OUR NEW INDIAN POLICY AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.
“While it cannot be denied that the government of the United States, in the general terms and temper of its legislation, has evinced a desire to deal generously with the Indians, it must be admitted that the actual treatment they have received has been unjust and iniquitous beyond the power of words to express. Taught by the government that they had rights entitled to respect, when these rights have been assailed by the rapacity of the white man the arm which should have been raised to protect them has been ever ready to sustain the aggressor. The history of the government connections with the Indians is a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises.”
We take the above sentences from the first report of the Board of Indian Commissioners appointed by President Grant under the act of Congress of April 10, 1869. The commissioners, nine in number, were gentlemen selected for their presumed piety, philanthropy, and practical business qualities. None of them was a Catholic; in taking their testimony not only with respect to the general treatment of the Indians, but in regard to the religious interests of some of the tribes, we shall not be suspected of summoning witnesses who are prejudiced in favor of the Catholic Church. One of the commissioners, indeed, Mr. Felix R. Brunot, of Pittsburgh, the chairman of the board, appears to have been inspired at times with a lively fear and hatred of the church; his colleagues—Messrs. Robert Campbell, of St. Louis; Nathan Bishop, of New York; William E. Dodge, of New York; John V. Farwell, of Chicago; George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia; Edward S. Tobey, of Boston; John D. Lang, of Maine; and Vincent Colyer, of New York—are gentlemen quite free from any predilection in favor of Catholicity. The passage we have taken from their first report relates only to the worldly affairs of the Indians. But a perusal of the various annual reports of this board, of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, and of the Indian agents, from 1869 until 1876, has convinced us that the injuries inflicted upon the Indians have been by no means confined to those caused by the avarice and rapacity of the whites. Sectarian fanaticism, Protestant bigotry, and anti-Christian hatred have been called into play, and the arm of the government has been made the instrument for the restriction, and even the abolition, of religious freedom among many of the Indian tribes.
We are confident that such treatment is not in consonance with the wishes of the American people. Have we not been taught, from our youth up, that the two chief glories of our country were the equality of all its citizens before the law and their absolute freedom in all religious matters? True, the Indians are not citizens, but we have undertaken the task of acting as their guardians, with the hope of ultimately fitting them, or as many of them as may be tough enough to endure the process, for the duties of citizenship. To begin this task by teaching our pupils that religion is not a matter of conscience—that the government has a right to force upon a people a form of Christianity against which their consciences revolt—and to punish them for attempting to adhere to the church whose priests first taught them to know and to fear God, is not merely a moral wrong; it is a crime.
The whole number of Indians in the United States and Territories, according to the very careful and systematic census contained in the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1875, was 279,333, exclusive of those in Alaska. It is not a very large number; the population of the city of New York exceeds it nearly fourfold. The Indian Bureau classifies these people under four heads:
I. 98,108 Indians who “are wild and scarcely tractable to any extent beyond that of coming near enough to the government agent to receive rations and blankets.”
II. 52,113 Indians “who are thoroughly convinced of the necessity of labor, and are actually undertaking it, and with more or less readiness accept the direction and assistance of government agents to this end.”
III. 115,385 Indians “who have come into possession of allotted lands and other property in stock and implements belonging to a landed estate.”
IV. 13,727 Indians who are described as “roamers and vagrants,” and of whom the commissioner, the Hon. Edward P. Smith, speaks in the following Christian and statesman-like language:
“They are generally as harmless as vagrants and vagabonds can be in a civilized country. They are found in all stages of degradation produced by licentiousness, intemperance, idleness, and poverty. Without land, unwilling to leave their haunts for a homestead upon a reservation, and scarcely in any way related to, or recognized by, the government, they drag out a miserable life. Themselves corrupted and the source of corruption, they seem to serve by their continued existence but a single useful purpose—that of affording a living illustration of the tendency and effect of barbarism allowed to expand itself uncured,”
—or, perhaps, of “affording a living illustration” of the wisdom and mercy of a policy which, neglecting these poor wretches “without land,” comes down upon other tribes, living peaceably and thrivingly upon reservations “solemnly secured to them for ever,” takes from them their homes and farms, and drives them forth to a new and desolate land; or, if they resist, exasperates them into a war that ends by adding them to the number of “roamers and vagabonds.” The sanguinary conflict which, as we write, is still being waged between a portion of the Nez-Percés Indians and the troops under command of that eminent “Christian soldier,” General Howard, is a flagrant instance of the manner in which Indians of the first and second classes enumerated by the commissioner are driven into the category of “roamers and vagabonds.” We cannot pause to trace the history of this our last and most needless Indian war; we pass it by with the remark that one of the indirect causes of it, according to the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1874, appears to have been the action of the “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” a Presbyterian organization, in selling to a speculator certain lands within the reservation which did not belong to the board, but to the Indians themselves.
The report of the commissioner for 1876—the Hon. J. Q. Smith—contains a number of statistical tables, an analysis of which will aid us in forming a correct conception of the present condition of the Indians embraced in the commissioner’s third class, as well as a portion of those in his second class. According to these tables—which contain the latest official returns from all the agencies—the whole number of Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska, and of the “roamers and vagrants,” is put down at 266,151, of whom 40,639 are of mixed blood. The latter are for the most part the children of Indian mothers and of French, Spanish, and American fathers. No less than 153,000 of the whole number “come directly under the civilizing influences of the government agencies,” and of these 104,818 “wear citizen’s dress.” The abandonment of the picturesque blanket for the civilizing coat, the embroidered buckskin leggings for the plain pantaloons, and the gay plume of gorgeous feathers for the hideous hat, is certainly a mark of progress. But when the wigwam is torn down, and the log, frame, or stone house is erected in its stead, a still more decided step towards civilization has been taken; and it may be with surprise that some of our readers will learn that our “savages” have built for themselves, or have had built for them, 55,717 houses, of which 1,702 were erected during last year.
The progress of education is a still further test of the condition of these people. There are 367 school buildings upon the reservations; and in these are conducted 63 boarding-schools and 281 day-schools, 23 of the school buildings, apparently, being unoccupied. The number of teachers is 437, and of pupils 11,328, of which number 6,028 are males. The amount of money expended for education during the year was $362,496, an average of $32 per pupil. The number of Indians who can read is 25,622, of whom 980 acquired that useful accomplishment during the year. The number of births (exclusive of those in the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory) was 2,401, and of deaths 2,215. The religious statistics in this table are evidently incorrect in at least one particular. The number of church buildings on the Indian reservations is 177; the number of missionaries “not included under teachers” is 122; and “the amount contributed by religious societies during the year for education and other purposes” was $62,076.
These figures we do not call in question, but the “number of Indians who are church members” is put down at only 27,215. It is to be desired that the compiler of the statistics had furnished us with a definition of what he understands by the words “church members.” He sets down for the Pueblo agency, in New Mexico, for example: “Number of Indians, 8,400; number of church buildings, 19; number of church members, none!” The truth is that all, or nearly all, of these Pueblo Indians are Roman Catholics, as their fathers were before them for more than three centuries; and that the 19 “church buildings” on their reservation are Catholic churches, in which the Indians are baptized, shriven, married, and receive the Holy Communion; but in the opinion of the honorable commissioner none of the Pueblos are “church members.” So with the Papago Indians in Arizona, who are 5,900 in number, who have a Catholic school, four Catholic teachers, and a Catholic church, but none of whom, in the eyes of the commissioner, are “church members.” In the seven reservations of which the religious control has been assigned to the Catholic Church there is a population of 24,094 souls and 32 churches, but the commissioner’s tables admit only 7,010 “church members” among this population. The truth is, as we shall show, the number of Catholic Indians alone is more than thrice as large as the whole number of “church members” accounted for by the commissioner’s tables. When a human being has received the Catholic rite of baptism he becomes a member of the Catholic Church; and from that moment it is the duty and the privilege of the church to watch over and protect the soul thus regenerated. It is because the church has wished to discharge this duty to her Indian children that certain of the sects have cried out against her, and even the commissioner (Hon. E. P. Smith), in his report for 1875, has not been ashamed to reproach her.
“At the seven agencies assigned to the care of the Catholics,” he remarks, “no restriction has been placed upon their system and methods of education, and no other religious body, so far as I am aware, has in any way attempted to interfere. I regret to say that this is not true, so far as the Catholics are concerned, of some of the agencies assigned to other religious bodies, and in some instances the interference has been a material hindrance to the efforts of this office to bring Indians under control and to enforce rules looking toward civilization.”
We regret to say that while, on the one hand, the Catholic Church has sought only to continue her ministrations to those of her children who were dwelling upon reservations “assigned to other religious bodies”—a duty which she could not neglect nor permit to remain unfulfilled—on the other hand, the most cruel, persistent, and petty persecution has been waged against Catholic Indians under the charge of Protestant agents, for the reason that they were Catholics, and the most unwarrantable interference, opposition, and maltreatment have been in many instances manifested in cases where Catholic priests were merely exercising the rights they possessed as American citizens, and discharging the duties imposed on them as Christian teachers.
But before we enter upon the proof of these unpleasant facts let us return to the statistics of the commissioner’s report, for the purpose of completing our review of the condition of the semi-civilized and civilized tribes. The whole number of acres of land comprised in the Indian reservations as they now exist is 159,287,778, of which, however, only a very small portion (9,107,244 acres, or 14,230 square miles) is “tillable”—that is, land fitted for agricultural pursuits, and on which crops can be raised. Now, from these figures, which are official, a very important truth may be deduced. The policy of the government, as explained by the commissioners in successive reports, is to gather all the Indians upon these reservations (or upon a few of them), to wean them from their life of hunting and fishing, and to teach them to support themselves and their families by purely agricultural pursuits. The idea may perhaps be a good one; but care should have been taken to provide ample means for its execution. There are, as we have seen, 266,151 Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska and of the “roamers and vagrants.” All these, if the present policy of the government be successful, will be finally planted upon this region of 14,230 square miles of tillable land, and bidden to live there, they and their children, for ever, earning their bread by the sweat of their brow in cultivating the soil. Now, 14,230 square miles of land is equal only to 28,460 farms of 320 acres each, or to 56,920 farms of 160 acres each. The tradition established by the government, by its original surveys of the public lands, by its Homestead Law, and by its Land Bounty Acts, is that 160 acres of land is the normal quantity for an ordinary farm; general experience has shown that this is none too much. But if the attempt were made to arrange the 266,151 Indians into families of 4 persons each, and to allot to each family a farm of 160 acres, there would not be tillable land enough “to go round”; 9,617 families would be left out of the distribution. We do not mean to say that a farm of something less than 160 acres may not be found sufficient for the maintenance of a family of four persons; but we do wish to call attention to the fact that the Indian reservations have been now reduced so far that only 56,920 farms, of 160 acres each, of “tillable land” remain in them. There is the more necessity for accentuating this fact since even in the last report of the commissioner is repeated the suggestion that the reservations are still too large, and that a few more treaties might be broken and a few more sanguinary wars provoked with advantage, in order to reduce further the area set apart for Indian occupation. This suggestion is made plausible by the device of calling attention to the whole area of the reservations—159,287,778 acres, or 248,886 square miles—while hiding away in very small type, and at the end of an intricate table of figures, the fact that 150,180,534 acres, or 234,656 square miles, of these lands are wholly unfitted for tillage, and can never be made available for agricultural purposes.
