Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States

By Adam Arenson

This innovative study presents a new, integrated view of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the history of the western United States.

Award-winning historians such as Steven Hahn, Martha Sandweiss, William Deverell, Virginia Scharff, and Stephen Kantrowitz offer original essays on lives, choices, and legacies in the American West, discussing the consequences for American Indian nations, the link between Reconstruction and suffrage movements, and cross-border interactions with Canada and Mexico.

In the West, Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wide range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Histories of Reconstruction in the South ignore the connections to previous occupation efforts and citizenship debates in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans.

By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction period within one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century.

Publishing on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, this collection brings eminent historians into conversation, looking at the Civil War from several Western perspectives, and delivers a refreshingly disorienting view intended for scholars, general readers, and students.

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9780520959576

Book preview

Civil War Wests

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Civil War Wests

TESTING THE LIMITS OF THE UNITED STATES

EDITED BY

Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Civil War wests : testing the limits of the United States / edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28378-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-520-28378-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-28379-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-520-28379-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95957-6 (ebook) — ISBN 0-520-95957-4 (ebook)

    1. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865–1877)—West (U.S.)    2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865.    3. West (U.S.)—History—1860–1890.    I. Arenson, Adam, 1978- editor.    II. Graybill, Andrew R., 1971- editor.

E668.C57    2015

973.7—dc232014024850

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Introduction

Adam Arenson

PART ONE BORDERLANDS IN CONFLICT

1 • Thwarting Southern Schemes and British Bluster in the Pacific Northwest

James Robbins Jewell

2 • Death in the Distance: Confederate Manifest Destiny and the Campaign for New Mexico, 1861–1862

Megan Kate Nelson

3 • Kit Carson and the War for the Southwest: Separation and Survival along the Rio Grande, 1862–1868

Lance R. Blyth

4 • Scattered People: The Long History of Forced Eviction in the Kansas-Missouri Borderlands

Diane Mutti Burke

PART TWO THE CIVIL WAR IS NOT OVER

5 • The Future Empire of Our Freedmen: Republican Colonization Schemes in Texas and Mexico, 1861–1865

Nicholas Guyatt

6 • Three Faces of Sovereignty: Governing Confederate, Mexican, and Indian Texas in the Civil War Era

Gregory P. Downs

7 • Redemption Falls Short: Soldier and Surgeon in the Post–Civil War Far West

William Deverell

8 • Still Picture, Moving Stories: Reconstruction Comes to Indian Country

Martha A. Sandweiss

PART THREE BORDERS OF CITIZENSHIP

9 • Race, Religion, and Naturalization: How the West Shaped Citizenship Debates in the Reconstruction Congress

Joshua Paddison

10 • Broadening the Battlefield: Conflict, Contingency, and the Mystery of Woman Suffrage in Wyoming, 1869

Virginia Scharff

11 • Dis Land Which Jines Dat of Ole Master’s: The Meaning of Citizenship for the Choctaw Freedpeople

Fay A. Yarbrough

12 • Citizen’s Clothing: Reconstruction, Ho-Chunk Persistence, and the Politics of Dress

Stephen Kantrowitz

Epilogue

Steven Hahn

Acknowledgments

Secondary Bibliography

Contributor Affiliations

Index

Key Locations and Sites of Conflict in Civil War—Era North America.

Introduction

Adam Arenson

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE AMERICAN WEST are some of the most familiar subjects in U.S. history. The journey of Lewis and Clark and the discovery of gold in California; the firing on Fort Sumter and the battle at Gettysburg; the assassination of President Lincoln and the driving of the Golden Spike to complete the transcontinental railroad—each has inspired hundreds of studies and preoccupied scholars and enthusiasts since the events themselves unfolded.

But little attention has been paid to the intersections of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the wider history of the American West, and how these seemingly separate events compose a larger, unified history of conflict over land, labor, rights, citizenship, and the limits of governmental authority in the United States.

