Betrayal at Little Bighorn

Custer’s Last Stand on Little Bighorn could have been adverted if his subordinates had followed their orders. On June 25, 1876, Major Marcus Reno failed in his duty as a soldier and allowed Custer and his men to be massacred by Lakota and Cheyanne warriors. 

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer received some intelligence that a Lakota/Cheyanne village was nearby. It was also made clear by Custer’s scouts that their army had been detected by the Indians. With the element of surprise lost, Custer decided to divide his army into four segments: “the pack train with ammunition and supplies, a three company force (123) commanded by Captain Frederick Benteen, a three company force (140) command by Major Marcus Reno, and a five company force (210) commanded by Custer.”¹ The pack train would stay back while the three other segments would advance on the enemy.

It was intended that all three waves would converge on the Indian village. Reno would meet with strong resistance after crossing the Ash Creek. Reno attempted to hold the line by dismounting his troops and setting up a skirmish line. As the Lakota and Cheyenne pressed the attack, Reno would be forced to retreat with his men. Many of the U.S. troops would be shot and pulled off their horses by the Indian warriors. 

Reno would regroup on top of steep bluffs to the east of Custer’s engagement with the warriors. Benteen would encounter no Indians to the south and would join Reno’s men. These officers would receive word from Custer, “Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Brings Packs. P.S. Bring Packs.”² By this point, it was clear to Reno and his men that Custer had engaged the enemy. “Firing was heard far away to the north-ward. It was heavy and continuous. There could be but one explanation of it. Custer’s detachment had at last met the Indians and was engaged.”³ Reno would order no charge or give any support to Custer.

The four hundred men under the command of Major Reno “felt…that Custer was in grave jeopardy”⁴ and understood that they needed to support their commander immediately. Captain Weir, who led D Troop, attempted to support Custer without asking permission. Weir would advance his men to the point where they could see Custer waving his hat encouraging them to bring reinforcements.⁵ Custer must have expected then that his message was received and expected that his men would soon reinforce his attack upon the Indians.

After the fact, Major Reno would be criticized for his actions on that day. During a court of inquiry, Custer’s demise would be blamed on Reno’s “indecision and tardiness.”⁶ Evidence proved that Reno gave no attempt to support Custer’s attack. Reno failed to hold his position and attack on the Indians in the timber (where he failed to hold or advance his line) and was implied as a “coward.”⁷ The court also expressed that Reno was “lying when he testified that he had not heard Custer’s gunfire downriver.”⁸

Private Peter Thompson, a private at the battle, would say of Reno: “As I stood looking at him I could not help wondering if he knew what his duty was...he kept himself in a hole where there was no danger of being struck and no doubt would have pulled the hole in after him if he could and if he even dreamed that by so doing he could have increased his security.”⁹

Custer may have been arrogant and one of the most photographed men in the nineteenth century, but he was not an idiot. He went into the battle against the Lakota and Cheyenne with a plan. It is unclear however, if Reno had followed orders and had not been a coward if that would have prevented Custer and his men from the same fate. It is possible that all of Custer’s men might have perished that day if Reno had reinforced his command officer. But one thing is clear; Custer was indeed betrayed by his Major, Marcus Reno.

Notes:

1.       National Park Service. The Battle of the Little Bighorn. November 18, 2013. http://www.nps.gov/libi/historyculture/index.htm (accessed November 28, 2013).

2.       Ibid.

3.       Ibid.

4.       Brady, Cyrus Townsend. "War With the Sioux." Pearson's Magazine, July 1904: 280.

5.       Ibid, p. 281.        

6.       Donovan, James. "A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn, the Last Great Battle of the American West." 377. New York: Back Bay Book/Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

7.       Ibid.

8.       Ibid.

9.       Thompson, Peter. "Thompson's Narrative of the Little Big Horn." By Walt Cross, 79. Stillwater: Cross Publications, 2007.

Reconstruction - Terror Begets Terror

When discussing the Reconstruction period, most will paint the South as ignorant racists and nothing else. There is always a cause and effect to all things. What would lead the people of the South to such racial hostilities?