The number of acres of land cultivated by the Indians during the year covered by the last report of the commissioner was 318,194, and 28,253 other acres were broken by them during the year. No less than 26,873 full-blood male Indians were laboring in civilized pursuits, exclusive of those belonging to the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory. These people are not savages; they worship God—many of them enjoying the light of Catholic truth; they educate themselves and their children; they live in houses and wear decent clothes; they toil and are producers of valuable articles. Let us see, now, what is said about these and the other Indians less advanced in civilization, by their rulers, the successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs and their subordinates, the agents. When we remark that we select our quotations from nine volumes of official reports, the reader will understand that we lay before him only a very few out of the numberless proofs of two facts:
1. That the commissioners, while repeatedly confessing that the Indians have been most cruelly and unwisely wronged in the past, are of the opinion that it would be a kind and wise thing to wrong them a little more in the future.
2. That the Indians are perfectly well aware of their wrongs; are quite able to formulate them; are often hopeless, from long and painful experience, of any effectual redress for them; and very frequently display a remarkable degree of Christian forbearance and forgiveness in resisting the wanton provocations to revolt offered to them.
“The traditionary belief which largely prevails,” writes the Hon. J. Q. Smith, in his report for 1876, “that the Indian service throughout its whole history has been tainted with fraud, arises not only from the fact that frauds have been committed, but also because, from the nature of the service itself, peculiar opportunities for fraud may be found.”
After an exposition of the duties of an Indian agent he thus proceeds:
“The great want of the Indian service has always been thoroughly competent agents. The President has sought to secure proper persons for these important offices by inviting the several religious organizations, through their constituted authorities, to nominate to him men for whose ability, character, and conduct they are willing to vouch. I believe the churches have endeavored to perform this duty faithfully, and to a fair degree have succeeded; but they experience great difficulty in inducing persons possessed of the requisite qualifications to accept these positions. When it is considered that these men must take their families far into the wilderness, cut themselves off from civilization with its comforts and attractions, deprive their children of the advantages of education, live lives of anxiety and toil, give bonds for great sums of money, be held responsible in some instances for the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and subject themselves to ever-ready suspicion, detraction, and calumny, for a compensation less than that paid to a third-class clerk in Washington or to a village postmaster, it is not strange that able, upright, thoroughly competent men hesitate, and decline to accept the position of an Indian agent, or, if they accept, resign the position after a short trial. In my judgment the welfare of the public service imperatively requires that the compensation offered an Indian agent should be somewhat in proportion to the capacity required in the office, and to the responsibility and labor of the duties to be performed.”
It is impossible to avoid making the remark, in this place, that there is a class of men who have no “families”; who are ever ready to renounce the “comforts and attractions of civilization”; who are accustomed to “live lives of anxiety and toil”; and who are impervious to “suspicion, detraction, and calumny,” while at the same time they are “able, upright, and thoroughly competent.” If the government, when it inaugurated its plan of filling the Indian agencies with men nominated by “the churches,” had allowed our bishops to nominate agents in proportion to the number of Catholic Indians, the chances are that the right men would have been forthcoming, and the commissioner would not now be complaining that, in order to keep an Indian agent from stealing, he must be paid $3,000 a year.
“Relief had been so long delayed,” says the same officer in the same report, “that supplies failed to reach the agencies until the Indians were in almost a starving condition, and until the apparent intention of the government to abandon them to starvation had induced large numbers to join the hostile bands under Sitting Bull.”
Two other instances of the same kind are mentioned; and a third is recorded, in which, owing to the failure of Congress to provide money promised by a treaty, “hundreds of Pawnees had been compelled to abandon their agency, to live by begging and stealing in southern Kansas.” “In numerous other instances,” adds the commissioner pathetically, “the funds at the disposal of this office have been so limited as to make it a matter of the utmost difficulty to keep the Indians from starving”—and this, too, when the same Indians had large sums of money standing to their credit held “in trust” for them in the treasury of the United States. A long discussion advocating the removal of all the Indians to a few reservations—although this could not be done without violations of the most solemn treaties—is clinched with the cynical remark that “there is a very general and growing opinion that observance of the strict letter of treaties with Indians is in many cases at variance both with their own best interests and with sound public policy.”
And these words are from the official report of the chief of a great bureau in the most important department of our government! Did we know what we were about when we made these treaties? If “no,” we were fools; if “yes,” then we are knaves now to violate them without the consent of the other, the helpless party. “The Indians claim,” says the commissioner, “that they hold their lands by sanctions so solemn that it would be a gross breach of faith on the part of the government to take away any portion of it without their consent, and that consent they propose to withhold.” Still, let us do it, cries the commissioner; “public necessity must ultimately become supreme law.” “Public necessity”—which in this case means private rapacity—“public necessity,” and not truth, good faith, and justice, must rule. Many tribes are living peaceably and doing well, on lands solemnly promised to them for ever, in various parts of the West; the civilized and semi-civilized tribes in the Indian Territory are living peaceably and doing well on lands solemnly promised to them for their own exclusive use for ever, and in some cases bought with their own money. But it would be more convenient for us to have them all together; so let us tear up the treaties, and drive all the Indians into the one territory.
From the same report we take this paragraph, which is only one of very many like it:
“The Alsea agency, in Oregon, has been abolished, but inadequate appropriations have worked hardship and injustice to the Indians. They are required to leave their homes and cultivated fields” (for no other reason than that white men covet them) “and remove to Siletz, but no means are furnished to defray expense of such removal or to assist in their establishment in their new home.”
The Board of Indian Commissioners, in their third annual report (1871), in view of the continued violation of treaties by the government in compelling tribes to remove from the reservations assigned to them, found themselves constrained to say:
“The removal of partially civilized tribes already making fair progress and attached to their homes on existing reservations is earnestly deprecated. Where such reservations are thought to be unreasonably large, their owners will themselves see the propriety of selling off the surplus for educational purposes. The government meanwhile owes them the protection of their rights to which it is solemnly pledged by treaty, and which it cannot fail to give without dishonor.”
But it has failed to give this protection in numberless instances, and it seems to rest very easily under the stigma of dishonor thus incurred—as, for instance, in the case of the Osages, of whom their agent, in a report dated Oct. 1, 1870, thus speaks:
“This tribe of Indians are richly endowed by nature, physically and morally. A finer-looking body of men, with more grace and dignity, or better intellectual development, could hardly be found on this globe. They were once the most numerous and warlike nation on this continent, with a domain extending from the Gulf to the Missouri River and from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains; but they have been shorn of their territory piece by piece, until at last they have not a settled and undisputed claim to a single foot of earth. It is strictly true that one great cause of their decline has been fidelity to their pledges. More than sixty years ago they pledged themselves by treaty to perpetuate peace with the white man. That promise has been nobly kept—kept in spite of great and continual provocation. White men have committed upon them almost every form of outrage and wrong, unchecked by the government and unpunished. Every aggressive movement of the whites tending to the absorption of their territory has ultimately been legalized.”
These Osages are nearly all Catholics, and the agent who thus writes of them is Mr. Isaac T. Gibson, a Quaker, or an “Orthodox Friend.” Would it be believed that three years afterwards the kind and sympathizing Friend Gibson was busily engaged in inflicting upon the people for whose wrongs he was so indignant an injury greater than any they had yet suffered? “Enterprising scoundrels” of whom he wrote in his report had robbed the Osages of everything save their faith; and good Friend Gibson tried to rob them of that. How he set about the task, and how he fared in it, will be told later.
If this be not enough, look at the picture of a model Indian reservation drawn by a lawyer of California, and addressed to J. V. Farwell, one of the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners. He is describing the Hoopa Valley reservation:
“I found the Indians thoughtful, docile, and apparently eager to enter into any project for their good, if they could only believe it would be carried out in good faith, but utterly wanting in confidence in the agent, the government, or the white man. Lethargy, starvation, and disease were leading them to the grave. I found, in fact, that the reservation was a rehash of a negro plantation; the agent an absolute dictator, restrained by no law and no compact known to the Indians. During my stay the superintendent visited the valley. He stayed but a few days. We had drinking and feasting during this time, but no grave attention to Indian affairs; no extended investigation of what had been done or should be done. The status quo was accepted as the ne plus ultra of Indian policy. He, too, appears to think that annihilation is the consummation of Indian management. If the reservation was a plantation, the Indians were the most degraded of slaves. I found them poor, miserable, vicious, degraded, dirty, naked, diseased, and ill-fed. They had no motive to action. Man, woman, and child, without reference to age, sex, or condition, received the same five pounds of flour per week, and almost nothing more. They attended every Monday to get this, making a day’s work of it for most of them. The oldest men, or stout, middle-aged fathers of families, were spoken to just as children or slaves. They know no law but the will of the agent; no effort has been made to teach them any, and, where it does not conflict with this dictation, they follow the old forms of life—polygamy, buying and selling of women, and compounding crime with money ad libitum. The tribal system, with all its absurd domination and duty, is still retained. The Indian woman has no charge of her own person or virtue, but her father, brother, chief, or nearest male relative may sell her for a moment or for life. I was impressed that really nothing had been done by any agent, or even attempted, to wean these people from savage life to civilization, but only to subject them to plantation slavery.”
The official volumes from which we are taking our information contain the successive annual reports of the various Indian agents and superintendents, who are 88 in number, and the reports of many councils held between the Indians and the Board of Indian Commissioners, agents, army officers, and special commissioners. The Hon. Felix R. Brunot, chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners, is the Mercurius in many of these councils. He does nearly all the talking on the side of the government, and before he talks he always prays. Thus: “Gen. Smith announced that Mr. Brunot would speak to the Great Spirit before the council began. Mr. Brunot offered a prayer.” In the interests of religion it is to be regretted that councils thus begun sometimes appeared to have been designed for the purpose of inflicting new wrongs upon the Indians. But we mention the councils here only for the purpose of taking from the reports of their proceedings, as well as from the annual reports of the agents, a very few of the remarks made by the Indian chiefs concerning themselves, the government, the agents, and the whites generally. The limits of our space compel us to string these together without further introduction:
Red Cloud: God raised us Indians. I am trying to live peaceably. All I ask for is my land—the little spot I have left. My people have done nothing wrong. I have consulted the Great Spirit, and he told me to keep my little spot of land. My friends, have pity on me, if you would have me live long. My people have been cheated so often they will not believe.