Traditionally, Civil War history has focused on the challenge of secession, the timing and reasoning behind the eradication of slavery, and the ways that large-scale military actions shaped the lives of soldiers and civilians on both sides. Histories of Reconstruction, meanwhile, have measured the promise of emancipation against the nation’s failure to achieve so many of those new possibilities. By contrast, histories of the American West have begun with the so-called frontier spaces of encounter, and have told the history of how these new territories and new peoples were integrated into European and then U.S. realms.

In geographical terms, Civil War history has generally been rooted in the battlefields and plantation landscapes of the South (which may or may not include Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, or other southern border states)—while the West of western history has most often meant the trans-Mississippi, and sometimes west of the 100th meridian. When Civil War historians talk about the war’s western theater, they usually mean the military engagements in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. But the Department of the Trans-Mississippi included armed conflict in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, reaching as far as the crucial Sibley Campaign and the founding of Confederate Arizona. The extensive Civil War fortifications along the Pacific coast and their role in the war generally merit only a footnote.¹

Historians have long fixed the endpoints of the Civil War and delineated the concerns of Reconstruction from vantage points along the eastern seaboard. On the battlefields between Washington and Richmond, there seems to be a clearly defined conflict between the United States and the Confederacy, with obvious geographical and temporal parameters. Much of the Civil War history concerning the West drifts toward the counterfactual: how much more significant it would have been if a Confederate raider attacked Seattle or San Francisco; if the Confederacy had held Arizona, conquered Southern California, captured St. Louis, or threatened Chicago; or if the Indian Territory representation in the Confederate Congress would have changed the course of the war. From the perspective of traditional Civil War scholarship, it can be hard to see these stories as much more than red herrings. Yet our contention that testing the limits of U.S. sovereignty is the central story of both the Civil War and the American West means that, even in failure, these pivot points provide a profound new understanding of the experience of the war years.

The importance of the West among the causes of the Civil War is well established, with the question of the extension of slavery into the lands conquered or annexed between 1845 and 1848 generally understood as the precipitating cause of the Civil War. Yet the West continued to matter to political and military leaders during the conflict itself, and the Civil War and Reconstruction transformed the region along with the North and South. The Mexican Cession and the Emancipation Proclamation both shaped the settling of the West and the meaning of the Civil War. Fighting in New Mexico affected fighting at Gettysburg, while the civil war in Mexico shaped the experience of the U.S. Civil War (and vice versa). The transcontinental railroad stitched the country closer together, but its regions were already deeply engaged in similar debates over citizenship, economic opportunity, and the legacy of conquest.

These facts were obvious and essential to nineteenth-century Americans. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Secretary of State William Henry Seward, and other U.S. and Confederate officials thought of the Civil War in continental and even global terms. Many of the men who led soldiers in the Civil War had spent the years just prior to the conflict in the West, engaged in total war conflagrations with Native peoples that some scholars have called U.S. attempts at genocide. For instance, Nathaniel Lyon, who would die a Union hero at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, directed massacres against the Pomo Indians of California in 1850, at Clear Lake and in the Russian River Valley. Philip Sheridan led troops in the Yakima War that roiled Washington Territory in the late 1850s. Before George Pickett led the ill-fated Confederate charge at Gettysburg, he was posted at Fort Bellingham, Washington Territory to watch for British aggression; during this interlude he fathered a son with Morning Mist, his Haida wife. In 1860, future Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart participated in campaigns against the Kiowas and Comanches.

Service during the U.S. War with Mexico (1846–48) was the first battle experience for many eventual Civil War generals, and it influenced their expectations in combat. But these bloody encounters in the American West occupied and tested these men right up to the moment that U.S. troops were recalled from western postings to fight against the Confederacy.² And, after Appomattox, Army officials continued to move between posts in the West and the South, applying the techniques of one theater in another.

