A History of the American People

without it ever impinging on her consciousness, insofar as that is reflected in her poetry. Of her
more than 1,700 poems, not one refers directly to the war, or even indirectly, though they often
exude terror and dismay. She was educated at Amherst Academy and spent a year at Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary: otherwise her life was passed at home, eventless, and for the last
twenty-five years of her life in almost complete seclusion. Only six of her poems were published
in her lifetime and evidently she did not consider it part of the poet's job to obtain publication.
Effectively, she did not emerge as a writer at all until the 1890s, after her death. In a sense, her
poetry is internal exploration and could have been written in almost any country, at almost any
period of history, with one exception: the South in the 1860s. Had she lived in, say, Charleston
or Savannah, she would have been forced to confront external reality in her verse. That is the
difference between North and South.
But not only in cloistered New England was the war distant. In vast stretches of America, it
had virtually no effect on the rapid development of the country. Not that Westerners were
indifferent to the war. They favored the Union because they needed it. The South was protesting
not only against the North's interference in its peculiar institution' but against the growth of government generally. But Westerners, for the time being at least, wanted some of the services that only federal government could provide. As the historian of the trails through Oregon and to California put it,Most pre-Civil War overlanders found the United States government, through
its armed forces, military installations, Indian agents, explorers, surveyors, road builders,
physicians and mail-carriers to be an impressively potent and helpful force.’ Up to the outset of
the Civil War, go percent of the US Army's active units were stationed in the seventy-nine posts
of the transMississippi-7,090 officers and men in 1860. Withdrawal of many units once the war
began made Westerners realize quite how dependent they were on federal power.
Lack of troops raised problems in the West and may have encouraged the Indians to take
advantage. There were raids and massacres, and the settlers responded by raising volunteers and
using them. They were less experienced at dealing with Indians than the regular units, and their
officers were often prone to take alarm needlessly and overreact-all the good commanders were
out east, fighting. What was liable to happen was demonstrated at Sand Creek in the Colorado
Territory on November 29, 1864, just after Lincoln's reelection. Following Indian atrocities, a
punitive column consisting of the Third Colorado Volunteers, under Colonel John M.
Chivington, attacked a camp of 500 Cheyennes. Their leaders, Black Kettle and White Antelope,
believed a peace treaty was in effect and said they had turned in their arms. The volunteers
slaughtered men, women, and children indiscriminately, killing over 150, and returning to
Denver in triumph, displaying scalps and severed genitals like trophies. This Sand Creek
massacre was later investigated by a joint Committee of Congress, and Chivington condemned,
though he was never punished. The Cheyennes retaliated brutally on several occasions, and on
December 21, 1866, after the war was over, in combination with Lakotas and Arapahos, they
ambushed and slaughtered eighty men under the command of Colonel William J. Fetterman, one
of the worst defeats the US Army suffered at Indian hands.
In some ways the Civil War hastened the development of the West because, by removing the
Southern-Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress, it ended a legislative logjam which
had held up certain measures for decades and impeded economic and constitutional progress. For
instance, the Californian engineer-promoter Theodore D. Judah, representing a group of San
Francisco bankers and entrepreneurs, contrived in the spring of 1861, immediately after the
Southerners had left Washington, to lobby the Pacific Railroad Act through Congress. This was
entirely a venture to benefit the North and the Northwest. It involved the railroads receiving from