Buffalo Good.: If you are going to do anything for us, do it quick. I saw the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at Washington, and he told me he was going to fix it up, but I have heard that so often I am afraid it is not true. I have been disappointed, and I think Washington is not so much of a chief after all. Because we do not fight, he takes away our lands and gives them to the tribes who are fighting the whites all the time.
Howlish-Wampo (“the Cayuse chief, a Catholic Indian, in dress, personal appearance, and bearing superior to the average American farmer”): When you told me you believed in God, I thought that was good. But you came to ask us for our land. We will not let you have it. This reservation is marked out for us. We see it with our eyes and our hearts; we all hold it with our bodies and our souls. Here are my father and mother, and brothers and sisters and children, all buried; I am guarding their graves. This small piece of land we all look upon as our mother, as if she were raising us. On the outside of the reservation I see your houses; they have windows, they are good. Why do you wish my land? My friend, you must not talk too strong about getting my land; I will not let it go.
Homli (chief of the Walla-Wallas): My cattle and stock are running on this reservation, and they need it all. It is not the white man who has helped me: I have made all the improvements on my own land myself.
Wenap-Snoot (chief of the Umatillas): When my father and mother died, they gave me rules and gave me their land to live on. They left me to take care of them after they were buried. I was to watch over their graves. I will not part from them. I cultivate my land and I love it.
Pierre (a young chief): I do not wish money for my land; I am here, and I will stay here. I will not part with lands, and if you come again I will say the same thing.
Wal-che-te-ma-ne (another Catholic chief, as, indeed, were the three last named): You white chiefs listen to me: you, Father Vermeerch, are the one who rules my heart. I am old now, and I want to die where my father and mother and children have died. I see the church there; I am glad to see it; I will stay beside it and die by the teachings of the father. I love my church, my mills, my farm, the graves of my parents and children. I do not wish to leave them. (Happily, the firmness of these Catholic Indians, the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla-Walla tribes, carried the day, and they were permitted to remain on their little reservation).
Tenale Temane (another Catholic Indian): We cannot cheat our own bodies and our own souls. If we deceive ourselves we shall be miserable; only from the truth can we grow ourselves, and make our children grow. Of all that was promised to me by Gov. Stevens I have seen nothing; it must have been lost.
The Young Chief: What you promised was not done; it was as if you had taken the treaty as soon as it was made, and torn it up. The treaties made with the Indians on all the reservations have never been kept; they have all been broken. I do not want to teach you anything about God; you are wise and know all about him. (The irony of this is exquisite.)
Tasenick (a Wascoe chief): The people who are put over me teach me worse things than I knew before. You can see what we were promised by the treaty: we have never got anything; all we have we bought with our own money. Our Great Father may have sent the things promised, but they never got here.
Chinook: When we made the treaty they promised us schoolmasters and a great many other things, but they forget them. We never had any of them. They told us we were to have $8,000 a year; we never saw a cent of it.
Mack (a Deschutes chief): It is not right to starve us; it is better to kill us.
Jancust: I cannot look you in the face; I am ashamed: white men have carried away our women. What do you think? White men do these things and say it is right.
Napoleon (a Catholic chief of the Tulalip reservation, who “came forward with much dignity and laid before Mr. Brunot a bunch of split sticks”): These represent the number of my people killed by the whites during the year, and yet nothing has been done to punish them. The whites now scare all the Indians, and we look now wondering when all the Indians will be killed.
Johnny English: We like Father Chirouse very well, because he tries to do what is right; when he begins to work he does one thing at a time.
Henry (a Catholic on the Lumni reservation): I have been a Christian for many years. We have some children at school with Father Chirouse; we want our lands for them to live on when we are dead.
David Crockett (a Catholic chief): I ought to have a better house in which to receive my friends. But we want most an altar built in our church and a belfry on it; this work we cannot do ourselves.
Spar (a young chief): All the agents think of is to steal; that is all every agent has done. When they get the money, where does it go to? When I ask about it they say they will punish me. I thought the President did not send them for that.
Peter Connoyer (of the Grande Rondes): About religion—I am a Catholic; so are all of my family. All the children are Catholics. We want the sisters to come and teach the girls. The priest lives here; he does not get any pay. He teaches us to pray night and morning. We must teach the little girls. I am getting old. I may go to a race and bet a little, but I don’t want my children to learn it; it is bad.
Tom Curl: We want to get good blankets, not paper blankets. I don’t know what our boots are made of; if we hit anything they break in pieces.
When, in 1870, President Grant announced the inauguration of his new Indian policy, the sects saw in it an opportunity of carrying on their propaganda among the Indians with little or no cost to themselves, and of interfering with, and probably compelling the total cessation of, the work of the Catholic Church among many of the tribes. To begin with, here were 72 places in which they could install the same number of their ministers, or laymen devoted to their interests, with salaries paid by the general government. Once installed as Indian agents, these men would have autocratic power over the affairs of the tribes entrusted to them; and they could make life so uncomfortable for the Catholic missionaries already at work there that they would probably retire. If they disregarded petty persecutions, the agent could compel them to depart, since it is held by the Indian Bureau that an agent has power to exclude from a reservation any white man whose presence he chooses to consider as inconvenient, as well as to prevent the Indians from leaving the reservation for any purpose whatever. There were, it was known, many Indian agencies at which the Catholic Church had had missions for many years, and where all, or nearly all, the Indians were Catholics. If these agencies could be assigned to the care of the sects, how easily could the work of converting the Indian Catholics into Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, or Unitarians be accomplished! The priests could be driven away and forbidden to return; the sectarian preachers would have full play; and the Indian appetite for Protestant truth could be sharpened by judicious bribery and intimidation. On the borders of the reservation there might be—as there are—Catholic churches and Catholic priests; but the Catholic Indians on the reservation might be—as they have been—forbidden to cross the line in order to visit their priests and to receive the sacraments.
The new Indian policy which furnished this opportunity was probably not original with President Grant, and we are not disposed to call in question the purity and kindness of his motives in adopting it. At the time of its inauguration, however, he was surrounded by influences decidedly hostile to the Catholic Church; and it is probable that from the beginning the men “behind the throne” had a clear conception of the manner in which the new policy could be worked for the benefit of the sects. It was based upon an idea plausible to non-Catholics, but which no Catholic can ever accept—the idea that one religion is as good as another, and that, for example, it does not make much difference whether a man believes that Jesus Christ is God, or that he was simply a tolerably good but rather weak and vain man. This idea has been carried out in practice-for even to the “Unitarians” have been given two Indian agencies: those of the Los Pinos and White River in Colorado, whose entire religious education for 1876, as reported by the agents, consisted in “a sort of Shaker service of singing and dancing held for two or three days.” The chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Mr. Brunot, appears to have been anxious to spread abroad the doctrine of indifferentism among the Catholic Indians. Whenever, in his numerous “councils,” he found himself in company with such Indians, he undertook to enlighten them after this fashion:
“A chief said yesterday: ‘I don’t know about religion, because they tell so many different things.’ Religion is like the roads; they all go one way; all to the one good place; so take any one good road and keep in it, and it will bring you out right at last.” ... “I heard an Indian say that the white man has two religions. In one way it looks so; but if you will understand you will see it is only one.” ... “It is not two kinds of religion, but it is as two roads that both go the same way.”
We scarcely think it is within the province of the federal government to pay a gentleman for preaching this kind of doctrine to Catholic Indians. But what was the new Indian policy? It was explained by President Grant, in his message of December 5, 1870, in these words:
“Indian agents being civil officers, I determined to give all the agencies to such religious denominations as had heretofore established missionaries among the Indians, and perhaps to some other denominations who would undertake the work on the same terms—that is, as missionary work.”
There is an undesirable lack of exactness in these words—for, as they stand, they might be understood as promising the agency of a tribe to a sect which had established on its territory a missionary station years ago, and had subsequently abandoned it. This, however, was certainly not the intention of the President; if he intended to act in good faith in the matter, he proposed, doubtless, to assign the agencies to churches that had established successful missions—missions actually existing, having churches, schools, and converts. It is impossible to believe that it was the intention of the executive to transfer tribes of Catholic Indians to Protestant sects, under the pretence that the sects, at some remote period, had made feeble and fruitless attempts to establish missions among them. This, however, has been the construction placed upon the President’s policy by the sects; and, strange to say, they have experienced no difficulty in persuading successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs to agree with them in this interpretation, and to carry it out in a manner productive of the most wanton cruelty and injustice.
