From this time Constantine decidedly favored the church, though without persecuting or forbidding the pagan religions. He always mentions the Christian church with reverence in his imperial edicts, and uniformly applies to it, as we have already observed, the predicate of catholic. For only as a catholic, thoroughly organized, firmly compacted, and conservative institution did it meet his rigid monarchical interest, and afford the splendid state and court dress he wished for his empire. So early as the year 313 we find the bishop Hosius of Cordova among his counsellors, and heathen writers ascribe to the bishop even a magical influence over the emperor. Lactantius, also, and Eusebius of Caesarea belonged to his confidential circle. He exempted the Christian clergy from military and municipal duty (March, 313); abolished various customs and ordinances offensive to the Christians (315); facilitated the emancipation of Christian slaves (before 316); legalized bequests to catholic churches (321); enjoined the civil observance of Sunday, though not as dies Domini, but as dies Solis, in conformity to his worship of Apollo, and in company with an ordinance for the regular consulting of the haruspex (321); contributed liberally to the building of churches and the support of the clergy; erased the heathen symbols of Jupiter and Apollo, Mars and Hercules from the imperial coins (323); and gave his sons a Christian education. This mighty example was followed, as might be expected, by a general transition of those subjects who were more influenced in their conduct by outward circumstances than by inward conviction and principle. The story, that in one year (324) twelve thousand men, with women and children in proportion, were baptized in Rome, and that the emperor had promised to each convert a white garment and twenty pieces of gold, is at least in accordance with the spirit of that reign, though the fact itself, in all probability, is greatly exaggerated.

Constantine came out with still greater decision, when, by his victory over his Eastern colleague and brother-in-law, Licinius, he became sole head of the whole Roman empire. To strengthen his position, Licinius had gradually placed himself at the head of the heathen party, still very numerous, and had vexed the Christians first with wanton ridicule, then with exclusion from civil and military office, with banishment, and in some instances perhaps even with bloody persecution. This gave the political strife for the monarchy between himself and Constantine the character also of a war of religions; and the defeat of Licinius in the battle of Adrianople, in July, 321, and at Chalcedon, in September, was a new triumph of the standard of the cross over the sacrifices of the gods; save that Constantine dishonored himself and his cause by the execution of Licinius and his son.

The emperor now issued a general exhortation to his subjects to embrace the Christian religion, still leaving them, however, to their own free conviction. In the year 325, as patron of the church, he summoned the council of Nice, and himself attended it; banished the Arians, though he afterward recalled them; and, in his monarchical spirit of uniformity, showed great zeal for the settlement of all theological disputes, while he was blind to their deep significance. He first introduced the practice of subscription to the articles of a written creed and of the infliction of civil punishments for non-conformity. In the years 325-329, in connection with his mother, Helena, he erected magnificent churches on the sacred spots in Jerusalem.

As heathenism had still the preponderance in Rome, where it was hallowed by its great traditions, Constantine, by divine command as he supposed, in the year 330, transferred the seat of his government to Byzantium, and thus fixed the policy, already initiated by Domitian, or orientalizing and dividing the empire. In the selection of the unrivalled locality he showed more taste and genius than the founders of Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or Washington. With incredible rapidity, and by all the means within reach of an absolute monarch, he turned this nobly situated town, connecting two seas and two continents, into a splendid residence and a new Christian Rome, 'for which now,' as Gregory of Nazianzen expresses it, 'sea and land emulate each other, to load it with their treasures, and crown it queen of cities.' Here, instead of idol temples and altars, churches and crucifixes rose; though among them the statues of patron deities from all over Greece, mutilated by all sorts of tasteless adaptations, were also gathered in the new metropolis. The main hall in the palace was adorned with representations of the crucifixion and other Biblical scenes. The gladiatorial shows, so popular in Rome, were forbidden here, though theatres, amphitheatres, and hippodromes kept their place. It could nowhere be mistaken, that the new imperial residence was, as to all outward appearance, a Christian city. The smoke of heathen sacrifices never rose from the seven hills of New Rome, except during the short reign of Julian the Apostate. It became the residence of a bishop, who not only claimed the authority of the apostolic see of neighboring Ephesus, but soon outshone the patriarchate of Alexandria, and rivalled for centuries the papal power in ancient Rome.

The emperor diligently attended divine worship, and is portrayed upon medals in the posture of prayer. He kept the Easter vigils with great devotion. He would stand during the longest sermons of his bishops, who always surrounded him, and unfortunately flattered him only too much. And he even himself composed and delivered discourses to his court, in the Latin language, from which they were translated into Greek by interpreters appointed for the purpose. General invitations were issued, and the citizens flocked in great crowds to the palace to hear the imperial preacher, who would in vain try to prevent their loud applause by pointing to heaven as the source of his wisdom. He dwelt mainly on the truth of Christianity, the folly of idolatry, the unity and providence of God, the coming of Christ, and the judgment. At times he would severely rebuke the avarice and rapacity of his courtiers, who would loudly applaud him with their mouths and belie his exhortations by their works. One of these productions is still extant, in which he recommends Christianity in a characteristic strain, and in proof of its divine origin cites especially the fulfilment of prophecy, including the sibylline books and the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, with the contrast between his own happy and brilliant reign and the tragical fate of his persecuting predecessors and colleagues.

Nevertheless he continued in his later years true, upon the whole, to the toleration principles of the edict of 313, protected the pagan priests and temples in their privileges, and wisely abstained from all violent measures against heathenism, in the persuasion that it would in time die out. He retained many heathens at court and in public office, although he loved to promote Christians to honorable positions. In several cases, however, he prohibited idolatry, where it sanctioned scandalous immorality, as in the obscene worship of Venus in Phenicia; or in places which were especially sacred to the Christians, as the sepulchre of Christ and the grove of Mamre; and he caused a number of deserted temples and images to be destroyed or turned into Christian churches. Eusebius relates several such instances with evident approbation, and praises also his later edicts against various heretics and schismatics, but without mentioning the Arians. In his later years he seems, indeed, to have issued a general prohibition of idolatrous sacrifice; Eusebius speaks of it, and his sons in 341 refer to an edict to that effect; but the repetition of it by his successors proves that, if issued, it was not carried into general execution under his reign.

With this shrewd, cautious, and moderate policy of Constantine, which contrasts well with the violent fanaticism of his sons, accords the postponement of his own baptism to his last sickness. For this he had the further motives of a superstitious desire, which he himself expresses, to be baptized in the Jordan, whose waters had been sanctified by the Saviour's baptism, and no doubt also a fear that he might by relapse forfeit the sacramental remission of sins. He wished to secure all the benefit of baptism as a complete expiation of past sins, with as little risk as possible, and thus to make the best of both worlds. Deathbed baptisms then were to half Christians of that age what deathbed conversions and deathbed communions are now. But he presumed to preach the gospel, he called himself the bishop of bishops, he convened the first general council, and made Christianity the religion of the empire, long before his baptism! Strange as this inconsistency appears to us, what shall we think of the court bishops who, from false prudence, relaxed in his favor the otherwise strict discipline of the church, and admitted him, at least tacitly, to the enjoyment of nearly all the privileges of believers, before he had taken upon himself even a single obligation of a catechumen?

When, after a life of almost uninterrupted health, he felt the approach of death, he was received into the number of catechumens by laying on of hands, and then formally admitted by baptism into the full communion of the church in the year 337, the sixty-fifth year of his age, by the Arian (or properly Semi-Arian) bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, whom he had shortly before recalled from exile together with Arius! His dying testimony then was, as to form, in favor of heretical rather than orthodox Christianity, but merely from accident, not from intention. He meant the Christian as against the heathen religion, and whatever of Arianism may have polluted his baptism, was for the Greek Church fully neutralized by the orthodox canonization. After the solemn ceremony, he promised to live thenceforth worthily of a disciple of Jesus; refused to wear again the imperial mantle of cunningly woven silk, richly ornamented with gold; retained the white baptismal robe; and died a few days after, on Pentecost, May 32, 337, trusting in the mercy of God, and leaving a long, a fortunate, and a brilliant reign, such as none but Augustus, of all his predecessors, had enjoyed. 'So passed away the first Christian emperor, the first defender of the faith, the first imperial patron of the papal see, and of the whole Eastern Church, the first founder of the holy places, pagan and Christian, orthodox and heretical, liberal and fanatical, not to be imitated or admired, but much to be remembered, and deeply to be studied.'

His remains were removed in a golden coffin by a procession of distinguished civilians and the whole army, from Nicomedia to Constantinople, and deposited, with the highest Christian honors, in the Church of the Apostles, while the Roman senate, after its ancient custom, proudly ignoring the great religious revolution of the age, enrolled him among the gods of the heathen Olympus. Soon after his death, Eusebius set him above the greatest princes of all times; from the fifth century he began to be recognized in the East as a saint; and the Greek and Russian Church to this day celebrates his memory under the extravagant title of Isapostolos, the 'Equal of the Apostles.' The Latin Church, on the contrary, with truer tact, has never placed him among the saints, but has been content with naming him 'the Great,' in just and grateful remembrance of his services to the cause of Christianity and civilization.

