Book Description
Native American dispossession provides the fundamental precondition to a fuller understanding of the American Civil War. The future design of western territories, presumed to be vacant and open for development as evidenced in the discourse of white politicians, provoked apparently irreconcilable differences among those politicians who argued over slavery and its extension. Republican Party ideology of the 1850's rested on concepts of free labor, free men, and free land, the promotion of homestead legislation, and the construction of a Pacific railroad through western lands. As the first nationally elected leader of his party, President Abraham Lincoln transformed ideology into policy during his first administration. Lincoln, mythologized after his assassination as the savior of a re-constituted republican government invigorated with "a new birth of freedom" for the formerly enslaved, escapes serious scrutiny from historians for his role in furthering indigenous people's removal from their ancestral lands. The Lincoln administration mustered the power of the federal government behind a national colonization effort predicated on acquisition of land in the West for white settlers. Civil War historiography privileges the liberating aspects of emancipation while maintaining crushing silence on the critical stages of Native American dispossession directed by Lincoln during the Civil War. An analysis of the Dakota War of 1862 demonstrates that Lincoln personified the mindset of the dominant white culture in erasing indigenous peoples from their lands, first in discourse and later in policy. Lincoln's uncompromising insistence upon making western land available to free labor in order to pursue his, and the Republican Party's, vision of the nation's future required the continued removal and dispossession of American Indians. President Lincoln's Indian policies accelerated American Indian dispossession and unleashed frontier violence of an unprecedented nature.