There are seventy-two Indian agencies: three in Arizona, three in California, two in Colorado, fifteen in Dakota, eight in the Indian Territory, one in Iowa, two in Kansas, one in Michigan, three in Minnesota, four in Montana, five in Nebraska, five in New Mexico, one in New York, two in Nevada, six in Oregon, one in Utah, seven in Washington Territory, two in Wisconsin, and one in Wyoming. According to any fair construction of the new policy, no less than forty of these agencies should have been assigned to the Catholic Church. In all of them the church had had missions for many years; in many of them all of the Christian Indians, or the great majority of them, were Catholics; in some of them the Indians had been Catholics for centuries, and their civilization was wholly due to the instruction they had received from Catholic priests. The following is a list of these agencies, with their location and the number of Indians embraced in each:
| Name of Agency. | Location. | No. of Indians. |
|---|---|---|
| Yakima | Washington | 3,000 |
| Fort Hall | Idaho | 1,500 |
| Tulalip | Washington | 3,950 |
| Puyallup | Washington | 577 |
| Skokomish | Washington | 875 |
| Chehalis | Washington | 600 |
| Neah Bay | Washington | 604 |
| Colville | Washington | 3,349 |
| La Point | Wisconsin | 646 |
| Pottawattomie | Indian Territory | 1,336 |
| Flatheads | Montana | 1,821 |
| Blackfeet | Montana | 14,630 |
| Papagoes | Arizona | 6,000 |
| Round Valley | California | 1,112 |
| North California | California | —— |
| Mission Indians | California | 5,000 |
| Pueblos | New Mexico | 7,879 |
| Osages | Indian Territory | 2,823 |
| Cœur d’Alenes | Idaho | 700 |
| Quapams | Indian Territory | 235 |
| Was, Peorias, etc. | Indian Territory | 217 |
| Hoopa Valley | California | 725 |
| Pimas and Mariscopas | Arizona | 4,326 |
| Moquis | Arizona | 1,700 |
| Warm Spring | Oregon | 626 |
| Grande Ronde | Oregon | 924 |
| Siletz | Oregon | 1,058 |
| Umatilla | Oregon | 837 |
| Alsea | Oregon | 343 |
| Malheur | Oregon | 1,200 |
| Nez-Percés | Idaho | 2,807 |
| Navajoes | New Mexico | 9,114 |
| Mescaleros | New Mexico | 1,895 |
| Milk River | Montana | 10,625 |
| Crows | Montana | 4,200 |
| Green Bay | Wisconsin | 1,480 |
| Chippewas | Minnesota | 1,322 |
| Mackinac | Michigan | 10,260 |
| Grand River | Dakota | 6,269 |
| Devil’s Lake | Dakota | 1,020 |
| ——— | ||
| Total | 117,585 |
Within the jurisdiction of these agencies there are 52 Catholic churches, 18 Catholic day-schools, and 10 Catholic boarding industrial schools. The Catholic priests and teachers employed among the Indians during the year 1875 numbered 117; while for the same year the Protestant sects had only 64 missionaries employed in all the agencies under their control. Would it not have been supposed that a fair interpretation of the new policy of President Grant—nay, that the only fair interpretation of it—would have awarded these 40 agencies to the Catholic Church? The missions of the church, in 1870, were in almost uncontested possession of these fields of labor. Her priests had borne the labor and the heat of the day; asking and expecting no aid from the state, and receiving very little from any other source, they had given themselves to the work of Christianizing these Indians; and while the sects had from time to time made spasmodic and desultory attempts at Indian missions, our priests and their coadjutors, the sisters of the teaching orders, had remained steadfast in their self-denying and arduous labor. But the sects were now inspired with a new and sudden zeal for the salvation of the Indians. They were not content with the 32 agencies in which, although there were many Catholic Indians, the church had not been able to establish permanent missions. They set up claims to the agencies we have enumerated, and it was observed that the fervor with which these demands were pressed was in exact proportion to the richness of the reservation and its desirableness as a future home for a missionary with a large family and with a numerous corps of needy relations. So fierce was their onslaught, and so rapidly were their demands conceded by the then commissioner, that, almost before the authorities of the church had been informed of what was going on, no less than 32 of the 40 agencies which, by any fair interpretation of the President’s policy, should have been assigned to Catholic care, were divided among the sects. Fourteen of the agencies, with 54,253 Indians, fell to the Methodists, the sect then, and perhaps now, most in favor with the administration; five, with 21,321 Indians, went to the Presbyterians; the same number, with 5,311 Indians, were awarded to the Quakers; the Congregationalists received three, with 2,056 Indians; the Reformed Dutch Church were given two, with 6,026 Indians; the “American Missionary Association” (a Congregational society) obtained two, with 2,126 Indians; and the Protestant Episcopal Church was gratified with one agency, the Chippewas of Missouri, 1,322 in number, who had been Catholics all their lives. There remained eight of the agencies to which the Catholic Church possessed a claim, and these were left in her possession, not, however, without a threat that they also would be taken from her—a threat already carried into execution in one case, the Papagoes, a tribe of 6,000, residing in Arizona, having been kindly transferred to the care of a sect called the “Reformed Church.” The agent of this tribe, in his last report, says:
“There is no school at present taught among these Indians. The intellectual and moral training of the young has been, for a long time, in the hands of the Roman Catholics, and the school hitherto kept by the sisters of the Order of St. Joseph.”
The school is now closed, it appears; and the “Reformed Church” seemingly does not intend to open another, as their agent remarks that “there is, perhaps, but little use to establish schools, or look for any considerable advance in education among them.”
The seven agencies still left to the care of the church are those of Tulalip and Colville, in Washington Territory; Grande Ronde and Umatilla, in Oregon; Flathead, in Montana; and Standing Rock (or Grand River) and Devil’s Lake, in Dakota. These agencies, according to the last report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, have a population of 12,819 Indians. No less than 7,034 of these wear “citizen’s dress”; they have 825 frame or log houses; they have six boarding-schools and three day-schools, taught by 19 teachers; 382 of the adults can read; they have 12 churches, and 7,510, or more than half the whole number, are “church members.” Nothing like this can be shown at any of the agencies under Protestant control, save the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory. The whole of the Indians on the Grande Ronde reservation—755 in number—are so far civilized that all of them wear citizen’s dress. They have 375 houses, and 690 of them are “church members.” Their agent speaks of them in glowing terms; last year, without receiving a penny of the sums due them by the government, they not only supported themselves in comfort, but were able “of their charity” to relieve the necessities of two neighboring tribes, the Salmon River and Nestucca Indians, who were starving to death “in consequence of the failure of the government to fulfil the promises made by the honorable Commissioner Simpson.” The parsimony of the government compelled them to dispense with the services of their regular physician; but, writes the agent, “we have been fortunate in securing the services of a sister, who has, in addition to her duties as a teacher, kindly dispensed medicines with the most gratifying success.” “The school,” he adds, “is in a very prosperous condition under the efficient management of Sister Mary, superior, and three assistants.”
The Indians on the Tulalip reservation, 3,250 in number, are equally well advanced; the whole of them wear citizen’s dress; they have 2 boarding-schools, with 6 teachers, and 2,260 of them are “church members.” We look in vain for statistics like these among the agencies under Protestant control; when there is anything like it, it is found in the reports from the tribes which have been civilized and Christianized by the Catholic Church and then stolen away by the sects.
In addition to the 33 agencies which belonged by right to the church, but were distributed among the sects, 30 others were portioned out among them, so that, according to the last report of the commissioner, while the church, entitled to 40 agencies, has but 7, the Quakers have 16; the Methodists 14; the Baptists 2; the Presbyterianscc 7; the Congregationalists 6; the “Reformed” 4; the Protestant Episcopalians 9; the Unitarians 2; the “Free-will Baptists” 1; the “United Presbyterians,” who seem to be disunited from the other Presbyterians, 1; and the “Christian Union,” which is not in union with any of the other sects, 1. If our space permitted, we should point out the miserable results after a seven years’ possession of these agencies. The four agencies under the care of the “Reformed” body, for example, embrace 14 tribes, numbering 17,049 souls. Among these are the Papagoes, 5,900 in number, already tolerably well-civilized by Catholic instruction, and all of whom wear citizen’s dress. With the exception of these, the “Reformers,” after seven years’ labor, have 50 Indians who wear citizen’s dress, 2 schools, 1 church building, and 4 church members! As they have not thought it worth while to send out any missionaries, one wonders what they do with their church building, but it is probably used as a store-house by the “Reformed” agent.
The Hicksite Quakers have 5 agencies in Nebraska, with 4,098 Indians. They have 392 “church members,” but 348 of these belong to a civilized tribe—the Santee Sioux, who are 793 strong. After seven years of labor the Quakers have got only 44 out of the other 3,300 Indians under their care to call themselves “church members.” In the Hoopa Valley reservation, given to the Methodists, there is a “school building,” but no school, no teacher, and no pupils; there is a “church building,” but no missionary and no “church members.” The poor mission Indians in California, the children of Catholic parents for many generations, also under the tender care of the Methodists, have neither houses, nor school, nor church, nor missionary. The 6,000 Indians on the Red Cloud agency in Dakota, under the charge of the Protestant Episcopalians, have a “school building,” but no teacher, no scholars, no church, no missionary, and no “church members.” The 3,992 Cheyennes and Arapahoes in the Indian Territory, in charge of the Quakers, have a school-house, but no church, no missionary, and no “church members,” and so with the rest.
In selecting a few typical illustrations of the injustice perpetrated by the assignment of tribes of Catholic Indians to non-Catholic sects, we are embarrassed by the richness and plenitude of our facts. We mention only two—the Chippewas of Lake Superior, and the Osages.
The agency of the Chippewas of Lake Superior became vacant early in 1873, and General Ewing, on the 19th of March of that year, addressed a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, submitting “that, under the Indian policy of President Grant, this agency should be assigned to the Catholic Church.” He accompanied his letter with a brief of the facts on which he thus claimed the agency for the church. The Chippewas number 4,551, and 3,696 of them wear citizen’s dress; they have six schools and three churches. More than 200 years ago the Catholic fathers Dablon and Marquette established the mission of St. Mary among the Chippewas, and the church has ever since looked upon them as her children. The Catholic missions, first permanently established among them in 1668, continued in a flourishing manner until the year 1800; they were revived after a lapse of 30 years; and for the past 47 years they have been continuously attended by Catholic priests—one being assigned exclusively and continuously to the religious instruction, education, and care of the Indians. The Indians at their own expense have built three Catholic churches, at Bayfield, La Pointe, and Bad River. The successive reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs from 1868 to 1872 set forth these facts. Praise is given in 1868 to Father Chebal for the good result of his labors; the agent, writing in 1870, says: “The religious instruction has been almost entirely under Catholic missionaries; 99 out of 100 of them are Catholics, and Father Chebal has labored industriously and successfully among them.” The agent, writing in 1871, again says: “Most of these people are members of the Roman Catholic Church. Their pastor has been a missionary among them for many years, and has labored with the zeal for which his church is proverbial to secure converts. He has accomplished much good.” The report of the agent for 1868 likewise mentions that the “Rev. L. H. Wheeler and his most estimable lady” had been conducting a Protestant mission there “under the control of the A. B. C. F. M. Society,” but that “this society having almost withdrawn their support, and further for the purpose of educating their own children, Rev. Mr. Wheeler has abandoned his mission.” The agent in 1869, Lt.-Col. Knight, of the army, thus writes:
“The Chippewas of Lake Superior generally have abandoned the heathen faith of their fathers. If they have not all been made intelligent Christians, they have abandoned heathenism. The Catholic missionaries are the most assiduous workers among them, and the largest portion of them have espoused that religious faith; yet the Protestant religion has its adherents among them. Father Chebal, of the Catholic faith, is untiring and devoted in his labors with them. The Protestant religion is without a missionary representative, which is unfortunate,” etc.
The case, it will be seen, was plain. The Catholic missions were shown to be the oldest and the only successful missions among the Chippewas, and “the right of the Catholic Church, under the policy of the administration, to the agency” was incontestable. But the agency had already been given to the Congregationalists, who had never before attempted to establish a mission among the Chippewas, and whose minister knew nothing about the tribe. Pressed hard by General Ewing, the secretary referred the matter to our pious friend Mr. Brunot, who, in an elaborate and most disingenuous opinion, decided that, although the assignment of the agency to the Congregationalists might have been erroneous, now that it was made it ought not to be changed—and this, too, although the department had made similar changes in other instances, taking, for example, the Nez-Percés agency from the Catholics, to whom it had been assigned, and giving it to the Methodists in 1870. General Ewing, unwilling to submit to this palpable injustice, again addressed the Secretary of the Interior, reviewing the whole question and incontestably proving the justice of his claim. But all was in vain; the agency remains in the hands of the Congregationalists, and the Catholic Chippewas and their priests are at the mercy of men who have no sympathy or bond of common feeling with either.
