Blackfoot Confederacy

“ But even without any exaggeration tales grave enough were being carried from lip to lip throughout the Indian tribes. Small wonder that the irresponsible young Chiefs, chafing under the rule of the white man and thirsting for the mad rapture of fight, were straining almost to the breaking point the authority of the cooler older heads, so that even that subtle redskin statesman, Crowfoot, began to fear for his own position in the Blackfeet confederacy. ”

“ The horses stray into the mountains; the women and their little babes go about alone. But the heart of a Blackfoot is a lie, and his tongue is a trap. If he says peace, it is to deceive. He comes as a brother: he smokes his pipe with us; but when he sees us weak and off our guard, he will slay and steal. ”

“ Young men will not follow him as a leader, and he is obliged to go as a servant or scout under another leader. He is likely never again to lead a war party, having learned to distrust his luck.
If a war party meets the enemy, and kills several of them, losing in the battle one of its own number, it is likely, as the phrase is, to "cover" the slain Blackfoot with all the dead enemies save one, and to have a scalp dance over that remaining one. If a party had killed six of the enemy and lost a man, it might "cover" the slain Blackfoot with five of the enemy. ”

“ The Blackfoot is a sworn and determined foe to all white men, and he has often been heard to declare that he would rather hang the scalp of a "pale face" to his girdle, than kill a buffalo to prevent his starving.
The hostility of this dreaded tribe is, and has for years been, proverbial. They are, perhaps, the only Indians who do not fear the power, and who refuse to acknowledge the superiority of the white man ”

“ The Blackfoot is the hereditary enemy of the Crow, toward whom hostility is like a cherished principle of religion; for every tribe, besides its casual antagonists, has some enduring foe with whom there can be no permanent reconciliation. ”

“ Governor Stevens also exhorted them to treat, for the sake of the example upon their inveterate enemies, the Blackfeet, that thereby they would prove themselves firm friends of the whites, and that he would then take delegations from each tribe with his party and proceed to the Blackfoot country, and make a lasting treaty of peace, so that they could ever after hunt the buffalo in safety, and trade horses with the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains. ”

“ THE Government could not escape the logic of the position it took when it made the Negro a soldier, and invoked his aid in putting down the slave-holders' Rebellion. As a soldier he stood in line of promotion: the Government destroyed the Confederacy when it placed muskets in the hands of the slaves; and at the close of the war had to legally render slavery forever impossible in the United States. The bloody deduction of the great struggle had to be made a living, legal verity in the Constitution, and hence the Thirteenth Amendment. ”

“ Crowfoot, head chief of the Blackfoot nation, was protesting his loyalty to the Lieutenant-Governor, and his squaws would one day stone him to death as a judgment. Fort Pitt, Battleford and Prince Albert must shortly capitulate to them, and then the squaws would receive the white women of those places as their private prisoners to do with as their sweet wills suggested. Already many of the accursed whites had been slaughtered, as at Duck Lake, for instance, but many more had yet to die. They must be utterly exterminated, so that the elect might possess the land undisturbed. ”

“ The Blackfeet sometimes cut to pieces an enemy killed in battle. If a Blackfoot had a relation killed by a member of another tribe, and afterward killed one of this tribe, he was likely to cut him all to pieces "to get even," that is, to gratify his spite—to obtain revenge. Sometimes, after they had killed an enemy, they dragged his body into camp, so as to give the children an opportunity to count coup on it. Often they cut the feet and hands off the dead, and took them away and danced over them for a long time. ”

“ But just as he laid his hand on the bridle of the first one, crack went the rifles of the Delawares, and there was one less Blackfoot thief on the scent after trappers. As soon as they could, after this, the party mounted and rode to camp, not stopping by the way, lest the main body of Blackfeet should discover the deed and seek for vengeance. Truly indeed, was the Blackfoot the Ishmael of the wilderness, whose hand was against every man, and every man's hand against him. ”

“ In November—with utter ruin impending—a Bill was introduced into the Confederate Congress for arming two hundred thousand negroes. It was debated till the following March. Then a feeble compromise was passed, merely giving the President power to accept such slaves as were offered to him. So inflexibly resolute were the leaders of the South in their hostility to emancipation. It was wholly unimportant. At that time Government [252] could have armed only another five thousand men; and could not feed the men it had.
The finances of the Confederacy were an utter wreck. ”

“ There is among this party, a Blackfoot chief, a renegado from his tribe, who sometime since killed the principal chief of his nation, and was {79} in consequence under the necessity of absconding. He has now joined the party of his hereditary foes, and is prepared to fight against his own people and kindred. He is a fine, warlike looking fellow, and although he takes part in all the war-songs, and sham-battles of his adopted brothers, and whoops, and howls as loud as the best of them, yet it is plain to perceive that he is distrusted and disliked. ”

“ When at last the truth began to dawn upon the administration that the negro might be made useful to loyalty, as well as to treason, to the Union as well as to the Confederacy, it then considered in what way it could employ him, which would in the least shock and offend the popular prejudice against him. ”

“ The objective point of the labors of the disunion leaders was a formal act of secession, by which Maryland would become an integral portion of the Confederacy, not only affording moral and material aid to the Southern cause, but relieving the rebel armies in crossing the Potomac from the charge, which at that stage of the conflict the leaders were anxious to avoid, of ignoring their vaunted doctrine of State rights by invading the territory of sovereign States. ”

“ The Confederate Congress passed a series of resolutions in which it was provided that on the capture of any white commissioned officer who had [p. 236] armed, organized, or led negro troops against the Confederacy, he should be tried by a military court and put to death or otherwise punished.
Democratic journalists and Congressmen at the North were hardly less violent in their opposition to the enlistment of black men. ”

