Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre

by Heather Cox Richardson

Western towns liked having the army around, and this fondness was undoubtedly in the minds of Republican politicians as they wondered how to placate the legislators who would soon be electing a senator in economically distressed South Dakota.

Meanwhile, the Pine Ridge Indian agent continued to insist that the Ghost Dancing Sioux were about to take up arms. There had been no lives lost and no property threatened around Pine Ridge or any of the other reservations, and experienced army officers continued to discount the agent’s fears.

The fate of the Minneconjous at Wounded Knee was sealed by politicians a thousand or more miles from the rolling hills and cathedral clouds of the Great Plains. The soldiers who pulled the triggers in South Dakota simply delivered the sentence.

For nearly thirty years, this compromise bought a truce, and people went about their everyday lives. But this complacency ended abruptly in 1846, when the United States went to war with Mexico. Southerners, backed by Democratic president James K. Polk, were eager to take Mexican lands. Northern Whigs like the Shermans, though, were convinced that the war was a Southern plot to annex much of Latin America, bringing in new Southern states and swinging the balance of power in the nation decisively toward the slave states.

On the other hand, though, the war threatened to hand national power to slave owners, perhaps forever. As U.S. troops pushed far into Mexico, horrified Northerners realized that if the nation kept the land it was rapidly conquering, the South could create enough new slaveholding states to overwhelm the northern states. With troops still in the field, Whigs in particular, and Northerners in general, demanded a law that would prohibit slavery in the new lands.

In the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that settled the conflict, Mexico gave America an enormous tract of land, including the territory that would later make up most of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. This was less land than Northerners had feared as the troops pushed farther and farther south, but it was enough to endanger the uneasy truce between the sections.

The chaos in California demanded the establishment of governmental law and order, but under what principles could this western state be organized? The stunning speed with which the area had gone from backwater to teeming settlement meant that there was no partner state to offer to whichever section didn’t get California, and, in any case, the new territory was far beyond the Louisiana territory that had been divided by the Missouri Compromise.

To calm the crisis, congressmen hammered out a compromise that made California a free state but offered Southerners the two huge Territories of New Mexico and Utah, Territories that eventually became the five states of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. In these large hunks of land, slavery could be established if the settlers decided they wanted it.

The Compromise did not, in fact, end tensions between the sections. Trouble erupted again in 1854, arising, as before, over the settlement of western lands.

The hitch in this plan was that the proposed Kansas Territory lay to the north of the Missouri Compromise line that had divided slavery from freedom since 1820.

Now, when Northerners proposed to move into the land that was theirs under the Missouri Compromise, Southerners abruptly changed the rules.

It was not so much that Northerners like Sherman wanted to end slavery. Most of them didn’t care about the welfare of slaves one way or the other. Rather, they worried that free workers would never be able to compete with slave labor. Slaves were cheaper than free workers, they thought, because slaves could be forced to work with less food and worse housing than a free worker, in conditions a free worker would never tolerate.

Southern planters, though, were determined to spread the slave system because it would let them dominate the western economy the same way they dominated the South.

Northern free labor advocates believed that the fundamental element of American society was that every man had the right to the profits of his own labor. A society based on this principle honored God’s plans for America (and perhaps for the world), while promising its citizens an ever increasing standard of living.

Slavery was incompatible with free labor, they insisted; it destroyed free workers by providing cheap competition that put free men out of work.11

Sherman abandoned his former Whig associations and decided instead to act in concert with anyone who was part of the growing movement to preserve the West for free labor.12

John Sherman took over Chase’s Senate seat in March 1861. Less than a month later, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, the Union’s outpost in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.

Cump loved his post in Louisiana, but loved the Union more. When the South seceded, he resigned from the military college and moved back to Ohio. But he resented the atmosphere that had stolen from him a job he loved, the first job that seemed likely to give him the respect and salary he needed to live up to the expectations of his well-connected wife.

Cump’s war service meant that he would eventually eclipse John in Americans’ memories of the nation’s nineteenth-century history.

By spring of 1865, “Uncle Billy,” as his soldiers knew him, had become one of the most loathed and loved generals in America.

Cump became the better remembered brother, but in his role as a legislator, John Sherman was just as vital to the North’s success. He was one of the chief architects of the government policies that financed the enormously expensive war, and in the process of funding the treasury he helped to transform the American economy.

In December 1860, the treasury was empty. Sherman was confident that the government could get volunteers to fight, but he was not convinced that it could find money to pay them.

Sherman was a close friend of the treasury secretary and had chaired the House Committee of Ways and Means, making him well acquainted with financial matters. He quickly became the Senate go-to man for financial legislation. Recognizing that Lincoln’s military power was extraordinary, and that the administration had “almost unlimited power of taxation,” Sherman and the Republicans set out to find ways to fund the war.

They started with taxes. New luxury taxes covered tobacco and liquor; new manufacturing taxes fell on every industry; new graduated income taxes swept in all those above poverty.

The Republican congressmen set out to clear the way for individuals to move up the economic ladder more quickly, developing the economy as they prospered. Congress provided free western land for those willing to farm it, then funded the construction of a transcontinental railroad line to enable young families to reach the western farming regions. Eager to increase production by bringing workers into the country, they also made it cheaper and safer for immigrants to travel to America.