Despite these lived connections, historians have long fixed the endpoints of the Civil War and delineated the concerns of Reconstruction while standing along the eastern seaboard. Traditional Civil War and Reconstruction scholars have resisted the redefinitions and expansions that a wider history of all of the nineteenth-century United States would create, thus refusing to put the American West and the Civil War in one frame.³

Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands, and stories of refugees and conflicts over allegiances have complicated our understanding of the path from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. In the West, both Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wider range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east.

This volume teases out the limits of this traditional perspective, this unnatural division between histories of the Civil War and the American West. By nearly any measure—lives lost, property destroyed, economic and emotional costs—the Civil War was the most momentous challenge to the existence of the United States ever mounted. But it was also only the largest conflict among many over the limits of U.S. authority. Since the Constitution was ratified, threats of disunion had emerged frequently in U.S. political discourse, but the pressure had clearly increased in the 1850s, and attacks came from Californios, from Mormon settlers in southern Utah, from filibusterers and Free Staters and jayhawkers, from raiders from Mexico and British troops in the Juan de Fuca Strait, and from American Indian nations pushed to the brink.⁴

To date, the histories of occupation, reincorporation, and expanded citizenship during Reconstruction in the South have ignored the connections to previous as well as subsequent efforts in the West.⁵ The ways in which questions of race, religion, citizenship, and federal oversight during Reconstruction were sorted out at least as much in the West as in the states of the former Confederacy is a process that western historian Elliott West has called Greater Reconstruction, an engagement with the nature and limits of federal power that can inform our study of U.S. expansionism from its origins.⁶ This volume erases the artificial divides scholars have created between western and Civil War America.

Slavery or union; empire or freedom; North or South—none of these binaries sufficiently captures the participants’ experience of the United States in these years, because the fundamental test of authority was wider and more profound. This becomes obvious in the West, through the category-expanding or category-defying histories presented in this volume: multiracial and multilateral conflicts of the Civil War, including battles among Native American nations; the multiple crises of sovereignty that roiled the entire continent, from Canada through the United States and into Mexico; the varied environmental realities that shaped the war and the nation; and the importance of a range of international and borderlands interactions in shaping the war. Indeed, the final national borders of the lower forty-eight states are a history of the Civil War as well as expansion into the West, just as the absence of change after 1853 is bound up in the relative strength of America’s continental neighbors in defending their territory during and immediately after the Civil War.⁷ It is only by considering events and tensions playing out in all three national regions that we can see new through-lines and turning points, and thus write a new, more inclusive narrative of nineteenth-century American history, attuned to the crises of authority and identity faced by the United States.

There are some precedents for bringing together these histories of the American West and the Civil War. Mabel Washbourne Anderson’s The Life of General Stand Watie, the Only Indian Brigadier General of the Confederate Army and the Last General to Surrender (1915) and Annie Heloise Abel’s The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War (1919) were foundational works in the field, marking these connections through the lives of American Indians from the West in the U.S. and Confederate militaries.⁸ Aurora Hunt’s The Army of the Pacific, 1860–1866 (1951) and Ray Colton’s The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (1959) provided the first examination of the military and political history of the Civil War in those western places.⁹ In 1978, David Nichols’s Lincoln and the Indians provided a groundbreaking look at the failures of the Indian System during the Civil War, from the U.S. abandonment of forts and treaty obligations in order to fight the Confederacy, to the concentration of refugees on new reservations, to the escalation of threats and countermands that led to the mass execution of Dakota men in 1862 and the massacre of Arapahos and Cheyennes at Sand Creek in 1864, among other atrocities.¹⁰

More recently, Alvin Josephy’s The Civil War in the American West (1991) narrated both the struggles between uniformed Union and Confederate forces and the concurrent engagements with American Indians in the region.¹¹ Laurence Hauptman’s Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (1995) provided an overview that opened in the West before emphasizing Indian service in both the North and South.¹² Josephy’s and Hauptman’s analyses suggested that the Civil War years marked a turning point for many Indian nations, as some lost autonomy, some lost their lands, and some faced brutal massacres—and even renewed genocide—at the hands of Union soldiers or other Indians.¹³ As in so many areas of U.S. history, greater attention to the history and historiography of American Indian nations reveals the defining threads of the U.S. national project, uniting western history, Civil War history, and the study of the United States as empire.¹⁴

