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“If a War It May Be Called”: The Peace Policy with American Indians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Jennifer Graber
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Abstract

In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant initiated the “Peace Policy” with American Indians, an approach that privileged humane interactions with native peoples and allowed religious groups to run reservations across the American West. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, administered the largest number of reservations and symbolized the policy's benevolent aims. This essay explores varying Quaker understandings of peaceful relations with Indians as well as the general public's perception of the Friends' nonviolence. The essay focuses on an 1871 Indian attack on an overland wagon train, including Quaker engagements with the army in the attack's aftermath. Despite the Society's part in an emerging culture of threat against Plains Indians, Americans continued to consider both the Society and the policy to be peaceful. As such, this episode proves useful for understanding the intersections of religion and violence in United States history. Close analysis of the internal Quaker debate about military engagement, as well as Americans' ongoing identification of the policy with nonviolence, shows how religious groups and religious language were employed to reclassify episodes of violence as peace.

Keywords

violencepeaceQuakersNative Americanschurch and state
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Winter 2014 , pp. 36 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2014

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References

Notes

The author thanks members of the colloquium on Religion in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, members of a panel on religion and empire at the American Academy of Religion 2012 annual meeting, as well as Howard Miller and Grant Wacker. This article is better because of these many readers and their critical feedback.

1. Nye, W. S., Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943), 131.Google Scholar For a full account of the attack, see Hamilton, Allen Lee, “The Warren Wagontrain Raid: Frontier Indian Policy at the Crossroads,” Arizona and the West 28 (Autumn 1986): 201–24.Google Scholar

2. The attack also raised alarm because the Warren wagon train was not the only convoy encountered by the Kiowas that day. Earlier, a military caravan accompanying General William Tecumseh Sherman had passed on the same road. For the developing historiography on the Peace Policy, see Beaver, R. Pierce, Church, State, and the American Indians: Two and a Half Centuries of Partnership in Missions between Protestant Churches and Government (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1966);Google Scholar Prucha, Francis Paul, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975);Google Scholar Milner, Clyde A., With Good Intentions: Quaker Work among the Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas in the 1870s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982);Google Scholar Keller, Robert H., American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869–82 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983);Google Scholar and Levine, Richard R., “Indian Fighters and Indian Reformers: Grant's Indian Peace Policy and the Conservative Consensus,” Civil War History 31 (1985): 329–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Quoted in Rockwell, Stephen J., Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 253–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Ohio Yearly Meeting, Meeting for Sufferings to Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs, November 1871, Garrett, John B. Papers, Ms. Coll. 903, Box 2, Folder 4, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford.Google Scholar The Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs (AECFIA) was the leading committee of Friends engaged in Indian work. Because its full name and even the abbreviation is rather cumbersome, I refer to the AECFIA in the text of the article as the “Indian committee.” Nineteenth–century Friends had many disagreements about the meaning of the peace testimony, as I will discuss later in the article.

5. For an account of the arrests, see Hamilton, “The Warren Wagontrain Raid.” Tatum narrated the arrests in his memoir. See Lawrie, Tatum, Our Red Brothers and the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant (Winston, J. C., 1899; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 116–18.Google Scholar

6. Ohio Yearly Meeting, November 1871.

7. Hamm, Thomas D., The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 9.Google Scholar

8. Hamm, Thomas D., “Hicksite Quakers and the Antebellum Nonresistance Movement,” Church History 63 (December 1994): 557–69.Google Scholar For more on this internal diversity, including the ways that these disputes about the peace testimony impacted Quaker political involvement, social reform activities, and involvement in non-Quaker peace and antislavery societies, see Brock, Peter, The Quaker Peace Testimony, 1660 to 1914 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 155–64.Google Scholar

9. Friend, February 25, 1871.

10. “Extracts from the Second Annual Report of the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs,” Friends’ Review, September 30, 1871. Perhaps the committee's reticence to discipline Tatum is best understood in light of developments during the Civil War that Peter Brock has described. He argued that most Friends continued to proclaim the peace testimony and many “fighting Quakers” were disowned. At the same time, he found that many communities did not take action against those who violated the peace testimony, especially in comparison to actions taken against “fighting Quakers” during the American Revolution. See Brock, The Quaker Peace Testimony, 182.