Constantine marks the beginning of the downfall of ancient and classical paganism. Still it dragged out a sickly old age for about two hundred years longer, until at last it died of incurable consumption, without the hope of a resurrection.

The final dissolution of heathenism in the Eastern empire may be dated from the middle of the fifth century. In the year 435, Theodosius II. commanded the temples to be destroyed or turned into churches. There still appear some heathens in civil office and at court so late as the beginning of the reign of Justinian I. (527-567). But this despotic emperor prohibited heathenism as a form of worship in the empire on pain of death, and in 529 abolished the last intellectual seminary of it, the philosophical school of Athens, which had stood nine hundred years. At that time just seven philosophers were teaching in that school, the shades of the ancient seven sages of Greece—a striking play of history, like the name of the last West-Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, or, in contemptuous diminutive, Augustulus, combining the names of the founder of the city and the founder of the empire.

In the West, heathenism maintained itself until near the middle of the sixth century, and even later, partly as a private religious conviction among many cultivated and aristocratic families in Rome, partly even in the full form of worship in the remote provinces and on the mountains of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and partly in heathen customs and popular usages, like the gladiatorial shows still extant in Rome in 404, and the wanton Lupercalia, a sort of heathen carnival, the feast of Lupercus, the god of herds, still celebrated with all its excesses in February, 495. But, in general, it may be said that the Graeco-Roman heathenism, as a system of worship, was buried under the ruins of the Western empire, which sank under the storms of the great migration. It is remarkable that the northern barbarians labored with the same zeal in the destruction of idolatry as in the destruction of the empire, and really promoted the victory of the Christian religion. The Gothic king Alaric, on entering Rome, expressly ordered that the churches of the apostles Peter and Paul should be spared, as inviolable sanctuaries; and he showed a humanity, which Augustin justly attributes to the influence of Christianity (even perverted Arian Christianity) on these barbarous people. The Christian name, he says, which the heathens blaspheme, has effected not the destruction, but the salvation of the city. Odoacer, who put an end to the Western Roman empire in 476, was incited to his expedition into Italy by St. Severin, and, though himself an Arian, showed great regard to the catholic bishops. The same is true of his conqueror and successor, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who was recognized by the East-Roman emperor Anastasius as king of Italy (A.D. 500), and was likewise an Arian. Thus between the barbarians and the Romans, as between the Romans and the Greeks, and in a measure also the Jews, the conquered gave laws to the conquerors. Christianity triumphed over both.

This is the end of Graeco-Roman heathenism, with its power, wisdom, and beauty. It fell a victim to a slow but steady process of incurable consumption. Its downfall is a sublime tragedy which, with all our abhorrence of idolatry, we cannot witness without a certain sadness. At the first appearance of Christianity it comprised all the wisdom, literature, art, and political power of the civilized world, and led all into the field against the weaponless religion of the crucified Nazarene. After a conflict of four or five centuries it lay prostrate in the dust without hope of resurrection. With the outward protection of the state, it lost all power, and had not even the courage of martyrdom; while the Christian church showed countless hosts of confessors and blood-witnesses, and Judaism lives to-day in spite of all persecution. The expectation that Christianity would fall about the year 398, after an existence of three hundred and sixty-five years, turned out in the fulfilment to relate to heathenism itself.

The last glimmer of life in the old religion was its pitiable prayer for toleration and its lamentation over the ruin of the empire. Its best elements took refuge in the church, and became converted, or at least took Christian names. Now the gods were dethroned, oracles and prodigies ceased, sibylline books were burned, temples were destroyed, or transformed into churches, or still stand as memorials of the victory of Christianity.

But although ancient Greece and Rome have fallen forever, the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism is not extinct. It still lives in the natural heart of man, which at this day as much as ever needs regeneration by the spirit of God. It lives also in many idolatrous and superstitious usages of the Greek and Roman Churches, against which the pure spirit of Christianity has instinctively protested from the beginning, and will protest, till all remains of gross and refined idolatry shall be outwardly as well as inwardly overcome, and baptized and sanctified not only with water, but also with the spirit and fire of the gospel.

Finally, the better genius of ancient Greece and Rome still lives in the immortal productions of their poets, philosophers, historians, and orators—yet no longer an enemy, but a friend and servant of Christ. What is truly great and noble and beautiful can never perish. The classic literature had prepared the way for the gospel, in the sphere of natural culture, and was to be turned thenceforth into a weapon for its defence. It passed, like the Old Testament, as a rightful inheritance, into the possession of the Christian church, which saved those precious works of genius through the ravages of the migration of nations and the darkness of the Middle Ages, and used them as material in the rearing of the temple of modern civilization. The word of the great apostle of the Gentiles was here fulfilled: 'All things are yours.' The ancient classics, delivered from the daemoniacal possession of idolatry, have come into the service of the only true and living God, once 'unknown' to them, but now everywhere revealed, and are thus enabled to fulfil their true mission as the preparatory tutors of youth for Christian learning and culture. This is the noblest, the most worthy, and most complete victory of Christianity, transforming the enemy into friend and ally.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] [Greek: Laboron], also [Greek: labouron]; derived, not from labor, nor from [Greek: laphuron], i.e., praeda, nor from [Greek: labein], but probably from a barbarian root, otherwise unknown, and introduced into the Roman terminology, even before Constantine, by the Celtic or Germanic recruits. Comp. Du Cange, Glossar., and Suicer, Thesaur. s.h.v. The labarum, as described by Eusebius, who saw it himself (Vita Const. i. 30), consisted of a long spear overlaid with gold, and a cross piece of wood, from which hung a square flag of purple cloth, embroidered and covered with precious stones. On the top of the shaft was a crown composed of gold and precious stones, and containing the monogram of Christ (see next note), and just under this crown was a likeness of the emperor and his sons in gold. The emperor told Eusebius (I. ii. c. 7) some incredible things about this labarum, e.g. that none of its bearers was ever hurt by the darts of the enemy.

[B] X and P, the first two letters of the name of Christ, so written upon one another as to make the form of the cross: (i.e. Christos—Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end), and similar forms, of which Muenter (Sinnbilder der Alten Christen, p. 36 sqq.) has collected from ancient coins, vessels, and tombstones more than twenty. The monogram, as well as the sign of the cross, was in use among the Christians long before Constantine, probably as early as the Antonines and Hadrian. Yea, the standards and trophies of victory generally had the appearance of a cross, as Minucius Felix, Tertullian, Justin, and other apologists of the second century told the heathens. According to Killen (Ancient Church, p. 317, note), who quotes Aringhus (Roma Subterranea, II. p. 567) as his authority, the famous monogram (of course in a different sense) is found even before Christ on coins of the Ptolemies. The only thing new, therefore, was the union of this symbol in its Christian sense and application with the Roman military standard.

[C] Cicero says, pro Raberio, c. 5: 'Nomen ipsum crucis absit non modo a corpore civium Romanorum, sed etiam a cogitatione, oculis, auribus.' With other ancient heathens, however, the Egyptians, the Buddhists, and even the aborigines of Mexico, the cross seems to have been in use as a religious symbol. Socrates relates (H.E. v. 17) that at the destruction of the temple of Serapis, among the hieroglyphic inscriptions, forms of crosses were found which pagans and Christians alike referred to their respective religions. Some of the heathen converts, conversant with hieroglyphic characters, interpreted the form of the cross to mean the Life to come. According to Prescott (Conquest of Mexico, iii. 338-340) the Spaniards found the cross among the objects of worship in the idol temples of Anahnac.



CAUSES OF THE MINNESOTA MASSACRE.

If great public phenomena do not come by chance, then there were causes for the Minnesota massacres, by the Sioux, in 1862-'3, quite apart from the aboriginal cruelty and ferocity of the Indian nature. We all know that the carnal Indian man is a bad enough fellow at the best, and capable of dreadful crimes and misdemeanors, if only to gratify his whim or the caprice of the moment. And when he is bent upon satiating his revenge for some real or imaginary wrong, I would back him in the horrible ingenuity of his devices for torture, in the unrelenting malice of his vengeance, against any—the most fierce and diabolical—of all the potentates in the kingdoms of eternal and immutable evil!

But the white man has always had the advantage of the red man. He was his superior in knowledge, power, and intellect; and came, for the most part, of that lordly race, the issue of whose loins already occupy all the chief countries within the zones of civilization. He knew, therefore, when he first began to deal with the Indian, what manner of man he was, what his enlightenment was, and how far it reached out into the darkness where all is night! He knew that this wild, savage, untamable redskin could not be approached, reconciled, traded with, or stolen, from, by adopting, in his case, the usages and courtesies of civil life, as we understand them, but that his own peculiar laws, customs, and manners must be studied and conformed to, if any headway were to be made in his regard and confidence.

At no time, from the beginning to the present day and hour, has any white man been so fuddled in his wits as to suppose that the Indian could either act or talk like a clergyman of any recognized Christian denomination. It was too much, therefore, to expect from him that he should exhibit any of the fine charities and warm affections which distinguish the Christian character. He was a redskin, implacable in his hate, not altogether trustworthy even in his friendships, and jealous of his reputation and the traditions of his race. Nor was he without manhood either. A brave, bloody, mocking and defiant manhood! capable of the endurances of the martyr, exhibiting sometimes the sublimest self-sacrifice and courage.

