Was Lincoln a Douche?

On Presidents’ Day it is customary to laud Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of These United States, as the greatest of all American leaders. The man saved the Union, ended slavery, told good jokes, had nice legs - what’s not to like? Historians in a recent poll affirmed their profession’s usual ranking of Lincoln as the Number One guy, well ahead of the current incumbent (No. 14) and his predecessor (No. 45). Old Abe of course has his critics, and not just among unreconstructed neo-Confederates. President Lincoln’s policy toward Native Americans - a combination of military repression and malign neglect - proved so destructive that Congress temporarily took over the conduct of Indian Affairs after Appomattox. Closer to our own time, Bobby Wilson, a member of the 1491s, assessed Lincoln’s relationship with his own Dakota nation in a short, pointed video, “Lincoln Was a Douche.” Reviewing the president's record, I kind of have to agree.

A few years ago, the organizer of a podcast called Lincoln Log asked me to offer my scholarly assessment of Number Sixteen on his show. In his invitation the podcaster asked me how Lincoln had affected my life personally, which suggested that the show’s attitude toward Mr. Rail-Splitter was not merely reverential but theological. In my reply, which I offer below, I effectively declined the invitation:     

 

“My recent scholarship endeavors to place Indigenous Americans at the center of their own stories, and to move white policy-makers toward the background…My views on Abraham Lincoln are shaped by the impact on Native Americans' lives of policies for which Lincoln, as president, bore ultimate if not always proximate responsibility.

Navajo prisoners at Bosque Redondo (Wikimedia Commons)

"The years of Lincoln's presidency were ghastly ones for tens of thousands of American Indians. Your listeners are probably familiar with the story of the Dakota Sioux* rebellion of 1862 and the 38 men Lincoln hanged for insurrection; they are probably less familiar with the hundreds of Minnesota Ho-Chunks deported after the Sioux War (even though they had nothing to do with it), and with John Pope's deadly punitive campaign against the Lakota[s]...who also had nothing to do with the Dakota rising. Lincoln was less directly responsible for the California and Arizona militias' war of extermination against the Apaches, the Colorado militia's infamous attack on the Cheyenne encampment at Sand Creek, and Kit Carson's forced removal of the Navajos to Bosque Redondo, where 4,000 people died in four years. All of these military actions occurred, however, in the course of a...war with the Confederacy which Lincoln was determined to prosecute to unconditional victory, and all occurred in regions where Lincoln or his subordinates feared that Native American warriors might become recruits or catspaws of the CSA. (Not without some justification: the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory did become formal allies of the Confederacy in 1861.) I have found little to no evidence that President Lincoln intended his Western commanders to fight a frontier war with kid gloves on.

"It is worth noting that the intense, nearly genocidal character of the Indian Wars of 1862-65 generated growing criticism from white Americans. At the end of the Civil War Congress endeavored to wrest control of Indian policy away from the Executive Branch, setting up its own peace commission and initiating its own peace treaties with the Plains nations. A few years later President Ulysses Grant, taking back a leading role in Indian policy-making, called his new approach the "Peace Policy," to distinguish it from the more bellicose actions of his immediate predecessors - including Lincoln. Perhaps if he had survived his fatal trip to the theater Lincoln would have embraced a similar policy a few years earlier, but I haven't found much support for this counterfactual speculation.

"…In an interview or conversation about 'Lincoln and the Indians,' I would emphasize the experiences of Native Americans, and while I could certainly try to explain the actions of President Lincoln and his subordinates, I would not be inclined to excuse or justify them. This approach to the subject may be too pitiless for your audience. If not, I would be glad to talk with you further about taking part in an episode of your podcast.”

 

I didn’t appear on the Lincoln Log. 

I rather like Lincoln as a person, and think he did some remarkable things as president, but the responsibilities of a modern historian - to tell the truth about the past - differ considerably from those of a hagiographer or professional moralizer.

 

* I would not use this term today, as many people find it offensive.

The World Is a Garden and We Are All Flowers

“I for one do not lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture” - Theodosius Dobzhansky, quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979), 186.

