THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

General Grant

Two of General Ulysses S. Grant's War Crimes that I can't forgive

After the civil war, Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War Against the Plains Indians, Then Lied About It:

The president promised peace with Indians — and covertly hatched the plot that provoked one of the bloodiest conflicts in the West. In July 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led a thousand-man expedition into the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. He was under orders to scout a suitable site for a military post, a mission personally approved by President Ulysses S. Grant, but he also brought along two prospectors, outfitted at his expense. Although largely unexplored by whites, the Black Hills were long rumored to be rich in gold, and Custer's prospectors discovered what he reported as "paying quantities" of the precious metal. A correspondent for the Chicago Inter Ocean who accompanied the expedition was less restrained in his dispatch: "From the grass roots down it was 'pay dirt.'" Taking him at his word, the nation's press whipped up a frenzy over a "new El Dorado" in the American West. The United States was going into the second year of a crippling economic depression, and the nation desperately needed a financial lift. Within a year of Custer's discovery, more than a thousand miners had streamed into the Black Hills. Soon Western newspapers and Western congressmen were demanding that Grant annex the land. There was one problem: The Black Hills belonged to the Lakota Indians, the most potent Indian power on the Great Plains. They had taken the territory from the Kiowas and the Crows, and they had signed a treaty with the United States guaranteeing their rights to the region. The Lakotas most esteemed the Paha Sapa (literally, "hills that are black") not for their mystic aura, as is commonly assumed, but for their material bounty. The hills were their meat locker, a game reserve to be tapped in times of hunger.
The outcry for annexation brought Grant to a crossroads. He had taken office in 1869 on a pledge to keep the West free of war. "Our dealings with the Indians properly lay us open to charges of cruelty and swindling," he had said, and he had staked his administration to a Peace Policy intended to assimilate Plains nations into white civilization. Now, Grant was forced to choose between the electorate and the Indians. He had no legal reason for seizing the Black Hills, so he invented one, convening a secret White House cabal to plan a war against the Lakotas. Four documents, held at the Library of Congress and the United States Military Academy Library, leave no doubt: The Grant administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and the American people about it. The episode hasn't been examined outside the specialty literature on the Plains wars. During four decades of intermittent warfare on the Plains, this was the only instance in which the government deliberately provoked a conflict of this magnitude, and it ultimately led to the Army's shocking defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876—and to litigation that remains unsettled to this day. Few observers suspected the plot at the time, and it was soon forgotten.

For most of the 20th century, historians dismissed the Grant administration as a haven for corrupt hacks, even as the integrity of the man himself remained unquestioned. More recent Grant biographers have worked hard to rehabilitate his presidency, and they have generally extolled his treatment of Indians. But they have either misinterpreted the beginnings of the Lakota war or ignored them altogether, making it appear that Grant was blameless in the greatest single Indian war waged in the West. Throughout his military career, Grant was known as an aggressive commander, but not a warmonger. In his Personal Memoirs, he damned the Mexican War, in which he had fought, as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation," and he excoriated the Polk administration's machinations leading to hostilities: "We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it." And yet in dealing with the Lakotas, he acted just as treacherously. The treaty between the Lakotas and the United States had been signed at Fort Laramie in 1868, the year before Grant took office. "From this day forward," the document began, "all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease." Under the Fort Laramie Treaty, the United States designated all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills, as the Great Sioux Reservation, for the Lakotas' "absolute and undisturbed use and occupation." The treaty also reserved much of present-day northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana as Unceded Indian Territory, off-limits to whites without the Lakotas' consent. To entice Lakotas onto the reservation and into farming, the United States promised to give them a pound of meat and a pound of flour a day for four years. Whether those who wished to live off the hunt rather than on the dole could actually reside in the Unceded Territory, the treaty did not say. All Lakota land, however, was to be inviolate. Most Lakotas settled on the reservation, but a few thousand traditionalists rejected the treaty and made their home in the Unceded Territory. Their guiding spirits were the revered war chief and holy man Sitting Bull and the celebrated war leader Crazy Horse. These "non-treaty" Lakotas had no quarrel with the wasichus (whites) so long as they stayed out of the Lakota country. This the wasichus largely did, until 1874. Custer's official mission that summer, finding a site for a new Army post, was permitted under the treaty. Searching for gold was not. As the pressure rose on Grant to annex the Black Hills, his first resort was rough diplomacy. In May 1875, a delegation of Lakota chiefs came to the White House to protest shortages of government rations and the predations of a corrupt Indian agent. Grant seized the opportunity. First, he said, the government's treaty obligation to issue rations had run out and could be revoked; rations continued only because of Washington's kind feelings toward the Lakotas. Second, he, the Great Father, was powerless to prevent miners from overrunning the Black Hills (which was true enough, given limited Army resources). The Lakotas must either cede the Paha Sapa or lose their rations. When the chiefs left the White House they were "all at sea," their interpreter recalled. For three weeks, they had alternated between discordant encounters with hectoring bureaucrats and bleak hotel-room caucuses among themselves. At last, they broke off the talks and, the New York Herald reported, returned to the reservation "disgusted and not conciliated." Meanwhile, miners poured into the Black Hills. The task of running them out fell to Brig. Gen. George Crook, the new commander of the Military Department of the Platte, whose sympathies clearly rested with the miners. Crook evicted many of them that July, in accordance with standing policy, but before they pulled up stakes he suggested they record their claims in order to secure them for when the country opened up. Throughout these proceedings, Crook thought the Lakotas had been remarkably forbearing. "How do the bands that sometimes roam off from the agencies on the Plains behave now?" a reporter asked him in early August. "Well," Crook said, "they are quiet."