Whether out of these wild and savage materials there lay anywhere, at any time, the human or divine power to mould a civilized community, does not appear upon the record. It is certain, however, that after all the far-too-late attempts to transfigure these savages into the likeness of a down-East Yankee, or, better still, into the similitude of a Western farmer, no permanent good results are likely to ensue.

The red man and the white are separated indeed by the prodigious distances (ethnologically speaking) not only of race and language, but of noble tradition and glorious history. They could never amalgamate in blood, or in the so-called natural sympathies of man. They seem to be born enemies! as their feelings and their instincts apparently reach them when they come into contact with each other. They cannot exist side by side. A mightier than they holds the destinies of both in His hands. He has tried the redskins. He has given them a good chance upon the earth, and they have failed to do anything but kill buffalo and breed like rats—often burrowing like rats—refusing to dig and plant the teeming, beneficent earth which had been committed to their charge; and preferring, generally, the life of a vagabond loafer to that of a thrifty, careful husbandman.

I do not blame them. They are as God made them, and man left them; for, I suppose, their forebears—somewhere afar off in Asia, perhaps, in the dim, immemorial ages—had all passed through the various phases of the civilization of their time, and that they did not grow out of the tail of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible reason there could be for the perpetuation—let alone the creation—of such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for unknown centuries—before the white man ever saw their faces—many thousands of them still squatting there, cleaving, like bereaved Autochthons, to the bosom of the dear old mother who had whelped and so long nurtured them; and trying to make themselves believe that they are still masters of the continent.

What they were made for at all, I do not pretend to divine. The Divine Maker of all knows best, and what He does is its own justification—satisfying the wellnigh insatiable cry of the universe for universal justice. They are the saurians of humanity; and it is remarkable that the idea of 'progressive development'—if I may be pardoned for making use of a term in modern philosophy about which there has been so much assumption and canting—it is remarkable that this idea, which the name of saurian suggests, should run through all nature, and be embodied in her finest forms and intelligences. There is a considerable distance between the saurian and good Master Adam, the gardener of Eden; but it seems to me, after all, that this brutal, foul, obscene monster of the prime, was only Adam in the making. He came after him, a long way, at all events; and if geology had been fashionable in his time, and he a savant, he might have chalked out for himself a very fine pedigree.

For this strange, eccentric Nature, who meant man from the beginning, and failed to realize her ideal because of those horrible nightmare dreams of which these saurians, mastodons, mammoths were the visible representatives, did, nevertheless, make, in every succeeding world (for every crust of this planet is the crust of a dead world), higher and higher organizations—until, at last, she gave to man his inscrutable birth!

That was, no doubt, a great triumph of power and genius! Man is a noble animal, the finest of all living fellows! et cetera! et cetera! But what sort of a fellow was he when he came, in his spindles and shacklebones, from the womb of the All-mother? Was he a Caucasian, or a Mongolian, a Negro, a Malay, or a Bosjesman?—this last being an effigy of man so abominable that no race that I have heard of will include him even as a lodger in the parish settlements!

Mark! what a sameness, and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us men out of our mothers, but babes—helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless babes!—ignorant; who must grow into the perfect stature and the mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way? Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law of nature is progress. It is often, nay, always, a very slow thing—but how sure! how inevitable! how beneficent in its results! She never makes worse after bad—and those weird opium monsters of the foreworlds were unspeakably bad!—but always she makes of bad better; and of better she has made her best, at present. In the light of this law, were any one mad enough to grope, he might come to the conclusion that the first man (or race of men) was anything but a grandee in mind, person, or estate; and that our seemingly puzzled but at last most wonder-working mother, ycleped Nature, made some very ugly attempts at man before she reached the climax of her imagination and her power as it obtains in the man Caucasian!

I regard all the colored races—and with no malice or evil of any sort in my heart toward them—as first experiments in the gamut of human creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my consciousness—let alone my active intellect—the belief that these were the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown modern Indian! It is an old face, as if the accumulated wrinkles of, not 'forty,' but a hundred 'centuries' had ploughed their marks there. They seem to belong to the dawn of time; while our Caucasian man is ever young and beautiful, the born master of all things.

We must deal with races according to their faculty, and credit them according to their faculty. If we fail, we fail in wisdom—and in prudence, which is a valuable attribute of wisdom. Expect not grapes from thistles! Expect no virtue—unless it relates to his own selfishness or his own tribe—from an Indian, or from very many other men!

It must not be forgotten, however, that Indians are people who, to say the least of them, are fashioned in the likeness of men. Here, as elsewhere, Nature sticks to her old plan, and will not budge an inch. In the chart of the Indian's nature are mapped out the same feelings, instincts, passions, the same organs and dimensions as belong to the highest race, or the highest race of the mixed races. She will have no nonsense about her red children, nor about her black. There they are, as she (for purposes of her own, not particularly clear) intended them to be—men, alive, oh!—not descendants of Monboddo's ape, nor of Du Chaillu's gorilla, but men proper and absolute! with their duties, responsibilities, and destinies.

Seeing, therefore, that the Indian (our American Indian, with whom we have now to do) has all the faculties—however defaced and blurred by long centuries of bloody crimes, which they regard not as crimes, but as virtues—seeing that these red, thriftless, bloody-minded Indians have all the human faculties intact—although, it may be, not so bright as those of some of our own people who call themselves Americans—is it not possible that by fair and manly dealing with them, by a just trade, and conscientious regard for the sanctity of treaty rights and obligations—that you, whom it may more particularly concern, might so win their good will as to make them friends instead of enemies? The devil that lies at the bottom of all savage natures is easily roused, not at all so easily laid again, and as easily kept in his own place. Indians are not incapable of friendship, nor of good faith, although the best require a great deal of looking after—and close looking, too! But what I want to urge is this: that if you always appeal to the worst passions of the redskin, rob him of his rights and property, cheat him by false promises, deceive him at all hands, and then mock him when he knocks at your door for credit or charity, that he and his may live, you cannot much wonder if, obeying his traditions, his religion, and the dictates of his savage nature—now maddened into fury and reckless of consequences—he indulges in the frightful havoc, the relentless murders and burnings, which have so lately marked his trail in Minnesota.

Let no one suppose for a moment, from what I have now said, that I design to offer any apology, any excuse for the nameless and unpunishable crimes which these miscreants have perpetrated. I have no pity and no compassion for them, and surely no word either which I desire should be construed, in this respect, to their favor. I go with the old Scotch judge—a rigid Antinomian! who, having tried and convicted a Calvinist as rigid as himself, asked him what he had to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced against him.

'My lord,' said the prisoner, 'it's a bad job; but I was predestined to do it!'

Whereupon his lordship replied: 'Ay! ay! my cannie laddie! an' I was predestined to hang ye for't.'

So while I set forth the necessary, evil nature of the Indian, and the consequent necessity of his bloody deeds, I also insist upon the necessity of hanging him for it.

I plead not for the Indian of Minnesota, after these most shocking, most appalling butcheries. I love my own race; and not a man, woman, or child, who was sacrificed by these monsters, but their wounds were my wounds, and their agonies tore my heart to the very core. Henceforth I shall never see an Indian but I shall feel the 'goose flesh' of loathing and horror steal over my Adam's buff! But you, my beloved friends of Minnesota! you who have suffered so much in your families and homes during the massacre, are you sure that you did all you could do as citizens and rulers in this land to see even-handed justice dealt out between the corrupt Government agencies and storekeepers, and the helpless Indians? Had these last no just and reasonable ground of complaint? complaint of the General Government, complaint of the delays in their payment, complaint of the swindling of the storekeepers and traders?

They had sold their lands, and gone away to their reservations. But the money for their lands—promised so faithfully at such a time—where was that money? Non est! The Indians depended on it, trusted to the certainty of its coming as the saint trusts in the promises. They came for it—often, in their history, in the depth of winter, for hundred of miles, through an inhospitable forest; their wives, children, and braves starving—many of them left behind in the wilderness to die; their only weapon made of coarse nails, lashed with wire, and this they called a gun barrel, and with this they killed what game was killed by the way.

This did not happen in Minnesota, it is true; but events as horrible and sickening as this did happen, and brought with them consequences more horrible still, which will never be forgotten while the State exists or the language lasts. Scenes were enacted at that 'Lower Agency' which were disgraceful to human nature, and the victims were invariably the redskins. Once when Red Iron came there, at the summons, or rather after the repeated summons of Governor Ramsay, it turned out that nearly four hundred thousand dollars of the cash payment due to the Sioux, under the treaties of 1851-'2, were paid to the traders on old indebtedness! How much of this enormous sum was really due to the traders it is bootless now to inquire; although it is pretty certain, from what we know of similar transactions, that not a twentieth part of it was due to them. Mr. Isaac V. D. Heard, who has written a 'History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863,' who is an old resident of Minnesota of twelve years' standing, acted with General Sibley in his expedition against the savages in 1862, and was recorder of the military commission which tried some four hundred of the participants in the outbreak—has not been deterred by the just hatred which the Minnesota people nurture against the Indians, and which they will keep hot until their rifles have exterminated the whole brood of them, from saying a brave word respecting the iniquities perpetrated by rascal peddlers and official prigs against the Indians which were the immediate causes of the massacre and the subsequent wars.