Scholars of the American West have long emphasized the importance of borderlands and borders, the extent of federal power, and the incorporation of new peoples into the United States.¹⁵ Howard Lamar’s pair of territorial histories, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (1956) and The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (1966) are by rights the first works of western history to engage these questions through the experience of the Civil War, although not many historians have taken up these subjects in the years since.¹⁶ Eugene Berwanger’s The West and Reconstruction (1983) was an early call to focus on the region’s role in the postwar nation, but it also has gone mostly unheeded.¹⁷

In 1991, Richard Maxwell Brown argued for conceptualizing U.S. history from 1850 to at least 1910 as a grand nationalizing struggle, turning to a great degree—along with the eastern conflict—upon a Western Civil War for Incorporation.¹⁸ That same year, Richard White emphasized how the American West served as the kindergarten of the American state, the region where the military, the Corps of Engineers, land and water managers, and Indian agents learned their skills. Emphasizing the processes of empire west of the Mississippi River, White wrote that in the West federal power took on modern forms, connecting U.S. military and bureaucratic action in the West before and after the Civil War, but again ignoring integral connections to the conflict in the East.¹⁹ These formulations have influenced the most recent work expanding the subject, including Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007), and Elliott West’s The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (2009), which demonstrated how the forces transforming America were at work in Idaho and Oregon as much as in South Carolina and Massachusetts, with results and consequences for all regions of the country.²⁰ My own work on St. Louis, alongside Richard Etulain’s recent book on Lincoln and the Oregon Country and Susan Schulten’s research on Colorado as a nexus of Civil War and western conflicts, has emphasized how these national and even continental conflicts were experienced in some of the key locations of the U.S. West.²¹ This volume continues the work that these scholars began, making connections between rebellions against U.S. authority at different moments and in multiple places. The volume is divided into three parts:

In part 1, Borderlands in Conflict, four historians focus on the West as a theater of political maneuvering and military conflict. James Robbins Jewell begins the volume in unfamiliar Civil War geography: the Union forts of Washington Territory, where the United States tracked spies and thwarted Confederate plots hatched on Vancouver Island and in British Columbia. Megan Kate Nelson considers the high hopes for a Confederate march to the Pacific and how the harsh realities of the New Mexico desert proved as formidable an enemy as any army. Lance R. Blyth ponders the complex and combustible interplay among a borderland political economy, U.S. Indian policy, and the increase in manpower created by the Civil War as he narrates the experience of three American Indian nations targeted by local forces under General Kit Carson. Diane Mutti Burke then describes how four western counties of Missouri—once claimed by waves of Indian nations, Mormon emigrants, free soilers and proslavery bushwhackers, and then Confederate sympathizers—were emptied out as a way to secure that borderland homefront for the Union.

The title of part 2, The Civil War Is Not Over, announces the main insight of its chapters, as together they demonstrate how the military, political, and economic exigencies of the conflict continued beyond Appomattox. Nicholas Guyatt examines why Republican leaders sought to convince ex-slaves to settle in Mexico, Texas, or Latin America throughout the 1860s, while Gregory P. Downs discusses how Union commanders in Texas sustained a war footing in facing down challenges from ex-Confederate, Mexican, and Indian adversaries in 1866. William Deverell describes the psychic and physical repercussions of the battles at Gettysburg and elsewhere for veterans living in California but reliving their war experience continuously. And then Martha Sandweiss considers the paths into and out of the Civil War evident in a photograph taken to commemorate the signing in Wyoming Territory of the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868.

