François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

After Napoleon’s judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien, Chateaubriand moved to the Rue de Mirosmesnil, near the now abandoned Parc de Monceaux, “where the Revolution had begun among the orgies of the Duc d’Orléans,” who used it as a hideaway “embellished with marble nudes and mock ruins—symbols of the frivolous, debauched politics that were to flood France with prostitution and debris.” Philippe d’Orleans, first in line for the French throne if the Bourbons died out, built the park as a “folly garden,” years before the revolution. Indeed a libertine, he banned the Paris police from the area, making it a haven not only for ordinary illegal activities but also for Jacobin meetings. Philippe supported the Revolution, even to the extent of legally changing his name to Phillippe Égalité, before himself falling victim to trumped-up charges during the Reign of Terror. As for Chateaubriand, “at most I talked to the rabbits in the park or chatted about the Duc d’Enghien with three crows on the bank of an artificial stream,” not “know[ing] what to do with my imagination or my feelings.” In his anxious boredom, he took to the road, traveling to Geneva to visit Madame de Staël, a friend from his Atala days, and the noble if eccentric painter, Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin, a man of “a species between the monkey and the satyr,” in whose studio “no model was safe.” Unlike the Duc d’Orleans, the libertine artist could exhibit a “total abnegation of self, an uncalculating devotion to the miseries of others, a delicate, superior, idealized way of feeling.” As for Madame de Staël, her professions of suffering perplexing—how “could there be any misery in having fame, leisure, peace, and a sumptuous sanctuary with a view of the Alps”—but he concludes that “hearts have different secrets, incomprehensible to other hearts. Let us not deny anyone his suffering. Sorrows are like countries: each man has his own.”

Chateaubriand’s sufferings still centered on the emptiness caused by the death of Madame de Beaumont. “Old seasons of ardor returned to me with all their fire and melancholy. I was no longer in the places I was living. I was dreaming of other shores.” He learned of the death of his sister, Lucile, who had descended into madness and died in Paris, alone. Tending to his wife’s illness at the time, Chateaubriand could not attend the funeral and knew nothing of her burial arrangements. “My sister was buried among the poor. In what cemetery was she lain?” For his part, Napoleon was about to triumph at Austerlitz. “What did it matter to me at the moment I lost my sister, the millions of soldiers who were falling on the battlefield, the crumbling of thrones—the changing of the face of the world?” We are ineluctably centered in our own bodies and souls, attending for the most part to them and to the bodies and souls who have touched us. “When she disappeared, my childhood, my family, and the first vestiges of my life disappeared with her.” Reflecting on his wife’s less heartfelt response to his sister’s death (she was “still smarting from Lucile’s imperious whims”), Chateaubriand writes, “Let us be mild if we wish to be mourned. Only angels weep for lofty genius and superior qualities.”

Like Napoleon, however, Chateaubriand was soon on the move once more. In 1806 he traveled to Greece (“amidst the silence of Sparta’s wreckage, glory itself was mute”), Constantinople (again silence, a city jammed with “a mute crowd who seem to wish to pass unseen and always appear to be hiding from the gaze of the master”), and Jerusalem (“the sight of the cradle of the Israelites and the homeland of Christians filled me with joy and reverence”). Three places, three regimes. Sparta betokens the limits of military-aristocratic prowess (with a glance at Napoleon?). Constantinople, a religious despotism, where marketplace and cemetery (making it seem “as if Turks were here only to buy, sell, and die”) defined one aspect of the way of life, prison and seraglio another. “No sign of joy or look of happiness meets your eyes here. What you see is not a people, but a herd led by an imam and slaughtered by a janissary,” with the seraglio functioning as “the capital of servitude,” where “a sacred guardian carefully preserves the germs of pestilence and the primitive laws of tyranny.” Jerusalem, by contrast, still lives, as the place where, “even humanly speaking, the greatest event that has ever changed the face of the world occurred.” Returning through Carthage and Spain, Chateaubriand counts as his ‘spoils’ not territory but a book, his Itinerary to Jerusalem. Uninflamed by ambition, he devotes himself to learning, not conquering. In his writing and thinking alike, “My accuracy is due to my good common sense; I am a child of the pedestrian race of Celts and tortoises, not of the race of Tartars and birds who are endowed with horses and wings.” Even if religion “has often ravished me in its embrace,” it has always “set me down on earth again.” Travel itself bores him; “I love travel only because of the independence it gives me,” the countryside only for “the solitude it offers.”

Between Napoleonic military conquest and the privacy of family, friends, and thoughts stands politics. Chateaubriand never loses sight of it. “I am, in a certain sense, the last person to visit the Turkish empire while it still practiced its old way of life. Revolutions, which precede or follow me everywhere I go, have spread across Greece, Syria, and Egypt. Is a new Orient coming into being? What will emerge from it? Will we receive the punishment we deserve for having taught the modern art of warfare to nations whose social state is founded on slavery and polygamy?”

More immediately, back in France, “Bonaparte’s successes, far from subjugating me, had revolted me.” As publisher and editor of the Mercure, he wrote an article reminding his readers of the murder that initiated the modern despotism Napoleon had founded. The Emperor had him arrested for his troubles and confiscated his property but, in line with the milder tyrannies of the day, allowed him to retreat to internal exile in the village of Vallée-aux-Loups, where he planted trees and thought of settling in a park of his own designing. That, too, would never happen: “I fear that the only way I will be able to leave this world is by crossing over the corpses of my dreams.” 

The publication of his next book, The Martyrs, “earned me the renewed attention of persecution.” It is an account of “the struggle between two religions,” paganism and Christianity, “one dying and the other being born,” a theme that offers “one of the richest, most fertile, and most dramatic subjects.” But the undermining of an imperial despotism of the past “could not escape the notice of the imperial police” of the present— “all the more so since the English translator, who had no reason to be circumspect and who did not care a whit about compromising me, had, in his preface, pointed out these allusions.” As before, the pressure lessened in due course. Much worse, his cousin Armand, an unrepentant Legitimist, was arrested, jailed, and executed after returning to France from exile in England, having hoped to sound out public sentiment in Paris regarding Napoleon’s regime. “I saw my cousin for the last time, and was unable to recognize him; the shot had disfigured him and his face was gone.” Decades later, at the time he wrote this chapter, the bloodstains were still visible on the wall.

To protect him from further persecution, his friends got him elected to the Académie Française, where his very prominence might serve as a shield. The honor brought with it an obligation to make a speech. “I was determined to make my claims in favor of liberty heard and to raise my voice against tyranny,” paying homage to Legitimist monarchy and decrying “the horrors of 1793.” Napoleon himself read and edited the draft, which Chateaubriand was then allowed to publish but not to read aloud. He was “baffled” that the bowdlerized text still retained his celebration of liberty, “the greatest good and the first need of mankind,” indispensable to literature, which “languishes and dies in irons.” 

“The mixture of anger and attraction Bonaparte felt toward me is constant and strange.” The regime locked him up one day, allowed him to take a seat at the Académie the next, signed off on the publication of his latest book, then instigated attacks on it by hostile reviewers. Beside these contradictions—likely actions taken according to a strategy of carrot-and stick manipulation—Chateaubriand places his own coherence: “I examine everything. I am a republican who serves the monarchy and a philosopher who honors religion”—all “inevitable consequences of the uncertainty of theory and the certainty of practice in human life.” “My mind, made to believe in nothing, not even myself, made to disdain everything, whether splendors or miseries, nations or kings, has nevertheless been dominated by a rational instinct that ordered it to submit to what is acknowledged to be good: religion, justice, humanity, equality, liberty, glory.” Moral and divine beauty remain “superior to all earthly dreams.” “All it takes is a bit of courage to reach out and grasp it.” With the publication of The Genius of Christianity, The Martyrs, and the Itinerary, “my life of poetry and study really came to an end.” It was only with the Bourbon Restoration, following the fall of Napoleon, that he turned, or returned, to politics. He regards The Genius of Christianity as his greatest work, the one that began “the religious revolution against the philosophism of the eighteenth century” and the literary revolution of French Romanticism (“for there can be no renovation in thought without an innovation in style”).

Accordingly, he turns now to the political man about whom he could not write explicitly and at length until after the years in which his religio-poetic writings appeared. Although some have ridiculed Chateaubriand for writing himself into a ‘parallel life’ with the great Napoleon, they are wrong. The two men did have parallel but contrasting lives, the one a writer who defended liberty, the other as a despot who abused it. But each man was, in his own way, a weaver of imagined things.  Each was the preeminent Frenchman of that generation, in his way of life. Each experienced glory and exile as a result of his way of life. Who will have the last word, in the eyes of posterity—the Christian man of thought or the Enlightenment man of action? 

Chateaubriand recalls the confusion of the Legitimist monarchs at the outset of the French Revolution, which they misunderstood as a mere revolt “where they should have seen the changing of the nations, the end and the beginning of a world.” Not only the Bourbons but all the European monarchs could not fathom the rise of ‘the democracy.’ Militarily, politically, diplomatically, they attempted to counter mass warfare and mass politics with the old ways of conduct. “Soon enough conscripts were going to rout Frederick’s grenadiers, monarchs were going to go plead for peace in the antechambers of obscure demagogues, and the terrible revolutionary attitude would unravel old Europe’s entanglements on the scaffold. Old Europe thought it was only warring with France and did not perceive that a new age was marching on it.” Napoleon did perceive it, reconstituting monarchy along new lines in France, and throughout the continent, where he acted as kingmaker in half a dozen countries. “How were these miracles worked? What qualities did the man who produced them possess?”

Unlike Alexander the Great, the son of a king, tutored by the greatest philosopher of his time, Napoleon “did not find power in his family; he created it.” Those who claim that Napoleon served as “merely the implementer of the social thinking that swirled around him,” embodying the ‘spirit of the age,’ do not ask themselves “how could there be a man capable of harnessing and steering so many strange supremacies.” 