The Osages, now in the Indian Territory, are and long have been almost wholly Catholic. But they were assigned to the Quakers, and good Friend Gibson, whose pathetic lament over the worldly sufferings of his protegés we have already given, had not been long in charge of them ere he issued an edict forbidding Catholic priests or teachers to remain on the reservation. Accustomed to oppression and maltreatment of every kind, the Indians felt that this last blow was too hard to bear without remonstrance, and in June, 1873, they drew up and signed a memorial to the President, asking that “their former Catholic missionaries and school-teachers be restored to them and allowed to again locate in the Osage nation.” No response was given to this petition, and on the 31st of March in the next year a delegation of the tribe, with the governor of the nation at their head, arrived at Washington, and, without assistance or suggestions, drew up and presented to the Assistant Secretary of the Interior a memorial which it is impossible to read without emotion. After setting forth that the signers of the memorial are “the governor, chiefs, and councillors of the Great and Little Osage nation of Indians, and all duly-constituted delegates of said nations,” they recount the story of their former petition, and say:
“... In the name of our people, therefore, we beg leave to renew our said petition, and to ask that our former Catholic missionary, Father Shoemaker, and those connected with him in his missionary and educational labors among our people previous to the late war, be permitted to again locate among us. We think that this request is reasonable and just. Catholic missionaries have been among our people for several generations. Our people are familiar with their religion. The great majority of them are of the Catholic faith, and believe it is right. Our children have grown up in this faith. Many of our people have been educated by the Catholic missionaries, and our people are indebted to them for all the blessings of Christianity and civilization that they now enjoy, and have for them a grateful remembrance. Since the missionaries have been taken away from us, we have done but little good and have made poor advancement in civilization and education. Our whole nation has grieved ever since these missionaries have been taken away from us, and we have prayed continuously that the Great Spirit might move upon the heart of our great father, the President, and cause him to return these missionaries to us. We trust he will do so, because in 1865, when we signed the treaty of that date, the commissioners who made it promised that if we signed it we should again have our missionaries.”
The assistant secretary received the memorial, promising to present it to the President at once and to obtain for the delegation a reply: but on the next day Mr. Gibson, who had followed them to Washington in a state of great alarm, hurried them away from the capital to Philadelphia, and thence homewards, not permitting them to return. Immediately after their departure the petition they had filed in the department was missing, and its loss was only supplied by General Ewing, who had a printed copy with the certificate of the secretary placed on file. Simultaneously with the mysterious disappearance of this petition the Commissioner of Indian Affairs received a paper purporting to come from the Osages at home. We dislike to use the phrase, but the proof is clear that this document was a forgery. It purported to be signed by twenty-eight chiefs and braves, with their “mark”; but, as General Ewing says, “it was evidently got up by interested white men and the names of the Indians signed without their knowledge.” The substance of it was that the delegation which had gone to Washington was not to be regarded. Upon their return home the delegation met their people in council, and the result of this conference is related in a letter to General Ewing, signed by Joseph Paw-ne-no-posh, governor of the nation; Alexander Bezett, president of the council; T. L. Rogers, secretary; and the eighteen councillors. The letter is too long to be given here. In presenting it to the Secretary of the Interior, with a full account of the whole transaction, General Ewing used some very strong, but not too strong, language. “Their petitions,” said he, “have not been heard, and now, through me as the representative of the Catholic Indian missions, they make a final appeal. The petition of a defenceless people for simple justice at the hands of a great government is the strongest appeal that my head or heart can conceive; and it is of course unnecessary for me to urge it upon you. It is as plain and open as the day; and if you can decline (which I cannot believe) to comply with the repeated petitions of this people, it is useless for me to urge you to it. You must give this agency to the Catholic Church, or you publish the announcement that President Grant has changed his policy, and that he now intends to force that form of Christianity on each Indian tribe that he may think is best for each.”
But it was all in vain. Friend Gibson carried his point, and, although he has since been compelled to retire from the agency, it is still in the hands of the Quaker organization. The population of the reservation, according to the last report, was 2,679; very nearly the whole of these are good and faithful Catholic Christians; but the agent reports: “Church members, none; churches, none; missionaries, none!” The Quakers have driven away the Catholic priests, and have not even taken the trouble to send a missionary of their own to fill their place.
But we must make an end, although we have only, as it were, touched the skirt of our subject. Time and space would fail us to tell of the priest in California who was thrown into prison, brutally beaten, and expelled from his flock, for the offence of coming to his old mission after the agency had been assigned to a Protestant sect; of the bishops who have been denied permission to build churches and schools on reservations for the use of Catholic Indians; of the frauds committed by Protestant agents on Catholic tribes; of the mingled tyranny and temptation with which the Protestant agents have repeatedly assailed our poor Indian brethren, making their apostasy the condition of their rescue from starvation. Are not all these things written in the reports of the Indian Bureau, in the annals of the Catholic Indian missions, and in the letters of our bishops and priests published from time to time?
The duty of the Catholic laity throughout the United States in this business is clear. Happily, the way for the discharge of this duty has been made easy. It is simply to provide generously for the support and increase of the work of the Bureau of Catholic Missions at Washington. This bureau was established in January, 1873; it is composed of a commissioner, appointed by the Archbishop of Baltimore, with the concurrence in council of the archbishops of the United States; a treasurer and director; and a Board of Control, of five members, appointed in like manner. The commissioner is a layman; he is recognized by the government as the representative of the church in all matters among the Indians. The treasurer and director must be a priest; the president of the Board of Control must be a priest; the other four members are laymen. The salaries of the commissioner and of the Board of Control are—nothing. Their work, like that of the directors in the councils of the Propaganda, is given in charity. “General Charles Ewing, the commissioner,” says Father Brouillet, “has for over four years generously given to the work of the bureau his legal services and a large portion of his valuable time gratuitously. He never made any charge nor received any pay for his services, and on more than one occasion he has advanced his own money to keep up the work.” The director and treasurer and two clerks are the only persons connected with the bureau who are paid, and their united salaries are only $1,000 a year. The whole expenditures of the bureau, for salaries, printing, stationery, postage, rent, and travelling, have not exceeded $1,600 a year during the four years of its existence—all the balance of its funds going directly to the benefit of the missions. The business of the bureau is to defend Catholic Indian missions against the organized assault which has been made upon them. For those desirous of aiding so good a work we add the information that “all remittances to the treasurer of the Catholic Indian mission fund should be by draft on New York or by post-office order, and should be addressed to lock-box 60, Washington, D. C.”
ST. HEDWIGE.[[11]]
The bulwark of Christendom is the title which Poland long claimed and well deserved, even when the country now known as that of Sobieski and Kosciusko was itself half-barbarous, and, instead of being a brilliant, many-provinced kingdom, was a disunited confederation of sovereigns. Among the many mediæval heroes who fought the invading Tartars on the east, and the aggressive heathen Prussians on the west, and looked upon their victories as triumphs of the cross and their death as a kind of martyrdom, were two Henrys, “the Bearded” and “the Pious,” the husband and the son of the holy Princess Hedwige, Duchess of Silesia and Poland during the first half of the thirteenth century. Her life, chiefly through her connection with other princely houses, was an eventful and sorrowful one, and, towards the last years of it, personally a checkered one. If God chastises those whom he loves, the mark of grace was surely set upon St. Hedwige of Andechs, the aunt of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and second daughter of a Bavarian sovereign whose titles and possessions included parts of Istria, Croatia and Dalmatia, Swabia, and the Tyrol. The life and customs of the thirteenth century, the magnificence on state occasions, and the simplicity, not to say rudeness, of domestic life at ordinary times; the difficulty of communication, and consequently the long separations between friends and kindred; the prominent part of religion in all the good works and public improvements of the day; the tales and legends that grew up among the people; the traditions which there was no one to investigate or contradict, and which did duty then for newspaper and magazine gossip; the personal connection between the sovereign and his people, and the primitive ideal of charity unclouded by doubts and theories, experiments and “commissions”; the summary processes of justice, tempered only by the pleadings of generous and tender women; government in a chaotic state, the profession of arms the dominant one, private wars at every turn, and individual acts of heroism, barbarity, and charity all alike received as a matter of course—all this is well known, and is equally true of all Christian and civilized lands of that day.
But as you went eastward through Europe confusion increased and manners grew rougher; primitive standards of right and wrong existed under the name of the law of the strongest; and whatever generosity human nature displayed was an untutored impulse, a half-heathen quality guided by a natural sense of honor rather than by fixed rules of morality. The Slavs, the Czechs, and the Magyars were magnificent barbarians, as the Franks and Teutons of four centuries earlier had been—Christians, indeed, and as fiercely so as Clovis when he drew his sword at the first recital of the Passion and exclaimed, “Would to God I and my Franks had been there”; but unrestrained and wild, more generous than obedient towards the church, which they would rather endow and defend than curb their passions in accordance with its teachings—splendid material, but an unwrought mine. Bishops and priests had fallen into loose ways among them and lost the respect of the people; vassals of the great lords, they stood on much the same level as the secular clergy at present do in Russia, and the popes had long striven in vain to make them give up marriage when they took Holy Orders. The parish clergy were mostly ignorant men, often employed in common labor to support their families, while of teaching monasteries or any places where learning was imparted and respected there were very few.
Hedwige came from a well-regulated country, where church dignitaries were the equals of civil ones, where the Roman standard was paramount, and churchmen were looked upon as powerful and learned men. Monasteries for both sexes abounded; Hedwige herself had been brought up by the Benedictines at Kitzingen, where her special friend and teacher, Petrussa, many years afterwards, followed her into Silesia and became the first abbess of the monastery of Trebnitz, near Breslau. Hedwige, whose mind was from her earliest years in advance of her time, and who mastered all the accomplishments of a woman of high station at that day before she was twelve years old, set herself the task of bettering her adopted country as soon as she had entered it. The men of that time knew less than the women; for their education, unless they were destined for the church, was purely military. Ecclesiastics were lawyers, doctors, authors, travellers, savants, poets, and schoolmasters; while the majority of laymen were only soldiers. But the women of corresponding birth were taught Latin and a good deal of medicine, besides household knowledge, embroidery, the national literature, music, and painting. For the times this was no unworthy curriculum. They had a practical knowledge of surgery and of the healing herbs of the field—which, in days when the chances of life and death often hung on the possibility of reaching or finding a physician within the radius of forty or fifty miles, was a very valuable gift—and an equally practical and useful acquaintance with all the details of housekeeping. Nothing in those days was “made easy”; mechanical contrivances for saving time and trouble were not thought of; and even the highest people worked slowly with their hands and did cheerfully without the luxuries which a cottage would scarcely lack in these days. Hedwige in her later years—for she never gave up her habits of industry—often reminded her attendants of the maxim, “He that worketh not, neither let him eat,” and would never allow that the rule did not apply to sovereigns as well as to private individuals. Her own life was laborious; she rose with the dawn, winter and summer, and, though her devotions took up many hours, she yet had enough to give to the education of her children, the making of vestments for poor churches, and of clothes for her pensioners. Her virtues, which were great and generous, flowed naturally into the mould of her time; she built and endowed monasteries, interceded for prisoners and criminals, made daily distributions of alms to the poor, nursed the sick and leprous in the hospitals—which she was the first in her adopted country to found and secure—and she brought up a number of orphan children. Of these she was so fond that when she travelled she took them with her in several covered wagons. Later on she kept in the palace at Breslau, at her own expense, thirteen poor men, whom she served every day at dinner, just before her own meal, and otherwise ministered to their wants in memory of our Lord and his apostles. In fact, her life is a kind of transcript of that of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and even the poetical legends of miracles wrought to turn away her husband’s displeasure, familiar to us all through the pictures of St. Elizabeth and the bread turned to roses, have a counterpart in Hedwige’s life.
