“Acts of Lawless Violence”: The Office of Indian Affairs, and the Coming of the Civil War in Kansas

On November 26, 1855, Indian Agent John Montgomery hand delivered a notice to the wife of George W. Gray, warning the squatters that they were now “required to abandon your ‘claim’ or ‘location’ on the Half Breed and Kansas Indian Reserve on the Grasshopper Creek.”  If they ignored this official dictate from the Interior Department’s Office of Indian Affairs, the notice continued, “the aid of the Military authority will be invoked, and if it becomes necessary, you will be ejected by force.”[1]

Several months later, on June 23, 1856, Montgomery returned to the squatter settlement with the military force he promised: an army lieutenant and ten men from the 1^st Cavalry Regiment.  A memorial to President Franklin Pierce signed by twenty-seven of the squatter-settlers, George W. Gray included, captured the mayhem that followed: “[the men] visited our settlement and burned twenty houses (chiefly dwelling houses) belonging to [us]…. The acts of lawless violence were committed by Agent Montgomery in total disregard of the distress of our wives and children and of our rights of property…. Suffice it to say we were driven from our homes in a most violent manner and our houses were burned before our eyes.”[2]

John Montgomery’s Notice to George W. Gray, November 26, 1855.  Montgomery and members of the 1^st Cavalry Regiment would set fire to Gray’s dwelling seven months later.  National Archives.

For students of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, John Montgomery’s violent expulsion of White settlers in Kansas Territory during the mid-1850s is simultaneously odd and familiar.   The violence – specifically, the burning of buildings and destruction of property – fit neatly into the patterns of turbulence that swept across Kansas Territory in 1856.  After all, it was only a month prior when the Free-Soil stronghold of Lawrence, located just miles away across the Kansas River, was ransacked by proslavery advocates under the direction of Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones.[3]  But as everyone knew at the time, the sacking of Lawrence was the outcome of seething North-South, Free-Soil-proslavery sectionalism, the culmination of Senator Stephen Douglas’s ill-conceived popular sovereignty solution to the question of slavery’s expansion in the west.[4]

Nowhere in the correspondence of Montgomery and his government counterparts, nor in the squatters’ memorial to the president, do we find mention of slavery as a wedge issue.  As Gray and his fellow memorialists understood the matter, Montgomery believed he had “the right to burn the houses of the settlers [because they were built] upon what he deems ‘Indian Country.”  In other words, the settlers faced the wrath of the government because they were violating the treaty rights of Indigenous people.  The squatters’ defense of their settlement and condemnation of Montgomery’s actions, as well as the larger context of the federal government’s orchestration of Kansas conquest, show that the forces of settler colonialism were hard at work before and during the notorious fiasco of “Bleeding Kansas.”[5]  Thankfully, recent efforts by the National Archives to digitize and make publicly available the copious records of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) mean scholars can more easily dig deeper into the history of settler colonialism in the years preceding (and during) the Civil War.[6]  As the Montgomery-squatter episode suggests, the question should not be if settler colonialism factored into the history of the Civil War but how and to what extent.

At the very least, the OIA documents illuminate how the federal government’s role in facilitating the expulsion, relocation, and incarceration of Native communities often circumscribed White citizens’ individual and collective relationships with the national government.  The Montgomery-squatter ordeal was by no means the start of the federal government’s entanglement with the settler colonial imperative of inevitable, sovereign self-reproduction.[7]

From the moment “Kansas-Nebraska” emerged in the national lexicon, Indigenous people – both longtime Kansas residents and recent arrivals – faced the immediate threat of entitled settler aggression. “By 1954,” Kristen Epps has argued, “the commitment to a permanent Indian reserve [in Kansas] could no longer resist the push of whites’ westward expansion and continued on the slavery question.”[8]  Indian agents frequently received word of thefts of Native property, destruction of their homes, their murders, and other settler depredations.  And when settlers were less interested in directly attacking Indigenous men, women, and children, they simply stole from their lands, chopping down trees or collecting other natural resources.[9]  The theft of timber was actually one of Montgomery’s stated reasons for pushing the squatters out by military force.[10]  The assumption on the part of White settlers, of course, was that the government – including both the OIA and the military – would turn a blind eye to their thievery, if not actively support it.  But when agents like Montgomery and some of his superiors resisted or sought to dictate the settler advance, they alienated a large portion of the White citizenry – and sometimes even risked their own safety.[11]

“Kansas & Nebraska” (New York: Morse & Gaston, 1856).  Indigenous dispossession had been well underway in Kansas when proslavery settlers and Free-Soilers went to war in 1856.  Library of Congress.

Perhaps no controversy brought into relief the tensions between Indigenous rights, federal government obligations and duties, and the settler colonial prerogative in Kansas as did the Leavenworth Town affair.  The Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny was the man who turned settler dealings into a major government scandal when he charged three military officers at Fort Leavenworth with orchestrating illegal land speculation and squatter settlement near the military installation.  At the time, in late 1854, the area was being transitioned, per treaty agreement, from Delaware possession to U.S. territory, but Manypenny believed fort officers, in anticipation of the government’s extension of preemption laws to the territory, were using their military influence to secure for themselves and hundreds of their civilian co-conspirators prime real estate at dirt-cheap prices.[12]

Manypenny’s accusations traveled through multiple Departments, between Congressional representatives, and eventually to the president, whose ear was ultimately won by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis.  Davis’s opinion effectively ended the discussion: “An examination [of the case] has satisfied me that the Delaware Indians have no right, whatever, to any portion of the military reservation at Fort Leavenworth…. [and that Manypenny’s charges] may be met by the reply that his… allegations of official misconduct on the part of the officers there, have not… been sustained by any proof, while they have been indignantly denied and repelled by the party accused.”  Manypenny was left with his tail between his legs – and his own set of dishonorable accusations.[13]  As one of the accused fort officers retorted, “[because] the charges of this guardian of the ‘poor Indian’ seem to be so utterly baseless, it is natural to ask what could have led him into a position where three responsible men point the finger at him as a willful calumniator!… [I am] hoping the gentleman will now turn from the Army to his own Department, where he can have ample employment in regulating abuses.”[14]

Title Page of George W. Manypenny’s Our Indian Wards (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1880).  Manypenny defended his actions against the Fort Leavenworth officers in his 1880 reflection on U.S. Indian policy.