Admittedly, Napoleon’s family origins weren’t low. The Buonapartes “have always been among the most ancient and most noble families,” one line in Tuscany, the other (Napoleon’s) in Corsica. During the Revolution he “was a democrat only momentarily”; “his leanings were aristocratic.” His first name had been “borne by several cardinals.” Although he falsified his birth date so that he could claim to have been born after France had taken Corsica, making him a native-born Frenchman, in his youth “he detested the French” as Corsica’s oppressors, “until their valiance gave him power.” Chateaubriand argues that Napoleon never relinquished his resentment of the French, speaking only “of himself, his empire, his soldiers, and almost never of the French” once he had achieved the summit of French politics. Rousseau had predicted that Corsica might astonish the world someday; he meant that its republican political institutions would serve as a model for the greater states. Chateaubriand confirms the conjecture, in a way. “Reared in Corsica, Bonaparte was educated in that primary school of the revolutions,” so called because the Corsicans, led by their republican hero, Filippo Antonio Pasquale de Paoli, had rebelled against their French conquerors in the years before Napoleon’s birth. And so, “to begin with, he brought us neither the calm nor the passions of the young, but a spirit already stamped with political passions.” Leaving Corsica for a French school at the age of nine, taunted by his classmates, who found his first name odd and his homeland contemptible, he told a friend, “I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can,” as indeed he would come to do. “Morose and rebellious, he irritated his teachers. He criticized everything ruthlessly.” He got through, receiving an appointment in an artillery regiment.

There, his real education began, and not only in logistics. He read widely in history, economics, philosophy (“I do not believe a word of it,” he said of Rousseau’s first Discourse), and geography. Among the epic poets, he preferred Ariosto to Tasso, as Ariosto draws “portraits of future generals.” His own literary style, seen in his letters and even a novella, Chateaubriand describes as “declamatory,” as befits his commanding temperament.

He returned to Corsica, where the elderly but unbowed Paoli distrusted him, since young Buonaparte’s father had given up on Corsican independence, becoming Corsica’s representative to the French royal court. Rejected by his patriotic hero, in 1792 Napoleon sided with the Corsican Jacobins against Paoli’s nationalists and the Corsican Legitimists. Now senior gunner and artillery commander of the Republican forces, he returned to France to oversee the siege of Toulon, which had recognized the Bourbons and opened itself to the English navy. “Here, Bonaparte’s military career begins” in terms of its historical significance, as he formulated the plan that retook the city. Chateaubriand does not neglect to note that during the siege Napoleon laughed at how a young officer, recently married, was cut in two by an artillery shell. And he comments that Napoleon rose to prominence by killing Frenchmen. “He grew strong on our flesh; he broke our bones and fed on the marrow of lions,” allied with the bloodthirsty Jacobins while Chateaubriand himself was fighting on the Royalist side. Although offered the command of Paris by Robespierre, Napoleon declined the honor, confident that he would take Paris by his own arms, “later on.” He had correctly calculated that the Reign of Terror could not rule for long. 

Robespierre and his colleagues not being ones to take ‘no’ for an answer, he soon found himself threatened by them, as well. Truth to tell, “He was difficult to help; he accepted favors with the same grudgingness he had shown when he was promoted by the king’s munificence” in his early career. At the same time, “he resented anyone more fortunate than he was.” “Here we see a glimmering,” Chateaubriand remarks, “of the loathing the communists and proletarians of the present time express for the rich.” Chateaubriand disagrees with his cousin, Tocqueville, who hopes that the regime of social equality may prove enduring and decent. “Whatever efforts democracy may make to improve its moeurs by means of the great purpose it sets itself, its habits drag its moeurs down.” Confusing licentiousness with liberty, “it feels a strong resentment toward any sense of restriction,” and its terror-rule didn’t last because “it couldn’t kill everyone.” It is easy to overlook this, because the revolutionary armies defeated the old-regime armies arrayed against them, bringing glory to the regime. 

That regime soon had need of a brilliant commander, when Royalists in Paris, backed by the English, clashed with Republican forces. Threatened with ruin, the leader of the Parisian Republican forces turned to Napoleon, whose “quick and expert thinking” won the day, made him a hero of the people, and earned him the generalship of the French army in Italy. “At this point, Napoleon enters fully into his destiny”; “events had fashioned him, and now he is going to fashion events,” no longer needing “to bow and scrape before the mediocrities” whose patronage he had reluctantly sought. In Italy, “the eagle does not walk, he flies, with the banner of victory from his neck and wings.” He drove the Austrians out of the country, going on to defeat the Germans at Rivoli in January 1791. By mid-year he had taken Trieste and the Austrians sued for peace. “As Muhammad went forth with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, so we [French] went forth with the sword and the Rights of Man.“

Under such circumstances, in the presence of such a man, the Republicans faced the crisis of victory. With Napoleon at the head of an army of devoted soldiers far more numerous than was necessary to defend France, Republicans “fear[ed] a supreme despotism that would threaten the existence of every other despotism”—the one they had established. They praised Napoleon while casting about for a way to rid themselves of him. Napoleon himself devised an answer. Saying, “Europe is a molehill; all the great empires and revolutions have been in the East,” he announced that “I have won all the glory I can win here” and proposed a vast imperial venture, evidently in imitation of Alexander the Great, beginning with the conquest of Egypt and projected to end in India. The regime was only too happy to concur, “rush[ing] to send the victor abroad” in 1798. “This Egyptian adventure would change Napoleon’s fortune as well as his genius—gilding this genius, which was already too bright, with a ray of sun that struck at the pillars of cloud and smoke”—a reverse Exodus, a return to Egypt by France’s Pharaoh of the future.

Unlike Chateaubriand, Napoleon was “a man who never meander[ed].” Also unlike Chateaubriand, his brain was a “chaos,” combining “positive ideas and novelistic feelings, systems and chimeras, serious studies and flights of the imagination, wisdom and folly.” His traveling library on the Egyptian expedition included ‘Ossian,’ Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rousseau’s The New Héloise, and the Old (but not the New) Testament. “From these incoherent productions of the age, he drew the Empire: an immense dream, which passed as swiftly as the disorderly darkness that brought it into the world.”

The Mamluk military class, controlled by the Ottoman Turks, ruled Egypt. Claiming to “respect God, his Prophet, and the Koran more than the Mamluks,” Napoleon marched his soldiers to the pyramids and declaimed, “From the heights of these monuments, forty centuries fix their eyes upon you!” And thanks to his courting of the Church, the Pope wrote him a letter calling him “my dearest son.” Although no devotee of the New Testament, the General knew how to be, or at least appear to be, all things to all men: Muslims, French secularists, Catholic Christians. The pose didn’t work for long. Soon enough, “his two-faced approach only made him, in the eyes of the Muslim masses, a false Christian and a false Muslim.” “By imitating Alexander, Bonaparte misjudged himself, and the age, and the state of religion—nowadays, no one can pass himself off as a god.” For a time, “his will was his destiny and his fortune,” but only for a time.

His soldiers in Egypt followed their, and his, “dreams of the Orient,” dreams going back to the Crusaders. And if the French “no longer had the faith that led them to liberate the Holy Sepulcher, they still had the boldness of crusaders, and a faith in the realms and the beauties that the troubadours and chroniclers had created around Godfrey.” But in reality, while expecting to “penetrate mysterious Egypt, descend into catacombs, excavate pyramids, unearth undiscovered manuscripts, decipher hieroglyphs, and reawaken Thermosirus,” priest of the Greek god Apollo, the god of reason, what they encountered in fact was mud huts, plague, Bedouins, Mamluks. Looking at things from several decades’ distance, Chateaubriand doesn’t quite share their disillusionment, since the French did, in the longer run, sow “seeds of civilization,” as a “ray of light stole into the darkness of Islam, and a breach was made in barbarism.”

From Egypt he marched his troops into Syria in February of 1799, pursuing his “dream of power.” Passing from Africa to Asia, “this colossal man was marching toward the conquest of the world—a conqueror bound for climes that were not to be conquered.” Climes: it was nature that would impose limits on Napoleon’s ambition, soon in Asia, later in Russia.

At Jaffa, he executed enemy soldiers who had surrendered, anticipating by many hundreds his future murder of the Duc d’Enghien. And as with that later crime, “this deed is passed over in silence or indicated vaguely in the official dispatches and accounts of men close to Bonaparte.” Ten years later, Napoleon would deplore the act of an Austrian military officer who allowed French and Bavarian prisoners to be slaughtered. “But what did he care about such contradictions? He knew the truth and toyed with it; he used it the same way he would have used a lie,” rather as Machiavelli advises his prince to judge words and men alike for their usefulness. “Heaven punishes the violation of human rights,” this time in a plague that descended upon the French troops. Claiming victory, Napoleon returned to Egypt.

Although “the French people raved about the Egyptian expedition and did not observe that it was a violation of both probity and political rights,” Chateaubriand does not join them. Indeed, he condemns European imperialism generally. Napoleon himself wanted to leave Egypt, seeing the war to have been “pointless and impolitic.” Similar plans for colonizing Egypt were entertained by the Old Regime Chateaubriand usually prefers. And the unromantic, dreamless English, who “esteem only practical politics, founded on interests,” also “consider fidelity to treaties and moral scruples childish” as they advance into other continents. Chateaubriand registers the ancient association of imperialism with tyranny.

In departing for France, Napoleon imitated Julius Caesar, who, to avoid capture by naval forces aligned with Ptolemy XIII, “saved himself by jumping into the harbor of Alexandria and swimming to shore,” where Ptolemy’s rival, Julius’ lover, Cleopatra awaited him. No Cleopatra waited for Napoleon, since love “held no real power over a man so devoted to death.” He “was bound for the secret rendezvous that another faithless potentate, Destiny, had made with him.” In Chateaubriand’s judgment, one must choose between God’s Providence, always faithful if not always smiling, and the false goddess, Fortuna. Following Machiavelli, Napoleon supposed that he could master Fortuna, but the goddess, and God, had other plans.

By the turn of the century, Fortuna remained active. “Change now sweeps the world,” with “the man of the last century,” George Washington, “step[ping] down from the stage and the man of the new century,” Bonaparte, stepping up on it. At this time, Chateaubriand remained offstage, in obscurity. “Napoleon was my age. We both emerged from the army, but when he had already won one hundred battles, I was still languishing in the shadows among those emigres who formed the pedestal of his fortune. Having fallen so far behind, could I ever catch up to him again?” Or did it matter? In exchange for Napoleon’s glorious victories, “would I have given up even one of the unremembered hours I spent in an out-of-the-way little town in England,” during his exile,” where he lived by turns in “sad poverty” and “merry destitution” with friends? Whatever the answer might be, the fact was that by the spring of 1799, when Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt and Chateaubriand returned to Paris from London, “he had captured cities and kingdoms, his hands were full of powerful realities,” whereas “I had nothing but dreams.”

