Part 7

This comprises all that is essential in this connection. The indicia gathered from particular acts of the government, or from the phraseology of individual treaties, really add nothing to the above.

We believe the following propositions to be consistent with the facts of history and with the latest judicial decisions.

1. The exclusion by the Constitution of "Indians not taxed" from the basis of representation was in no sense a guaranty to the Indian tribes of their political autonomy, but was a provision in the interest of an equitable apportionment of political power among the States, some States having many Indians within their limits, others few or none.

2. The self-government enjoyed by the Indian tribes under the Constitution of the United States, as under the European powers, has always been a government by sufferance, by toleration, by permission. The United States, for their own convenience, have allowed this self-government, because to reduce the savages to the condition of submitting to civilized laws would have involved a great expense of blood and treasure; while through the tribal organization a much better government, for the purposes of the civilized power if not for the welfare of the Indians themselves, could be obtained, than through an administration which should disregard that organization. But this toleration of savage self-government worked no prejudice to the sovereignty of the United States.

3. The decay of a tribe in numbers and in cohesion, no matter to what extent carried, does not bring the members of such tribe within the municipal jurisdiction of the State wherein they are found, so long as the tribal organization continues to be recognized by the National Government. See the Kansas Indians, 5 Wallace, 737.

4. Congress is constitutionally competent to extend the laws of the United States at once over every Indian tribe within the Territories, if not within the States of the Union, even though treaties may guarantee to individual tribes complete and perpetual political independence; the breach of faith involved in the latter case being matter for possible conscientious scruples on the part of legislators, not for judicial cognizance. See 11 Wallace, 616; 2 Curtis, 454; 1 Woolworth, 155.

We have thought it important thus to review the doctrine of the Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because, from the high standing of the Committee, from the assumption which the Report makes of completeness in the citation of "treaties, laws, and judicial decisions" pertinent to the subject, on the express ground of a desire to enlighten, not only Congress, but the country, in respect to our Indian relations, and from the wide circulation given to the Report, as compared with that obtained by an ordinary decision of the Circuit or Supreme Court of the United States, the Report has apparently come to be accepted by Congress and the country as an authoritative exposition of the history and law of the subject although, in the very month in which it was submitted to Congress, the Supreme Court, in the Cherokee Tobacco, pronounced a doctrine which cuts up that of the Report, root and branch.

Such being the constitutional competence of Congress to deal with the Indians, without restraint either from the self-government hitherto permitted them, or from treaties to which the United States are a party, it is for Congress to decide, firstly, what the good faith of the nation requires, and, secondly, what course will best accomplish the social and industrial elevation of the native tribes, with due consideration had for the interests of the present body of citizens.

How, then, stands the matter with the faith of the nation? By the Report on Indian Affairs for 1872, there appear (p. 16) to be in the neighborhood of 120,000 Indians with whom the United States have no treaty relations. These certainly can have no claims to exemption from direct control, whenever the United States shall see fit to extend its laws over them, either to incorporate them in the body of its citizenship, or to seclude them for their own good. There are, again, as nearly as we can determine by a comparison of treaties with the Reports of the Indian Office, about 125,000 Indians with whom the United States have treaties unexpired, but to whom no distinct guaranty or promise of autonomy has been made. Examination of these treaties reveals nothing which should prevent the United States from establishing a magistracy and a code of laws for the government of these tribes, according to principles suited to their present condition, yet tending to raise them to a higher social and industrial condition. On the other hand, the perpetual interdiction of all white persons upon the reservations of these tribes, except "such officers, agents, and employees of the government as may be authorized to enter upon Indian reservations in discharge of duties enjoined by law," would seem to preclude the possibility of these regions ever being opened to settlement, and the Indians thereon resolved into the body of citizens on equal terms. But, as matter of fact, not even such treaty provisions need, with intelligent and firm but kindly management, greatly or long embarrass the government in the adjustment of the Indian question according to either principle which may be adopted, seclusion or citizenship. Few of these tribes but are obliged, even now, to seek from the United States more aid than they are entitled to by treaty; while it is certain that in the near future most, if not all, will be thrown in comparative helplessness upon our bounty. The United States being the sole party to which they can cede their lands (8 Wheaton, 543), and the sale of the great body of these lands being their only resource, the government will have the opportunity, not only without fraud or wrong to this people, but for their highest good, and indeed for their salvation from the doom otherwise awaiting them, to cancel the whole of these ill-considered treaties, leaving the natives where they ought to be,--subject to direct control by Congress. We repeat, there need never be any difficulty in securing, at the right time and in the right way, the relinquishment of lands or privileges from the Indians. They are, unfortunately, only too ready to sacrifice the future to present indulgence; while the government on its part can always afford to pay them far more for their lands than their lands are worth to them. Under this relation of the parties in interest, and with the pressure of actual want, due to the inability of the natives properly to cultivate what they possess, the United States may at an early date, with good faith and judicious management, easily secure the relinquishment of every franchise that stands in the way of a satisfactory adjustment of the difficulty.

