Grant had done some homework. “Well then, I meant it in my first inaugural when I said I would favor any course that would tend to their civilization and ultimate citizenship. This time I made the issue more prominent. Gave it several lines. A significant portion of the speech. An invitation, really. Because now something has to be done. What you don’t know, though you might have heard, is that there already has been action on the ‘Indian Problem.’
“Before you and I get down to work, Meacham, allow me to make this point. The immediacy of the matter stems from what has just happened: a war concluded; a restless populace out of gainful employment in this financial down-turn. We need new avenues, new ways of seeing and thinking.
“When are you leaving?” Grant had asked.
“Tomorrow,” Meacham had said.
Grant had muttered something Meacham couldn’t catch but then had added:
“You’ll be among the first, then. Tomorrow you’ll get on a train and, in spite of some delays as the job is finishing up, in a matter of mere days you’ll be all the way back in striking distance of Oregon. Here’s my point: By the time you get off that train in Reno or Sacramento, the wide-open country will just have shrunk. Finally. This month. When they drive that golden spike out in Utah, the continent will have been stitched together, hooked up by those bands of steel.
“I don’t have to tell you, the restlessness you’re looking at now is indeed small potatoes compared to what is coming. Those you ride with on that train won’t be military. They will be enterprising ‘go-ahead’ people. Shopkeepers and grocers and purveyors of goods: medicines, towels, sewing-machines. Professors. Lawyers. Tourists. East-coast hunters looking to bag a shaggy-maned buffalo in order to go home and brag about it. Shooting from the advantage of the train!
“There will be a mind-set riding that train with you. It will have been noticing the sections of the Congressional Land Grant that stretch ten miles wide along the rail line. Land that is just there for the taking. For sale, to suitable purchasers, for cash on the barrelhead or at 7% interest, a million railroad acres. Opened up by trains. Good-by to the Wild West.
“So. Let’s turn to the ‘brass-tacks’ part of this,” Grant had said. “Let me tell you a little story, and perhaps you can help me fill in some of the details. You may know much of it.” What Grant had described was one part brilliance, one part derring-do, or all of it was foolishness.
In January, three men, Quakers from Baltimore, had requested to meet with him. They had ‘thee’d and thou’d’ him for hours. Urged him to address ‘The Indian Question’ forthrightly during his second term. Take a stand for the aborigines. Allow them to be educated. Fed and clothed. Yes. But above all, Christianized. So their understanding could be opened. Their understanding of justice and of law be awakened. Replace their reliance on medicine men and their hocus-pocus. Let the medicine men be replaced by Christian men of good character, who would be teachers and models. Many Quakers would volunteer, commit to being the moral shepherds. They would undertake to bring truth and justice and charity -- and peace -- to the Indians. With simple brotherly love. That way, get the Indians ready for citizenship when the time was right…. In a few years, when the treaties had been allowed to lapse.
There was more the Quakers had laid before him, but none of it, they warned, would ever come to pass, given the present and continuing scandalizing of the Indian. The polygamy, the trafficking in women. The soldiers’ and agents’ wanton destruction of families. The drunkenness….
As they went on, eventually Grant had caught the Quakers’ fever, had relented in the face of their insistence that there had to be a cleaning-up, a re-dedication, a lifting-up, in love. He had succumbed: “Yes,” as president he at last had said, “You are right! Let us have peace!” They had gone away, rejoicing.
He had liked their notion. He had glimpsed in it the germ of an even bigger idea. About a re-birth -- and a consolidation. He had to think about it.
He had sent the Quaker delegation off with his blessing to begin compiling a list of brethren who could find in their hearts a calling, a vocation, to serve the Indians in the name of God and the United States.
“But the Quakers weren’t the only ones with ideas,” Grant had told him. Others were closing in on the problem, too. Congress was just commissioning a group of wealthy Christian men -- examples of ‘enlightened Christian manhood,’ he had called it -- to visit the Sioux, where it was the same story: drunkenness, debauchery, families torn apart. Suffering. Those commissioners would be reporting their findings by the end of the summer. And they were of non-Quaker denominations. Outspokenly non-Catholic, but otherwise mainstream -- Episcopalian, Lutheran, what have you.
The idea was growing in him, Grant had said. It was beginning to add up to something. Why not take the Quaker notion and encourage it to spread. Cast a wider net, across all the faiths, of Christian workers across the country.
He saw complications, but now he was entertaining the notion of each of the denominations agreeing to work in discrete areas -- in states, in territories, primarily -- where tradition had placed them, in places where they had already labored to Christianize the Indians. To even think of setting aside a new state in the edge of the country, across the Mississippi, where the Indians might congregate. But that would be off in the future. For now, the land would be apportioned to the denominations according to the missionary work that each of them had already attempted in efforts to civilize the Indians.
So that Pennsylvania and Kansas, for example, would go to the Quakers, for openers. The Lutherans might accept responsibility for, say, Minnesota. And so it would proceed.
Yes, Meacham had said, fighting off a fleeting image of cats being stuffed into a gunny-sack.
“I’m not sure of the details yet,” Grant had said. “But my thinking on the Indian Problem has been opened. I can see I have surprised you. You can object, Meacham, but set your cavils aside in order to see where this thought might lead. Follow me in this: One could envision persuading the religious groups to such a plan.
“Everything would be accounted for, with responsibilities assigned. But this is Washington. The cry that would go up from the military would be deafening. ‘Our territory!’ they will say.
“From the beginning, the army has had jurisdiction over the Indians, and has never come up with a new idea on the subject that goes beyond moving them here and there. Uprooting them to make way for what is coming -- or has already arrived. The army mostly adheres to the notion that the Indians at best must be kept out of the way. Make reservations. Tuck them aside where they are inconspicuous. Run the Indians down. Herd them onto the reservations. If the Indians get ideas -- to take the point of view of two of my most important senior officers, Sherman and Sheridan -- and become more troublesome, the army would be ready to use the ultimate solution. Simply exterminate them.
“We can do better than that. I think to myself: Why not let us experiment. Let the military keep its share of responsibility. Let it keep right on running those reservations not run by the religious groups. Let it downsize and modernize, put some of its energies to better oversight of the safety on roads and trails, maintenance of the forts, national boundaries, and looking for renegades.”
Grant acknowledged that part of the plan needed work. “Let it be sufficient for now to acknowledge that there is more to be done on that one. Make a renewed effort to identify who should be retained, who let go from the corps. Based on the individual ethics of the corps member. But to be fair, where the military are concerned, one has to acknowledge that Christianization of Indians was not what they signed up for.
“So
