Today’s Republicans Are Like Lincoln in Only One Way

[David Lockmiller]

The New York Times today published an opinion piece by historian Megan Kate Nelson titled "Today’s Republicans Are Like Lincoln in Only One Way." The opinion description provided by the author is: "They share a determination to undermine the land rights of Native peoples."

The following is an extended excerpt from the opinion:

The Homestead Act provided 160 acres of public land for every loyal citizen of the Union. The Pacific Railway Act approved federal support for a transcontinental railroad. Two other acts, one setting aside public lands for agricultural colleges and the other creating the Department of Agriculture, were rooted in Republican beliefs about the centrality of free-labor farming in the future of the West — and of the nation.

Before the West could be settled with white farmers, however, the federal government had to remove a major obstacle: Native peoples. But indigenous groups had no intention of handing over their homelands to be sold or distributed to white Americans.

So to force Native submission, the Lincoln administration developed a two-pronged approach.

The Pacific Railway Act stipulated that where the government had already negotiated treaties granting lands to Native groups, it would extinguish those titles.

Where there was no treaty in place, the Union War Department would declare war on Native communities and force their surrender. Then they would be removed to reservations, where they could be monitored by Union troops, taught “the arts of civilization” and converted to Christianity.

In the New Mexico Territory, James Henry Carleton, a Union brigadier general, put this policy into action in the fall of 1862. He sent troops to fight Chiricahua Apaches in the south and ordered his favorite officer, Colonel “Kit” Carson, to make hard war first upon Mescalero Apaches, and then Navajos in the north.

Carleton intensified these campaigns the next year because in the summer of 1863, gold had been discovered in the mountains of central Arizona Territory. Once the Union Army removed Apaches and Navajos from their homelands — the plan went — miners would lay claim to the Arizona diggings. Farmers would follow, planting the fields that would feed them. Lincoln’s War Department and General Land Office supported these campaigns.

“The immense mineral resources of some of those Territories ought to be developed as rapidly as possible,” the president wrote in his annual address to Congress in 1862. “It is worthy of your serious consideration whether some extraordinary measures to promote that end cannot be adopted.”

In January 1864, Lincoln signed a measure creating a reservation for Navajos and Mescalero Apaches at Bosque Redondo in central New Mexico. Suffering from Carleton’s mismanagement and a series of environmental disasters, the reservation was a calamity from the start.

The more than 8,000 Navajos and Mescalero Apaches incarcerated there endured bad water, exposure to the elements, spoiled rations and rampant disease. They called the reservation “Hwéeldi” — Land of Suffering.

Reports of these conditions sparked multiple congressional investigations, and by 1864, Lincoln was calling for new policies that would “provide for the welfare of the Indian.” But at the same time, he was advocating to render the western territories “secure for the advancing settler.”