Delaware scouts during the Civil War. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. From the collections of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, New York.
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: WHY INDIANS FOUGHT F
rom 1861 to 1865, American Indians found themselves swept up into a war not of their own choosing. Over 20,000 American Indians served in the
Civil War, a conflict, according to the most- recent estimate, that cost 750,000 lives. Natives contributed to the Union as well as the Confederate cause on both land and sea, as “grunts” in the trenches, and even as commissioned and non-commissioned officers. An unknown number perished in battle, of disease, or as POWs, including at the infamous Andersonville Prison. The significant presence of so many Indians in this brutal conflict, at a time when the United States’ frontier army was under- taking campaigns of “pacification” against the Indian nations in the Great Lakes, Plains and Southwest, may seem strange. While the Confederate constitutional convention was meeting in February 1861 at Montgomery, Ala., the United States Army was attempting to capture Cochise, the Chiricahua Apache leader. Less than two weeks before the Sec- ond Battle of Bull Run in August of 1862, the
40 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2015
“Great Sioux Uprising” began in Minnesota. Subsequently, President Lincoln refused to pardon 38 of their leaders who were blamed for this conflict and who were subsequently executed at Mankato, Minn. In the summer of 1864, when the Army of
the Potomac was in the trenches before Pe- tersburg, the United States’ frontier army was removing thousands of Navajos and Mescalero Apaches, forcing them on their “Long Walk.” They were later incarcerated for four years at a concentration camp, the Bosque Redondo, at Fort Sumner, N.M. Two weeks after Lincoln’s re-election in
November, 1864, Colonel John Chivington and the troops of the 1st
and 3rd Colorado
Cavalry attacked a peaceful camp of mostly Cheyenne Indians along Sand Creek, killing about 150 men, women and children and mutilating their bodies. To be sure, some communities by 1861 had
been integrated into the region that sur- rounded them, becoming dependent on the non-Indian world for economic and political survival. Frequently, the reasons for volunteer-
ing were simply the result of persuasive and well-respected community leaders who were committed to joining the war effort of North or South. Although slavery was not the major raison d’etre for most of Confederate enlist- ments, some American Indians were slave- holders or were historically and economically tied to the “peculiar institution.” Others who joined the Union leaned toward abolitionism, objected to their poor treatment as “free persons of color,” or served with blacks in the United States Colored Troops. Some individual Indian soldiers, as was true of their white counterparts, were inspired by wanderlust and search for adventure. As many other non- Indian recruits, Natives were attracted by financial inducements to enlist. Some clearly served as “substitutes” and numerous others chose sides especially in the last two years of the war when cash bounties to enlist were upwards of 30 to 40 times greater than in 1861!
Indians nevertheless, did have unique
reasons to enlist. In some instances, the decision was based on past alliances, treaty
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