 

Dobzhansky himself, 1966 (via Wikimedia)

 

Raised by elitist parents and schooled at a high-toned college - “four years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery,” to steal a phrase from Orwell - I in my youth grew accustomed to the argument that high culture could not exist without social inequality. The masses toiled and were taxed and exploited so that mannered commentators could discuss affairs of state on Sunday-morning television, philanthropists could endow galleries of art by past and present masters, and well-educated authors could write of adultery and ennui in the suburbs. Friedrich Nietzsche, a popular fellow on high-toned college syllabi, epitomized this aristocratic view in Chapter Nine of Beyond Good and Evil, claiming that only “a society believing in…differences of worth among human beings” could produce men of elevated spirit. These great-souled men, in turn, should rule a society that “is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and a scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may…elevate themselves to their higher duties.”

Exhausted and alienated by my parents' and contemporaries' elitism, how delighted I was to encounter, early in graduate school, Dobzansky's quote and his democratic attitude in a work by one of the modern masters of history. Braudel was a scholar as canonical in his way as Nietzsche, who nonetheless devoted his career to study and celebration of the everyday and common. People and the societies they create are ends in themselves, culture is produced and reproduced by everyone, the great innovators and artists of history owe much if not most of their insight to their teachers, contemporaries, and disciples, and nearly everyone has a good story to tell.* These observations and beliefs became all the more important for me to retain as American political and economic leaders adopted, in the early twenty-first century, the principles of one of Nietzsche’s bastard offspring, Ayn Rand. The United States’ headlong rush toward aristocracy slowed somewhat in the 2010s - more so during the recent unpleasantness - but the belief that most people don’t matter very much remains a compelling one for a powerful minority.

(The title of this post is from the underrated film Party Girl [1995].)

 

* I’d like to claim that I learned most of these lessons from my graduate-school training and subsequent reading, but actually most of it came incidentally, from magazine articles and genre fiction. I learned of the categorical imperative from one of George Will’s columns; of the diffusion of creativity and good stories through the general population by way of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and another underrated film, The Good Girl (2001); and of the idea that “solitary” geniuses were usually inspired by other, more obscure geniuses from some of Stephen Jay Gould’s articles. The universalist definition of culture I will admit to acquiring from the essays of Clifford Geertz.

Some Context

 

Last month's remark, "Everything is terrible," deserves some explanation. I have been privileged enough throughout my life to enjoy immunity from the effects of most bad news stories - the COVID lockdowns and the recent spell of high inflation being notable recent exceptions. Two new developments in June affected me directly, as they did millions of other Americans: the Supreme Court's lawless Biden v. Nebraska decision cost my family 10,000 dollars in student-loan forgiveness, and the wildfires in Canada poured enough smoke and exotic chemicals (e.g. formaldehyde) into southern Indiana that I developed a very bad cough, akin to that of a pack-a-day smoker. Sometimes it feels like the world is out to get you.

 

New York City, 6.7.23. (Aelthemplaer, Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand, my better half and kiddos and I managed to avoid most of the hideously-hot weather afflicting the southern United States - and southern Europe, and eastern China, and the world in general - this July by visiting family in the Pacific Northwest, where we enjoyed cool days and sunny skies. We would have enjoyed them even more if we hadn't all come down with COVID, the pandemical disease that the rest of the world has supposedly managed to put behind it. One's misfortunes aren't always synchronized with those of the rest of the world.    

That's Quite Enough, Mister Manypenny

Your Humble Narrator occasionally still publishes A Thing (other than this blog). Last fall the online journal Cosmos & Taxis included my article "Mr. Manypenny's Millions: Freedom and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Native American Annuity Conflict." "Freedom" is what Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny feared Indigenous Americans would lose if they became dependent on U.S. government annuities; "Sovereignty" is what Native American recipients believed these annuities regularly demonstrated. (Also, they were usually payments for past land cessions.) Why some Indigenous American leaders nonetheless agreed to convert their annuities to lump-sum payments forms a significant part of the story.

Behold, the very source of one's enslavement.