“ But the Secession leaders and agitators are, for the most part, men of a lower social standing, jealous of the planters, and suspicious of their loyalty to the Confederacy. That they will promote in any sensible way the now inevitable emancipation is not to be hoped; and this throws a great charge on the Government and the Northern citizens. While silent, for the enemy’s sake, the Northern men have to provide for the employment and maintenance of any number of negroes who may apply to them. ”

“ It is the duty of history to record that there is to be found no apologist for cruelties that rebels inflicted upon brave but helpless Black soldiers during the war for the extirpation of slavery. The Confederate conduct at Pillow must remain a foul stain upon the name of the men who fought to perpetuate human slavery in North America, but failed. ”

“ The term deed as used by us has the same social significance as coup, a full discussion of which has been given by Grinnell. [33] Without going into details, it seems that among the Blackfoot, the capture of a weapon was the coup, or deed, rather than the formal striking of the enemy, though such was also taken into account. Our impression is, from what we have heard in the field, that there was no such formal development of the coup practice as among many other tribes. An old man relating his deeds seldom mentions scalps but dwells upon the number of guns, horses, etc. ”

“ Lincoln has just written in the margin a note that will annul the text. The time for certain concessions is past, and the South has no more doubts of it than the North. It may be that the slave States will succeed in founding their deplorable Confederacy, but it is impossible that they should succeed in making it live; they will perceive that it is easier to adopt a compact or to elect a President, than to create, in truth, in the face of the nineteenth century, the nationality of slavery. ”

“ The southern people demand that this organized "irrepressible conflict" shall stop— that the institution of slavery shall be maintained as an existing fact in this Confederacy. The sentiment is rapidly approaching to unanimity among them, that any attempt to impair its property- value, or a single political privilege which it confers, or any of the constitutional rights by which it is guarantied, or to place over them the party which arrogates to itself the right to do any of these things, will be a fatal blow at the peace and stability of this great country. ”

“ They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States. ”

“ The society, so far as it has come under the notice of white men, has commonly been designated by them as the “Dog Soldier” society—a misapprehension of a name belonging probably to only one of the six or eight orders of the organization. The corresponding Blackfoot organization, the Ikunuhkatsi or “All Comrades,” is described by Grinnell in his “Blackfoot Lodge Tales.” The Kiowa organization will be noted later. ”

“ In their hostile encounters, the Blackfeet have much that is common to many Plains tribes, and also some customs that are peculiar to themselves. Like most Indians, they are subject to sudden, apparently causeless, panics, while at other times they display a courage that is heroic. They are firm believers in luck, and will follow a leader who is fortunate in his expeditions into almost any danger. On the other hand, if the leader of a war party loses his young men, or any of them, the people in the camp think that he is unlucky, and does not know how to lead a war party. ”

“ The most of them are coming round to right views of negro suffrage, too. That is the only justice for the blacks, and it is the only safety for us. The idea of allowing the loyal colored population to be represented by the whites, the most of whom were traitors,—of letting a Rebel just out of the Confederate army vote, and telling a colored man just out of the Union army that he has no vote,—the idea is so perfectly absurd that the Rebels themselves must acknowledge it. ”

“ We saw crowds of soldiers mixed up with the lowest rabble in the town, workingmen in dirty clothes, newsboys, ragged children, negroes, and even women walking in the procession, while swarms of negroes and low white women elbowed each other in a dense mass on the pavement. To see such creatures exulting over our misfortune was enough to make one scream with rage. One of their dozen transparencies was inscribed with "A dead Confederacy." ”

“ Swift to move, whether on foot or horseback, they made long journeys to war, and with telling force struck their enemies. They had conquered and driven out from the territory which they occupied the tribes who once inhabited it, and maintained a desultory and successful warfare against all invaders, fighting with the Crees on the north, the Assinaboines on the east, the Crows on the south, and the Snakes, Kalispels, and Kutenais on the southwest and west. In those days the Blackfeet were rich and powerful. The buffalo fed and clothed them, and they needed nothing beyond what nature supplied. ”

“ Though the Confederates knew that their fathers had fought side by side with black men in the Revolution and at New Orleans, and though they themselves raised negro regiments in Louisiana, and employed them against the Federal Government, they were furious that such soldiers should be used against themselves, and therefore in the most inhuman manner put to death, or sold into slavery, every coloured man captured in Federal uniform. ”

“ If we are unwilling to impair the force of this applauded provision, we shall be obliged to conclude, that the United States afford the extraordinary spectacle of a government destitute even of the shadow of constitutional power to enforce the execution of its own laws. It will appear, from the specimens which have been cited, that the American Confederacy, in this particular, stands discriminated from every other institution of a similar kind, and exhibits a new and unexampled phenomenon in the political world. ”

“ Seven days later, the convention of Confederate States unanimously adopted a constitution of their own, and the new government was authoritatively announced to be founded on the idea that the negro race is a slave race; that slavery is its natural and normal condition. The issue was made up, whether the great republic was to maintain its providential place in the history of mankind, or a rebellion founded on negro slavery gain a recognition of its principle throughout the civilized world. To the disaffected LINCOLN had said, "You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors." ”

“ Whenever the Southern Confederacy shall achieve its independence—no matter what its resources, its allies, or its aims—it will have to stand face to face with civilized Europe on this question of slavery, and the strength which it derived from the ægis of the Constitution—“the league with the devil and covenant with Hell”—will be withered and gone. ”