In the United States the Indian Wars to the East of the Mississippi were slowly coming to an end, particularly after the death of Tecumseh which marked the end of the battle for control of the Old Northwest. As the country continued to expand to the West it kept pushing the remaining Indians further and further from their traditional lands in order to make room for settlers. In 1818 Florida was ceded to the U.S. from Spain and this precipitated the Seminole Wars which lasted until 1842 when all of these people were forcibly removed to make room for settlers.
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law in 1830, by United States President Andrew Jackson. The law authorized the president to negotiate with Native American tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for white settlement of their ancestral lands. The Act was strongly supported by southern and northwestern settler populations, but of course opposed by Native tribes who didn’t want to give up their cultivated farmland.
In the end 60,000 members of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed by the United States government in a march to an area in the west that had been designated Indian Territory and later became part of Oklahoma. It later became known as the Trail of Tears because of the thousands who died from exposure, disease and starvation in the process before reaching their destination.
Tribes from the Great Lakes and Northeastern Woodlands including members of the Western Lake Confederacy (Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Kickapoo, Iowa, Sac, Fox, and Potawatomi) and the Council of Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) were also moved to the Indian Territory.
By 1842 most of the Indian Wars east of the Mississippi had been settled but, for the next 100 years, the conflicts would be west of the Mississippi and last from 1811-1924.
In 1861 the American
Civil War (1861-1865) broke out over slavery. While slavery had always existed in British
North America it had been abolished in Upper Canada in 1793 and in 1834 Britain had abolished it
throughout the Empire, freeing 800,000 slaves, mostly in the Caribbean.
In the U.S. the war was between the Union states that remained loyal to the federal union, or “the North” and the Confederacy states that voted to secede, or “the South”. The central cause of the war was the status of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery into territories acquired as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-Amercian War. On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, four million of the 32 million Americans were enslaved black people, almost all of them living in the South.
Slavery was the
central source of escalating political tension in the 1850's. The Republican Party was determined
to prevent any spread of slavery to the territories, which, after they were
admitted as states, would give the North greater representation in Congress and in the Electoral College. Many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the
Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won,
many Southern leaders felt that disunion was their only option, fearing that
the loss of representation would hamper their ability to promote pro-slavery
acts and policies.
Slavery was the main
cause of disunion. Slavery had been a controversial issue during the
framing of the Constitution but had been left
unsettled. The issue of slavery had confounded the nation since its inception,
and increasingly separated the United States into a slaveholding South and a
free North. The issue was exacerbated by the rapid territorial expansion of the
country, which repeatedly brought to the fore the issue of whether each new
territory should be slaveholding or free. The issue had dominated politics for
decades leading up to the war.
Confederate soldiers fought the war primarily to protect a Southern society of which slavery was an integral part. From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily whether slavery was an anachronistic evil incompatible with republicanism. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment, to stop the expansion of slavery and thereby put it on a path to ultimate extinction. The slaveholding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their constitutional rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy, due to the large amount of capital invested in slaves and fears of integrating the ex-slave black population.
Manifest destiny heightened the conflict over slavery, as each new territory acquired had to face the thorny question of whether to allow or disallow slavery. Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the new states carved out of these territories entering the union were apportioned equally between slave and free states but pro and anti-slavery forces collided over the territories west of the Mississippi.
The Mexican-American War and its aftermath was a
key territorial event in the lead-up to the war. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo finalized the
conquest of northern Mexico west to California and slaveholding interests looked forward to expanding
into these lands.
During 1861–1862 in
the war's Western Theatre, the Union
made significant permanent gains but in the war's Eastern Theatre the
conflict was inconclusive. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending
slavery a war goal, declaring all persons held as slaves in states in rebellion
"forever free."
To the west, the
Union destroyed the Confederate navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its
western armies, and seized New Orleans. The
successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863,
Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to General Ulysses S. Grant's command
of all Union armies in 1864.
Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his march to the sea. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond.
The Civil War
effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Lee surrendered to
Union General Grant at the Battle of Appomattox Court House, after having
abandoned Petersburg and Richmond. Confederate generals throughout the Confederate army followed
suit.