There is a prevalent idea that holiness and the present time are incompatible, or rather that the holiness of which the biographers of mediæval saints admiringly tell us is out of place in this century. The mistake lies in the frame of the picture presented to us. Holiness is of all times, and is the same in substance as it ever was. If, instead of reproducing the beautiful legends of old, and restoring a sort of literary Preraphaelitism in the history of the strong and wise women of by-gone times, the modern biographer were to go to the root of the matter and bring out in strong relief the commonsense virtues, the simplicity and faithfulness to natural duties, the reliance upon God, and the single-minded purpose which distinguished the women who are known as saints, they would succeed in winning the interest of modern readers. These saints were wives, mothers, and mistresses, lived and loved, sorrowed, rejoiced, and suffered, as women have done from the wives of the patriarchs down to the good women of our own century, perhaps of our own acquaintance. They were models whom it is praiseworthy to copy—not pictures held up to our gaze as beautiful inaccessibilities. The very rudeness of life then should make them more human in our eyes; they made mistakes with good intentions; they had predilections which savored of weakness; they struggled through temptations to final perfection—for saintship implies, not the glorification of every act they ever did, but the general state of their life and soul after they had suffered and conquered in the fight that we all have to wage with the world, the flesh, and the devil. Of the striking incidents of a saint’s life it is best to judge as one would of those in the life of any other personage of by-gone ages—that is, according to the standard of the age in which he or she lived; of the root-virtues which won the saint’s canonization: by the everlasting standard of the Ten Commandments. There is no more mischievous error, nor one more likely to blind us to the good we can draw from the lives of men and women who have gone before us, than the view which sets a barrier between historic holiness and every-day life at the present day.
Hedwige lived in times which had their share of wars, invasions, pestilences, and other such stirring events: Poland and Germany were in a stormy state, and the fate of many of her own family was peculiarly stormy; indeed, hardly a sensational drama of our day could deal in more violent incidents than did the half century through which she lived. Her sister Agnes became the wife of Philip, King of France, in place of his lawful but divorced wife, Ingeburga, and incurred not only personal excommunication as an adulteress, but was the cause of the French kingdom being laid under an interdict for more than a year. Her elder sister Gertrude, Queen of Hungary, was assassinated by a political faction in the absence of her husband, who had left her regent. Her two brothers, Henry and Egbert (the latter Bishop of Bamberg), were the accomplices of Otho of Wittelsbach, the suitor of Hedwige’s only daughter, in the murder of Philip, the Emperor of Germany, whom he slew to revenge himself for the warning the emperor had given the Duke of Silesia against the would-be suitor of the young princess; for Otho was as cruel as he was brave. For this deed the Electors at Frankfort degraded the brothers from their dignities, titles, and possessions, after which Henry exiled himself to the Holy Land, where he fought the Saracens for twenty years, and Egbert fled to Hungary, where the queen, his sister, gave him a home and shelter for the rest of his life. Otho was beheaded, his head thrown into the Danube and his body exposed to the birds and beasts of the forest.
But the punishment of treason did not end here; Hedwige’s home was destroyed by the indignant avengers of the emperor, and her father’s heart was broken at the news of his son’s crime; so that of the old cradle-land of the family nothing but smoking ruins and sad memories remained, while a few years later she saw her two sons, Henry and Conrad, meet in deadly conflict as the heads of two rival parties in the duchy, the latter defeated and pursued by his brother, and only saved by his father to die a few days later from a fall when out hunting. Her husband and her remaining son died within three years of each other, the latter in battle against the invading Tartars; and, what no doubt pierced her heart still more, her husband was excommunicated for retaining church property in provinces which he claimed as his by right of the testament of the Duke of Gnesen and Posen. The early death of three other children must have been but a slight sorrow compared with these trials, and the peaceful life of her sister Matilda, Abbess of Kitzingen, and of her daughter Gertrude, second abbess of Trebnitz—the same who escaped becoming the bride of “Wild Otho,” as he was called—could not but have made her envy it at times. She had had in her youth an inclination towards the monastic life, but gave it up at her parents’ desire, and married, according to the customs of her time and class, at the childish age of twelve. But she had seemed from her infancy marked out for no common lot; she was grave, sedate, and womanly; she felt her marriage to be a mission and the beginning of duties; she saw at a glance the state of neglect and uncivilization and the need of betterment in which her adopted country stood, and set about imbuing her husband with her ideas concerning improvement. He was only eighteen, and loved her truly, so he proved to be her first disciple. She began by learning Polish, which her husband’s sister Adelaide taught her, and then gathered all the inmates of the palace, to teach them prayers and the chief doctrines of the faith, in which they were very imperfectly instructed, although full of readiness, even eagerness, to believe. Her father-in-law, the reigning duke, fully appreciated her worth and respected her enthusiasm. Her husband joined her in plans for founding monasteries and building churches when it should come to his turn to reign over Silesia; and in the meanwhile she strove to teach the nobles and the people a greater respect for the priesthood by herself setting the example of outward deference towards priests, whether native or foreign, ignorant or learned. The strangers she always asked to the palace, gave them clothes and money for their journey, attended their Masses, and sometimes served them at table.
In order to introduce clerical learning and morals into Silesia and Poland, it was necessary to rely upon Germans, as has often been the case in other countries, where a foreign element has been, for some time at least, synonymous with civilization. In England Italians chiefly, in a less degree Normans, and in one signal instance a Greek,[[12]] brought with them the knowledge of church architecture and chant, besides secular learning; Irish missionaries had before that helped on the Britons, and Saxons, later on, carried the same influence across the sea to heathen Germany, who in her turn became the evangelizer of the Slav nations. Still later, when Poland was as fervent a Catholic country as Germany, another Hedwige (the name had then grown to be a national one) converted the Lithuanians and became the mother of the Jagellon dynasty. Here, on the confines of Russia, the Latin Church stood face to face with the Greek, and the tide of progress and conversion was stayed. Then came the perpetual turmoils with the warlike Turks, till religion became rather an affair of the knight than of the missionary, until that wave of circumstances having passed away, and the Turks having sunk from the height of their military renown to the insignificance of a mongrel and undisciplined crowd, the battle between faith and scepticism—the modern form of heathenism—has shifted to a great degree to the arena of the mind. The Lepanto of our day is being fought out as obstinately on paper as that of three hundred years ago was on sea; of its nature it cannot be as short or as decisive, but it is nevertheless the counterpart—and the only worthy one—of that romantic and daring feat of arms. The struggle in the days of Hedwige was in some sense much narrower; but though her husband and son engaged in it rather as blind instruments than far-seeing directors, she, with the instincts of her sex and her habitual union with God, helped in it as a teacher and missionary. She proved her gift for it first upon her household, then, in the years of her retirement, upon her special charge—some young heathen girls, natives of Prussia, whom she taught herself and provided for in life. One of these, Catherine, to whom she was godmother, she married to her trusty chamberlain, Schavoine, and left them the estate of that name after her death. But notwithstanding her thirst for doing good and her high idea of her duty to her subjects, she thoroughly enjoyed the quiet of home-life, away from the court, and, whenever it was practicable, would spend some weeks at a time with her young husband and her children at Lähnhaus. It is here that her memory lives freshest at present; here that she tended her dovecot, which is brought to mind by the yearly market of doves, unique of its kind, still held at Lähn on Ash-Wednesday; here that she and her favorite doe crossed the Hedwigsteig, a rough, rocky pathway, to the Chapel of the Hermit and the image of the Blessed Virgin, which afterwards became a pilgrimage-shrine, where the neighboring peasants came to see her and unite in her prayers, so that the present village dates back to the huts of branches hastily put up around the spreading tree that formerly protected the image; here that she rested on the Hedwigstein, or moss-grown boulder, yet remaining, with her name attached to it; here that she built a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, and established some Benedictine monks; and here that in her later years she received the confidence of her friend, Baroness Jutta of Liebenthal, a pious widow, who founded the monastery of that name for Benedictine nuns and the education of young girls, and herself became its first abbess.
Duke Henry, when he came to be sovereign, did not forget his plans and promises, but helped her generously in the endowment of her hospitals, churches, and monasteries. Himself the son of a German princess, he had great faith in the influence for good, in morals, in agriculture, in learning, of his mother’s and his wife’s countrymen; and, according to the custom of the time, Hedwige was accompanied on her journey to Silesia, as a bride, by an escort of German knights, who were not to compose a separate court or household for her, but to settle in the country and make it their home. Such immigration, of course, had its sad as well as its good side; it led to jealousies that were neither unnatural nor inexcusable, although it also leavened the country with some useful and healthy habits. It was on this delicate question that her two sons quarrelled so violently as to make it the pretext of a civil war; Conrad, the youngest, being passionately attached to the old Polish customs and not discriminating between these and crying abuses, while Henry, the eldest, inherited his father’s love for the Germans. The old nobility formed a powerful party and rallied round Conrad, hailing him as their future national sovereign, although his father was still alive and his elder brother the acknowledged heir. Henry the Bearded had by that time retired from public life, and divided his possessions between his two sons, giving the eldest the city of Breslau and all Middle and Lower Silesia, while the youngest received the provinces of Leubus and Lausitz. The latter were less cultivated than the former, but this was chiefly due to that want of, or remoteness from, German influence and immigration; so that the father, knowing his sons’ opposite views on this subject, hoped to satisfy each by his partition. Conrad, however, resented the gift of a less civilized and extended territory, and took this pretext to make war on his brother, with the result already noted.
The retirement of Henry, the husband of Hedwige, which lasted for twenty years or more, was the result of a strange form of piety and self-renunciation not uncommon in the middle ages. The Duke and Duchess of Silesia had been married twenty-three years, and had had six children, three of whom died in infancy. A little after the birth of the youngest, in 1209, Hedwige, still in the bloom of her years (she was only thirty-five and her husband forty-one), and after many prayers and struggles, felt herself impelled to dedicate the rest of her life to God only, and, with her husband’s consent, to live separate from him. They had always loved each other tenderly, and Henry’s conduct, unlike that of many sovereigns of his and of later times, had been irreproachable; he looked upon his wife as a saint, and upon her wishes as commands; he had allowed her to guide his charities and public improvements, had followed her advice, had trusted to her to bring up his children exactly as she thought fit, which was more rigorously and less luxuriously than is often the case with royal children—in a word, had leant wholly upon her. To signify his full acquiescence in this half-monastic vow, he received the tonsure, and, contrary to the custom of his class at that time, let his beard grow, whence came his surname, the Bearded.
