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About The Conservative (Nebraska City, Neb.) 1898-1902 | View Entire Issue (April 27, 1899)
4 Che Conservative * AUK OUK HANDS CI.KAN ? ( Written for TUB CONKBHVATIVK ) . Under above heading , in The Outlook , of Jan uary 28 , the Bev B. D. Mcf'onnell attempts to refute thn assertion "That this nation's treatment of the Indian and negro demon strates our inability to govern that class of people. " It is not a pleasant task to enumer ate the short-comings of either j our family or nation , but believing that just such gusli as that of McCounell lias ever blinded our people to their needs and deeds , I make an attempt to answer by simply repeating a few historical facts. Draper Bays : "The clergy will yet have to appear before the bar of civiliz ation to answer for having taught the Southern women that slavery was a divine institution. " I fear that the Rev. S. D. McConnell will have to appear at the same bar , to make answer for his attempt to make his so-called "race su periority" an excuse for robbery and barbarity. The records of the interior and war departments and the testimony of thousands of such men as Washing ton , General Wool , Scott , Lincoln , Sec retary Stautou , General Cooke and Bishop Whipple amply sustain me in using the words "robbery and bar barity. " In 1862 when Bishop Whipple went to Washington to intercede for the Indians Secretary Stan ton said to a friend , "What does the Bishop want ? If he came here to tell us that our Indian sys tem is a sink of iniquity , tell him we all know it. Tell him the United States never cures a wrong until the people de mand it ; and when the hearts of the people are reached the Indian will be saved. " How could the hearts of the people be reached when the Rev. McConnells were saying : "If , however , the practical , which obtains among good men , bo ap plied to our conduct in these particu lars , we may not , in my judgment , fear the scrutiny of the world. " If the "good" men of the nation could thus sustain the violation of every treaty and the cruel starvation and use less slaughter of the Indians ( and use less slaughter of white men , for it was ten white men to every Indian killed and there was also a useless expenditure of money as every Indian lulled cost one hundred thousand dollars each ) what could wo expect from the rest of the nation ? McConnell says : "Tho Indians had no ownership in the land in the way we understand the term. " In every treaty by which England , Franco and Spain convoyed territory to us wo find this clause : "Subject to the Indian right of occupancy , " and every treaty that we made with the Indians plainly acknowl edges the Indian's right of possession ; this was the judgment of the statesmen of all nations and very strenuously in sisted upon by those of our own. McConnell lays great streps upon "tho superiority of the white , " and the "sav agery of the Indian. " Any man who has had a few years' experience upon any police force will tell you that it is morally impossible to get any lower than the white man in brutish acts and licentiousnessand the majority of these , whoso acts would make a hog blush , are not from the tramp and laboring class , but educated sons and daughters of those who were enabled to give their children too much leisure. Can the Reverend McConnell give us a record of any Indian massacre more brutal ( or half as treacherous ) than the massacre of the Indians by the whites at Sand Creek ? The Indian scalpers of colonial times are cited to prove the Indians brutal , but they always fail to tell us how England , France and the colonists got to bidding so high for scalps. Massachusetts at one time paid premiums of one hundred pounds per scalp. Was the white man superior in these transactions ? Has the cool , calculating murderer , too cowardly to do his own murdering , much to brag of ? Seventy thousand Union soldiers died in the rebel prisons , and fifty-eight thousand of them were starved to death. So systematic was this , many men of our brigade captured in March , 1805 , were dead from starvation before the surrender of April 9. One regiment of our brigade , the Twenty- fourth Michigan , had 15J8 men so starved in these white man's hells , 539 of them died there , 9 soon after released , and 85 made physical wrecks ; some without anna , some without legs and feet that they had lost by slow , agon izing rot. A member of that regiment has thus truthfully expressed himself : "Savages of the forest and cannibals of the sea isles never exhibited greater cruelties to captives than the Confeder ates did to their prisoners of war. * * * * * * "As martyr fires emblazon the deeds of fanaticism and bigotry , and burnings at the stake lighten up the forest darkness of the savages , so the records of South ern prison pens disclose the enormities of slavery's influence , which read like pages from the history of hell. " Can the Reverend McConuell recall any act of savagery on the part of the Indians equal to the torture of this slow starvation and rot where men ate the flesh from their own limbs ? But the Southern people were not the only ones that slavery and years of other wrong-doing had made indifferent to the misery of their fellows , for , in spite of a mighty mass of earnest and pathetic appeals from relatives and friends of prisoners the Union general ordered the exchange of prisoners stopped upon the ground "that our men had been so ill-treated it would take mouths to get them in shape to return to the ranks , while the exchanged rcbs could fall in. at once. " And at this time the Union general had over 100,000 men and was confronted by but 117,000. And , mind you , we were far from having exhausted our resources. ' Wisconsin alone had 130,000 men liable for military duty , and up to this time but 60,000 had enlisted , while the rebs had exhausted "the cradle and the grave" and were discussing the arming of the blacks. McCounell asserts that the Indian can not be civilized. If it is a civilization founded on equal rights , as taught by Christ , I t-ay he can , for the Indian has given ample proof. The white man's whiskey , often forced upon him , and the destruction of the Indian's churches , school houses , implements of toil and farms , by our government and people , time and again and again , is the cause of his failure. Every one who has lived among the Indians for any length of time , say they are honest. I have a brother-in-law who has been running two stores in the Indian territory for years and ho says , "I never lost a dollar by an Indian , and , on the other hand , white men have held up my Tulsa store twice. " McConnell would have us believe that this nation has done better by the Ind ians than any other. How does he account for Canada not having any Indian wars ? In all English-Indian treaties they are addressed as ' 'the In dian subjects of her Majesty" and the promises contained in those treaties are rigidly kept , hence the English govern ment has been obliged to expend only one dollar to our one hundred dollars. Bishop Whipple tells a good story , il lustrating our superiority in well-doing. "When officers and men went to take possession of Alaska , after the purchase , one of the officers happened to enter the Greek church and saw on the altar a beautiful copy of the Gospels in a costly binding studded with jewels. He called upon the Greek bishop and said , 'Your Grace , I called to say you had better remove that copy of the Gospels from the church , for it may be stolen. ' The bishop replied , 'Why should I remove it ? It was a gift from the mother of the emperor , and has lain on the altar for seventy years. ' The officer blushed and said , 'There is no law in the Indian country and I was afraid it might be stolen. ' The bishop said , 'The book is in God's house , and it is His book and it shall not be taken away. ' The book remained , the country became ours and the next day the Gospel was stolen. " Even the "bloody Spaniard" of whom wo hear so much , could teach us much in regard to the governing of Indians. In their conquest of Mexico they no doubt intended the Indian's enslave ment , but , when they found the Indian preferred death to slavery , they pro ceeded to educate him , and , about the time our forefathers were burning old women for witchcraft , whipping young women from town to town at the cat's tail because they wore quakoresses , and paying one hundred pounds each for scalps , the Spaniard was building