Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

away, and even if African Americans had not yet achieved the levels of equality they yearned for, they had still reached levels none had ever dreamed possible before the war. In November 1864, two weeks after Maryland officially abolished slavery, Frederick Douglass returned to Baltimore for the first time since his flight from slavery twenty-six years before. He was “awed into silence” by the changes the war had wrought, and as he spoke to a racially mixed meeting at an African American church, he declared that “the revolution is genuine, full and complete.”29

Douglass was, for once, being an optimist. It was not an optimism widely shared by other racial minorities who found themselves with less at stake and thus less to gain by the war. By 1861, many of the most familiar Indian tribes had been driven out of their ancient lands east of the Mississippi and either penned into reservations and “civilized” with white agriculture, education, and churches or else forcibly relocated west of Mississippi with the tribes of the unsettled western plains. Few of these uprooted eastern tribes had much connection with the larger issue of slavery and disunion, except for the “civilized” Cherokees of the federally designated “Indian Territory” south of Kansas, who had been removed from their Alabama and Georgia homelands in the 1830s and who retained black slavery and a rudimentary plantation system.

Like blacks, Indians seized on the war as an opportunity for advancing or protecting political agendas of their own, although in the case of the Indians, those agendas varied from place to place and tribe to tribe. The Iroquois of western New York had been resisting federal pressure to surrender their reservation lands and move west since the 1830s, and during the Civil War many Iroquois stepped forward to volunteer for the Union army on the premise that Iroquois cooperation in winning the war would induce an appreciative federal government to leave them alone on their lands. In southern Minnesota, the failure of the federal government to meet its treaty obligations with the Santee (Eastern Dakota) Sioux of the Minnesota River reservation provoked a bloody uprising in August 1862 that led to the deaths of more than 350 white settlers. In the Indian Territory, intratribal political factions among Cherokee, Creeks, and Seminoles led to a miniature civil war among the tribes, with various factions soliciting Confederate or Union intervention in the Territory to promote their own control. The semi-nomadic tribes on the plains of the unorganized western territories took advantage of the withdrawal of Federal regular units to overrun white settlements and communications routes to the Pacific.30

The more Native Americans involved themselves in the Civil War, the more they seemed to lose by it. As many as 2,000 Iroquois may have volunteered for Union service, including the nearly all-Iroquois 132nd New York, but their willingness to fight for the Union was interpreted by the federal government as a willingness to further assimilate themselves into white culture, and it only fed postwar government pressures to dissolve the New York reservations and, as a New York state legislature report recommended, absorb the Iroquois “into the great mass of the American people.” The Sioux uprising in Minnesota was brutally suppressed by hastily recalled Union troops, and thirty-eight Sioux and half-Sioux were hanged for their role in the uprising on December 26, 1862. The tribes of the Indian Territory were devastated by fighting between pro-Confederate and pro-Union bands all through the war, and the plains tribes suffered much more in the long run by the withdrawal of the regulars than they could have imagined. In the absence of the regulars, untrained and vengeful white western volunteer regiments took up responsibility for dealing with unruly bands of Cheyenne, Mescalero, Navajo, Comanche, and Kiowa, and the volunteers showed little of the discipline and none of the restraint that the regulars had exercised on western outpost duty. On November 29, 1864, 600 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho who had camped at Sand Creek, Colorado, under promises of protection by Federal troops at nearby Fort Lyon were surprised by a force of Colorado volunteers determined to avenge Cheyenne raids on white settlements on the Platte River. The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle vainly waved a large Stars and Stripes to prove the peaceful intentions of his village, but the Colorado volunteers cut down 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women and children whom the white volunteers afterward mutilated.31

Other, less visible ethnic and racial groups saw their fortunes fluctuate during the war as well. Stereotyped images among Anglo-Americans defined Jews as cunning moneylenders and “Shylocks.” “What else could be expected from a Jew but money-getting?” asked the Southern Illustrated News in an 1863 article titled “Extortioners.” Those prejudices guaranteed that American Jews would be regularly targeted in both North and South as aliens and swindlers who fattened themselves, through war contracts and shady dealing, on the sufferings of their presumably Christian neighbors. In December 1862 Ulysses Grant grew so convinced that “the Jews, as a class” were guilty of “violating every regulation of trade established by … Department orders,” that he ordered the expulsion of “this class of people” from his Mississippi military district—not thinking that this order would include sutlers as well as more than a few Jewish soldiers. The protests that erupted over Grant’s order (including a Senate resolution condemning it as “illegal, tyrannical, cruel and unjust”) went all the way up to Lincoln, who promptly had the order rescinded. Grant’s prejudices notwithstanding, 7,000 Jews (out of an American Jewish population of about 150,000) enlisted to fight for the Union, and six of them won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in action, while another 1,340 Jews joined the Confederate forces.32

Hispanic Americans constituted an even smaller piece of the American ethnic pie, especially since the Anglo-Texans who turned Texas into an American republic and then an American state in the 1840s successfully drove most of Texas’s small Hispanic population south into Mexico. However, when Confederate Texans mounted a small-scale invasion