Terror begets terror. Opposition and violent hostility grew out of chaos. With the emancipation of the slaves set in motion, life in the South was changing; however, other aspects of Southern life did not return to any sort of normalcy after Lee’s surrender. 

As Confederate soldiers were returning home from the war, they were finding more than emancipated slaves; they were coming home to tremendous confusion and disorder. Governmental order was nonexistent outside of some larger cities and near Federal troops. “The people were forbidden to take steps toward setting up any kind of government.”¹

The South became a lawless land were “Federal and Confederate deserters, and bushwhackers and outlaws of every description”² were free to roam and terrorize. Hard and despite times create environments where horrible crimes occur. Murders and “outrages upon women were frequent.”³ Thieves would prey upon the defenseless.

Want for food was great. What the war had not already consumed or what the Federal army had not confiscated, the thieves would steal from the Southern farmers. Southern mothers began to trade sex with Federal troops, so that their poor children would not starve to death.⁴

The Freedmen’s Bureau would only intensify the resentful feelings between the white Southerners and the ex-slaves. Northerners would teach the ex-slaves that the Southerner “was naturally unfriendly to him.”⁵

Logically, the poorest whites without land of their own welcomed the emancipation of the slaves in hopes that they could become wage workers on the labor less farms; however, the competition for employment would create some friction between the two groups.    

Rumors would circulate that the Union League would confiscate the property of the white land owners and redistribute them among the ex-slaves.⁶ The cotton fraud of 1865—where private cotton was confiscated as “Confederate government cotton” and the proceeds of the sales divided up by Federal agents—took advantage of Southerners after the war.⁷ The cotton tax of 1865-1868 would take “$70,000,000 from the cotton farmers [both white and black] of the South.”⁸ Refusal of congressional representation of the Southern states and the Reconstruction Acts would generate a belief among Southerners that they were being “persecuted by the Washington government.”⁹

 

Many Confederate soldiers, who received a pardon at Appomattox, felt that their treatment in the years following the war was in violation of the terms of their surrender.  Even Robert E. Lee admitted that he would not have surrendered to Grant had he known how the South would be treated in the post war years.  Lee expressed his feelings to Texas Governor Fletcher Stockdale on the matter: “Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been nor surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”¹⁰

In light of the circumstances after the war, it is easy to see how desperation could have forced Southerners into continuing their war against the North through a campaign of terror. The North had backed a wounded animal into a corner and it lashed out against them. 

Notes:

1.       Fleming, Walter Lynwood. "Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama." 654. New York: The Columbia University Press, 1905.

2.       Ibid.

3.       Ibid.

4.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 205. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

5.       Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabma, p. 654.

6.       Ibid, p. 655.

7.       Woodman, Harold D. "King Cotton and his Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925." 238. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

8.       Woodman, Harold D. " Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Miltary, Social, Religious, Educational & Industrial - 1865 to the Present Time, Volume I." 5. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906.

9.       Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabma, p. 655.

10.    DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 201.

 

Lincoln’s Imperialistic Reconstruction of the South

The North did not abandon the battle for Reconstruction. The goal of Reconstruction was to reunify the South to the federal government and to deny the political rights of all Southern men (since the right to vote for all women was already denied), who had fought against them during the War of Northern Aggression. Once their goals were met, they promptly left the South to pursue their Republican Party agenda of imperialism.

On April 12, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The War for Southern Independence was officially over. The ragged and exhausted Confederate soldiers would start their long journeys back to their war-torn homes and starving families. The war was over and it was time for the victors to claim their prize, rewrite history, and to commence with the Reconstruction.

First and foremost, Abraham Lincoln’s goal in fighting the war was clarified to Horace Greely when he said, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”¹ In order to “save the Union” to the extent that Lincoln desired, he choose to destroy slavery. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”² Reconstruction was just an extension of his ultimate goal, “to preserve the Union.”