The chapters of part 3, Borders of Citizenship, consider how geography as well as race, ethnicity, religion, and gender shaped the possibilities of citizenship after the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. Joshua Paddison describes the political contortions of Republican senators from western states as they sought to embrace the voting rights for African Americans while preventing Chinese or American Indian men from gaining suffrage. Virginia Scharff considers what racial factors informed the decision to grant woman suffrage (the first instance in U.S. history) in Wyoming Territory in 1869. Fay A. Yarbrough considers how the struggle between Choctaw leaders and their former slaves reflected the national debate over the expansion of citizenship. And Stephen Kantrowitz considers how and when members of the Ho-Chunk nation could use citizen’s clothing to accentuate their claims to U.S. citizenship through land holdings, even in states from which they had been removed.

Steven Hahn’s epilogue brings the volume to a close by considering how our narratives of nineteenth-century U.S. history could change dramatically if we take these connections between the American West and the Civil War to heart.

The geographic sweep from Missouri and Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) to the desert Southwest—where, one might say, West meets South—receives the greatest attention here. The combination of empires in the history of this demanding environment—Comanches, Spanish, Mexican, Texan, U.S., and Confederate—and the multiple and also incomplete attempts at incorporating this area into the United States highlight many of the volume’s central concerns. As many locals know, if one considers the Southwest and tells the history of the Civil War or the American West, it looks very different than it does from Boston or Charleston, Los Angeles or San Francisco, even different from Dallas or St. Louis. That southwestern sensibility is essential to the story told here. But more stories, from antebellum California and Texas, from Montana and Utah, from Matamoros and Hawai’i, belong here, and we encourage students and scholars to bring these connections to their work.

In the American West and in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the United States was redefined. Scholars have much to gain by seeing these events as a sustained test of the limits of U.S. governmental authority and that government’s ability to shape land, labor, and rights. What emerges from such a reconceptualization is a richer, truer, and more provocative vision of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. history, one that reaches beyond North and South.

NOTES

Thanks to Stephen Aron, Carolyn Brucken, Virginia Scharff, Andrew Graybill, Niels Hooper, and the contributors for their help with earlier drafts of this chapter.

1. In James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), coverage is even less: the states and territories of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah are referenced only in the prewar years; Colorado and Nevada each receive one passing mention (both on p. 818); Washington Territory receives no mention at all.

2. David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978); Robert Wooster, The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), chap. 8.

3. Gary Gallagher, one of this generation’s leading experts on the Civil War, has strenuously objected to the idea that government action in the West and the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction should be studied together. "When you don’t think there’s anything to say about what Reconstruction actually was, why don’t you pretend it was really about the West! Some historians of the West do that, Gallagher told an interviewer from Civil War Trust in 2013. That way you can bring Native Americans in, you can pretend that some of the things going on with Native Americans and African Americans are sort of the same, but it’s a real strain. Reconstruction is about reconstructing the former Confederate states. That’s what the term means. It’s really not about the West, it’s not about California, Gallagher declared, though he concluded his answer by noting that thousands of Union veterans ended up in California. Clayton Butler, Understanding our Past: An Interview with Historian Gary Gallagher," Civil War Trust, 2013. www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-history-and-scholarship/gary-gallagher-interview.html. Thanks to Steve Kantrowitz and Kevin Levin for the reference.

4. Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Timothy J. Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Ernesto Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008); Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012); Richard D. Poll and Ralph W. Hansen, ‘Buchanan’s Blunder: The Utah War, 1857–1858," Military Affairs 25, no. 3 (1961): 121–31; Poll and William P. MacKinnon, Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered, Journal of Mormon History 20, no. 2 (1994): 16–44; Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Amy S. Greenberg, A Gray-Eyed Man: Character, Appearance, and Filibustering, Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 673–99; Charles Henry Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Jerry D. Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); E. A. Schwartz, The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1980 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Benjamin Logan Madley, American Genocide: The California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, PhD diss., Yale University, 2009. Thanks to Ben Madley and Gray Whaley for their help with the sources about American Indian nations and their conflicts between 1848 and 1860.

5. Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); James Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013); Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

6. Elliott West, Reconstructing Race, Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 6–26; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Berkeley: University of California Press published for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, 2012); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000); D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Downs, Sick from Freedom, epilogue.

7. See the chapters of Nicholas Guyatt and James Jewell in this volume for more on this point.

8. Mabel Washbourne Anderson, Life of General Stand Watie: The Only Indian Brigadier General of the Confederate Army and the Last General to Surrender (Pryor, OK: Mayes County Republican, 1915); Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1919); Wiley Britton, The Union Indian Brigade in the Civil War (Kansas City, MO: F. Hudson, 1922). For the most prominent American Indian in the Union Army, see Arthur Caswell Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant’s Military Secretary (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo Historical Society, 1919); and William Howard Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1978).

9. Aurora Hunt, The Army of the Pacific: Its Operations in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Plains Region, Mexico, etc., 1860–1866 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1951); Ray Charles Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).

10. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians.

11. Alvin M. Josephy, The Civil War in the American West (New York: Knopf, 1991).

12. Laurence M. Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1995).

13. For an emphasis on the terror of the Civil War years experienced by Indian nations far from the traditional battlefields, see Madley, American Genocide; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), especially chap. 6; and the work of Madley and Walter L. Williams. See also David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

14. For essays that engage this historiographic question directly, see the papers offered at Why You Can’t Teach U.S. History without American Indians, a symposium commemorating the fortieth year of the D’Arcy McNickle Center American Indian Studies Seminar Series at the Newberry Library in Chicago, May 3–4, 2013. www.newberry.org/why-you-cant-teach.

15. For a sense of this convergence, read especially the introductions of Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.—Mexico Borderlands History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History, American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–41; Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, and Adam Arenson, eds., Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson, eds., Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011); Brian DeLay, ed., North American Borderlands (New York: Routledge, 2013); Sterling Evans, ed., The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-Ninth Parallel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). See also Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Andrew R. Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.– Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta–Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

16. Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories; Howard Roberts Lamar, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956) and The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).

17. Eugene H. Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).

18. Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 44 and 191 n19; the meaning and consequences of this conceptualization were explored in Richard Maxwell Brown, Western Violence: Structure, Values, Myth, Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 1 (February 1993): 4–20; and Violence, in The Oxford History of the American West, Clyde A. Milner, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 393–425.

19. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991), 58.

20. Richardson, West from Appomattox; West, Reconstructing Race; Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). West lays out these challenges of seemingly divergent history in The Last Indian War, xviii–xxii; quote from xxii.

21. Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic; Richard W. Etulain, Lincoln and Oregon Country Politics in the Civil War Era (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013); Susan Schulten, The Civil War and the Origins of the Colorado Territory, Western Historical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 21–46.

PART ONE

Borderlands in Conflict

ONE

Thwarting Southern Schemes and British Bluster in the Pacific Northwest

James Robbins Jewell

FOUR MONTHS BEFORE JOHN BROWN seized the armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, events in the far northwestern corner of the United States also brought the nation to the brink of war—not with itself, but with England. The blood spilled in June 1859 belonged to a pig, leading to one of the most bizarre episodes in U.S. diplomatic history. After Abraham Lincoln’s election as president, the tensions from decades of mutual suspicions between the United States and its northern neighbor, compounded by the presence of a vocal group of southerners in the regional capital of Victoria, took on overtones of the Civil War.

As the Civil War began, the Pacific Northwest presented very real concerns for the Union government. Royal Governor James Douglas was openly belligerent toward the United States. Therefore, he might have ignored British neutrality and launched preemptive strikes into Washington Territory, or ignored attempts by southern sympathizers on Vancouver Island trying to outfit a raider with which to attack U.S. commerce in the Pacific.¹ Miners in the Fraser River region with Confederate sympathies might have launched paramilitary attacks into Washington Territory.