There is still a third body of Indians, about 55,000 in number, occupying chiefly the regions known as the Indian Territory, and representing the tribes which were the subjects of the colonization policy of Pres. Monroe, to whom the United States have plighted their faith that no foreign authority shall ever be extended over them without their consent. These are not beggarly and vagabond Indians, to whom the offer of subsistence would be sufficient to obtain the relinquishment of their franchises, or the cession of their lands. They are self-supporting, independent, and even wealthy. Their cereal crops exceed those of all the Territories of the United States combined. In the number and value of horses and cattle, they are surpassed by the people of but one Territory; in expenditures for education, by the people of no Territory. If these people ever relinquish their autonomy, it will be because they desire the privileges of American citizens. This may well be in the immediate future, and surely will be, sooner or later, unless they are made to fear the violence and greed of their white neighbors. Meanwhile, they should be honorably protected in the enjoyment of their treaty rights. They have already advanced so far in civilization as to secure their own future, as against any thing but squatter and railroad rapacity; and their fate does not properly form a part of the Indian problem of the present day.

Excepting thus the present inhabitants of the so-called Indian Territory, who ought to be excepted from any scheme that embraces the half-civilized and the wholly savage tribes, we have practically a clear field for any policy which Congress shall determine to be best suited to the serious exigency of the situation; for, however easy to dismiss the subject for a time with ridicule, the task of so disposing a nomad population of 200,000 to 240,000, as to reduce to a minimum the obstruction it shall offer to the progress of settlement and of industry, without leaving the germs of lasting evil to a score of future States, and at the same time to secure the highest welfare of that population,--this task is a most serious one, to which the best statesmanship of the nation may well address itself.

In characterizing the classes of persons who will naturally be found among the advocates of the policy of an immediate bestowal of citizenship upon the Indian tribes, whether they be willing or unwilling, whether for good or evil, we have in effect stated all the arguments in favor of that policy; for it is not probable, that, aside from those who would properly be placed under one or another of the classes indicated, there are a score of persons reasonably well informed in Indian affairs, who would so much as affect to believe that such a course would have other than disastrous consequences to the natives.

The considerations which favor the policy of seclusion with more or less of industrial constraint are so direct and familiar, and are sustained by so general a concurrence of testimony and authority, that they will not require us greatly to protract this paper in their exposition and enforcement. These considerations are four in number; three of them having especial reference to the interests of the Indians, the fourth bearing on the welfare of the States to be formed out of the territory now roamed over by the native tribes.

First: so long as an Indian tribe is left to its own proper forces and dispositions, free from all foreign attraction, it is not only easily governed, but the whole body obeys the recognized law of the community with almost absolute unanimity. No expressions would be too strong to characterize the social homogeneity of an Indian tribe, and the complete domination of the accepted ideas of right and wrong, of honor and baseness. Public opinion is there conclusive upon every individual; and the spectacle, seen in every town and village with us, of large numbers openly practising that which public opinion reprobates, or refusing to do that which public opinion prescribes, is wholly unknown. We do not say that this is the most desirable as the ultimate form of society; but this tyranny of sentiment may and should be made a most powerful auxiliary for good in the early stages of industrial and social progress for this people.

Second: it is unfortunately true, that, when the Indian is, by the powerful attraction of a race which his savage breast never fails to recognize as superior, released from the control of the public sentiment which he has been accustomed to obey, he submits himself by an almost irresistible tendency to the worst and not to the best influences of civilized society. While there are undeniably exceptions to this statement, it is supported by such a mass of melancholy evidence in the history of scores of tribes once renowned for all the native virtues, that no one has the right to advocate the introduction to such influences of uninstructed and unprovided tribes, unless he is prepared to contemplate the ruin of nine-tenths of the subjects of his policy.

