The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

To train Indians for contract freedom, the government would confine them and subject them to a regimen of industrial education and labor until they could demonstrate sufficient “civilization.” If they tried to escape, they would be arrested and returned to reservations. Their education in freedom and civilization had devolved into coercion, whose rationale sounded much like the slaveholders’ justifications for the slavery just ended in the South: the care and feeding of an inferior people who needed to be forced to labor and adopt Christian civilization. Some of that coercion would ironically come from black soldiers—whom the Lakotas called black Wasichu or black white men.