Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (42 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
C
HIEF
J
USTICE SALMON P. CHASE,
writing for the majority in the case of
Texas v. White
(1869):
The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible union, composed of indestructible States. . . . Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the Ordinance of Secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the Acts of her Legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation on law. . . . Our conclusion therefore is that Texas continued to be a State, a State of the Union, notwithstanding the transactions to which we have referred.
This postwar decision, involving the payment of U.S. Treasury bonds, made it clear that secession was unconstitutional.
Chapter Five
When Monopoly Wasn’t a Game
The Growing Empire from the Wild West to World War I
What happened at Custer’s Last Stand?
What happened at Wounded Knee?
Of what was William Tweed boss?
What happened at Haymarket Square?
What did “separate but equal” mean?
Who fought in the Spanish-American War?
Milestones in the Spanish-American War
What did America gain from the Spanish-American War?
What was the Bull Moose Party?
How did a dead archduke in Sarajevo start a world war?
Who sank the Lusitania, and what difference did it make?
What was the cost of World War I?
I
n thirty-five years, from the Civil War’s end to the twentieth century, America moved with astonishing speed from a war-torn nation of farmers to an industrial empire holding far-flung possessions. By the end of the First World War in 1918, the United States stood among the first rank of global powers.
Powering this dynamic growth was a lightning bolt of industrial development that spread railroads, built steel mills, and opened oil fields. This industrial surge was joined to a simultaneous explosion of practical invention, best exemplified by names that are now familiar parts of the American vocabulary: Edison, Bell, Westinghouse, Wright, and Pullman.
But progress carries a price tag. It was, as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner titled their collaborative novel about this era,
The Gilded Age
: beautiful on the surface, but cheap, base, and tarnished underneath. For every mile of railroad laid, every ton of coal or iron ore mined, thousands of workers died. Many of them were immigrants or war veterans, miserably underpaid, working in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, with little or no political voice. The new fortunes being made opened up an era of astonishing corruption. The outlaws of the Wild West were small-time hoodlums compared with the politicians of New York and Washington, who brazenly bilked millions, and to the millionaire industrialists who kept these politicians in their pockets.
Since the Revolution, the American political process had opened up through agonizingly slow reforms, but power remained in the tight grip of the few. That was what the Founders had envisioned: a nation ruled by an enlightened aristocracy comprising gentlemen with the leisure and education to debate issues and rule judiciously. But in this period of a growing empire, more than ever before, the keys to government were pocketed by the powerful and wealthy, the great industrial and banking magnates who literally owned the government and turned it to their personal enrichment. It was what Alexander Hamilton might have had in mind when the Constitution was being debated, and it was light-years away from the agrarian republic that Jefferson envisioned.
The new industrialists were America’s Medici, and they dictated American policies as surely as those Italian bankers had owned popes and principalities. Viewed beside Morgan, Gould, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, the postwar presidents in office were either weak, inept, or corrupt. Not until the rise of Theodore Roosevelt—himself the scion of a wealthy family and certainly no liberal in the modern sense of the word—would the White House be powerful enough to challenge these merchant princes.
Pitted against them were the powerless. Immigrant laborers dying in the deserts and mountains as the railroad inched across the West. The urban poor working the factories and only slowly acquiring power through the unions that were fought with the deadly force of state militias and federal troops. Homesteaders who lost out to the railroad czars and cattle barons in incredible land grabs. Women filling the sweatshops of the swelling cities, yet still invisible on Election Day. And the Indians, last remnants of the millions in America when Columbus arrived. It was the subjugation of the few unconquered tribes that opened this era, but they did not go gently to their deaths.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
G
ENERAL
W
ILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN,
1867:
The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.
C
HIEF
G
ALL,
a leader of the Hunkpapa Sioux warriors at Little Bighorn:
If you had a country which was very valuable, which had always belonged to your people . . . and men of another race came to take it away by force,what would your people do? Would they fight?
What happened at Custer’s Last Stand?
The most famous Indian battle in American history was a final flourish to the Indians’ hopelessly valiant war dance. The battle itself was simply the result of the actions of one vain, headstrong—some have suggested mad—soldier, George Armstrong Custer. The Indian victory at the Little Bighorn merely hastened the inevitable: the brutal end of Indian resistance and extinction for their singular way of life.
