Wounded Knee Massacre Analysis

1. The Wounded Knee Massacre took place on December 29, 1890, but the tensions that led to this eruption in conflict had long been developing. For years the United States government had been seizing land that belonged to Native Americans through “trickery… deportation… and murder”, including that of the Lakota Sioux, who were the victims of the massacre. Not only that, “Americans had shown ‘democratic energy and enterprise’ in ‘driving back the Indians, or annihilating them as a race’”, demonstrating that Native American genocide was as much about stealing land as it was ethnic cleansing. Obviously, the Native Americans that remained alive but were confined to reservations, on land that was undesirable and vacant of bison (which were essential
to Native Americans), were discontent and in tumult. Americans noticed this unrest and were disturbed by it, and it made their relations even more uneasy, because they feared Native Americans might revolt. This resulted in demands for the Lakota Sioux to surrender their weapons and to leave their reservation; after this, tensions peaked and the massacre ensued. Wounded Knee represented the end of the Indian Wars, a series of armed struggles between American colonists and Native Americans, and subsequently the cementing of total U.S. dominance of the frontier, representing the success of American western expansion. Word Count: 242
2. The abolitionist movement in the 1830s and 1840s was anti-slavery, obviously, but it was not often anti-racist. Many of the most outspoken abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, did in fact share the same racist beliefs about African-Americans as did enslavers, but alternatively used those beliefs to conclude that African-Americans should not be enslaved. In the 17th century, there was debate concerning how best to justify the racial hierarchy that placed whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. For example, Isaac Newton in Opticks argued that physics clearly showed that white was “the chiefest color”. In the early 18th century, this racism profoundly affected the abolitionist movement by suffocating the voices of slaves and of free blacks, effectively dehumanizing them. Garrison was arguably the most influential white abolitionist of his time, but he also succumbed to racist rhetoric about black inferiority. This was most clearly made evident by his stance on gradual equality; his belief that African-Americans would need time to learn how to behave in ‘civilized society’ and that they were too barbaric to live alongside whites in their current state. Racist abolitionists like Garrison also firmly believed in the idea of uplift suasion, believing that blacks could eventually become as refined as whites, if they adopted the mannerisms and habits of white people. The racist undercurrent to much of the anti-slavery activism in the early 18th century weakened the movement by pushing out black abolitionists. Frederick Douglass, for example, was initially part of Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery lecture tour, until he became dissatisfied with how he and his story were used as props for Garrison. He wanted his own voice and his own platform on which to give his anti-racist and anti-slavery philosophy, so he split from Garrison to pursue his cause in his own way. The division created within the abolitionist movement between those who held racist beliefs about inherent black inferiority and those who did not limited what the movement could accomplish. Word Count: 338
3.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, just after the Compromise of 1850. Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was African-American, it was a fictional novel, but addressed the very real main theme of anti-slavery. It was an impassioned piece of work that showed the harsh reality of the life of a slave. Written so soon after the Compromise of 1850, it was a controversial piece, and scandalized slavery supporters, who heavily criticized it. The Compromise of 1850 was meant to diffuse tensions between slave states and free states, as far as land acquisition was concerned. One of the five bills passed under the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Act, which heavily fined officials who did not arrest a fugitive slave or any person found giving aid to a fugitive slave. The act also required civilians to help slave catchers, which was a widely-disliked provision in the North. Since the plot of the novel concerns runaway slaves, it is clear why this work caused such a profound reaction and was so revolutionary and shocking for its time. The novel was stirring enough to even further incite Northern anger at the institution of slavery and in particular the Fugitive Slave Act. This anger increased tensions between the North and the South, and precipitated the Civil War, which began in 1861, less than a decade after the novel was published. Word Count:
243
4. The Radical Republicans were a leftist faction of the American Republican Party in the mid to late 19th century that differentiated themselves by the belief that “a powerful national state must guarantee blacks equal political standing and equal opportunity in a free-labor economy” and also by the desire to punish Confederate leaders after the Civil War. In the years 1866 and 1867, directly following the end of the Civil War, Radical Republicans took control of Congress and then of policy, and ousted ex-Confederates from positions of power, as well as gave freed slaves the right to vote. They enacted the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill, which further gave rights to African-Americans; however, these bills were initially vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, who was convinced that protecting blacks’ civil rights would be a “violation to all our experience as a people” and that “giving blacks full citizenship discriminated against whites”. Johnson voiced the opinions of many racist Americans when he implied that these policies could lead to the perceived evil of intermarriage. Later, the Reconstruction Act was passed in 1867, putting the Confederate states (except Tennessee) under military rule and also central authority from Washington. This, the Republican Congress believed, would “thoroughly transform… [the South’s] political and social elements”. Though freed slaves proved themselves politically and economically competent during this Reconstruction period, civil and political equality could and did not last, because the “black community, abandoned by the nation, fell victim to violence and fraud”. Word Count: 250
5.
Racial violence became a central feature of the Reconstruction era because of the changing nature of the social and racial hierarchy. For as long as African-Americans had been present in the United States, there had been a firm racial hierarchy in place, in which whites were at the top and blacks were at the bottom, and this was reflected in their rights; whites had them all, while blacks effectively had none. But all this began to change during Reconstruction, as slavery was outlawed and laws began to change to enfranchise blacks and give them more rights as citizens, as well giving them political positions. The social and political advancement of black Americans made whites insecure and uncomfortable with their shifting position in society. Whites clashed with blacks in the political arena if a black person dared to vote against their white employer, and this led to widespread violence against African-Americans, which was thought by whites to be “a response to the ‘bad legislation, official incompetency, and corruption’ of Black politicians. The Ku Klux Klan, a group dedicated to white supremacy, emerged during the Reconstruction, and committed violent acts and assassinated Republican leaders, both black and white. The Klan was effectively “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party… and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy”. The Klan’s violent acts had the political purpose of destroying the Republican party’s infrastructure
and undermining Reconstruction policies that empowered blacks, in an attempt to revert society to its prewar state, wherein blacks remained at the bottom of society. Word Count: 261