The American Indian And The "Great Emancipator"

Perhaps the veneer of lies and historical distortions that surround Abraham Lincoln are beginning to crack. In the movie, "Gangs of New York," we finally have a historically correct representation of the real Abraham Lincoln and his policies. Heretofore, many socialistic intellectuals, politicians and historians have whitewashed these policies in order to protect Lincoln's image because of their allegiance to the unconstitutional centralization of power he brought to our government. 

The false sainthood and adulation afforded Lincoln has its basis in the incorrect assumption he fought the war to free an enslaved people. To believe this propaganda one must ignore most everything Lincoln said about the Black race and his continued efforts at colonization. Lincoln's treatment of the American Indian has been very much ignored, though not exactly misrepresented. 

One would find it hard to refute that Abraham Lincoln's political idol was Henry Clay. Lincoln would say of Clay; "During my whole political life, I have loved and revered Henry Clay as a teacher and leader." Lincoln delivered the eulogy at the funeral for Clay. When elected President, Lincoln set about implementing Henry Clay's political philosophies. 

Throughout Clay's political life he was a strong believer in National Socialism and a complete racist in all references to the American Indian. As Secretary of State Clay would declare: "The Indians' disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world. I do not think them, as a race, worth preserving." 

This mentality lead to the forced walk of all Cherokees from the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia to Oklahoma during the winter of 1838. Over 20,000 Cherokees were dragged from their homes, which were then plundered and burned. They were force marched most of them barefooted to Oklahoma during the dead of winter with the sky for their blanket and the earth for their pillow. Over 4,000 Cherokees died on this march and it became known as the "Trail of Tears." 

Similar atrocities occurred all through the Lincoln Administration. In 1862, the Santee Sioux of Minnesota grew tired of waiting for the 1.4 million dollars they had been promised for the sale of 24 million acres of land to the federal government in 1851. Appeals to President Lincoln fell on deaf ears. What made this even more egregious to the Sioux was the invasion of this yet unpaid for land by thousands of white settlers. Then, with a very poor crop in august of 1862, many of the Indians were hungry and facing starvation with the upcoming winter. 

When Lincoln outright refused to pay the owed money, remember he had a war to finance the Indians revolted. Lincoln assigned General John Pope to quell the uprising and he announced at the beginning of his campaign: "It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made." Lincoln certainly did not challenge this statement. 

The Indians were quickly defeated in October of 1862 and Pope herded all the Indians, men, women and children, into forts where military trials were immediately convened. None of the Indians tried were given any semblance of a defense. Their trials lasted approximately 10 minutes each. All adult males were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death with the only evidence against them being they had been present during a "war" which they themselves had declared against the government. 

The authorities in Minnesota asked Lincoln to order the immediate execution of all 303 males found guilty. Lincoln was concerned with how this would play with the Europeans, whom he was afraid were about to enter the war on the side of the South. He offered the following compromise to the politicians of Minnesota: They would pare the list of those to be hung down to 39. In return, Lincoln promised to kill or remove every Indian from the state and provide Minnesota with 2 million dollars in federal funds. Remember, he only owed the Sioux 1.4 million for the land. 

So, on December 26, 1862, the Great Emancipator ordered the largest mass execution in American History, where the guilt of those to be executed was entirely in doubt. Regardless of how Lincoln defenders seek to play this, it was nothing more than murder to obtain the land of the Santee Sioux and to appease his political cronies in Minnesota. 

Lincoln's western armies, using the tactics of murder, rape, burning and pillaging, simultaneously being used against Southern noncombatants by the eastern armies, turned their attention to the Navajos. 

In 1863-64, General Carleton and his subordinate, Colonel Kit Carson, invaded the Navajo land, especially those concentrated in the Canyon de Chelly area. Crops were burned, innocents were murdered, women were raped and general chaos was rained upon these noble people simply because, like the Santee Sioux, they demanded from Lincoln what they had been promised; their land and to be left alone. General Carleton, believing there was gold to be found in the area, stated: "This war, will be pursued against you if it takes years until you cease to exist or move." Again, there was no protest of this policy from Lincoln, his Commander in Chief. 

The Navajo were forced to march over 300 miles to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Over 200 Navajos died on this march and, eventually, over 2,000 perished before a treaty was signed in 1868. While at Bosque Redondo, the Navajo suffered the vilest conditions; bitter water, no firewood and impossible growing conditions for crops. The soldiers and the Mexican guards subjected the women to rape and humiliating treatment. Children born at this "concentration camp" were lucky to survive their first few months of life. 

As our Founding Fathers did in our Declaration of Independence from the British, the Cherokee Nation listed its grievances with the Union when they declared their unification with the Confederate States on October 28th 1861. These brave people had already observed the atrocities of Lincoln's war criminals and saw through any so-called war for liberation. 

"When circumstances beyond their control compel one people to sever the ties which have long existed between them and another state or confederacy, and to contract new alliances and establish new relations for the security of their rights and liberties, it is fit that they should publicly declare the reasons by which their action is justified. 

The Cherokee people had its origin in the South; its institutions are similar to those of the Southern States, and their interests identical with theirs. Long since it accepted the protection of the United States of America, contracted with them treaties of alliance and friendship, and allowed themselves to be to a great extent governed by their laws. 