The next year, Napoleon led French troops back into Austria, then to northern Italy in a thirty-day campaign ending in the defeat of Austria. England remained at war with the Republic, by now a republic in name only, ruled by the three-man Directorate, not the Assembly, with Napoleon elected as consul for life in 1802. But by fall of the previous year, the preliminary agreements of the Treaty of Amiens ended the Wars of the French Revolution, with France relinquishing its claim to Egypt while regaining territories it had lost in the French Revolutionary Wars, England recognizing the ‘republic’ and gaining access to Continental trade for the first time in more than a decade. Napoleon used what he intended as a brief spell of peace to consolidate his power, murdering the Duc d’Enghien in March 1804 while decreeing “on the same day the Civil Code, or Napoleonic Code” in order “to teach us respect for the laws.” He would be elevated to the position of emperor shortly after that, an act solemnized by plebiscite by the end of the year. 

“Injured Europe was attempting to bandage its wounds.” A new military coalition formed against he obvious threat presented by the newly crowned French potentate. Napoleon would greet his rivals at Austerlitz.

 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800-1815. Books XIII-XVI. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

Exiled to England after having fought on the royalist side in the French civil war of the 1790s, Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800, where the future First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was even then “restoring order through despotism.” He writes this thirteenth chapter of his Memoirs thirty-six years later, in Dieppe, where the seventeenth-century aristocrat, Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, Madame de Longueville, herself had set off for exile during the Fronde. As he walked the cliff behind the chateau where he was staying, Chateaubriand thought of the “monarchic grandeur” of the splendid century and the “plebeian celebrity” of his own time. “I now compared the men at these two ends of society,” “ask[ing] myself to which of these epochs I would prefer to belong.” While the persons of the Old Regime—Louis XIV, Richelieu, Mazarin, Turenne, the Prince of Condé—impressed him far more than the mediocrities of the ever-democratizing nineteenth century, “What are the troubles of 1648 compared to the Revolution that has devoured the old world, of which it will die perhaps, leaving behind neither an old nor a new society.” The “facts” of the present century, “the value of events,” counterpoise the persons, “the value of names,” of the seventeenth. 

The Memoirs preserve the names of Chateaubriand and his contemporaries. He thinks of his memoirs as “Confessions,” having in mind Saint Augustine, who prayed to God, “Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul,” asking of his readers, “When you find me in these books of mine, pray for me.” Men need to pray and to be prayed for, inasmuch as their living memories can fail them and the memory of their own lives will soon fade in the minds of their contemporaries. “Oh, the vanity of man forgetting and forgotten!” 

In France, when he arrived from eight years of exile during the revolutionary wars, “everywhere was mud and dust, muck and rubble”—betokening a nation “beginning a world anew” (Chateaubriand slyly borrows a slogan from the Revolutionists), “like those nations emerging from the barbarian, ruinous night of the Dark Ages.” “France was now as new to me as the American forests had been.” The transformation was more than physical. “We have no idea today of the impression the excesses of the revolution had made on European minds, and above all on men who had not been in France during the Terror,” as “it seemed to me that I was literally about to descend into Hell,” with no Virgil to guide him. At the site where the guillotine had severed the heads of Louis XVI and Chateaubriand’s brother and sister-in-law, “I feared stepping in the blood not a trace of which remained.” With such memories of imagination, and after so many years in England, “talking, writing, and even thinking in English,” only “gradually I came to savor the sociability that distinguishes us—that charming, simple, rapid exchange of intelligence, that absence of all stiffness and prejudice, that disregard of great fortunes and names, that natural leveling of all ranks, and that equality of minds which makes French society unlike any other, and which redeems our faults.” “After a few months’ residence among us, a man feels that he can no longer live except in Paris.”

Revisiting “the places where I had led my youthful dreams,” he found that while “so many heads had rolled…yet the rabble remained,” attending such entertainments as a magic-lantern horror show in what had been a cloister for the Capuchins. French religiosity, for centuries woven into the way of life, had itself suffered decapitation. Politically, as he writes these words in 1836, three regimes contend with one another: the Republic, with its principle of equality; the Napoleonic Empire, with its principle of power; and the monarchic Restoration, with its principle of liberty. Chateaubriand had missed all but the beginning of the Republican era. “No one had ever seen, and no one will ever see again, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity issuing from government by the multitude, the scaffold substituted for the rule of law and obeyed in the name of humanity.” A year after his arrival, he witnessed the second regime change, in which returned exiles concealed their identities, even their nationality, in “an agreed-upon travesty” so as not to offend the partisans of the Republican regime, now replaced, or the Napoleonic regime, now triumphant. “The returning émigré chatted peaceably with the murderers of a few of his relations.” Former revolutionaries had enriched themselves, some assuming aristocratic titles; the “Brutuses and Scaevolas” of the Terror now found employment as Napoleon’s police. “A vigorous generation was growing up, sown in blood, but raised to spill only the blood of foreigners,” as Napoleon would soon have them do. “Day by day, the transformation of republicans into imperialists—and from the tyranny of all into the despotism of one—was coming to pass.”

There was little a solitary and forgotten writer could do about French politics, except to witness it. As it happened, however, he did more than he imagined in the realm of moral sentiment, secular and spiritual. The publication of his novel, Atala, began “my public career.” Although the substance was more or less Rousseauian, the style was new—a rejection of the tepid neo-classicism of the time, inaugurating the Romantic style in France as surely as Goethe’s Werther had done in Germany. “The old century rejected it, and the new one welcomed it.” 

“I became all the rage. My head was turned. I was unacquainted with the pleasures of self-importance, and I was intoxicated by them: I loved fame like a woman or, rather, like a first love,” sneaking into cafés to read “my praises sung in one or another unknown little paper.” “If I was not spoiled by all this, I must really have a good nature.” Still, “I did not have to wait long to be punished for my authorial vanity,” as “the profits of fame are charged to the soul.” He was introduced first to the sister, then to the brother of Bonaparte. His eventual acquaintance with the Emperor would indeed challenge his soul, test the goodness of his nature rather more sternly than the rapturous “perfumed notes” he had begun to receive from admirers. In the meantime, he spent his evenings in a circle of returned exiles, the salon of Madame la Comtesse de Beaumont, whose father, once “entrusted with the business of foreign affairs under Louis XVI,” had died on the scaffold. There was Louis-Mercelin de Fontanes, a poet, Grandmaster of the Imperial University, perpetual reviser of his own works; Louis de Bonald, who had fought alongside the royalists in the 1790s, but a philosophic modernist; and Charles-Julien de Chênedollé, another poet and veteran of the royalist army. It was de Fontanes whose “muse full of awestruck faith that directed mine toward the new paths she was hastening to make,” the paths toward The Genius of Christianity. In going back to the seventeenth century, to the works of Corneille and Racine, de Fontanes had acquired the strength of that fruitful age and sloughed off the sterility of the century that followed.” But of all his friends in this circle, Chateaubriand remembers Joseph Joubert most fondly, a man who “will forever be missed by those who knew him,” exercising “an extraordinary hold on the mind and heart.” “Once he had taken possession of you his image was there like a fact, like a fixed idea, like an obsession you could not shake.” “A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, following an elaboration all its own, became like painting or poetry.” He never completed anything, having “adopted an idea of perfection that prevented him.” “I am like an aeolian harp that makes beautiful sounds and plays no tune,” he confessed. He finally came to Catholicism before his death; “I will not be seeing him down here again.”

“Never again will there be a place where so many distinguished people belonging to different ranks and destinies come together under the same roof, able to chat on equal terms about the most ordinary or lofty things: a simplicity of speech that did not derive from indigence but from conscious choice. These were perhaps the last gatherings at which the wit of the old regime made its appearance,” with “an urbanity…born of education and transformed by long use into an attribute of character.” It was by Madame de Beaumont’s kind patronage that Chateaubriand was able to complete The Genius of Christianity. The project must have seemed a work out of season. “Accuracy in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the arts in our times. It heralds high poetry and true drama’s decline into decadence,” as “we content ourselves with insignificant beauties when we are powerless to create great ones,” imitating “armchairs and velvet cushions to trick the eye when we are no longer able to depict the person seated on those cushions and chairs” thanks to our “realism of material form. “For the public, who have become materialists themselves, demand it.”

With the publication of the new book, “the Voltairean contingent raised a cry and rushed to arms.” Chateaubriand’s prospects looked dubious: “what hope was there for a nameless young man to undo the influence of Voltaire, in ascendance for more than half a century”? But on the contrary, “there was a need for faith, a craving for religious consolations which came of being so long deprived of them,” after the violence of Republican revolution and of Republican wars. “People hastened to the house of God as they hasten to the doctor’s house during a plague.” And the First Consul approved, having made overtures to the Catholic Church in order to “build his power upon society’s earliest foundation.” “Later, he would repent of his mistake. Ideas of legitimate monarchy came in with those religious ideas,” and the Bourbons were still alive. The Genius of Christianity had a more enduring effect than it had on Bonaparte’s ever-shifting tactics. “If the work represented an innovation of literary style, it also represented a change of doctrine”: in its wake, “atheism and materialism were no longer the basis of belief or unbelief in young minds.” “A person was no longer nailed in place by anti-religious prejudice,” anti-Christlike; “he no longer felt himself obliged to remain a mummy of nullity bound in the bandages of philosophy”—Spinoza’s pantheism, for example—and not very good philosophy, at that. After all, what are Saint-Simonianism, Phalansterism, Fourierism, and Humanism next to the metaphysics of Abelard, Saint Bernard, or Thomas Aquinas? “The shock The Genius of Christianity delivered to men’s minds thrust the eighteenth century out of its rut and put it off the road for good.”

It was the one possible counter to Bonaparte. Science continued apace, following the lead of eighteenth-century materialism. But scientists had no answer to despotism. “The Laplaces, the Lagranges, the Monges, the Chaptals, the Berthollets, all of these prodigies, once proud democrats, became Napoleon’s most obsequious servants.” “These men whose research had soared to the loftiest heavens could not raise their souls above Bonaparte’s boots.” “They pretended to have no need of God, and that is why they had need of a tyrant.”  It was “the men of letters” who pushed for freedom, as “Christianity is the thought of the future and of human liberty” as well as “the only basis for social equality,” balancing equality “with the sense of duty which corrects and regulates the democratic impulse.” While a despot’s commands, and even the commands of Republican law, can change, being “the work of mortal and various men,” morality “springs from the immutable order,” and “it alone can endure.” “Wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed, minds, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted affirmation for doubt, embraced the whole human race with its doctrines and precepts.” Chateaubriand goes so far as to pin his own hopes for divine mercy on the continued influence of The Genius of Christianity. As for literary affairs here below, he thought at the time that writers will henceforth divide between the style of the Enlightenment savants and that of the “classical models,” the models of the seventeenth century, albeit presented “in the new light” of what became known as Romanticism, its Gothicism animated by a reanimated spirit of Christianity. And more: “What has touched me—at least I have ventured to think so—is the thought that I have done some little good, that I have consoled a few distressed souls, that I have revived in a mother’s breast the hope of raising a Christian child, which is to say a submissive, respectful child, attached to his parents.” 