The Indian was subjected to all sorts of frauds, little and big—the smaller thieves thinking that they also must live, no matter at whose expense, although I demur to the proposition. Why should they stop at stealing a thousand or two, more or less, while that four hundred thousand swindle leered at them so wickedly over the left shoulder, mocking at all law and justice, and scot free from all punishment? These 'traders' could charge what sums they liked against the Indian, and get them too; for there was no one to defeat or check their rapacity. Mr. Heard tells us that no less a sum than fifty-five thousand dollars was claimed by one Hugh Tyler, as due to him by the Indians, when the great swindle just alluded to was committed; and that he was paid out of the accruing funds. This man was a stranger in the country, an adventurer, who went out into the wilderness 'for to seek his fortune;' and it is curious to read the items of which his little bill, fifty-five thousand, is composed. Here they are: For getting the treaties through the Senate; for 'necessary disbursements' in securing the assent of the chiefs. Very curious and instructive items they are, to all who consider them. To say nothing of the corruption of the Senate which the first item signifies, if it has any meaning at all, there is the guilty record of the 'necessary disbursements,' or, in other words, bribes, paid to chiefs for betraying their country and their race. This was a part of the regular machinery of the Agencies. All their plans were cut and dried, and they had men to carry them out. They could not stir a peg without the assent of the chiefs; and when they found a man too noble to be a traitor, they got the Governor to break him as a chief, and invest a more pliable, accommodating redskin with his rank and title. Through the influence of bad men, and by the forging of lying documents, which the Indians could not read, and which were never interpreted to them except to cheat them as to their contents and meaning, they have always managed to get their treaties signed; after which the newly made chiefs could not so much as take the liberty to beg a pipe of tobacco of them.

As a sample of their infamous dealings, we take the following excerpt from Mr. Heard's book, page 41:

'In 1857, a trader, pretending that he was getting them to sign a power of attorney to get back the money which had gone to the traders under the treaty of 1851 and 1852, obtained their signatures to vouchers, by which he swindled them out of $12,000. Shortly after, this trader secured the payment of $4,500 for goods which he claimed (falsely, it is said) to have been stolen. About the same time a man in Sioux City was allowed a claim of $5,000 for horses, which he also alleged to have been stolen.

'In 1858, the chiefs were taken to Washington, and agreed to treaties for the cession of all their reservations north of the Minnesota, for which, as ratified by the Senate, they were to have $166,000; but of this amount they never received a penny until four years afterward, when $15,000, in goods, were sent to the Lower Sioux, and these were deducted out of what was due them under former treaties. The Indians, discovering the fraud, refused to receive them for several weeks, and only consented to take them after the Government had agreed to rectify the matter. Most of the large amount due under these treaties, went into the pockets of traders, Government officials, and swindlers generally.

'The Indians were grievously disappointed with their bargains, and from that time the control of affairs passed from the chiefs—who, it was believed, had been bribed—to the young men. They had now nearly disposed of all their lands, and received scarcely anything for them. They were six thousand two hundred in number, and their annuities, when paid in full, were hardly fifteen dollars apiece.

'Their sufferings,' continues Mr. Heard, 'were often severe, especially during the winter and spring previous to the massacres.'

Their crops failed them; a heavy fall of snow, late in the season, came to increase their miseries, and delayed the spring hunts. The Sissetons, of Lac Traverse, had to eat their horses and dogs—and at least fifteen hundred of the old men, women, and children had to be supported by the Government at an extra expense; and this was so inadequately done that some died of starvation.

The history of these iniquities is no new thing in Indian affairs. It is, from first to last, a record of the most shameless lying and fraud. The Agency seems to have been established there as a sort of Jonathan Wild's shop, for the purpose of carrying on the trade of thieving. What did these storekeepers—who credited the Indians for tobacco and rum, for bread and beef, for clothing, and such other luxuries as they had come to regard as necessaries—care for the winter prospects of the wretched Indians, after they had lined their pockets with that four hundred thousand dollars? Not a dime! And when subsequently it was found that only half the regular Government payment would be handed over to the Indians during the next year, these storekeepers—on the 'Wild' plan—not only refused to give them credit for articles indispensable to life in the wilderness, but insulted them to boot; and this so exasperated the proud, revengeful nature of the Indian, that he remembered it afterward in many a bloody murder which he committed, and the innocent suffered for the guilty!

Mr. Heard acquits the Agency, and all connected with it, of being in any way the causes of this outbreak. But his own statements of their dealing with the Indians hardly bear him out in his judgment. I do not mean to say that the people of the Lower Agency were a whit worse in such dealings than those of the Upper, or any other similar Agency. It is an understood thing, and mercilessly practised, that the Indian shall be fleeced whenever the white man has a chance to fleece him. It is the law and the gospel of these Agencies; and we must not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked in this matter by the mistaken humanity of Mr. Heard.

And yet, if we think of it, there could not have been devised a more evil scheme, either against the natives or the settlers, than these wellnigh irresponsible Agencies. From all parts of the Union, from every country of the Old World, emigrants had come to settle in the beautiful Minnesota State; they had built themselves good, substantial houses, ploughed, fenced, and planted their rich and prosperous farms, conquered the savage wilderness into blooming cornfields, orchards, and gardens—and here was their true El Dorado! where they hoped to live in peace, plenty, and security. They were not afraid of the savages, but their wont was to make friends of them, and to be their friends, entertaining them at their homes when they visited the settlements, and doing all they could—with some exceptions—to perpetuate among them a good feeling and an intelligent understanding.

To a certain extent, and in some cases, they succeeded in this straight-forward diplomacy. But the predisposition of the reds to enmity with the whites was still there, slumbering only, not eradicated; nor could all the kindness and generosity of the whole Caucasian heart, heaped upon them in the most lavish profusion, ever root it out. Nature put it there—I wish she hadn't—for reasons of her own, just as she put murder into the cruel heart and brain of the tiger in the jungle.

There was this 'original sin,' therefore, to contend against always, without reference to any tangible causes or provocations. All knew this. All knew, from the youngest to the oldest, that the true policy of the whites was to conciliate the Indians. They knew his inextinguishable memory of wrongs, his dreadful vengeance, his power, and his constant opportunity to do irreparable mischief. And, as I said, the settlers were, for the most part, anxious to smoke the pipe of peace and friendship with him.

But what was the good of all this? What, think you, did it avail in the councils of the savages, when they sat over their fires discussing their wrongs and prospects? What the good-hearted settlers did in the way of reconciliation and good will was undone a thousandfold at the Agency. It is true that the Agency had become necessary to the subsistence of the Indian, and that this fact made him bear much which, under other circumstances, he would instantly have resented and punished. But they well knew how they were robbed; and when did a wrong of that, or any sort, pass muster upon the Indian's roll of vengeance? Every fraud against an Indian, every lie told him, every broken promise, every worthless article sold to him at the Agency, was more than a set-off to any act of kindness shown to him by the settlers. Add to these local crimes, the great error of the Government in unduly withholding the Indian payment for their lands—and you have the Indian's casus belli, the grounds, or some of them, on which he justified himself to his own bloody and remorseless conscience, for his inhuman deeds! For the Indian beeps a conscience, such as it is; but of a truth, better no conscience than an Indian's conscience! It is like an appeal to hell, one's appeal to this! all the accursed passions imprisoned there coming up from their limbos, their eyes glaring with the malice of ineradicable hate, and bloodshot with murder, to support the conscience, and strengthen its resolution for an unspeakable vengeance.

But, after all, this poor devil is really to be pitied for his ignorance and brutality, and as really to be killed without mercy. He is in the way of civilization, and must go to the wall. I find that Nature herself is utterly pitiless; that she cares neither for white nor red, nor for any other color or person, but, like a horrible, crashing car of Juggernaut, she rolls steadily forward, astride the inevitable machinery, crushing all who oppose her.

But this digression is no apology, in the matter of its argument, for the Indian Agents, who must have been aware, long before the outbreak took place, that their frauds were fast culminating in the Indian mind, and that every fresh wrong they did to them was only bringing nearer by a step the indiscriminate massacre of the settlers.

There were other causes, however, besides these, to enrage and madden them, which must not be lost sight of. Our Government had prohibited their sanguinary wars upon the Chippewas, and they regarded this as an act of wanton tyranny. They were bred in the faith that war is the true condition of an Indian man, and that peace was made for women and children. War was the only outlet for their power, the only field in which they could distinguish themselves and win immortal renown. All the great kingdoms of knowledge and literature were shut against them as with walls of brass. They could not read or write, and their leisure was passed in idle gossip, or in deliberations on infernal schemes against the white man to revenge themselves for their wrongs.