The question of slavery’s influence on the motivations and machinations of the various parties involved – Native actors, White settlers, and government agents – is a significant but less transparent matter.  In some instances, it seems apparent that ostensibly legal concerns about “Indian rights” and treaty obligations served as rhetorical covers for imposing Free-Soil or proslavery outcomes in Kansas Territory.  Historian Tony Mullis has offered some speculation along these lines regarding Jefferson Davis’s animosity toward specific officials, as well as Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder’s attempts to move the seat of government from the Shawnee Mission to the new town of Pawnee in 1855.[15]

Yet the documentary evidence in the OIA archives leaves little doubt that most government agents, Davis especially, operated according to the guiding principles of settler colonialism.  According to the Secretary of War, even if the squatters and officers had operated extralegally, he supported the broader thrust of their cause: “the object of this government was ‘the speedy settlement of the country’…. The exploration of the country by intended settlers, the selection of lands, the marking out of their locations, and the commencement of improvements, all conduce to this object, and unless they threaten in some way – not yet stated – the interest of the Delawares, I see no reason for arresting their progress.”[16] How Davis’s settler colonial formulations intersected with his values of Black subjugation – the question of whether or not he drew a straight line between his support of Indigenous displacement and the expansion of anti-Black slavery – deserves more analysis.[17] Further exploration of the OIA records, in addition to many other collections that speak to the experiences of Indigenous people, might help us to better discern these overlapping connections.

 

 

[1] John Montgomery’s official notice to G.W. Gray, November 26, 1855, M234, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-81: Kansas Agency, 1851-1876 (hereafter cited OIA LR), Roll 365, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/163987256. Notably, Montgomery had warned the squatters about two months earlier, as they were initially staking claims, that they were settling on Native lands.  John Montgomery to Alfred Cumming, October 6, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/163985741.

[2] Memorial of Alexander Bayne and others of Jefferson County, Kansas Territory, to Franklin Pierce, 1856 [received July 17], OIA LR, Roll 365.

[3] Gunja SenGupta, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1860 (Athens: University of George Press, 1996), 101-11.

[4] Nichole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 14-27.

[5] Scholars of the broader Kansas region have offered preliminary analysis of some of these settler colonial dynamics.  See, especially, Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Athens: The University of George Press, 2016), 4, 26-38, 86-87; Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 2-4, 10, 15-32; Tony R. Mullis, Peacekeeping on the Plains: Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 3-4, 35-59; Nichole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 1-49; Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854-1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 2-4, 11-71.  My introductory remarks on settler colonialism and the Civil War published in the Muster can be found at https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/03/a-war-for-settler-colonialism/.

[6] Digital access to the microfilmed Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881 collection is available through the National Archives website at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/159715232.  The National Archives tweeted the collection’s digital availability on January 28, 2020: https://twitter.com/atlantaarchives/status/1222162952482062337

[7] Lorenzo Veracini theorizes this “sovereign entitlement” in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 53-74.

[8] For pertinent histories of these Native nations, see Joseph B. Herring, The Enduring Indians of Kansas: A Century and a Half of Acculturation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990); Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery, 13-44. 87 (“commitment”).

[9] See, for instance, David Z. Smith to George Manypenny, December 9, 1854, OIA LR, Roll 364; Petition of Adile Clement, Joseph James, Victoire Gonville, Julie Gonville, Louis Pappan, and Pelagie Gonville to Congress, [1855], OIA LR, Roll 364; John Montgomery to Alfred Cuming, November 1, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364.

[10] John Montgomery to Alfred Cumming, March 28, 1856, OIA LR, Roll 365.

[11] Still awaiting military support by the end of March 1856, Montgomery urged his superior to act quickly, explaining, “my life has been threatened and I am in danger.”  John Montgomery to Alfred Cumming, March 28, 1856, OIA LR, Roll 365.  Robert Neighbors, the superintendent of the Texas agency, did not survive his own battle with Texas settlers a few years later.  See Glen Sample Ely, The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858-1861 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 88-102.

[12] Manypenny received much of his information about the Leavenworth affair from his subagent, Benjamin F. Robinson.  See George Manypenny to Robert McClelland, September 26, 1854, OIA LR, Roll 364; Benjamin F. Robinson to George Manypenny, November 14 and 22, December 12, 1854, March 2, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364.

[13] Robert McClelland to George Manypenny, January 8, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364; House Motion of Rep. Alfred P. Edgerton, January 23, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364; Jefferson Davis to Robert McClelland, January 27, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364.

[14] E.A. Ogden to E.M. Hudson, November 3, 1854, OIA LR, Roll 364.

[15] Mullis, Peacekeeping on the Plains, 142-48.

[16] Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce, January 18, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364.

[17] John Detchemendy believed Reeder’s scheming was a function of his supposed Black sympathies.  In Because he candidly shared this interpretation with Manypenny, it suggests that he thought Manypenny was a like-minded (i.e., pro-slavery) audience. John Detchemendy to George Manypenny, April 19, 1855, OIA LR, Roll 364.