A new northern front of the Civil War opened in December 1863 when Confederate agents seized the S.S. Chesapeake off Cape Cod and sailed it to Nova Scotia.² A second cross-border operation occurred in September 1864 when twenty Confederate agents attempted to capture the U.S.S. Michigan, the sole Union warship patrolling the Great Lakes. The attempt was foiled when one of the conspirators was captured and revealed the plot.³ Most famously, on October 19, 1864, a Confederate lieutenant and twenty men crossed from Québec into Vermont, robbing three banks in the small town of St. Albans, making off with $200,000 before fleeing back across the border.⁴ That no military (or paramilitary) operations emerged in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War demonstrates how effectively Union officials in the region controlled the situation and avoided another front of the war breaking out on the Pacific Slope.

MAP 1.1. The Pacific Northwest in the Civil War Era.

Long before the outbreak of the Civil War, however, U.S. officials wrestled with the dilemmas posed by their uncertain northwestern border. Political maneuvering between the two countries had dominated the Oregon question ever since Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805 at Fort Clatsop, Oregon. In 1818, the United States and England agreed to the joint occupation of the disputed Oregon lands (essentially from 54°40’ latitude south to the present-day California–Oregon border, and west of the Continental Divide). Failure to work out a satisfactory division of those lands in 1827 led to an extension of the joint occupancy agreement, a policy that was still in place in the 1840s. Growing U.S. expansionist sentiments in the Pacific Northwest rekindled British distrust and led to rising tension between the British and Americans, reaching a critical level during the 1844 presidential campaign. James K. Polk based his enthusiastic expansionist candidacy on American braggadocio, political rhetoric, and Manifest Destiny. Polk’s campaign platform called for the reannexation of Texas and the reoccupation of Oregon. The British took the hostile political language quite seriously, and prepared to defend the farthest western region of British North America from U.S. expansionism.

Despite the heated rhetoric, which served its purpose in helping to get Polk elected, the president-elect softened his demands.⁵ Although in his inaugural address he spoke boldly about pursuing all of Oregon, Polk’s initial offer to the British was more restrained.⁶ Like his predecessors, Polk’s first official proposal to settle the nagging Oregon question was to extend the 49th parallel as a boundary line all the way to the Pacific Ocean.⁷ When British officials refused the offer, Polk asked Congress to terminate the 1827 joint occupation agreement.⁸ The expansionist House quickly complied, but the measure was shot down in the Senate. In response to the rapidly deteriorating situation, one British official suggested sending naval vessels both to the Puget Sound region and to the mouth of the Columbia River. In March 1845 it appeared the two nations might go to war over the unsettled Oregon question.

By then, with the annexation of Texas underway and war with Mexico looming, the vigor of President Polk’s expansionism was evident. Fortunately, the British ambassador returned with a new offer: England agreed to the 49th parallel line, excluding Vancouver Island, with the details regarding the San Juan Islands (between Vancouver Island and the mainland) to be worked out in arbitration. In April 1846, with General Zachary Taylor’s forces already south of the Rio Nueces, provoking war with Mexico, Congress agreed to arbitration with Britain and averted war on two fronts.⁹

Relations between the two nations improved after 1846 but remained precarious, as the dispute over San Juan Island made obvious in 1859. Both U.S. and British citizens had settled the island, repeating the pattern of joint occupancy and uncertain ownership. Then came a military showdown that commenced with the death of a pig.

The British inhabitants, who outnumbered the Americans until May 1859, were employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and they did not recognize U.S. claims to any part of San Juan Island. One interloping American named Lyman Cutler sparked the international conflict when he took matters into his own hands. After building a cabin he planted a garden, which he fenced as best he could. Unfortunately for Cutler, free-roaming HBC livestock easily trampled the garden and uprooted his potato patch. Following unsuccessful complaints to the local HBC official, Cutler shot and killed an offending hog, for which he attempted to pay the pig’s owner. The seemingly justifiable killing of the wandering British pig very nearly ignited a war, bringing England and the United States closer to armed conflict than