Enter Bonaparte, “the Man of his times” on the verge of taking “his seat at the head of the table of the human race.” They met in 1802, at a reception given by his brother Lucien, Minister of the Interior. “He made a favorable impression on me”—his smile engaging, his eyes “marvels to behold,” with “nothing of the charlatan in his gaze, nothing theatrical or affected.” He had read Chateaubriand’s book and it had “struck a chord” with him. “A prodigious imagination animated that coldly calculating politician: he would not have been what he was if the Muse had not been with him. Reason effectuated a poet’s ideas. All these men who lead great lives are a compound of two natures, for they must be capable of both inspiration and action; one man conceives the plan, the other executes it.” Recognizing Chateaubriand (the incident had surely been arranged), he engaged him with a few remarks about the grandeur of Christianity. Chateaubriand recalls his previous interview with George Washington, “the man of the last century,” who sent him away “with a kindly wish.” Napoleon would soon send him away “with a crime.”

Before that, however, the First Consul had use for Chateaubriand, appointing him First Secretary of the French embassy in Rome. (“He was a great discoverer of men; but he wanted them to put their talents to work only for him,” as “there was to be no one but Napoleon in the universe.”)  On his way to his appointment, he recalled that his route to the south followed that of Hannibal, whereby “the vengeance of the human race bore down upon a free people, who could not establish their greatness except through slavery and the rest of the world’s blood.” So it would be for the French, under the command of Napoleon. Chateaubriand takes care to distinguish Napoleon from the French soldiers he sent to war. On his way to Rome, he saw Milan, occupied by the French army. The troops were not oppressors, there. “Lively, witty, intelligent, the French soldier involves himself in the doings of the people he lives among. He draws water from the well, like Moses for the daughters of Midian.” 

“Not only is ancient Italy gone, medieval Italy has vanished,” both leaving traces behind. Saint Peter’s Cathedral “and its masterworks,” the Roman Capitol “and its ruins” stand on opposite sides of the Tiber. “Planted in the same dust, pagan Rome subsides deeper and deeper into its tombs, while Christian Rome is descending again, little by little, into its catacombs.” The desperately ill Madame de Beaumont joined him there. On her deathbed, she told the priest that “she had always been deeply faithful at heart but that the unthinkable horrors that had befallen her during the Revolution had, for a time, made her doubt the justice of Providence; that she was prepared to confess her transgression and to put herself at the mercy of God; but that she hoped the sorrows she had suffered in this world would curtail her expiation in the other.” She died “without the slightest sign of fear”; Chateaubriand pressed his hand on her heart and felt it stop. She “was the very soul of a vanishing society.” With her death, Chateaubriand decided to give up his political career. “You have not experienced desolation of the heart if you have never lingered on alone, wandering in places lately inhabited by a person who made your life worthwhile.” He also conceived of writing his memoirs, “the one work capable of mollifying my grief,” as he wrote to Joubert. “Rest easy, though,” he continued. “These will not be confessions painful to my friends,” following the bad example of Rousseau. “I will say nothing of myself not in keeping with my dignity as a man and, I daresay, with the exaltation of my heart,” for “it is not lying in the eyes of God if we reveal only those parts of our life that will encourage noble and generous feelings in our fellow man.” “There’s no shortage of examples if one wants to see poor human nature trounced.” [1]

Rome, ancient and medieval. Against the excesses of modernity, Chateaubriand sets his memoirs, defending both elements of the Old Regime: “religion alone commanded my attention with its seriousness and the loftier considerations it suggested to me”; at the same time “I thought I understood the importance the ancients attached to the value of their name,” to honoring the dead in remembrance. “Perhaps, among the great men of antiquity, this idea of an immortal human life took the place of the immortality of the soul, which for them remained a riddle.” It is true that death is a blessing. As Chateaubriand reads the Book of Genesis, after Adam comes to know evil, God mercifully prevents him from taking the fruit of the tree of life; knowing evil, Adam “is now oppressed by misery” and “should therefore not live forever.” “What a gift from God is death!” Only God can bear the misery of knowing evil.

And “such enormous misery!” In the thirty-five years since Madame Beaumont’s death, he has seen how “man stumbles from one mistake to the next.” “When he is young and drives his life before him, he still has a shadow of an excuse, but when he is yoked to his life and drags it painfully behind him, what excuses him then? Our days excuse one another. Our life is a perpetual blush, for it is a neverending blunder.”

In the parallel but sharply contrasting soul of Napoleon, plans for imperial conquest gestated, as “his genius”—distant from the genius of Christianity—was “growing to keep up with the greatness of events.” That genius didn’t endure death but dealt it out. “He had the capacity, like gunpower expanding, to blow the world away.” Napoleon wanted to retain him in his service, establishing a new republic in a Catholic section of the Alps for that purpose. In March 1804, back in Paris, Chateaubriand presented himself to Napoleon prior to departing for his new assignment. He saw a change in the man. “There must be something strange going on we don’t know about,” he told his friends, as there was “something sinister” in Bonaparte’s eyes. “A superior man does not bring forth evil painlessly, for it is not its natural fruit, and he should not bear it.” Two days later, he learned that Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon, the Duc d’Enghien, had been sentenced to death by a hastily-arranged military court.

The Duc d’Enghien had commanded a corps of émigrés in the Army of Condé, the royalist troops who had attempted to retake France for the monarchy in the 1790s. He had been condemned to death by the First Republic. Now, more than a decade later, Napoleon had received police reports, which were false, claiming that the Duc had been conspiring with royalists to undertake a coup d’état against him. He refused an interview when the Duc sought to exonerate himself, after which a firing squad killed him. The killing alarmed monarchs throughout Europe, with Czar Alexander fatefully determining that Napoleon must be resisted. Later on, one French cynic judged the execution “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” Chateaubriand immediately understood it as worse than a blunder but a crime, a legal murder. Against his wife’s pleadings—she saw that “the lion had tasted blood, and this was not a moment to irritate him”—he wrote a letter of resignation. 

“There are times when loftiness of soul is a veritable infirmity. No one understands it; it passes for a kind of closed-mindedness, a prejudice, an obtuse ingrained habit, a caprice, a foible that prevents you from seeing things as they are,” making yourself, in the eyes of “the mediocre,” “a stranger to the march of the age, the movement of ideas, the transformation of mores, the progress of society.” Not so with Napoleon himself, however. No mediocrity, he much later told Chateaubriand’s old friend, M. de Fontanes, that “my resignation was one of the things that had most impressed him.” This did not of course prevent Napoleon from holding “the sword suspended above my head until the day of his downfall.” They were linked together, now. “Our two natures, opposite in so many respects, always reared their heads again, and if he would gladly have had me shot, killing him wouldn’t have weighed too heavily on my conscience.”

In Paris, fears of a Robespierre-like Reign of Terror flared. The Bourbon exile Louis XVIII wrote to the King of Spain, “There can be nothing in common between me and the great criminal whom audacity and fortune have placed on the throne that he has had the barbarity to soil with the pure blood of a Bourbon, de Duc d’Enghien. Religion might make me pardon a murderer, but the tyrant of my people must always be my enemy.” Gustav IV of Sweden—who, unlike the young Louis XVIII, had actually reigned as the king of his country—also “dared to raise his voice in defense of the young French prince,” who had been the last of the eminent Condé line. Gustav condemned this violation of “the laws of chivalry” in a Europe that had long since abandoned them. “Alas, we had gone through too many different forms of despotism.” In their obsequiousness, most of Napoleon’s contemporaries “sputtered congratulations on the dangers the First Consult had just escaped” and “society rapidly returned to its pleasures, for it was afraid of its grief,” of being convicted of “the crime of memory.”

Chateaubriand asks himself, if Bonaparte had not killed the Duc d’Enghien, “what would have been the result for me?”  A glittering political career, with no more literary productions. “France may have gained something from my alliance with the emperor, but I would have lost something. Perhaps I would have succeeded in preserving a few ideas of liberty and moderation in the great man’s head; but my life, classed among those called ‘happy,’ would have been deprived of what has given it character and honor: poverty, struggle, and independence.” Instead, he followed the way of the Man of Sorrows, against the modern Caesar. 

As for Bonaparte, “he was not able to subdue his conscience as he had subdued the world.” Like so many human beings, “superior men and little men alike,” he tried to pass off his error “as a work of genius—a monumental scheme beyond the grasp of the vulgar,” an attempt dictated by pride and believed by folly. Bonaparte thought of himself as Napoleon, man of destiny. “How it justifies, chalking it all up to destiny, the evil that we do ourselves!” And so, the man who murders his father excuses himself by saying, “I was made like that!” Chateaubriand replies: “But what do I care if you were made like that? Am I expected to submit to your way of being?” God, the ultimate reality, God alone is entitled to make such a demand. “When people cannot erase their errors, they deify them; they make a dogma of their misdeeds, they change their sacrileges into a religion, and they would consider themselves apostates if they gave up worshipping their vices.”

“There is a serious lesson to be drawn from Bonaparte’s life.” He was ruined by two bad actions whose consequences only turned unfavorable years later. The first was the murder of d’Enghien, which marked him as a dangerous man in the eyes of Europe; the second, in 1807-08, was his betrayal of his ally, Spain, a year into the Peninsular War, which eventually drew British intervention. It is true that he prevailed initially after both crimes, rolling up victories against Spain, Prussia, and Russia in that decade, but ultimately “it did no good for him to ride over [these crimes] in glory; they remained, and they ruined him.” With them, “he violated the laws of morality while neglecting and scorning his true strength, which is to say his superior capacity for order and equity. As long as he concentrated his attacks on anarchy and the foreign enemies of France, he was victorious; he found himself robbed of his vigor only when he entered upon the paths of corruption.” A crime always “bears within it a radical incapacity and a germ of tragedy,” a flaw or crack in the soul that weakens the criminal. Proof of this may be seen not only in the response of the King of Sweden, but the Russian cabinet’s protests, prefiguring later wars, and the Prussian campaign of 1806, the War of the Fourth Coalition, which Frederick William III called an act avenging the Duc’s murder. To be sure, France won that war, going on to defeat Russia, too, in 1807, but the animosities that brought on Napoleon’s eventual ruin began with the murder and subsequent war with Spain. “These historical details, which are rarely noted, deserve to be for they explain enmities whose first cause would be very difficult to locate elsewhere, and at the same time they reveal those steps by which Providence leads the destiny of a man from the crime to the punishment.”