It was not a wise thing to do, I think; although, no doubt, it was humane enough, as we understand humanity. Did not the 'dragons of the prime tear other in their slime,' and so thin out the horrible race, until Nature herself put the final claws of annihilation upon them? Why, in mercy, then, do we try to prevent the inevitable? War is a great clearer of the atmosphere; and one of our poets, Coleridge, I believe, says that 'Carnage is God's daughter'! a bold figure of rhetoric, not without its apparently sufficient apologies. Why not let the Sioux and Chippewas, or any other of the wild, irreclaimable brood, fight their bloodiest, and do their prettiest to help Nature, who seems bent on the extermination of all inferior races? They have got to die, any way!—that is a great consolation!—and if the philanthropists at Washington had only left them to themselves, they would have died by mutual slaughter—great numbers of them—long ago, and saved said philanthropists from the crime of killing them, which they are now doing, by inches!—a far more cruel way of dying.

I was much pleased, when last summer they were upbraided for doing a little war against the Chips, in spite of Washington, with the sarcastic reply of a chief, who said: 'Our Great Father, we know, has always told us it was wrong to make war; yet now he himself is making war, and killing a great many. Will you explain this to us? We do not understand it!' This was a hit, a palpable hit, let who will reconcile it.

Mr. Heard gives us the following brief statement of the manner in which treaties are made with the Indians; and I earnestly call the attention of the Government and all just citizens to its statements. He says:

'The traders, knowing for years before, that the whites will purchase lands, sell the Indians goods on credit, expecting to realize their pay from the consideration to be paid by the Government. They thus become interested instruments to obtain the consent of the Indians to the treaty. And by reason of their familiarity with the language, and the associations of half-breed relatives, are possessed of great facilities to accomplish their object. The persons deputed by the Government to effect a treaty are compelled to procure their cooperation, and this they do by providing that their debts shall be paid. The traders obtain the concurrence of the Indians by refusing to give them further credit, and by representing to them that they will receive an immense amount of money if they sell their lands, and thenceforth will live at ease, with plenty to eat, and plenty to wear, and plenty of powder and lead, and of whatever else they may request. After the treaty is agreed to, the amount of ready money is absorbed by the exorbitant demands of the traders, and the expenses of the removal of the Indians to their reservations!

'After that the trader no longer looks to the Indian for his pay; he gets it from their annuities. He, therefore, does not use the same means to conciliate their good will that he did when he was dependent upon their honesty. Claims for depredations upon white settlers are also deducted out of their moneys before they leave Washington, on insufficient testimony; and these are always, when based on fact, double the actual loss; for the Indian Department is notoriously corrupt, and the hand manipulating the machinery must be crossed with gold! The 'expenses' of obtaining a claim enter into the amount demanded and allowed. The demand is not only generally unjust, but, instead of its being deducted from the moneys of the wrong doer, it is taken from the annuities of all! This course punishes the innocent and rewards the guilty, because the property taken by the depredator is of more value than the slight percentage he loses.

'Many of the stipulations as to establishing schools and furnishing them with farming utensils, are never carried out. Building and supply contracts are entered into without investigation at outrageous prices, and goods belonging to the Indians are put into the traders' stores, and sold to their owners, and the moneys realized shared by the trader and the Agent!'

Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota, in his appeal for the red man, confirms this statement beyond doubt or question:

'There is not a man in America,' he says,'who ever gave an hour's calm reflection to this subject, who does not know that our Indian system is an organized system of robbery, and has been for years a disgrace to the nation. It has left savage men without Governmental control; it has looked on unconcerned at every crime against the laws of God and man; it has fostered savage life by wasting thousands of dollars in the purchase of paint, beads, scalping knives, and tomahawks; it has fostered a system of trade which robbed the thrifty and virtuous to pay the debts of the indolent and vicious; it has squandered the funds for civilization and schools; it has connived at theft; it has winked at murder; and at last, after dragging the savage down to a brutishness unknown to his fathers, it has brought a harvest of blood to our door!'

The Bishop continues:

'It was under this Indian system that the fierce, warlike Sioux were fitted and trained to be the actors in this bloody drama, and the same causes are to-day, slowly but surely, preparing the way for a Chippewa war. There is not, to-day, an old citizen of Minnesota who will not shrug his shoulders as he speaks of the dishonesty which accompanied the purchase of the lands of the Sioux. It left in savage minds a deep sense of injustice. Then, followed ten years of savage life, unchecked by law, uninfluenced by good example. They were taught by white men that lying was no disgrace, adultery no sin, and theft no crime. Their hunting grounds were gone; the onward march of civilization crowded them on every side. Their only possible hope of being saved from starvation was the fidelity with which a great nation fulfilled its plighted faith, which before God and man it had pledged to its heathen wards. The people here, on the border, and the rulers at Washington, know how that faith has been broken.

'The constant irritations of such a system would, in time, have secured an Indian massacre. It was hastened and precipitated by the sale of nearly eight hundred thousand acres of land, for which they never received one farthing; for it was all absorbed in claims! Then came the story (and it was true) that half of their annuity money had also been taken for claims. They waited two months, mad, exasperated, hungry—the Agent utterly powerless to undo the wrong committed at Washington—and they resolved on savage vengeance. For every dollar of which they have been defrauded we shall pay ten dollars in the cost of the war. It has been so for fifty years; it will be so again. God's retributive justice always has compelled a people to reap exactly what they have permitted to be sown!'

These extracts from the Bishop's Plea confirm what I have stated in the preceding paragraphs; and the last sentence—which I have marked in italics—is well worth the while of every reader to ponder well.

Mr. Heard dates the commencement of the massacre to the breaking of a stray nest of hen's eggs on the prairie, and what came of the transaction; but the date lies farther back than that, so far as the resolution to seize the first favorable opportunity for slaughtering the whites is concerned—and belongs to the era of the great crimes of our Government against them, as shown in the forcible seizure of their lands without their receiving any payment, even 'a farthing' for them; the hucksters, under the connivance of the Government agents, getting the whole of it, and, in the instance alluded to a while ago, keeping back from them, as payment for old debts, about three hundred boxes of the money upon which they had depended to keep themselves alive during the winter and the following year.

Such enormous crimes were sure to reap a bloody harvest. The Indian is no fool, although he can't do addition and subtraction. He knows when he is about fairly dealt with, and he knows when he is mightily plucked. In this case of the 'old debt payment' he knew that he was robbed wholesale, and through the mouth of Red Iron he proclaimed the fact to Governor Ramsey, in council assembled. Alluding to this robbery, he said:

'We don't think we owe them so much. We want to pay all our debts. We want our Great Father to send three good men here, to tell us how much we do owe; and whatever they say, we will pay; and (pointing to the Indians) that's what all these braves say; our chiefs and all our people say this!'

At which all the Indians present responded:

'Ho! ho!'

This Red Iron was the principal chief of the Sissetons, and his indignation at the wrongs done to his race made him so 'boisterous' that Governor Ramsey was imprudent enough to break him of his chieftainship. The scene and its results were by no means creditable to the Governor. This latter personage had summoned Red Iron to meet him at a council, held December, 1852, and he did not turn up as expected. So, I suppose, he was sent for, and brought in by the soldiers. He is described by one who was present, as about forty years old, tall and athletic; six feet high in his moccasons, with a large, well-developed head, aquiline nose, thin, compressed lips, and physiognomy beaming with intelligence and resolution. He was clad in the half military, half Indian costume of the Dacotah chiefs, as he sat in the council room; and no one greeted or noticed him. A very poor piece of revenge! In a few minutes the Governor, turning to the chief in the midst of a breathless silence, by the aid of an interpreter, opened council. The Governor asked the chief what excuse he had for not coming to the council when he sent for him.

Whereupon Red Iron rose to his feet, 'with native grace and dignity,' says Mr. Heard, his blanket falling from his shoulders, and, purposely dropping the pipe of peace, he stood erect before the Governor, with his arms folded and his right hand pressed upon the sheath of his scalping knife. With the utmost coolness and self-possession, a defiant smile playing upon his thin lips, and his eyes sternly fixed upon his excellency, the Indian, with a firm voice, replied:

'I started to come, but your braves drove me back.'

GOVERNOR. 'What excuse have you for not coming the second time when I sent for you?'

RED IRON. 'No other excuse than I have given you.'

GOVERNOR. 'At the treaty, I thought you a good man; but since, you have acted badly, and I am disposed to break you. I do break you.'

Red Iron looked at the Governor for a moment with a look of withering contempt and scorn, and then burst out in a voice full of derisive mockery.

RED IRON. 'You break me! My people made me a chief. My people love me. I will still be their chief. I have done nothing wrong.'

GOVERNOR. 'Red Iron, why did you get your braves together, and march around here for the purpose of intimidating other chiefs, and prevent their coming to council?'

RED IRON. 'I did not get my braves together; they got themselves together, to prevent boys going to council to be made chiefs to sign papers, and to prevent single chiefs going to council at night, to be bribed to sign papers for money we have never got.' And then the inexorable fellow continued, without any regard to his excellency's nerves or conscience: 'We have heard how the M'Dewakantons were served at Mendota; that by secret councils you got their names on paper, and took away their money. We don't want to be served so. My braves wanted to come to council in the daytime, when the sun shines; and we want no councils in the dark. We want all our people to go to council together, so that we can all know what is done.'