11. In the introduction to a recent edited volume, John Carlson and Jonathan Ebel offer a helpful survey of the field. See “Introduction: Brown, John, Jeremiad, and Jihad: Reflections on Religion, Violence, and America,” in From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 8.Google Scholar Harry Stout also offered an assessment of the field. See Stout, Harry S., “Review Essay: Religion, War, and the Meaning of America,” Religion and American Culture 19, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 275–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Carlson and Ebel helpfully note that “legal forms of coercion and threats of enforcement may entail violence short of the actual use of force.” See Carlson and Ebel, “John Brown, Jeremiad, and Jihad,” 5. Most historians working in the field, however, do not have such a robust definition of violence.

13. Historians of Quakerism have found many examples of this sort of assessment, including a Civil War–era fascination with the trope of the “fighting Quaker.” See Ryan, James Emmett, Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)Google Scholar, and Connerley, Jennifer, “Fighting Quakers: A Jet Black Whiteness,” Pennsylvania History 73 (Autumn 2006): 373–411 Google Scholar.

14. The emphasis on the ways in which religions are deployed to sanctify violence in American history might stem from the sheer number of studies that focus on the Civil War.

15. This committee was called the Board of Indian Commissioners and was composed mostly of representatives from mainline Protestant groups.

16. As a result of the wagon train attack, the policy of strict separation was later revised to allow the military to enter reservations in order to arrest suspected perpetrators.

17. Tiro, Karim M., “‘We Wish to Do You Good’: The Quaker Mission to the Oneida Nation, 1790–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Fall 2006): 353–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Rockwell has noted the concerns Americans had about federal activity in the Reconstruction period, including federal interactions with Indians. See Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State, chap. 8. For suspicions about fraud and the Indian Bureau, see Genetin-Pilawa, C. Joseph, “Ely Parker and the Contentious Peace Policy,” Western Historical Quarterly 41 (Summer 2010): 196–217,Google Scholar and Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State, 290.

19. For more on general skepticism of the military as well as particular concerns about Indians, see Byler, Charles A., Civil-Military Relations on the Frontier and Beyond, 1865–1917 (Westport: Praeger, 2006),Google Scholar intro. and chap. 1.

20. For more on Quaker cartoons in this era, see Connerley, “Fighting Quakers.”

21. See Connerley, “Fighting Quakers,” and Ryan, Imaginary Friends.

22. Hoig, Stan, Tribal Wars of the Southern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 13.Google Scholar

23. Anderson, Gary Clayton, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 5–7.Google Scholar

24. Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 3.

25. Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 20–24;Google Scholar Hoig, Tribal Wars, 237.

26. Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, 348–51.

27. On the Washita attack, see Hoig, Tribal Wars, 256. On the ways the attack shaped attitudes about military force against Indians, see Byler, Civil-Military Relations, xviii.

28. “Opposition to Grant's Quaker Indian Policy,” Daily National Intelligencer, May 1, 1869.

29. Editorial, Daily Central City Register (Central City, Colo.), May 6, 1869.

30. Editorial, Miner (Prescott, Ariz. Territory), June 26, 1869. “Shad-bellied” refers to a kind of topcoat worn by Quaker men.

31. Rahill, Peter James, The Catholic IndianMissions and Grant's Peace Policy, 1870–1884 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1953). 32.Google Scholar “Missions and the Quaker Policy,” Vermont Chronicle, June 11, 1870. These complaints were well founded. By 1872, the Orthodox and Hicksite Friends had sixteen reservations between them. This was compared to the Methodists' fourteen, Presbyterians' nine, Episcopalians' eight, Catholics' seven, and Baptists' five. See Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis,

53. Nonetheless, mainline Protestants dominated the Board of Indian Commissioners, the committee created by Grant that had responsibility to advise the Interior Department on Indian Affairs. On their influence, see Genetin-Pilawa, “Ely Parker and the Contentious Peace Policy.”

33. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism, xv.

34. Friends General Conference, Memorial of the Society of Friends in Regard to the Indians (Baltimore: Rose and Co., 1867), 2.

35. Ibid., 5–6.

36. “Proceedings of the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs,” Friends' Review, July 10, 1869.