Bonaparte’s soul became progressively disfigured. “He became suspicious; he inspired fear; people lost confidence in him and in his destiny; he was compelled to see, if not to seek out, men he would never have seen before, and who, because they had been admitted into his company, believed they had become his equals. Their defilement infected him. His nature began to deteriorate.” It is Chateaubriand’s answer not only to Bonaparte but to Machiavelli and his attack on Christianity.

 

 

Note

1. In this, André Malraux takes Chateaubriand, not Rousseau, as his model. See his Anti-Memoirs (Terence Kilmartin translation, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).

 

 

Pekka Häkäläinen: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

 

Lakotas worship Wakhán Thánka, the Great Spirit, whose messenger was Ptesánuin, the White Buffalo Calf Woman. She appeared, Häkäläinen writes, at a time when “Lakotas were starving because their lives had no structure or meaning”—no regime. She gave their chief, Bull Walking Upright, the seven sacred ceremonies, including the Sun Dance and the purification lodge, along with the sacred ceremonial pipe, an instrument of peacemaking, of prayer, and of prosperity—the latter, because if unwrapped and smoked it would bring the buffalo. Before vanishing, she transformed herself into a white buffalo calf.

Although the story is ancient, it “acquired new urgency in the early nineteenth century, when Lakotas made their second concerted push into the West, this time from the Missouri Valley” toward the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota. The urgency arose this time not as a response to famine but in response to the Lakotas’ increasingly desperate confrontation with the most recent and most formidable modern empire, the United States. They regarded Pahá Sápa, the Black Hills, as “the gift of the White Buffalo Calf Woman,” a fulfillment of her ancient prophecy, and thus a place in which sanctity and prosperity intertwined. The Black Hills’ favorable climate attracted large buffalo herds, which migrated to the Hills when droughts struck the grasslands. When the Lakotas arrived, the Cheyennes had already “emerged as the dominant group” in the region, allied with the Arapahos. To the Lakotas, “control of Pahá Sápa became a spiritual and material imperative without which nothing in the world was secure,” and by the 1820s they had displaced the rival peoples. “The Black Hills belonged to them.”

From there, “Lakotas reinvented themselves, with stunning speed, as equestrian hunters and herders who relied on horses to move, feed, clothe, protect, enrich, and perfect themselves”— feeding on the rich buffalo herds and faithfully performing the Sun Dance, as prescribed by the prophet of the Great Spirit. “Almost all resident Indians saw the Lakotas as aggressors and mobilized to drive them back,” making the region “an ever-shifting geography of violence” among peoples who shared similar regimes, regimes including “a hunting-pastoral way of life” which “demanded an unusually high people-to-land ratio,” requiring each people to range freely or perish. Throughout the decades of the 1830s and 1840s, Lakotas fought Crows and Shoshones to the north and west, Pawnees, Omahas, Poncas, and Otoes in the south, where “the competition over hunting rights became particularly vicious because the herds had begun to thin out,” partly because the supple hides of buffalo cows were prized by American traders. “The central planes erupted in carnage,” with “self-perpetuating cycles of killings and retributions.” Nations holding one another to be “irredeemable enemies…exploited, conquered, or dispossessed” one another. That is, the ethos of the warrior regime, which despised peaceful herding, pursued wealth beyond mere sustenance by trading with representatives of the American commercial republican regime, which had organized its exploitation of herd animals on peaceful ranches. The American regime (at first unwittingly) depleted the resources of the warrior regime, which organized its political economy along the lines of warfare and hunting. Trade between sharply differing regimes need not bring peace and understanding; it may even be, unwittingly or not, a catalyst for war.

In these wars, Lakotas enjoyed the advantage of superior numbers. Their population exceeded ten thousand, now sustained by immunity acquired from vaccines distributed by the Americans. They had firm links to American traders, having already established commercial relations with them in the Missouri Valley. And their kinship structure, based not on bloodlines alone but adoption of both allies and captives, further enhanced their power. They eclipsed their Dakota kin, who had remained in the east, even as “the booming Missouri traffic demoted the Mississippi-Minnesota trade to a sideshow. The beaver population declined, taking Dakota wealth with it, the Dakota were impelled to sell their lands to the Americans. But the Lakotas continued to add lands to their domain, combining policies of ethnic incorporation with what we now call ethnic cleansing. Polygamy increased, along with the regime’s tendency toward a quasi-aristocracy of warriors—a “quintessential warrior society.” “Horrified and humiliated by the seemingly unstoppable violence and human suffering unfolding before them, U.S. agents denigrated Lakotas as irredeemable savages ‘determined to exterminate’ their neighboring tribes.” Häkäläinen charges that Americans inclined to impute Lakota savagery to an ingrained way of life rather than to a more ordinary struggle over land and resources, which begs the question of why they struggled in such a savage way. This turns out to be important, since he will later criticize the Americans for similarly savage tactics. 

By mid-century, the Black Hills had replaced the Missouri Valley as the geographic center of the Lakota empire. Whereas Lakotas once had used the Black Hills as a “sanctuary and supply depot” on their forays from the valley to the west, the “spatial logic” of the regime “inverted,” with the valley now the sanctuary and supply depot on forays to the east—a “seismic shift of power in the great interior of North America.” The rich and diverse “microclimate” of the Black Hills “sustained rich and diverse plant communities” featuring “hundreds of native species,” many of them edible and nutrient-rich. Some 30 million bison on the Great Plains enabled the Lakota to pursue a way of life consisting of hunting animals and men alike, a perfect training ground for cavalry fighting with plenty of the red meat warriors thrive on. They needed such an imperial metropole and such a hunting ground; beginning in the 1830s, they fought the Crows for nearly 50 years in “the longest known war in the history of North America.” This was not only a war for resources but a religious war, the Black Hills having long been regarded by local Amerindian nations as a place of spiritual significance where they “gathered to hold ceremonies and seek visions.” For all of these reasons, “the fighting became unyielding.” 

The Lakotas had the advantage of both a far greater population and a central and geographically secure base of operations—in effect, the closest thing to a modern state in the region. They pushed west into the Rocky Mountains, crucially “contain[ing] the violence in enemy lands…far from their own,” much as the United States has done since the Civil War. And, like the United States, such a strategy means that weakening one adversary leads another to rise up in an attempt to take its place. The Blackfeet exploited the Crows’ slow decline, “push[ing] in from the north to poach the superior Crow horses.” Both sides also engaged in diplomacy, forging alliances with smaller tribes in attempts to outflank and decisively overpower the enemy. “It was into this world that Sitting Bull, Gall, Spotted Eagle, Touch the Clouds, John Grass, and other warrior-leaders were born.” Warriors who led successful military raids enhanced their authority. Sitting Bull, for example, was said to own “more than a hundred horses, a pool of redistributable wealth that brought him respect, followers, and power.” Military success translated into economic and political power. And the successes of the few meant prosperity for the many. Until the consolidation of the Lakota empire centering in the Black Hills, “the northwestern Great Plains had been used by many but were home to few.” Now, as “in the course of the 1830s and 1840s Lakotas fought and defeated scores of people and absorbed uncounted numbers as captives,” the Plains were controlled by the 13,000 Lakotas. And as the Comanche empire on the southern plains disintegrated under pressure from the Texans, they “emerged as the most powerful Indigenous nation in North America.” 

Indeed, “their vision for the West was supple and capacious.” Far from materialists, simply, “their quest to control game, pasture, water, and trade in the West coexisted with a spiritual mandate to balance the world by extending wólakhota”—kinship—to “those capable of proper behavior and thoughts.” Such behavior and thoughts had been provided by the White Buffalo Calf Woman, whose gift of the ceremonial peace pipe provided an instrument whereby foreign nations could be incorporated into the Lakota regime, both under the rule of the Great Spirit. “When the Lakotas smoked and prayed, they created a compact with Wakhán Thánka” and with those who shared in the ceremony. In the words of one Lakota elder, “the spirit in the smoke will soothe the spirits of all who thus smoke together, and all will be as friends and all think alike.” It is impossible not to see in this the Lakota equivalent of the Americans’ notion, ‘Manifest Destiny,’ and in the Americans’ willingness to accept immigrants from Europe who ‘thought alike’ with respect to the American regime. The Americans themselves didn’t understand this until later on, as they continued to sell guns and merchandise to a people who wanted those things in order to strengthen and extend their empire. The Lakota “regime…was becoming too big for [Americans] to reign it in.” 

Häkäläinen pauses to describe the institutional structure of the Lakota regime, which in the form of its ruling offices differed substantially from that of the United States. Based, as he has already described, on kinship ties sanctified by the actions of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the regime consisted of “concentric circles” extending “from nuclear families to extended families, to thióšpayes [clans], to oyátes [peoples of council fires], to the Ochéti Šakówin [the Seven Council Fires, i.e., the Lakota as a whole], and, through wólakhota [the life of peace, forged and solemnized in the pipe ritual], to non-Lakotas willing to embrace the Lakota ethos and way of being.” The thióšpaye consisted of ten to twenty extended families, with an ithánchan or spokesman and a council of respected elders who deliberated and decided when to move camp, when to hunt, when to negotiate with foreigners, and when to make war on them. Once the decision had been reached and announced, rule shifted to the men selected as wakícunzAs or “deciders,” who organized the hunts themselves, distributing the goods acquired and arbitrating any disputes that arose over those goods. Their decisions were enforced by a set of marshals appointed by the ithánchan, men who “enforced the council’s decisions, with brutal force if necessary.” The ithánchan’s authority rested on the safety and prosperity of the clan, as failure could result in a challenge to his authority by anyone, and anyone could leave the clan “at any time.” Dissenters could “go out on their own, establish distinct political identities, and yet remain full-fledged members of the Lakota nations.” Whereas the American Union could sunder over a matter of principle, Lakotan union consisted more of a shared ethos or ‘spirit of the laws’ under the rule of the Great Spirit—better able to bend without breaking.

