is an examination of how the army’s patterns of interaction with Indians at home played directly into the actions and habits of mind its officers directed toward the resistant subjects of the new overseas empire.
The American state project of consolidating territorial control over the continent entailed more than purely military conquest. And the same is true of the next phase of its expansion overseas at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus it was that General Miles, once established on Puerto Rican soil, addressed the island’s residents in a register familiar to him from his days of conciliating and coercing Indians in the West. Following an uneventful landing at Guánica, Miles’s forces moved on to take control of Ponce, the principal town on Puerto Rico’s south coast.10 On the morning of July 28, General Miles raised the American flag over his headquarters in the customs house and issued a proclamation “to the inhabitants of Puerto Rico” in Spanish and English,
In the prosecution of the war against the kingdom of Spain by the people of the United States, in the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, its military forces have come to occupy the island of Puerto Rico…. We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for centuries has been oppressed, but, on the contrary, to bring you protection, not only to yourselves, but to your property; to promote your prosperity, and bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our government. It is not our purpose to interfere with any existing laws and customs that are wholesome and beneficial to your people so long as they conform to the rules of military administration of order and justice. This is not a war of devastation, but one to give all within the control of its military and naval forces the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization.11
Three weeks later in the far-off Philippines, another veteran Indian fighter named General Wesley Merritt issued a similar proclamation. Although the Spanish had capitulated to the United States, ten thousand American troops occupied Manila in a tense standoff with the forces of the recently declared Republic of the Philippines on its outskirts. Merritt’s proclamation likewise alternated assurances of “beneficent purpose” with assertions of the absolute power of the United States to act as a “government of military occupation.” By these ritual acts of proclamation and flag raising, U.S. commanders signaled America’s claim over the Spanish colonies. As an occupying power, the United States promised protection and the “blessings of enlightened civilization” in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty and as a “reward” for “honest submission” to American authority.12
Figure 1. Raising the flag over Ponce Customs House. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
At first it might seem that Generals Miles and Merritt, as the advance guard for American overseas occupations of uncertain duration, were called on to improvise new words for the subject peoples their nation saw itself as liberating from the rule of a decadent empire. And yet there is something familiar about the messages each devised for the occasion, and in the attitude these frontier campaigners assumed in addressing their island audiences. Although delivered abroad, the generals’ proclamations fell into well-established patterns developed over two centuries of talking to Indians across the expanding empire back home. In rhetoric and tone, there is little to distinguish the overtures of the newly arrived invaders of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines from hundreds of pronouncements made to the native nations of North America by military ambassadors from the Great Father dating back to colonial times. They are also consistent with the messages delivered by American commanders who proclaimed the end of Mexican sovereignty over the lands and people the United States conquered in its war with Mexico.13 Implicit in the language directed at Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Filipinos was the presumption that American sovereignty derived not only from its military defeat of Spain, but equally from the manifest superiority of the enlightened civilization it proffered. Such professions of beneficent intent rested on familiar assumptions of racial and cultural superiority.
Eight years before he raised the Stars and Stripes over the customs house at Ponce, Nelson Miles had sounded similar themes when he addressed Oglala Lakota chiefs Red Cloud and Little Wound on the subject of the Ghost Dance movement at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota. Miles had spoken then as the commander of the Division of the Missouri, with military jurisdiction over Indian Country. As in Puerto Rico, he claimed the mantle of upholding “order and justice.” On that late October day in 1890, Miles had appealed to the Lakota leaders to suppress the “excitement” of the Ghost Dance “craze.” As he would in his proclamation in Puerto Rico, Miles had stressed the sovereign power of American government and touted the benefits of submission to its authority. He began in a conciliatory vein, emphasizing the progress Indians had achieved toward becoming civilized: “It is not long since the Indians commenced to learn how to live and make themselves comfortable, and are getting horses and wagons and cattle, and they have made a very good beginning…. When we go back, we shall report to the Great Father that the Indians are well disposed, and are doing well.”14 Such gains in civilization were precarious, however; they would be jeopardized by Indians “becoming foolish and crazy and carried away by excitement,” Miles admonished. The general pointedly reminded the chiefs that “All men in this country—, red, white and black men, live under one government, and that government is sufficiently powerful to punish all evil doers who commit acts of lawlessness under pretence of religion or any other influence or excuse.”15 Sovereignty and the authority to punish went hand in hand, but in Indian Country—and in American insular territories under military government—punitive violence was also deployed as a preemptive strategy for asserting sovereignty in places where the legitimacy of U.S. rule was rejected by the native inhabitants. As a colonizing power, the United States used punitive measures not just militarily, but also rhetorically. Violence underwrote sovereignty in situations where not only military control was in question, but also, more fundamentally, the moral or cultural claims on which sovereignty is premised were at issue.
The proclamation Miles disseminated among the Puerto Ricans might have served just as well to make the other point he had tried to impart to the Lakota chiefs in 1890: it was not his intention, nor that of his government, to interfere with “existing laws and customs” as long as they were “wholesome and beneficial,” which, of course, the Ghost Dance was not, in the government’s view. American legal doctrine recognized Indian nations as “distinct, independent political communities,” yet the United States acted in myriad ways that contradicted those principles of autonomy and self-rule.16 This was one of the anomalies that defined Indian Country as a colonial space within the American nation-state, one that would be replicated in the insular territories abroad where sovereignty was equally constrained and the limitations the United States placed on the peoples it incorporated into its empire were justified by familiar arguments about their unfitness for self-government.17
Two weeks after his conference with Red Cloud and Little Wound, General Miles summoned nearly a third of the army to the Dakota Badlands. Five thousand troops converged on the Pine Ridge and Standing Rock Reservations in a massive show of force intended to intimidate those Indians who just months before had been coerced into forfeiting nine million acres as their Great Sioux Reservation was broken up and land that had been promised them in perpetuity was made available for white settlement.
Said to be the largest army concentrated in one place since the Civil War, soldiers arrived by train from as far away as California, Colorado, and Texas. On December 29, an inept attempt to disarm Big Foot’s band of Miniconjous led to the tragedy of the Wounded Knee massacre: more than two hundred people were killed, including women and babes in arms; many others were wounded.18
Eight years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, Bear Coat Miles became the first of four veterans of the Indian Wars who served in succession as military governor of Puerto Rico. In the Philippines, all four of the commanding generals who led the campaign to put down Filipino resistance to U.S. rule from 1898 to 1902 were also veteran frontier Indian fighters. Meanwhile, in Cuba,