Hedwige retired to Trebnitz, where she lived in a separate house with her own women and the chamberlain Schavoine, who took his name from the estate which Henry gave her on their separation. Other grants of money were also made her, and her husband promised his countenance and help in any good work she should wish to do there or elsewhere throughout his possessions. They often met in after years, generally at festive ceremonies for the building or opening of churches, and once at the grave of their unhappy son Conrad; and Henry himself, though keeping up a court and moving from place to place, betook himself to prayers, study, and good works, having given over the government to his sons. In his old age he came forth again in the character of a sovereign and a leader, and, indeed, led a stormy, stirring life for a few years before his death.
Hedwige, in this proceeding of her retirement, had another object in view—that is, the example which she hoped her voluntary giving up of married life would be to the married priesthood of Poland and Silesia. Such was, to a great extent, the case, and the celibacy of the clergy, so long preached in vain, became in a few years the rule instead of the exception.
The Cistercian abbey of Trebnitz, now Hedwige’s home, was the first institution of its kind for women. It was begun in 1200 and finished eighteen years later, but was ready to be inhabited in 1202. It stood in a wooded region, three miles from Breslau. The legend of its foundation, as commemorated in an old rhyme or Volkslied (people’s song), refers it to a vow made by Henry, who, while out hunting, got entangled in a morass and could see no human means of rescue; but what is certain is that the royal couple had long planned and looked forward to a monastery for women, and the date of the laying of the first stone of Trebnitz corresponds with that of Henry’s accession to the throne. The building was intended to accommodate a thousand persons, and was built by the hands of convicts and prisoners, even those who were condemned to death, whose work on it was to be equivalent to the rest of their sentence. Hedwige’s pity for, and kindness to, captives, whether innocent or guilty, was a conspicuous trait of her character; and the undeserved physical hardships of prisoners in those times were enough to turn the sympathies of every kind-hearted person from justice towards the criminal. In the same way did the neglected sick, and especially the lepers, touch her heart; indeed, all the oldest hospitals in Silesia are due to her.
The neighboring Cistercian monks of Leubus cast the leaden plates for the roof and the smaller bells of the new monastery, in return for which Henry gave them two estates; and the duke himself with his foremost nobles inspected the progress of the work, and solemnly made the round of the land deeded to the institution, marking his own name on the boundary stones. Bishop Egbert of Bamberg, Hedwige’s brother (this was before his disgrace), procured a body of Cistercian nuns of his diocese as a beginning, and accompanied them himself on their journey to their new home. Hedwige’s great-uncle, Provost Popo of Bamberg, came too, and the meeting of these strangers with the high clergy of Silesia and Poland was, as the old chroniclers would have said, “a brave and pleasant sight.” The buildings were decorated with evergreens, and the pomp of jewelled garments, clerical and national costumes, armor, horses richly caparisoned, embroidered robes and canopies, was dazzling. It was the Sunday within the octave of the feast of the Epiphany—a sharp, bright winter’s day; the cavalcade from the court of Breslau, consisting of the duke and duchess and their retinue, escorted the nuns and the foreign ecclesiastics, while the bishops of Breslau and Posen, each with his chapter, and the Cistercian abbot under whose jurisdiction Trebnitz was placed, received the latter at the gate of the finished portion of the new church. Here the duke handed the Abbess Petrussa, Hedwige’s old friend and teacher, a deed of the property henceforth belonging to the order—a document which, like all following ones of the same kind, ended with a forcible denunciation of any future injury to the rights of the abbey. “Whoever injures this foundation, without giving full satisfaction therefor, shall be cut off from the church; and let his everlasting portion be with Judas, the Lord’s betrayer, who hanged himself, and with Dathan and Abiron whom the earth swallowed up alive.”
When the deed had been read, and the dedication of the building “to the honor of God and of the holy apostle Bartholomew” declared, the clergy, who held torches in their hands, threw them on the ground, as a sign of all secular claims on the possessions of the abbey being extinguished; and during this ceremony the solemn excommunication against all who should injure the monastery was read aloud once more. The men who had worked at the building, or in any way contributed to it, were freed from all feudal claims, from the obligation to fight, to furnish huntsmen, falcons, or horses for the ducal household, to work at the fields or at the public works, and received the immunities and protection usual to the vassals of a monastery.
Although Trebnitz was undoubtedly named after the neighboring village so called, a story grew up of the humorous mispronunciation of a Polish word, trzebanic, by the German abbess, when asked by Henry if “there was anything else she needed?” The word signifies “We need nothing more,” and has some likeness to the name of Trebnitz; but popular tales such as this abound everywhere. Among the later gifts to the monastery were three villages, bound to supply the nuns with honey, wax, and mead—the first for their “vesper-meal,” the second for their candles and torches, and the third for their “drink on holidays.” The object of the institution, which the original deed set forth as being the securing of “a place of refuge wherein the weaker sex may atone for its sins through the mercy of God,” was at once obtained, and other advantages also grew up around the women’s republic of Trebnitz. It was soon filled with young girls sent there to be educated; widows came either to enter the order or to live under its rule and protection as out-door members; women fled there to repent, and others to avoid temptation; and lastly came Gertrude, the duke’s daughter, to become a nun within its walls. Seven years after its festive opening Hedwige herself retired there and began the second half of her long life by caring for and educating the heathen maidens from Prussia. Trebnitz was her favorite home until her death, and the institution which was most identified with the holy Duchess of Silesia; but the list of great works she and her husband set on foot, each of them a starting-point of much hidden good, is a long one. The parish church of Bunzlau having, with most of the town itself, been burnt, she built a new one, dedicated to Our Lady. At Goldberg, a village near one of the royal summer palaces, she founded a Franciscan convent, intended to serve the purpose of a school for the neighborhood. Nimptsch, her place of refuge during the civil war between her two sons, was not forgotten; for while there she laid the first stone of a church, and almost at the same time began one dedicated to St. Andrew for the town of Herrnstadt. Her friends often remarked on her lavishness in building, and asked her whence she could expect to draw the means. She used to answer confidently: “I trust that the heavenly Architect who made the world, and my dear and faithful husband Henry, will not let me be shamed, so that I should be unable to finish what I have begun with good motives and to their honor. Do not be too anxious about my doings; all will end well with God’s help.” In Breslau, the capital, she built three hospitals—that of the Holy Ghost, that of St. Lazarus (this was for lepers), and that of St. Barbara. For many years Hedwige’s charity towards the sick had produced a rivalry among all good men, both nobles and burghers, to tend and care for some sick persons in their own houses or in rooms hired or built for the purpose; but her wish always was to found a public hospital. The duke gave her a suitable piece of land for the building and garden; the abbot of the Augustinians, Witoslaus, gave his lay brothers as sick-nurses and his choir-monks as overseers and confessors. Contributions flowed in from the rich members of the population, and the first hospital was finished in a very short time. The third contained what was an immense luxury in those days—a number of bath-rooms, open gratis to the poor on certain days, and rooms where they could be bled, as was the custom on the slightest illness. All those who came in contact with Hedwige caught her spirit of generosity, and rich men, lay and ecclesiastic, vied with her in founding churches and monasteries. Canon Nicholas of Breslau, the duke’s chancellor, obtained Henry’s leave to endow a Cistercian monastery with the estates which the duke had given him for his lifetime, and others followed his example.
These ceremonies were always solemn and the deed of gift publicly read, signed, witnessed, and sworn to. As much pomp hedged them in as was usual in a treaty of peace or the betrothal of sovereign princes; and, indeed, the foundation of churches, though a common occurrence, was looked upon as quite as important as any civil contract. In 1234 a terrible famine, fever, and pestilence decimated the land, and, among many other Silesian towns that possessed as yet no hospital, Neumarkt was in special distress. Hedwige hurried there and set on foot a temporary system of relief and nursing, but also entreated her husband to build a permanent hospital for incurables, where they might be cared for till their death. This he did, and attached to it a provostship, the church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and Pope Innocent IV. sent special blessings to the Bohemian Benedictine monks who were entrusted with the care of the sick. Four years later Henry built a church in Löwenberg and gave it to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; this was a month or two before his death. But these are only a few of the works of this generous couple. Many villages and remote places obtained benefits from them, travelling priests were cared for, young girls helped in their need and protected or dowered, many poor families housed and fed; and the famine of 1234 especially gave Hedwige an opportunity of justifying her title of “Mother of the poor.” She distributed unheard-of quantities of grain, bread, meat, and dried fruits to the people, who came for relief from long distances. She gave lavishly, with that apparent recklessness that marks the charities of saints, smilingly saying, “We must help the poor, that the Lord may have pity on our own needs and appease our own hunger.” She forgave all feudal dues for years on her own possessions, and looked after her employés so diligently that they complained that the “duchess left them nothing but the leavings of the peasants.” When she did not distribute her alms in person, the poor groaned and wept, and cared less for the charity than if it had been seasoned by her gracious presence. When Breslau was wholly burnt down in 1218, and three years’ distress fell upon the land, she did the same and relieved thousands. That year was marked by the death of the Abbess of Trebnitz, Petrussa, and the choice of Princess Gertrude as her successor, which coincided with the festival held to celebrate the entire finishing of the monastery and the dedication of the church. The religious ceremonies were followed by a banquet in the refectory and by games for the people in the courtyard. Henry was present and rejoiced with her; her son’s wife, Anna, daughter of King Ottokar of Bohemia, was there with her children, one of whom was to fill, but unworthily, the throne of Silesia. It was a family gathering as well as a religious feast; but if, as tradition says, Hedwige was then gifted with a more than ordinary insight into the future, she must have felt sad to think of the turmoil that was coming and that would part her more and more in spirit from her husband.
After the death of his second son, Conrad, Henry turned his arms against a relation of his own, Duke Ladislaus of Gnesen and Posen, and came off victorious. His old warrior-blood once again stirred in him, it was impossible to keep him from the excitement of war, and Hedwige’s entreaties and messages were of no avail. She feared the excommunication which Pope Innocent had more than once threatened to launch against the restless Polish sovereigns, and was relieved when he undertook a war against the Prussians, who at least were heathens, and whose cruelties really needed strong repression. Still, it was rather the thirst for fighting that led the Duke of Silesia against them than any exalted motive of justice or desire to open the way for their conversion.