Sherman and his colleagues also encouraged trade and industry. Before the war, the nation’s buying and selling had been accomplished with state banknotes, but Congress replaced this notoriously volatile currency with the country’s first national money, printed on the back with green ink.

When too many greenbacks inflated the currency, Congress established a more stable currency backed ultimately by gold, to be distributed by new national banks.

Most dramatically, the wartime Republican Congress changed the nation’s system of tariffs.

Before the Civil War, manufacturers had begged for tariffs that would protect their fledgling industries from foreign competition, but American consumers demanded the low tariffs that would keep inexpensive foreign products flowing into the United States. In the prewar years, the government bowed to consumers and imposed tariffs solely with an eye to raising the low revenues the inactive government needed.

During the war, though, the desperate need to raise money to fight the war inspired Republicans like John Sherman to develop a new kind of American tariff that would protect industry. Rather than using tariffs simply to raise revenue that would flow directly to the treasury, the Republicans put tariff walls around virtually all of the nation’s production, agricultural as well as industrial, believing that by supporting the entire economy the government would improve everyone’s standard of living and enable Americans to pay the new taxes Congress had imposed.22

The wartime tariffs worked, increasing revenues both for the treasury and for businessmen. Congress increased them as necessary to bring in money until, by the end of the war, tariffs of 47 percent of an item’s value protected American industry.

The measures set in place during the war to develop the national economy created great prosperity and fundamentally reshaped the economy. To feed, clothe, equip, and move the army, government officials dealt contracts to expanding factories and the railroad industry.

The new greenbacks and the new national banknotes made it feasible for the first time for businesses to operate across state lines, and new, national companies developed. The tariffs guaranteed that American business could sell products domestically at a profit, providing more cash to pour into development.

The iron industry, especially, boomed under the influence of the protective tariff, driving the rapid growth of the railroad industry, and workers laid 5,000 miles of new railroad tracks across the North during the war.

Indeed, the West was still at the heart of the Republican vision of the world, just as it had been when Northerners took a stand against the Slave Power. The government encouraged settlers to move west during the war, claiming the region for the Union.

Before the war, the plains were unorganized land, but by the end of the Civil War, Congress had carved the West into Territorial blocks, a configuration that looked almost like it does today.25

The powerful Plains Indians held the ground that American miners and settlers hoped to turn to their profit. Before horses had come to North America with the Spanish explorers, Plains Indians were poor and relatively weak, but the arrival of horses had dramatically changed Indian cultures.

They would be the most powerful foreign fighting force the U.S. Army would meet until World War I.26

The coming of the modern gun in the late nineteenth century gave even greater military power to those Indians wealthy enough or lucky enough to own one, although they continued to prefer to use their ammunition on animals and to grapple with men at close range. Killing an enemy by shooting him from a distance was “just shooting,” and carried no particular honor.27

They depended for survival on game, especially the bison, called “buffalo” but a very different animal from the Asian water buffalo and the African Cape buffalo that give that species its name. Bison, standing over six feet tall at the shoulder and weighing up to 2,000 pounds, ranged over the plains in numbers estimated as high as 40 million; before the arrival of settlers, observers wrote of herds that covered fifty square miles.

These huge numbers of animals were possible because, over time, Indian societies had altered the landscape of the plains to nurture the bison herds. It was imperative to their economy that the land be preserved as it was.28

Plains Indians constructed their world around the bison.

When American migrants pushed onto the Plains in the late 1850s, Plains Indians defended their lands against them, too. When U.S. soldiers came to back up the interlopers, they fared no better.

“Sioux” was a name that meant “enemy” and had been fixed upon the Lakota by their own enemies.

The Sioux were divided by different dialects into three groups: an eastern, a middle, and a western group, named, respectively, the Santees, the Yanktons, and the Tetons. Each of these larger language groups was made up of a number of distinctive bands. These bands ranged along the rivers, which ran generally northwest to southeast, in the region from Minnesota to what is now Montana.

By 1858, settlers moving into Minnesota had forced the Santee Sioux from their 24 million-acre territory onto a single strip of land twenty miles wide and 150 miles long, along the upper Minnesota River. No longer able to feed themselves, the Santees depended on the rations the government had promised them in exchange for their land, but the unprecedented expenses of the Civil War delayed funding for Indian appropriations.

Farther west, the Teton Sioux were not as wary of war as the Yanktons and were willing to entertain the idea of fighting the army. They had twice as many people as the other two Sioux divisions combined and did not fear soldiers, since they had not had any contact to speak of with them.

The Teton Sioux included seven main groups—the Oglala, Minneconjou, Hunkpapa, Brulé, Sans Arc, Two-Kettle, and Black Foot Sioux—themselves broken down into bands. Members of these different groups interacted freely, but followed their own chiefs and camped as a unit whenever the groups came together.

didn’t really matter, for within months, Sitting Bull’s people would stop their halfhearted skirmishing with soldiers and commit themselves to a full-blown war against eastern incursions. A vicious attack on their allies to the south, the Cheyenne, prompted the Hunkpapa to abandon their sporadic warfare and undertake to throw the interlopers out of their territory altogether.

1858. Those clashes escalated until, in 1864, they came to a conclusion so horrific it convinced many of the Teton Sioux bands that they must stand together against the Americans.