Jennifer Graber
This essay considers the ways in which racial violence in the nineteenth century proved formative to developments in the religious lives of people raced outside of whiteness. It draws on borderlands scholar Luís León’s description of marginalized communities transforming existing religious concepts and practices, as well as creating new religious options, a process he calls religious poetics. It also suggests the critical importance of debating and enacting racial violence for members of communities raced white. These actors engaged in a poetics of racial violence, in which they sought to interpret and reconfigure their worlds in relation to the violence that perpetuated America’s racial order. The essay surveys justifications for and condemnations of racial violence, as well as responses to racial violence, in an effort to explore how religion and violence intersected in the ongoing development of racial classifications and the circulation of social power in nineteenth-century America
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation,
Jennifer Graber
Publication Date: 2014
Publication Name: Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation
American Indian History
Religion and Violence
American Religious History
Quakers
‘‘If a War It May Be Called’’: The Peace Policy with American Indians
Jennifer Graber
In May 1871, a U.S. cavalry surgeon examined the bodies of seven American citizens killed by Kiowa Indians who had attacked their civilian wagon train crossing northern Texas. The serviceman recorded his gruesome findings in a letter to his commanding officer.The bodies were ‘‘riddled with bullets, covered with gashes, and the skulls crushed.’’
He recounted the worst part of his task, inspecting a body that had been fastened to a wagon wheel, mutilated, and set ablaze. ‘‘Owing to the charred condition of the soft parts [of the body],’’ he wrote, ‘‘it was impossible to determine whether the man was burned before or after his death.’’ The scene horrified the surgeon. Reports of the attack soon scandalized the country and led to fierce debate about the federal Indian policy in place, an approach dubbed the ‘‘Peace Policy’’ by supporters and opponents alike. President Ulysses S. Grant had inaugurated the policy in 1869. Among other things, the policy put religious organizations in charge of reservations with the hope that American Indians might respond to their benevolent and ethical administrators by living peacefully and acculturating. The wagon train attack proved a devastating blow to the policy's backers within the Grant administration.
The attack also confounded the religious representatives serving on reservations. They had come to the plains to prove that peace and kindness, rather than coercion and force, were the best methods to achieve Indian acculturation and stop Indian attacks.Groups ranging from the Roman Catholics to the Dutch Reformed sent their men and women to more than seventy reservations across the American West. Though the policy was ecumenical, one group stood at its symbolic center. The Quakers, or Society of Friends, had lobbied for the policy and were assigned more reservations than any other group despite their small numbers. As President Grant’s secretary of the interior remarked in 1869, ‘‘Friends were appointed not because they were believed to have any monopoly of honesty or of goodwill toward the Indians, but because their selection would of itself be understood by the country to indicate the policy adopted.’’According to the secretary, the Quakers’ central role in the new policy signaled the administration's ‘‘sincere cultivation of peaceful relations with the tribes.’’
The nation looked to the Kiowa reservation’s Quaker administrator, Lawrie Tatum, in the aftermath of the wagon train attack.How would he react to these brutal murders? Over subsequent months, some of Tatum’s coreligionists were displeased. In November 1871, members of the Ohio Yearly Meeting of Orthodox Friends sent a letter to Quaker leaders tasked with Indian affairs.
The Ohio Friends expressed their concern about Tatum’s actions. After the attack, Tatum had questioned the suspected Kiowa perpetrators when they visited him on the reservation. When the Kiowas acknowledged the attack, Tatum headed straight for the nearby fort in order to ask soldiers to arrest them. The Kiowas did not realize the nature of Tatum’s errand and followed him. When the Kiowas tried to leave the fort, soldiers stopped them. In the struggle, troops killed a Kiowa bystander. The arrested Indian men were to be taken to Texas for trial, which would likely result in the death penalty.
The Ohio Quakers complained that Tatum’s errand to the fort and request for the‘‘use of military force was a violation of the principle of peace’’ and‘‘an act of war.’’ They worried that, if Friends acquiesced to the death of one Indian at the hands of the military, they might also ‘‘justify taking ten or one hundred lives’’ and potentially ‘‘excuse a protracted war
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