To be readmitted to the Union, each Southern State, which had legally seceded from the federal government in 1861, needed “10 percent of the number of [their] state’s citizens eligible to vote in 1860 [to swear] an oath of allegiance to the Union.”³ This was known as Lincoln’s 10 Percent Plan. Since all women, white or black, were ineligible to vote and the Northern government would restrict all Confederate men who had fought against the Union and central government not to vote, the North freed hundreds of thousands of previously unregistered voters—the slaves. If Lincoln’s “10 Percent Plan” was going to work, he had no choice but to free the slaves.

Good to his word, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party did what they needed to “preserve the Union,” by freeing all the slaves with the 13th Amendment. Part of the readmission requirements for the Confederate States was to ratify the amendment. Now with the black males free from their chains of slavery, the North set out to quickly register them for the Republican vote. These “Union Leagues” registering the ex-slaves would take tax payer’s money from the citizens of all political parties to only register only Republican voters.⁴ In true political fashion, these federal agents promised the ex-slaves many things, “including the property of white Southerners;” but the ex-slaves would be forced to register only for the Republican Party, and no other.⁵ Clearly, during the Reconstruction period, a vote opposing the Republican Party would only lead to punishment for both the white or black man.  

The federal agents in the war-torn South would focus their energies most on voter registration, over the other necessities of life. There would be others who came to the South to help the ex-slaves integrate into society, like missionaries, abolitionists, and other freedmen; however, “the primary concern of the Party of Lincoln was to get these ex-slaves registered to vote Republican, not to educate them, feed them, or help them find employment.”⁶ The purpose of Reconstruction was intended to strengthen the central government and its power, not civil rights.

If the war was for civil rights or social equality, then the North should have extended the right to vote to everyone, to include women white or black, but they did not. “Voters in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas refused to extend the right to vote to blacks in 1867 and 1868.”⁷ It would not be until 1920 that women would be given the right to vote in America. The North simply wanted 10 percent of the population to vote their Southern State back into the Union as quickly as possible, so that they could push forward with their imperialistic agenda. The Republican Party was not in the South to help race relations, but did more to create a divide between the white and black races.

The educational programs provided by the federal government and the teaching of the Northerner’s view (or revisionist history) created the hostile racial tensions in the South. One Yankee myth was that the war was fought due to Southern reluctance to free their slaves; and that this reluctance motivated the North to invade the South for humanitarian reasons. The educated Southerner knew that slavery was dying gradually and would soon end in the South as it had in other nations before the War Between the States. Jefferson Davis commented on this fallacy by saying:

War was not necessary to the abolition of slavery. Years before the agitation began at the North and the menacing acts to the institution, there was a growing feeling all over the South for its abolition. But the abolitionists of the North, both by publications and speech, cemented the South and crushed the feeling in favor of emancipation. Slavery could have been blotted out without the sacrifice of brave men and without the strain which revolution always makes upon established forms of government. I see it stated that I uttered the sentiment, or indorsed it, that “slavery is the corner stone of the Confederacy.” That is not my utterance.”⁸

The North had to justify their war of imperialism and invasion into the sovereign Southern States. If Southerners were not indoctrinated to believe that they were at fault and sinners of an immoral act, they might attempt to stop the North from committing their political plundering of their States. Not only had the North won the war to preserve the Union, after the war they had a wonderful opportunity to mold Southern state Constitution’s through their rule of puppet military governments. The seeds of modern day waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds and resources can be traced back to the Republican operations in the South during this period. Their first plundering came in the form of expanded budgets of the state and local governments.⁹ These acts would steal money right out of the tax payer’s pockets.

The expenses of the governments were largely increased; offices were multiplied in all departments; salaries were made more worthy of the now regenerated and progressive commonwealths; costly enterprises were undertaken….The result of all this was promptly seen in an expansion of state debts and an increase of taxation that to the property-owning class were appalling and ruinous.¹⁰

One example of their destructive programs of consumption can be seen in the Louisiana legislature. While the limited government-minded Jeffersonians were running the state legislature before the war, it would only cost the tax payers about $100,000 a year to run; however, after the war, the Republicans managed to raise the costs over $1 million, “because of lavish spending on lunches, alcohol, women’s apparel, and even coffins.”¹¹

 

 

At this time, no taxpayer was safe from Northern plunder, especially the taxes on property rights. Property taxes were increased to incredible amounts, so that the taxman could confiscate Southern landowner’s property for “unpaid taxes” with ease.¹² This would make it easy for the government to secure properties to push forward with their internal improvement projects to build roads, canals, and railroads.

