interceded on Custer’s behalf, for Custer was essential to the three-pronged campaign with which he intended to demolish the Sioux, who, he believed, were encamped on the Little Bighorn River, also known as the Greasy Grass. Custer returned to service and though General Alfred Terry, not Custer, was placed in charge of the Dakota column—Custer still had his 7th Cavalry—they planned to advance on the encampment from the east. Leading the Montana column, Colonel John Gibbon, with seven companies of infantry, would approach from the west, and General George Crook, a renowned Apache fighter in the Southwest, would come up from the south with his Wyoming column, some 1,200 men.

  General Terry intended to meet up with Gibbon’s column on the Yellowstone River, at the mouth of the Rosebud River, while Custer followed the Rosebud; then Terry and Gibbon together would go along the Yellowstone to approach Little Bighorn River, near where they believed the Sioux were encamped, and strike the Indians—if, that is, Custer had by then pinpointed their whereabouts. For Terry had ordered Custer to follow a southward trail that had been recently discovered and then join him and Gibbon; that way Custer would be attacking from both the east and the south. Meantime, if Custer encountered Indians along the way, he was to use his own judgment about whether to engage them.

  Custer vastly underestimated the grit and the canniness of the Sioux. He also had no idea that Sitting Bull had amassed a coalition of about 2,000 warriors and was preparing to fight. With word spreading of the soldiers’ advance, with the miserable conditions in the reservations, and with their mounting anger, more and more agency Indians had been swelling the ranks of the Sioux hunting bands, which had already been joined by such tribes as the Northern Cheyenne and the Miniconjou and Blackfoot. The Indians refused to give up their land whether or not the Great Father threatened them.

  On June 17, Cheyenne and Sioux horsemen, led by Crazy Horse, attacked General Crook’s Wyoming column on the Rosebud River. Riding up close, knocking the soldiers from their horses with their lances and firing their rifles for six ferocious hours, the warriors had stopped Crook’s advance cold. Said one white soldier in retrospect, “the Indians were always scientific fighters. When . . . they succeeded in arming themselves with breechloaders and magazine rifles, the Sioux of the northern plains became foemen far more to be dreaded than any European cavalry.”

  A week later, around noon on June 25, Custer discovered what turned out to be a recently abandoned camp, the campfires still warm. The inhabitants had fled, leaving only a single tipi. Inside was a Lakota warrior, killed during the battle with Crook. Custer had not yet heard of the defeat and could not, in all likelihood, have imagined it. He decided to press forward with five companies in the afternoon.

  What Custer then decided to do and when he decided to do it—and the outcome of his decisions—would be discussed for generations.

  BACK EAST, THE country was celebrating its Centennial in Philadelphia with an exuberant display of unity and strength and modern technology. The fairgrounds stretched over 236 acres, and almost 200,000 people had come to the opening ceremonies in May, whether in the special trains built for the occasion or in their milk wagons: working women, cooks, servants, dandies, western farmers dressed in homespun. In Machinery Hall, President Grant himself had set into motion the gigantic Corliss engine that supplied power to the entire fairground. “Rich men and poor men,” reported a special correspondent for The New York Times. “The crowd was nothing if not American.” The Americans ogled the newfangled telephone or watched as bricks were fired, or they visited in droves the quaint, souvenirlike Indian tipis, located in the newly erected U.S. Government Building. They were not thinking about Custer.

  News that Custer had gone down to certain death—and, as it would turn out, conspicuous celebrity—reached Philadelphia on July 4 in detailed accounts of the two hours of combat soon known as the “Last Stand.” On Sunday, June 25, 1876, Custer had divided his men into three battalions, and by late afternoon, he and his battalion were under fierce attack. Leading his warriors, Crazy Horse had painted his face and dusted his horse with dirt before dashing past the soldiers to draw their fire. Crazy Horse was not hit—it was said that no bullet could kill him—and he broke the soldiers’ line in two. In the smoke and dust, the shouting and the confusion, mortally wounded bluecoats tumbled from their horses; they were clubbed and shot and slashed with tomahawks; and in the end, nothing remained of Custer’s battalion in the 7th Cavalry, no wounded, just dead ponies and saddles and corpses, 225 of them. “Our young men rained lead across the river and drove the white braves back,” Sitting Bull recalled.

  Two warm and sunny days later, on June 27, General Terry arrived at the battlefield where his lieutenants found the swollen bodies of some 210 dead soldiers, stripped and scalped and torn by scavenging animals. They seemed to have died in clusters, or some of them had; the rest were scattered all over the field. Naked but unmolested, Custer had been hit in the temple and near the heart.

