Native Americans The Civil War example essay topic

People have been living in the Americas for thousands of years. Only fairly recently, the past few hundred years, have foreigners begun to arrive and drastically disrupt the way of life of the aboriginal population. The situation has become so severe that a population that was one believed to be numbered in the millions, was at one point reduced to as few as 220,000 in 1910, and entire tribes have been either irretrievably warped or have disappeared altogether. While Native American Indians have almost completely recovered population-wise, they will never catch up to the rest of the world, and their culture can never fully recuperate. At the time the United States was settled by Europeans, it was abundantly populated by dozens of separate nations with diverse civilizations and cultures.

Like other colonized regions, the indigenous people suffered first from the introduction of diseases that were common in the regions that the settlers were from, to which the Indians had no immunity. It is believed that millions died of smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and influenza. Some estimate that such epidemics were responsible for more than 80 million deaths during the early colonial period alone. Although The Indians numbers were never accurately recorded (estimates have ranged from in the low millions to as much as around a hundred million) it is certain that they are far from a complete recovery. For nearly 300 years the population of Native Americans had been declining, since shortly after Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere to a while after the civil war.

But starting in the beginning of the 20th century the United States census bureau has reported an almost continuous increases in native populations (with some exceptions, notably an influenza epidemic that occurred in 1918). Despite these promising statistics the population of Native Americans is only a small fraction (0.8 percent) of the hundreds of millions of other inhabitants in the United States. Despite their initial confusion to their situation after the arrival of Europeans, the Native Americans did not take their disenfranchisement from their own land lying down. Native Americans have a long history of 'fighting back' against invaders encroaching on the land that they had lived on for as long as they could remember. Although there was never a complete and outright war between the Indians and the white settlers, there have been countless battles fought between many different forces which the Indians were involved in. Before the arrival of white people to the continent, Native Americans still engaged in war between the various different tribes.

Their reasons for fighting each other were drastically different than the reasons they had when fighting non-Indians. Some Native American battles were fought for revenge. The most common cause of war between Native American groups was probably to defend or enlarge tribal territory. Later, their conflicts with white people were fought for trying to prevent the theft of their land, or in raids for food and supplies they were denied.

There have been many famous clashes between Indians and the United States government. On November 4th 1791, In what is considered the worst ever defeat administered by Indians to U.S. troops more than 600 soldiers were killed by a force of mostly Shawnees and other Indians. The cause of the conflict was settlers moving into the Indian's land in large numbers, ignoring Indians rights and demanding military protection if the Indians opposed them. This kind of situation was the cause for many of the largest fights with Native Americans, for example the battle of little big horn (otherwise known as Custer's last stand) in which Indians that were ready for the arrival of the Calvary killed every soldier under General Custer's command. A battle which United States citizens viewed as a horrible attack by savage Indians, but was actually self defense. The closest event to a war that the Indians have experienced (and won) was the war for the Bozeman trail.

From 1866 through 1868, in Montana and Wyoming, under the command of Chief Red Cloud great forces of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho faced off against The United States Military. This great victory of the Indians was formalized in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Much of the violence that Indians were involved in could not be considered battles. Native Americans have been slaughtered in great numbers, both from direct combat and more subtle ways. In one of the most terrible examples of this in history the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo besieged Fort Pitt and attacked the Pennsylvania frontier with a series of raids which killed 600 settlers. In desperation, Amherst (the British military commander in North America) wrote the commander at Fort Pitt (Captain Simeon Ecuyer) suggesting he deliberately attempt to infect the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo besieging his fort with gifts of smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs.

Ecuyer took this as an order and did exactly that. It proved particularly effective because the Ohio tribes had little immunity having missed the 1757-58 epidemic among the French allies contracted during the capture of Fort William Henry (New York). The Shawnee were fighting the Cherokee in Tennessee at the time, and they carried the disease to them, and then the Shawnee living with the Creek Confederacy. From there it spread to the Chickasaw and Choctaw, and finally the entire southeast. Before it had run its course, the epidemic had killed thousands, including British colonists. Many of the engagements between Indians and the US government are no more than mass murders.

In a massacre in which over 300 Native Americans were killed, mostly women and children, the general attitude of the United States felt of it as a sort of justified retribution for previous events (like Custer's last stand) in which Indians killed US soldiers. After the battle an army investigator concluded 'The Indians brought on their own destruction as surely as any people ever did. ' and later the press expressed the sentiment 'There is nothing to conceal or apologize for in the Wounded Knee battle'. The battle of Wounded Knee (if it can be considered a battle) is perhaps the last of the major events in which a great many Indians were slaughtered (others include incidents like the Chivington massacre), but in a way it was also the end of the Indians resistance to the US government. Before the outbreak of the Civil War the position of the Cherokees, and for that matter, all the Five Civilized Tribes (which were The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations), was unique.

They were reported as capable of making treaties with the United States, they negotiated directly with special United States agents, with various departments of the Federal government and with Congress. No state occupied such a position. The strategic location of the Cherokee nation made it peculiarly difficult for the Cherokees as a whole to join either the North or the South. Cherokee History for three-quarters of a century was filled with complexities, both domestic and those arising from Federal relations. The Domestic problems, for a number of years preceding the Civil War, demanded the attention of the nations' most capable men. When those problems were brought near solution the Indians were forced into that struggle between the states which was no quarrel of their own.

Statistics show that just under 3,600 Native Americans served in the Union Army during the war. Perhaps the best known of their number was Colonel Ely Parker, who served as an aide to General U.S. Grant, and was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. Statistics for the Confederacy are not reliably available, but most scholars of Native American involvement in the actual fighting of the war are very well acquainted with the major Southern figure among them: Brigadier General Chief Stand Watie. Stand Watie was a three-quarter blood Cherokee who was born in December 1806 near what would become Rome, Georgia. He was one of the signers of a treaty that agreed to the removal of the Cherokee from their home in Georgia to what was then the Oklahoma territory. This split the tribes into two factions, and Stand Watie became the leader of the minority party.

While the war was raging back East, out in the West things were seldom quiet or peaceful. Statistics show that nearly 90 engagements were fought by U.S. troops in the West during the war, most of them involving Native American tribes people. From January to May 1863, there were almost continuous fights in the New Mexico territory, as part of a concerted effort by the Federal government to contain and control the Apache. During the period of 1861 to 1865, Native Americans all over the continent were struggling for autonomy, as peoples with their own organization, culture, and life-style. Some tribes (like the Cherokees) were directly involved in the war. Other Native Americans living in the war-torn areas of the East made individual decisions as to whether they wished to have anything to do with the situation.

And others, living in the mountains, prairies, and deserts of the rest of the country, suddenly realized they had a chance to take back some of their own land, as they saw fewer and fewer U.S. Army soldiers assigned to forts in their tribal areas. For Native Americans the Civil War could best be viewed as a vessel for the Beginning of better integration into the new United States government and culture. After the Civil War, although so little remained of their once vast civilization, Native Americans were beginning to make a recovery. Despite a long history of disease, broken treaties, and constant removal from their own land Native Americans can finally focus within their own society to try to rebuild what they have lost. Although they may never fully recover, Native American Indians are at the best position they have ever been in since their exposure foreign influences. Bibliography

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