140 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
civilians. Non-technological innovations were perhaps even more
important, the Civil War having fostered an extreme patriotic ideol
ogy in the Union Army that carried over into the Indian wars. Now
more centralized under presidential command, US forces relied less
on state contributions and were thus less subject to their control.
The prestige of the Department of War rose within the fe deral gov
ernment, so that it had far more leeway to send troops to steamroll
over Indigenous peoples who challenged US dominion.
The Union Army victory over the Confederate Army transformed
the South into a quasi-captive nation, a region that remains the
poorest of the United States well over a century later. The situa
tion was similar to that in South Africa two decades later when the
British defeated the Boers (descendants of the original seventeenth
century Dutch settlers). As the British would later do with the Boers,
the US government eventually allowed the defeated southern elite
to return to their locally powerful positions, and both US southern
ers and Boers soon gained national political power. The powerful
white supremacist southern ruling class helped further militarize
the United States, the army practically becoming a southern institu
tion. Following the effective Reconstruction experiment to empower
former slaves, the US occupying army was withdrawn, and African
Americans were returned to quasi-bondage and disenfranchisement
through Jim Crow laws, forming a colonized population in the South.COLONIAL POLICY PRECEDES
MILITARY IMPLEMENTATION
In the midst of war, Lincoln did not forget his free-soiler settler
constituency that had raised him to the presidency. During the Civil
War, with the southern states unrepresented, Congress at Lincoln's
behest passed the Homestead Act in 1862, as well as the Morrill Act,
the latter transferring large tracts of Indigenous land to the states
to establish land grant universities. The Pacific Railroad Act pro
vided private companies with nearly two hundred million acres of
Indigenous land.14 With these land grabs, the US government broke
multiple treaties with Indigenous nations. Most of the western ter-