By the end of the
war, much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed, especially its
railroads. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million
enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in a partially successful attempt to rebuild
the country and grant civil rights to
freed slaves.
As American settlers and fur trappers first spread into the western
United States territories, they established various trails leading from
Missouri. These included the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the
California Trail and later the Bozeman Trail.
Initially relations were generally peaceful between American settlers and Indians but, as the combination of various gold rushes, the end of the Mexican-American War (1848) the U.S. Homestead Act (1862) and the Civil War (1865) brought more and more settlers and miners into the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, conflicts over the land and resources led to warfare.
During the Amercian Civil War, Army units were withdrawn to fight the war in the
East. They were replaced by the volunteer infantry and cavalry raised by the
states of California and Oregon, western territorial governments, and local
militias. These units fought the Indians (who mostly sided with the Confederacy) and kept open communications with the
east, holding the West for the Union and defeating the Confederate attempt to
capture the New Mexico Territory.
Many tribes fought the
American settlers, and between 1811-1924 there were hundreds of battles between
the settlers and soldiers, and various Indian Nations, with thousands dying in
the process. In Texas it was with the Cherokees and Comanches, in the Pacific
Northwest it was with the Yakama and Cayuse, and the Rogue River people. In the
Southwest it was with the Navajo and Apache and in the Great Basin it was with
the Utes and Nez Perce. In California, Oregon & Nevada it was with the
Shoshone and other members of the Snake Indian confederacy, and in Colorado and
Nebraska it was with the Cheyanne.
But it was the Sioux of
the Northern Plains and the Apache of the Southwest that waged
the most aggressive warfare, led by resolute, militant leaders such as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse.
The Sioux were
relatively new arrivals on the Plains, as they had been sedentary farmers in
the Great Lakes region previously.
They moved west, displacing other Indian tribes and becoming feared warriors.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, national policy called for all Indians to either assimilate into the American population as citizens, or to live peacefully on reservations. Raids and wars between tribes were not allowed, and armed Indian bands off a reservation were the responsibility of the Army to round up and return.
Nonetheless the Great Sioux War erupted in 1876-1877 (also known as the Black Hills War) and was a series of battles and negotiations that occurred between an alliance of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne against the United States and was conducted by the Lakota Sioux under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The cause of the war was the desire of the US government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills which was Indian territory. The conflict began after repeated violations of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie once gold was discovered in the Black Hills. As settlers began to encroach onto Native American lands, the Sioux and the Cheyenne refused to cede ownership. One of its famous battles was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in which combined Sioux and Cheyenne forces defeated the 7th Cavalry, led by General George Armstrong Custer. Often known as Custer's Last Stand, it is the most storied of the many encounters between the US Army and mounted Plains Indians. Despite the Indian victory, the Americans subsequently leveraged national resources to force the Indians to surrender, primarily by attacking and destroying their encampments and property, ending with the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.
Sitting Bull
By 1890, settlement in the American West had reached sufficient population density that the frontier line had disappeared and the Census Bureau released a bulletin declaring the closing of the frontier as there was no longer a clear line of advancing settlement. The West was won and the Indians were now all on reservations and/or facing assimilation. Nonetheless, following the surrender of Geronimo in 1886, the Apache wars continued until 1924 which was the last raid into U.S. territory by a group of Apache warriors into Arizona.
After nearly 300 years of continuous conflict
in North America, from the start of the Beaver wars in 1610, the settlers and
colonists had finally won. 40,000 years of Indigenous history, culture and way
of life was mostly extinguished and almost all of their land was taken away.
While the slaughter was much greater in the U.S., where the remaining people
ended up on reservations, in Canada they were put on reserves, but the end
result was the same.
The amount
of land set aside as reserves for the First Nations amounts to less than 0.4%
of the total Canadian landmass. The combined landmass of all the First Nations
reserves in Canada is less than half the landmass of the Navaho Reservation in
the U.S. But, while there are basically no reservations east of the
Mississippi, the Canadian reserves are spread across the entire country.