All of this recalls Aristotle’s analysis of the components of the polis in Greece. Indeed, the move to the Black Hills triggered a shift in political authority from the clans to the tribal councils, from the ithánchan to the nacá or tribal chief, betokening “a growing centralization of Lakota political life.” The ceremonial counterpart to this structural centralization was the hunká ceremony, “by which prominent older women and men symbolically adopted members of other families, becoming their guardians.” A chief could extend his kinship network into multiple clans and council fires, “cut[ting] across traditional band and tribal lines.” But “the most tangible expression of the councils’ increasing political weight was a revolutionary institution of shirt wearers, wicháša yatánpikAs, a select group of ‘praiseworthy men,'” who came to form a kind of administrative committee that executed the decisions passed down by the councils. They were charged with the responsibility to “bind their oyátes behind council decisions through moral authority, lead attacks on enemies, and serve as peacemakers with outsiders.” Given the Lakotas’ warrior ethos, the structure of their ruling offices (their politeia, as Aristotle would say) led to strife between the “younger men who needed combat to prove themselves as warriors and providers” and the more cautious elders, the shirt-wearers; “long periods of peace could jam the war-driven social engine that turned boys into warriors, husbands, and leaders.” In republican America, individual liberty was air to the fire of faction; among the aristocratic Lakota, faction arose from generational conflict. European titled aristocrats kept their elder sons in line by the device of primogeniture; they were really oligarchs, not aristocrats in Aristotle’s sense, persons of virtue. Lakotas rested their aristocracy squarely on virtue, warrior virtue; when well balanced, this honed an impressive military class, but when unbalanced it could shatter the union.

Fortunately, “the great genius of the Lakota political system was its prodigious capacity to absorb and dilute [these] built-in tensions.” The senior men constituted the tribal councils while the younger men “found a countervailing instrument in traditional men’s societies,” which sponsored celebrations, planned war parties, and followed codes of conduct that “infus[ed] the larger society with hard military discipline that underwrote Lakota power.” In Tocqueville’s terms, the elders held governing authority, the young men’s societies held the authority of civic associations, which could “exert pressure on tribal councils,” taming factional impulses by ‘institutionalizing’ them. “Consummate shape-shifters, Lakotas understood power as a pliable substance that could be carved up, shared, and transferred fluidly among different institutions and bodies of people, and it was this expansive concept of power that allowed them to keep their bustling and polarized nation on a common orbit.” Aristotle emphasizes the ethical and political importance of prudence, the rational capacity to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining ethical and regime principles; Lakotas understood this, “shift[ing] power from people to people and situation to situation,” with the band councils ruling in times of peace, warriors drawn from the young men’s societies ruling in times of conflict. Then, “harsh punishments were considered normal, ‘the soldier’s right,’ and not even headmen were immune.” 

All of the Seven Council Fires “lived by this ethos, keeping people and power movable and channeling both wherever they were needed,” making the Lakotas “appear far more formidable than they actually were,” given the fact that “their population density,” though greater than that of their Amerindian rivals, “was less than one person per ten square miles.” It was their “horse-powered capacity to connect and exploit key strategic nodes…which allowed them to control resources without controlling people” as they “rang[ed] widely but rul[ed] lightly.” Häkäläinen calls this a “kinetic empire.” They ruled not “by forcing others under direct control or by making things predictable” but by “keeping things—violence, attachments, borders, power, themselves—fluid and in motion.” Aristotle, meet Heraclitus, therefore with no need for a single Alexander the Great or (as the nineteenth century saw) Napoleon. “For Lakotas mobility did what capitals, bureaucracies, and standing armies did for sedentary empires: it kept them safe and united, empowering them to maintain enduring relationships of hierarchy and difference” in “a human kaleidoscope of ever-changing shapes and patterns”—all pervaded by the teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman, prophet of the Great Spirit. 

The rival empire had other ideas. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824, giving institutional reinforcement to America’s longstanding policy of Indian removal, solemnized in dozens of treaties in which Indian nations ceded landed in exchange for annuities. “The cotton boom shifted the practice into overdrive and stripped it of lingering constitutional scruples,” as President Jackson countenanced (he may have had little real choice) Georgia’s removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from land established for them under their own peaceful regimes during the Washington Administration. Indians became “subjects of a rising imperial power that was already seizing Indian lands faster than it could sell them.” “Jackson harnessed the [Indian] Office to implement a wholesale removal of Natives from the East and, by extension, the expansion of slave capitalism across the South”—effectively replacing the Indians’ slave systems with the American one. One hundred thousand Indians departed from a hundred million acres of land.

Many Americans assumed the same could be done in the West, with much less trouble. “The southern Indians had possessed what white southerners deemed”—rightly, one might add—as “impressive qualities”: self-rule, literacy, “city-like villages with large, well-tended farms.” The inhabitants of the West consisted of nomads in the north and an unimpressive number of Mexicans in the south—effectively, “an empty vastness.” The Plains wasn’t even much worth occupying; the Pacific coast was the real prize. 

This changed with the discovery of gold in California and Oregon in 1848. More Americans than ever began to cross Indian Territory, where diseases imported by the travelers reduced the Indian populations still further. In 1851, Colonel David Mitchell, superintendent of Indian affairs in St. Louis, called a meeting of the Plains Indians. Admitting that Americans were “disturbing pasturelands and bison,” he offered $50,000 worth of compensation in the forms of (in his words) “provisions, merchandise, domestic animals, and agricultural implements” per year for half a century. This suggests more than just a material offer in exchange for noninterference; it suggests another American strategy, as old as removal, the strategy of regime change. Mitchell quite evidently wanted the Plains Indians to stop fighting one another and settle down as peaceful farmers and herders. Institutionally, he wanted “to convert the decentralized plains tribes into coherent nations under supreme leaders who would be closely attached to the U.S. government” whose members would “learn to farm, worship and live properly under the tutelage of agents and missionaries.” Under his plan, the Great Plains would consist of three regions: Lakotas, Crows, Assiniboines, Mandans, northern Cheyennes, and northern Arapahos in the north; Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches in the south; southern Cheyennes and southern Arapahos in-between. Although Häkäläinen calls this a “spatial solution to what was essentially a racial problem,” it was more fundamentally a regime solution to a regime problem.

The Lakotas demurred, being no mean imperialists themselves, and devoted to their own regime, a regime they intended to defend. As a principal Lakota spokesman explained, a one-chief system would not do for the mobile, hunting, warrior people that they were, needing to “split up and coalesce in an endless nomad’s cycle.” We will follow the bison, he insisted, animals which respect no lines drawn on maps. Further, Lakotas demanded recognition of rule of the plains “all the way south to the Arkansas—much of it still a Pawnee territory—as well as more territory in the West,” a demand they justified by “the right of conquest,” inasmuch as westerly lands “once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped these nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” True enough, Mitchell agreed, recalling the longstanding alliance between the Lakotas and the United States—but only so long as the Lakotas kept peace among the Indian nations and with the United States. Although Häkäläinen doesn’t seem to notice, the right of conquest was not necessarily a prudent principle for the Lakotas to invoke, although it must have seemed so to them, at the time. But he does see that “the meeting between Lakotas and Americans was a meeting between two fundamentally different powers,” the difference being a regime difference—two regimes “coexist[ing] on separate mental planes”—beginning with different understanding of what is worth having and of what way of life is worth following. “Lakotas sought the land’s resources, whereas Americans coveted the land itself.” Ominously, the treaty language “allowed both to claim they now possessed the right to rule the midcontinent as sovereign powers.” 

Initially, the American strategy worked. Although war broke out between Lakotas and Crows in 1852, they made peace the following year, and generally peaceful trade prevailed among the Indians, except for the Lakota-Pawnee struggle. But relations with Americans declined, as overlanders killed bison and the United States government cut their promised annual annuity from a fifty-year term to ten. More immediately, in August 1854 a U.S. Army force of thirty soldiers provoked an incident at a large Lakota camp; regarding this as a betrayal of the treaty and of the longtime alliance, Lakotas conducted a series of retaliatory raids on U.S. sites that winter. This was at exactly the time when the Kansas territory erupted in what amounted to a civil war over the introduction of slaves. The Pierce Administration and its Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, undertook what it hoped would be a short, decisive war with the Lakotas, bringing in General William S. Harney, “one of the army’s most experienced generals,” to fight it. The Indians, Harney averred, “must be crushed before they can be completely conquered”. He proceeded to inflict “the worst military defeat” of the Plains Indians in “more than century” at Blue Water Creek in present-day Nebraska. Harney then set down his terms in March 1856: cultivate the land; replace warrior bands with a more formal chain of command; halt horse trading, “which he saw as an engine of intertribal warfare”; elect a tribal chief in each council fire, a man who could restrain the young warriors. In return, the United States would restore the annuities.

But the Lakotas hadn’t really surrendered their ambitions. “Lakotas were making themselves scarce, but not because they had been defeated or domesticated.” They simply withdrew, “distancing themselves from Americans and their institutions” in yet another shape-shift. While duly collecting the annuities they had been promised, they reduce their harassment of travelers along the Oregon Trail. Reassured, the Americans turned their untender attentions to the untender Comanches, destroying their empire. 

Once again, U.S.-Lakota peace succumbed to the advance of American settlers. The Indian Office, which preferred a less harsh policy toward the Indians than the War Department, proposed a policy of establishing reservations for the Plains Indians as a shield against “an imminent settler wave from the east.” Yet the Lakotas had been “expanding an empire of their own.” During the summer of 1857, “what may been the most significant summit in Lakota history” occurred at the northern edge of the Black Hills. The longstanding debate between tribal councilors and warrior societies renewed, as did factionalism between council fires who trusted the Americans and those who did not. The young warrior chief Sitting Bull “emerged as a leading hard-liner” at the conference. In the end, the Seven Council Fires agreed to keep Americans out of the Black Hills and to keep the existence of gold there a secret. They also determined to continue their expansion. After all, the regime required it. “Young men needed war and raiding to establish themselves as warriors and providers and live full and meaningful lives” in accordance with the ethos of the Lakota way of life. Neither Americans nor the other Indian nations were exempt from this policy. Upon learning of the Lakotas’ policy, the War Department followed the recommendation of a young lieutenant, G. K. Warren, who argued that Americans should wait and allow the Indians to succumb to their own wars and the further attrition caused by “disease, poverty, and vicious indulgence.” 