In peace and war, they have been faithful to their engagements with the United States. With much hardship and injustice to complain of, they resorted to no other means than solicitation and argument to obtain redress. Loyal and obedient to the laws and the stipulations of the treaties, they served under the flag of the United States, shared the common dangers, and were entitled to a share in the common glory, to gain which their blood was freely shed on the battlefield. 

When the dissentions between the Southern and Northern States culminated in a separation of State after State from the Union, they watched the progress of events with anxiety and consternation. While their institutions and the contiguity of their territory to the states of Arkansas, Texas and Missouri made the cause of the seceding States necessarily their own cause, their treaties had been made with the United States, and they felt the utmost reluctance even in appearance to violate their engagements or set at naught the obligations of good faith. 

But Providence rules the destinies of nations, and events, by inexorable necessity, overrule human resolutions. The number of the Confederate States increased to eleven, and their government is firmly established and consolidated. Maintaining in the field an army of two hundred thousand men, the war became for them but a succession of victories. Disclaiming any intention to invade the Northern States, they sought only to repel invaders from their own soil and to secure the right of governing themselves. 

They claimed only the privilege asserted by the Declaration of American Independence, and on which the right of the Northern States themselves to self-government is formed, of altering their form of government when it became no longer tolerable and establishing new forms for the security of their liberties. 

Throughout the Confederate States, we saw this great revolution effected without violence or suspension of the laws or the closing of the courts, The military power was nowhere placed above the civil authorities. None were seized and imprisoned at the mandate of arbitrary power. All division among the people disappeared, and the determination became unanimous that there should never again be any union with the Northern States. Almost as one man, all who were able to bear arms rushed to the defense of an invaded country, and nowhere has it been found necessary to compel men TO SERVE, or to enlist mercenaries by the offer of extraordinary bounties. 

But, in the Northern States, the Cherokee people saw with alarm a violated constitution, all civil liberty put in peril, and all rules of civilized warfare and the dictates of common humanity and decency unhesitatingly disregarded. In states which still adhered to the Union, a military despotism had displaced the civil power and the laws became silent amid arms. Free speech and almost free thought became a crime. The right of the writ of habeas corpus, guaranteed by the constitution, disappeared at the nod of a Secretary of State or a general of the lowest grade. The mandate of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was at naught by the military power, and this outrage on common right, approved by a President sworn to support the constitution. War on the largest scale was waged, and the immense bodies of troops called into the field in the absence of any law warranting it under the pretense of suppressing unlawful combination of men. 

The humanities of war, which even barbarians respect, were no longer thought worthy to be observed. Foreign mercenaries and the scum of the cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted and organized into brigades and sent into Southern States to aid in subjugating a people struggling for freedom, to burn, to plunder, and to commit the basest of outrages on the women. 

While the heels of armed tyranny trod upon the necks of Maryland and Missouri, and men of the highest character and position were incarcerated upon suspicion and without process of law, in jails, in forts, and prison ships, and even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a President and Cabinet Ministers; while the press ceased to be free, and the publication of newspapers was suspended and their issues seized and destroyed. 

The officers and men taken prisoners in the battles were allowed to remain in captivity by the refusal of the Government to consent to an exchange of prisoners; as they had left their dead on more than one field of battle that had witnessed their defeat, to be buried and their wounded to be cared for by southern hands" 

Lincoln's armies, after decimating and destroying the South in the War for Southern Independence, turned its war criminals loose on the Indians of the Great Plains and the Southwest. The tactics of murder, rape and pillaging, perfected in such places as Atlanta, the March to the Sea and the Shenandoah Valley, were repeated in places with names like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. 

Small wonder one of Lincoln's favorite Generals was William T. Sherman, who wrote to his wife in 1862 that his goal was the "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people of the South." He said while campaigning against the Indians: "The only good Indian I ever saw was dead," and lamented to his son shortly before his death that he had been unable to kill all of the "Red Sob's." 

Abraham Lincoln's "American System," adopted from Henry Clay, brought about the necessity for the removal of the Indians from the west. This concept of government had been vetoed as unconstitutional by virtually every president, beginning with James Madison. 

The system called for the subsidizing of the railroads with stolen taxpayer money. Lincoln had long been the primary attorney representing the railroads before being elected President. For the railroads to complete their lines into the west, the Indian had to be either "neutralized" or eliminated. Thus, Lincoln left his fingerprints on the campaign against the Indian well into the 19th century. 

Lincoln's policies of taxpayer-supported railroads would lead, not only to the attempted annihilation of the Indian, but to tremendous scandals in the administration of another of Lincoln's war criminals, Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, like Lincoln, handed out his "political plum" appointments of Indian Agent to cronies who proceeded to gain tremendous wealth by selling supplies and stealing money that should have gone to the Indians. 

Today, as we Southerners protest the conversion of the Battlefields of the National Park Service into "the beginnings of reparations for slavery," by Marxist politicians and journalists, and challenge the erection of a statue of Lincoln in Richmond, we might ask ourselves as the Indian has done for years: Why, in the most sacred land of the Sioux, is there a monument carved into the granite mountain, a figure of Lincoln, who promised the annihilation of a band of the Sioux to please his political cronies? 

To continue to idolize Lincoln is to refute history and intellectual thought and to worship at the foot of Marxist government. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, Americans will be able to see the Lincoln Administration and its legacy of how we are governed today in the light of truth. We may even be able to see its consequences as clearly as the Cherokee Nation saw them in 1861! By Michael Gaddy