While the white men wearing blue and gray uniforms fought one another to the death, there were about 300,000 American Indians left in the West. They had been pushed and pressed inward from both coasts by the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California and Colorado gold rushes, and all the other reasons that whites had for stripping the Indians of their hunting lands. The “permanent Indian frontier” pledged by Andrew Jackson during the removals earlier in the century had long been breached by private and public enterprises, as had every treaty in the sad history of the Indians. When the Civil War ended, the politicians, prospectors, farmers, railroad builders, and cattlemen were ready to take up where they had left off when the war interrupted.
The most powerful and numerous of the surviving tribes were the Sioux, divided into several smaller groupings: the Santee Sioux of western Minnesota, who had tried to accept white ways; the Teton Sioux, those extraordinary horse warriors of the Great Plains, led by the Oglala chief Red Cloud; the Hunkpapa, who would produce Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse; and the Tetons’ allies, the Cheyenne of Wyoming and Colorado. Farther south were other tribes: the Arapaho of Colorado; the Comanche of Texas; the Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo of New Mexico.
For twenty-five years, from 1866 to 1891, the United States army fought a continuous war against these Indian tribes at considerable cost in lives and money. The final thrust began when the Sioux balked at the opening of the Bozeman Trail, a route to the gold fields of California that passed through Indian territory in Montana. Under Red Cloud, the Sioux attacked, destroying the forts that the army was trying to build along the trail. A treaty in 1867 ended this phase of the fighting, but it would get worse. Herded onto small reservations overseen by the scandalously corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indians attempted to live under the white man’s rules.
Gold again proved the undoing of any hope for peace. Trespassers on the Indian reservations in South Dakota’s Black Hills, led by Custer himself, found gold, and there was soon a rush into the territory. The Indians were ordered off the land, but decided to go on the warpath instead. Joined by the Cheyenne, the Sioux concentrated their strength in the Bighorn River region of southern Montana. In the summer of 1876, setting out against specific orders to refrain from attacking, Custer led his 250 men in a direct frontal assault, ignoring warnings that from 2,000 to 4,000 Indians awaited his attack. Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Sioux, had dreamed of a victory over the soldiers, but had performed a “Sun Dance” just before the battle and was too weak to fight. Led by Crazy Horse and another chief, Gall, the Indians destroyed Custer’s force to the last soldier, allowing only a half-Indian scout to escape from the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.
Of course, it didn’t read that way in the newspapers back East. In the midst of the nation’s Centennial celebrations, an outraged nation read only of a massacre of brave soldiers by bloodthirsty Indians. The romanticized reports of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and a famous painting of the scene, provoked a furious popular and political reaction, demanding total warfare on the Sioux. The army’s response was savage, and half of the United States army was sent to exact revenge. The remnants of the Sioux tribe were hunted down, their camps wiped out, forcing them onto reservations. In May 1877, Crazy Horse led some of the last free Sioux into the Red Cloud reservation to surrender. Sitting Bull took the Hunkpapa into Canada, where a government agent allowed them to live and hunt freely. In September 1877, thirty-five-year-old Crazy Horse was arrested under the guise of a meeting with General Crook of the U.S. Army. Seeing that he was about to be taken captive, the war chief resisted, was bayoneted by a soldier, and died.
After the Sioux wars came the great mopping-up battles in the Northwest, against Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, and in the Southwest, against Geronimo and his Apache. Captured in 1886, the ferocious chieftain Geronimo was displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where he sold his picture postcard for a quarter.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
From the last words of
CRAZY HORSE
(1877):
We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and for our teepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservation, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt.
We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages.
Then “Long Hair” [Custer] came in the same way. They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same thing to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight.
What happened at Wounded Knee?
The Little Bighorn had proved a costly victory for the Indians, only hastening the inevitable. Their subsequent battles against federal troops were all disastrous, as one Indian leader after another was captured or killed, and surviving bands were forced onto reservations. But in spite of the odds, some Indians refused to submit, leading to the last resistance movement of the nineteenth century and a notorious massacre that truly marked the end of the era of the Indian wars.
In 1888, a Paiute Indian named Wovoka spawned a religious movement called the Ghost Dance. Ghost Dancers believed that the world would soon end and that the Indians, including the dead of the past, would inherit the earth. Wovoka preached harmony among Indians and rejection of all things white, especially alcohol. The religion took its name from a ritual in which the frenzied dancers would glimpse this future Indian paradise.