37. Ibid.

38. Some historians have emphasized the difference between Quaker and Indian expectations about the Peace Policy. Hamalainen and Anderson have argued that Kiowas and Comanches used the reservations only as winter staging grounds and felt free to move outside boundaries in order to sustain themselves economically. At the same time, these historians have emphasized how agents such as Tatum simply did not understand Indian economies on the southern plains, including widespread practice of raiding. See Anderson, , The Conquest of Texas, 352–53, and Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 326.Google Scholar For more on the Hicksite experience in Indian administration, see Milner, With Good Intentions.

39. Lawrie Tatum, Diary, May 1869, Lawrie Tatum Papers BL 49 (LTP), Folder 7, Special Collections, State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI), Iowa City; Lawrie Tatum to Ely Parker, June 24, 1869, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs M234 (LR), Roll 376, National Archives and Records Administration (NA), Washington, D.C.

40. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, October 16, 1869, LR, Roll 376, NA.

41. Enoch Hoag to Ely Parker, October 16, 1869, LR, Roll 376, NA. Agent Darlington was the Quaker agent assigned to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, not far from the Kiowa and Comanche reservation.

42. “The Indians: The Piegan Slaughter,” New York Times, March 11, 1870. See also Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 31–32.

43. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, February 11, 1870, LR, Roll 376, NA.

44. Lawrie Tatum to Ely Parker, May 7, 1870, LR, Roll 376, NA.

45. Tatum, Diary, July 4, 1870, LTP, SHSI.

46. Lawrie Tatumto EnochHoag,August 6, 1870,LR, Roll 376,NA.

47. Tatum, Diary, September 2, 1870, LTP, SHSI.

48. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, September 6, 1870, LR, Roll 376, NA.

49. Tatum, Diary, November 27, 1870, LTP, SHSI.

50. Haley, James L., The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 21.Google Scholar

51. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, March 18, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

52. “Indian Policy of the Quaker Commissioners,” Milwaukee Sentinel, April 9, 1870. The piece was reprinted from the April 2, 1870, issue of the Lawrence (Kansas) Tribune. Thomas Hamm has noted that the 1870s brought a new wave of questions and debates about all forms of Quaker distinctiveness, including pacifism. See Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism, xiv, 69.

53. “Western Indians,” Friend, February 25, 1871.

54. “An Indian Massacre: Official Report of the Slaughter of Men, Women and Children in the Camp Grant Reservation in Arizona,” New York Times, May 31, 1871. For a full account of the attack and its aftermath, see Jacoby, Karl, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).Google Scholar

55. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, May 6, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

56. Richards, Jonathan, “The Indians,” New York Times , May 16, 1871.Google Scholar

57. Tatum wrote about Satank's son's death in his diary. Tatum, Diary, December 7, 1870, LTP, SHSI.

58. Keller also recounted Tatum's response to the attack. See Keller, American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 133–37.

59. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, May 25, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

60. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, May 28, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

61. Lawrie Tatum to Mary Ann Tatum, May 28, 1871, in “Lawrie Tatum's Letters,” Prairie Lore (July 1967): 60.

62. Lawrie Tatum to Mary Ann Tatum, June 3, 1871, “Lawrie Tatum's Letters,” 60–61.

63. “The Indian Council,” New York Times, June 17, 1871.

64. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, June 17, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

65. ColumbusDelanoto Ely Parker, June 20, 1871,LR,Roll 377,NA.

66. “The Indians,” New York Times, June 20, 1871.

67. “The Indians,” New York Times, June 22, 1871.

68. “Commissioner Tatum's Views of What Should Be Done with Satanta and ‘Big Tree,”’ New York Times, June 29, 1871.

69. Enoch Hoag to Lawrie Tatum, June 26, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA; Hagan cites a letter from Wistar. See Hagan, William T., United States- Comanche Relations: The Reservation Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 78.Google Scholar

70. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, July 1, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

71. Lawrie Tatum to Mary Ann Tatum, July 17, 1871, LTP, Folder 2, SHSI.

72. “The Indians,” New York Times, August 3, 1871. The paper reprinted a July 22, 1871, letter from Tatum.

73. Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs, Letter, Friend, August 26, 1871. Hoag included a similar letter to the president in his correspondence with Parker. See Enoch Hoag to Ely Parker, July 19, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

74. “Eminently Practical Suggestions to Quaker Indian Commissioners,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, July 19, 1871.

75. “Horrible Barbarity: Results of Quaker Policy on the Indian,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, July 28, 1871.