As anticipated, the Lakotas and Crows fought one another, a war that continued into the 1870s, with the Lakotas eventually gaining the upper hand. As for the Americans, they could not have intervened easily even if they had wanted to, as they soon fell into cataclysmic war with one another. During the American Civil War, Lakotas “extended their range of operations to the U.S.-Canadian border in the north, the central plain in the south, the Missouri Valley in the east, and the Continental Divide in the west,” consolidating an empire of their own, structured in a way “Americans could neither see nor understand”: “Built around a shifting tribal alliance rather than a state, it was a distinctively fluid organism that reflected Lakotas’ vision of the world and their place in it,” a place in which they eschewed “direct control over foreign people or territories to secure them ” but instead rested their authority “on a capacity, underwritten by military power and mobility, to do certain things—raid, extort, intimate, and kill—over and over again and cross vast distances.” Whereas most empires established ruling institutions over subject peoples, the Lakotas preferred to “harness resources, create dependencies, enforce boundaries, and inspire awe” in a manner that ensured the Lakotas “a presence even when absent.” More specifically, whereas “the U.S. empire was built on institutional prowess and visibility…the Lakota empire was an action-based regime, which gave it a fickle, on-and-off-again character”—fluid and hard to discern. This empire enabled the Lakotas to amass horses, cattle, mules, human captives, weapons, food, and even such luxury items as Navajo blankets. The Lakotas now had “the largest, richest, and safest Indigenous domain in North America.” With the integration of many non-Lakota bands into the Lakota regime under the auspices of way-of-life kinship, the Lakotas numbered about twenty thousand in the early 1860s. These new members “were not nations within a nation,” as seen in most empires, but “individuals, families, and bands residing among Lakotas who dealt with diversity by simply accepting it,” judging their new members on the basis of “loyalty, not likeness.” In a sense, they were doing what the American Founders had done, and what Lincoln and the Republican Party sought to re-establish after the decades of departure from American principles seen in the ‘race theory’ of the Southern planters.

They were doing it by “elud[ing] the long arm of the U.S. military-bureaucratic machine by shifting shape and hiding in plain sight.” Although the U.S. Army remained suspicious, Lakotas “cultivated face-to-face relationships with Indian [Office] agents and through those intimate relationships they could manage and control them,” influencing the reports the agents sent back to Washington. Among these agents, Thomas Twiss understood the Lakotas better than other U.S. civil officials. On the eve of the Civil War, he reported that the Lakotas intended to preserve the wild game in the region—their main food source—and to maintain their independence, having seen what had happened to the eastern Indians who had ceded their lands to the Americans. Twiss hoped that the Lakotas eventually would accept settlement on reservations. The Dakotas accepted the offer, but sure enough, in 1862 the Lakotas severed their ties with the United States. 

They remained disunited, however, with those who “embraced yeoman farming and Christianity,” the regime-change policy of the Americans diverging from “traditionalists who held on to the collapsing communal world of the hunt and the village,” the waning aristocracy Tocqueville had likened to the European aristocracy, three decades earlier. In the Minnesota Valley, some Dakotas who had not acceded to their council fire’s surrender killed several hundred settlers, took more as hostages, burned farms and looted stores. President Lincoln sent Major General John Pope (the loser at Second Manassas, he could be spared) to chase the Indians away. Lincoln commuted the sentences of many captured Dakotas, but the remainder were hanged in “the largest mass execution in American history.” [1] Congress annulled all treaties with the Dakotas, cutting off their annuities and thereby driving them to Lakota territory, where Pope determined to pursue them. Häkäläinen judges this “the Union army’s biggest misstep in the west,” as the war which began in Minnesota in 1862 ended some four years later in Montana, having involved the much more formidable Lakotas in what had begun as a campaign that could have been limited to a simple expulsion of a handful of Dakotas. In so doing, the Army tipped the scales of Lakota politics towards the warriors, including Sitting Bull. “Just as the Confederate South was teetering toward collapse, the United States faced another daunting challenge to its authority”—a sustained guerrilla war Lakotas fought with “hit-and-run attacks that emphasized mobility over firepower and debilitated the enemy piecemeal,” especially along the key geopolitical chokepoint, the Oregon Trail. This didn’t prevent them from undertaking full-scale battles when they enjoyed superior numbers; after one such battle, at Sand Creek in the Northern Platte, Lakotas cut off travel along the Trail, making “the United States’ ties to the West…dangerously frail.” Subsequent treaty negotiations with Lakotas were confined only to those among them who wanted peace with the Americans; “Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Crazy Horse shunned the talks.”

Congress drastically reduced the size of the U.S. Army in the years following the war. Without much military force at their disposal, the Americans resorted to a variant of its longtime divide-and-rule strategy. Instead of attempting to identify friendly and unfriendly factions among the Lakotas, the Americans made treaties with the ‘friendlies,’ leaving the Lakotas who refused to sign treaties now self-identified as ‘hostiles’ and targeted for conquest. That conquest turned out to be harder than Americans anticipated. 

In spring of 1866, hostile Red Cloud met with the Americans at Fort Laramie. Citing the longstanding alliance between his people and Americans, he proposed a new treaty, guaranteeing peaceful coexistence if the United States controlled the number of emigrants and supplied Lakotas with ammunition, goods, and food—that is, if the U.S. bridled its own source of power while enhancing the power of the Lakotas. The Americans agreed, but soon afterwards, just as the Lakota chiefs were working to gain the consent of their people, Army Colonel Henry B. Carrington announced that he intended to occupy the Powder River, Big Horn country, and the Yellowstone. Carrington and his allies in the Army didn’t know that the Lakotas had obtained guns from the Hudson Bay Company in Canada, and so miscalculated Lakota military strength. The Americans learned otherwise in the winter of 1866-67, losing a battle near Fort Phil Kearny. “Humiliated, the army demanded revenge, and the government recognized a grave threat to the westward course of the empire.” No more General Pope: Washington now sent General William Tecumseh Sherman at the head of ten thousand troops to the West. Sherman was cautious. Having been denied the much larger force he wanted, and having recognized the vastness of the Great Plains, Sherman wanted to avoid “universal war” there.

Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and the Minneconjous chief High Backbone dominated a major council of tribes called in 1867. They headed “a burgeoning warrior cult fueled by decades of war against American and Native rivals.” The centralization Lakotas had long resisted now came to fruition, as the three chiefs “coordinated operations through their personal gravitas.” They blocked American access to the Bozeman Trail and contained the U.S. Army in its forts. At the same time, Comanches now launched raids against American settlements in Texas; Apaches harried U.S. troops in Arizona. Sherman complained that “fifty of these Indians can checkmate three thousand of our soldiers.” “Only two years after the close of the brutal Civil War, Americans faced another spiraling crisis that ate away at their moral fiber.” 

As a member of the Congressionally-established Indian Peace Commission, Sherman stiffened his position. The Indians could become farmers or face war. Negotiations ensued, resulting the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, “a bafflingly inconsistent compromise” which allowed the construction of a railroad along the Platte (“now a more tolerable concession” for the Lakotas, “as bison hunting in the region was becoming useless”) while establishing the Great Sioux Reservation, extending from the Missouri River across the Black Hills and roughly two hundred miles north to south in lands including several important rivers—an area of more than 48,000 square miles. The treaty recognized Lakota sovereignty, with a “nation-to-nation relationship between the Lakota nation and the United States”; “the United States seemed to have embraced the Lakotas as equals and favored allies.” 

The Fort Laramie Treaty set a clear border between the United States and the Reservation. This settled the geographic dispute, but it did not settle the regime tensions between a commercial republic and a warrior aristocracy. For the Grant Administration as for the Washington and Lincoln administrations, Amerindian regime change remained the solution to those tensions, inasmuch as the reverse policy, a policy of changing the United States into a Lakota-like warrior aristocracy would scarcely have brought peace to the Plains, even if Americans would have stood for such a revolution. The technological instrument for such change was the railroad. As early as 1869, Secretary of the interior Jacob B. Cox observed that extension of the rail lines would make exploration for “mineral and agricultural wealth” more feasible in Lakota territory, even as it made buffalo hunting less feasible. Nevada Senator William Stewart concurred: “As the thorough and final solution of the Indian question, by taking the buffalo range out from under the savage, and putting a vast stock of grain farm in its place,” the railroads would bring regime change to the region. In Häkäläinen puts it, “As the Union and Pacific and the Central Pacific inched closer to their Utah meeting point in the winter of 1868, it was as if a countdown toward the end of the Lakota reign in the northern plains had begun”; “modernity, it seemed, was finally catching up with the nomads.” Grant put General Philip Sheridan, the best U.S. cavalry commander of the Civil War, in charge of protecting Americans and the less powerful Indian nations against Lakota and Cheyenne raiders, still animated by the warrior ethos. Sheridan chose George Armstrong Custer as the field commander of this force.

The Grant Administration’s Indian policy, implemented by the Indian Office under the directorship of Ely S. Parker of the Seneca nation—a former military aide to Grant—operated under the principle that a warrior aristocracy would only become peaceful if it saw that armed resistance was impossible. Armed resistance would become impossible when Americans greatly outnumbered the Lakotas and Cheyennes, and when the buffalo population had diminished to the point that the warriors needed to become farmers. Congress refused to allow Grant to put the Army in charge of this policy, so he installed Quakers, “effectively subcontracting them to implement the United States’ Indian policy,” a move Häkäläinen rightly describes as a “softer and more mature imperialism,” albeit one (as he does not say) consistent with one dimension of American policy from the beginning. The same policy was being implemented in the American South, as Reconstruction was precisely an attempt to reconstruct the regimes of the Southern states, taking them from planter aristocracies to commercial republics.

As in the South, so in the West. Some Southerners and some Lakotas did adopt the new regime, “experimenting with farming in the unforgiving northern plains conditions and gradually adopting elements of the American culture.” But most Lakotas still wanted “guns and ammunition, not plows and seeds”—the longstanding policy of demanding from the Americans the means of strengthening their own regime and their own territorial control. Häkäläinen bravely attempt to describe this as a means of forging a Lakota form of modernity, but what he means isn’t ‘modern,’ only (as he puts it) “relatively new,” namely, the “horse-powered bison hunt that could yield massive quantities of hides, meat, fat, and sinew in a manner of minutes.” That isn’t modernity; it isn’t the scientific conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, although it is an intelligent way of reorganizing natural resources for the relief of man’s estate. Similarly, Lakotas wanted such modern technological devices as guns, metal, and textiles (they greatly esteemed the Winchester rifle, which “nearly revolutionized their ability to inflict harm on their enemies”), but they had no little interest in changing their regime, which was the central question. “Lakotas were still Lakotas and in control of their world, even though that world had changed fundamentally.” 

