Do we know how Abraham Lincoln felt about American Indians compared to African Americans at the time of the Civil War? Did he feel that American Indians had rights under the US Constitution?
I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have read a little about Lincoln and Native Americans. I think it’s fair to say that he was paternalistic and condescending toward them, but did not simply dismiss them as “ignorant savages” undeserving of fair treatment.
I do not know whether he ever expressly said the Declaration of Independence applied to Native Americans. That was a major point in his evolving views on African-Americans – even when he insisted they were not the equal of whites, he held that they nevertheless deserved the same shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It was under Lincoln’s administration that 38 Dakota were killed in the largest mass execution in American history. The executions were in retaliation for an Indian uprising in Minnesota. Some 300 Dakota had been sentenced to die, but Lincoln commuted the sentences of most of them. His correspondence showed he was interested in separating the innocent from the truly guilty and did not take a “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” view.
Lincoln met with at least one delegation representing the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache and more. His comments to them were, as I mentioned earlier, incredibly condescending. This line struck me as especially clueless: “Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”
You can read more about that speech here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln6/1:329?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
I’d be interested to hear from others with more detailed info.
Thanks Clark for the great reference.
Lincoln was a pretty prominent figure on many totem poles for the coastal tribes.
Indians were in the 1860s not considered Americans; they were essentially the foreign inhabitants of a land the United States intended to colonize. The various Indian nations were considered nations unto themselves to varying degrees given their relative size, importance, and ability to resist their own destruction, which was a throwback to the way the British had dealt with them. The idea of Indians being citizens would have been considered very strange indeed in 1861, and indeed it didn’t happen until 1924. Indians could become citizens in the early years of the USA, but in the same manner as, say, a Russian or a Scot; they had to leave their nation, reside in the United States as it existed, and become naturalized.
In determining how people “felt” about other races in those days it is rather important to note that Americans in the days of Abraham Lincoln had a completely different concept of what “equality” meant.
Today, “equality” is a broad term; we consider all human beings to be of equal worth and value in all aspects of life, and that they are intrinsically the same except in superficial, physical ways. In the 1860s the idea of people being intrinsically equal did not exactly exist, and in a way could not exist. At the time the fact that “race” is more a social construct than a biological one was of course impossible to know, because they were just then unravelling the concepts of genetics and natural selection and even educated people wouldn’t have known what little was known. DNA was generations away from being discovered. The idea that a black person, white person and aboriginal person had to be the same aside from the color of their skin and characteristics of their hair was an idea without foundation in science as it was understood at the time.
To an American in 1861, equality meant LEGAL equality. The history and foundation of the United States was based on rebellion against a European social order that organized people in accordance with the economic and social circumstances of their birth; if your father was the Duke of Floppingham-Bulbhead, you were legally different from the guy whose father was a pig farmer. The guiding principle of American “equality” was that such a system was no good and was, in fact, corrosive. What brought America to wart was the conflict between that belief and the institution of slavery. MAny abolitionists - maybe most - would not have said black people were intrinsically equal to whites the way someone in 2016 would assume they are. But that wasn’t the argument, and indeed many of those same people wouldn’t have necessarily thought WHITE people were all intrinsically the same. What they felt was that black people should be legally equal, irrespective of their intrinsic equality.
Well, that’s half of it, anyway; there was also a very strong religious element to abolitionism, whereby it was felt enslaving God’s children was a horrible sin. But that’s sort of a divine legal equality, if you will.
That makes sense RickJay. Even today tribes are considered separate ‘nations’ and while American Indians can vote and are considered US citizens, as you said that didn’t happen until the 1920’s. In the 1860s I guess they were considered as separate from Americans as any other foreign nation would be and so wouldn’t be protected by the Constitution of the United States.
Lincoln oversaw thelargest mass execution in U.S. history.
Or you could say that he issued the largest mass pardon of Native Americans in U.S. history.
The trial court, that heard the actual evidence (such as it was), condemned many more to death; Lincoln pardoned 7 out of every 8 of them.
Today’s Republicans would call him “soft on crime”.