By Benjie Howard
The Civil War had ended in 1865 freeing almost 4 million enslaved people, but Reconstruction and true equality for Black Americans was undermined by the Andrew Johnson administration after the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
General Oliver Otis Howard, who like Major John Wesley Powell, had fought and lost an arm in the war, was appointed the head of the Freedman’s Bureau and tasked with making real the promise of full citizenship and opportunity for Black Americans. Howard was a believer in racial equality, founded the first integrated church in Washington, started Howard University, but he and the bureau were ultimately undermined by white supremacists and former Confederates in the House and Senate, who were working to not only replace slavery with subjugation by other means, but also to exact revenge on Black Southerners for having the audacity to see themselves as equal citizens.
Howard was tasked by Johnson with traveling to South Carolina and telling freed people, who had been living, governing, and farming on their own during and after the war, that they would now be placed again under the thumb of their former slave owners. The trauma of this redesigned subjugation is unimaginable. It exemplifies possibly the most glaring moment when the country had a chance to live up to its own ideals and failed; when the hope of Reconstruction is shattered and replaced by an equally dark, and increasingly violent evil.
Howard, like Powell, found himself in the West during the decade after the war. Howard was appointed as the head of the Department of the Columbia overseeing Northwestern Indian reservations and negotiations with non-treaty tribes. The irony is that this man who had worked to secure rights and opportunities for freed people in the South was now tasked with taking them away from already free people in the West.
On a special assignment to the Southwest, Howard negotiated a final surrender with the Chiricahua Apache war leader, Cochise, in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona in 1872. He negotiated with leaders of the non-treaty Nez Perce in Walla Walla and again at Lapwei. He was moved by the logic and eloquence of the case made by Chief Joseph and his brother Ollokot for their legal right to remain in the Wallowa Valley, and live as they had for centuries. He failed, however, to honor the Nez Perce rights defined in their 1855 treaty to remain on their ancestral land. Clouded by his faith, he was unable to imagine that reservation life, with its farming and Christianity, would be a disastrous outcome for a free people. Joseph had explained this clearly many times before.
In the end, negotiations descended into war and Howard violently pursued Joseph, Ollokot, Toohoolhoolzote, White Bird, Looking Glass and 750 people from four Nez Perce bands. The war was fought across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. After four months of heroism and brutal fighting in what would become one of the most studied tactical retreats in military history, Joseph surrendered in the Bears Paw Mountains just a few miles from the Canadian border in October of 1877. The Nez Perce were taken into captivity. These proud and wealthy horse and cattle owning people were forcibly removed to Kansas and then to Colville, WA, reduced to surviving on government handouts and migrant labor. More people died of disease than in the war itself. Howard spent much of the rest of his life trying to rationalize his decisions and the resulting violence committed against women, children and the elderly. Joseph never quit advocating for his peoples’ return to the Wallowa Valley.
Powell also found himself in charge of the fate of Indians in the West. After the 1871 trip through the Grand Canyon, he was appointed Special Commissioner for the Office of Indian Affairs, which was tellingly at that time, under the U.S. Department of War. He was assigned to investigate the “conditions and wants” of the Indians of Utah, Nevada, Southern Idaho, Northern Arizona, and Southeastern California. He heard the same eloquent articulation of the rights of free people that Howard did, the same declarations of treaty obligations on hunting grounds, game, traditional ways of life, sovereignty and protection from white settlers. He did almost nothing to secure the promises made, leaving his post having granted none of the “wants,” and only worsening the already declining “conditions” for native people in the West.
Powell and Howard saw themselves as “friends of the Indian,” but in truth, were anything but. Both men were comfortable in the hubris of their worldview — a particular North American mix of personal ambition, Christian arrogance, white supremacy and a steadfast belief in the mythology of bootstrap economics and Manifest Destiny. They were fundamentally unwilling to see the equal humanity of the people they were appointed to serve. Powell, as the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology, eventually came to see himself less as an advocate for the rights of Indians, and more as a chronicler of a dying race of people. He ends up categorizing native people in his own social Darwinist fantasy as ‘barbaric.’