The pretext for the expedition was the cruelties they committed on their inroads into Poland, and especially the duchy of Masovia. To attack them among their own forests and morasses was so hopelessly difficult that the bishops, whom the pope had admonished to preach a “crusade” against them, had hitherto refrained from doing so. The event proved the wisdom of this inaction; for after marching a large army over the border, under the command of Henry of Silesia and Duke Conrad of Masovia, with whom the bishops with their men-at-arms joined forces, the assailers found themselves in a network of marshes, behind which the assailed quietly waited. The wearied troops had at last to be ingloriously marched back again, while the enemy came out in their rear, made a raid into Masovia, carried off five thousand Christian captives, burnt a thousand villages and hamlets as well as almost every church in the province, and drove Duke Conrad into Germany for refuge. Henry then advised the fugitive duke to call upon the German Knights of Venice, a military order who afterwards under their grand master, Hermann Balk, settled in Kulmerland and effectually routed and conquered the Prussians. The conversion of the latter was, therefore, a feat of arms rather than a triumph of missionary zeal; and perhaps it was less to be wondered at that, after only three hundred years’ Christianity, they should have accepted another change in the shape of the Lutheran Reformation. The order itself, however, was more blamable, in that it departed, in the person of its head, the famous Albert of Brandenburg, from its old chivalric standard of honor, and went over to the “new doctrine,” as it was called, because this defection promised political independence. And, again, it strikes one, in reading of these thirteenth-century feuds, that history repeats itself; for a new religious war has sprung up between Prussia and Posen, and the two civilized races are in much the same relative positions, speaking broadly, as the two barbarous ones were then, although Posen can point to a short and dazzling career between the two eras of persecution.
It is impossible here to recount the various and sad events that led up to the death of Henry. He died in 1238, at the age of seventy, under the ban of excommunication, which was only partially removed, and deprived to the last of the presence of his saintly wife. The scene of the return of his body to the abbey church at Trebnitz was heartrending. The nuns and vassals, no less than his widow and children, looked upon him as their stay and their protector; they bewailed him with genuine grief as their benefactor, and buried him with all imaginable respect and pomp as their founder. Hedwige’s life as a widow became more penitential than before.
After her death a hair-shirt and a belt with small, sharp points turned inwards were found on her body; but these she had worn for many years before her widowhood. Her cloister-life, however, was not her only one, for she watched with intelligent interest the politics of the time, the great events, and even the less obtrusive details, whose consequences to the cause of good might afterwards be manifold; and above all she lived in her son, Henry the Pious, a worthy and able sovereign, whose reign was to be short, stormy, and glorious.
In January, 1241, the Tartars, under their chiefs Batu and Peta, having previously desolated Russia, fell with nearly three hundred thousand fighting men upon Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Poland. The King of Hungary, Bela, was beaten by Batu, while Peta besieged, took, and burnt Cracow on his way to Silesia. The King of Bohemia, Wenzel, brought as large an army as he could to defend his frontiers, while Henry gathered thirty thousand men in his father’s city of refuge, Liegnitz, waiting to attack Peta on his road to Breslau. Trebnitz was in dire confusion; monasteries always fell the first prey to the heathen invaders, and the nuns judged it prudent to scatter themselves and claim each the protection of her own family, while Hedwige, with her daughter, the Abbess Gertrude, and her daughter-in-law, Anna, shut themselves up in the strong castle of Crossen on the Oder. Before she left she gave her son a scarf, or rather sword-belt, embroidered with her own hands, which he received as an omen of good-fortune, cheering her with hopes of his speedy and victorious return, while the stricken, heroic mother feared but too surely that she should never see his face again. All Breslau retired within the citadel to await the attack, and Henry tried to intercept the foe on his way. He drew up his army on some high ground just outside the walls—Wahlstatt, a good battle-ground, as he judged—and himself gave the signal to attack the oncoming foe. He commanded the main body, while lesser brother-sovereigns directed the wings; but the irresistible might of numbers, which was the chief reliance of the Tartars, bore down all opposition, as a whirlwind does the densest forest. The Poles and Silesians fell like heroes, defending themselves and asking no quarter, until a cry arose in German, “Strike dead! strike dead!” which, whether raised by accident or by treachery, produced a panic by its likeness to the Polish word for “Fly! fly!” The army seemed literally to melt away; squadrons broke and ran, and a cloud of small, sharp Tartar arrows clove the air after them; the Asiatic cavalry hunted and trampled down the fugitives. One of the Polish leaders at last succeeded in rallying part of the troops, and the fight began again with some hopes of victory, when the enemy had resort to a kind of infernal machine used in ancient Indian warfare, the likeness of a gigantic head, which was so made as to give out a dense smoke and unbearable stench, besides being in some degree explosive. The contrivance was held by the Christians to be magical and devilish, and the Tartars themselves, so dangerous was it to those of their own men who had the handling of it, only resorted to it in the utmost extremity, which shows how hard-pressed they were on this occasion by the Silesian soldiery. But the terrible device stood them in good stead this time. The panic was renewed, and once more a wild flight and wilder pursuit took place; the leaders, the knights, and Henry himself, regardless of the flight of their followers, fought on long after they knew their fate to be hopeless and death certain. One by one the brave fellows were cut down, the little band decreased at every stroke of sword or flight of arrows, and the duke, with four knights, found himself almost alone on the lost field of battle. They urged him to try to save his life by flight; he scouted the proposal, and told them that since God had not willed that he should conquer, he would at least die. “For the faith,” he said; “at least, it will be a martyr’s death.” His charger was killed under him, and he fought on foot for some time, hewing a lane for himself through his enemies. One of his knights managed at last to bring him a fresh horse, which he had no sooner mounted than his person was recognized by hundreds of his foes and he was hemmed in on all sides. While in the act of lifting his sword to cut down a Tartar in his front, he was wounded from behind by a long lance thrust in precisely where a joint in his armor exposed the shoulder; the spear went right through and pierced the lung, and the son of Duchess Hedwige sank dying from his horse. The enemy cut off his head, and, hoisting it on a spear, paraded it before the walls of Liegnitz, summoning the defenders to surrender; but they, guarding Henry’s young sons, answered back from the battlements: “If we have lost one duke to-day, we have four yet with us in the castle, and these we will defend to the last drop of our hearts’ blood.” The next day they were relieved by King Wenzel of Bohemia, who, however, came too late to do anything but hasten the departure of the Tartar horde, which had suffered severely in the encounter, but rallied soon enough to maraud, burn, and sack churches, abbeys, villages, etc., throughout Hungary and Silesia, Bohemia and Mähren, until, one year later, Jaroslaus von Sternberg finally routed their diminished army under the walls of Olmütz. This roused Germany and France, and the Christian sovereigns combined sent a mighty army, under the command of Wenzel of Bohemia, to defend the Austro-Hungarian frontiers, whence the Tartars retreated, by the same road by which they had come, to their steppes on the high table-lands of Asia. Their traces in Europe, however, were not blotted out for half a century; the ruined churches, blackened villages, and ravaged fields long showed their awful track; and the outward work of Hedwige’s life would have been well-nigh destroyed had not the spirit she had brought with it remained alive as the germ of a future exterior restoration.
The night of the lost battle, when Henry’s headless body lay on the field, Hedwige, after a prayer of unusual length, woke her nearest friend and favorite attendant, and said to her:
“Demundis, this night I have lost my only son. He has left me as swiftly as a bird flies upwards, and I shall never look upon his face again.” She forbade her to say anything of this to the dead man’s wife and sister until some messenger from the army should bring news of the battle; and it was not till the third day that Jaroslaus von Janowitz came with the terrible tidings. Anna, Henry’s young widow, hastened to the field to seek and recover her husband’s body, which was so mutilated that she only recognized it by the six toes of the left foot. The corpse was brought to Trebnitz and buried with his father, brother, and infant sons in the abbey church. Hedwige prayed thus aloud over his grave: “O Lord! I thank thee that thou hast given me such a son, who, as long as he lived, loved and honored me truly, and never gave me an hour’s sorrow. However gladly I would have kept him by my side on earth, I hold him blessed in that, by the shedding of his blood, he is now united in heaven with thee, his Creator. With supplication, O Lord! do I commend his soul unto thee.”
Hedwige’s life and work were drawing to an end. Her last public act was one of charity to the dead and comfort to the bereaved living. The bodies of many heroic defenders of their country had been left to rot upon the field of battle. She had these gathered together and buried in consecrated ground, and ordered solemn requiems to be sung for the repose of their souls, while she made herself accessible to every sorrowing widow, mother, sister, or orphan of the dead soldiers, listened to their complaints and laments, comforted and helped them, and brought God’s peace once more into their hearts. After this she prepared herself to die. Her first care was a practical one: she set her affairs in order—a moral duty too often foolishly confounded with worldliness. Then she redoubled her devotions, and, sending for her chaplain, asked to receive Extreme Unction. He demurred, seeing no sign of death about her; but her holiness was so well known that he asked her the reason of her request.
“It is a sacrament,” she answered reverently, “which should be received in full consciousness, that we may treat it with due reverence and thankfulness; and I fear that sickness would make me receive it with little or no preparation, and would prevent me from being, as far as possible, worthy of this dying grace. I shall belong to the sick before many days are over, and I would fain be strengthened for the passage through death to the joy of meeting my God.”
Her agony was not long, but she seemed to struggle with a fear of death and of the devil’s temptations. When her daughter wished to send for Anna, she said: “No; I shall not die before she comes home” (she was then absent on a visit to her brother, King Wenzel of Bohemia). Her biographers tell us that angels and saints visited her on her death-bed. She died with the veil of her holy niece, Elizabeth of Hungary, wound round her head, and held in her hand, and often to her lips, a little ivory image of the Blessed Virgin. At the very last she was calm and peaceful, blessed her daughter and daughter-in-law, and every nun in the monastery of Trebnitz, her chosen home, and died at evening twilight, on the 15th of October, 1243. Twenty years later the clergy of Silesia, Poland, and Bohemia sent deputies to Rome to beg for her canonization, which Pope Clement IV. proclaimed almost immediately. Many miracles through her intercession were sworn to by credible witnesses, and the neighborhood blossomed with gracious and beautiful legends of the sainted duchess, the mother of the poor and the guardian angel of Silesia. The ceremony of transferring her body to a shrine in the abbey church at Trebnitz in 1268 was the occasion for a national festival; pilgrims flocked in from the remotest districts, and many foreigners came too. Sovereigns and knights, in costly robes and armor, walked in procession to her altar; lay and ecclesiastical pomp was showered upon and around her remains; but nothing of all this was so great a tribute as the memory she left, deep in the heart of the people, of a model wife, mother, mistress, and sovereign, a woman strong in principle, truthful in every word and deed, charitable yet not weak, merciful yet not sentimental, a wise, far-seeing, but tender, brave, and thoroughly womanly woman.