Mix Tape

Cat Stevens, 1976. Wikimedia Commons

At the end of our first year in college, several of my dorm mates put together that most typical of late-'80s youth artifacts, a mix tape. Each student in our dorm entry contributed one favorite song. I suspect most of us left out guilty or geeky pleasures in favor of something more reflective of our preferred identity. I kept and periodically listen to my copy, and offer here the playlist, for anyone interested in what privileged college freshmen liked to listen to thirty years ago:

1) The Unforgettable Fire - U2
2) Father and Son - Cat Stevens
3) Higher Ground - The Feelies
4) The Bitch Is Back - Elton John
5) In the Winter - Dusty Springfield
6) La Femme Accident - OMD
7) Unexpected Song - Bernadette Peters
8) Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word - Elton John
9) Blue Sky - Allman Brothers Band
10) In the Name of Love - U2
11) On the Road to Find Out - Cat Stevens
12) Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
13) Laura - Billy Joel
14) Runaway - Del Shannon
15) I Get a Kick Outta You - Nancy Sinatra
16) The Powers That Be - Roger Walters
17) Imagine - John Lennon
18) Three Little Birds - Bob Marley*
19) Knights in White Satin - Moody Blues
20) Love the One You're With - Stephen Stills
21) Angels Don't Cry - The Psychedelic Furs
22) I Fought the Law - The Clash
23) Uptown Girl - Billy Joel
24) Songbird - Fleetwood Mac
25) Eyes of the Girl - Wang Chung**
26) Redemption Songs - Bob Marley
27) Rocky Raccoon - The Beatles
28) Suicide Machine - The Germs
29) Bamboleo - Gipsy Kings***
30) Sweet Home Alabama - Lynard Skynard
31) Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton

Some agreeable stuff here, but on the whole I find our collective taste rather sedate and old-fashioned. The playlist includes a fair number of show tunes and 1970s popular music, plus a little U2 and a handful of '80s obscuranta, but very little popular music from the decade during which we all attended high school. A historical analogue would be a playlist created by college freshmen in 1969 that included Rogers and Hammerstein tunes, some Fabian and Buddy Holly numbers, a few early '60s folk songs, and nothing by the Beatles or the Who or the Rolling Stones. I have long considered my generation a conservative one, and artifacts like these do not challenge that view.


* As required by law.
** If you liked Wang Chung, you were an insufferable geek. This song was my choice.
*** Probably the best thing on the tape.

Peoples of the Inland Sea

I am pleased to announce the publication of my third book, Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 (Ohio University Press, 2018).

In writing Peoples of the Inland Sea I set myself an ambitious task: to chronicle the history of Native Americans in the Great Lakes region over a quarter of a millennium, from European contact to the Industrial Revolution. What made this manageable, and I think makes the book enjoyable for readers, is the commonality of experiences shared by the Great Lakes Indians, by the Dakotas and Delawares, Ho-Chunks and Illiniwek, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, and Menominees, Miamis, Odawas, and Ojibwas, Potawatomis, Shawnees, and Wyandots. Like another great inland sea, the Mediterranean, the Great Lakes drew the indigenous peoples who lived on its shores and plied its waters into an extended community. 

Native Americans in the region traded with one another, shared hunting ranges and fisheries, married into one another’s families, and built multi-ethnic communities like Auglaize, Kekionga, and Michilimackinac. Men and women wove commercial and family connections throughout the Lakes country, a network of relationships that also became conduits for religious and political ideas. Indigenous “nativism,” the idea that all Indians had been created as a single race by the Master of Life and owned Great Turtle Island (North America) in common, grew from the teachings of Lakes Indian prophets like Neolin and Tenskwatawa, and gained its earliest converts from the shorelands of the Inland Sea. Pan-Indian unionism, the unification of diverse Native American nations into a single political movement, also had some of its most memorable

victories here. Over more than a century, Lakes Indian nations formed regional military alliances against Iroquois raiders, arrogant British soldiers, and land-hungry American settlers. In the 1780s and ‘90s, one of these alliances, the United Indians, challenged and nearly defeated the newly-independent United States. As late as 1810 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s construction of a multi-ethnic Indian nation-state terrified American officials in Washington. The War of 1812 brought military defeat for the unionists, but the Lakes Indians’ long struggle for cultural survival, to preserve their languages, traditional subsistence economy, family structures, and communal festivals, continued. This, too, was a common endeavor, which all Native peoples undertook even in the face of dispossession and Removal.

*

The publisher's webpage has more information, including a link to a short podcast by Zoe Bossiere. I also had the pleasure of talking about Peoples with Julie Rose on her show Top of Mind, broadcast on BYU Radio on July 6. The program can be found here.

*

(Second image above is George Winter's "Scene on the Wabash " [1848], via Wikimedia Commons. The portrait of Tenskwatawa is from the National Park Service. First photo is by the author.)