The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War

by Annie Heloise Abel

But you told me, that when you first read my letter, you held up your hands, and exclaimed, "What! is the man a Traitor?" And you said that not one of my friends in Little Rock, and I had, you said, a great many, pretended to justify the letter. You have never found a friend of mine, or an indifferent person, silly enough to think, like you, that it savored of treason. It is only rarely one meets a man so scantily furnished with sense as to misunderstand and pervert what is written in plain English. I was vindicating myself, and still more the Government, and persuading the Indians to remain loyal, notwithstanding the wrongs they had endured. I, too, was an officer; and my acts had been the acts of the Government. My promises to them were its promises. The procuring of supplies by me, was its act; and when, reaching or not reaching the frontier, the supplies were like the unlucky traveler, who journeyed from Jerusalem to Jericho, then the Government ceased to act, and unlicensed outrage took its place. And, further, my act was the act of the Government, when I told the Indians why they had not received their supplies and money, and vindicated that Government at the expense of those who were guilty of the act; and who having done it and reaped the profit, should not be heard to object that all the world should know what they did, nor be allowed to escape the responsibility of all the consequences.

If to tell the Indians that other Generals had wrongfully stopped

their supplies, in any degree resembled Treason, that could only be so, because it was treason to do the act. It cannot be wrong to make known what it was right and proper to do. The truth is, that the acts done were outrages, which it was desirable for the doers to conceal from the Indians. I refused to become a party to those outrages, by concealing them. I would not agree in advance to be silent, when you should repeat and improve on those outrages, and consummate what had been so felicitously begun.

I do not doubt that there are assassins wearing uniforms, who are knaves enough to pretend to read my letter as you do, and to see in it the desire of a disappointed man to be revenged, even by the ruin of his country. Power always has its pimps and catamites. These would no doubt gladly have made my letter the means of murdering me by that devilish engine of Military despotism, a Military commission, that is ordered to preserve no records. You, I think really look upon it with alarm. It is, no doubt, very desirable to you, that the blame of losing the Indian Country, which, if not already a fact accomplished, is a fact inevitable, should be made to fall upon me. You, as the pliant and useful implement of Gen. Hindman, are the cause of this loss; and you know I can prove it. You and he have left nothing undone, that could be done, to lose it. And you may rest assured, that whether I live or die, you shall not escape one jot or tittle of the deep damnation to which you are richly entitled for causing a loss so irretrievable, so astounding, so unnecessary and so fatal, and one which it will be impossible to excuse as owing to ignorance and stupidity. No degree of these misfortunes, can be pleaded in bar of judgment. You will have forced the Indians to go to the North for protection. You will have given away their country to the enemy. You will have turned their arms against us. You will have done this by disobeying the orders of your Government, continuing the courses it condemned, and to put an end to which it sent you out here; by falsifying its pledges and promises, taking for others' uses the moneys which it sent out to pay the Indians, robbing them of the clothing sent by it to cover their nakedness, and thus thrusting aside all the considerations of common honesty, of justice, of humanity, and even of policy, expediency and common sense.

When Mr. C.B. Johnson agreed, in September to loan your Quartermaster at Little Rock, $350,000 of the money he was

conveying to Major Quesenbury, the Quartermaster of the Department of Indian Territory, you promised him that it should be repaid to Major Quesenbury as soon as you should receive funds, and before he would have disposed of the remaining million. You got the money by means of that promise; and you did not keep the promise. On the contrary, by an order that reached Fort Smith three hours before Mr. Johnson did, you compelled Major Quesenbury, the moment he received the money, to turn every dollar of it, over to a Commissary at Fort Smith; and it was used to supply the needs of Gen. Hindman's troops; when the Seminoles, fourteen months in the service have never been paid a dollar; and the Chickasaw and Choctaw Battalion, and Chilly McIntosh's Creeks, each corps a year and more in the service, have received only $45,000 each, and no clothing. Was this violation of your promise, the act of the Government?

To replace the clothing I had procured for the Indians in December, 1861, and which, with near 1,000 tents, fell into the hands of the troops of Generals Price and Van Dorn, I sent an agent, in June, to Richmond, who went to Georgia, and there procured some 6,500 suits, with about 3,000 shirts and 3,000 pairs of drawers, and some two or three hundred tents. These supplies were at Monroe early in September; and the Indians were informed that they and the moneys had been procured and were on the way. The good news went all over their country, as if on the wings of the wind; and universal content and rejoicing were the consequences.

The clothing reached Fort Smith; and its issue to Gen. Hindman's people commenced immediately. I sent a Quartermaster for it and he was retained there. If any of it has ever reached the Indians, it has been only recently, and but a small portion of it.