Nor is it the worst elements of the Indian which thus submit themselves to the worst elements of the white community. The very men who bear themselves most loftily, according to the native standards of virtue, are quite as likely to fall, under exposure to white contact, as are the weakest of the tribe. Their familiar attractions all broken, their immemorial traditions rudely dispelled, their natural leadership destroyed, the members of a wild tribe, strong and weak together, become the easy prey of the rascally influences of civilized society.

Third: the experiment of citizenship, except with the more advanced tribes, is at the serious risk, amounting almost to a certainty, of the immediate loss to the Indians of the whole of their scanty patrimony, through the improvident and wasteful alienation of the lands patented to them, the Indians being left thus without resource for the future, except in the bounty of the general government or in local charity. On this point a few facts will be more eloquent than many words.

The United States have by recent treaties or legislative enactments admitted to citizenship the following Indians,--In Kansas, Kickapoos, 12; Delawares, 20; Wyandots, 473; Pottawatomies, 1,604: in Dakota, Sioux, 250: in Minnesota, Winnebagoes, 159: in Wisconsin, Stockbridges, to a number not yet officially ascertained: in Michigan, Ottawas and Chippewas, 6,039: in the Indian Territory, Ottawas of Blanchard's Fork, 150. Time has not yet been given for the full development of the consequences of thus devolving responsibility upon these Indians; but we already have information, official or semi-official, to the effect that the majority of the Pottawatomie citizens, after selling their lands in Kansas, have gone to the Indian Territory, and re-associated themselves as a tribe; that of the Wyandots, considerable numbers have attached themselves to the re-organized tribe in the Indian Territory; that of the citizen Ottawas of Blanchard's Fork, nearly all have disposed of their allotted lands, and are still cared for to some extent by the government as Indians; that of the Ottawas and Chippewas of Michigan, a majority certainly, and probably a large majority, have sold the lands patented to them in severalty,--in many cases the negotiation preceding the issue of patents, two parties of white sharpers contesting for the favor of the agent, in the way of early information as to the precise lands assigned, and the disappointed faction, in at least one instance, resorting to burglary and larceny for the needed documents.

It will be thus seen, that, of these Indians upon whom the experiment of citizenship has been tried, more than half, probably at least two-thirds, are now homeless, and must be re-endowed by the government, or they will sink to a condition of hopeless poverty and misery.

Fourth: the dissolution of the tribal bonds, and the dispersing of two hundred thousand Indians among the settlements, will devolve upon the present and future States beyond the Missouri an almost intolerable burden of vagabondage, pauperism, and crime. It is not even essential to the result of a dispersion of these tribes that the law should pronounce their dissolution as political communities. Unless the system of reservations shall soon be recast, and the laws of non-intercourse thoroughly enforced, the next fifteen or twenty years will see the great majority of the Indians on the plains mixed up with white settlements, wandering in small camps from place to place, shifting sores upon the public body, the men resorting for a living to basket-making, beggary, and hog-stealing, the women to fortune-telling, beggary, and harlotry; while a remnant will seek to maintain a little longer, in the mountains, their savage independence, fleeing before the advance of settlement when they can, fighting in sullen despair when they must. It is doubtless true that some tribes could still remain together as social, even after being dissolved as legal, communities; but the fate we have indicated would certainly befall by far the greater part of the Indians of the plains, were the reservation system broken up in their present social and industrial condition. To believe that a pioneer population of two, three, or four millions, such as is likely to occupy this region within the next twenty years, can, in addition to its own proper elements of disorder, safely absorb such a mass of corruption, requires no small faith in the robust virtue of our people, and in the saving efficacy of republican institutions.

This last consideration we have urged, not on behalf of the Indians, but in the interest of the present white communities beyond the Missouri, to whom such a dispersion of the tribes would be a far greater burden than the maintenance of the reservation system in its integrity could possibly be, and in the interest of a score of States of the Union yet to be formed out of that territory. Surely it is not in such cement that we wish to have the foundations of our future society laid.