  The great Indian victory was a Pyrrhic one. Custer’s defeat emboldened western Indian haters, it silenced eastern philanthropists, and it shook the already shaken peace policy. Indian killing was now an act of principled patriotism that united North and South. “As this is the centennial year of American independence,” wrote an ex-Confederate to Representative Thomas L. Jones of Kentucky, “I desire to let the world see that we who were once soldiers of the ‘lost cause’ are not deficient in patriotism. Will you be kind enough to intimate to the President that I offer him the services of a full regi
ment, composed exclusively of ex-Confederates, to avenge Custer’s death.”

  The Sioux and Cheyenne would succumb to Ranald Mackenzie’s cavalrymen, and by the next year, after a winter of plunging temperatures and biting hunger, and with Colonel Nelson Miles and General Crook in pursuit, the Sioux were losing heart. Riding a spotted pony on the stage road from Fort Laramie to the Black Hills, in May 1877 the proud and silent Crazy Horse met with a delegation of U.S. soldiers at the Red Cloud Agency and placed his weapons on the ground. His people had little ammunition, food, or hope. With the promise of a reservation in Powder Hill country, he surrendered. The rest is uncertain. The army arrested him. On the way to the guardhouse, on September 5, 1877, he was mortally stabbed by a soldier. He was thirty-seven. His parents took his body and never told anyone where they buried him.

  MINERS, PROSPECTORS, AND unwitting or witting settlers were soon swarming over the Black Hills, buoyed by “manifest destiny.”

  The Sioux had been reduced to helpless dispossession, for dispossession had been the true center both of the peace policy and of the war policy. But to the white settlers, ranchers and prospectors, to the magnates and to the men seated at their hardwood desks in the Capitol, to the readers of newspapers, the illustrators of magazines, and the investors on Wall Street, to all of them, westward settlement indicated progress—imperial progress, evolutionary progress, material progress. In the year of Custer’s defeat, almost $2 million worth of gold was taken out of the Black Hills.

  General Sherman had scanned the West and had seen the future: those iron rails stretching from Atlantic to Pacific, the sooty locomotives, their whistles shrieking across the grasslands where the buffalo hardly roamed. In 1880, the six-year-old Gertrude Stein would travel with her family on one of those grand locomotives, bound from the East to Oakland, California, and from the window of the train she saw something quaint, as if out of a storybook—what she called “red Indians”—scattered along what was for her, but not for them, a very exciting way.

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  CONCILIATION; OR, THE LIVING

  Nathan Bedford Forrest carefully trimmed his mustache and the chin whiskers that had grown as lead gray as his thinning hair. He wore civilian clothes, also grayish, but the buttons of his vest were polished. He stood over six feet tall on small feet. He didn’t know the difference between whiskey and brandy, he didn’t use tobacco, he didn’t eat much. He hated whistling, he hated dirt, he hated disorder. He liked to curse but never told a smutty story. No one wanted to see him angry. There were tales about how he had plunged his bowie knife into an army insubordinate, wiped off the blood, and then casually walked away as the man fell to the ground. He was born a soldier, it was said, the way some people are born poets. But now, in the fall of 1877, the fearsome general once known as the Wizard of the Saddle weighed a skeletal one hundred pounds. His flesh was stretched over his long frame, his face the waxy color of magnolia. Eager to recoup his fortune and assuming he was physically invincible, he had leased 1,800 acres on President’s Island in the Mississippi River, and it was there, on his plantation, that he contracted malaria.

  At the end of October, Nathan Bedford Forrest was dead. He was fifty-six years old.

  When it came time to bury Forrest, some 20,000 people lined the streets of Memphis to watch a three-mile-long procession: two hundred mounted men from Forrest’s cavalry, a brass band and ex-Confederate riflemen, still more ex-Confederates, a sprinkling of men dressed in Union blue, and black convicts who worked Forrest’s plantation. All had followed the coal-colored hearse pulled by four sleek horses and the retinue of carriages that carried family and city officials. In one of them rode the gaunt former president of the former Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, along with the Tennessee governor, James D. Porter, who were pallbearers.

  In the casket lay General Forrest dressed in his Confederate uniform.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest was gone, but he had already become the stuff of myth: an audacious cavalry commander and ferocious guerrilla warrior, the illiterate backwoodsman responsible for Fort Pillow, a former slave trader and one of the richest men in Tennessee. General Sherman had said that Forrest possessed a genius for strategy—although Forrest had operated mainly on the margins of the major campaigns and, as one detractor noted, had never faced a really good officer, and he had rarely attacked unless he outnumbered his enemy. Still, there was something timeless about the man who remained incapable of pity or fear, or that’s at least how he struck the writer Lafcadio Hearn, who observed the funeral procession with a mixture of horror and awe.