The Governor is nothing abashed at these damaging charges, but returns once more to the assault.

GOVERNOR. 'Why did you attempt to come to council with your braves, when I had forbidden your braves coming to council?'

To which Red Iron, with the same masterful, defiant smile upon his 'thin lips,' answers:

RED IRON. 'You invited the chiefs only, and would not let the braves come too. This is not the way we have been treated before; this is not according to our customs; for among Dacotahs, chiefs and braves go to council together. When you first sent for us there were two or three chiefs here, and we waited, and we wanted to wait till the rest would come, that we might all be in council together, and know what was done, and so that we might all understand the papers, and know what we were signing. When we signed the treaty, the traders threw a blanket over our faces, and darkened our eyes; and made us sign papers which we did not understand, and which were not explained or read to us. We want our Great Father at Washington to know what has been done.'

This last speech—whose words hit like bullets—made the Governor wince, and he replied, with more sharpness than wit:

GOVERNOR. 'Your Great Father has sent me to represent him; and what I say, he says. He wants you to pay your old debts, in accordance with the papers you signed when the treaty was made' ['which we did not understand; which were never read nor explained to us; which we were forced to sign,' as Red Iron had just told the Governor!]. 'You must leave that money in my hands to pay those debts. If you refuse to do that, I will take the money back.'

The Governor was getting deeper and deeper into the pit which he had dug for the Indian. This last speech was most unhappy and impolitic for the side he was advocating. It put dreadful weapons into the hands of Red Iron, which the crafty 'old man eloquent' did not fail to use against his antagonist.

He makes this manly answer, not at all abashed in the presence of the chief magistrate:

RED IRON. 'You can take back your money! We sold our land to you, and you promised to pay us. If you don't give us the money, I will be glad, and all our people will be glad; for we will have our land back if you don't give us the money. That paper was not interpreted or explained to us. We are told it gives about three hundred boxes ($300,000) of our money to some of the traders! We don't think we owe them so much. We want to pay all our debts. We want our Great Father to send three good men here to tell us how much we do owe, and whatever they say, we will pay; and (pointing to the Indians) that's what all these braves say. Our chiefs and all our people say this.'

And the Indians responded with the usual 'Ho! ho!' of acquiescence.

But the Governor don't see it. A poor devil of an Indian, according to his Christian conviction, ought to be content to pay unaudited, untaxed bills, wherein the margin is broad enough for any scoundrel to do his robberies by tens of thousands. So his excellency told Red Iron:

GOVERNOR. 'That can't be done!' [Nay, more confounding and appalling still, he added:] 'You owe more than your money will pay, and I am ready now to pay your annuity, and no more; and when you are ready to receive it, the Agent will pay it.'

Red Iron replies in a speech full of pathos:

RED IRON. 'We will receive our annuity, but we will sign no papers for anything else.' [You've swindled us enough, lied to us deep enough already, and we have no belief in your words or agreements.] 'The snow is on the ground, and we have been waiting a long time to get our money. We are poor; you have plenty. Your fires are warm; your tepees (wigwams, tents) keep out the cold. We have nothing to eat. We have been waiting a long time for our moneys. Our hunting season is past. A great many of our people are sick for being hungry. We must die because you won't pay us. We may die! but if we do' [hold on, reader! no curses on the white men are coming next, as one might naturally expect, either from Christian or heathen orator, under the circumstances!]—'but if we do,' he continues, 'we will leave our bones on the ground, that our Great Father may see where his Dacotah children died!' [He has seen many such shambles, O thou eloquent Indian! eloquent to ears of flint and hearts of granite! and I never heard that the 'Great Father' ever shed a single tear over them.] He goes on: 'We are very poor. We have sold our hunting grounds, and with them the graves of our fathers. We have sold our own graves.' [Out of all those hundreds of thousands of acres, not six feet of earth, which they could call their own, left for any one of them!] 'We have no place to bury our dead, and you will not pay us the money for our lands.'

I give this interview, and what transpired there, as a sample of the treatment which the Indians were in the habit of receiving at the hands both of the General Government and the State authorities. Not the wisest kind of treatment, one would think, this which Red Iron received, taking all the circumstances into account. The reader will be surprised, however, that Governor Ramsey, not content with 'breaking' the chief, as he called it—the greatest dishonor which he could inflict upon an Indian of rank—sent him, when the council broke up, to the guard house, under an escort of soldiers! This impolitic official ought to have remembered that the fire was even then ready for the kindling, which finally burst out in such fearful devastation over his devoted State; that it was enough to have cheated the Indians, without thus inflaming their already excited passions, by heaping so great an indignity upon the person of their chief. But he was regardless of everything except the display of his own power and authority. No doubt he thought he was acting for the best, and that the dirty redskins needed to be held with a high hand. But it was bad thinking and doing, nevertheless; a most shortsighted and foolish policy, which came wellnigh, as it was, to an Indian outbreak.

The braves of Red Iron retired under the leadership of Lean Bear, a crafty fellow, eloquent in his way, and now irreconcilably mad against the whites; and when he had led them about a quarter of a mile from the council house, they set up a simultaneous yell, the gathering signal of the Dacotah. Ere the echoes died away, Indians were hurrying from their tepees toward them, prepared for battle. They proceeded to an eminence near the camp, where mouldered the bones of many warriors. It was the memorable battle ground where their ancestors had fought, in a Waterloo conflict, the warlike Sacs and Foxes, thereby preserving their lands and nationality.

A more favorable occasion, a more fitting locality for the display of eloquence which should kindle the blood of the Indian into raging fire, and persuade him to any the most monstrous and inhuman deeds, could not have been chosen even by Indian sagacity. An old battle ground, where the Sioux had been victorious over their enemies; the whitened bones of the ghastly skeletons of their ancestors who fought the battle, bleaching on the turf, or calling to them from their graves below to take God's vengeance in their own hands; the memory of the old and new wrongs inflicted upon them by the whites; the infuriating insult just offered to their favorite chief—all conspired with the orator's cunning to give edge to his eloquence and obedience to his commands.

Governor Ramsey has a good deal to thank God for, that, stimulated by Lean Bear's rhetoric, the Sioux did not that night attack the whites, and make an indiscriminate slaughter of the population, as they would have done, if it had not been for the friendly Indians and half breeds. Perhaps he thought he was strong enough, for the hour, to defeat them in any attempt at an outbreak. But it is not strength so much as strategy which is needed in Indian warfare. To whip the Indians, we must become Indians in our plan and conduct of battle. The civilization and mathematics of war, as practised by cultivated people, are useless in the wilderness, and all our proud and boasted tactics are mere foolish toying and trifling—a waste of time, strength, and opportunity. No one doubts that if our troops could meet the Indians in open field, they would slaughter them like rats; but they know better than to be caught on the open field, except they are pretty sure of an advantage. They steal upon you like thieves, shod with moccasons which have no sound; they think it equally brave to shoot a man from behind a tree as to sabre him in a hand-to-hand encounter.

It is dreadful to contemplate what an incarnate fiend we have roused in this cheated, wronged, and despised Indian. I tremble to think of it. I tremble when I remember also what Bishop Whipple says in the 'Plea,' from which I have already quoted; they are words which ought to be thundered continually into the ears of the 'Great Father,' until he compels a total revolution in our Indian affairs—words which all settlers in those regions should keep forever present in their minds; and, with the Minnesota massacres still fresh in their memory, they should be taught by them never for a moment to trust an Indian, and never knowingly to give him just cause for complaint; to go always armed; to organize, in towns, districts, and counties, the yeomen of the soil, who must be ready at any moment, by night or day, to meet the treacherous, ubiquitous enemy. These last will be found of more value than the 'thundering' suggestion contained in the first of these precautionary propositions. For it is upon themselves that they must chiefly rely for defence, these hapless settlers! and upon no Government, and no soldiers.

Think of it, our 'Great Father' at Washington! and you, his unruly children, you Senators and Congressmen! One of your most loyal citizens in the State of Minnesota, a Christian bishop, well acquainted with all the facts, the dodges, lies, frauds, and all the ins and outs of your Indian administration, declares, with the fullest solemnity which his office and functions can give to words, and with the voice, not of prophecy, but of logical deduction, that the same causes which brought about the Sioux massacre, 'ARE TO-DAY, SLOWLY BUT SURELY, PREPARING THE WAY FOR A CHIPPEWA WAR!' What a Chippewa war means, those who did not know in 1861, found out through the Sioux in 1862 and 1863, to their perpetual sorrow. Like the Bourbons, however, our Government either cannot or will not learn lessons from experience. If they were compelled to bear the penalties of their neglect and wanton maladministration of affairs in the Indian districts, the loss would be small and the retribution just. But they sit at ease, far away from the scene of carnage, and 'get' nothing but the 'news,' which they read as they would any other record of human passion and depravity. It is the innocent settlers who pay the penalty for the guilt and transgressions of their rulers.

