The War-Treaty Ratio

Jesse Walker | June 29, 2005

In yesterday's New York Times, John Tierney summarizes an argument I first encountered in Terry Anderson's book Sovereign Nations or Reservations?:

As the economists Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney have documented, the downfall of the American Indians correlates neatly with the rise of two federal bureaucracies.

The first was the standing army established during the Mexican War of the 1840's. Before then, settlers who wanted Indian land usually had to fight for it themselves or rely on local militias, so they were inclined to look for peaceful solutions. From 1790 to 1840, the number of treaties signed with Indians each decade far exceeded the number of battles with them.

But during the next three decades there were more battles than treaties, and after the Army's expansion during the Civil War the number of battles soared while treaties ceased. Settlers became an adept special interest lobbying for Washington to seize Indian land for them. For military leaders, the "Indian problem" became a postwar rationale for maintaining a large force; for officers like Custer, battles were essential for promotions and glory.

Indians no longer had any bargaining power, and they were powerless to resist the troops that avenged Custer's death. They were consigned to reservations and ostensibly given land, but it was administered by another bureaucracy, the agency that would grow into what's now the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Comments

|6.29.05 @ 10:54AM|#

For the serious egghead, a nice bibliography here on the ambivalences of our great federalizing figure of the 19th century viewed war and Indians.

http://campus.lakeforest.edu/~ebner/mackiag/Bibliographies.html

|6.29.05 @ 10:59AM|#

You mean that the presence of a standing army creates the tendency to use it as a first resort?

Gee, I bet our founders never thought of that :)

|6.29.05 @ 11:28AM|#

Special interest lobbies and a shifty bureaucracy controlling a powerful military force had tragic results? That's shocking!

drf|6.29.05 @ 11:43AM|#

What about the land snatched for the William J LePetomaine Hospital for the Gambling Insane?

It just cost a box of those warped paddle games!

|6.29.05 @ 11:59AM|#

RE: "Settlers became an adept special interest lobbying for Washington to seize Indian land for them."

Post-Kelo formulation, let:
Settlers = Developers;
Washington = Local bureaucrats;
Indian land = Private property.

|6.29.05 @ 12:11PM|#

The Trail of Tears was pre-1840.

fyodor|6.29.05 @ 12:13PM|#

Would developers still be able to seize private property without a standing army? :-)

|6.29.05 @ 12:31PM|#

fyodor,

Possibly, with enough hired goons. The standing army used now is the police force.

Jesse Walker|6.29.05 @ 12:33PM|#

The Trail of Tears was pre-1840.

A lot of atrocities were pre-1840. Anderson's argument is that the expansion of the military following the Mexican War (and again following the Civil War) radically changed the ratio of peaceful agreements to violent conflicts, not that the conflicts didn't exist beforehand.

|6.29.05 @ 1:13PM|#

Tierney states that the "Indians no longer had any bargaining power," when discussing the shift in policy post-1840, but I don't see him mention any bargaining power pre-1940. Settlers still wanted the land, and only their lack of overwhelming force kept them from taking it. Wouldn't that tension have kept on building no matter what? I understand that an army needing something to do greatly accelerated the process, but does Anderson argue that the treaties would have held had the army not undergone a rapid expansion?

Anon

|6.29.05 @ 1:47PM|#

Perhaps another explanation would be that the treaties were exploitative instruments of theft, whose paltry pro-Indian features were violated at will, and that the rise of a military presence in the West, post 1840, was a consequence of the Indians' getting wise and refusing to sign onto their own exploitation.

|6.29.05 @ 4:14PM|#

I don't buy it. Lots of unsavory Indian-European conflict occured during the colonial period when English imperial bureaucrats conducted "benign neglect" and let Americans run their own affairs in small government terms. Small government didn't impede serious conflict any more than a large federal government encouraged it.

|6.29.05 @ 11:29PM|#

I don't see the evidence for a preponderance of "peaceful settlements" prior to the 1840's - the reason the early 1800's were relatively peaceful was that most of the most potent Indian tribes (the Iroquois, Pontiac's confederation, etc.) had been smashed by British or colonial forces in the 1760's and 1770's. The last major Eastern Indian campaigns were waged predominantly by militia forces (Tippecanoe in 1811, the Battle of the Thames in 1813). There were plenty of treaties signed between 1790 and 1840, but most of them were violated before the ink was dry, and the Indians no longer had the power to resist.

The US Army in the 1840's was a joke, the Mexican War notwithstanding - the Regular Army numbered only 9,000 - 10,000 men in 1845, and even on the eve of the Civil War had only risen to 16,000. There was plenty of campaigning against the Comanche in Texas and the Plains Indians, but on the whole the Indians gave as good as they got before 1860. There's no question that the US Army acted as an agent of "Manifest Destiny" after the Civil War, but it was a symptom, not the cause - the Indians were grossly outnumbered by the influx of white settlers, and given the tenor of the time they would have eventually been dispossessed had every bluecoat stayed in barracks without firing a shot.

|6.30.05 @ 3:53PM|#

Enjoy Terry Anderson's arguments; not sure of their blanket applicability.

Take the Southwest. Here the main trade was in women and children captives to be used as domestic slaves by Indians and Hispanics both. The lack of military power meant anyone could get a few friends together and raid the other side. The book to read is James Brooks, Captives and Cousins.

It was the presence of the US military during and after the Civil War that put an end to this human trade, at a large cultural cost to Indians and Hispanics.