This notwithstanding, even such militants as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, recognized that the Lakotas would need to “learn to live with the wašicus,” the whites, “whose presence in their world had become an irrevocable fact.” “I shall make peace with whitemen slowly,” Sitting Bull said, now speaking as the supreme war chief of his people. Häkäläinen interprets this to mean that they would become farmers and settle into reservation life. But at the same time, they remained suspicious, having seen that others among the Seven Council Fires who had changed their regimes had declined, thanks to crop failures and declining government rations. Lakotas wanted to take the American agencies located on their lands as conduits of American resources, first and foremost. For their part, many American agents saw that the federal government assistance was inadequate to the task of regime change. “Most of the funds went to appeasing the militant chiefs and bands that categorically rejected farming and lived in the Black Hills and the Powder River country, far from the Missouri agencies,” where the Lakotas were more willing to adapt. 

Skirmishes continued. To defuse the situation, in 1870 President Grant called a conference in Washington with Lakota chiefs. There, the chiefs learned that the printed version of the treaty differed from the version as read to them, two years earlier. “Back then interpreters had provided a more cursory—perhaps a purposely selective—reading of the terms to Lakota chiefs who had accepted their words as facts.” But now they saw a document authorizing the United States to build new roads through the Reservation, to retain existing forts near their borders, to put Lakota agencies only in the Missouri Valley, not on the westerly sections of the Reservation, and, crucially, that Reservation lands themselves would belong to Lakotas only “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” Red Cloud vigorously denied that this had been the substance of the document he had signed, according to the oral version which had been read to him. He demanded to be taken back to his homeland. In response, U.S. officials agreed to locate government agencies wherever Lakotas wanted them, and they could continue to live on their territory for thirty-five years, buffalo herds or no buffalo herds. They would continue to receive annuities and would choose who could trade in their country; further, “the Black Hills and all the resources and riches they might contain were inviolate and belonged to Lakotas.” 

None of this mattered, however. The United States House of Representatives determined to put more tribal lands in the public domain, so that the railroads could be extended. The House also declared a halt to any new treaties. “Lakotas did not know it, but the United States had ceased to consider them—along with hundreds of Indigenous societies—as a sovereign nation.” That is, they effectively voided the Fort Laramie Treaty, in both its written version and in the version orally reported to the Lakotas during the initial treaty negotiations. 

While Red Cloud temporized, eventually continuing negotiations over the placement of a principal Indian agency on Reservation land, Sitting Bull and his allies gathered Lakota military and economic strength. “Much of their maneuvering—raids, wars, transnational diplomacy and commerce—unfolded in the deep interior, beyond the reach and sight of the American state, leaving the agents uninformed and nervy.” Even as “the United States was starting to emerge as a global power by extending its imperial reach to the Pacific,” intending to leave “no room for sovereign Native nations in the modern United States, northern Lakotas spearheaded an explosive expansion in the heart of the continent,” intending “to command all the northern grasslands where bison still existed in adequate numbers,” whether or not those lands were on the Reservation. “It was a forward-looking campaign that would turn a vast segment of the interior into a buffalo reserve where Lakota power and sovereignty would endure.” For this to occur, Lakotas would need to dispossess the other Amerindian nations in the region, once and for all, in order to make Lakota territory “overlap, almost perfectly with the bison.” In 1872, Sitting Bull “accepted government rations for the first time,” but not because he was relenting to American pressure. Once again, he took the supplies because they “helped expand and consolidate the Lakota empire in the far north—just as the U.S. empire was gearing up for an invasion.” (Some decades later, V.I. Lenin would famously tell a Kremlin colleague that the Soviet Union would obtain the rope to hang the capitalists from the capitalists themselves.)

Lakota wars against Pawnees, Crows, Shoshones, and Utes went well, as “massive Lakota war parties seeking game, horses, mules, and cattle” proceeded. “As their rivals yielded ground, Lakotas emerged, in many ways, more powerful than ever” in the 1870s. After winning a decisive victory over the Crows in 1875, “never before had they ranged over more territory or reached so far”; “formidable, flexible, and ubiquitous, they commanded the attention of the U.S. government like no other Indigenous nation.”

Such attention was far from tender. It was the railroad that would enable the rapid U.S. troop deployments that would seal the fate of the Lakotas. Although the financial panic of 1873 slowed construction, it didn’t stop professional buffalo hunters from depleting the herds, a campaign welcomed by Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano “as a way to accelerate the nomads’ domestication.” Soon the herds plunged into “terminal decline.” Seeing that the Americans had no evident intention to fulfill the terms of the Treaty of Laramie as they understood them, Lakotas “started preparing for war.” The Americans’ discovery of gold in the Black Hills led to an overwhelming push by prospectors, overwhelming General Sheridan’s capacity to enforce the treaty—which he, at least, still intended to do. Red Cloud disbelieved U.S. claims that they were undermanned, pointing to the presence of American troops “all over the world,” although it must be remarked that those overseas troops were mostly sailors. When government officials recommended that the Lakotas leave the Black Hills for Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Spotted Tail rather tellingly argued, “If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone.” Lakotas rejected an offer to purchase the Black Hills, continuing to reject the policy of regime change.

President Grant saw no alternative but war. But the U.S. Army really was undermanned, and U.S. Indian agents underestimated the Lakotas’ capacity for making war. Sheridan nonetheless formulated a campaign consisting of a three-pronged attack, with columns from western Montana, Fort Fetterman in today’s Wyoming, and Fort Abraham Lincoln on the upper Missouri River. Given the Lakotas’ well-known cavalry prowess, the overall commander of the expedition, General Alfred H. Terry, depended upon George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry to match Lakota mobility with American mobility in “a war of attrition in which American matériel and strong supply lines would decide the outcome.” What the U.S. Army, from Sheridan on down the chain of command, failed understand was the Lakotas’ capacity to mass troops, when necessary. “Blinded by preconceived notions of what counted as organization, he could not see how kinship, a shared sense of connectedness, had allowed Lakotas to forge a common front against an overpowering enemy” in a “sweeping national mobilization Lakotas had implemented in plain sight.” Unknowing, Custer rode to his Last Stand.

With that spectacular defeat, Congress and the Army alike snapped to attention, “mount[ing] a comprehensive campaign to defeat and dispossess the Lakotas,” while “elevat[ing] [Custer] into an exemplary Christian knight.” Although the signatures by three-quarters of adult Lakota males necessary to cede lands never materialized, “Congress did not care,” claiming the Black Hills in February 1877. Sheridan shouldered the Indian agents aside, putting the agencies under military control and confiscating the Lakotas horses and weapons. Sitting Bull took his followers to Canada, returning several years later to surrender; Crazy Horse was killed during an Army attempt to arrest him; Spotted Tail killed by a captain of the Indian police. Lakotas left the Black Hills for the Great Sioux Reservation, having lost eleven million acres of land. Even as they attempted to learn farming—a way of life severely limited in the drought-prone Reservation lands—Congress cut their rations.

“In the midst of the death and despair arrived a message of hope, rebirth, and deliverance from Nevada where the Paiute Indian holy man and prophet Wovoka spoke of a new religion that promised the resurrection of the dead and the return of the old, seemingly lost, Indigenous world.” While prophesying “the resurrection of the dead and the return of the old, seemingly lost, Indigenous world,” Wovoka also “urged Indians to be industrious and to work with and for the whites,” with the whites’ territory restricted to the eastern half of the continent. Lakota emissaries traveled to hear Wovoka’s prophesy and brought it back to their people, along with its attendant ceremony, the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance, Wovoka claimed, would hasten the Millennium, uniting all Amerindian nations, as the ghosts of their ancestors would assist in their defense. By 1890, one-third of the Lakotas were participating in the Ghost Dance. One of their chiefs augmented the prophesy by claiming that warriors who wore “ghost shirts” would be invulnerable to bullets.

All of this alarmed the Americans, and the tensions erupted at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, when an attempt to disarm a Lakota village led to gunfire in which some 150 to 300 Lakotas, including women and children, were killed, along with 25 U.S. soldiers. Häkäläinen judges it “an atrocity, a betrayal, and a human catastrophe” perpetrated by the American troops. Other accounts make it look like an instance of panicked troops grossly overreacting to Lakota resistance; others still claim that some of the Lakotas fired first. Whatever the facts may have been, the fight occurred in a context in which the Lakotas had likely been deceived by the Fort Laramie Treaty in a more or less irreconcilable regime struggle with the United States. Subsequent years saw the federal government “abandon[ing] its obligation to protect Indigenous property for a distinctively colonial land policy, whereby the Indian Office “manag[ed] them as wards.” The Indian Office “continued to attack the Lakotas’ religious traditions, pressure them to dress and talk like white Americans, and limit their rations to force them to lease and sell their land to white farmers and cattle raisers.” Lakota children often were sent to American boarding schools, in an attempt to assimilate them into the American regime. Nonetheless, both the Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance continued to be practiced, now ‘underground,’ “sustaining the principle of indissoluble Lakota sovereignty.”

Generations later, the Indians Claims Commission ruled that the federal government takeover of the Black Hills violated the Fort Laramie Treaty and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. In 1980, in the case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed upheld the decision, requiring that Lakotas be compensated for the illegal taking of lands guaranteed to them by the Fort Laramie Treaty. Lakotas have refused compensation, however, demanding the return of the Black Hills. Contemporary Lakotas have also attempted to revive their old regime, establishing tribal courts and colleges and a “Lakotanized curriculum” in schools. It is unclear how far they intend to take this policy, inasmuch as some of the traditional practices were decidedly sanguinary. Many Lakotas aim at peaceful secession from the United States. Some say this explicitly, others more indirectly. At a recent meeting of one South Dakota governing body, a Lakota woman arrived just late enough to avoid the flag pledge.

 

Note

1. Lincoln’s policy regarding the Lakotas formed part of his larger policy regarding Western lands, as described by Richard W. Etulain in Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society, 2020). Lincoln approved the Homestead Act, passed by Congress in 1862, the establishment of the Department of Agriculture, the establishment of agricultural colleges, and the construction of a transcontinental rail line. Farming and railroads supported one another by opening farm produce to the national market; railroads also strengthened the Union itself by giving Americans the technological means to extend their extended republic. With regard to the western Amerindians generally, Lincoln had little time to consider them: “Pressed by the mounting demands of the Civil War, the president neither addressed Indians’ needs nor reformed a flawed Indian policy system.” He assured those who urged reform that he would take up the problem after the war, but such good intentions were never tested, perforce.