This period after the Civil War and before the Western States had been fully defined by borders and land-use law, was a time when white men like Powell and Howard, men who were celebrated as freedom fighters, found themselves in positions of tremendous power and influence. They could have made decisions that would have helped secure the promises of democracy equally to Black American citizens. They could have honored treaties and acted on the well-established strategies for the preservation of traditional Native life articulated time and time again by people like Chief Joseph. Powell, at one point, argued for limited white settlement. He argued that the boundaries for western states might be more naturally delineated based on rivers and watersheds, instead of arbitrary dividing lines. This would have allowed for the possibility of native communities to live through and around white settlement. Instead, Powell becomes the director of the U.S. Geological Survey which served in supporting a land use design that pressures tribes from all sides, inviting almost unfettered white settlement, fencing, extraction and exploitation of resources — drawing arbitrary lines across the land, severing the natural movements of people, cutting them off from their ancestors, sustenance and trade.
The problem was not that these white men of means and influence were unable to envision a higher road because they were simply stuck in the ideology of their time in history. That kind of thinking assumes that they couldn’t have know better, when the truth is they absolutely did know better and chose not to act, not to advocate for a higher moral bar. When they did act, it was through neglect and violence, especially in the case of Oliver Otis Howard, who expresses a self-awareness of his own hypocrisy via defensiveness and some rare empathic reflection in his writings from 1877 until his death.
These guys knew better because the example and the articulation of a better democracy was all around them. Nearly a century before the first Powell expedition, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson studied and learned about North America’s original form of Democracy from the Haudenosaunee Delegation. They brought knowledge to ideas of matriarchal democratic governance the Constitutional Convention. Powell and Howard were well read. The ideas and advocacy from people like Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth were known to them. The Nation was aware of the ascendance of formerly enslaved people who gained control of the House and Senate in South Carolina during Reconstruction. More than 1,500 African Americans held political office across the South in the years after the Civil War. Hiram Revels, Benjamin S. Turner, Robert DeLarge, Jodiah Walls, Jefferson Long, Joseph Rainey and Robert B. Elliott were elected to U.S. Congress. Poor Black and White farmers had established economic collectives on former plantations in the South during and after the Civil War, providing a living example of small ‘d’ multiracial democratic life. Black women were fighting (often without the support of white suffragettes) for the protection of Black bodies and the right to vote. In Howard’s case, he not only read about these things — he was there, he witnessed it with his own eyes.
On his trip to Walla Walla just before the Nez Perce War, Ollokot had made clear to Howard and delegates from the Department of the Columbia, a superior way of living in the West, including democratic governance for Native people. By 1869, all of the Western tribes were aware of, and had experienced for generations, the devastation white settlement brought and the dehumanizing, violent complications and contradictions of American bureaucracy. Other Native leaders made similar pleas and provided similar alternative visions for sustainable organization and side-by-side democratic coexistence, and were similarly dismissed or ignored.
In the South, by 1877, Confederates had resorted to mob-violence and intimidation to confront a Black voting majority, and Reconstruction was effectively killed by the Compromise of 1877.
Between April 9, 1865 (Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox) and October 5, 1877 (Chief Joseph’s Surrender at Bears Paw) the U.S. had an opportunity to take a higher path and realize what James Baldwin would later refer to as a multiracial democracy. It was an opportunity to close the gap between the rhetoric of Freedom, Justice, Equality, and peoples’ actual lived experience. It was an opportunity for white folks to heed the example of Black excellence in the South and Indigenous excellence in the West, and follow by example. We failed as a Nation to seize the moment. This failure, which was actually a triumph for Confederate power brokers, Christian hubris, and white supremacy, ushered in nearly100 years of subjugation, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, settler violence, land theft, negated treaty rights, boarding schools, and cultural genocide.
END OF PART 2