  Hearn saw Forrest as “a typical pioneer, one of those fierce and terrible men, who form in themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilization.” Defender of his beloved Tennessee and his beloved South, Forrest was one of the last Confederates to surrender—not until May 1865 did he admit defeat—and after the war, still defending his homeland, he was apparently the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, although when questioned by Congress he disingenuously denied having had any part of it. Denials notwithstanding, Forrest told friends, “If they send the black men to hunt those confederate soldiers whom they call kuklux, then I say to you, ‘Go out and shoot the radicals.’ ”

  Yes, there was something timeless—and infamous—about Nathan Bedford Forrest. For one thing, he was known far and wide as the Butcher of Fort Pillow although there too he had refused responsibility for what had happened back in the spring of ’64. It didn’t matter. Let Northerners scowl. General Forrest was also the consummate self-made man: from the rural South, not well born by any means, he had remade himself in true American fashion, converting the boy with the hardscrabble background and an aptitude for violence first into a millionaire and then into a glorious commander who knew that to win, you had to get there first, with the most men. He had survived the death of the thirty or so horses shot from beneath him, and he had survived the war, and though he had unsuccessfully invested in railroads and construction, he was surviving Reconstruction. He had reinvented slavery, after a fashion, by negotiating with local prisons for inmates to work on his malaria-infested plantation, which began to produce, it was said, more than 400 bales of cotton a year. The inmates received a measly 10 cents an hour.

  Fortune had been kind to Forrest. Had he died sooner, he might have been remembered as a fighter for a bad cause, said a sarcastic reporter in an article called “Conciliation.” He might have been remembered as the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Pillow. Yet by 1877 Forrest could be hailed as the noble defender of his homeland who had bravely resisted interlopers and invaders. Of course, that those invaders just happened to be Union men preserving the country from traitors was of no moment now. All had been forgotten, all forgiven. Even calling what had happened at Fort Pillow a massacre was a quarrelsome exaggeration. “Nothing interferes more with conciliation than to charge those who are to be conciliated with participating in revolting crimes,” concluded the mordant reporter. Had dear General Forrest lived longer, he might even have entered the cabinet—or, better yet, taken a seat on the Supreme Court.

  On Decoration Day, which had recently become an official holiday, Forrest liked to sprinkle flowers on the graves of the Union dead; in 1877, when he appeared during the Fourth of July celebrations in Memphis, a group of black men and women was said to have handed him a bouquet of reuniting blossoms.

  ON THE NIGHT of his burial, the rains came, heavy, gray, leaden rains, and a wild and howling wind.

  Was Nathan Bedford Forrest, outfitted in the regalia of intransigence, again shouting the old Rebel yell and beckoning fellow Southerners to rise, reclaim their heritage and recommit to the peculiar institution, though far changed, for which they had fought? Or was the sound of the wind the sound of the death knell for the Confederacy and the Old South?

  Perhaps both.

  It was 1877, time for a renewed compromise—called “conciliation.”

  THE FUNERAL OF Nathan Bedford Forrest did not at all resemble the n
ational funeral of John Quincy Adams, twenty-nine years earlier, when the momentary coming together of North and South had also marked the end of an era. And Old Adams had foretold, Cassandra-like, a future no one wanted to imagine: a divisive and brutal war, if nothing was done about slavery, if no one listened, if temperatures—like his own—climbed too high and minds stayed too made up. Slavery was “a deep-seated disease,” he had told Whittier, “preying upon the vitals of this Union.” He had foretold war, and war there had been.

  Its effects were still being felt, especially in a South confounded by poverty, violence, and resentment. The previous year, during the Fourth of July celebrations, while Northerners had marked the Centennial in Philadelphia and digested the news of Custer’s defeat, in the small, predominantly black town of Hamburg, South Carolina, there had been a parade. Company A of the 18th Regiment, National Guard—a black company—was marching on Market Street when two white men had suddenly appeared, driving a one-horse buggy and demanding to pass right through the center of the procession. They were told they would have to wait for the parade to pass or to drive on the side of the street, where there was apparently more room to maneuver. They refused. According to Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, the head of Company A, they had no intention of getting out of the way “for no d—d niggers.”

  A relative of one of the men in the buggy was soon insisting that Doc Adams be arrested for obstructing the road. Adams was served with a warrant, and when he appeared before the black trial justice, Prince Rivers, who had issued it, Adams reputedly ridiculed the complaint. (Newspapers would later complain that Adams had been “insolent.”) The distinguished-looking Judge Rivers, who had stolen his master’s horse during the war and ridden it across Confederate lines to join Thomas Higginson’s Union regiment, cited Adams for contempt of court. He scheduled a trial date for July 8, a Saturday. By that time, though, about 100 white men, many of them drunk, most of them armed with pistols, rifles, hatchets, and clubs, were gathering. Afraid for his life, Adams told Rivers that he couldn’t show up for his trial because he had overheard them saying they were going to kill him.