It is time somebody, or some vast numbers, banded as one man, began to think upon this threatening question, and to act upon it. It concerns the faith and honor of this great republic before all the world, that the wrongs alluded to should be speedily righted. We are not, in reality, what our Indian legislation would almost seem to accuse and convict us of, a nation of man-catchers, baiting our trap with fine farms, and free government, and happy homes, and abundant prosperity of all sorts, that so we may inveigle the simple minded, and then hand them over to the tender mercies of the Indians! God forbid that such crimes should be ours! But there is a coloring of truth about the whole programme. We invite settlers to populate our vast and wellnigh boundless wilderness, promising them protection from enemies abroad and a happy peace at home; and in the same breath we cheat the savages, and stir them up to hatred and violence against every white man, woman, and child in the country. This is like preaching security and peace while your lighted match is applied to the powder barrel. It is a logic which confutes itself, and needs no sillygism to prove its lying.

Why should we not bravely and manfully, with all the wisdom we possess, confront and reform the evils and iniquities of this system? It is a part and parcel of the work committed to our charge, that we shall wisely deal with this people, until God, by His own mysterious means and agencies, removes them finally from the continent and the planet. There is no room for the red man where the white man comes. He must give way. It is destiny, and there is no help for it. He knows this as well as we do; and he gnaws the grim fact with the teeth of the hopeless damned. But why imbitter him needlessly against us, against the Government, against the people among whom he resides, and over whose dear lives and properties he holds suspended the scalping knife and the flaming pine brand? We are unworthy of the sovereign possessions reserved for us from before the foundations of the world—making the title deeds, therefore, unusually sound and wellnigh unquestionable—if we cannot deal like rational men with the hordes of savages, whose lands we have robbed them of, whom we have reduced to mere pensioners upon our caprice—not bounty—and so satisfy them and their claims that the business of human life may be carried on safely in their vicinity and actual presence. 'Who art thou that saith 'there is a lion in the way'? Rise, sluggard, and slay the lion! The road has to be travelled.'

We are certainly not afraid of any lion, whether he be red or black; and, until lately, both these monstrous red and black animals lay in the direct path of the nation, on which it must travel or perish. We have pretty well mauled and knuckled the black animal, and wellnigh settled with his keepers, one and all! but this red lion is of a different sort, and requires altogether another kind of treatment. We shall yet save the bruised and bleeding black to the service of civilization and humanity. He never was half a bad fellow at the bottom of his leonine bowels, and he already takes to white civility and customs, like an educated, intelligent, and trusty dog of the 'poor dog Tray' sort! And I, for one, have more than a sneaking affection for his old black mug, and a world of hope in his future behavior, if we don't spoil him for the field and for watch and guard at home, by our infernal 'culture,' as the thing is called.

Is this red lion a more terrible devil to combat, or harder to trick into civility, or more impervious to the injunctions of the Ten Commandments? I suppose it will be said that he is; that the black fellow bolted the whole code at a gobble, and wagged his tail, as if the feat must surely please his new masters; that he had long had the benefit of civilized cooking, and knew a gentleman by his toggery; that, moreover, he was of a teachable, plastic nature, and was meant to lie down in due time upon the hearth rug before the fire, in any gentleman's sitting room in the land. It may be true. I believe all this myself, and a good deal more, about him; and I take renewed hope also for this great republic—which is the hope of the world!—that it has thus, at last, tamed him, and fitted him for exhibition upon a nobler theatre than that of Barnum.

But the red lion, you say, is untamable—cannot be dealt with successfully by the wit of white men; and that it is best, therefore, to rob him of the golden apples which he guards, and which are his only food, and so starve him out. But you can't deal that way with the Indian lion, my friend, without feeling the taste of his claws. You have tried it long enough. Bishop Whipple says, 'for fifty years'! And I ask you how much nearer are you to the taming of him now, than you were those 'fifty years' ago? Echo answers: 'That's an impudent question!' and I reply, so be it! but you can't shuffle it off in that way. I have tried my hand at suggesting how imminent dangers, calamities, and horrors may even yet be averted from the Western settlements; and if those who urge that justice shall be done to them, equal to that which we here render, or try or pretend to render to each other—if those who urge this are not listened to now, their plea will be remembered when it is all too late, and thousands of innocent people are again murdered, and their homes laid waste and desolate.

I again say, let no one think by these statements that I am making a special pleading for the Indians, or that I sanction their butcheries. God knows how far all this is from my thought or feeling! I am a white man right through all the inmost fibres of my being: too white, I often fear; for I find my love of race, and pride of blood and ancestry, often encroach too far upon the proper regions of my humanity, and threaten to blear my eyesight to the fair claims of the inferior races.

But I have to do with a thoughtful, reflective, and, at the bottom, just and humane people; and knowing this, I felt safe, or nearly so, against all misconstruction, in this my attempt to show that the late Indian massacres were not instigated merely and solely by the passion of the Indian for blood, but that they had deeper, broader, more tangible causes than this, some of which I have briefly hinted at. Woe to them by whom these butcheries came! Woe also to them who, knowing what must inevitably result from their foul dealings, continued to deal foully with the Indian—until the doomsday came!

I have not put in a single tithe of the evidence which I might adduce to prove my case. It is of no use appealing to the higher powers for redress. 'I am sick at heart,' says the good Bishop Whipple; 'I fear the words of one of our statesmen to me were true: 'Bishop, every word you say of this Indian system is true; the nation knows it. It is useless; you will not be heard. Your faith is only like that of the man that stood on the bank of the river, waiting for the water to run by, that he might cross over dryshod!'' And then he continues, with solemn emphasis and pity: 'All I have to say is this, that if a nation, trembling on the brink of anarchy and ruin, is so dead that it will not hear a plea to redress wrongs which the whole people admit call for reform, God in mercy pity us and our children!'



BURIED ALIVE.

A Dirge.

"There may be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily."

"A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted."

Deep, deep in the tender heart Make a grave for the joys of the Past! Let never a tear fall hot on their bier, But hurry them in as fast As we bury the Beautiful out of our sight, Ere corruption and horror have saddened our light.

Deep, deep in the sinking heart Make a grave for the dreams of the Past! Let the shrill cries of pain still assail thee in vain, Though they follow so wild and so fast: Through the fibres and sinews, and hot, bloody dew Let the sharp strokes fall piercing, unceasing, and true.

Call, call on the feverish brain To bring aid to the gasping heart! To sustain its quick throbs, to suppress its fierce sobs, As it must with its idols part: While the ruthless spade in the grave it has made Hurries forever the beautiful Dead!

Call, call on the tortured soul To stand close by the sinking heart, While the nervous mesh of the writhing flesh, Shuddering and shivering in every part, Its strange anguish renews as the hot, bloody dews Follow the track of the rude spade through.

Call, call on the gifted brain To send on in the funeral train Her fair children enwrought from the tissue of thought— Though their wailing will all be in vain— Yet shrouded in robes of funereal woe Let them move on to monotones, solemn and slow!

Rouse, rouse the immortal soul With its hopes and its visions so bright, To send them in the train with the thoughts of the brain, Though their vesture seemed woven of light, To sigh, wail, and weep o'er the pulse-rhythmed sleep Of the Dead in their living urn!

Heave, heave the weird sculptured stone; Press it deep on the throbbing grave! With a wildering moan leave the Buried alone In their tomb in the quivering heart: While it pours its wild blood in a hot lava flood Round its beautiful sepulchred Dead.

But my God, they are not at rest! Can they neither live nor die? See, they writhe in their throbbing grave! While the nervous mesh of the quivering flesh Its strange anguish renews as the hot, bloody dews Follow the track of my Beautiful back As they rush into life again, Bringing nought but a sense of pain!

We may bury deep the Past— Vain is all our bitter task! It is throbbing, living still, for beyond all power to kill, It can never find a rest in a woman's stormful breast, It can never, never sleep rocked by anguish wild and deep, It can never quiet lie with shrill sobs for lullaby; And since woman cannot part from the idols of her heart, And as severed life is Hell for the souls that love too well, Better far the tender form whose lorn life is only storm, With the coffined dead should seek To lie down in a dreamless sleep— And find rest in the dust with the worm.

Dig a quiet, lowly grave In the earth where willows wave! Round the burning anguish deep wrap the cooling winding sheet, Shroud the children of the brain, and the soul's high-visioned train: Ah, o'er the snowy sleep let no pitying mortal weep, For the weary seek repose with the worm!

Creeping pines and mosses grow O'er the fragile form below! Violets, bright-eyed pansies wave o'er the lowly, harmless grave; Let the butterfly and bee all the summer flutter free, O'er the flowers grown from a heart which no wrongs could ever part, Nor torture e'er remove from the creatures of its love; With the wild and feverish brain, and thought's bright but blighted train, With strong heart, but anguished soul, and pain's weird and heavy dole— Let the weary, tired form, whose lost life was only storm, In the shroud's pure snow Find release from woe, Nor hope, nor joy, nor love it e'er again would know!



NEGRO TROOPS.