The Republican Party would institute government subsidies that would benefit the corporations and lead to the same “internal improvement” projects that were outlawed by Southern state Constitutions before the war. Ruinous mismanagement of government funds for internal improvement projects like those that had failed in the 1830s throughout the nation, would indebt the South further. Railroad subsides alone would generate tremendous debt for the ex-Confederate states in the sum of $132 million.¹³ Naturally, these projects would be mismanaged and would be subject to waste, fraud, and abuse of tax payer’s money.

To further perpetuate misinformation and the Yankee myths that they were right in their actions during the Reconstruction period, they would destroy freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment. Just as the Adams Administration destroyed the people’s rights to free speech with the Sedition Act of 1798, the Republican Party would resurrect a similar measure designed to prohibit “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the federal government”¹⁴ or its operations in South. The Republicans would subsidize newspapers to promote their corrupt system and censor the truth from the public.¹⁵ Republican newspaper monopolies would surface in many towns throughout the South, which would in effect be an extension “Lincoln’s policy of censoring or shutting down opposition newspapers in the North during the war.”¹⁶  

With no Confederate army or white voters available to oppose the corporate welfare programs, government expansions, increased budgets, and tyrannical rule of the federal government in the South, these programs and laws would be easily enforced. By the 1870s, the North had molded the Southern States into their own image by removing their laws against corporate welfare programs and to abolish slavery (to free up the vote). The South had been forced back into the Union; and through propaganda and brain washing, the falsehood that a state had no right to secede from the Union had been solidified into the minds of rising generation of Southerners. They had been indoctrinated to believe that the war was their fault; and that the war would not have occurred, if it was not for their immoral acts of slavery. Southerners were enslaved to the federal government through massive debt. The deteriorating race relations were a result of Republican policies to preserve the Union; thus, once their mission to reunify the nation was complete, the Reconstruction ended and they left the South. There was no abandonment of the Reconstruction policies or programs, the mission was simply over.

The modern student of American history, who reads the Republican Party’s propaganda from the Reconstruction period justifying their actions for the war and subsequent clean up in the South, will easily mistake the Republican Party’s departure from the South without ensuring racial equality as an abandonment of the Reconstruction. The North did not care about the ex-slave, but simply used them as pawns to guarantee their votes, in order to reconstruct the South in their own image. The North had to suppress the vote of the white ex-Confederates to be successful. The federal government has maintained this façade through control of the national education program and the media. The corruption and plundering that befell the South after the war, which was aided by the ex-slave’s votes and their manipulation, would be the factor that generated Southern hostility towards the black race.¹⁷ “Had the Republican Party not been so determined to recruit the ex-slaves as political pawns in its crusade to loot the taxpayers of the South, the Ku Klux Klan might never even have come into existence.”¹⁸

Notes

1.       Crocker III, H. W. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War." 6-7. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008.

2.       Ibid.

3.       Texas Politics, Reconstruction and the Civil War Amendments: Readmission Requirements. n.d. http://www.laits.utexas.edu/txp_media/html/cons/features/0206_01/slide2.html (accessed November 19, 2013).

4.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 209. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

5.       Ibid.

6.       Ibid.

7.       Ibid, p. 210.

8.       Kennedy, James Ronald and Kennedy, Walter Donald. "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" 141. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1998.

9.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 211.

10.   Ibid, p. 212.

11.   Ibid, pg. 215-216.

12.   Ibid, p. 216.

13.   Ibid, p. 213.

14.   Maxfield, M. Richard. "The Real Thomas Jefferson." 198. Washington D.C.: National Center for Constitutional Studies, 1983.

15.   DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 217.

16.   Ibid.

17.   Ibid, p. 218.

18.   Ibid.