Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Lincoln shared the biases of his generation. According to Lincoln the Indians were savages, while the white man was civilized. In spite of the Civil War, Lincoln noted, white men generally shunned war and sought peace, while the “redmen” were disposed to fight and kill one another. Christianity was superior to any Indian religion. They were an inferior, vanishing people who were destined to be pushed aside by white Americans. Like the Minnesota voters who decried slavery in the southern states, he was silent about the degradation and exploitation of America’s Native Americans. Like his protagonist Frémont, he closed his eyes to the plight of the Indian.⁷⁸

Yet the memory of Lincoln was that of “the Great Emancipator.” Shortly after Lincoln’s death, Kirby Benedict, a federal judge in the Territory of New Mexico, wrote a eulogy to President Abraham Lincoln. It ended with these words: “The voice of the blood of Abraham Lincoln will never cry in vain to Heaven from the free ground upon which it has been shed.”⁷⁹ Lincoln was the author of one of the most important documents in the history of the American Republic. His leadership during the Civil War in which he destroyed the institution of Black slavery and preserved the Union at all costs made Lincoln a great statesman. Not only did Lincoln, a grieving father, manage affairs on the domestic front, he also gave to Mexico material and manpower that enabled Benito Juárez and his Republican Army to defeat the imperial armies of France and Austria. In this latter sense Lincoln was not only a great national leader, but was an important international figure as well.⁸⁰ Yet, and unfortunately, from the point of view of many Indians “the Great White Father” was ultimately just another politician.