We conclude, then, that Indian citizenship is to be regarded as an end, and not as a means; that it is the goal to which each tribe should in turn be conducted, through a course of industrial instruction and constraint, maintained by the government with kindness but also with firmness, under the shield of the reservation system. It is true that this system can no longer be kept up without sacrifice on our part. In the days of Pres. Monroe, the sequestration of the Indians involved only the expense of transporting eighty or ninety thousand persons to a region not settled, nor then desired for settlement. To-day there is no portion of our territory where citizens of the United States are not preparing to make their homes. To cut off a reservation sufficient for the wants of this unfortunate people in their rude ways of life; to hedge it in with strict laws of non-intercourse, turning aside, for the purpose, railway and highway alike; and, upon the soil thus secluded, to work patiently out the problem of Indian civilization,--is not to be deemed a light sacrifice to national honor and duty. Yet that the government and people of the United States cannot discharge their obligations to the aborigines without pains and care and expense, affords no reason for declining the task.

The claim of the Indian upon us is of no common character. The advance of railways and settlements is fast pushing him from his home, and, in the steady extinction of game, is cutting him off from the only means of subsistence of which he knows how to avail himself. He will soon be left homeless and helpless in the midst of civilization, upon the soil that once was his alone. The freedom of territorial and industrial expansion which is bringing imperial greatness to the nation, to the Indian brings wretchedness, destitution, beggary. Surely there is obligation found, in such considerations as these, to make good in some way to him the loss by which we so largely gain. Nor is this obligation one that can be discharged by lavish endowments, which it is of moral certainty he will squander, or by merely placing him in situations where he might prosper, had he the industrial aptitudes of the white man, acquired through centuries of laborious training. Savage as he is by no fault of his own, and stripped at once of savage independence and savage competence by our act, for our advantage, we have made ourselves responsible before God and the world for his rescue from destruction, and his elevation to social and industrial manhood, at whatever expense and at whatever inconvenience. The corner-stone of our Indian policy should be the recognition by government and by the people, that we owe the Indian, not endowments and lands only, but also forbearance, patience, care, and instruction.

It is not unusual to sneer at the sentimentality of "the Quakers" and other active friends of this race. But we may as well remember that posterity will grow much more sentimental over the fate of the Indian than any Quaker or philanthropist of to-day. The United States will be judged at the bar of history according to what they shall have done in two respects,--by their disposition of negro slavery, and by their treatment of the Indians. In the one matter, the result is fortunately secure; nor will it be remembered against us, in diminution of our honor, that we procrastinated and sought to evade the issue, and for a time made terms and compromised with wrong. In that, when at last we were brought face to face with the question, we did the one thing that was right, and in tears and blood expiated our own and our fathers' errors, the ages to come will give us no grudging and stinted praise. Would that we were equally sure that no stain will rest upon our fame for what shall yet be done or left undone towards the original possessors of our soil! What is past cannot be recalled; nor has any thing yet gone into history that need deeply dishonor us as a nation. Posterity will judge very leniently of all that has been done in heat of blood, in the struggle for life and for the possession of the soil by the early Colonists; it will not greatly attribute blame that, in our industrial and territorial expansion, and a conquest of savage nature more rapid than is recorded of any other people, savage man has suffered somewhat at our hands; it will not attempt nicely to apportion the mutual injuries of the frontier, to decide which was first and which was worst in wrong, red man or white; it will have ample consideration for the difficulties which the government has encountered in preserving the peace between the natives and the bold, rude pioneers of civilization. But if, when the Indians shall have been thrown helpless upon our mercy, surrounded and disarmed by the extension of settlement, and impoverished by the very causes which promote our wealth and greatness, we fail to make ample provision out of our abundance, and to apply it in all patience and with all pains, to save alive these remnants of a once powerful people, and reconcile them to civilization, there is much reason to fear, that, however successfully we may excuse ourselves to ourselves by pleading the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, impartial history will pronounce us recreant to a sacred duty.

FOOTNOTES:

From The International Review, May, 1874.

The doctrine of a vanishing Indian nationality was strongly insisted on by Mr. Justice McLean in his opinion in Worcester vs. the State of Georgia:--

"If a tribe of Indians shall become so degraded or reduced in numbers as to lose the power of self-government, the protection of the local law, of necessity, must be extended over them. The point at which this exercise of power by a State would be proper need not now be considered, if, indeed, it be a judicial question.... But, if a contingency shall occur which shall render the Indians who reside in a State incapable of self-government, either by moral degradation or a reduction of their numbers, it would undoubtedly be in the power of a State government to extend over them the ægis of its laws."--6 Peters, pp. 593-4.