There was a time not long since when the serious consideration of a question like this would have met with little favor. We remember seeing, in this city of New York, one genial October day, not very many years ago, a small company of negro soldiers. They were marching in Canal street, not in Broadway, and seemed to fear molestation even there. The writer was a schoolboy then, cadet in a military school (one of the first established of those excellent institutions), and had, of course, a particular interest in all military matters. So he stopped to look upon these black soldiers—marching with all the more pride (as it seemed to him) because they marched under the floating folds of the stars and stripes. His boy's heart was stirred by the spectacle, and full of a big emotion; but the fashion of the times overpowered the generous impulse, and he treated the negro soldiers with contempt.

This was in the palmy days of the old regime. The stifling of that generous impulse was one of the glories of the old regime. Not a decade of years went by, and the writer stood again in the streets of New York city, and saw another sight of negro soldiers. It was, indeed, and in all respects, another sight. This time the black men marched in Broadway; this time they feared no molestation. It was a balmy day in spring, and God's sunshine glistened gladly from the bright bayonets of United States black soldiers. What a spectacle it was! There marched the retributive justice of the nation—'carrying the flag and keeping step to the music of the Union.' That march was a march of triumph, and its sublime watchword was: 'LIBERTY AND UNION, NOW AND FOREVER, ONE AND INSEPARABLE!'

What a marvellous change in public opinion! Now, negro companies are treated with respect, negro regiments are honored; because we honor the defenders of our national ensign, which is the representative and symbol of our national life. The men who joined so gallantly in the assault on Port Hudson; who fell so nobly at Milliken's Bend, in repelling the attack of men whose blackness was not, like theirs, of the outside skin, but of a blacker, deeper dye, the blackness of treason in their inner hearts; the men whose blood drenched the sands of Morris Island, and made South Carolina more a sacred soil than it had ever been before, because it was blood poured out in defence of the nation's honor, and to wash out the stain of Carolina's dishonor; these men cannot be contemned now. They have shown themselves noble men. They have made for themselves a place in American history, along with their fathers at New Orleans, and their grandfathers under Washington. And the rebel epitaph of the brave Colonel Shaw, who led them unflinchingly against the iron hail of Wagner, is no reproach, but a badge of honor: 'We have buried him under his niggers.'

Since that memorable assault, another State has witnessed the patriotic gallantry of these despised 'niggers;' and in the first Virginia campaign of Lieutenant-General Grant, negroes have borne an honorable part. There is a division of them attached to the old ninth corps, under Burnside, in the present organization of the Army of the Potomac. While that noble army was fighting the battles of the Wilderness, this division was holding the fords of the Rapid Ann. When Grant swung his base away from the river, after the disaster to his right wing, and moved upon Lee's flank, the ninth corps, with its negro division, held an honorable post in the marching column; and at Spottsylvania Court House the correspondents tell us how, with the war cry of Fort Pillow in their mouths, these 'niggers' rushed valiantly to the assault, and elicited the highest praise for their steadiness and courage. Not less honorable is the record of the negro troops attached to the cooeperating Army of the Peninsula. The three extracts from official despatches, which follow, show what the record is.

May 5th, General Butler telegraphs to Secretary Stanton: 'We have seized Wilson's Wharf Landing. A brigade of Wild's colored troops are there. At Powhatan Landing two regiments of the same brigade have landed.'

May 9th, General Butler telegraphs from Bermuda Landing: 'Our operations may be summed up in a few words. With seventeen hundred cavalry we have advanced up the Peninsula, forced the Chickahominy, and have safely brought them to our present position. These are colored cavalry, and are now holding position as our advance toward Richmond.'

May 25th, the War Department announced, in a bulletin, that 'General Butler, in a despatch dated at headquarters in the field, at seven o'clock this morning, reports that Major-General Fitzhugh Lee, lately promoted, made, with cavalry, infantry, and artillery, an attack upon my post at Wilson's Wharf, north side of James River, below Fort Powhatan, garrisoned by two regiments, all negro troops, Brigadier-General Wild commanding, and was handsomely repulsed. Before the attack, Lee sent a flag, stating that he had force enough to take the place, demanding its surrender, and in that case the garrison should be turned over to the authorities at Richmond as prisoners of war(!); but if this proposition was rejected, he would not be answerable for the consequences when he took the place. General Wild replied: 'We will try that.' Reinforcements were at once sent, but the fight was over before their arrival.'

It has been not unfrequently said that negroes were cowards and would not fight. The best answer that can be made to that charge is the official order, hereto annexed, of General 'Baldy' Smith. It will be remembered that Grant had just accomplished the transfer of his army from the swamps of the Chickahominy to the south side of the James River, and had immediately thereupon attacked the earthworks in front of Petersburg. The time was June—a month later than the official despatches from Butler already quoted:

'To the Eighteenth Army Corps:

'The General commanding desires to express to his command his appreciation of the soldierly qualities which have been displayed during the campaign of the last seventeen days. Within that time they have been constantly called upon to undergo all the hardships of the soldier's life, and be exposed to all of its dangers.

'Marches under a hot sun have ended in severe battles, and, after the battle, watchful nights in the trenches gallantly taken from the enemy.

'But the crowning point of the honor they are entitled to has been won since the morning of the 15th instant, when a series of earthworks on most commanding positions and of formidable strength have been carried, with all the guns and materials of war of the enemy, including prisoners and colors. The works have all been held, and the trophies remain in our hands.

'This victory is all the more important to us as the troops never have been regularly organized in camps where time has been given them to learn the discipline necessary to a well-organized corps d'armee, but they had been hastily concentrated and suddenly summoned to take part in the trying campaign of our country's being. Such honor as they have won will remain imperishable.

'To the colored troops comprising the division of General Hinks, the General commanding would call the attention of his command. With the veterans of the Eighteenth Corps they have stormed the works of the enemy and carried them, taking guns and prisoners, and in the whole affair they have displayed all the qualities of good soldiers.

'By command of 'W. F. SMITH, Major-General.

'WM. RUSSELL, JR., 'Assistant Adjt.-General.

'Official: SOLON A. CARTER, 'Captain and A. A. A.-G.'

It may be added that 'Baldy' Smith has never been known as being particularly partial to the use of negro troops. He is reported to have said, after the assault on Petersburg, that the war was virtually ended, because the negroes had now shown that they could fight, and so it was only a question of time.

The man is not to be envied who can contemptuously disregard this record. And while we give unstinted honor to the heroes whose valor has made the Army of the Potomac immortal in history, and made its campaign of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania a campaign of glory, let us not forget that negro troops in that army, and in other armies in the same campaign, have borne their part faithfully, and deserve well of the republic. Nor let us forget the damning atrocities at Fort Pillow, where black men in United States uniform were massacred in cold blood, because they were willing rather to die freemen with their white comrades of the United States army, than live slaves to rebel masters:[D] thus vindicating their claim to freedom, and reflecting upon our country's flag the especial honor which such determined bravery has ever been awarded among men—reminding us of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae, and the Old Guard at Waterloo, disdaining to surrender.

So strange are the events of history! So mysterious is the plan of Providence, choosing now, as in the days of the apostle Paul, 'base things of the world, and things which are despised, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are!' What a stinging example of time's revenges, to be sure, that negroes should have a part in bringing to nought the rebellion of negro-holders! that they should be found fighting for the very Government whose power had aided to keep them in bondage to these negro-holders! In face of such facts, will any one impiously declare that fate, or blind chance, rules the affairs of men!

We might well pause at this point to consider the philosophy of revolutions. It would be an interesting study to investigate the efficient or radical causes of these singular phenomena of God's providence—these crises in history, when 'the fountains of the great deep are broken up,' and the experience of centuries is crowded into the limits of a single year, and we see the old landmarks all swept away before the overwhelming tides of a new era. Then it is that precedents avail us nothing, and we are driven to lay hold of those principles of justice and right which are alone eternal. For in the storm and wreck of revolution those principles are our sure beacon lights, shining on, like the stars, forever. Thus philosophizing, the question would be: Have revolutions a fixed law? Is there a recurring sequence in the mighty 'logic of events,' that will enable us to define a formula for the revolutions of systems in society? So science has demonstrated a law for the revolutions and changes of systems of worlds in infinite space. Or, are the revolutions of history, like the volcanic disturbances of our planet earth, in a sort, abnormal? They seem to come, like the deus ex machina of the Roman poet, to cut the Gordian knots that perplex statesmen and bewilder nations. The affairs of men get so tangled up sometimes, that to prevent anarchy and chaos, God sends revolutions, which sweep away the effete institutions and old, worn-out systems, to replace them with new and living systems. And thus there is a perpetual genesis, or new creation, of the world. Let any one read Carlyle's vivid description of the badness of the eighteenth century, 'bad in that bad way as never century before was, till the French Revolution came and put an end to it,' and he will understand something of this question of revolutions. It suggests the old scholastic dispute of the free agency of man, and looks as though, granting that freedom, it were, after all, too great a gift for us. For history seems to teach, as its one grand lesson, confirming, as always, the revelation in Christ, that men cannot take care of themselves; and that God leaves them to their own ways long enough to satisfy them that human agency is inadequate to solve the question of reform, and then, when the times are ripe, He takes the reins into His own hand, and starts society anew. It is the patient process of education by centuries, or by ages—only to be made perfect in the millennial age. So it is that the world moves. It moves by the free agency of man, kept in its balance by the guiding hand of God.