76. Lawrie Tatum to Col. Benjamin Grierson, August 4, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

77. Lawrie Tatum to Gen. William Hazen, August 5, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA.

78. Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, October 14, 1871, LR, Roll 377, NA; Lawrie Tatum to Mary Ann Tatum, October 14, 1871, LTP, Folder 2, SHSI.

79. The report comes from the minutes of an August 1871 Indian committee meeting. See Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs, “Minute Book,” vol. 4, AA9, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records (PYMICR), Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College (HC), Haverford, Pennsylvania. Selections from the minutes were reprinted for a wider Quaker audience. See “Extracts from the Second Annual Report of the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs,” Friends’ Review, September 30, 1871.

80. “Commissioner Tatum's Views of What Should Be Done with Satanta and ‘Big Tree.”’

81. “Extracts from the Second Annual Report of the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs.”

82. Ibid.

83. “Minute Book,” vol. 4, November 13, 1871, PYMICR, HC.

84. “Minute Book,” vol. 4, November 14, 1871, PYMICR, HC.

85. “Indian Department,” Friends’ Review, December 2, 1871.

86. “The Indians,” Friends’ Intelligencer, March 29, 1873.

87. “Indian Department,” Friends’ Review, September 7, 1872.

88. Jonathan Richards, “The Indian Policy,” Friend, May 24, 1873; “Fourth Annual Report of the Friends Associated Executive Committee on Indian Affairs,” Friends’ Review, August 30, 1873.

89. J. P. S., “The Bright Side of the Peace Policy,” Friends’ Review, May 16, 1874.

90. For the classic study of the Red River War, see Haley, The Buffalo War.

91. “Transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department,” Advance, October 3, 1878.

92. “The Work of the Friends among the Indians in the Indian Territory and Kansas,” Friend, May 18, 1878.

93. Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 284; John Jasper Methvin, In the Limelight (n.p., 1926), 46.

94. “Article II—President Grant's Indian Policy,” Methodist Quarterly Review, July 1877.

95. W. McKay Dougan, “The Power of Kindness,” Herald of Truth, September 1, 1881.

96. Frances Willard, “A Quaker Conquest,” Boston Daily Advertiser, August 19, 1881.

97. “Gen. Crook's Bad Policy: How the Apache War Could Have Been Prevented, The Commanding Officer Responsible for Geronimo’s Raid, A Peace Policy That Does Not Work,” New York Times, June 9, 1885.

98. See F. McGloin, “Our Indian Problem,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, November 1875; “The Indian Policy,” New York Observer and Chronicle, August 3, 1876; “Our North-American Indians,” Ballou's Monthly Magazine, November 1878; “The Voice of San Juan,” Daily News (Denver), January 17, 1880; and “The Indian Business: The Remarkable Mysteries That Surround the Quaker Policy,” Daily News (Denver), January 18, 1880.

99. James E. Rhoads, “Progress in Indian Civilization,” Friends’ Review, June 14, 1894. Tatum reprinted the whole speech in his memoir.

100. Tatum, Our Red Brothers, preface, 285, 24, 46–47, 166, 202.

101. Ibid., 172, 202.

102. “Major Tatum Dead,” Wichita Daily Eagle, February 1900, exact date unknown, LTP, Folder 18, SHSI folder.

103. Stout, “Review Essay,” 284.

104. Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 166. Even the Ohio Yearly Meeting, which had sounded the loudest protest against Tatum's activities, made similar arguments. In 1879, they issued a statement in which they “rejoiced” that Quakers had ended their involvement with Grant’s Indian policy and returned to “more directly religious work.” In the same piece, they applauded Captain Richard Pratt's “successful” management of the Indian prison at Fort Marion and endorsed his effort to start the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. They expressed confidence in Pratt’s ability to “procure” enough Indian children, continue his educational methods from Fort Marion, and transform his Indian subjects into “decided Christians.” See “Indian News,” Friends' Review, September 27, 1879.

105. Enoch Hoag, “The Indian Work,” Friends’ Review, April 25, 1875.

106. T'owyhawlmah's (Pedrick, Laura) story of the Red River War is recounted in Maurice Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Myths, Legends, Folktales, vol. 2 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1981), 233–36.Google Scholar The volume also includes stories of the war from Ohettoint (Charley Buffalo) on pages 239–40 and Aukoy (Maggie Smokey) on pages 247–48.