10 ChaPter^1
people. We must fight to win the prize. No people to whom liberty is given,
can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench liberty from
the iron hand of the tyrant.” For African-Americans, that fight against racial
and class tyranny–Whites with economic power versus Black people suffering
under racism and poverty–would continue well into the next century, as
Reconstruction, perhaps the best opportunity to address the race issue, fell
victim to old political realities, a rigid class system, and persistent racism.Native American Genocide and Western Expansion
The West [the area to the west of the Louisiana Purchase] was the last frontier
in the continental United States, and with the Civil War over and the slavery
issue settled, it was time to make good on filling that frontier to create a truly
national market, and begin creating a global capitalist power. The West was
a site of hope and expansion, and, as Republican ideology would explain it, a
place for White men to gain land and independence. But the West, contrary
to many myths, then and now, was not empty. Native tribes had inhabited the
region even before Columbus’s conquests, and, as American economic and
political leaders, and “average” farmers and workers, saw it, they stood in the
way of American expansion and progress. While the history of White mas-
sacre of Indians was already established, there was a legal problem for the
settlers. Various treaties had recognized Indian sovereignty, or independence
from the U.S. government. Indians, as it were, were like independent nations
and relations with them had to be determined by treaties, like any other for-
eign country, not by U.S. government law. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851,
for example, gave Indians sovereignty over the Great Plains for “as long as the
river flows and the eagle flies.” But this self-determination and these treaties
were never fully respected. A Cherokee official described a government offi-
cial from the Bureau of Indian Affairs official as arriving “with a pocket full
of money and his mouth full of lies. Some chiefs he will bribe, some he will
flatter and some he will make drunk: and the results will be called a treaty.”
In fact, the Fort Laramie Treaty gave rise to one of the more horrid attacks
on Indians in that era, the Sand Creek Massacre [also called the “Chivington
Massacre”]. In the 1851 Treaty, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians got title to
lands in what are today Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas. Seven
years later, however, the Pikes Peak Gold Rush in Colorado brought large